Tomorrow is a Long Time

-Part One-

Prologue

You have to be brave to get old. He told me that once. As I watched the delicate lines etched into the fabric of my skin, thinning and fraying with age, like soft paper, I knew he was right.

I think of him, of the unmistakable cadence of his voice, chuckling at my realization that my face had changed, as we lay together in the old brass bed and I, rolling over, had caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror that hung on the far left wall, tarnished with age, as I was. He ran a finger over each deep line that time’s scythe had torn through the plane of my forehead, against the crescent edges of my eyelids. He told me I could not be more beautiful.

I cried, wondering how it could be that I had woken to find that I had spent more of my life than not staring into his face, tasting his mouth, bathing my ears in his voice.

How had I not yet been taken?

I told him this, and he kissed me the way that he always did, with his fingers in my hair and his body pressed against me, like every kiss might be our last.

I’ll never wake, he whispered. I’ll keep you here until I die. Until my last living thought is a dream of you.

The sun draped like honey through the corner window, its wooden pane creaking in the early morning breeze. The leaves of the sugar maple rustled restless and full like a maiden’s skirts, and the murmuring of the cows echoed through the green pastures that lay beyond our white picket fence.

Our bones ached, and we moved slowly when we rose from the bed. I watched as he fumbled with the buttons on his flannel shirt, his skin too softening with age, the indentations like a fine mesh over his back and shoulders. I marveled at the mirage of his years that faded in and out of focus and interposed with the young, firm body that had first pressed me down onto this bed. His eyes searching, so careful not to hurt me, so oblivious to his own beauty, which was piercing and my heart broke with it, devastated at his perfection, as I was still.

I understood that he saw me in the same shifting facets of light, and I loved him for it.

He caught me staring at him and smiled. The kids will be coming soon.

I know, I replied. I remember staring out the window at the quiet hopefulness of the morning, thinking of my children, or their existence. Our children. It was as if our souls had been split off into these separate beings, and we walked outside of ourselves as new creations: beautiful, harsh, and wild.

I smiled at him, arching my body like a nymph. The rays of light banded against my bare skin. I rolled over onto the bed and peeked through the crook in my elbow. I let my mind clear and drank him in until all that was left of my being could be read in the flicker of my lashes.

He hesitated, only for a moment, before ripping off his clothes and tumbling back into bed. He rolled me over in his arms and growled into my neck—both of us laughing—and then covered my face with kisses, and the laughter was displaced, and our desperate consumption of the other blocked out all light or thought. I was only his and he only mine…

Now, as I write this (or right this, as it were), the sunset passes over the mirror that hangs on the far left wall of my small corner apartment in the old Victorian house on Louis Street. But I dare not look into the glass. I can sense the vague outline of the twenty-six-year-old figure who hovers there, as transient and horrifying as spectral mist made flesh. Even after thirteen months of being home (home, so strange to think of it that way), I still cannot look her in the face. Though I see her in my mind’s eye, in a black-and-white photograph, lost to time. And I see her now—firm skin, streak of amber hair across the shoulder. I feel her in the aching loneliness of this body, howling at his absence, where the brain makes the body remember. Remember something that never actually was.

I spent weeks shifting about like I was still in a seventy-year-old body, until the youthfulness trapped in my veins like overripe fruit burst open and demanded that I reclaim what was rightfully mine. Meanwhile, the heads of strange passersby would turn in the street. I avoided their concerned glances, unable to assimilate into a world that left me feeling alien, displaced. But I’ve learned again how to order take-out from the organic market and smile at the young girl behind the counter. I’ve learned to condition my ears to the constant hum of the streets outside my window at night. My violin’s strings cry out in the dusk, lamenting all the things my soul cannot say.

And I’ve been to The Slam again, my old haunt. I’ve ordered my dark hot chocolate and listened to Isabelle’s poetry and feigned disapproval at Johnny’s latest conquest. I’ve danced against him, and lost my screaming head in the hypnosis of the music, his warm lips experienced against my own. His mouth on mine was too much to bear at first, and he apologized for the tears on my face, and I apologized that I could not explain.

Neither of them knows where I was during those months that I disappeared, or the reason for my reticence—my fragility— when I reappeared.

