Orpheus Lost Read Free

I’ve got a rehearsal. I’m part of a West-meets-East quintet: violin, oud, cello, bass and tabla.”
    “Where? In Paine Hall?”
    He raised his eyebrows.
    “It figures, doesn’t it?” she said. “I’m in math, not music, and I’m at MIT, but I did my undergrad work here and my particular thing is the math of music. I used to hang out at Paine Hall sometimes, pestering people. I’ll come and listen.”
    He was drumming his fingers on his violin case. “That’s never—No really, it wouldn’t work. I don’t think the others would accept it.” He looked at her again, curious. “The math of music?”
    “Specifically, changes in the employment of non-aligned wave frequencies from Monteverdi to Bach.”
    “That’s my area,” he said, his interest quickening. “Early to high Baroque. My area in Western music, at least.”
    “So I figured. From your instrument.”
    “Custom-made. Authentic reconstruction.” He stroked the case as a proud father might stroke a child’s hair. His eyes glittered. His nervousness fell away like a coat discarded. He hummed a few bars of Monteverdi. “I prefer Monteverdi’s Orfeo to Gluck’s, actually, except for that one aria.”
    “I thought you couldn’t do performance at Harvard.”
    “You can’t. My doctorate’s in composition. But we all perform too.”
    “So can I?” she asked.
    He broke off humming and frowned. “Can you what?”
    “Be a fly on the wall in your practice room?”
    “Oh…no, really. It would interfere. For me it would, anyway.” He sighed, as though defaulting in advance on the ability to explain. “Look, the truth is, I’m a recluse. I live inside my music, really. I tend to shut out everything else.”
    “We’re two of a kind, I suspect.”
    He smiled politely at this, patently disbelieving.
    “Except I live inside pure mathematics,” she said, “which makes less sense than living inside music, though in my own opinion, my private cave is just as beautiful.”
    “You don’t understand.” He hefted the violin case under his right arm and raked the fingers of his left hand, agitatedly, through his hair. “I listen to music, I play music, I compose it. I don’t do anything else. I mean, I don’t know how. I’m just no good at anything normal. I don’t know how to have coffee with someone.”
    Leela did lean toward him then. “I could teach you,” she said.
    “Why?” He seemed genuinely curious to know the answer.
    Why? Leela asked herself. A question of harmonics, perhaps, of vibrating at the same frequency. Or then again, because she could not bear to walk away from him. “I don’t know,” she said, though this was less than the absolute truth. Incongruously, she was awash in childhood sensations: the sense of an interlocking part.
    “I don’t know,” she said again. “You remind me of someone I grew up with. That’s not a good reason, is it? I don’t know if this one’s any better, but I just want to. I want you to want to.”
    Impulsively, she stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the lips.
    He took a step back, affronted, but his eyes met hers again and they stood there, for seconds or minutes, and then he reached for her with his right hand and almost crushed her, the violin case pressed awkwardly between. He kissed her like a man starved for contact, and they stood there in the middle of Harvard Square, oblivious, devouring each other, crowds parting around them.
    “Sweet Jesus,” Leela gasped, coming up for air.
    “Where can we go?” he asked.
    She raised her eyebrows and gulped a little with laughter. “What about the rehearsal?”
    “I don’t need practice.”
    “I mean your East-West quintet.”
    “It’s actually not until tomorrow,” he confessed.
    “In that case,” she decided, “we could go to my place. It’s close, if you don’t mind a short walk. I’m just north of the Yard.”
    Hours afterwards, she said drowsily: “I don’t know your name.”
    “I don’t know yours.”
    “Mine’s