Then I look down, at the back of the huge hall.
Caleb’s standing there, leaning against the wall, his hands in his pockets.
I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and lie back on the floor.Chapter Twenty-SixCalebI get there just as the lights go dim. Perfect timing.
I almost didn’t come, even though I’ve come every year for the past seven, since I started graduate school here. The organ concert is awesome in the biblical sense of the word, unlike anything else I’ve ever experienced.
But it’s also filled with undergraduates, and even though I always taught undergrads as a grad student, being their professor is somehow… different. Seeing them drunk and dressed as sexy butterflies didn’t feel creepy when I was just a graduate student.
It does now. On my bike ride to Scarborough Hall I passed a girl who was — I think — dressed as a sexy mummy and seeming to be wearing nothing but haphazardly placed crepe paper, and I nearly stopped her just so I could offer her my coat, praying the whole time that I didn’t recognize her.
It’s bad enough that every time Thalia walks into my class, I have to remember pushing her against that wall, hard as hell, the way she gasped and dug her fingers into me. I can’t imagine having to teach calculus to someone whose nipple I’ve accidentally seen.
The floor in Scarborough is completely covered in students, most lying down, Halloween costumes dimly visible. I take off my coat and stand near the back, under the organ loft.
The lights go down. The crowd hushes. I close my eyes, and it feels like church.
“Good eeeeevening,” a voice booms from above, affecting a cheesy Transylvania accent. “And velllcome to the annual All Hallow’s Eve midnight organ concert!”
I can’t see Mike from where I’m standing, since I’m half-below the loft that holds the pipe organ, but I grin anyway. I appreciate a guy who knows how to play to his audience.
The students on the floor cheer and stomp. It’s more raucous than you’d expect for a pipe organ concert.
“Tonight, ve vill begin vith an arrangement of Handel’s Organ Concerto, Opus Seven, Number Vun, in B flat major,” he booms. “Please enjoy.”
The entire hall is dead quiet. It feels like the building itself is holding its breath, waiting.
I wait, eyes closed.
The first note floods the room like dark sunshine, low and vibrant, the sound so thick I feel like I could reach out and touch it. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. The wall behind me hums.
I’ve never heard anything like this before. I’ve been to plenty of other concerts, but there’s something particular about this one: the way it feels like the air itself is the music, like the building and the organ and the people listening are all part of the same song, the same power.
And I needed it. I needed to go somewhere and feel something new and get away from myself, just for a little while.
It’s been a bad week. It’s been a long week, a rough week, because on top of everything else I’ve had to see Thalia sitting in the back of my classroom, taking notes and turning in homework and generally pretending that I’m invisible.
Of course she was angry. I’d been pretending that, as long as I didn’t touch her, the nature of our relationship didn’t matter. That it was appropriate to contact and walk her home and give her my scarf and flirt with her, as if all that wasn’t also wildly inappropriate.
I shouldn’t have. My entire life is laced through with shouldn’t and don’t and it’s laced through with an intense longing that knocks the breath from me sometimes, and underneath all that it’s laced through with the queasiness at the knowledge that this is over a twenty-two-year-old student.
In that way, Halloween has brought a small measure of relief, that after seeing countless girls in various states of undress, my only thought has been she must be cold.
The organ booms and I feel the music on my skin, in my lungs when I breathe, and I make myself stop thinking about anything else.
I don’t know how long that lasts. The first song ends and another begins, then another and I stand there, against the wall, and float away on a wall of sound.
At last, the music stops. The last note echoes through the hall, a ghost floating away until it dissipates in a hall so silent I swear I can hear the building settle.
Then a thump, a creak from above, and I hear Mike’s voice.
“Sank you for your kind attentions,” he says, still with the same accent. “Ve vill now have ze briefest of intermissions and ven ve return, I vill be playing Louis Vierne’s Organ Symphony Number One in D minor, Opus Fourteen, and of course, Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.”