by André Aciman
“Has she?”
I hesitated a moment. “He,” I corrected.
“Where?”
“Italy.”
“Italy, of course. They do things differently there.”
She is clever, I thought.
* * *
Erica and Paul.
So, yes, they did get along. I let them talk and walked over to some of the other guests. I even joked a bit with Micol’s friend who, despite the birthmark, was not without beauty and a lively sense of irony, which told me she was a gifted and talented aspiring critic.
For a fleeting moment, my mind traveled back to all the weekends during the last academic year when friends from the university would come for our usual informal Sunday dinner. We’d have our traditional chicken potpie, the quiches—both bought and ready to be warmed—plus my signature cabbage salad with all kinds of ingredients thrown in. Someone always brought cheeses, and someone else, dessert. And there’d be lots of wine and good bread. We’d talk about Greek triremes and Greek fire and about Homeric similes and Greek rhetorical figures in modern authors. I’ll be losing all this, the way I’d lose my small New York rituals, acquired without my knowledge, and that I’d learn to miss when I was elsewhere. I’d lose my colleagues and my new friends, to say nothing of the two of them as well, especially now that we’d learned to be informed with each other outside of yoga and the academy.
I looked around now and saw that the place was as empty as when Micol and I moved in last August. A table, four chairs, a few weather-beaten deck chairs, a sideboard, empty bookcases, one sunken sofa, a bed, closets with countless hangers dangling like stuffed birds with their wings stretched out, and that desolate grand piano that neither Micol nor I had ever even touched and that was still piled with the playbills we kept promising to take back to New Hampshire but already knew we never would. Everything else was already packed and shipped. The university had extended our stay until mid-November, which was when the next tenant, also in the Classics Department, was due to arrive. Maynard and I had been in graduate school together and I’d already written him a welcoming note. The dryer takes too long and the Wi-Fi is unreliable. I’d never envied him. Now I’d trade his lot for mine in a second.
* * *
Eventually, and just as I’d predicted, the two started talking about Clive the journalist again, whose last name neither of them remembered. Paul was wearing a bleached-white short-sleeve linen shirt with the chest button wide open. When he raised his elbow and brought his hand to his head to recall Clive’s surname, I could see the skin of his arm all the way up to the scantiest tuft of hair under his arm. He probably shaves there, I thought. I loved his glistening wrists—so thoroughly tanned. I could just see myself spending the rest of the evening trying to catch him raising his hand to his head the next time he’d try to remember someone’s name.
On occasion, I’d catch him exchanging an elusive and hasty glance with his boyfriend across the room. Collusion and solidarity—something sweet in the way they seemed to look out for each other.
She had come wearing a loose sky-blue blouse. I couldn’t quite stare at her chest because its contour was just subtle enough not to be provocative, but I knew she was aware each time I looked. I’d never seen her except in yoga clothes. It was her dark eyebrows and large, hazel eyes that drew me—they didn’t just stare at you, they asked something of you and then lingered as though actually expecting an answer, to which your speechless, blank stare spelled a failure to respond. But they weren’t quite asking anything either—they had the look of total familiarity of someone who remembers you, and is trying to place where from, and the suggestion of a jeer in her eyes was just her way of saying you weren’t helping her remember because she could tell you remembered but were pretending not to. There was, and I’d been noticing it too often, something implied each time her eyes strayed to me; it had almost made me break the silence between us once when I saw her waiting in line at a movie theater. She was with her husband, saying something to him, when suddenly she turned and looked at me, and for a brief moment neither of us stopped staring until we both recognized each other, did some silent backpedaling, and simply flashed a silent nod hello, meaning Yoga, right? Yes, yoga. Then we let our gazes scamper away.
Meanwhile, Micol and the yoga teacher decided to step out onto the balcony to light cigarettes. He was making her laugh. I liked hearing her laugh; she seldom laughs—we seldom laugh. I bummed a cigarette from one of the other guests and joined them. “We’ve packed away all our ashtrays,” my wife explained, holding a half-emptied plastic glass on the rim of which she tapped the ashes of her cigarette. “No willpower,” said the yoga instructor about himself. “None here either,” she responded, both of them laughing now as he reached for her cup and tapped his ashes. We chitchatted a while longer until something totally unexpected happened.
Someone had opened the piano and was already playing what I instantly recognized as a piece attributed to Bach. When I stepped back into the room, the crowd had huddled around the piano to listen to what I should have guessed but didn’t want to guess was Paul playing. For a moment, and perhaps because I wasn’t expecting it, I was transfixed on the spot. We had already shipped the rugs back and the sound was far clearer, richer, and it echoed in the vacant apartment, almost as though he were playing in a large but totally emptied basilica. Why hadn’t I known that he’d actually be tempted by this relic of a piano, or that he’d play a piece I hadn’t heard in many years.
It went on for a few minutes and all I wanted was to come behind him and hold his head and kiss him on his exposed nape and ask him to please, please, play it again.