Only him and a group of five doctor-scientists with titles I can’t pronounce. His family, the therapist that I refuse to see any longer, and a friend who will never tell. What’s the use of trying to get over something that was only a dream?

So the days pass, as monotonous as waves’ crash along the sands. It seems pointless that I should have to live through all of them again; endless days that have lost their music.

I grow terrified that someday I will forget that other life. That it will fade, like dreams do, like watercolors in the afternoon sun. Soon, all I’ll have to remember it by is my mark, my one keepsake: the hand and wrist of aged flesh on my left arm, which I keep concealed in long, black gloves and expose only when I am away from the prying of foreign eyes. The doctors say they can’t explain it, that it must be some sort of psycho-centric phenomena that caused part of my body to assimilate with the age of my mind, specifically in my dream core. They say they can fix it, but I fought them off with the vehemence of a mother protecting her young. I’d see them all dead, I screamed, if they tried to take away the most intimate thing that stood as proof of all that was real; real to me and Cal.

I hear that he kept his remembrance too. His photos pop up from time to time on the celebrity news, commenting on how wonderful he looks, how healthy. Young actresses are begging to know who his cosmetic surgeon is, what innovative technique he allowed them to experiment with. It’s as if years of decadent living had been erased from his face. Only I recognize the stark glare behind his eyes when the journalists stand too close, the paparazzi too emboldened. It’s the frozen unconsciousness of someone caught in the headlights. Haunted. Lost.

As for myself, I live those feelings. I would drive back to the place that we called our home if it existed. Or our cabin in the woods. But he had it built especially for me. I’ve thought about going to him. I think about it and it scares me, how dangerously I want to see him, touch him again. But it’s forbidden, and I have to agree with the doctors that it’s best if I leave him and his family in peace. The experiment was a success; I accomplished what I had set out to do, not knowing what it would cost me, this dispossessed life.

Soon, time will erode the smooth surface of my flesh, and then even my arm will blend with my present self, and I will be left with nothing but the ravings of a madwoman, and the littered fragments of a half-forgotten dream.

So I write. I put Joan Baez on the portable turntable. I watch a fire-kissed leaf float on the autumn winds across the windowpane and lightly graze the shoulder of a woman passing by on the street corner below. I turn the ornate, mother of pearl ring encased in diamonds and silver around on my ring finger and conjure the past. And I hear his voice close to my ear. As dreams become as tactual as reality, so will these pages surrogate my memory.

Chapter 1:

The first time I saw Cal, I was four years old. While I don’t know if watching his films constitutes knowing him, it’s when I fell in love with him. Dad was into action movies and, in one of his favorites, Cal plays a war vet dealing with the horrors of coming home. As his character, he was quiet, tortured, yet powerful. Even with his face covered in mud and his arms trailing blood and ash, he was painfully beautiful to me, and I loved him with the same blind, childish love that I bestowed on my stuffed animals and fairy tales. Whenever Dad would watch that film, I would sit cross-legged as near to the screen as he would let me.

Eileen, doesn’t that bother you? Mom asked as she walked in on a particular scene where Cal was stitching up his arm.

No, I mumbled with my thumb crammed in my mouth.

Mom would shake her head and admonish Dad for letting me get so close to the screen, and Dad would just point at me and laugh. You wanna try to get her to move?

My eyes would be transfixed like other kids were at Disneyland or sitting on Santa’s lap in the mall. Cal could have been doing anything; it wouldn’t have mattered to me. I adored him.

As a teenager, my quiet fascination with him continued. I waited for a weekend that my parents would be out of town (a rare occasion). Instead of throwing a party or having a tête-a-tête with a cute boy (like a normal person), I went to the video store and rented the film that had been heralded his most accomplished, and most controversial. It was the only one that my parents wouldn’t let me see.

I watched it two times that weekend—once by myself and once with Isabelle. I handed her tissues as tears slid down my own face. As the ending credits rolled, I clicked the remote and we sat in silence, staring at the blank screen.

Suddenly, Isabelle grabbed my knee and said, We’ve got to find Josh and Bear. Seriously, I need some touch after that.

She scrambled off my bedroom floor and dialed Bear’s number.

I sighed, folding my legs beneath me and staring at the gray square where a vague shadow held my gaze, trapped.

