Chapter 10
Chapter Ten
Madeline
August 2025
I t didn’t take long for Greta and Bernard Copperfield to reveal themselves as important people for Madeline to know. Just five days after Henry left for Los Angeles, Bernard appeared at the breakfast table with Greta and Madeline and said his friend David was going to be in town in two days, that he was a jazz musician based in Paris who had expressed “real interest” to meet Madeline Willis. “I wouldn’t introduce you if I felt the two of you wouldn’t connect,” Bernard said, rubbing an apple on the collar of his shirt.
Madeline swallowed her toast too soon and coughed into her hand. Greta and Bernard were looking at her like, This is your big opportunity. Aren’t you going to take it? So Madeline heard herself say, “Wow. That’s incredible. I’d love to meet him.”
When was the last time she’d spent any time with a “real” musician? Back in Los Angeles, she’d seen plenty of them milling around East Los Angeles, their guitars strapped to their shoulders, their trunks stuffed with drum sets, their eyes alight with creativity. Because Madeline had been born and raised a classical music snob, she struggled to understand how these people managed to write their own music. Back when she’d been practicing eight, nine, ten hours a day, she’d never given herself time to figure that out.
Would David look down at her for never writing her own stuff?
Did she have to tell him everything about her backstory?
The night of the dinner, Madeline put on a long black dress and piled her hair into an elaborate updo that she then let shimmer to her shoulders. Sweeping through the residency kitchen dressed to the nines, she ran into a few of the other artists, all of whom had heard about Madeline’s piano inclinations and had spent the past few days begging her to show them. But Madeline was terrified to approach the piano again. What she’d felt, playing it for the first time in so long, had been staggeringly emotional—almost to the point of pain. It felt rational that it should be so painful. It touched all the delicate parts of her heart.
To the other residents now, she said, “One of these days,” and breezed past, shuffling through her bag for her phone. When she got outside, she dialed Henry, squeezing her free hand into a fist. Henry answered on the third ring and said, “Madeline! I was just thinking about you!” Madeline’s face burst into an enormous smile. She could picture him somewhere, drenched in the Los Angeles light, maybe on set with a walkie-talkie and an important-looking badge that called him “screenwriter.”
“How are you? How is everything?” she asked.
Henry laughed. “It’s a lot of boring meetings and talks with the director and ‘get into character’ sessions with the actors. No surprise that Sophia’s here all the time, wanting to insert herself into everything, making all of our jobs ten times harder.”
Madeline knew how complicated his relationship with Sophia was and winced. “I guess it is based on her life story,” she said.
“True! I don’t know how I would feel if my life was turned into a movie. Although I have a hunch nothing half as exciting as all that will happen to me,” Henry said.
“Don’t speak too soon,” Madeline said. “You’re still young.”
“They’re calling me The Kid around here,” Henry said.
“I guess compared to them, you are.”
Henry sighed. His tone darkened. “I just want to be taken seriously.”
“You are,” Madeline said, touching her hair. She wanted to wrap him in her arms. She wanted to dart back to the beginning of summer when things didn’t feel so complex.
A beat passed. A bird circled overhead.
“I miss you,” she said.
“I miss you, too,” Henry offered. “I’m sorry I left.”
“You shouldn’t be sorry. This is enormous for your career,” Madeline said.
“My grandma said things are heating up for you,” Henry said. “Dinner with someone tonight? Some guy from Paris?”
Madeline blushed. She hadn’t told him, but she should have known it would get back to him anyway. “I don’t know if it’ll come to anything.”
“Why not? My grandparents are really well-connected, and you’re good, Madeline. I still can’t believe you didn’t tell me you could play like that,” Henry said, a smile in his voice.
“I told you. I quit,” Madeline said. “And I’m too old to be a classical pianist now. I mean, I haven’t played in six years. And I started when I was three, so six years is like an impossible gap to fill.” She could never catch up to the people she’d once beat soundly, competition after competition.
“You started at three years old! Do you know what I was doing when I was three?” Henry asked.
Madeline wanted to hang on his every word. She closed her eyes. “I don’t know? What were you doing when you were three?” Inexplicably, she caught herself thinking about what their child might look like at the age of three. If their child was a piano prodigy, would she make him or her practice four, five, six hours a day at the age of five? Would she rob him or her of their childhood?
“Oh, Madeline, I gotta go,” Henry said suddenly, his tone formal. “I’ll call you later, okay?”
The line went dead.
