Read Evenings at Five for Free Online Page A

size of a remote control garage opener. Now it lives on my desk next to my ragged old thesaurus and before I boot up my computer every morning I turn it on. It’s still set at the tempo he left it on, his last workday in this house: 94, smack dab in the middle of andante.
Pock-pock-pock-pock
, like a lively heartbeat, with the little red light flashing. It’s very comforting, and I sometimes feel I am purloining some of the pulsing energy of his music and his strong personality.
    Rudy’s chair again
    Perhaps she could handle one more deserving note. Oops, this one was six months old, from the student of Rudy’s who gave him the brass elephant.
    I was in the practice room one afternoon improvising a tune when my professor stuck his head in and said, “Young man, you’d do better to go up to the library and listen to some Beethoven.” I went on improvising, though my spirits were dampened, and after a while Professor Geber stuck his head in the door and said in that unforgettable voice: “Try it in B-flat, it might work better.” It did, and I transferred to his class. I am the one who gave him the brass elephant when he retired. He wrote me a letter I will always cherish, saying he kept it on his desk at home and every time he touched it he thought of me.
    That one will have to wait a little longer,
Christina thought, choking up.
I can’t rise to it tonight.
Lauren’s note had brought back their whole opening scene, like having time’s tail whip you in the face.

Christina’s study phone
    Chapter Eight

    That cold and rainy afternoon in June of 1972, cocktail time in the fifty-five-room mansion at Saratoga Springs. The artists in residence, in jeans or other studiedly funky getups, are gathered in the downstairs library, a fussy Victorian room with velvet furniture and novels by late-nineteenth-century popular authors and volumes of poetry by Henry Van Dyke. There’s a lady celebrating her eighty-first birthday, a novelist who writes generational novels about Jewish families in Brooklyn, and she’s wearing a blue-and-white patterned dress and nice jewelry and has stocked the bar with bottles of Scotch, bourbon, gin, rum, and white wine, along with the appropriate mixers, so all can have their choice of libations. There are also little dishes of nuts and pretzels, set out by the octogenarian novelist, whose name is Zelda.
    Christina, wearing brown strap sandals with stacked heels, bell-bottomed khaki jeans with a button fly, her grandmother’s gold-and-seed-pearl pendant, shaped like a tiny grape cluster, hanging demurely on its fragile chain just below the V of her faded salmon-colored T-shirt, has arranged herself, mermaid style, on a velvet chaise longue the color of saffron, and sips a Scotch and water, trying to look like a reserved novelist shrewdly summing people up. She celebrated her thirty-fifth birthday (prime rib and two beers) three evenings before at a Ramada Inn in Erie, Pennsylvania, en route to this artists’ retreat, where she has been invited to stay for two full months. On the door of her motel room was a decal of a smiling masked thief tiptoeing away with a bag over his shoulder: PLEASE DO NOT LEAVE VALUABLES IN CAR .
    Although she was exhausted from her all-day drive from Iowa City, where she was on tenure track at the university, she dragged herself out to her blue 1970 Mustang, the car she would still be dreaming about as her ur-car thirty years later, and unloaded the rest of her valuables: her blue IBM Selectric (which she would belt into the Mustang’s bucket seat on the passenger side and drive off with in high dudgeon every time she and Rudy had a big fight for the next ten years, until both machines were replaced and the fights got less dramatic); two months’ worth of ribbons and correction tapes; her cheap typing paper and her two reams of twenty-pound bond; her
Webster’s New World Dictionary, College Edition
; her brand-new hardbound
Roget’s International Thesaurus, Third