Capriccio

Erica and Paul.

They had never met before, yet both stepped out of the same elevator together. She was wearing high heels, he boat shoes. Riding to my floor, they’d discovered they were headed to the same apartment and that they even knew someone in common, a certain Clive about whom I knew nothing whatsoever. How they managed to arrive at Clive struck me as strange, but then why find anything strange on an evening that already promised to be strange, since the two persons I so desperately wanted to see at my farewell party had in fact arrived together. He came with his significantly older boyfriend, she with her husband, but I still couldn’t believe that, after months of wanting to draw closer to the two of them, I finally had them both under my roof on my last few days in the city. There were many others present—but who cared about the other guests: his partner, her husband, the yoga instructor, the friend Micol kept saying I had to meet, the couple I befriended last fall at a conference on Jewish expatriates from the Third Reich, the peculiar acupuncturist from 10H, the crazy logician from my department along with his nutty vegan wife, and sweet Dr. Chaudhuri from Mount Sinai who’d been happy to reinvent the very concept of finger food tonight to accommodate the guests. At some point we uncorked the prosecco and everyone drank to our return to New Hampshire. The speeches echoed in the already empty apartment and a few graduate students toasted and roasted me with affection and humor, as more guests kept coming and going.

But the two who mattered stayed. There was even a moment, as people were milling around the barren apartment, when she stepped out onto the balcony and I followed, then he followed, and the two of them leaned against the banister with flutes in hand, talking about this man Clive, she at my left, he at my right, while I set my glass down on the floor and put my arms around each of their waists, friendly, casual, totally okay. Then I removed my arms and leaned against the balustrade, all three of us shoulder to shoulder, watching the setting sun together.

Neither shifted away from me. Both were leaning into me. It had taken months to bring them here. This was our quiet moment on the balcony overlooking the Hudson on this unusually warm mid-November evening.

His department at the university was on the same floor as mine, but we had no academic dealings with each other. From the looks of him, I assumed he was either a graduate student finishing his dissertation or a recent postdoc or an early-tenure-track assistant professor. We shared the same stairway and the same floor, occasionally crossed paths at large faculty meetings, or more commonly at Starbucks two blocks down Broadway, usually late in the afternoon before graduate seminars started. We’d also noticed each other when we met a few times in the same salad bar across the street and then couldn’t avoid smiling when we ran into each other after lunch to brush our teeth in the same bathroom. It became a standing source of smiles when the two of us met on our way to the men’s room with our toothpaste already spread on our brushes. Neither, it seemed, brought his tube to the bathroom. One day he looked at me and asked, “Aquafresh?” and I said yes. How did he know? By the stripes, he replied. And so to seize his opening, I asked which brand he used. “Tom’s of Maine.” I should have known. He was definitely a Tom’s of Maine type. Probably used Tom’s deodorant, Tom’s soap, and other non-mainstream products found mostly in health food stores. Sometimes, after watching him rinse out the toothpaste, I wanted to know how fennel after salad tasted in his mouth.

We weren’t courting each other but an implicit something seemed to hover between us. Our frail pontoon bridge was built over shy afternoon pleasantries and then hastily dismantled the next morning with scarcely a greeting when we happened to take the same stairway. I wanted something, and I suspect he did too. But I was never sure I’d read the situation clearly enough to say anything or move things farther along. During one of our brief exchanges, I took the opportunity to tell him that I was coming to the end of my sabbatical and would soon be moving back to New Hampshire. He said he was sorry to hear this; he’d meant to sit in on my seminar about the Pre-Socratics. “But time!” he said. “Time!” mingling an awkward, apologetic smile with a modest sigh. So he’d looked me up and knew about my seminar on the Pre-Socratics. This was flattering. He was on deadline for his book on the Russian pianist Samuil Feinberg. I had never heard of Feinberg before and felt it added another side to him I wished I’d taken the time to know better. If he was free and wanted to come for a small farewell reception in our nearly empty apartment—there were no more than four chairs left, I said—he’d be more than welcome. Would he? Definitely, he said. His reply came so quickly I was tempted not to believe him.

