The fountain outside Thornberg Hall was the focal point of many campus traditions: the annual chicken toss (in recent years it had been replaced with a Costco rotisserie chicken), the chancellor's yearly Founding Day remarks, and most importantly: it was the place of new beginnings and endings, for those fortunate enough to not see Huntsman Hall as such. When one became a Lion, one was supposed to touch the water and swear an oath of fealty to the school, and when one left, one was supposed to do the same or else forever have unfinished business. On some nights, you could see fireflies cavorting in the spray.
Crickets chirped in the distance, but there were no fireflies tonight. Perhaps it was too early: 5:30 was a bit early for dinner, and I sat with my back to the fountain facing the path where Carmen would be walking from—if she were to show at all. My personal record with love had been, well, checkered. I couldn't speak much from experience. But what I did know, from what I had read and what I had been told, is that love—especially love from people like Carmen—was like cigarette smoke. Sweet as it rose into the sky, but too much became toxic. You could reach out and try and grab a fistful, but you'd capture nothing. Under ordinary circumstances it was too soon to talk of love, but I had learned the previous week that Project Narcissus had a talent for stoking flames, making them burn brightly but quickly.
I was checking my phone when at once I smelled something sweet, and there was Carmen standing over me. My eyes went first to the jade pendant nestled in the V of her top, and then to her. She seemed taller than she actually was, but of course: I was sitting down.
"Hey, how's it going? Ooh, nice shirt—so fashionable," she greeted me, sitting down next to me. I looked at my shirt, having forgotten what I was wearing. For Prof. Rubinowitz I saw an obligation to dress up more than I usually did, which meant wearing something with buttons and ditching the shorts that were suitable for SCU's perpetually temperate weather. Carmen showed more skin than I did, but not as much as Valdez did when he was feeling buff.
"Thanks, I like yours too. Shall we get going?"
"Lead the way, sir," she said with pomp. I slowed down my stride to accommodate her, and we walked side-by-side, as if we had known each other for days.
"So who's this old guy we're meeting? One of your professors?"
"No, not mine. Prof. Mikhail Rubinowitz," I said in the best Russian accent I could, "is a retired piano professor from here. He's a legend: he's taught for more years than I've been alive, and is the premier scholar of the Romantic piano repertoire."
"Ooh, romantic... like George Michael?" She laughed at her own joke.
"Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, I could go on and on."
"And I would listen all the way."
"Any of those names ring a bell?"
"Not at all. Did any of them compose Fur Elise? Because I took a year of piano lessons, and that's the one piece I remember learning. Can't play it anymore though. You could teach me though."
Carmen was so entirely sincere in her insincerity that I wanted to take her seriously, to take her flirting as more than words that could have been said to any other guy. I looked at her again and she looked back at me.
"No, that was Beethoven. One of the greatest composers of our time. He wrote Fur Elise, but he also wrote nine symphonies, a few concertos, many more sonatas. His sonatas are very interesting actually, like his Moonlight Sonata—do you know what a sonata is? It's a—"
"Next you're going to tell me that a piano is the one with the black and white keys. But OK, is this professor dude expecting me to be, like, some sort of music nerd? Because unless he wants to talk Broadway and sing showtunes, I'm not that gal."
"He knows nothing. As little as I do about you."
Carmen paused, and grasped my hand firmly. "If you want to learn who I am, you'll have to wait and see. Maybe tonight, maybe tomorrow, I don't know. I like a mystery." She let go, leaving my hand to twitch, pointed out a seagull, and continued speaking:
"Love is like one of those seagulls: you see people throw them potato chips to try and tame them, but the seagull will betray you and fly away whenever it wants. They're like my spirit animal. I can like a guy however much I want, and he's none the wiser—and that makes me like him more. Then there can be a guy who wants me—who feeds me, dotes on me, woos me—and when he thinks he's caught me, I fly away!"
"Who said anything about love?"
"I did, silly. There are plenty of guys out there who chase seagulls."