Later, when I wove my hands through Bear’s silky dark hair, curled beneath him on the threadbare couch in his parents’ basement while Isabelle and Josh breathed softly in the laundry room, it was Cal’s face I saw. His warm scent in my oxygen…

The memory of that afternoon waned in Isabelle. She was able to lose herself in any warm body. When she finished with Josh, she moved on to Bear; twins are interchangeable like that. Then it was the substitute history teacher with the tweed jackets and shoulder-length hair, who was soulfully moved by a sixteen-year-old with legs that pranced around him like a fawn and with doe eyes that pierced his horn-rimmed glasses and reminded him what it was like to be free and unfettered again.

During our college years, Isabelle’s endowments captured the eye of several bass players and shaggy-haired drummers who wafted through The Slam like ghosts. But she preferred them that way, young and transient, having lost the taste for older men with loneliness carved into their faces and an innate desire to love her more because she is young, and therefore forbidden, and less for her infidelity and insatiable desire to be free of them after a week or two.

Most recently though, having placed college and graduate school safely behind us, with only minimal scars to recount that odyssey of make-believe life in dorm rooms and Gothic libraries, where you’re trapped somewhere between childhood and adulthood and not really living either; that purgatory of the newborn independent where we are clueless and insensible to knowing how to live this life…most recently, Isabelle decided that she had seen enough of freedom to know that, in its many guises, it is often deceitful. What’s more, undesirable. The song of free love was not as sweet as it claimed to be. So, Isabelle settled down with a nice boy whom she met while browsing the poetry section of the city library. He liked to stand on the street corner at night and offer to write poetry for passersby on the spot (because he saw it in a movie and thought it was romantic and a good way to get recognized). Also, it didn’t hurt his dreams any that his parents were infinitely wealthy and supportive of his pursuits.

He’s the entire package! He’s the one! Isabelle had exclaimed.

When he left her a short month later for a fellow heir-to-fortune, Isabelle was devastated. She stayed in bed for five days and did not eat or bathe; just listened to Bat for Lashes on continuous repeat and let the futile tears drain. Now, Isabelle was a dichotomous mixture of her two former selves. Having made herself vulnerable to a new breed of animal, the responsible, sensitive, committed kind, and found him just as wanting as the teenage boys in grown-up suits that haunted smoky stages or the Humbert Humberts of the world with their smell of pipe tobacco and expensive cologne, Isabelle guarded her heart with a deeper respect for it. She placed the bowl of meat on the ground and stepped away from the cage instead of holding it to the beast’s mouth. She tied her feelings back with ribbons when they purred, and was less confused or offended when they growled or skulked away. Someday perhaps, one of them would make his home in her. Until such time, she enjoyed their company the way one enjoys snow flurries in October. It’s beautiful and hopeful, and it will end soon after it begins.

If you resolve yourself to the fact that it’s all temporary, she told me, and expect that it will end, then you can appreciate it for what it is, and not consume yourself with what it isn’t.

Ironically, it had been much the same for me all of my life. I found momentary solace in the arms of the warm, leather-jacketed, wavy-haired men who leaned against brick walls with cigarettes, who strummed Bob Dylan songs on street corners with the case laid open, or who painted unseen sorrows into faces on blank canvases. But I knew with each one whose hands brushed mine that there was only emptiness to be found, an emptiness in me. Their mouths were never sweet enough; their voices exhaled false, discordant notes. None of them were him.

You have a sickness, Isabelle told me as we nursed hot, soothing cups of chocolate with cream and gratings of cinnamon stick glittering like dark snow.

We were sitting in a café on Kraus Street last Christmas. It was our final year of graduate school and, instead of going home for the holidays, I had been asked to perform a solo for the conservatory’s annual Christmas Gala at the Opera House. My parents are terrified of flying, and regretted that they could not take the time off work either. But they promised to leave the gifts unopened, and to celebrate with me once I was able to return home closer to the New Year.