Then there was Erica. We were in the same yoga class, sometimes she was there unusually early—six a.m.—as was I; sometimes the two of us showed up very late, at six p.m. There were even times when we came twice on the same day, at six a.m. and at six p.m., almost as though we’d been looking for each other but knew better than to hope to meet twice on the same day. She liked her corner, and I was always a foot away. Even when she wasn’t there, I liked to lay my mat on the floor about four feet out from the wall. At first it was because I liked our usual spot, later I found subtle ways of saving her spot for her. But neither of us was a regular, which was why it took ages to exchange so much as a hasty nod. Sometimes when I was already lying down with my eyes shut, I would suddenly hear someone drop a mat next to mine. Without looking, I knew who it was. Even when she approached our narrow corner on bare feet, I’d learned to recognize her stealthy, timid swish, the sound of her breathing, the way she cleared her throat once she’d lain down. She made no secret of acting surprised yet pleased to see me there. I was more circumspect and would pretend to do a double take with a sudden Oh, it’s you look. I didn’t want to be obvious, nor give the impression that I was either eager to connect beyond what had always been light, perfunctory yoga chitchat whenever we gathered outside the studio with our shoes off waiting for the earlier group to vacate the room. There was something always civil yet mildly ironic when we discussed our mediocre performance in class, or complained about the bad substitute teacher, or sighed, wishing each other a pleasant weekend after hearing a stormy weather forecast. We both knew that none of this was going anywhere. But I liked her slim feet, and her smooth shoulders gleaming with a summer’s tan that seemed to resent letting the scent of last weekend’s sunscreen wear off. Above all I liked her forehead, which was not flat but rounded and which hinted at thoughts I couldn’t put into words but wanted to know better, because there was a wry afterthought visibly floating on her features every time she flashed a smile. She wore tight clothes with her lean calves exposed so that, if I allowed my mind free rein, I could easily imagine her legs raised ninety degrees in a viparita karani pose with her heels resting against my chest, toes reaching my shoulders, ankles cupped in my hands as I knelt facing her. Then if she’d bend her legs and gradually tuck her knees around my waist, all I would need was to hear her breathe and utter a moan to know that what I wanted was more than just yoga fellowship.

I was thinking of inviting our yoga teacher for a farewell evening, I said. Would she and her husband like to join us? That would be great, she said.

So here they both were. It was warm for November, and our French windows were wide open, and a breeze from the river kept wafting across the room, while candles flickered on the windowsills, and all of us felt we were in a movie spending the most enchanted Saturday evening where not a thing goes wrong. All I did was introduce people to people and pose questions, deftly, so nothing I asked might sound like those hackneyed, typically rehearsed host questions if I sensed that a conversation was drying up. What did you make of the final scene in the movie? What did you think of those two aging actors? Did you like the movie as much as the director’s previous one? I find myself liking movies that suddenly end with a song. Do you?

It was my farewell party but I was still the evening’s host. I made sure the prosecco kept flowing freely, and everyone seemed completely relaxed. You could see it in the way the two were leaning against the wall and chatting, and, when I’d occasionally join them, I felt we were a band apart. If everyone had left the room, we wouldn’t have noticed and would have gone on talking about this or that book, this movie or that play, every subject flowing into the other with never a disagreement.

They asked questions too—of me, of each other, and once or twice would turn to those who’d approached us by the kitchen to draw them into the conversation. We burst out laughing and I held their hands, and I know they both liked that I’d done it and they responded with a gentle squeeze of their own that was neither lax nor merely politely reciprocal. At some point he, and later she, rubbed my back, delicately, almost as if they also liked the feel of my sweater and wanted to feel it again. It was an amazing evening, we were drinking, our cell phones had not rung once, and Dr. Chaudhuri’s dessert would start coming out soon. The party had been supposed to end at eight thirty but it was well past that and no one gave a sign of wanting to leave.

