Fugue For Three Voices chapter 1

[figureofdismay]

The concert at Alice Tully Hall lasted on the whole 15 minutes, and that was counting the small eternity that he sat motionless and falling into a black, endless pit of blankness, while the orchestra petered away, paused, backed up, and tried again to lead him to his cue. It wasn’t a tough piece, not any harder anyway than the last ten times he’d played it on stage in farther flung venues than this. Maybe it was the fact that it was New York. Maybe it was something about the city air that scrubbed his brain clean of all notes. He knew it wasn’t because his father was in the audience, because he wasn’t. He wasn’t even in the country as far as he knew. Rehearsals had gone well. Roman had liked the sound of the hall, filling the empty vastness with the great ringing sound of the Steinway concert grand gleaming before him. He hadn’t even really needed his sheet music, the pieces were supremely familiar. He had joked casually with Pleager, the conductor, through the pre-show meeting and hadn’t even had a vague shiver of nerves the afternoon before the concert. His main concern was the heavy, leaden sky that promised early sleet or snow and might make for a sluggish trek back to the hotel after the after concert drinks. There was no sign of danger, but still, for no particular reason, Roman had been utterly unable to play.

There was no concert. Roman had sat through the conductor giving him two tries at the opening bars, and part way through the third try he’d stood on shaking legs and stumbled backstage. He’d gone for his coat in his greenroom, before Caroline could make her way to the back of the house from the prized mother of the prodigy box and demand to know what the fuck he was thinking, and hurried out of the stage door, and into the first cab he could catch on the street. He almost didn’t tell the driver to go back to the hotel, considering and discarding the idea of going for the airport, or trying for a new hotel or even the brownstone where he’d spent his first eleven years – not that he was sure that any of the Roys still even held that property. In the end, the fact that he didn’t have his wallet on him meant he had to go back to the suite where the fare would go on the tab. And where before long Caroline would swoop in and demand to know what had happened.

Roman didn’t really think she’d accept ‘fuck if i know’ as a answer but he didn’t have any other so that was going to be fun.

*

It wasn’t fun. Roman had taken a scalding hot shower when he got back to his room to try to shock his brain back into reality and had then sat in bed, in his pajamas, shivering with his wet hair in the anemically heated room, running his fingers through the piece he’d been completely unable to bring to mind 40 minutes earlier against the counterpane folded back across his lap. If it hadn’t been totally and completely too late to try again, Roman could probably pound it off in his sleep. This was how Caroline found him when she stormed into the suit.

She started with stiff, cold-voiced horror at the situation that was crashing onto them. “Do you even understand the humiliation you’ve brought down on our heads? You were contracted to play for the next two nights, are you going to put us through this all over again for the rest of the weekend? Do you know how many terribly important people who could affect our future asked me questions I couldn’t answer?”

“I’m not fucking going back to that hall,” Roman had insisted, which was the only thing he could articulate. He was still too much of a Roy to be able to feel humiliation, not the way Caroline felt it, loss of face somehow meaning as much to her as getting her way or not, he didn’t care that he looked a fool. Fine, Roman the fool, that was him. But the complete and utter blank had threatened to eat him whole and he didn’t know why it had happened but going back to the place where it had happened felt like running up to the edge of a cliff and hoping the momentum didn’t carry him over the edge. “Say I’m sick, say I broke something, say you had to have me locked up in the loony bin because uh, I suddenly, totally flipped and think I’m a canary or something, I don’t care.”

“Roman, be serious! You know your career is already in a precarious place.”

“Right. I’m ruining us by gaining my full adult height, such as it is, losing my baby face and fucking up your dreams of keeping me your shirley temple dearest forever. Sorry, but I couldn’t exactly do something about the passage of time.”

“Look, are you sick? Should I get a doctor?” Caroline had asked, ignoring his outburst. And then she had ignored his protestations while she rang up the concierge doctor and had Roman examined, pronounced mildly feverish, and tucked up in bed with non-prescription sleeping tablets that he grudgingly took. He was knocked out into a velvet dark where the confusion couldn’t find him while Caroline sat up in the sitting room and plotted what she was going to do with her suddenly failing prodigy.