Isabelle phoned her mother, who was staying in Nice with a new lover, to say that no, she would not be soaking up the rays on this most holiest of holidays, but would spend Christmas with me and my family in the wooded Connecticut countryside, baking gingerbread cookies and singing Christmas carols around the piano while Mom placed fresh pies on the windowsills to cool and the wind whistled through ice-kissed branches outside the oak bay window. It was a beautiful picture she painted, reminiscent of Christmases past, when Isabelle would become Jo to my Meg and we would create our own Christmas decorations with frosted pine cones and abandoned bird’s nests. We’d make up stories about the mysterious tracks we would find in the snow while wandering through the wintry woods, and of the war-torn solider or the framed man on the run whom we would hide and nurse and cover with such warm love, it would be impossible for them to fathom existence without us, for somehow our afternoon rambles always turned our fantasies toward destined lovers trapped in a world of ice and frost, waiting for us to rescue them.

But instead of reliving joyous frivolities of childhood, she and I would be holed up in the hollow city, where even the twinkling lights seemed cold against the crackling hearth-thoughts of home. So we curled up on Christmas Eve in the chummiest coffee shop we could find. The waitresses wore green-and-red-striped aprons with bells on their earrings. Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland crooned over the cheery hum of rustling paper bags and various drink ingredients called out at random. We propped our knees against the locust wood tables and traced our fingers over the spots and rings that were its birthmarks. We scoped out cute guys (eye-art, as Isabelle called them). Our conversation naturally gravitated toward our latest conquests. Isabelle asked me what was happening with Antwon, a Russian cellist whose music had brought me to tears the first time I heard it, and who I had been dating on and off for the better part of the semester.

We still see each other from time to time, I said. He’s actually the one who got me the gig with the conservatory.

Seriously?

Well, he got me the audition. We had been fooling around in the studio one day, and he asked me to play this piece that I had been working on for Christmas. He taped me secretly, and gave it to his professor. I had no idea he’d done that.

That’s hot, Isabelle said.

Yeah, well. I’d told him when he first heard me play that I wasn’t interested in the conservatory. I want to create, not follow in the footsteps of other artists and obsess over whether or not I can imitate their genius…

Yes, I’m well aware of your artistic standards, Isabelle said, casting me an all-knowing glance that was free of condescendence.

I sighed. I know. I’m a snob and a freak.

No, you’re not. What you create is brilliant and you should do your own thing. But anyway, back to Antwon.

Right. Well, he played the song for him and they agreed to let me put together my own arrangement for it. And, here we are.

What’s your solo going to be? Isabelle asked, taking a sip of her cocoa.

It’s very Middle Eastern sounding. I wanted it to be what a song of praise may have sounded like during that time period, and I wanted it to represent the type of emotions that a mother experiences after childbirth. Placid but beautiful, hesitant but stirring.

Solid. I can’t wait to…oh, but wait! Darn you, she said, laughing and swatting me on the arm. You keep luring me off the subject with all of your musical, artsy speech. Tell me about Antwon.

We called it quits, I said, not meeting her eyes.

Why?

I paused. Listening to the swish of the bells against the doorframe was more pleasant than answering her question. Because he told me that he was in love with me.

Isabelle nodded. She took a sip of her drink, her eyes averted toward the flickering lights strung about the little stage in the far corner where there would be a holiday-themed poetry slam later that evening to finish out the night.

You’re thinking something. You might as well say it, I said.

What’s there to say? she asked with wide eyes.

You tell me.

A beautiful genius with equal parts talent, money, bright future, and sexuality tells you that he loves you. I’m sure I would have broken up with him on the spot, too.

I had nothing to say in return. In truth, I knew that what she was saying was right, and that what I was feeling made no logical sense.

I suppose, she continued, that if you didn’t love him back…

I don’t.

Not at all? She placed her cup on the table and met my eyes.

I thought about how the sounds of his bow against the strings reached into the deepest of places in me, opening me. I thought about his eyes, black as ink, and the waver that rippled through his voice when he spoke of home, which was all grey and stone in his mind’s eye, but home nonetheless. I thought about the constellation that was tattooed on his forearm, and the way his skin tasted like warm honey.

There are plenty of things that I love about him. But that’s not the same as loving him, I replied. I can’t give him what he wants.

Which is what?

I made a face at her. Was she going to make me spell it out? Which is my assurance that he is the only one I will ever love or want. That I could be content with him.

Eileen, do you honestly think that you can promise that to anyone?