No one seemed to know the piece, and after Paul finished a respectful silence fell over the room. His boyfriend eventually broke through the crowd and placed a very gentle hand on his shoulder, probably to ask him to stop playing, except that Paul suddenly broke out into a Schnittke piece that made everyone laugh. No one knew this piece either, but they all laughed when he right away started playing a madman’s rendition of “Bohemian Rhapsody.”
Midway through his playing, I had decided to sit on the metal casing covering one of the radiators below a windowsill and Erica came to sit next to me, quietly, like a cat looking to snuggle into a tight spot on a mantelpiece without disturbing or displacing the china. All she did was turn around looking for her husband, and as she did so, let her right elbow lean on my shoulder. He was standing at the other end of the room holding a wine glass in both hands, looking uneasy. She smiled at him. He nodded back. I wondered about them. But after turning to face the piano player she did not remove her elbow from my shoulder. She knew what she was doing. Bold but undecided. But I could focus on nothing else. I admired the carefree ease with one’s body that comes from a confident disposition that is used to finding good fellowship everywhere. It reminded me of my younger days when I too assumed that others not only wouldn’t mind but actually hoped I’d reach out to touch them. My gratitude for such carefree trust made me reach for the hand closest to my shoulder; I gave it a light, momentary squeeze to thank her for her friendship, knowing that my reaching her hand would displace the elbow. She didn’t seem to mind at all, but soon her elbow withdrew. Micol, who’d been in the kitchen, had come to stand next to the radiator and placed her hand on my other shoulder. How different from Erica’s elbow.
Paul’s boyfriend told him it was time to stop playing as they had to leave soon. “Once he starts playing, there’s no stopping, and then I have to be the bully who breaks up the party.” At that point, I stood and came up to Paul who was still at the piano, put my arm around him, and said that I had recognized the Arioso by Bach and that I had no idea he was going to play it.
“I didn’t know it either,” he said, his own sense of surprise at once so disarmingly candid and confiding. He was pleased that I recognized Bach’s Capriccio. “It’s a piece Bach wrote, ‘On the Departure of His Beloved Brother.’ You’re leaving, so it’s not without meaning. If you want
I can play it again for you.”
What a sweet man, I thought.
“It’s because you’re leaving,” he repeated, and everyone heard, and the sheer humanity in the tone of his voice tore something out of me that I couldn’t show or express among so many guests.
So, once again, he played the Arioso. And he was playing it for me, and everyone could see he was playing it for me, and what broke my heart was that I knew, as he must have known, that what is so dreadful about farewells and departures is the near certainty that we’ll never see each other again. What he didn’t know, and couldn’t have known, was that this same Arioso was what I’d heard played for me some twenty years before when, then too, I was the one departing.
Are you listening to his playing? I asked the one person who was absent, but never absent for me.
I’m listening.
And you know, you do know I’ve been floundering all these years.
I know. But so have I.
What lovely music you used to play for me.
I wanted to.
So you haven’t forgotten.
Of course I haven’t.
* * *
And while Paul played and I stared at his face and couldn’t let go of his eyes that were staring back at me with such unguarded grace and tenderness that I felt it in my gut, I knew that some arcane and beguiling wording was being spoken about what my life had been, and might still be, or might never be, and that the choice rested on the keyboard itself and me.
Paul had just finished playing Bach’s Arioso when he immediately explained that he had decided to play a choral prelude as transcribed by Samuil Feinberg. “Less than five minutes, I promise,” he said, turning to his partner. “But this tiny choral prelude,” he said, interrupting his playing before picking it up again, “can change your life. I think it changes mine each time I play it.”
Was he speaking to me?
How could he possibly have known about my life?
But then, he must have known—and I wanted him to know. How music could change my life meant something irreducibly clear the moment he had spoken these words to me, and yet I already sensed that the words themselves would elude me in a matter of seconds, as though their meaning were permanently bound to music, to an evening on the Upper West Side when a young man introduced me to a piece of music that I had never heard before and now wished I’d never stop hearing. Or was it the autumnal night made brighter with the Bach, or was it the loss of this hollowed-out apartment filled with people I’d grown to like and liked even more now because of the consolations of music? Or was music just a premonition of this thing called life, life made more palpable, life made more real—or less real—because there was music and incantation trapped in its folds? Or was it his face, just his face when he had looked up at me from his chair and had said, If you want I can play it again for you?
Or perhaps what he might have meant was this: If the music doesn’t change you, dear friend, it should at least remind you of something profoundly yours that you’ve probably lost track of but that actually never went away and still answers when beckoned by the right notes, like a spirit gently roused from a prolonged slumber with the right touch of a finger and the right silence between the notes. I can play it again for you. Someone had spoken similar words two decades before: This is the Bach as transcribed by me.
As I looked at Erica sitting next to me on the radiator casing and at Paul at the piano I also wanted their lives to be changed because of tonight, because of the music, because of me. Or perhaps all I wanted was for them to bring back something from my past, because it was the past, or something like the past, like memory, or maybe not just memory, but tiers and layers deeper, like life’s invisible watermark that I still wasn’t seeing.
Then once again his voice. It’s me, isn’t it, it’s me you’re looking for, me the music summons up tonight.
