15. Sasha

Sasha was back in the usual place at the coffee house. She sat expectantly with her Dr. Pepper in front of her. She eschewed coffee. It made her feel silly, the way she came to this place every week and never bought anything, talking to a man who was her teacher. And they never even talked about class. It all seemed so, well, desperate.
She didn’t know anyone else, and this seemed so much easier and more pleasant that trying to make friends out of her classmates. They were always too busy walking away from her. At least she recognized most of them from behind. Part of her wondered what she was doing here. She should be working on her music, not chatting it up with some professor. But Southern California had not been kind to her. This person was the only peek into what they were really like. She was miserable in this place. It was too dry, too expensive, too lonely. Not at all what she thought it was going to be. She took another swig from her soda and it fizzled against her tongue and cheeks.
She noticed the professor walking towards her and she smiled lightly and waved. Their meetings were becoming easier and more expected for both of them. They no longer asked if they could sit down; it was understood.
He sat across from her in the quick, quiet, catlike way she had come to know over the last few weeks. He never seemed to make any noise. She felt like she was always blundering around with her enormous backpack like one of those tourists at the airport who’d purchased too many souvenirs. He traveled light.
“I have something for you,” she said, digging through one of the pockets of her bag.
His eyes opened wide and caught a glint of sun in them as he answered, ”Really, what is it?” Sasha rifled through, down to the bottom and pulled out a green CD. She slid it across the table sheepishly.
“I seem to recall you saying you wanted to hear some of my work, so I brought this for you.”
“Is this you playing?”
“No. It’s a composition I wrote recently. I cheated and used computer generated instruments instead of real ones.” She looked at him. His eyes were asking the questions, so she continued. “It’s a trio of instruments, with three movements. I wanted to write something where the instruments kind of talk to each other and have a conversation without words. I wanted to see if I could do it. So here it is. I hope you like it.”
“I can’t wait,” he said. He sounded so sincere, she thought, but it was surely her imagination. No one really likes the esoteric music of the concert hall, especially when it came from an amateur like herself. Regardless, she had put it out there for him, and hopefully he would not hate it.
He placed the CD on top of his mini-stack of belongings, and their conversation continued in its usual ease for a while, until he said, “So tell me about your family. You haven’t really talked about them at all.”
She sat back in her chair and thought for a moment. “Well, they live in Wyoming. I have a younger brother and a married older sister. What else do you want to know?”
“Well, tell me about your parents. Are they retired? Do they work? What does your sister do? You know, the usual stuff.” He was teasing her now.
“Ok, fine. My dad is semi-retired, whatever that means. My mother was a stay-at-home mom for most of my life, then got a job when we all left the house. She works in an accountant’s office, and all I really know about her job is that she’s really busy around tax time. My sister is a pediatrician. Brother is a math genius. He’s getting a degree in engineering, or at least that’s the rumor.”
“Are you close to your family?”
“What about your family?” she dodged. “Tell me about them.”
“Well, they are insane and dysfunctional like every other family in the world,” he started with a wry laugh. “I have a younger brother. He’s a psychologist. My mother is also a psychologist, and she’s married to a scientist who does work that he doesn’t talk about, so I’m not really sure what he does. My father is retired and lives a couple of hours from here.”
“That doesn’t sound very dysfunctional,” Sasha accused.
“You don’t know my mother.” They both laughed, and Sasha looked towards him to see if there was any sign that he would continue or change the subject. When his face straightened out, he looked at her more seriously and said, “So you’re not very close with your family, right?”
Her voice caught in her throat. “Well, in a family of engineers, doctors, and accountants, I’m a musician. I believe the term for it is Black Sheep.”
“How often do you talk to them?”
Sasha looked to the side at the glass double doors that led to the patio outside. “Not very often. I’ve talked to them once since I moved here.”
“How come?”
It seemed like a perfectly legitimate question. A natural question. But there was no natural, simple answer. She hated her family at this moment, for making her explain to someone how weird they all were. “They just don’t understand me. It’s hard to talk to them sometimes.”
“What don’t they understand?”
“Well, they don’t understand why I would ever leave Wyoming, or why I want to study music, why I’m not married, why I’m so strange. It seems like it’s just easier to stay away from them and not give them the chance to make me feel small.” She paused, and then quickly restarted, “I still love my family and talk to them, but we’re just not very close. I guess you could say we’re functionally estranged. We check in every once in a while to make sure everyone’s still alive, but I don’t call them and tell them things about my life. They just wouldn’t understand.”
She was staring at her hand around the bottle of soda in front of her, a barrage of memories crowding her eyes. She blinked them away and looked at Wolf. He smiled quietly at her and said nothing. Sometimes it really made her nervous the way he looked at her and said nothing; she found it hard to return his gaze for very long before she had to look away. She didn’t want this person to discover how dysfunctional she was, and yet she couldn’t seem to hide things from him. He always knew which questions to ask and how to ask them so she couldn’t dodge them.
“So what about you? Have you ever been married? Any kids?”
“No. Never been married, and I don’t have any kids. It’s not because I don’t want them, because I love kids. It’s just that the women I’ve been with have never been interested in having children or getting married. So it never happened.”
Sasha nodded, both in understanding and disbelief. Wolf didn’t seem to have any shyness about himself or his past. It was weird. She couldn’t seem to find any part of his life that he didn’t want to talk about. It made her feel inept and silly to be so ashamed of the sensitive parts of her life. It made her feel like more of a freak than usual, but at the same time, it was also cathartic to be able to tell her most personal secrets to someone she trusted enough not to judge her for it.
He looked at the clock, then said, “I’ve got to go to class. See you next Thursday?”
“Sure,” she answered. He left in his usual quick way, and she tracked his movements until he was out of her view.