I looked at my hand again, still uselessly twitching from the surprise of it all, and then at the seagull. They were the rats of the sky, and if they were to have any significance at all, it would first come from Chekhov. Though if she kept saying interesting things like that, Prof. Rubinowitz would have some amusements for his trouble.
It was too light outside for the streetlamps to turn on, but inevitably by the time dinner and the recital finished, we would have them and the moonlight to guide our voyage home. Thoughts of flowers and dulcet mountain springs filled my mind, and I was beginning to think I was more weak-willed than I had professed to Valdez, and that if she stayed too long within arms' reach, Carmen Szeto might get what Carmen Szeto wanted. No fever or chills, as he had promised, but wanderlust was a secondary symptom of the primary realization that this was better than solitude.
"Nice neighborhood," Carmen remarked to me.
"It is nice. I could never live somewhere like here."
"Why, couldn't afford it?"
I nodded, gravely.
"You're really one of those silent but brooding types, aren't you," she laughed. She bent down to a lilac bush, broke off a branch, and gave it to me. I took a sniff: deeply fragrant. Complemented her own scent—that felt like such a perverted thought, but I suspected people like Carmen wore fragrances to be noticed.
"I picked it just for you."
"That's someone else's plant, you can't do that. It's not right."
"I'm a rebel, what can I say? And it faces the road. They'll never notice."
My hand trembled as I folded the stem down and placed the lilac in my shirt pocket, like a boutonniere. It felt like a bullet had just grazed my chest—I may as well have placed an asp to my breast like Cleopatra and gotten it all over with. I was in the hands of powers beyond my mortal, humble understanding, and I knew then how Jose must have felt in that land beyond the edge of reality, seeing Lucy approach with red Solo cup in hand. I looked in her eyes again, which really were the color of burnt, bitter almonds.
"It's beautiful. Thank you."
"Have you seen the musical My Fair Lady?" she asked.
"I can't say I have."
"The genius Chris Marley doesn't know something? How the tables have turned! You're an English major, surely you've read Pygmalion."
"You know me too well," I said. I could only imagine what she would think if I said I was beginning to see her as crude Eliza, other than that she would find the power imbalance alluring.
"So My Fair Lady is a musical adaptation of that play, meant for those of us who aren't nerds. There's a song where Freddy Eynsford-Hill is waiting outside Prof. Higgins's place, serenading Eliza from afar, and he sings—let me demonstrate—of lilac trees lining the street where she lives." She began singing, a rich and experienced mezzo-soprano that undoubtedly wasn't the original register of the song, but all too adequate for me to imagine what she wanted me to see.
"You have an enchanting voice. Are you classically-trained?"
"I told you, I'm a Broadway fan. I was in all my high school's musicals. I sing in the shower too, sometimes. Even in French."
She was beginning to grow on me. Slightly. Just a hair. We arrived at Prof. Rubinowitz's door, and I knocked twice. I heard faint piano playing from inside stop, and a few moments later, Prof. Rubinowitz opened the door.
"Come in, come in! And you have brought your friend! The borscht and pelmeni are almost ready. All made by myself, with my mother's old recipes."
"Wow, I can't wait!" Carmen said enthusiastically.
"Ha, ha, I am joking! They are from Google," he said, and ushered us inside. Carmen took off her shoes when she entered, and I did the same—I immediately felt a twinge of shame for defiling his Persian carpet the last time I was here.
He sat us down on the couch, Carmen sitting closer to me than she had to, and went back to the kitchen humming another tune I didn't recognize. We were left to our own devices—literally: Carmen immediately pulled out her phone.
"I need to do my BeReal," she said, and leaned over so I was in frame. "Smile," she pleaded, and she grinned while I looked like I'd just seen a ghost. Carmen quickly looked around the room, her eyes lingering on the piano and then on me.
"He has a pretty nice place. Very aesthetic. It's like I've traveled back in time," Carmen remarked. "What do you think he does for fun?"
