Isolde turns her attention back to the program. The soloist is a foreigner, photographed in black and white with his chin on his fist and his saxophone gleaming against his cheek. He looks moody and implacable and gifted. He is playing in front of the symphony orchestra tonight, and pictured opposite is the conductor, a plump jolly man with his baton loose in his hand like an idle dagger.

“A great soloist,” the saxophone teacher is saying, “is never some perfect airtight freeze-dried package who has studied and studied and studied. A great soloist is always born out of a partnership or a group. A great soloist is always someone who has had something to feed on.”

Julia is listening politely but frowning all the same. Isolde notices that her nibbled skepticism, which at school seemed an index of aggression and dissatisfaction and gloom, now seems an index of something different, a carefulness or guardedness maybe, something more instinctive and less hostile.

“This is the first concert you’ve come to this year, isn’t it, Isolde?” the saxophone teacher says suddenly, and Isolde nods.

“This guy is awesome,” Julia says, flapping the program. “I’ve got all his recordings. Hey, do classical players have groupies? That’s something I definitely need to look into.”

She is trying to be kind to Isolde, but Isolde finds that all she can do is blush and smile and mumble that she’s looking forward to it. She is squeezing her toes together tight.

The gong sounds a gentle arpeggio to remind them to take their seats. The crowd at the Coke machine begins to disperse, and the sax teacher smiles at them both in turn.

“I really hope you find this inspiring,” she says. “This is a special night for me as well—last time I heard this arrangement live I was only a little bit older than you. It woke me up.”

Saturday

The orchestra is plush and dazzling against the polished wood of the stage. In the first row of the balcony the sax teacher sits between her two students, calm and matriarchal and silent, the two girls sloping off on either side of her so the three of them seem to form a kind of heraldic crest, a heroic grouping that might be placed above a shield to complete a coat of arms. Julia sits with her hands in her lap, watching the flashing silver and gold with an intent glazed blindness, her eyes unmoving as if she is concentrating on holding something very still in her mind. Isolde is more restless, deliberately leaning away from the saxophone teacher lest their elbows touch, and watching the musicians in a detached, musing way, her gaze drifting from the stage and over the dim unsmiling wraith-faces around her.

As Isolde peers vaguely at the pale faces in the audience she thinks about the different ways you can perform the act of listening. Some in the audience have their eyes shut and their faces tilted slightly upward, enjoying the rain of the music on their skin. Some are nodding in a slow, meaningful sort of way, perhaps every four or five bars, as if something is slowly and majestically taking shape before them. Some, like the sax teacher next to her, are simply sitting still.

Isolde thinks how strange it is, that every person in the auditorium is locked in their own private experience of the music, alone with their thoughts, alone in their enjoyment or distaste, and shivering at the vast feeling of intimacy that this solitude affords, already impatient for the interval when they can compare their experience with their neighbor’s and discover with relief that they are the same. Am I hearing the same thing they are hearing? Isolde wonders half-heartedly, but she is distracted from pursuing the thought any further, turning her attention instead to watch an elderly woman in the stalls flounder noisily in her handbag for a tissue or a mint.

Julia is listening in a dreamy, sleepy way, the music drawing from her one slow, definite impression rather than a slideshow series of impressions that she can cobble together later and divide to find the arithmetic mean. She is thinking about Isolde. She can’t quite see her past the stern unmoving profile of the saxophone teacher, just a flash of her knee every time Isolde crosses her leg, but even so she finds her left-hand peripheral vision is sharpened with a tense hyperawareness whenever the younger girl shifts in her seat. She thinks about the long look that she and Isolde shared in the counseling class, probing the thought again and again like a bloody tooth and wondering, as she has wondered many times, where the look might have come from, and where it might lead.

Sometimes when Julia’s thoughts circulate like this she becomes stricken by the irrational fear that she might open her mouth and say exactly what she is thinking, just to spite herself. She thinks of what she would say, if she did say something, and then she bites her lip and fights back a cold rush of fear at the thought of actually saying it.

The saxophone teacher is thinking about Patsy. She is thinking about Patsy in the smoky afterward bar, still with her concert program tucked in her fist, ordering glasses of wine which they will later refill, in a secret giddy way, from a screw-top bottle in Patsy’s handbag. She sees them both folding themselves into a corner, unwrapping scarves and coats and talking about the crowd and the arrangement and the soloist, and then Patsy saying, “What did you imagine?” and already half-laughing in her eagerness.

“I imagined the music was pouring out of the saxophone like water,” the saxophone teacher said, “pouring over the lip of the bell and pooling on the floor at his feet, and the water level was getting higher and higher and the tide was churning stronger and stronger and in the end he had to finish the piece just to save his life. And then we clapped and he started a new piece and I imagined that the sax was sucking his breath out of him, instead of him blowing the air in, and that the mouthpiece was pushing and pushing to get further and further in, that the sax was trying desperately to suffocate him, and he had to keep playing to save his life.”

Patsy laughed and clapped and they touched glasses and drank, and the saxophone teacher said, “What did you imagine?”

“I imagined that noise had the power to seriously hurt you, even kill you,” Patsy said, “depending on the quality of the musicianship. The more elegant the playing, the more total the death. The Town Hall would be like the arena where you were sent if you had done something truly terrible. You’d be marched into the auditorium, strapped down and buckled on to the red velvet seats so tight you couldn’t move. The soloist would be the executioner, playing faster and faster and watching you over the footlights with wet greedy eyes.”

The saxophone teacher laughed and clapped and they touched glasses again and drank, and Patsy said, “That concert changed me forever.”

Saturday

On Saturday nights Bridget works at the local video store. She sits glumly on a high vinyl stool and watches the lonely people drift from shelf to shelf, keeping one eye on the black-and-white security television that dimly shows the curtained nook where the adult tapes are shelved. The clock says half-past nine. Bridget watches the inching revolutions of the minute hand and listens for the padded thump of a late tape through the dewy drop-slot.

“Hello, Bridget,” somebody says.

Bridget shoves her chewing gum to the side of her mouth and turns her tired head to see Mr. Saladin standing by the door, crisp in beige trousers and a woollen coat. He smiles at her in a boyish way.

“Hi, Mr. Saladin,” says Bridget, brightening and slithering forward off her stool. “I’ve never seen you here before.”

“My nephews live in the area,” says Mr. Saladin. “Two blocks over.”