**

Roman had been performing since he was 13, while Caroline all but claimed that he was 10 or under. She’d had him taking lessons since he was 6, first because 5 year old Shiv had refused the teacher Caroline had hired for her. Caroline’s ideas of what a daughter of the Collingwood estate should learn were somewhat Victorian, but not so much so that she couldn’t accept her winsome little son’s need to please and substitute him into all the lessons her furious tomboy daddy’s girl refused.

Roman wasn’t sure sometimes if it was a positive thing or not that he took to the music so well. It was good, though, basically. The notes knocked all the other chatter out of his head while he was at the keyboard. It was an excuse to avoid any suggestion that he should be out playing ball and running track and other other things healthy rich boys should be doing to prove they were healthy rich boys, the robustness Logan wanted to demand of his sons. It was reason for him to beg to go with Caroline when the great divorce finally came down, and he was looking at being trapped in New York under Logan’s thumb, under his disappointed sneer with Ken and Shiv and the suffocating corporate edifice that Logan wanted to feed him to, by way of a strong American education to ‘toughen him up.’ Between military school and Caroline’s ambitions to make a celebrated prodigy of him, Roman came down in the camp with fame and acclaim and without push ups and 6am roll call.

Caroline and the lawyers had lobbied hard and won him, and carried him back to England when he was 12, and at the time Roman didn’t even mind how clear Caroline had made it just how much of Logan’s wealth she had had to give up to take away even the leftover Roy son. “But we’ll make it worth it, won’t we, RoRo,” she’d said, patting his shoulder with a long, cool hand as she’d settled him in place on their chartered flight – no more private jets of their own for Lady Collingwood and son, but they weren’t reduced entirely to commercial.

And he had made it worth it for her. Little Roman had been in magazines and newspapers, he’d played in country halls and churches as a budding artistic curiosity before he’d caught on, and Carloline’s connections had started to bring him serious acclaim. That was around when the boys at school, where he was a day boy of moderate academic standing and middling popularity for a few idyllic years, had discovered his little musical career and had promptly made his life hell. He was 15 and Caroline was selling him as marginally twelve, and it had suited her to take him from school and start him with private tutors, old school ties cachet be damned, to further obscure his real age. It would be a shame, after all, if his graduation was announced when newsworthy, and rob them of the last few years of the blurry edge of his being a child genius before he had to stand on his own two feet as an adult talent.

Roman wasn’t altogether clear that he was going to be an adult talent. He had skill, he knew that. He’d worked at it hard enough, under Cawthorne, under Billings, under Olbermann, under his own boredom, solitary inclinations, and lack of ability to think up anything better or more satisfying to do with his time – beyond the usual intense fantasy life that plagued an isolated teenage boy who only vaguely dreamed of touching anything warmer than a set of ivory keys. But he could hear talent when it was played in front of him, he could hear it in the recordings he studied. Roman didn’t really think he could hear it when he played, no matter what his mother and the musical martinets she employed said about it.

He spoke with his siblings, sometimes, on the phone, but they didn’t have much idea what to say to one another. Shiv made fun of him for starting to pick up an English accent, and afterwards he’d tried harder to cling to the flattened tones of upper crust new yorkers, the vestiges of his Americanness that made him feel the coolly observant outsider on the Collingwood estate. Kendall was even harder to talk to, his vacillations between painful earnestness and aggressive detachment. Roman knew that Logan had his claws into Ken deep as they would go and he shivered to realize it but there was nothing he could say to Kendall to warn him that he would hear. Nevertheless, Kendall was the one who had come to see him play the first big concert Roman had done when he was 16. Kendall was 18 then and free to arrange his own transatlantic flight. The two of them had had coffee at the hotel afterwards, like a couple of grown ups in a movie. Kendall had told him all about his future at Waystar, the first year of his business degree, and how he, Roman, would have a place at Waystar, too, for as long as Kendall was there, if he ever decided he didn’t like the piano anymore. Then Kendall had told him, bright eyed, leaning close and flushed, how great coke and pussy was and how fantastic a time Roman was going to have once he got a little freedom from Caroline’s gilded cage. “You gotta go to college, man, you gotta cut loose and see what you’ve been missing, it’s the only way to wake up and live,” kendall had insisted.

