"Don't you dare come home to save me," Ruth said, the week they packed the car. "Come home to eat. Those are different errands."
"You could say you'd miss me."
"I could say a lot of things and still pay a mortgage I don't have," Ruth said. Then she put her palm on Claire's bun, which was not yet a bun, only a ponytail, and left it there a second longer than efficiency required. "I will miss you in the afternoons. The house likes a metronome. Go."
The practice rooms at the Institute were underground in spirit even when they had windows. They smelled of dust, valve oil from someone else's life, and the particular warm plastic of headphones students used when they were trying not to hate each other. Claire learned the geography of ambition: who warmed up in scales like a religion, who warmed up by playing the hardest passage badly until it surrendered, who cried and then pretended the crying was allergies. She was not the best pianist in the building. She was a pianist who came back the next day. Dr. Lena Voss noticed the coming back before she noticed the talent, or she pretended to, which was its own pedagogy.
Voss was in her fifties then, with cropped gray hair and a scarf she wore even in overheated rooms, as if drafts were a moral condition. She spoke in short sentences that left a mark.
"You rush where you feel safe," she said, after Claire's first month. "Safety is not a tempo marking."
"I was trying to sing."
"Singing is not an excuse for leaving your bass behind. The bass is the adult in the room. Don't abandon the adult because the melody is pretty."
Claire went back to the room in the basement and played the left hand alone until the pretty part got lonely and agreed to cooperate. This was the real training, the part people meant when they said years and did not mean the poster of a child at a concert grand. Years were Tuesdays. Years were the same eight measures, ugly, then less ugly, then suddenly, for no reason the ego could claim, clear. Years were Voss saying "again" without cruelty and without comfort, which forced Claire to locate her own.