Occasionally I would sneak a glance at Micol meaning Things okay at your end? to which a hasty nod would mean Yes—all okay at yours? Good enough here, I’d respond. We were a perfect team, and being a team is what had kept us together. It was why, I think, we’d always known we’d make a good couple. Teamwork, yes. And sometimes passion.

What’s with these two? she signaled with an inquiring tilt of her head, meaning the two young guests she’d never seen before. Tell you later, I signaled back. She looked pinched and a bit suspicious. I knew that killjoy look that said, You’re up to something.

The two had a sense of humor and laughed quite a bit, sometimes at my expense since I was seldom up-to-date with things everyone else seemed to know. But I let them have their fun.

At some point Erica interrupted and whispered: “Don’t look now, but your wife’s friend keeps staring at us.”

“She’s interested in a job at the university, which is why I’ve been avoiding her.”

“Not interested?” he asked, a smidgen of irony in his voice.

“Or not convinced?” she threw in.

“Not impressed,” I replied. “What I meant to say was not attracted.”

“She’s pretty, though,” Erica said. I shook my head with a derisive smile.

“Quiet! She knows we’re talking about her.”

All three of us looked sheepishly away. “Plus her name is Kirin,” I added.

“Not Kirin, it’s Karen,” he said.

“I heard Kirin.”

“Actually, she did say Kirin,” said my yoga partner.

“That’s because she speaks Michigander.”

“You mean Michiganese.”

“Sounds meshuga.” We burst out laughing. We couldn’t seem to control ourselves.

“We’re being watched,” he said.

As we were still trying to muffle our laughter, my mind raced ahead of me. I wanted them in my life. And under any conditions. I wanted them now, with his boyfriend, her spouse, whatever, with their newborns or adopted children if they had them. They’d be welcome to come and go as they pleased, just be in my humdrum, ever-so-boring day-to-day life in New Hampshire.

And what if Erica and Paul got to like each other in some other, unforeseen manner—which might not be so unforeseen at all?

It might even give me a vicarious thrill. The libido accepts all currencies, and vicarious pleasures have an over-the-counter exchange rate that is considered reliable enough to pass for real. No one ever went bankrupt borrowing someone else’s pleasure. We go bankrupt only when we want no one. “Do you think she could make anyone happy?” I asked about my wife’s friend, not knowing why exactly I had asked the question. “A man like you?” he immediately added as though ready to aim a quick dart, while her sly but tacit smile, following his, told me she might have read the ulterior meaning of my question. Both seemed to agree that I was not the type who was easily made happy. “If you only knew how simple are the things I want.” “Like?” she asked, almost too abruptly, as though eager to catch me waffling or fibbing. “I can name two.” “Name them, then,” she said, challenging me on the spot without realizing that she had spoken too hastily and that my answer, clearly hanging on the tip of my tongue, wasn’t what she expected at all. Noticing I hesitated, he said, “Maybe he doesn’t want to answer.” “Perhaps I do,” I replied. Again a rueful smile quivered on her lips. “Perhaps not.” So now she knows, she must know. I could tell I was making her nervous. But this, I knew from experience, was the moment when the bold question is asked, or doesn’t even need to be asked, because the answer can only be yes. But she was nervous. “Most of our wants are imaginary anyway, aren’t they?” I said, trying once more to soften what I’d just said to give her an out in case she was looking for one and couldn’t find it. “And some of our fondest desires end up meaning more to us unrealized than tested—don’t you think?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever waited long enough to know what delayed desires are.” He burst out laughing.

“I have,” she said.

I looked at them, and they looked at me. I liked awkward moments like these. Sometimes all I needed was to draw them out and not rush to nip them in the bud. But the tension was rising and she hastened to say something, anything, which also told me she had indeed intuited what I wasn’t saying: “I’m sure there must have been someone who bruised you once, or scarred you.”