Roman had thought about getting away to go to college, it had been a compulsive fantasy and fear ever since he was 17 and should theoretically have been taking his exams and applying to the ivory towers of the land. Or not of the land, it would be an excuse to get back to New York, Juilliard was a real possibility if he’d been free to try. Not that they’d reached out officially, but a contact of Caroline’s who sat on the board had told him after a concert that he needed only to apply. Caroline had been happy to let many smitten and enthralled college officials pay them court and pay them fees and hire him for exclusive concerts at private manors and halls, which had given him expectations. But when Roman had asked seriously to apply, put his career on hold and further his studies, Caroline had frozen him out. After the first few dismissals, she hadn’t even been willing to acknowledge she heard him asking. He’d threatened to apply without her permission, unnecessary once he turned 18, and that was when he realized that she, as his mother and manager, had been compensated for all his concerts and his CD deal and royalties. If Caroline wasn’t interested in paying his tuition, he had very little that was strictly his own, and few skills or even education beyond his playing, given how little he and Caroline had actually followed through with his tutors after pulling him from the day school. If there were exams to pass to usher him to classes without the benefit of an official diploma, he had no firm concept of how he’d do. He wasn’t dumb, he did know that, but how that translated into the real world beyond music and his mother’s affluent friends, he’d always been a little afraid to find out.


*

Caroline had put the idea abroad that he was sick. A bad flu, stricken with a fever, terrible aches, nervous exhaustion, the poor boy is bedridden, no, no, she was looking after him in the Hamptons house Caroline had kept in the divorce, not quite bad enough for a spell at a hospital, though she wasn’t going to lie, the strain was such on both of them that the doctor had suggested it, but her Roro wouldn’t like it and certainly a mother knew what was best for her boy, no, no he wasn’t contagious, it was merely his delicate constitution and the great whirlwind of touring he’d been doing this last year, it was bound to catch up with him. No, no, he wasn’t taking visitors, there would be no interviews, the further three concerts he’d missed had been cancelled and refunded, and the London weekend planned for two weeks hence had been postponed, with new dates to be announced when the schedules could be coordinated. The London concert date slid by while he hid in his room, and he’d been unable to give his mother a clue about when she should begin arranging for a fresh slate of appearances, even though she’d been inundated with calls.

Roman had listened to Caroline give the spiel multiple times as she paced with tight-faced sharpness that belied her airy tone up and down the sitting area in his room while he sulked in bed. He’d even agreed with some of the story when he first heard it. He was tired and worn down after the long marathon of concert dates over the last 20-ish months. He’d even truly and obligingly run a fever the first few days of his sudden involuntary break, complete with restless and achilly twisting limbs and heavy, muddled head, queasy, unwilling stomach. Caroline had sent the maid up with broth and toast twice a day and let him sleep and sleep, with the heavy green curtains pulled tight against the midwinter daylight.

But by the end of the first week, when they should have been boarding the charter flight back to england so that he could begin preparation for the next concert appearance, Roman had awoken clear headed and replete with youthful energy, or near enough, anyway to rise and scrub himself down in the shower and come down for breakfast. To know that he was perfectly well enough to get on a plane, to go to rehearsal, to meet with whatever cultural arts reporters his mother might arrange for him to see. Yet he knew that he wasn’t going to do any of that. He couldn’t.

He said as much to Caroline, who asked him with less-than-motherly confusion and concern, more like accusation, why on earth he couldn’t, why was he doing this to them. He still had nothing more for her than a pained shrug and “Fuck if I know. Sorry, mom, but uh… I’m a blank.”

“Have you even tried? Have you sat down and even tried to play since we left the city?” she had demanded.