I have to believe that I can. Otherwise, what’s the point?

Isabelle looked away, and I regretted being so candid. I knew she was struggling with the same demon in a different guise.

How will you know when you find it? she asked. Because I can tell you, firsthand, that even when you think you’ve found that kind of love with someone, it can evaporate in an instant. Even if both of you have declared love for each other. Even if it’s not one-sided like poor Antwon.

Ouch.

I’m sorry. I don’t mean to lash out at you. It’s still a sensitive subject for me, that’s all.

I know. If it’s any consolation, I feel terrible for it. But when I told him that I couldn’t return the same…assurances to him, he said that he couldn’t waste his time with me anymore. We ended it as amicably as it could be ended after that. I know I hurt him, but I didn’t lead him on.

Can I tell you though, all transference issues of mine aside, it worries me for you.

Why should it? I know what I want, and I’ll be content when I have it.

Yeah, but you always choose these guys you have no future with, who want companionship more than passion. You make up your mind about them before you’ve even given yourself a chance to feel anything.

Yes, but that’s because I know that they’re…

…not who you want, Isabelle said. What is it that you want? I didn’t reply. Or who? she asked, and then she stopped, with a surprised look of realization that both intrigued and horrified me. It was as if she’d just figured me out.

Lee, she said, shaking her head. You have a sickness.

I buried my face in my hands. I know, I said from beneath them.

Please tell me that you haven’t been turning down amazing men for the past seven years of your life because of, what? An eighty-five-year-old man? Or worse, some fictitious figment of some writer’s imagination that he pretended to be in some film over fifty years ago, before you were even born! Please tell me that we are not in pathological territory here.

I would have laughed if there had been anything amusing in what she said. But her words cut sharp into my breast, and fear rose in me like a fever, flushing hot and uncontrollable over my cheeks.

Thanks for making me feel like a lunatic, I said with a trembling voice.

You know I’m not saying this to intentionally hurt you, she replied, pressing her hand over mine. But Eileen, you’ve got to admit that, if that’s what you’re thinking, it’s not healthy.

I never said…I’m not…it’s not that.

Then what? Are you holding out for some carbon-copy of him or something?

No, I said, my mind becoming clearer. I’m holding out for someone who makes me feel the way that I felt when I fell in love with him. It’s a hard confession to make, and I’m well aware that I could very well be crazy.

Isabelle started to interrupt, to object, but I stopped her.

No, really. I get it. It’s crazy to think a girl of five could fall in love with a total stranger, one who’s now her grandfather’s age, and then begin her adult life comparing every real man she meets to one that’s not even wholly real, but an assortment of characters in movies he acted out in films. And, I added, I’m also well-aware that, like most crazed fans, I could very well be projecting my own subconscious desires onto his image and essentially making my own state-of-the-art fairy-tale prince out of a person who, in reality, doesn’t even come close to mirroring the alternate identity I’ve fantasized for him.

But, if you know all that, then why hold on to that fantasy?

I looked down into the recesses of my mug, while Judy G. sang softly above us and begged her lover to stay with her until the holidays were over. My chocolate had gone cold, and I pushed it aside and instead ran my fingers across the knotted planes of wood.

Don’t laugh, I said. But a big part of the reason that I’ve hung into my feelings for him for so long is because I don’t think that I love his imagined self. See, you’re laughing, but you know for a fact that I’m good at reading people.

Yes, eerily good, she conceded. But people you’ve met.

Yeah, well. Actors draw from what they know, don’t they? I mean, any character that an actor plays has to exist within them somewhere; otherwise, their performances would be transparent, muddled jokes or badly told lies. Something in his soul spoke to mine.

No, you mean something that a writer wrote that he recited spoke to you.

Actually, no. It was in his eyes. It was hidden behind his performances. His own pain. I understood him.

Ask the guy who shot Reagan for Jodie Foster, I’m sure he’ll tell you the same thing.

Smartass.

Sorry.

Forget it, then.

Eileen…

No, please. Just forget it. I know it’s nonsense, okay? And I know it’s unhealthy or I have a problem, whatever. Don’t you think I know that? Do you think I like hurting nice guys like Antwon? He was a kind, decent human being and I hurt him. I hate that. Maybe if I weren’t so messed up in the head, I could have loved him. Or maybe not. Because, to be completely transparent with you, I don’t miss him that much.

