Free Sight Reading by Daphne Kalotay Page A

party, Nicholas heard himself saying the words, so stupidly. The cheap wine had left a cloying taste on his tongue, as if in retribution. Around him the air, too, was sweet, the flowering trees blooming hugely in the darkness. “ . . . love shouldn’t be about possession . . .” With each echo Nicholas heard the self-effacement, the falseness of that statement, understood what Hazel had done, all those years ago, for his benefit. She had protected him, by pretending not to need or want an engagement ring. How had he not heard it before? He who had made a profession of listening.
    Many times he had recalled sitting across from her that fateful night, stunned by her beauty, blurting out, impromptu, “Won’t you marry me, Hazel? Won’t you be my wife?” Even then he had heard the dissimulation in his phrasing, the way the words, “Won’t you . . . ?” suggested doubt, when really he would have been shocked had she refused his proposal. And yet he had seen the slight disappointment flash across her face, watched her as she understood that this was it, this proposal of marriage that she had dreamed of, and that there was no little velvet box to peer into.
    And so he had blubbered something about how he hadn’t found a ring yet, how as soon as he scrounged together a bit of money he would buy one. That was when Hazel told him she didn’t need a ring, wasn’t even sure she quite believed in rings, since really they were about possession, and love shouldn’t be about possession. . . .
    He sighed as he turned down his street, past magnolia trees where preposterous blossoms hovered like plump birds. He had taken Hazel’s word without even considering who she was, a woman who understood the tactile beauty of objects, who found imagery and symbols in any objet d’art, whether museum paintings, graffiti murals, or the patterns in their Persian carpet.
    As he let himself into the darkened flat, he resolved to make it up to her. He flicked on the light and blinked at the bare walls. Of course Hazel had left her mark, had doused the bathroom and kitchen counters with a purifying layer of bleach, had detonated disinfectant and soaked the stove’s coils in a tubful of suds—acts that to Nicholas had the aura of witchcraft. And indeed the apartment looked, felt, even smelled new, with Hazel’s apothecary jars lining the bathroom sink and her shoes tucked neat as bunnies into compartments on the closet door. Now Nicholas looked into Jessie’s room, saw her picture books on the little child’s desk they had purchased for her. How he wished he could lean over right now and pick her up, fill the room with her hiccupping giggles.
    Restless, he went to the piano, where he had been working out ideas for the Scottish piece.
    It was the first time he had looked to material from his own life. Perhaps that was why, ever since beginning the project, he found himself remembering things. Scraps of memories—sounds, images. Not always a comfortable sensation, these shimmers of moments long past.
    One happy discovery was that he still knew, by heart, much of the poetry he had memorized as a schoolboy—the Kipling and Yeats and Keats, and, later on, the Scottish poets he had discovered on his own.
    God gied man speech and speech created thocht,
    He gied man speech but to the Scots gied noght
    It had been a delight to discover in university that he could transfer his love for sound and rhythm and meter to a whole other vocabulary—one that needed no words at all. He took a seat at the piano and thought back to the seaside village in Moray. Even now it was poets’ phrasing he heard, “the rim of the sky hippopotamus-glum” and “the lacy edge of the swift sea” and “What bricole piled you here, stupendous cairn?”
    And then came different words: “a stupid accident.”
    In his mind he saw the nubby