The truth was he had. In the midst of his fever he’d been unable to sleep the first night the small prescription of sedatives had run out, and he’d slipped across the hall to his music room and sat at the familiar old upright where he’d taken his summer lessons years ago, knowing he wouldn’t wake his mother, who slept at the other end of the long hall and under the influence of her own sleep aid, and had played through his favorite, “Raindrops,” and on the unthinking momentum of that, the first movement of the piece from the concert that wasn’t without a hitch. Then, as he’d geared up for the second movement, imagined around him the hall, the seeking eye of the conductor, the orchestral cues, the notes had dissolved from under his hands, from out of his head. In their place there had only been more of the ringing emptiness. His fingers had fumbled and stiffened for the first time since he was 10. He’d tried “Raindrops” again, backing up to what had worked already, and fumbled that, too, missing measures, panting as he forgot what came next. His head had swum, the room whirling around him with fever and horror. He had slammed down the cover over the keys and leaned on his folded arms against it until he could steady his breathing and his legs enough to flee back to bed.

That was the last time he’d tried to play. Roman had worried he’d lose more pieces he’d previously had by heart if he tried them without understanding what was going on.

“Yes, mom,” he had admitted, “I’m not that much of a coward. I did give it the ol’ college try… Didn’t go great. Went really, totally awful actually. So uh. If you don’t want a repeat of last time, I’ve probably gotta stay ‘sick’ for a while.”

“Roman!” she exclaimed, “This is hardly the time to be joking! This is your future that you’re dangling over the cliff!”

“Believe me, I am completely fucking aware it’s my future,” he protested.

“Oh, Roman, you do know how I wish you wouldn’t swear. It doesn’t suit your image and what if you slip up in public?” she said with an exasperated gesture as she got up and went for her pack of cigarettes in the kitchen drawer. Caroline’s attempts to quit smoking never seemed to stretch as far as actually disposing of her stash.

Roman sighed and walked over to open the french doors to the covered patio despite the chilly weather and curled up sideways in one of the pair of rattan chairs so that Caroline could finish her lecture with the aid of nicotine while adhering to her rule about smoke in the house. He pulled his robe collar up around his ears and tucked his feet between the chair cushions trying not to shiver. “I think it probably maybe doesn’t matter if I swear as much as pop if I can’t do another concert without going into a fucking fugue state,” he muttered into his knees as Caroline settled herself with her lighter and her coffee cup and her basalt ash tray on the small glass table beside her.

“Roman, you must stop this now,” she snapped, “You can’t take this defeatist attitude. I don’t know where you got it from, it certainly wasn’t from me. And certainly not your father, for all his faults that man wouldn’t admit defeat if it throttled him.”

“I know, I know. Logan and Carolines fail son, that’s me. Guess I was just born with it,” he snarked, mugging a fake smile. She rolled her eyes and scowled at him before remembering that she was trying to prevent frown lines and smoothed her face with a conscious little shrug. He felt like telling her that the smoking was working against her more than normal human expressions, but one argument at a time was enough for the morning.

“You can’t just give up, Roman. Just think of all the work we’ve put in, that you’ve put in, over the years, all for this. The connections are made, the concert schedule is lined up! We have a manager who isn’t a thief, and your CDs are selling well at every event! Just consider how easily that can all fall apart if you stop showing up when people expect you. You’re twenty years old, Roman. Who knows how long you can skate along on your youthful genius – not long at all, if you earn a reputation for being an unreliable diva.”

“Glen Gould had no social skills, moved to the Canadian wilderness and stopped giving concerts and everybody was still dying to buy his stuff or work with him,”

“You are not Glen Fucking Gould, Roman, and you’re setting yourself up for defeat if you try to pretend otherwise.”

“Language, mother,” he scolded with a sarcastic smile in retaliation, and then went back to scowling at his sharply bent kneecaps. “And thank you for that, without your input I never would have known that I was only a fleeting echo of the real ex prodigy superstar. Of course.”