But before Madeline could register his quick retreat, Greta and Bernard were outside, dressed immaculately and guiding her to Bernard’s BMW, which he’d bought recently with the money he’d earned from the sales of his latest book.
“Were you talking to Henry?” Greta asked, adjusting the strap of her beautiful black dress, then the pearl earring in her ear.
“I was!”
“He really needs to focus,” Greta said, sliding into the leather passenger seat. “I hope he isn’t calling too often?”
“He’s working himself to death, Greta,” Bernard said, sounding far more easygoing and playful. “He’s responsible! His girlfriend lives here! He’s allowed to talk on the phone every now and then.”
Greta clucked her tongue and turned around to look at Madeline in the back seat. “It’s terrible, isn’t it? I want so much for him. I’m willing to make him miserable, if only so he can look back and realize he accomplished everything he wanted to.”
Madeline laughed, thinking of her mother, of all her mother had sacrificed and all her mother had demanded that Madeline sacrifice in pursuit of music. “I know what you mean.”
They met Bernard’s friend, the jazz saxophonist David, at a swanky French-fusion restaurant on the outskirts of the Nantucket Historic District. They were seated on the rooftop overlooking the gorgeous harbor, where Madeline could just-barely make out the sailboat she and Henry had spent all summer on. She didn’t feel comfortable going by herself and wondered if her sailing days were over just as soon as they’d begun.
David was a slightly overweight fifty-something American man with salt-and-pepper hair who’d spent too long in Paris and was happy to pretend he’d forgotten American customs. He wore a pair of sunglasses far past nightfall and ordered the most expensive glasses of wine off the menu, frequently saying that American wines couldn’t hold a candle to French ones. But despite all that, Madeline found him just as charming as Bernard and Greta did. She loved his fabulous stories of playing music all around the world. She loved his talk about his children, his French wife, the arrondissements that smelled of fresh bread and hot chocolate.
Of course, it soon came out that Greta and Bernard knew David because he’d been a resident at The Copperfield House thirty years ago. Madeline wasn’t surprised.
“I didn’t know anything back then!” David said with a laugh. “I’d just dropped out of Juilliard, for crying out loud, and I didn’t know what to do with myself or my musical talents. I was pretty sure I was garbage because all of my Juilliard professors had told me I wasn’t any good and that my career was over, just like that.”
“But you got into Juilliard,” Madeline heard herself whisper. “That means you’re great.”
“Sure. Maybe at one time I was okay,” David said. “But I didn’t have it in me to be a classical musician. There are too many rules and regulations. You have to wear too many tight-fitting suits, and you can’t get away with not practicing ten to fourteen hours a day, not at that level.” He laughed and poured more wine for everyone. “Tell me, Madeline. What’s your background?”
“She’ll hardly tell us anything,” Bernard said, his eyes glowing. “We were hoping she’d open up to someone like you. Someone with a similar music background. A prodigy.”
“I’m no prodigy. Only my mother calls me that, and I don’t even think she believes it,” David said with a laugh. “But come on, Madeline. You have to tell us something. We’re all friends here.”
Madeline winced, and with her thumb, she traced a line down her thigh. “I, um, I started playing when I was three.”
David nodded and propped his elbows on the table, which was something Madeline thought rich people would never do.
“My mother did everything to keep me in lessons,” Madeline said. “We didn’t have a lot of money, and I know it was hard for her.”
Madeline went on to explain that she’d won everything from the Midwest Piano Contest to the Manhattan Junior Piano Competition to the Kansas Little Pianists before going “junior professional,” as it was called. She’d cut an album at the age of thirteen. She’d dropped out of school to pursue contests and practicing as much as she could. She’d changed piano teachers five times before landing on Mrs. Everett, who’d taken her “all the way, or very near it.” As she spoke, Bernard, Greta, and David were rapt.
But when it came time for Madeline to explain what had happened at Juilliard, she simply couldn’t. Her tongue felt numb.
So she said, “I was going to audition for Juilliard, but I didn’t.” She sipped her wine and raised her shoulders. “I quit after that and moved to LA.”
David gaped at her. “You quit? Just like that?”
Madeline nodded.
“Your mother let you?” David asked.
Madeline felt a stab of sorrow. She raised her shoulders again. She couldn’t talk about her mother, not here, not anywhere.
“Didn’t you miss it?” David asked.
Madeline answered honestly, for a change, “I missed it every single day. I still do.”
