The Invention of Flight Read Free Page A

feminine to have any kind of intelligence. Neither of them notices the wife’s burnt hair, and she runs outside the house, past the other musicians, and into the back yard. The cornet player sees her leave and feels triumphant, assuming it’s jealousy, thinking kindly that it might help the wife to grow if she begins to face realities such as this, if she begins to stand on her own in the way that the cornet player has always had to do, choosing first the trombone and finally the cornet over the flute and violin, to the confusion and anger of her parents who were certain that instruments were extensions of the body, of the voice, and were created for specific sexes, but who were thankful at last that she hadn’t chosen the cello, a woman’sinstrument that a lady would not play. This had been the first place where people listened to her, where they seemed not to notice the blue shadow of a beard on her chin, the thick shoulders and waist that she had begun to emphasize in defiance. At the end of the year she can go back home to her parents or she can go to New York and begin making the rounds. But she’s afraid that she is not good enough. She leans toward the pianist, toward his words, desperately afraid of leaving.
    The teacher, a composer and director, sits near the center of the room, drinking straight gin. He brushes a hardened crumb of cheese from his lapel, scans the room for a victim. He sees the flutist with yellow hair who is talking to a tuba man who has a wife and a new child and soft muscles in his stomach but who is no doubt thinking, as the teacher is thinking, only of the way the flutist’s lips bloom on cold metal, cheekbones like soapstone. She is obviously uninterested in the tuba man and uninterested in the percussionist who comes over to join the two of them and begins to rub the back of her hair territorially, runs his hand down to the small of her back, the fingers of the tuba man’s right hand tensing, swollen beefy lips tight. Most of the women and half of the men in the room are in love with the percussionist, and the teacher is for a moment worried, watches the flutist’s eyes for signs of dilation, of interest, when she looks at him as he taps the stretched skin of her wrist, and, finding none, settles back. He knows that even though he hasn’t written anything true in years they all hold him in awe, that that supports the illusion this is the only musical universe which exists, that theflutist will eventually make her way to him. He looks around at them, the students, knows that though they wouldn’t admit it, didn’t like to think about it, some of them know this is the only place they will ever have the courage to think of themselves as artists and that, too, the impossibility of the adjustment from being artists to being teachers or salesmen, hawking band instruments and uniforms at small high schools, will destroy some of them. At times he feels that he should discourage them, tell them they are no good—the good ones will only benefit from that. But he can’t, says you are good, so good, possibly brilliant, and in turn they sit at his feet, they say it is only because of you that I am great, only through you that I am great, only with your greatness that my greatness grows.
    The pianist has come to feel that conversations like this are somehow shallow, small talk about large things, has grown weary of them, would like to cultivate some distance from this, from all of it, the talk of techniques and composers, harmonies and forms, buildings filled with the cacophony of too many voices, too many instruments. Singers walking in the open, across a field, across a campus, still going over an alto part in Latin and singing aloud, not noticing or caring about the heads turning. The phrase from a Bach invention that follows him through the daily domestic things and at night will not, no matter how hard he tries, let him sleep. But the cornet player is