"I'd imagine he reads and plays piano," I said, gesturing toward the two focal points of the room I knew perfectly well she had seen. "That's what I do for fun."
"What happened to the jet skiing or the tiger-taming? Is that just business as usual?"
The mistakes of Chris from a week ago were going to haunt me like an albatross around my neck, weren't they.
"It's business," I laughed, and Prof. Rubinowitz's call for help carrying plates from the kitchen rescued me. We helped him carry three bowls of borscht, a steaming serving platter of pelmeni, and serving dishes of garnishes to the table. I delicately unlodged the lilac blossom from my shirt and put it in a flower vase on his tableware cabinet, where he kept the samovar and white-and-blue china we were not important enough to use. It had already worked its magic.
"The flower, I forget what you call it in English, is beautiful. Boys these days do not understand fashion. It must have been your idea," Prof. Rubinowitz said, and turned to Carmen, who beamed.
"It was mine. I'm Carmen," she said, reaching her hand out for a brief handshake.
"Misha. Are you also a pianist?"
"I'm an economics major. But I can sing—Broadway, mainly."
"Economics!" he shouted with mock acclaim. "That is a fine major. We cannot study astrology anymore, so it is the next best thing. Have you seen them on the news? They always say things will go up, things will go down, buy cryptocurrency, sell cryptocurrency, we are doomed, we are not doomed... it is all very confusing to me."
"It confuses me too," she said, sweetly, and then gave me a glance to indicate her pride had been wounded and it was my job to soothe it. I didn't care to give her that:
"That's why we study the humanities," I said, and Prof. Rubinowitz and I laughed.
"So how did you meet Chris?" he asked her.
Carmen looked like she was doing mental calculus. "It was a chance encounter—you might call it a stroke of luck. Chris is one of the most famous kids on campus, after how heroically he and his friends saved a girl from robbers. The chancellor gave a speech honoring him at the football game. So you could call me a fan, and as soon as I saw him I knew I had to meet him."
"He never told me this! And I thought he was like me, feeble and cowardly," Prof. Rubinowitz said with poor timing. "Let us eat, and then I will play for you two."
Prof. Rubinowitz ate in silence, and so did we. I couldn't think of much I wanted to say to Carmen, most especially in his company; I stole glances at her, how she delicately dabbed sour cream from the corners of her lips, how occasionally the mask broke and I could see her smile at Prof. Rubinowitz's hearty home cooking. Under any other circumstances, someone seeing the three of us together would assume we were one strange family.
We cleaned the table, and Prof. Rubinowitz sat at the piano bench, holding himself with full professorial confidence.
"Tonight I am thinking I shall play Chopin's Revolutionary Etude and Beethoven's Sonata no. 32, his last sonata."
"You just taught me that word!" she rudely whispered to me. Prof. Rubinowitz smiled, like he was talking to a young child.
"They are both in C minor, and greatly fit my mood, because," and he lowered his voice and turned conspiratorially to Carmen, "I am dying."
"Oh no!" she said, and nudged me to make sure I was listening.
"I do not know how soon I will die, but I am near my end. Listen carefully to this etude I am using to warm up my fingers. You will hear echoes of it in the Beethoven, near the end of the first movement. Listen carefully," he admonished us, and began playing the etude. Carmen and I sat quietly as he played, and listened to the piece's rolling temblor. I had played this once long ago, too long ago to remember well, but did not mention this since I knew he would then ask me to demonstrate. Without pause he began the Beethoven sonata, and I shushed Carmen when she began clapping at the end of the first movement. At the end, we both applauded, and he turned to us with a smile.
"It is not bad, no?"
"It was divine," Carmen said. "I really liked how you played that jazzy bit at the end, it added some flair."
I was about to comment on something more technical—was she really so unfamiliar with classical music that she had to compare it to something else?—but Prof. Rubinowitz kept smiling.
"Beethoven was beyond our times. He was deaf when he composed his music, but you heard that variation's rhythm. He could not have been deaf at all: he was listening to the music of the heavens."
