S.V. Redkin – The Great Conductor (страница 7)
“Hm, not much, huh? I guess it’s a good thing you aren’t paying for it.”
“Well, if you think about it—”
“Hang on a second. You were talking about going on a date, weren’t you?”
Christine shook her head with a smile. Her friend was known for jumping from topic to topic in a conversation without finishing them. Christine had accepted it a long time ago and did not hold it against Laura.
“His name is Victor O’Brian, and he has very nice blue eyes.”
“The name rings a bell, but . . . the eyes are important. What do they say about the eyes of a man? They are the shortcut to the woman’s panties, aren’t they?”
Christine laughed. “Who says that?”
“
“Not really.”
“Figured as much. Bye now.”
Laura gave a kissing sound and hung up. Christine put down her phone and, seeing that she was already in her neighborhood, was going to put it back in her pocket, but then she remembered about Victor’s message.
The message read:
She smiled.
Victor had noticed her trick with the coaster and did the same, which had made both of them laugh.
Extra bonus point well earned.
Chapter 6
Sebastian woke up at his usual time, five-thirty in the morning, and, at first, couldn’t remember what day it was. This happened to him sometimes. He attributed these memory gaps to exhaustion from over-practicing and overworking, and had meant to see someone about them, but never found the time. For a musician, having trouble with memory was not ideal, but he wasn’t too worried about it because it seemed his brain took special care of the music he played. The music scores seemed set in stone in his mind.
He tried his best to remember every detail of the latest conversation with the Great Conductor. Although the meeting was a blur—he definitely should have rested more—he knew exactly what he needed to do. He just needed to figure out how to do it.
But first things first. As usual, a cup of coffee and a couple of quick-boiled eggs for Lydia. Sebastian wondered how her made-up meeting had gone. Did she fall asleep in her chair in front of the TV again?
After cooking the eggs, he would be busy practicing his concerto for a few hours. After that, he had to plan his approach to what the Great Conductor called “the great transformation”—the transition from a good musician to a great composer. He would build an environment for music creation without distractions. This was a complex process that was not easy for many talented people to achieve.
How many contemporary composers could one name off the top of one’s head? Sebastian had every intention of becoming the name that no one would forget. His name was going to be on par with Scarlatti, Debussy, Handel, Ravel, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, and, of course, Shostakovich. But to get there he had to make some sacrifices.
“The great composers are not of this world,” the Great Conductor had told him during their second meeting. “They aren’t normal people. They are portals for God’s work. The ability to create music that touches and changes people is an honor that is bestowed only on a few chosen ones. You have to be ready to be selected. Anything else is of no importance.”
Sebastian understood the logic. To become a great musician, playing something technically correct was not enough. You needed to add depth to your performance, and that depth came from your personal experiences and the emotions they evoked. One of those was suffering. It was an invaluable state to be in, as it brought a range of emotions that could be expressed through music. You were not just a creator of music; you were a re-creator, bringing new aspects to the piece that people had never heard before. However, to become a great composer required a significant step up in the game. It required certain sacrifices.
“What do I need to do to get rid of . . . distractions?” Sebastian couldn’t bring himself to mention his mother; in his heart, though, he had agreed with the Great Conductor that she was a major obstacle to creating the required environment. He just couldn’t get over the idea of Lydia not being around—it was a weird version of Stockholm syndrome where the aggressor was his own mother. She had been a constant presence in his life, not always a positive one, but she was an integral part of who he was, the fabric of his existence.
When it came to being a mother, Lydia Hasselbach was never the kind of caring person who showered her own son with love and attention. Sebastian couldn’t speak for his brother, Paul, but the constant stream of criticism, irritation for whatever small reason she decided to make important at any given time, and her overall absence from making any important decisions in Sebastian’s life that weren’t related to music made it difficult for him to think of her as a mother, as someone who loved him no matter what. As a child, he was closer to his father. After his father died, there were two things that Sebastian cared about the most—music and his brother. In that order.
Sebastian knew that his mother was trying to project all of her dreams onto him, but she had not done it in a supportive way. It felt like she was always angry with the whole world and never failed to remind Sebastian about it. When he was younger, he couldn’t understand why. But Paul, who never felt shy about looking through Lydia’s things when she was away—mostly looking for money—told Sebastian a few family secrets.
In her early twenties, Lydia was a promising harpist, but she had one major flaw for a classical musician at the time—she was a woman. The world of classical music was notorious for its patriarchy, with hardly any room for women onstage. At best, she could only hope for a position in chamber ensembles, but Lydia refused to be a pushover and was determined to change history alongside other outstanding women who were making their way into the man’s world of classical music.
Without having too many options, in order to get a position in an orchestra, she not only used her musical skills but also her physical charms to entice a maestro who happened to be married to a wealthy woman at the time and whose family was one of the main donors to the orchestra. Thanks to some “friends” in the orchestra, the wife soon found out about Lydia’s affair with the maestro. In order to keep the scandal from spreading, the couple decided to keep it quiet and within the “family.”
The maestro’s reputation was untainted. Lydia had to leave. She did so, but not without a struggle, because she truly believed that the man had feelings for her. She tried to prove this. The conductor sent some passionate letters, which did not work and made the situation worse.
Lydia was accused of faking the letters in a “desperate and pathetic” attempt to keep her position in the orchestra. In the end, the conductor kept his job because he was a genius, and Lydia ended up jobless with no prospects—no one wanted to hire a “disgraced and rebellious woman.” To keep the truth from her father, Lydia faked an accident in which she “hurt” her wrist, thus rendering her unable to pursue any serious musical career, except for some tutoring.
Her father was happy that the accident had inadvertently knocked some sense into his daughter’s crazy head. Not that he was against her music career; he just did not see much future for her in it. To divert Nathan’s attention and distance herself from anyone who could possibly know about her “professional affair,” Lydia found some young students, managed to get a couple of gigs that led nowhere, and started dating the guy from next door, Stephen Copeland, whom she had been ignoring all her life. The young man had a good job and soon proposed to Lydia when they found out that she was pregnant. That was how Sebastian’s parents came to be together.
Paul suspected that there might have been other men, but he could never find any proof. Either he was wrong or Lydia was good at covering her tracks.
Nathan never particularly liked Stephen, but since the young man made “an honest woman” out of Lydia and had a house of his own, he accepted him as his son-in-law. When Stephen began to make some decent money, he rose a few positions in Nathan’s esteem. Lydia, however, never really seemed to love her husband and, some years later, started to blame him for her problems. Only God knows what their marriage would have become had Stephen not died one day from a stroke, leaving the house to his wife.
Paul blamed Lydia for his father’s death, never to her face, but he would always vent his feelings to Sebastian, who, though devastated, had accepted his father’s demise with a “God works in mysterious ways” type of attitude. Sebastian didn’t blame Lydia, but he didn’t love the way she had treated their father, either. It was actually similar to the way she treated Sebastian, except, perhaps, when he played music well at some competitions. He accepted her as a necessary evil because he did not have any other choice when he was a kid and didn’t know better when he became an adult. She was his only mother.