EPTHis hands were rusty; the once-crisp sonata slipped through his fingers like Jello on chopsticks. It had been nearly three hundred and ten days since Jack had played Clementi on a keyboard; normally he played the markets on one. Soon, the clock would strike midnight and the cherubic building manager would knock at the door, smiling through the tempered glass window, and let him go into the snowy courtyard, and then it would be three hundred and ten days.
He’d first seen her face through the other side of the tempered glass. She was playing La Campanella, a piece which suited her personality well. To a neophyte like Jack was then, it sounded deceptively simple and clear, especially when compared with Liszt’s other virtuosic monstrosities. But beneath the façade lay at least five years of long hours spent alone in practice.
Or, at least that’s how long she’d said she’d played. Of course, Jack had no idea whether she was lying or not. He just knew, from that day onwards, that he wouldn’t mind seeing those bony white fingers dance over the keys a lot more often. Day in, day out, Jack would sit in the practice room and listen to her as he labored over problem sets and class readings. Some days he would just walk right in and sit in a chair and listen. Her only annoyance was that he would often knock far too loudly for her liking.
They didn’t talk much, at first. The music filled that in. Some days it would be a sunny Mozart sonata, other days it would be somber Rachmaninoff. One day she began to play an intimate piece. Jack asked her for the title, and she said that it had none, at least not yet. It would be named for a certain guy, eventually.
So Jack did the only thing someone with basic knowledge of chords could do. He sat by her left side and clunked out an accompaniment to her melody.
She’d started him off on a basic curriculum. He was a quick study, and within half a year, was playing reasonable pieces from her childhood. She said that his sound, his style, reminded her of how her own childhood teacher would play.
They didn’t do everything together in the piano room. The glass window on the door made it hard for any romantic liaisons to fully develop inside, but they did their best.
When they moved in together later that year, they bought a small upright for the apartment, but they still preferred the beat-up Steinway in the third-floor practice room that overlooked the now-blossoming courtyard. They got so good at some duets that they could play them with their eyes closed and lips locked. For the entire summer, Jack would sneak dinner in from the cafeteria after his lab shift let up, and they would play, in the truest sense of the word, the piano until the knocking came at midnight.
Third year rolled around. She noticed a change in Jack. He no longer brought problem sets and books to the practice room, but a stack of business cards, a laptop, brochures and pamphlets, the paraphernalia of worldly ambition. And he no longer appreciated those romantic nocturnes, the slow waltzes. He went straight for Chopin’s etudes. They argued more and played less. Twice the cherubic building manager had to knock and tell them to keep it down. She bitterly thought that he’d never asked that when they were playing Schubert.
They played their last duet as autumn rains fell on the flagstones outside. The piece got louder and faster as they went on, mainly because each tried to outplay the other. It would be their first and last argument about the piano. Jack picked up his business cards, his laptop, his brochures and left. He narrowly ducked the book of duets as he walked through the courtyard. Dark blue ink ran all over his fingers when he picked it up; the book was printed in black. He made out his own name for a fleeting moment on the piece of paper taped to the inside cover before the rain washed everything on it away.
He graduated in three years. Found a job at a prop shop downtown, a cookie-cutter place named after the street the office was located on, got a promotion, got an account, and bought a loft in a trendy section of town, filled it up with all the usual items, but no piano. His neighbors bought one, though, and their ten-year-old would unknowingly drive him crazy by playing the very same pieces which she had started him on.
The next winter, Jack for some reason found himself at his alma mater again, this time handing out brochures and business cards. It took fifteen minutes before the false eagerness which the undergraduates displayed was too much to bear. He took a walk outside, and for some unconscious reason, he found himself below that third floor window again. Strangely, he felt no sadness, even though he remembered everything. The memories had faded to black and white.
The same cherubic face, the same sign-in sheet. Room 301 was available. The Steinway was no longer there, having been replaced by a Yamaha. Still, it was a decent machine, and soon Jack was playing again, first slowly and with trepidation, then with increasing confidence.
Suddenly, knocking. Five bony fingers behind tempered glass. Jack opened the door to no one, but he didn’t mind. At his feet lay a new duet. It was untitled.
