Angels Go Naked. Cornelia Nixon

hear, J.J.,” she called and closed the door.

      A week later, the weather changed. Icy clouds swept over New Haven, and one morning the heat came on in her room. In bed, she felt a hot blast from the duct above, and a wave of nausea rolled up her throat. She leaped to her feet, amazed. Daydreams were one thing. Throwing cold water on her face, she rushed out into the frigid air, walked to the music school. But as she stepped into the hot building, her stomach rolled.

      She had to practice by an open window in her coat, fingers stiff with cold. Back in her room, she taped the heat duct closed, slept in mittens and a hat. But the next day was the same: in the heated dining room, she looked at foods she had thrown up the year before, and had to leave. She couldn’t sit in class. Blue veins started rising underneath her skin, delicate green circles at the eyes. She hadn’t slept with anyone but Henry, ever, and she hadn’t seen him for a year. Meeting her own eyes in the mirror, she tried to communicate with buried portions of her brain.

      “So, do you really think you’re still pregnant? Or is it just nostalgia for that happy time?”

      She thought of going back to see the doctor with the hanging face. But what could she tell him this time? That she had daydreamed just a little bit too much, and now her mind was going to make her live through it again? Surely it would stop. She went back to the Mozart, windows open to the cold.

      Rehearsals started, in a heated room. She got herself well chilled, lying on a frozen marble slab, and dove into the stifling interior. Her chair stood in the inner circle of the orchestra, rows of bodies radiating heat. Her stomach heaved, seasick on its rolling inner tide. The conductor was a famous white-haired visitor up from New York, and his cheeks produced two furious red patches at even a small mistake by any member of the orchestra. Fifty string players watched Margy, waiting for the moment when the error would be hers.

      She tried to banish daydreams of all kinds. But as she crossed campus, an eighteen-wheeler truck roared through the light on Elm, and instantly she saw herself beneath it, bones crushed, breasts sheared off. Gasping, she stood, face in hands. In the practice room, windows open to the cold, she turned her head and saw a rifle poked in through one, aimed at her. But when she whirled to look, the air outside was empty, innocent, two floors off the ground.

      Two days before the concert, she passed a woman on the curb outside the music school who smiled and handed her a flyer with a brightly colored photograph.

      “PAY ATTENTION,” it said. “SOMEONE WANTS TO MAKE THIS LEGAL IN YOUR COUNTRY.”

      The photo underneath was expensively produced, red and white and blue, tiny hands and feet, small curved spines and bulging eyes, tender see-through skin. A bucketful, in fact, ripped in half, sauced with blood.

      Margy made it just inside the first-floor women’s room and threw up in a sink. Quickly she washed her face. This wasn’t happening. She had a concert, she was fine. Shredding the photograph, she flushed it down three toilets, a few flakes at a time.

      J.J. was outside his practice room, closing cardboard in the doorjamb, stuffing a towel underneath, so no one could hear him practicing. He hadn’t hung around her room lately, but she rushed up to him, glad to see a friendly face.

      “J.J.,” she cried. “I just threw up.”

      He toed the towel into place.

      “You, Itzhak? That can’t be true. And here we are, all waiting for our treat.”

      She giggled nervously, then noticed his face. He watched her, not smiling. She stepped back a pace.

      “Jesus, J.J.”

      He finished with the towel, smiled to himself. He stood up straight.

      “Remember what they say, baby. It’s lonely at the top.”

      Pinching her cheeks between his thumb and fingers, he gave her face a little shake.

      “Lo-oo-onely,” he said and stepped inside the door.

      The stage was hot. Dry air whirled up from the floorboards like a wind from hell. Beyond the bright lights shining in her eyes, the audience roared quietly, finding seats, rustling programs. Her father had driven down from Boston, but she could not see him. She could see bored men in black suits, strange women in furs, sneering music students slouched in cheap seats, high up underneath the balconies. Since the nausea’s return, her nose had been acute, and a smell rolled toward her now, perfume, mothballs, sour after-dinner breath. Blue cheese, garlic sausage, gin.

      She tuned the violin, though she had done it twice already in the warm-up room. Lifting the bow, she felt a rill of nausea begin. Stopping, she concentrated on the cool black velvet skirt that slid across her legs. She had worn nothing underneath, and she saw a flash of a cool beach, Wading River, open sea. Henry had married Ann in June, and she had moved down here with him. They might have seen her name for this concert. She peered out past the lights. Her stomach lurched. She felt a sudden need to stand up, take her violin, and walk offstage.

      Too late. To a scatter of applause like rain, the concert master was parading in, Andre’s favorite student, a tall, precise young man with two curls drooped over his forehead. The chair beside hers groaned, and the caustic florals of his deodorant swept over her. The conductor swept in like a man who had no time to give this puny orchestra, and she sat up, caught the stagelights in her eyes, played through the opening Beethoven with the other violins.

      The Beethoven was over much too soon, and the conductor dashed out, not pausing to bow. The concert master turned and looked down at her, thin lips firm, violin held lightly on his knee. “Don’t drag the allegro this time. And try not to smile so much. Do you realize you always smile when you play? It’s a little disconcerting for the rest of us. You must realize, it looks a little smug.”

      Margy’s lips parted. She couldn’t organize her tongue. Smile? She smiled?

      He turned back toward the audience, which had started to applaud again, as the conductor almost goose-stepped from the wings. He popped up on the stand, nailed Margy with his eyes, flourished both hands.

      With a crash of sound, the other instruments came in on the introduction to her first solo. The music galloped past her, huge and fast. She tried to count. Had she lost track? She heard the phrase before the entrance to her solo, lifted her bow, and realized in time, it was the false entrance. Thank heavens she had not started to play. But now adrenaline sloshed through her veins. Her stomach rolled into a long, slow curl. Dizzily she gripped the violin, waited for the nausea to stop, and heard a silence on the stage.

      The conductor’s finger quivered in the air above her head. The orchestra pulled in its breath, a hundred mouths in one sharp suck. The moment for her entrance had arrived, and passed.

      She raised the bow, too slowly. It was a dream. The orchestra was a Tyrannosaurus rex with jaws spread wide, waiting for her to step inside. She couldn’t move. The concert master turned, stared down at her, eyes frozen wide.

      Somehow her fingertips pressed on the strings, her arms moved the bow. Dimly she heard the sounds out of the violin, tone as tinny as a fourth grader on a cigar box tied with string. It was the worst concerto solo ever turned in with Yale Orchestra, and she knew it every second that she played. Eyes fastened on the violin, she made herself keep going, going, to the awful end.

      Finally it was over. The audience began to make its roaring sound, like a building falling down. The conductor turned, held out his hand toward her, and even smiled. But she did not rise, and as he strode stage right for the last time, she stood and plunged straight off into the wings, violinists parting on all sides, as if suddenly recalling things they had to do offstage.