“That piano’s been downstairs, waiting for you,” Greta breathed.
“But you couldn’t touch it till you were ready,” Bernard countered. It sounded like he really understood.
David looked terribly excited. He adjusted his sunglasses and said, “Play with me. Please. I want to know what kind of musician you are.”
“But you’re a jazz musician,” Madeline said. “I was only ever a classical musician, and now, I’m nothing.”
“Nonsense. Greta and Bernard haven’t stopped singing your praises.”
“I’m sure they’re overdoing it,” Madeline said. “I only played ‘Claire de Lune’ for them. It’s one of the easier pieces I’ve ever done.”
“It’s not one of the easiest pieces to play beautifully, and you know that,” David pointed out.
Madeline’s heart thudded. She knew that was true: that plenty of pianists could play and even memorize “Claire de Lune,” but that most of them played it clunkily, without the poetry that the piece required. She looked away from his penetrating gaze.
“I’ve hardly ever improvised,” she said then, hoping to get out of it. She knew that if David wanted her to play jazz with him, she would have to make something up as they went along. It required a level of creativity and skill that was beyond the classical music level. It scared her because there was no perfection involved. She couldn’t practice it over and over again for ten, twelve hours a day.
“Come on. Just try it once,” David begged. “If you hate it, I’ll never ask anything of you again.”
Greta and Bernard ordered more wine and watched Madeline like two foreboding hawks until she finally agreed to play with David. “Just once.”
But Madeline was surprised to find that she did not hate playing with David.
The afternoon that Madeline and David improvised together—Madeline on the grand piano and David on his saxophone—they played for three, then four, then five hours, chasing each other down each line of musical thought until they were exhausted and starving. When they were finished, Greta had dinner ready for them, and she and Scarlet and Julia and Bernard beamed across the table at Madeline and David as though they’d just discovered something sensational that nobody else in the world knew about yet.
Madeline was surprised at how at ease she already felt with David. Now that they’d improvised for so many hours, she found herself cracking jokes and teasing him the way she might have teased a father figure (not that she’d ever had one before). When Henry called during dinner, Madeline didn’t hear the phone, and when she tried to call him after they were finished, he didn’t answer. But her heart was too full to care. Over a nightcap, sitting on the back screened-in porch and watching a storm roll toward the island, David told her he needed a pianist in his five-piece jazz band back in Paris. “Jefferson was the pianist I’ve worked with the past, oh, fifteen years? And he recently moved to Tokyo to form a new project. His wife is Japanese, and she couldn’t take the French anymore,” David said, his voice lilting. “But for as long as I’ve played with Jefferson, and as much as I love what we’ve made together, I have a hunch about you, Madeline Willis. You’re the real deal. It’s hard to believe you haven’t played in six years.” David tugged at his black-and-gray hair and laughed at himself. “I’m sorry to embarrass you like this.”
Madeline’s blush was so enflamed that she guessed she was cherry red. But she had to admit to herself she was enjoying the compliments almost as much as she’d enjoyed playing for so long, throwing her ego away in pursuit of beautiful music.
“I’m nervous,” Madeline admitted. “Paris is so different, you know?”
“Of course,” he said. “We could do a trial run? Let’s say, September through Christmas? After that, you could re-assess how you want your career to go. And I’ll introduce you to all the right people, you can be sure of that. Maybe you’ll have opportunities in Asia or South America or somewhere else in Europe. Or maybe you’ll be called back to Manhattan. That’s where the real money is.”
Madeline’s chest opened up. She pictured herself like a sultry jazz pianist in a shadowy bar, wearing all black, her hair in curls down her back. She pictured newspaper headlines and articles talking about America’s next big talent. She thought of Henry, so many thousand miles away from here, throwing himself through the obstacle course called Hollywood. What if, in becoming this “brilliant jazz pianist in Paris,” she could show Henry that she was, in fact, good enough not only for him but for Hollywood itself? What if it was her destiny to return to the piano? And, if it was her destiny, hadn’t she sat down at the Copperfield piano for a reason—to show them what her heart was actually made of?
“Tell me what else you want to do with your life,” David asked when she didn’t answer. “If not this, how will you fill your time?”
The only answer Madeline truly had ready involved flying to Los Angeles and moving in with Henry, then waiting around till he had time for her. But that idea had never really fit.
Madeline smiled shyly and laughed at herself. “I don’t have any other plan.”
David clapped his thigh. “Then what are you waiting for, girl? Let’s make you a star.”