Except the Music
Kristine Kathrin Rusch
Except the Music
© 2006 by Kristine Kathrin Rusch
Copyright for digital edition for all languages
© Digitpub srl 2010
via Adige 20 - 20135 Milano, Italia
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ISBN 978-88-6586-002-1
Cover by Roberto Grassilli
warehouse.robertograssilli.com
This title is also available in português and italiano.
Converted in epub format in July 2010
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Except the Music
Kristine Kathryn Rusch
“Where do musicians go to die?” She rested on one elbow, her honey brown hair spilling down her arm and onto the pillow. The rest of her body was hidden by the linen duvet, which warded off the room’s chill.
Max paused, his left black tuxedo pump—shined to perfection before the concert—in his right hand. The question unnerved him. She had overheard his remark earlier, made at the festival to one of the other performers: places like this are where classical musicians go to die.
His cheeks warmed. He was glad he had his back to her. He slipped the pump over his sock-clad foot, then picked up the other shoe. “It was a joke.”
His voice was soft, gentle, as if he wasn’t the kind of man who had any malice within him. He knew that wasn’t true, and he had a hunch she did as well. But he couldn’t be certain of that; he knew so very little about her.
“I know you meant it that way,” she said, scrunching up the pillows and pulling the duvet over her large—and not fake—breasts. “Still, it got me to wondering.”
He buttoned his shirt halfway, stuffed the bow tie in the pocket of his pants, and looked for his jacket. The room seemed smaller than it had two hours ago. Then it had seemed charming—slanted ceilings, large windows with a spectacular view of the ocean, a bed in the very center—made, which surprised him—and two antique upholstered chairs next to a curved reading lamp. A small table sat near the even smaller half kitchen. The walls were lined with bookshelves, filled floor-to-ceiling with well-read paperbacks. Until he saw those, he would have guessed that she was a weekender, like so many others in this godforsaken coastal town.
“Wondering?” he asked. “About death?”
She shrugged a pretty shoulder, then turned a lamp on the end table beside the bed. He hadn’t noticed the lamp or the end table before. Of course, he had been preoccupied.
“Death is a hobby of mine,” she said so calmly that it made him nervous.
He finally turned toward her. She was forty, give or take, but still beautiful in a mature way that he rarely saw outside of the major cities.
She didn’t look like the typical classical music groupie. Granted, most of them were middle-aged women with too much time on their hands, but their beauty—if they once had any at all—had faded. They now had a soft prettiness or a competent intelligent look about their tired faces. Dressing up made them look like librarians, and he always sensed desperation in them.
She had stood out, even on the first night of the festival, wearing a lavender silk blouse that made her honey hair seem blond. She was statuesque, overdressed for the Oregon Coast, and yet, he had a sense then—which he still had—that she had dressed down for every one of the concerts she attended. Her hair was long, where most of the middle-aged women wore theirs too short—and she wore no make-up: she needed none.
“You seem startled,” she said, and that was when he realized how ridiculous he looked. He still had his shoe in his hand, one sock-clad foot resting on his knee, his shirt unbuttoned and his pants unzipped.
A man who was trying to escape. A man who was done with this one-night stand, as pleasurable as it had been.
A man who should have known better, but had—even at the ripe old age of 45—let his penis get the best of him.
“I just never heard anyone claim they specialized in death before,” he said.
“I don’t specialize,” she said. “I dabble.”
She fumbled in the end table’s only drawer, finally pulling out a cigarette with an air of triumph. Max winced. The place didn’t smell of tobacco, but apparently that didn’t mean anything. She hadn’t tasted of tobacco either. Maybe the cigarette was of a different kind.
She lit it, and he realized he was both right and wrong: the cigarette was a different type—he just hadn’t expected to smell cloves instead of marijuana.
“I wouldn’t have bought the season tickets if it weren’t for the Mozart on the bill.” She took a long drag from the cigarette, then let the blue smoke filter slowly out of her lungs. “I so love that requiem. I think it’s the best of all of them.”
Max didn’t; he preferred Fauré’s. “Mozart never finished it. There’s some argument about how much of it is his work.”
“Precisely.” She jabbed the cigarette toward him with the movement of a long-standing smoker. “A requiem partially composed by a dead man. Don’t you find that amazingly appropriate?”
“I think it’s more appropriate that I find my coat before I leave.” He slid the other shoe over his foot. “Did you see where I dropped it?”
She gave him a wicked smile. “I wasn’t looking at your clothes.”
He gave her a wicked smile in return. No sense letting her know that she was freaking him out.
He stood, looked around the small space for the tuxedo jacket that had cost him more than she probably paid for everything in this place. He remembered this feeling; he’d had it in his twenties before he married, this sinking sensation that if he had simply taken five minutes to talk with the woman before slipping into bed with her, he would never have touched her.
Then he saw the jacket, lying in a heap on top of a fake Persian rug.
“You don’t have to run out,” she said.
“Actually, I do,” he said, picking up the jacket in one neat movement. “I’m staying with a local family, and it would be rude to wake them just because I stayed out too late.”
That shoulder shrug again, accompanied by a practiced pout. “So don’t go home at all.”
“I’m the celebrity,” he said, with only a trace of irony. “They’ll be watching for me.”
As if he were a child again, and they were his parents. He hated this part of music festivals, and he didn’t care how much the organizers explained it to him, he still didn’t understand the lure. He felt as though the patrons, who had spent thousands of dollars supporting music in the hinterlands, had also bought a piece of him, even though none of them acted that way. They all seemed honored that a man of his skills would deign to visit their home.
He would rather have deigned to drop $500 per night for a suite at a local resort, but that money would have come out of his own pocket. And with CD sales declining precipitously and classical music going through a concurrent but unrelated slide, he had to watch his pockets closely. He still had a lot of money by most people’s standards, but he also had a sense that money might have to last him for the rest of his life.
“Poor, poor pitiful you,” she said with a smile. It had been that smile, wide and warm and inviting, that had brought him here in the first place.
“Yep,” he said, “poor, poor pitiful me.”
And with that he slipped out the front door and into the cool fog-filled night. As he walked the three blocks back to the performing arts center – built twenty years ago with funds raised at the festival – he realized that he hadn’t even learned her name.
He was out of practice. There had once been a time when he would have learned enough about her to cover himself for the rest of the festival. Now he was going to have to avoid her.
He sighed, feeling the accuracy of his earlier statement.
This really was where classical musicians went to die.
***
The North County Music Festival drew several thousand people annually to the Oregon Coast. Max had come every year since the very first, mostly because of Otto Kennisen, the genius behind it all. Otto had taken Max under his wing when Max had been fourteen, and Max owed him for that.
The festival had grown from a tight little community of internationally known musicians who wanted a coastal vacation into one of the more respected classical music festivals in the Northwest. Although that didn’t mean much any more.
When he had started in professional music as an acclaimed prodigy about thirty years ago, the international music scene had more festivals than sense. Classical music sales were at an all-time high, and some musicians had become superstars.
Now, the music wasn’t being taught in the schools or played much on the radio, and what was being played was Top 40 Classical—“acceptable” excerpts from Bach or Mozart or Beethoven, rarely the entire works, and never works by “difficult” composers like Schoenberg or Stravinsky.
Europe still loved its classical music, but it also loved its classical musicians, preferring anyone with a European pedigree to an upstart American.
Max was able to make his living touring and playing music—his CD sales were down, but not as far down as some of those former superstars—but the changes bothered him. Once, he would have toured the major concert halls in Portland and Seattle. Now he made the rounds of the music festivals and augmented his visits with performances with the remaining reputable orchestras.