Isabelle laughed. I’m sorry, she said, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings with the stalker crack. And I don’t think you’re crazy, okay? I think your expectations are just a little skewed.

Maybe they are. But I can tell you one thing that’s true. If I ever meet a man who can move me with a glance the way that he did, or break my heart with the cadence of his voice; if he touches my heart, then it won’t even be a question for me. I’ll love him on the spot and never stop until I die. Now, why not hold out for that?

Isabelle just shook her head. You’re a dreamer, she said. I suppose there will be another dreamer out there for you somewhere. And in the meantime?

In the meantime, you and I will content ourselves with lots of first kisses and interesting conversation. Take for instance those two gorgeous men at the counter who are glancing our way and look in desperate need of a place to sit and drink their coffee, I said, turning my head toward two identical, dimpled faces with chocolate-brown locks cascading down their backs.

Josh! Bear! Isabelle exclaimed. We locked arms and pressed our cheeks against our old friends, who were as dear to us as the old bedrooms and treasured snowy pastures we had forsaken at home to forge this new life. The four of us cuddled back into the booth and stayed until closing time, reminiscing about old memories and planning new ones.

We roamed through the city that night, glancing in the storefront windows and singing carols softly to each other. At midnight, we kissed under mistletoe and the guys sacked out on the floor of our dorm room in the nearly vacant campus. It was the nicest way to spend Christmas away from home, surrounded by my family of old friends.

As I lay there that night, and then throughout my performance the next day and the succeeding days traveling home and falling into our Little Women ways, I thought about what Isabelle had said. At home, while Isabelle was taking a shower, I rummaged through my cedar chest and found a stack of old magazines that I had salvaged from secondhand bookstores. I turned to a particular page of an old Vogue and saw his face. My heart ached with familiarity and a yearning that felt deeper than love. I shoved the fragile pages back into the chest, locked the lid, and wondered if I would ever be right.

Chapter 2:

During the following summer, Isabelle and I graduated and, heartbreakingly, we went our separate ways. Her degree in English literature (with a concentration in poetry) landed her a teacher’s assistant job while she pursued her doctorate at a ritzy, private New England university. I found myself satisfied with my degree in musical performance, and with my minor in teaching, I felt confident that I could make a good run of private lessons if I ever found my paid performances waning.

Since the Christmas performance at the Opera House, I had been blessed with stellar reviews and more offers for future engagements than I knew what to do with. I also had the tremendous fortune of signing with an obscure, but well-respected, producer to compose my first album. (My latest album is still in limbo, given my months of having been MIA, and the subsequent months that I’ve sequestered myself.)

Yesterday, I finally summoned the nerve to call my agent, Jack, expecting a rebuke filled with more four-letter words than an uncensored reality show. We burnt you out too soon, was all that he replied. Take another month or so. Come back when you’re ready. I was shocked. I wonder if persons higher than myself made phone calls on my behalf, and if so, what on earth did they tell him?

When I first signed with the company, I spent my summer months being carted here and there, all over the country, to perform in various venues. When I wasn’t performing somewhere, my agent had me in the studio, composing new music. It’s true; maybe they did burn me out. But I loved my work, the thrill of creating and the gratification of performing it for others.

In early September, when the winds in the north began to cool, Jack called to say that I had been requested to play at the grand re-opening of a Scottish castle, which had been renovated into a ritzy hotel for high-class clientele.

Scotland? Are you serious?

As a heart attack, love, Jack replied.

But, why me?

Eileen, the small-town, innocent act was okay when I first signed you, but come on. You’ve gotta stop acting shocked every time someone recognizes your talent. You’re one of a kind, doll. You’ve got it, and word’s gotten around. People want to hear you.

I laughed. Okay.

So is that a yes?

Yes. Of course, yes, I said, trying to sound as demure as possible. When Jack hung up the phone, I jumped and screamed, only covering my mouth after the fact and hoping that I hadn’t alarmed the tenants beneath me. Scotland!

