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This time, the man took my arm and I let him.As if you have a choice. He led me down the sidewalk a few more feet. “Here.”
I waited in the cabstand queue for a good twenty minutes until it was my turn. A cabbie—at least I hoped it was a cabbie—took my luggage from me and I felt my way to the backseat of the cab. I slumped into it, feeling as if I’d just played sudden death chess for fifty straight hours.
“Wo gehst du hin?”
“Uh…Grand Hotel Vienna?”
“American?”
“Yeah,” I said, leaning back.
“Oh yeah! Go Yankees, eh?”
I offered an unenthusiastic thumbs-up. “Go, Yankees.”
The Grand Hotel Vienna was an expensive luxury hotel, chosen by Lucien because of its concierge services. He’d booked me in five-star hotels in every city, so that I’d never be without first-rate help in English, should I need it.
But this hotel was a few minutes’ walk to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde where Charlotte would be playing for the next three nights. It was risky to stay so close, but Lucien had insisted on making things as easy as possible in Vienna, my first city, until I got acclimated to the whole experience.
I let the bellboys take my luggage and lead me to the front desk. I checked in and readied my credit card but learned Lucien had paid for this hotel himself. A little bon voyage gift. A wave of homesickness crashed over me so strong I had to grip the counter for a second.
I was led again to the elevators, then my room. I tipped the bellboy with a ten euro note—identifiable to me by the fold I’d made in its corner. When he was gone, I slumped on the bed, savoring the merciful silence. The stillness. The fact that I didn’t have to feel my way anywhere but the bathroom and that I could do with no curious or pitying eyes on me.
I wanted to sleep but Rule #2 reared its ugly head: No holing up in hotels.
With a groan, I hauled myself off the bed, hauled my luggageontothe bed, and started to unpack. I felt my way around the room to get its layout, put the clothes in the dresser, hung up the suits, and then turned to my messenger bag that carried all my lifelines.
Navigation was my first priority. Prior to departure, I actually did go to the Helen Keller Foundation for a cramming session on how to get around. They advised me to bring earbuds so I could listen to directions as I walked the streets of the strange cities, and outfitted my phone with a program called Lingo that would translate any phrase or word I asked it to.
They also gave me 3x5 notecards, each marked with a polite request for assistance across busy streets, printed in different languages. The idea being, you stand on a street corner, holding a card into the black ether and wait for someone to investigate. They read it and help you cross. Sounded all well and good…in theory.
In real life, the idea of standing on a corner like that was one tiny step away from begging. I took the cards with a polite smile and a mental promise to myself to never use them. But somehow they’d ended up in my messenger bag. Lucien, I reckoned.
Second to navigation was not being ripped off or robbed. I had a money reader that was the size of a business card. I slid the bill into the reader, and it would tell me the denomination. I’d then fold the corner of the bill a certain way, so I could tell how much it was before I put it in my real wallet, which I kept on a belt that tucked into my pants. My credit cards were in there as well, while I had a dead credit card and fifty Euros stashed in what I called my bait wallet—one I kept in my jacket pocket. If someone tried to rob me, I’d give them that and hope it would be enough.
I set up my laptop, with my writing software, on the suite’s desk that faced a window. I felt the sunlight on my hand and turned my face to it, allowing myself a moment of satisfaction. I had done it. It sucked and was mentally exhausting in a way I couldn’t have imagined, but I’d made it. I was in the same city as Charlotte, and tonight I’d be in the same room with her.
Eating dinner in the hotel restaurant, getting a cab to the concert hall, and making my way to the will-call ticket booth were each and every one fraught with difficulty and stress, but at four minutes to seven, an usher led me to my seat: last row, upper level, closest to the door so I could make a quick escape.
I slumped into the plush chair, my cane propped between my knees, utterly wiped out. My earlier satisfaction was obliterated. This was too much. Too hard. Too stressful to cast off again and again into unknown spaces, without the slightest ability to get my bearings. I had made it to the concert hall, but at what cost?
The orchestra, Charlotte among them, tuned up, and then the crowd around me erupted with applause—the conductor taking his place at the podium I guessed. A silence and then…music.
I had no idea of the program, of course. I recognized nothing of the four or five pieces they played, but it didn’t matter in the slightest. The music washed over me and carried me along its soft currents. Charlotte’s violin was indistinct from the rest of the orchestra, but I imagined I could hear her anyway. She was there. In the same room with me, even if that room was enormous and she and I at opposite ends. My Charlotte was there, and I could feel her; her energy and love and everything she poured into her music. I felt the stress of the day loosen its grip on my mind and muscles.
That feeling, that euphoria of possibility, reinforced the idea that I was doing the right thing. It was quite obviously going to be harder than I ever foolishly imagined it to be. The hardest thing I’d ever done, but wasn’t that the point?
I wouldn’t give up. I couldn’t. The long, black road lay stretched out before me, but I would walk it because Charlotte Conroy was waiting for me on the other side.
chapter forty-one
The tour began and it was immediately obvious it was going to be a daunting whirlwind of dates and cities and one gorgeous concert hall after another. I was only a section violin, second chair, but I played as if I were our soloist, pouring my heart and soul into my music.
And my love, that is all for Noah.
I played as if he could hear me, suffusing every note with my love for him, sending it out into the ether.
“He has supersonic hearing,” I murmured to myself one night in a hotel with Annalie snoring gently in the opposite bed. “Maybe he’ll hear me.”
