The practice rooms at Juilliard were small, windowless, holy. Noelle lived in them the way other freshmen lived in dormitories — she arrived before the building opened and left when the security guard came to lock up, and in between she worked. The Ballade No. 1 in G minor was her mountain. She had chosen it, or it had chosen her; either way, there was no going around it. It opened with a Largo of terrible intimacy — a single melodic line, unaccompanied, like a confession — and then the Moderato took hold and did not let go: the great singing theme, the storm of the middle section, the coda that poured down the keyboard like a building on fire. Technically it was among the most demanding things Chopin ever wrote. Emotionally it was something else entirely, something Noelle was only beginning to understand.
Voss understood it. Voss had played it at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1979, a fact she mentioned exactly once, the way other people mention a scar.
"You have the hands," Voss said one afternoon in October, stopping Noelle mid-phrase with a single raised finger. Noelle's hands hovered over the keys, stung. "Everyone in this building has the hands. Do you know what you don't have?"
Noelle shook her head.
"Patience." Voss crossed the room and stood behind the piano, where she could see Noelle's face in the reflection of the open lid. "You play the coda as if you're angry at it. You're not angry, child. You're afraid of it. There's a difference, and the audience will hear the difference even if you can't."
"I can play it," Noelle said, and immediately hated the petulance in her own voice. She was eighteen. She had been the best pianist in Newark. At Juilliard, she was one of forty, and the arithmetic of it kept her awake at night.
"I know you can play it." Voss sat down on the bench beside her — a rare honor, a rarer intimacy — and placed her own hands on the keys. Her hands were knotted with arthritis at the joints, spotted with age, and they produced the opening Largo with a tenderness that made Noelle's throat close. Just that: the first phrase, eight bars, nothing fast, nothing loud. And it was the most beautiful thing Noelle had heard in the building. "Technique without heart is noise," Voss said. "Noise is what the boy down the hall makes, and he's very good at it, and nobody will remember him. Heart is what makes a room go silent. You have it in you. I saw it in your audition. But you have to stop performing and start telling the truth."
It became her koan. Stop performing, start telling the truth. Noelle wrote it in the margin of her score in pencil, and in the months that followed she played the Ballade the way Voss taught her: slowly, then slower, then at tempo, then — once, in the spring, in a masterclass with the whole piano department watching — the way she had always heard it in her head. She played the Largo as a confession. She played the great theme as a promise. She played the coda as a fire she was willing to walk through. When she finished, the room was silent for a full five seconds, and then Voss, from the third row, stood up and clapped once, twice, slowly, and Noelle felt something crack open in her chest like an egg.
That was the life. That was the whole of it: the practice rooms at dawn, the smell of old wood and key felt, Voss's red pen on her scores, the Friday-afternoon teas Deborah insisted on sending in the mail — actual tea bags, taped to handwritten notes that said PLAY LIKE YOU MEAN IT — and Zoe's letters, nine years old going on forty, demanding to know when she could come hear the "fancy piano." Noelle had a window seat in the library where she did her theory homework. She had a favorite bench in the third-floor practice corridor. She had a future, and it had a shape, and the shape was hers.
At Christmas she played for Deborah and Zoe in the living room of the Newark apartment, on the upright piano a neighbor had given them years ago, and Zoe sat on the floor with her chin on her knees and said, when the last chord died away, "Do it again," and Deborah cried without bothering to hide it, and Noelle played it again, slower, the way Voss had taught her, telling the truth.
She kept the Ballade in her fingers like a language she was fluent in. She could play it in the dark. She could play it hungover, heartbroken, half-asleep — she proved all three, once each, to the horror of her roommate. Voss began to talk, quietly, about competitions. About the spring recital. About a summer program in Aspen that would "change the way you think about phrasing." Noelle called her mother every night, just as promised, and Deborah would ask, "Did you play like you meant it today?" and Noelle would laugh and say, "Every day, Mom. Every single day."
She did not know that she was living inside the last good year of her life. Nobody ever knows. That is the only mercy, and the only cruelty, of it.
Chapter 5: The Call
The call came on a Thursday in November, during the ten-minute break between her ear-training seminar and her lesson with Voss. Noelle was nineteen. She was standing in the third-floor corridor with her theory binder under her arm, and her phone lit up with HOME, and Deborah's voice on the other end was doing something Noelle had never heard it do: it was being careful.
"Baby," her mother said. "I need you to sit down."