“Sounds good,” Isolde says, and gives a little wave. Julia smiles, and then the two of them turn away from her and walk out into the night.

Sunday

Mrs. De Gregorio clutches her purse in the crook of her lap while she sips her tea. She sits with her knees together and her thighs elevated a little because she is resting her heels against the crossbar of the chair and only her square toes touch the ground. Her breasts almost reach her lap, and as she sits down she wedges her purse into the gap where her body hinges. The saxophone teacher thinks how very strange it looks, Mrs. De Gregorio curving herself around her purse in this protective way. From where the sax teacher is sitting, she can see only the twin-balled golden clasp peeking out from beneath the soft acrylic bulge of Mrs. De Gregorio’s breast.

She smiles. “What can I do for you, Mrs. De Gregorio?”

“I’ve come about my daughter,” Mrs. De Gregorio says, and as always the saxophone teacher marvels privately at this woman’s performance, this single unitary woman who plays all the mothers so differently, each performance a tender and unique object like the veined clouding on a subtle pearl. “This might seem like a bit of an odd errand,” the woman says, “me marching in here like this to ask you such a personal question, but lately at home we’ve noticed a few changes, and—” Mrs. De Gregorio looks down into her lap and sighs. “She’s just become impossible,” she says at last.

“Let’s start at the beginning, then,” the saxophone teacher says briskly, tugging down her shirttails and smoothing flat the wool of her jersey as if she means business. “First of all—why the saxophone? Why did you choose this particular instrument? The saxophone has connotations, as you know. A saxophone is not a piano or a flute. A very particular type of girl gravitates toward the saxophone, and quite frankly it’s the type of girl who is not very likely to keep the peace. Why did you choose the sax for your daughter?”

“Oh, it was her choice,” Mrs. De Gregorio says, but the saxophone teacher shakes her head and swiftly interrupts her—

“Let’s not play that game, Mrs. De Gregorio. Your daughter is your project, we both know that. The elements beyond your control are really very few indeed. I can see you’re the type of mother who likes to hold the reins. The type of mother who regards her children as free agents is a slapdash mother, a vague uncaring mother who simply doesn’t appreciate a job well done. You are not that person.”

Mrs. De Gregorio nods, a little defeated.

“So you chose this fate for your daughter,” the saxophone teacher continues. “You pushed her toward the instrument of her undoing. You could have had a daughter who played the violin, long-haired and eccentric and quietly confident, but you chose the saxophone. You made that choice.”

“I wanted to say,” Mrs. De Gregorio says, fumbling for the words, “I wanted to say that we’ve noticed a definite change, that’s all. She won’t talk—well. You know what it can be like. And I just wanted to ask what she says to you each week. Whether you might have any clues. A boyfriend or something. Something we could work through, and understand.”

“Why do you think that your daughter would tell me the truth?” the saxophone teacher asks.

“About her studies,” says Mrs. De Gregorio weakly. “Or her life at school. Something like a boyfriend, a problem that we could work through, and understand.”

The saxophone teacher doesn’t speak for a moment, just so Mrs. De Gregorio feels uncomfortable and wishes she hadn’t spoken so freely. Then she says, “But how can you ever know?” She is more brooding now and less abrupt. “How can you ever get to the kernel of truth behind it all? You could watch her. But you have to remember that there are two kinds of watching: either she will know she is being watched, or she will not. If she knows she is being watched, her behavior will change under observation until what you are seeing is so utterly transformed it becomes a thing intended only for observation, and all realities are lost. And if she doesn’t know she is being watched, what you are seeing is something unprimed, something unfit for performance, something crude and unrefined that you will try and refine yourself: you will try to give it a meaning that it does not inherently possess, and in doing this you will press your daughter into some mold that misunderstands her. So, you see, neither picture is what you might call true. They are distortions.”

“Has she said anything?” Mrs. De Gregorio says. “I know it’s an odd question. It’s embarrassing to have to ask. But is there anything we should know about?” Her hand disappears under her breasts, checking that her purse is still tucked into the vast crux of her lap. Her fingers find the wadded leather lump and touch it briefly.

“Oh, Mrs. De Gregorio. I’m her music teacher,” the sax teacher says. She returns her mug to the table and folds her hands.

“But then what do I do?” Mrs. De Gregorio asks with a kind of rising panic. “What options have I left?”

“You could ask your daughter,” the saxophone teacher says. “You could sit down and actually talk to her. But you always run the risk that she might lie.”

Monday

“What did you imagine while you were watching?” the saxophone teacher asks when Julia arrives for her lesson on Monday afternoon. “At the concert.”

“I liked the second half better than the first half,” Julia begins, but the saxophone teacher waves her arm impatiently and says, “No, I meant what did you think about while you were watching? What sorts of things were you thinking about?”

Julia looks at her curiously, as if this might be a test. “Why?” she asks.

“It’s a game I used to play with an old friend of mine,” the saxophone teacher says. “We had a joke that the better the performance, the more catalytic the effect. A poor performance might only make you think about what you had for dinner or what you were going to wear when you woke up the next day. But a great performance would make you imagine things you would never have been brave enough to imagine before.”

She is speaking eagerly, like a child. Julia unclips her saxophone case and says, “I was just thinking about the music.”

“Yes, but around that. When your mind drifted. What did you imagine?”

Julia slips her reed out of its gated plastic sheath and holds it for a second. “I imagined what was going to happen,” she said, “when I dropped Isolde home.”

The lights change. The overhead lights and the bright overcast light from the window are doused; a template falls into place in front of a solitary floodlight and the attachment begins to rotate, so that the yellow light is thinly striped and ever changing, playing over the pair of them like passing streetlights striping the dashboard of a moving car. Julia sits down. The streetlights come and go, streaking over her knees and curving away over her shoulder to disappear, and she is dark for a moment before another streak of light rises up to replace the first, and then another, and another, all yellow and forward bending.

“I imagined,” Julia says, “that on the way home we would talk about the concert a bit, and what we thought of it, and the teachers that we had in common at school, and we’d keep coming back to you, to talk about you, because you are the only real thread of connection between us. We’d talk about you for a while back and forth, only we wouldn’t be quite honest, because the most important thing would be to create an attractive impression of ourselves, and what we truly thought didn’t really matter. We’d say whatever things would put us in the best light. We’d lie. All the way home we’d lie to each other, back and forth.”