A different woman finally escorted Melanie to the hair-washing area, where she was draped in an elegant silk smock and silently directed to a chair that tilted comfortably backwards to a sink of blue glass. She wished she had removed her sweater. Having her hair washed took forever because the woman used what had to be five or six different shampoos, conditioners, and rinses. She was leaned forward again, her hair patted down with a towel, then led to another room deeper in the heart of the hotel and into a plush, overstuffed version of a traditional barber’s chair. Four of them lined the full-length mirrored wall like obese ballerinas. From where she sat, the mirrors in front and behind revealed hundreds of her own bright-red faces staring back at her. In the spotless silver screens, the flat motion of the salon behind her took on the elegance of a vintage black-and-white film, but her own reflections looked like they had been crudely colorized for cable TV.
A heavily accessorized woman, presumably Judit, approached. She looked angry. Before she said a word, Melanie panicked. She wanted to scream, to throw a blow-dryer through the nearest mirror. She could already see her reflections shattering. They tinkled and sparkled on the marble floor. She saw her severed hair among the broken glass, like some kind of lost limb that still tickled her scalp. She gagged. There was no way she could allow this woman to cut off her hair. She heard fabric tear as she pulled off the smock. She dropped a five-thousand forint bill on the counter, grabbed her coat, and bolted for the door. Everyone watched her in bemused disbelief. Melanie hated every last one of them.
Tears rolled down her face and ice formed in her hair. Unwilling to face the crowds back at Nyugati, and risk running into someone she knew, she pulled her coat close around her neck and rushed home. Four long blocks. She cried the entire way, uncontrollably, without any specific reason she could pinpoint. Nanette will never let her hear the end of it — she could be a total bitch like that sometimes. She half-jogged the entire way, sobbing into her scarf. Her teeth chattered. Clothes stuck to her damp skin. It felt like someone had dumped an ice bucket down her turtleneck. She couldn’t feel her ears, and was going to get pneumonia, but at least her headache was gone. A pack of drunk boys in generic-looking blue jeans and bootleg NBA jackets came out of the McDonald’s and jostled each other for her attention, taunting her with fake boo-hoo-hoo sobbing. She could still hear them as she slammed the apartment door behind her, shutting out the whole stupid city.
4.
Melanie stripped off her wet clothes and left them in a bunch on the kitchen floor. The whole room stank of garbage and sour milk and something so nasty she didn’t even want to attempt to identify it. She shoved some pans off the stovetop and onto the counter, creating a chain reaction that sent an ashtray full of butts crashing into the sink. She ignored the new pile of broken glass and filled the kettle from the tap. She took a match from the box and turned on the gas.
Naked, the usual heat of the apartment felt about right. An ogre in blue overalls lived downstairs in the dank basement of the building, from which he controlled the heat with a huge lever mounted on the wall. Every November 1 he switched it from OFF to SWELTER, and every April 1 he moved it back again, regardless of petty details like the actual atmospheric conditions. What he did with the rest of his time remained a mystery. He obviously didn’t work on the elevator. She and Nanette typically adjusted the heat by opening the living room windows and curtains to various apertures. None of that was necessary right then. Her ears and fingertips and toes still tingled. The radiators clanged and clanged around the clock; they needed to place bowls full of water and orange peels on them to prevent their skin from drying and cracking. The dry cold was murder. The kettle whistled, G-flat sliding up to D-sharp, before she removed it from the heat. Chamomile.
Melanie loved having the apartment to herself, even if it was a complete mess. Once the concert was over and done with she would scrub the floors, vacuum, dust. It’ll be like therapy. She carried the pot, a clean mug, and an oversized Milka bar into the bathroom and set them on the floor, where they kicked up a tiny puff of baby powder. She avoided looking at herself in the mirror and then realized that she was avoiding herself, so she looked. Her face was puffy. Rings had formed under her eyes. She dislodged some remaining specks of ice from her hair. She was exhausted, miserable. So absolutely miserable.
The pre-concert jitters manifested themselves most clearly in her stomach, which lurched at the very thought of appearing in front of an audience. She wanted to throw up in the sink. Obsessing only made it worse. It was uncontrollable. She knew, deep down, that some day people would catch on to her — they would discover that she was a fraud and did not possess even the vaguest hint of musical talent. It was certain to happen. It could happen today. Today, she wouldn’t even be able to hide down in the pit but, instead, would be up on stage in full view. On national television. The composer would be there. The entire nation of Hungary would be watching her. It would get made into a multiplatinum album.
