Chapter 2 The Voice Above My Ceiling

Sylvie Ostry kept her door open when she was teaching, and she was teaching almost no one, so her door was almost always open. Coralie climbed to the fifth floor the next morning with two coffees and found the door ajar the way she expected. She knew the room before she entered it. The piano in the corner, tuned by Coralie herself, the last woman to touch its strings. The sofa with the broken spring that announced every guest. The smell of eucalyptus and rosin. And Sylvie, standing at the window with her back turned, so that Coralie had the rare luxury of not having to pretend she recognized anyone. "You brought the good one," said Sylvie. "The roast that tastes like a bonfire." "How could you possibly know that?" "Because you only buy it when you want to ask me something." Sylvie turned. Coralie heard the turn, the shift of weight, the small grunt of a woman whose knees had opinions too. "Sit. Ask." Coralie sat. The sofa spring told on her. The two of them had met two years ago, in the lobby, over a package that had been delivered to the wrong flat. Coralie had asked, by reflex, whether it was Sylvie's, and Sylvie had said it was, and then, after a pause, had said something that Coralie still carried around with her like a coin in a pocket. You have no idea who I am, do you. Coralie had admitted it. Sylvie had laughed instead of leaving, and from that laugh something had started. Sylvie had spent her life listening to voices. She had taught at the conservatory for four decades and had spent the last of it teaching the frightened and the damaged, the ones who came to her after other teachers had given up. She could hear a lie in a student's throat a full second before the student spoke it. She was the only person Coralie had ever met who understood the register without needing it explained. "A face is a rumor," Sylvie liked to say. "A voice is a fact." The morning after the voice, Coralie asked the question she had climbed five flights to ask. "Who was the man in your flat last night?" Sylvie went quiet. The kettle, which she had set going without Coralie noticing, began to gather itself toward a whistle. "Came about the lessons," Sylvie said at last. "Said he wanted to train his voice. His speaking voice. He's a performer of some kind, he said. Wanted me to help him find his real one." "That's a strange thing to ask a retired teacher." "It's not strange at all." Sylvie poured, and the cups told Coralie where they were. "It's the ordinary thing. Half the people who came to me over the years wanted to find a voice that was already theirs and just buried. The other half wanted to borrow one that wasn't." Coralie heard Sylvie sit. Not the sofa; a chair, the wooden one, which meant Sylvie was choosing her words and did not want the spring to interrupt her. "How did he sound?" Coralie asked. And Sylvie, who never hesitated about a voice, hesitated. "He sounded like a man doing an impression of someone," Sylvie said. "Not of anyone I know. Just someone. There was a man under the man, and the man on top was doing the talking. And the one underneath kept slipping through at the ends of the words." Coralie felt a cold line drawn down the middle of her back. "The ends of the words." "Yes." "He ate them." "Every one," said Sylvie. "He swallows his endings." She set down her cup. "Don't look like that. I've known a thousand students with bad habits. He's a client, and I've told him I'm retired." "What did you tell him, exactly?" Sylvie was quiet for a moment. Somewhere below, the cello began its morning scale, patient and slow, and the two women listened to it the way other people might watch rain. "I told him the voice he was using didn't belong to him," Sylvie said. "I told him I could hear the seam. I said a good ear could hear the seam from across a room, and that if he kept using it, someone was going to ask him where he got it." Coralie sat very still. "And what did he say to that?" Sylvie picked up her cup again, and Coralie heard the tiny chime of porcelain, and underneath it the faint metallic click of a ring on a wedding finger tapping the china, once, twice. "He laughed," Sylvie said. "Then he said a strange thing. He said the seam was the whole point." The cello went on with its scale. The rain, which had stopped overnight, started again, a slow, patient drizzle that turned the window gray. Coralie wanted to say something useful. She wanted to say, do not see him again. She wanted to say, let me be here when he comes. She wanted to say any of the small, practical things she said when the world got too loud. Instead she asked one more question, the one that mattered, and she asked it the way she asked all of them, because it was the only thing she could ever really know about a person. "What did he look like?" Sylvie did not answer at once. That was the answer. Sylvie Ostry, who had spent her life teaching people to be seen and heard, who had never once fumbled a description of a voice, sat in her chair and could not tell Coralie what the man looked like in any way that would help, because Coralie could not keep a face, and Sylvie had understood that from the first day. "He looked like a person," Sylvie said finally. "That's the best I can do for you. A person with a voice that doesn't fit." She stood. Coralie heard the chair scrape and the small sound of someone gathering their courage. "Cor, listen to me," Sylvie said. "You keep the register. You keep the cards and the prints and every tell I ever taught you to notice. You have the best ear in this building and the best ear I have ever taught. Promise me you'll use it. Promise me that if anything ever happens, you will trust the ear and not the eye, because the eye is the liar in your head and the ear is the witness." "That is a grim thing to say over coffee." "It is," Sylvie agreed. "But you brought the good roast, and you never bring the good roast unless you want to ask me something, and I always tell you the truth. So there it is." They sat a while longer, the way two people sit when one of them has said something she cannot take back. Sylvie told her about the students she still took, the ones who came to her after other teachers had given up: a boy who stuttered so badly he had learned to sing around his own sentences, a woman of fifty who had never once heard her own voice on a recording and had cried for an hour when she finally did. Sylvie could hear a lie in a throat a second before it was spoken, and she had spent forty years using that power for nothing but good, which Coralie had come to believe was rarer than any talent. "You should have taught more," Coralie said. "I taught enough," said Sylvie. "The rest of them taught themselves, and that's the point." The kettle gave one last small click, and somewhere below the cello found its phrase and held it, and Coralie felt the exact shape of the life she had, which was small and loud and almost entirely made of sound. Coralie left an hour later with the empty cups and a strange weight in her sternum she could not name. Upstairs, in her own flat, Lorcan was in the studio, working through a script in a whisper, one character after another, giving each of them a different throat. She stood in the doorway a moment and listened to her husband become seven people, and for the first time in six years the sound of it made her uneasy. She took the card out of her register. Man upstairs. Ends words. Beneath it, she added a second line. Sylvie is frightened. ---