It’s loud in the theater. It seems as if everyone is in conversation, speaking of things that I could never understand or even pretend to understand. Right now, as I sit in the velvet seat examining rows upon rows of tucked knees and moving lips and glossy eyeballs rolling in their sockets, I’m reminded of why I usually spend my nights alone, in my apartment, with the black windows and the locked doors. In the walls of my throat, I can start to feel a small panic settling in, growing its needle-like claws and digging them into my red flesh. The little girl sitting next to me has a shrill voice and can’t properly pronounce anything. I can almost feel the heat of the lights blossoming upon my skin. I clench my toes, bite my tongue, hold my breath, and make a fine point of cursing you with every fiber of my being.
I know you’re somewhere behind the curtain, tuning the instrument that used to sit like a block in our living room. You’re probably nervous, although you always claimed that you never got nervous, that after years of studying abroad in various gray cities, you had trained your nerves until they were something that you could control, like the movement of one’s fingers. But I can tell when you’re nervous, and I can easily imagine the beads of sweat gathering along the nape of your neck, behind your cape of hair. Perhaps you’re muttering to yourself about dinner or the parking or the goddamn heat in this theater. And now the sweat is rolling down your back.
The lights dim, and a hush ripples through the audience. The little girl next to me squirms in anticipation, and her father places a firm hand on her knee. My heart swoops as the curtains rise with ominous gusto and I suddenly realize — I was wrong. Your hair is tied back in an unforgiving bun, and your back is straight as a board, the flesh of it cold and pale, like marble. A couple beats of heavy silence pass before the conductor slowly raises his baton — the opening movement begins.
I don’t know what good music sounds like. You used to practice in the living room and scowl at my ignorance. Sometimes, late at night, even when the city had fallen into a lull, we’d sit on the carpet, listen to your tapes and you’d look at me with the most expectant eyes I have ever seen in my life. Eyes that glinted like a cat’s. Well? Can you feel it move through your body like it’s your own blood? Can you feel what I feel? The questions you’d ask me.
But I don’t feel anything at all. The first few notes of the opening movement are fierce and unapologetic. It almost sounds like a crashing, a clashing. I think that surely something has been broken, but nobody stirs in the audience, and the music continues with thunderous resolve. Even the little girl is left unfazed, her eyes glazed over either with awe or boredom, I can’t tell. You sit patiently for a few seconds, your back even straighter than before, your head bowed down and your hands resting on your lap. It doesn’t look natural, that position, but you always wore your discomfort like a badge. Your fingers then slowly rise into the air, as if casting a spell, and fall upon the keys once, twice, three times, with an intensity I have never seen before. It is at that moment, when your fingers first strike the keys and perhaps even the split second before, that I instantly recognize the piece. Because it is the only piece I ever enjoyed, although I could never bring myself to admit that to you. The only piece you ever showed me that made me feel it.
Is this some kind of trick? Some cruel twist of irony? Had you somehow burrowed into my mind and extracted the very core of all my discomfort, the prevailing proof of your talent, my inadequacy, our incongruity? A cold sweat begins to form along my upper lip as the music continues to ebb and flow with that ease, that naturalness, that sanctity ascribed only to God’s greatest creations. I anxiously check my watch. If I left now, would anyone notice? Certainly you wouldn’t. I look at you and I can recognize even from a distance that look of concentration that used to haunt me and still haunts me today. That look that denied everything else access, everything but the music.
And now, as the music crescendos and the conductor convulses with crazed, jerked movements, I am suddenly reminded of the words you had once used to describe good music: it’s like better days. You narrowed your eyes and paused for emphasis before your lips curled around the words: better days. I took it as the greatest insult then, but now I don’t know. I had seen it as a perfect enough reason to curse all music, to pack my things, to forget our arguments and move on. But now I don’t know. The last dregs of the movement seem to come from some rip in the ceiling, from some place higher than heaven itself, and now I don’t know.
