Angels Go Naked. Cornelia Nixon

hands plunged down behind the pew, as still as if they’d turned to stone.

      Ann leaned back her head, looking high up toward the ceiling, a parted sea of water shining in her eyes. She said something to distract the other two, and all three of them looked up, as if they could see something descending from above. In a moment, other people near them looked up too.

      The Bach swelled to an end, and the crowd pressed in, packing all the spaces on the floor. Forging a path back through stiff overcoats, miasmas of perfume, Margy stepped out into the cold, pure night. She’d seen enough, and as she hurried up the avenue, alive with pinpoint lights, Salvation Army bells, and taxis rushing through the slush, the city opened up around her, smaller than before, while she felt strangely huge, as if she were parading through the air like the Macy’s Mickey Mouse balloon. A thousand windows lit up small and bright, no bigger than the hollows in a honeycomb, and for a moment she could almost see inside, into the thousand tiny rooms, where figures crossed, and smiled, hiding their hurts, and wanting the wrong things, and spending long nights in their beds alone.

      A Solo Performance

      Joshua, his name was today, though sometimes it was Jennifer. Leaving her narrow room, going down the dormitory stairs, she could feel him on her chest, warm and heavy, smelling of milk and pee. He’d have a squarish head, pink skin, fair hair wisping up above the baby sling. She could see him as she passed the dining hall, though no one in there could. It was a daydream, postcard from a life she didn’t have. Stepping out into the warm fall day, leaving her college, crossing the quad, she was just a skinny girl in bell-bottoms, violin pack on her back, with no baby. Yellow maples glowed. Gargoyles grimaced under bright blue sky. A light breeze ruffled ivy on the library. (The baby would enjoy it, and she stopped to show him, in the sun.)

      Reaching Elm Street, she checked both ways for picket lines. Once she’d turned the corner, met a barricade of broken chairs, a line of cops in glinting riot shields. But this morning no one seemed to want to stop the war. Only the overachievers were out, heads down on their way to physics, music, math. Head down, she crossed the street (cautious, with the baby on her chest, one hand around his warm, diapered behind).

      Across another quad, she could see violinists now, converging from all sides. Lifting her head, she began to walk quickly (steadying the baby with both hands). Now she was Margaret Rose, Violin, who had been picked to do the big Mozart concerto solo with Yale Orchestra. Across the grass, when they saw her, the other violinists slowed, let her beat them to the music school. Striding in, she took the dim steps (careful not to jar the baby) to the floor where Andre’s master class would be.

      The room was packed already with a crowd of violinists, fidgeting and chewing gum. Here at Yale, she spent a lot of time in rooms completely filled with other string players, and all of them would twitch, check wallets, zippers, the exact location of their instruments, as if obsessive compulsion were an advantage on the violin. Margy took her violin out, tuned, tightened her bow, then loosened it, reclipped her barrettes, adjusted her headband. Straight hair was the only kind in style, but hers curled like some low-grade packing substance, swarm of locusts in her field of vision as she played. Clamping it down, she tuned again, rechecked her bow.

      Arching the bow across the strings, she slid into a few bars of the solo, experimentally. Suddenly she felt her belly swell up like a gourd, baby inside, head like concrete, pressed down, stretching her tender parts. Lifting the bow, she let her head tip back. One-two-three, she counted through a big contraction, breathing with the pain. It was just a daydream too, not quite as voluntary as the rest, something her mind would show to her. Eight-nine-ten, she exhaled with the agony.

      “Miss Perfect,” a voice sneered in a whisper behind her.

      Margy sat up. Her belly didn’t vanish, but it moved away, became less real. Engaging the bow, she launched into the hardest passage of her solo, tortuous quick changes, lightning triple-stops. She’d practiced it a million times. Her fingers knew it, hands and arms. To show she could, she went on playing for a few beats after Andre strode into the room.

      Andre was a big man with an anxious face, dark nervous curls just going gray. When he stood in front of them, all motion stopped. Famous for playing cautiously, he was also famous for harsh praise, and sometimes shattered students casually.

      “You are a musical illiterate,” he’d said the week before to a young man, in front of the whole class.

      Now the room went silent as the inside of a rock. His voice was just above a whisper, but it rose to the ceiling like a cathedral oration.

      “The solo in a Mozart concerto is never good enough. The music is always far above your head. Mozart was a genius. You are not.”

      He swept his hand toward Margy, offering the chance to be never good enough. She raised the bow. Her stomach dropped. Everything she knew about Mozart abandoned her. She wavered through the first few bars.

      Andre began to bite his thumbnail, shifted it around to bite the other way. He darted one big hand out in the air. She stopped.

      “Hear that? Play that phrase again. You’re schmaltzing it. That’s junk.”

      She tried again. He leaped to his feet, made little jagged gestures, pinkie cocked as if above a porcelain teacup.

      “Just play the notes, the way they’re written! Not like that!”

      His black wool legs stood right in front of her. His voice lashed over her. She smelled her sweat. The last allegro seemed a continent away. Why bother, when he wouldn’t like it anyway? Tipping her head back, she let her body stretch around the baby’s head, pain a high note with vibrato, well sustained. She could no longer hear Andre. Breathing with the big contractions, she closed her eyes and played.

      At last he strode out of the room. Limp, shirt wet to the waist, she slumped to her knees, slid the violin into its case. All around, the class filed out.

      A small Asian woman stopped beside her, standing like a truck driver, one hip jutted to the side, cracking her gum. She was a year ahead of Margy, but she looked about fourteen, straight black hair in ponytails that swung as she moved. She chewed vigorously.

      “So, are you nervous when you play, or what? I mean, you know, on stage?”

      Margy stood up.

      “Nervous? No,” she said automatically and stopped. Of course she was, not as bad as when she was a kid. Then she used to throw up, wet the bed. But it seemed bad luck to talk about it, with a solo in three weeks. Better to deny it, like a magic charm.

      “When I was a kid, my mother told me just to say, ‘These people are in for a real treat,’ and sweep out there onto the stage.” It had never worked, but it seemed like the right thing to say.

      The other violinist did not smile. “‘These people are in for a real treat’? Hunh.” She left the room.

      Next afternoon, when Margy showed up at the practice rooms, a trumpeter she knew leaned on a windowsill beside the room she liked to use, eating a sandwich. J.J. had long hair of several kinds, straight blond on top but curly brown below, like pubic hair, with muttonchop sideburns that made him look like a Saint Bernard. She liked J.J., but it was another warm day, peaceful, and she had crossed campus with the baby on her chest. The moment she stepped into the music school, her belly swelled up and the pain bore down on her, too hard to breathe. She breezed by J.J., almost afraid that he might see.

      He lifted his sandwich in salute. “Hey. I hear you don’t get stage fright.”

      “Ask me in two weeks.”

      “Why? You’re not going to be scared then either, are you? That’s not what I heard.”

      She paused a beat. So they were out there quoting her. She couldn’t think about that now. She had a private lesson in an hour with Andre.