“Maybe you could break your wrist,” Caroline said thoughtfully, not paying attention to his grumbling, “Not actually, of course, that would never do, but we could get you one of those big medical braces or something conspicuous like that. Say that you did it in your tennis lesson or you came off your bicycle or something. Then you would need at least 6 more weeks to heal and the whole winter schedule could reasonably be pushed back.”

“And I’m supposed to have been playing tennis in barely above freezing weather, in January, while I’m also sick with a mysterious monster flu bug and-or victorian lady hysterical exhaustion?”

“Or riding your bicycle. Or skateboarding even, teenagers do skateboard, I hear all about it. And you could have been delirious. Or stir crazy from being cooped up in your bed!” she gestured her cigarette at him after tapping her ash, “I’m not sure you’re not, you know. I think I am. We’ve been holed here for weeks, thanks to you. And they couldn’t make you hold to your contract with a broken bone.”

“Ugh, you’re a crazy person,” Roman complained, slithering out of the patio chair in annoyance and hugging himself for warmth, “And I’m gonna end up actually sick again if I stay out here and let you blow smoke at me. I’m going back to bed.”

“I’m just trying to think of something constructive,” Caroline called after him as he strode back into the kitchen breakfast room, “You could try helping me instead of complaining. You can’t just turn into a lump and expect it all to be peachy, Roman. Roman? Are you listening to me?”

But by that point he’d scurried to the foot of the back stairs and could reasonably pretend he hadn’t heard her. He hoped she’d remember to shut the french doors soon, there was a terrible draft.

**

Caroline’s friends and Roman’s benefactors who among the so-called inner circle of supporters and who knew to where they had retreated, had been sending flowers and little get well gifts to show how much they cared about the poor little piano boy who was apparently teetering on the edge of collapse. The gifts spoke to just how firmly Caroline’s campaign to keep him a little child in the public’s eye had taken hold. The vases of flowers on the foyer table had powder blue ribbons, and there were a number of teddy bears, big and small, lined up in front of them. One person had sent, absurdly, an etch a sketch, and more rewardingly, someone had sent a small package wrapped in blue paper with red balloons that had turned out to be a gameboy color, which Roman had plucked from the pile of get well cards before his mother could see it and make him give it to the housekeeper’s kid.

Caroline didn’t believe in video games, at least for boys like Roman. He was too impressionable, she said, and his hands were too valuable. His father, or rather his father’s assistant in all likelihood, had sent him a playstation and a dozen games for his birthday a couple years ago, but Caroline had swooped in and bundled it back out of his room within a week, berating him for letting it take up too much of his practicing time. Which it hadn’t, he was still practicing the same number of hours and making all his appropriate appearances, he was only playing video games when he would otherwise have been doing homework, or napping, or jerking off because he was 17 and an otherwise healthy human male, but he wasn’t going to argue with his mother about that, thank you very much, and anyway, he had actually given himself a blister on his thumb from the controller from playing so long so maybe it was for the best. But he’d always meant to go find it in the attic one day and show her he could make his own decisions. Probably. About his hobbies.

Roman hesitated at the base of the front stairs and then looped back around to the foyer table, and detached one of the bears from it’s arrangement, a soft cream thing with small round ears wearing blue pajamas that had clutched a ‘get well balloon’ on a stick, and tucked that under his arm, too, before darting back up the stairs. Caroline was making her usual mid-morning raft of reassuring phone calls in the office at the back of the house so she wouldn’t see, and anyway she’d never cared the way his father had about ‘girl’ toys and their appropriateness, but still. The instinct was there to sneak, and the habit.

He wasn’t going to fake a broken arm, Caroline had acknowledged that much the night before at dinner. He wasn’t going to just bounce back and get on his merry concert tour either, despite her wishes, and he didn’t even understand why. It wasn’t defiance. It didn’t even seem to be a breakdown, he didn’t feel particularly unhappy or upset when he wasn’t sitting in front of the keys and feeling the notes trickle out of his ears or whatever they were doing instead of making their way to his hands. When he was just sitting around in his bed or pacing up and down the music room he felt basically normal and fit, no different than all those weeks ago when he’d pulled off a perfectly successful appearance in Coln.