"I'm inspired," Carmen said airily.
"Then let us perform something together for Chris. What is your singing voice?"
"Soprano, a bit more mezzo when I feel like—I can be flexible." She gave me a glance.
Prof. Rubinowitz went to one of his bookshelves of sheet music and looked around a bit, humming, then pulled out a book. "Do you know Je te veux by Satie? Martha and I used to play it together."
I was hoping she would say something distasteful, like how she only performed Gilbert and Sullivan, or how she had hated the piano ever since she witnessed one fall on Wile E. Coyote's head. Instead, she laughed.
"I know it well. 'I want you,' it means in French," she explained to me. I silently cursed Prof. Rubinowitz's aged intuition.
Prof. Rubinowitz began the accompaniment, and a few measures later Carmen began singing—and she could sing, and she was singing directly at me. If he were not in the room, I would think she would have pulled me up and forced me to dance with her, or worse. I sat immobile, feeling the ethereal imprint of the lilac against my chest and her hand clasping mine. I think if Valdez were at our evening soiree, he would recant his statement about her not being his type—anyone would, and there was nothing wrong with that. I knew exactly whom she wanted, and it may have been a lie—but when she lied, I believed her.
After the last note, Prof. Rubinowitz raised his hands and then delicately folded them on his lap. "You sing that piece with such authentic emotion, it is like you are singing the truth."
I was not looking forward to Googling the lyrics later.
"It was a moving performance, the both of you," I added.
"That is enough piano for me, for tonight. Let me show you my book collection, since you two are here." He closed the fallboard and returned the Satie to the bookshelf, and gestured for us to look.
"Many of these books are older than I am. You have the French, and then the German, and then my beloved Russian, and of course because we are in America we have to have some American books—I am a good patriot—and, hmm," he said, pulling out a black-bound book with gold lettering on the spine. "Moby Dick. First edition. Too much about whales—I do not like it. But I own it anyway."
"Is it valuable?" Carmen asked.
"Over fifty thousand dollars in this condition," he said proudly. Prof. Pineda's mission echoed in my ears, intermingled with the Satie. I did some estimation: if one book were worth that much, and he had hundreds, he'd better have some home insurance. Now, if I had brought my backpack, I could sneak one or two in when he wasn't looking, some of the smaller volumes—certainly no Hugo or Tolstoy.
"It's beautiful," she said, interrupting my larcenous train of thought. She leaned in closer to admire it without daring as he did to touch it. I could see it was a used copy, but only just barely. It would have been against his character to keep damaged books, and those wouldn't have resale value. I decided I preferred my flights of fancy when they didn't involve theft.
Prof. Rubinowitz put the book back. "All this cooking has tired me—I am not as young as you two. Will I see you two again another night?"
"I hope so," I said, and Carmen nodded.
"I will see you two to the door, as a good host should," Prof. Rubinowitz said, and he waved us goodbye and closed the door, firmly.
"I bet he's going to bed right now," I remarked to Carmen. She appeared contemplative, though I didn't think my comment had sparked her thought.
"It's only 7:30. The night is young. Too young. Let's go out somewhere, the two of us, and keep enjoying ourselves."
"Where?"
"Anywhere the wind takes us," Carmen said. "There's a place down by the Trader Joe's, Leila's Patio. There we could drink and dance, now that we've warmed up. So what do you say?"
"I'm really not sure."
"Aw come on, let's have some fun!" she said, nudging my arm. We began walking in the direction of campus and wherever Carmen had in mind. I remembered reading once that when being kidnapped, if you had your wits about you, the trick to survival was never letting them take you to a second location.
"Down by the Trader Joe's?"
"Down by the Trader Joe's. I could go alone, but that's no fun—who would keep me company? I'd be despondent. And yeah, people would buy me drinks and all, but I've heard it before: 'Carmen, pick me!,' 'Carmen, sit down with us!'. They're so desperate. So what do you say?"
