the conductor had the violin and viola soloists skip over the unaccompanied duet section of the Mozart Sinfonia. The conductor was depriving me and the rest of the rehearsal audience of hearing one of the best parts. I was mad at myself, too, for feeling desolate and missing my friends, especially Janet Stimson, and my grandmother, with whom I lived. (When I was nine, my parents had gone, as missionaries, to live in Japan.) Partly just because I wanted to have contact with somebody, I remarked crossly to the man sitting near but not next to me, “Haven’t they left out the cadenza?”
The man looked startled. He had a large head and wore thick glasses. His hair was curly and soft. “I don’t know,” he answered quietly. “I’m not familiar with this piece.” He turned back to the orchestra. In profile his nose and lips were large—suitable for his large head, I decided. The black temple piece of his thick glasses gleamed silvery in the mellow houselights. I forgot him.
No, after the music had been poignant in the way only Mozart could conceive, I glanced at my neighbor and noticed the quality of his attention. He wore the expression of one who could be moved by beauty. Then I forgot him.
Until, in a pause in the rehearsal, he blew his large nose into the neat white square of a folded cloth handkerchief. As a girl, I had learned to iron by ironing my grandfather’s similar 100 percent cotton white handkerchiefs, but my rehearsal neighbor wasn’t old. Older than I, but not old. Probably a doctoral student.
When I stood to go back to my dorm room, he smiled at me. It was the most purely welcoming smile I had ever seen—free of all intent but sheer friendliness.
“So they left out the cadenza?” he asked.
“A cadenza from eighteenth-century music characteristically ends with trills,” I answered. “We heard the trills, but no cadenza. I’m an old viola player.”
He looked at me quizzically. “Old?” Then he grinned. “Which high school do you go to?”
I knew I looked young: my hair was in two braids. I’m sure I flushed. “I’m a student at the university. From Memphis. Are you a graduate student?”
“I’m an associate professor in the physics department.”
We had both misjudged each other. I laughed, and he smiled.
He waited, and then with unexpected sophistication I realized what I must say if the conversation was to continue. I must exempt myself from being a student in his department.
“I’m a psychology major,” I said.
“A junior?” he asked, still smiling, and I knew he needed to guess my age.
“I’m a freshman,” I answered, “but they accepted me as a psych major because I aced the advanced test in psychology on the Graduate Record Exam.” It had been difficult to get permission to take the GRE; most high school students took the SAT.
“Did you?” He was obviously pleased for me. Perhaps he was pleased with me.
“I’m eighteen,” I added. “I bet you waited too late to get a ticket to the performance. Like me.” Suddenly my confidence faltered, and I relied on stereotype. “A typical absentminded professor?”
“Actually,” he answered, “I do have a ticket. I just like coming to dress rehearsals. It’s more relaxed.”
“I procrastinated,” I confessed. “I meant to get a ticket.”
“I always get two. Usually the second one goes to waste. Maybe you’d like to have it?”
“Yes,” I said. “Thank you.”
As he handed over the ticket, he remarked, “The two seats are together.”
“Of course,” I answered, though I hadn’t thought that far ahead.
He grinned more broadly, amused at both of us. “I’m forty-one.”
The next day before the concert, I walked to the inexpensive beauty school near the campus and asked for a student stylist who could do an updo with curls. “With wings over the tops of the ears,” I added. For the first time, I wanted to be transformed from a big child into a young woman. Entranced with studies, teachers, and a few good friends, throughout high school, I’d never dated anyone.
While the stylist combed through my hair, I avoided my reflection in the mirror by mentally reviewing the appearance of the physics professor—his steep, rather forbidding forehead, the thick lenses of his glasses—what did he want to see through those glasses? Big black frames. I realized I didn’t know his name. A physicist—someone who wanted to understand the physical world in mathematical terms—E=mc2: Energy equals mass times the speed of light squared. A physicist was someone whose inquiry concerned the basic nature of