His mother had threatened to call in a therapist for him, a psychiatrist, something. Obviously there was something wrong with him, and there was nothing he could do besides shrug and agree that probably that was right because if there was nothing wrong with him the fateful concert would have chugged along just fine. But he couldn’t think of anything to say to a psychiatrist, and he told her that, too.

“It’s not like we’re broke without it, right? I mean, right?” he’d tried to wheedle out of her the night before, “Like, I know it cost you, in the divorce, Pop wasn’t crazy about splitting up his kids. And the tutors and everything. But still, come on mom, we’re sitting here in our hamptons house and I’ve been selling out concerts for the last 5 years. Plus, the CDs. Sales can only go up if I turn into an interesting recluse, right? The intrigue of it all? If I don’t play again, it’s not like we’ll be ruined, right?”

“Roman… No, no, not ruined, no. But you should be aware… There was a reason I married your father. It wasn’t quite a fairytale you know, the estate…. Life is long and expensive, my dearest. More So than you can possibly think. And your talent, even if nothing else, I know you can’t see it, but it’s such a rare gift, surely you don’t want to just throw it away just because things got a bit complicated for the first time? Wouldn’t that be sad? Wouldn’t you miss it? I thought you loved music, dearest!”

“I do. I do! And even if I got tired of it, which, you know, could happen someday, I don’t know what the fuck else I could do. It’s not like I’ve got, like, marketable life skills. It’s not like you let me go to college, mother, despite what you said about the point of sour Mr. Whatshisface with all his textbooks who tortured me about the cromwell and the roundheads and Shakespeare and geometry and whatever for 3 years.”

“It wasn’t a matter of letting you or not, Roman. You were perfectly clear you didn’t want to go to Oxford or Cambridge, you wanted to go to a performing arts school which seemed terribly redundant. You agreed with me, Roman, I know you remember that.”

“Sure, okay, I remember, I remember, but. Mom, this is why I’m asking. Are we okay without it? If I take a, like, delicately artful hiatus for six months, a year? Really, honestly, no waffling, no Caroline hyperbole, would we be okay through that?”

“Well, yes, certainly, we could coast along nicely for that long, and much longer, if it was truly necessary,” said his mother with a heavy sigh and a defeated shrug of her hands, “But the thing to remember, Roman, is that you are a famous boy right now. You are in the public eye. You and Charlotte Church are the child darlings of the music world right now, and I know you’re smart enough to realize that the public’s patience and memory isn’t long. Not terribly long at all, my dear. If this hiatus of yours carries on too long, you’ll find that it’s a hiatus that continues on. These aren’t threats, dearest, I’m not saying this to scare you or make you upset, but you need to be aware of certain realities of the world. So that you can make an informed decision. It’s a serious thing, Roman, it’s our future.”

“Yeah, yes, Mom, I know. It’s our future. Listen, I’m not hungry anymore, okay? I’m gonna go… sit in front of the keyboard and pretend I can practice, I guess.”

“Must you always be so dramatic, Roman?” she’d sighed and slumped theatrically back in her louis XVI dining chair, clutching her glass of white wine. “This isn’t the end of this conversation, you know,” she’d warned as he fiddled with his plate and put his napkin beside it with exaggerated care, pretending he wasn’t simply running from the scene of the argument, “You need help, dearest, that’s obvious whether you believe it or not. I’m going to find someone who can sort you out. Just you wait and see, it’ll all come right in the end.”

“Right, uh-huh. I mean, if you’re really concerned about our cash flow in the future, maybe you shouldn’t waste your money on some sports-psych-y hack but whatever, mom. We’ll burn that bridge when we come to it, right?”

So he’d slunk off and stared at his sheet music, slouching on the piano bench in the music room with the curtains pulled wide to let in the faint glow of moonlight over the seafront. He’d run scales and stretched. He’d trilled and fiddled with a bit of jazzy nonsense with no origin and no aim until he was just plunking at mid notes to fill the quiet. Then he’d sat and sat, ambivalent, with his mouth full of dread. His head ached and he’d given up and gone to bed.

**