It was the magic of a four-star dinner and an invitation to continue chatting in his corner suite overlooking the Boston skyline. It was feeling like she stood on the cusp of the life she’d always dreamed of. And it was the way he touched her, as if he knew she’d been burning for this moment for years, and he didn’t want her to have to wait a second longer.
It hurt, but she’d expected that, and the pleasure leading up to the pain made up for it. She had to leave in the middle of the night to get back to her hotel, pack up, and catch a late-night Greyhound back to Philly. When she arrived, tired and grimy, at her apartment, Gus waited outside, fresh from his much shorter flight. “Where have you been? I’ve been waiting half an hour,” he said, and crushed her lips against his before she could answer.
He came knocking after midnight every night for nearly a week. The pain went away; the pleasure didn’t. All day long, her body wound itself up in anticipation of it, even as exhaustion chipped away at the level of her work.
When Gus didn’t show up on Monday night, Miriam was almost relieved. But it worried her that she didn’t run into him during the day on Tuesday. Or Wednesday. She called him, but leaving a message felt kind of needy. Lizzy Bennet would not be needy.
She squashed the part of her brain that whispered that Lizzy Bennet wouldn’t have jumped in bed with him in the first place.
When the knock came that night, Miriam didn’t let herself analyze her relief. She simply threw herself into making sure he knew what he’d missed. The next day, she did see him at school. He was discussing recital accompaniment with Kaye Fleming, a soprano a year older than her. “Hey,” Miriam said, holding her arms out toward him.
He glanced at her. “Oh, hey, Mira.” He gave her a friendly hug and kept walking.
Miriam was a realist. Gus had a way of looking at a girl like nothing else in the world mattered. With a focus in those brown eyes that turned bone into bread dough. He approached the piano the same way. Doors slammed, people shouted nearby, and he wouldn’t even twitch. She loved that about him because it happened to her too.
If he could dismiss her this easily, he was already headed for the exit.
But Miriam had no intention of giving up. They were the same, down where it counted: in their commitment to the music. He might not realize it yet, but she’d show him. She had passion to spare; burn hot enough and he was sure to catch fire.
When he came back, she intended to be ready. Miriam went looking for ways to make the sex hotter and the anticipation greater. And it worked. He came back three nights in a row for more. She watched him carefully, looking for signs of change, yet every night, when the climax passed, he got dressed, and she watched his brain returning to Beethoven or Chopin or Liszt.
And in the end, the only thing that changed was her.
Twenty-three days after that night in Boston, Miriam entered the venerable arched doorway of the Curtis Institute with no way of knowing it would be the last time. Gus hadn’t knocked on her door in three days. Nor could she find him in any of the places she usually saw him during the day. The gnawing in her stomach told her he was avoiding her.
But she had to talk to him. The double line on the pregnancy test saw to that. She’d seen his name on the recital hall schedule tonight, so she dressed carefully, forced a few crackers down her throat to quell the nausea, and went to find him.
But the hall lay quiet. The door stood ajar; she peeked inside. Gus’s music bag rested against the leg of the grand piano, but the room seemed to be deserted.
Until she heard the sounds from the alcove to the right of the stage.
Miriam froze. Then, like a mosquito to a bug zapper, she found herself floating into the room, her body curiously immune to the sensation of walking. In the shadows just outside the light, she saw the figures pressed against the wall of the balcony stairwell. Kaye Fleming, her red hair disheveled, her shirt pulled up. And Gus’s bare ass sticking out of his jeans.
The moment seemed frozen in time. The pillars of dust circling lazily in the glow of the stage lights. The smell of old building, spicy enough to evoke a sneeze. The way those long, fluid fingers, which had played her body as artfully as they played the piano, dug into the wall in passion for someone else.
You stupid, stupid twit. You knew better than this. You knew better! And you let him do it anyway!
She’d never felt so humiliated. The meager contents of her stomach crouched on their mark, poised for an all-out spring to exit her body.
She barely made it to the restroom in time.
Miriam didn’t really sleep that night. When morning came, mocking her with the beauty of spring, she got dressed and started walking in circles around downtown Philadelphia. She watched the buses of tourists queued up at Independence Hall, the pair of women feeding snacks to toddlers on a picnic blanket at Washington Square. She didn’t know what to do. She had no one, and she didn’t see any way out. Not for a good Catholic girl, anyway.
She wandered aimlessly, but maybe she knew where safety lay, even if her brain was too tangled in knots to see it. Because when she finally came back to the present, she found herself standing in front of a building she’d only seen from a distance. The building where Teo Tedesco worked as a bean counter for
