The Soloist Read Online Free Page B

feeling guilty about it.

4
    The weekend before graduation I celebrated my thirty-fourth birthday alone, as I had nearly every year since moving away from home. I didn’t want to just stay in the apartment, so I drove up to Santa Barbara and stayed at a bed-and-breakfast place my mother had particularly enjoyed the last time she and my father visited. It’s right on the water, with red fuchsia growing all over its white stucco walls. In full sun it almost hurts your eyes to look at it. I made sure to get a room facing the ocean.
    I spent the day shopping for a suit. I like new clothes, but I dislike having to shop for them. I hate spending money on things like clothes or furniture—practical things. I get that, I’m sure, from watching my parents despair over the monthly bills when I was very young. There was a time when we lived well, but that was when I was being paraded around Europe, and it was all other people’s money anyway. As soon as my career slowed down, my patrons withdrew from sight.
    In the end I didn’t find a suit that I liked enough to buy, but I did find, in a used bookstore guarded by a sleepy miniature dachshund, a beautiful volume of photographs taken in space accompanied by quotes from astronauts describingtheir experiences. One quote in particular, from a Russian cosmonaut, caught my attention. He said that what struck him most about being outside the atmosphere was the silence. “It was a great silence,” he wrote, “unlike any I have encountered on Earth, so vast and deep that I began to hear my own body: my heart beating, my blood vessels pulsing, even the rustle of my muscles moving over each other seemed audible.…”
    This immediately made me think of the kind of silence I used to love, the instant before I would start a piece and the audience would quiet down to absolute stillness. I always held the bow over the strings for a few seconds too long, just to relish that incredible vacuum, when a hall filled with hundreds of people could become so quiet. No one ever, ever sneezed, coughed or budged until I offered release with the first note.
    The astronauts careen through infinity at five miles a second, moving, working and even floating outside the capsule, but always surrounded by absolute silence. What does that do to someone? I wonder. To stare into all that velvety blackness and see the earth hanging in the middle of it, a sparkling, round ball floating in near-perfect emptiness, where sound has no meaning at all.
    The book reminded me of the period in my childhood when the race to put men on the moon was at its highest pitch, and like most young boys, I dreamed of being an astronaut. Unlike most young boys, though, I actually trained for it. I asked my father to bring home a wooden crate from the warehouse just large enough for me to fit into, but not too large—I wanted to get used to being cramped. I appointed the crate with cushions, a blanket, a clock, snacks, a water bottle, a thermometer and a homemade periscope,and “trained” by setting the crate in front of the television set and watching my favorite programs through the periscope, which extended upward through a small hole in the top of my “capsule.” I began by sitting in the crate through an entire half-hour program, and decided to increase my sitting time by five minutes each day.
    As with my cello practice, I approached this astronaut training with purposeful intensity. At the end of a month I was up to three hours a day and still going strong. Understandably, my mother was deeply concerned. She tried to talk me out of doing it, but with no success; the idea of piloting a sleek bullet through the dark vastness of space fascinated me to the point of obsession. I was determined to increase dramatically my tolerance for sitting in cramped spaces, so that word of my training would reach the directors at NASA and inspire them to grant me early acceptance into the space program.
    My training came to an abrupt end when my