The Protege

Laszlo puts the stereo on while he’s cooking and hums to the music. Not the melody, the other harmonies that I barely even notice are there at first. Occasionally he stops to think or take a phone call and I see his long fingers moving on the counter, sometimes not even to the notes. Sometimes to the spaces between the notes as if he hears those, too. He does even the most ordinary things while moving through the music, though not like a dancer moves to a song, using it to make something else. A conductor, that newspaper piece called him. I wonder if this is what a conductor is, someone who stands at the very center of all these sounds and silences and hears every one of them.

After we eat and I tell Laszlo about what I’ve read, I read for a bit longer and then go to bed in a large, plain room. It’s the guest room, he says, but it’s going to be my room if I want and I can change how it looks. My cello is beside my bed and he says I can play it whenever I like, even in the middle of the night, so I don’t know what else I could need.

Except when I close my eyes in the darkness I can’t sleep.

Sometime later I get out of bed and go downstairs. Laszlo’s reading on the sofa and he looks up in surprise when he hears me come in. Something’s wrong. I look around the room, trying to figure out what it is, but it’s not the room.

Laszlo watches me, a finger in the closed pages of his book. “Is everything all right, Isabeau? Do you miss your father?”

I go to the window and peer through the glass, looking into the dark garden. I open the casement and lean out into the chilly night air, listening as hard as I can.

Laszlo has come up behind me. “If you’re ever unhappy here I want you to tell me. You can go home whenever you want.”

I turn to him, finally figuring out what’s wrong. In my part of London there are always noises. The neighbors arguing. Pounding electronic music. Cars going past at all hours. “It’s too quiet here.”

Laszlo looks out the darkened window, and then goes and switches on the stereo. After perusing the CDs for a moment he selects one and presses play. Music expands throughout the room in a soft cloud and I immediately feel better. I go and sit on the sofa and Laszlo sits beside me, and we just listen.

“This piece is called Dream 13,” he says finally, and sketches his finger back and forth in the air like a bow. “That’s the cello. Do you hear it?”

I do hear it, and put my head down on the cushion and close my eyes, letting the music cocoon me. There’s a cello, and a piano too. The piano sounds like watching rain fall on leaves through shiny clean glass. The cello is a sigh first thing in the morning after a long sleep. “It’s so pretty,” I whisper.

“If you want, I can start to teach you how to play some of this piece tomorrow.”

Just like that, as if it’s nothing to take a piece of music and make it your own for a while. To have a thousand such pieces sitting waiting in CD cases and written out on sheet music that you carry can around. A whole room for making music in. I never knew that people like Laszlo existed.

I open my eyes and look at him. “Who will play the other part?”

“The piano? I will.”

“Are you good at playing the piano?”

He smiles. “I get by.”

“Yes, please, Laszlo. I want play this.” Sitting here with him in this magical house of music I feel brave enough to tell him a secret that I’ve never told anyone before. “I want to play everything.”

He doesn’t tell me it’s silly to want to play everything. Everything including the whistling of the kettle? The bins being collected? Every song on the radio and every sound from the stereo? Maybe I do mean everything. And why not? I’ve heard all sorts of things in my cello and I want to know how to find them again.

Laszlo nods. “Then you shall.”

I listen to the music, feeling sleepy but with lots of thoughts and questions buzzing around in my head. I wonder if Laszlo just gets by on the piano, or if he’s actually very good. I wonder if Laszlo is married. I wonder if one day he might marry me. I would like that, and then we could play music together, always.

I wake early in the morning and look out onto the street. There are only houses on Laszlo’s street, no shops, but there are people walking past in coats and hats, the women in high heeled shoes. They’re not the sort of people I’m used to seeing but they might like music, too. Everyone likes music, don’t they?