The Polaroid and a few of Nanette’s less essential cameras were scattered around the living room. Melanie ran her finger along a row of CD spines and it stopped at some piano music. The Diabelli Variations — Beethoven’s simultaneous tributes to and parodies of his contemporaries. Anything to distract herself from the scene at the salon, from the impending opera. She didn’t even want to think about her violin just yet. She hated that violin sometimes, just like she hated her job. The opera orchestra was just a stepping-stone until she could get up the energy to move back home. She planned to audition for the Boston Symphony one day soon. In the meantime, she slipped into the tub. The suds rose slowly to cover her belly. The music wasn’t loud enough. Only the right hand was audible, the high end.
Slowly, oh so slowly, she felt her pre-concert nerves settling, as she knew they would. They always did. It was a terrible, exhilarating cycle: there existed a now-familiar transition, a fibrous layer separating her fear from the deep-rooted animal need to just get the concert underway. It was the waiting that killed her. Once it started, she would feel that gushing, can’t-step-in-it-twice river of sonic clarity that existed nowhere else but on stage; that feeling was precisely why she had learned to play music in the first place, why she pushed herself so hard to practice. Then, at the merciful end of every concert, with the applause raining down, she would want nothing more than for the music to start anew, to wash over her one more time. She would want to run back to the top of the slide and speed down again, laughing, screaming. This first climb up was the worst part. Right now, with her fingers beginning to prune, she struggled to recall that sense of self-erasure, that lovely erosion of her ego in favor of an artistic experience she will share with the audience, the other players, even the conductor. The glory of cozying up next to the godhead for a few movements. She relaxed more. She had chewed through half of the candy bar. Embarrassed by her private gluttony, glad Nanette wasn’t home, she wrapped the remaining part in its foil and slid it out of her immediate reach. As she did so, her hair splattered onto the tiled floor and despite the grief she knew to expect, she was pleased to feel it affixed to her head instead of severed and swept into piles in some trendy, faux-chic salon. As badly as she wanted a new look, she resigned herself for the time being to buying some new clothes instead. An entire spring wardrobe, if that was what it took. The Beethoven ended abruptly, seemingly in the middle of a waltz. The effect was jarring even before the CD changer rolled over to Nan’s most recent favorite band. It was noise, worse than static, and so popular that there was no getting away from it in any bar or supermarket. Melanie climbed out of the tub and wrapped her hair in a towel. She walked dripping through the apartment to change the music. It wasn’t that she disliked pop music per se. Even Bartók incorporated many elements of the folk tradition into his works, and a generation of contemporary composers would inevitably do the same with hip-hop and techno, but even at its best, she considered this four-four nonsense somehow antithetical to the natural rhythms of the human body. Or at least to the natural rhythms of her body. Pop music demanded attention to its own carefully packaged and marketed angst, yet came nowhere close to the emotional depth of, say, String Quartet No. 6. That was about angst too, real angst: World War II, the demise of the composer’s mother and motherland. The kind of music Melanie performed, or usually performed, had context. It had a spiritual depth. She put on Bartók’s No. 6 and turned up the volume. Then she put down another towel and lay on the edge of the bed that she still, for some reason, shared with Nanette. Her toes touched the rug and her skin was warm and smooth from bathing. She was still holding the glass bottle of lotion. She felt good, loose. With her hangover gone, forgotten, she started to get dressed. The new clothes she had purchased for the occasion were splayed out like a snow angel on the bed, and they included her first-ever pair of thigh-high stockings. Ankle-length skirt, long-sleeve shirt, and flats. The concert memo specified that she wear all white. All wholly inappropriate before Easter, but white suited Melanie. The skirt fit wonderfully. She looked ravishing, or as close to ravishing as she could get. She put on a heavy, antique sterling choker handed down from her grandmother. Family legend had it that Paul Revere himself made the tiny ring that now served as the centerpiece. No earrings; her ears remained unpierced. No makeup — she couldn’t stand how it felt on her skin.