“No one’s taking you away from me. Not ever.”
She slips her arms around her neck and her voice drops to a whisper only I can hear. She gazes up at me, eyes shining. “Do you promise, daddy?”
I smile as I look down into her green eyes. “I promise, sweet girl. With all my heart.”
Chapter Thirty
Isabeau
Now
There’s a piano in the hotel suite on our wedding night. “A room with a piano, and you,” Laszlo says, kissing me. “What else do I need to make me happy?”
I get out of my white lace dress and take out cello, and sitting in a white corset and suspenders, my hair hanging in long curls over my shoulders, we play together. We play Vocalise, and for the very first time in my life it sounds different to my ears. The two instruments, once so alone, have found each other.
Laszlo looks thoughtful. “When we played this together in the airport in Singapore a woman came up to you after and spoke to you.”
“She said, ‘It’s not in his face, but it’s in the notes he plays. He loves you.’ And I shook my head because I never knew you loved me. I couldn’t hear it.”
He gets up from the piano and comes over to me, cupping my cheek. I turn my face into the warmth of his palm as he asks, “Do you hear it now, how much I love you, sweet girl?”
I do hear it, all the beautiful notes of his love, my maestro. I have been his ward, his protégé, his lover and now his wife. “I hear it, daddy. All of it. Every note.”
He smiles, as he always does when I call him that. Laszlo picks me up and takes me over to the bed, his hands tight around my corseted waist. “And you’ll come to Bangkok, my love, my world-class soloist, as often as you can?”
Laszlo has accepted the role of musical director of the new Bangkok symphony orchestra, and I’ve accepted Ms. Sanchez as my agent. I’ve already booked several performances in London and Italy with premier orchestras. It will be hard, being away from him so much, but Bangkok is always only a flight away, and when I’m with him there will be a place for me to play in his orchestra, filled while I’m not there by a temp. So I get the best of both worlds, a career as a soloist and the pleasure of playing with Laszlo, which will always be one of my keenest pleasures in the world.
I take his finger in my mouth and suck it lovingly, saying between licks, “I’ll always come back to you, no matter how many times I leave. Wherever you are in the world is my home.”
Laszlo’s eye narrow with heat as he watches me, his words a purr that cascades through my body. “Good girl. Are you going to keep being my talented, beautiful Isabeau, my wife, my sweet protégé?”
I take another of his fingers into his mouth and continue to suck, showing him how happy he makes me. All those things. “Yes, daddy. Yes, sir. Yes, maestro.”
I can’t wait to perform with the new orchestra. Meanwhile I’ve been playing with the RSLO until we leave for Bangkok, just because it makes me happy. The violist who made me feel so small and ashamed at the airport and was rude to me in Bangkok looked disconcerted to see me there. A little guilty, too.
Domenica, my section leader, was able to explain. “She took a picture of you and Mr. Valmary kissing in the street in Bangkok and put it on Facebook. That’s how we all found out about you.”
I tell the violist that I think we got off on the wrong foot and it was awkward at first but I think we’ve cleared the air, though I doubt we’ll ever be best friends.
In the days that followed Laszlo’s proposal he told me more about his relationship with my father. How he enjoyed writing about me as much as my father loved reading the letters. How proud both of them were of me. How they both just wanted to protect me. I don’t need to take just Laszlo’s word for that, because my father wrote letters, too. Not as many as Laszlo and not as long, but he kept them all for me, in case he would be allowed to show them to me one day.
“I think it’s time you saw these, sweetheart,” he said, handing me the box the night of our engagement. I read them sitting on the couch in Laszlo’s home. In our home.
It was so good to be home.
One letter in particular stays strong in my memory, that Dad wrote after Laszlo’s furious letter when I was sixteen. The one where Laszlo begged Dad to tell me he was trying to get better.