I looked at the two and could tell they hadn’t a clue. I myself didn’t have a clue. I could already see how the bridge between the three of us was destined to remain fragile and would so easily be dismantled and drift downstream after tonight, and all the amity and cheer fostered by prosecco, music, and Dr. Chaudhuri’s finger food would dissipate. Things might even regress to what they’d been before we discussed toothpastes or laughed at the mean yoga instructor, whose breath, incidentally, was positively foul, wasn’t it, she’d said once, as soon as we’d had a moment together after class.
Now, while Paul played, I thought of our home in New Hampshire and how distant and sad everything there seemed as I looked out and faced the nightscape on the Hudson and thought of the furniture that we’d need to uncover once we were home, and the dusting and airing of the house, and all those hasty weekday dinners sitting face-to-face alone now that the boys were away in school. We were close, yet distant too, the reckless fire, the zest, the mad laughter, the dash to Arrigo’s Night Bar to order fries and two martinis, how quickly they’d vanished over the years. I had thought marriage would bring us together and that I’d turn over a new leaf. I’d thought that living without children in New York would bring us together again. But I was closer to the music, to the Hudson, to the two of them, about whom I knew not a single thing, and couldn’t care a whit about their lives, their Clives, their partners or husbands. Instead, as the choral prelude filled the room and grew a touch louder, my mind drifted elsewhere, as it always does when I’ve had a bit to drink and hear a piano cutting through an ocean and seas and years away to an old Steinway played by someone who, like a spirit beckoned by Bach tonight, hovered in this barren living room to remind me: We’re still the same, we haven’t drifted. This was how he always spoke to me in such moments, We’re still the same, we haven’t drifted—with a jeering languor inflecting each of his features. He had almost said it five years ago, when he’d come to see me in New Hampshire.
I try to remind him each time that he has no reason to forgive me.
But he utters an impish laugh, shoos away my protestations and, never angry, smiles, takes off his shirt, sits on my lap in his shorts, his thighs straddling mine and his arms tight around my waist while I’m trying to focus on the music and the woman next to me, and raising his face to mine as though about to kiss my lips, whispers, You fool, it takes two of them to make one of me. I can be man and woman, or both, because you’ve been both to me. Find me, Oliver. Find me.
He’s visited me many times before but not like this, not like tonight.
Say something, please tell me something more, I want to say. I could, if I let myself, warm up to him with guarded words and reach out with diffident steps. I’ve drunk enough tonight to believe he’d love nothing more than to hear from me. The thought thrills me, and the music thrills me, and the young man at the piano thrills me. I want to break our silence.
You’ve always spoken first. Say something to me. It’s almost three a.m. where you are. What are you doing? Are you alone?
Two words from you and everyone’s reduced to a stand-in, including me, my life, my work, my home, my friends, my wife, my boys, Greek fire and Greek triremes, and this little romance with Mr. Paul and Ms. Erica, everything becomes a screen, until life itself turns into a diversion.
And all there is, is you.
All I think of is you.
Are you thinking of me tonight? Did I wake you?
He doesn’t answer.
* * *
“I think you should talk to my friend Karen,” said Micol. I crack a joke at Karen’s expense. “I also think you’ve had enough to drink,” she snaps.
“And I think I’ll have some more,” I said, turning to speak with the married specialists on Jewish expatriates from the Third Reich and, without knowing how it happened, began to laugh. What on earth were these two doing in my soon to be ex-home?
Holding another glass of prosecco, I did walk up to and speak with Micol’s friend. But then seeing the scholars on Jewish expatriates from the Third Reich I found myself laughing again.
Obviously I’d had to
o much to drink.
I was thinking of my wife again and of my boys away in school. At home, every day, she’ll sit finishing her book. Then she’ll let me read it, she says, when we’re back in our small college town wearing snow boots all through the school year, teaching in snow boots, going to the movies in snow boots, to dinners, to faculty meetings, to the bathroom, to our bed in snow boots, and all of this tonight will be a thing from another era. Erica a thing of the past, and Paul locked in the past as well, and I’ll be no more than a shadow clutching to this very wall that won’t see me tomorrow, still not letting go, like a fly struggling against the draft that must whoosh it away. Would they remember?
Paul asked why I was laughing.
“I must be happy,” I said. “Or it’s too much prosecco.”
“Me too.”
It made the three of us laugh.
* * *
I remembered that after the Arioso and the choral prelude, after the endless toasts and all the prosecco, there had been a moment of awkwardness when I helped Erica find her cardigan in the guest room. Two of the guests had already left, the others had congregated in the hallway, waiting. We were alone in the room, and, as I told her how happy I was that she had come, I could have let the silence between us last a little longer. I sensed her unease but knew she wouldn’t have minded a few more seconds of this. But I decided not to push things any further and instead found myself kissing her goodbye on her exposed neck instead of her cheek. She smiled, as I smiled. My smile was apology, hers forbearance.
When it came time to bid him goodbye, I made a gesture to shake his hand, but he embraced me even before my hand touched his. I liked his shoulder blades when we hugged. Then he kissed me on both cheeks. His boyfriend kissed me the same way as well.