It never occurred to me to be nervous. Because I created my own music, essentially I never got lost. If I felt nerves overtake me on the stage, I stuck to my knowledge of chord progressions and I improvised until I was able to relax and run through the more creative sequences. But often they were in completely different successions when I played on the stage than when I wrote them or performed off of sheet music in the studio. But as the hired car drove me up the long, gated path to the Highland Majestic, I texted Isabelle a message that read,

Dumbest thing I’ve ever done in my life…ever.

The towers rose like tidal waves and the long, stone walkways on the circumference of the second and third levels seemed to have bled off the pages of a fairy-tale storybook and manifested themselves before me.

More nerve-wracking than that, however, were the long lines of limousines and exquisite foreign automobiles that stood like a procession of the cold, impressively rich. I had performed at distinguished halls of music before, yes, but never before had I felt like such a lamb to the slaughter, or a curiosity on display for a different species to gawk at.

Are all of these cars guests? I asked Henry, my driver.

Of course, he said, matter-of-factly. It’s the grand opening.

He stared at me rather pointedly, no doubt wondering if I was on the waitstaff or perhaps merely a complete imbecile. I turned from his prying eyes to glance at the processional of couples who were being deposited by their drivers at the main doors. The men wore suits and the women wore expensive, designer coats and gleamed in the waning twilight from the endless baubles of diamonds and gold strung around their throats and wrists and stemming from their ears. I glanced down at my own attire. I wore an Indian wedding skirt and a sleeveless, V-neck blouse with a crimson shawl thrown over it. Appropriate for hanging with my artsy friends in the Village, maybe, but definitely not formal enough to blend into this crowd unseen. My scuffed, lace-up boots only added more insult.

Would it be possible for you to drop me off at the staff entrance? I said as we waited in the long line of cars.

Henry glanced at a slip of paper. It says that your agent wants you to check in with him in the main lobby. This is the entrance to the main lobby.

I sighed. It’s fine. Whatever.

I hugged my battered violin case to my lap. No matter how much of a fuss Jack put up about it, with its scuffed leather exterior and the Velcro strap I had replaced for the handle that had worn through with time, this was the case that my darling instrument had been stored in, and I refused to part with it. Looking down at it, and at my clothes, I shook my head and laughed. I looked more like a roaming gypsy than the paid entertainment for this exclusive occasion.

Henry pulled the car under the arched dome of the main entrance. There was a deep plum carpet spread across the white stone floor. Photographers waited eagerly to snap the portraits of the guests. At the sight of them, I wanted to crawl into a hole and die. Why had Jack done this to me? How could he not have warned me that the mere arrival at this place would be a formal occasion and, worse, photographed for the whole world to see.

I caught myself physically backing away from the car door as Henry stopped and exited his own to walk around to escort me out. In the midst of mind-numbing panic, I remembered something that Isabelle had remarked on once. She said, The world loves eccentrics. Well, fine then. I’ve never necessarily wanted to brand myself as an oddity, but if I stepped from this car with my head held high, wouldn’t it at least be better than a face covered in shame? And at least I could make the best of a less than desirable situation.

Henry stood beside my door and opened it. I need a minute, I said, slamming it shut.

Pulling off my crimson pashmina (which was at least nicely made), I wound it around my throat and fluffed it out so that it looked more like a luxurious scarf strategically placed to accentuate my bare shoulders. I pulled an earth-toned clip out of my handbag and gathered my hair into a low chignon, parting my bangs severely on one side and smoothing them over the upper plane of my forehead. I touched some lavender oil to my wrists and beneath my ears, and decided that would have to do.

Channel Grace Kelly. Think Gwyneth, I said to myself as I opened the door and allowed Henry my hand to escort me out. With my violin case held tight to my side and my other arm folded just so across my abdomen, I set my face in the most composed, demure expression I could conjure, and pretended not to notice when the photographers paused and lowered their cameras, then looked at one another and shrugged and set off bright starbursts of light into my eyes.

The warmth of the golden glow coming from the lobby was my finish line. I stared at the plush carpeting at my feet, and then again to the doors that promised my escape from this nightmare alley. Having reached the doors, I was ordered by several photographers to pause and turn and look to my right. I did so, trying my best to appear as though I knew what I was doing. After suffering their requests, I was finally released into the main hall of the castle, which was full of