"You've really thought this through." Carmen skipped ahead a little, and her shadow danced in the lamplight.
"I'm just thinking—it's not forbidden to think. Thinking about a ferocious, gentlemanly, heroic, irresistible guy I met, who used to wear a lilac blossom in his breast pocket. You aren't Harry Styles, but you're the next best thing."
"You're joking!" I said. "Look, I appreciate your generosity, but alcohol doesn't sit well with me. I have a stomach issue. Genetic. Makes me vomit." Some of that was true.
Carmen laughed again, and put her hand on my shoulder. "Oh, you poor thing! You should have said so, saved me all this hassle. I'm no psycho—I'm not taking you to a bar to drink water, or worse, mocktails."
We approached the junction at which we could either turn into town and make merry in the night, or return to the place where things were proper—the fountain, the ponds, civilization. There was a bench and we sat down.
"I'm sorry if this wasn't the night you were expecting. The professor's an old guy, an eccentric guy, but a lucky guy. What I'd give to have even one of those books—there's my tuition right there. I think the old adage about fortune favoring the bold is wrong: fortune favors the old," I said, looking into Carmen's darkened eyes.
"What are you going to do, steal them?" she scoffed.
"You think they could fit into my backpack? Would he notice?"
"If you've been befriending him to scope his place out for a heist, that's low, even by my standards. You're joking, surely."
"Of course I'm joking," I said quickly, but I think she could see in my eyes that there was something left unsaid.
"My usual seat at Leila's Patio is calling me. But I'll see you again, or you'll see me—don't miss me too much. You know how to find me—if it's you, I'll respond," Carmen said, and looked at me again, like she was sizing me up. A quick lean in, a quick peck on the cheek, as surgical and practiced as an inoculation—I didn't resist—and she left, having become that merry wanderer of the night. I heard Satie again, and I couldn't tell if it were her singing to herself in the distance or an echo of memory.
There may have been something to be said for soaking in the moment—or figuring out what I could do with an empty birdcage—but I had tired myself. I hadn't brought my sheet music, though I could print something from Project Narcissus since the library was still open—that would be a neat party trick to show Prof. Rubinowitz the next time I saw him—but I had already had a little night music, and just a little was sufficient to sate my appetite. So I retraced my steps and headed toward my dorm.
By the fountain's edge, sitting on a bench and facing the waters, I spied a familiar silhouette. It was dark, but I knew my eyes did not deceive me: it was Cassandra. Alone, undoubtedly in a pensive mood. I had not realized the previous week just how rough things must have felt from her perspective, and it was so soon after Sunday too. It wouldn't be good for her to see me, especially not with a faint outline of lipstick on my cheek. I took a side path and passed behind her, and no other obstacles stopped me from returning to my dorm.
Valdez was again there—for someone who went to so many parties, he managed to spend a lot of time loafing around. He did his usual chair-spinning maneuver, then began:
"You have a mosquito bite on your cheek, my friend. How was it? You're back so soon—what went wrong?"
"I'll tell you about it later," I sighed, and put in my AirPods. I opened Instagram—I needed a distraction—and posted on my story a picturesque shot of Elysium Lane I had taken discreetly while walking with Carmen back to campus; the edge of her head was visible in-frame. I considered airbrushing her out with Project Narcissus, but there was something appealing about the picture's imperfection. It was authentic, so I kept it in. A minute or two later, Carmen liked my story, with no further comment. Maybe because she was in it.
While I could imagine myself peeling petals off a daisy, asking if she liked me or not, I had a more pressing concern. Prof. Pineda had emailed me, asking to get breakfast at a cafe on campus and chat about my progress. I wasn't sure what I'd say, or if I'd describe my side quest, but that was a problem for tomorrow's Chris. There was also a text from Prof. Rubinowitz I had missed on my walk back, asking if I'd like to come back tomorrow and help finish the prodigious amount of leftovers. I responded quickly in the affirmative, and decided that was also best left for tomorrow's Chris.