Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

reader’s chair; but Martin Orrick, moon child—born, that is, under the sign of the Crab—would have no more idea what his novels meant than did the shelves on which they stood. He built them of carefully recollected emotions set side by side or one against another—the emotions of characters, the emotions implicit in particular kinds of language, the emotions embodied in particular acts—and he tinkered with the thing he’d brought into the world with an old-fashioned carpenter’s stubborn, unambitious concern for workmanship, until he could feel his creation beginning to resist him, beginning to be itself, at which point, like any benevolent god, he would abandon it, wishing it good luck.

Thus the French horn, though he would never be a really first-rate player, nudged Buddy Orrick partway back to health. For all his self-hatred and self-pity, he couldn’t help but see that he was better on the horn than most people his age—easily better than anyone that year in the All-State Orchestra, for instance, where he played principal horn. His emotions were still too raw, his insecurity and fear of discovery still too great for him to be anything but generous—defensively shy and friendly—toward players less well trained than himself; but he was improving. Before long he would think himself much better than he was and would hurt people’s feelings by showing them, more or less gently, all they were doing wrong.

Needless to say, when he saw his cousin Joan now, she accompanied him on horn concertos. They were by this time writing to each other regularly and had even joked of marrying, though they hadn’t yet held hands. When the time for his Eastman Preparatory School recital came, on which his scholarship depended, he wrote and asked her to come to New York and accompany him. She agreed to come. The visit would turn out to be one of considerable significance in their lives, both for better and for worse, though part of its significance they wouldn’t understand for some time.

They played the Mozart third concerto and the relatively easy Beethoven horn sonata, and he played well, as she had known he would. To Joan—and no doubt to his mother and Aunt Mary, beaming in the first row—he looked wonderfully handsome, playing the horn. He was dressed very formally in a suit and tie, as she’d never seen him except perhaps once or twice at church, and he had that touching scrubbed-farmboy look, comic and poignant (a word she pronounced at the time, only having read it, pwagnant). He missed, at most, only two or three notes in the whole performance, which she knew was remarkable on that slippery instrument, and he had, there in the paneled auditorium, a beautiful, soulful tone. It couldn’t really be said of him, as people had said of her (and would say all her life), that he had remarkable talent. In fact in certain ways, she was prepared to admit—though her heart crashed wildly at sight of him—her cousin was musically stupid. Though his technique—result of pure diligence—was impressive, he sometimes went sharp, and he couldn’t even hear it when you pointed it out; and he rushed his sixteenth notes and, when you told him so, stubbornly insisted it wasn’t true. His stubbornness really was amazing, in fact. She was the one who was supposed to be from Missouri. But she found ways of tricking him into slowing down—without his even knowing what was happening to him—and as she told him, brightly smiling (so that he, too, smiled), he played in tune much more frequently than not.

Her unbeautiful period, it ought to be mentioned, was by this time behind her. She’d grown into her nose; by some mysterious process her mouth—in fact, everything about her—had changed, become all one could wish. She even noticed it herself. Though Buddy didn’t mention it, she knew, much to her delight, that he too had noticed. Running to meet her on the platform at the Buffalo train station, he’d stopped suddenly, a few feet away, and had blushed bright red, as her father would do, so that she too had blushed. Then he’d come to her quickly, for fear he’d lose his nerve, and had given her a quick hug, as he always did when they met again after months apart, and she’d turned her face just slightly, so that her cheek brushed his, and she’d smelled his country after-shave and felt the coldness of his ear. He snatched up two of her heaviest bags to hide his embarrassment and said, “It’s really neat to see you.”

She smiled, watching him, wondering if he’d look up, and feeling, as always, much older than he, though she was in fact one month younger to the day. “You too,” she said.

When they practiced he worked with an earnestness that amused her. She did not guess—though it would come to her much later—that what made him play so carefully, so tensely and therefore awkwardly, was not fear of the recital but fear of looking bad in front of her. (During the recital his nervousness would make him forget about her and he would play lightly, easily, no longer thinking of the music note by note.) All the time they practiced his family hovered near, his mother leaning over her left shoulder to watch the notes fly by, his ten-year-old sister leaning over her right, his red-headed baby brother standing at Buddy’s knee, watching with an expression of awe and loving admiration, though he must have heard Buddy play like this a thousand times, and often from that same position, standing by the bell of Buddy’s horn. Sometimes his mother would say “Hmpf” with interest when Joan picked her way more or less successfully through a difficult passage (it was all difficult, when it came to that; the piano reduction had been done by an idiot), but though she was watching the notes, Buddy’s mother didn’t think to help out by turning pages. In short, it should have been a miserable business,