“There was,” I replied. “Some people leave us scuttled and damaged.” I thought awhile. “In my case I’m the one who did the scuttling, yet I’m the one who never recovered.”

“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 too 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.

I was pleased, thrilled, and crushed. I stood at the door and watched all four of them walk down the corridor. I’d never see them again.

What had I wanted from them? For them to like each other so I could sit, sip more prosecco, and then decide whether or not to join their party? Or had I liked them both and couldn’t decide which of the two I wanted more? Or did I want neither but needed to think I did because otherwise I’d have to look into my life and find huge, bleak craters everywhere going back to that scuttled, damaged love I’d told them about earlier that evening.

Micol and her friend Karen were cleaning up in the kitchen. I’d told them to leave the dishes alone. Karen reminded me point-blank that she’d like to speak to me again. “Maybe soon?” she said. “As soon as I’m back in the city,” I said. I lied.

Micol walked her to the elevator then came back, meaning to help tidy up a bit before turning in. I told her not to bother.

“Nice party,” she said.

“Very nice.”

“So, who were those two?”

“Kids.”

She gave me a knowing smile. “I’m going to bed, are you coming?”

I had cleaning up to do, I said, but I’d join her soon enough.

I took my time putting some of the plastic dishes into two contractor bags left over from our packing and, as I was about to turn off the lights in the living room, I found a pack of cigarettes on the side table near the only ashtray in the apartment, probably Karen’s. I took one out of the pack, lit it, turned off all the lights, put the ashtray next to me on the old sofa that was no longer ours, put my feet up on one of the four chairs that would stay behind with their new masters, and began thinking of the Arioso as I remembered hearing it so long ago. Then in the semi-darkened living room I looked out and caught the full moon. My God, how beautiful it was. And the more I stared at it, the more I longed to speak to it.

Didn’t change your life, did I? says good old Johann Sebastian.

Afraid not.

And why not?

Music doesn’t give answers to questions I don’t know how to ask. It doesn’t tell me what I want. It reminds me that I may still be in love, though I’m no longer sure I know what that means, being in love. I think about people all the time, yet I’ve hurt many more than I’ve cared for. I can’t even tell what I feel, though feel something I still do, even if it’s more like a sense of absence and loss, maybe even failure, numbness, or total unknowing. I was sure of myself once, I thought I knew things, knew myself, and people loved that I reached out to touch them when I blustered into their lives and didn’t even ask or doubt that I mightn’t be welcome. Music reminds me of what my life should have been. But it doesn’t change me.

Perhaps, says the genius, music doesn’t change us that much, nor does great art change us. Instead, it reminds us of who, despite all our claims or denials, we’ve always known we were and are destined to remain. It reminds us of the mileposts we’ve buried and hidden and then lost, of the people and things that mattered despite our lies, despite the years. Music is no more than the sound of our regrets put to a cadence that stirs the illusion of pleasure and hope. It’s the surest reminder that we’re here for a very short while and that we’ve neglected or cheated or, worse yet, failed to live our lives. Music is the unlived life. You’ve lived the wrong life, my friend, and almost defaced the one you were given to live.

What do I want? Do you know the answer, Herr Bach? Is there such a thing as a right or wrong life?

I’m an artist, my friend, I don’t do answers. Artists know questions only. And besides, you already know the answer.

In a better world, she’d be sitting next to me on the sofa to my left, and he’d be at my right, an inch away from the ashtray. She kicks off her shoes and puts her feet up next to mine, on the coffee table. My feet, she finally says, sensing we’re all staring at them. Ugly feet, aren’t they? she says. Not ugly at all, I say. I’m holding their hands. I free one hand, but only to let it linger on his forehead. While she leans into my shoulder, he turns around, faces me, then kisses me on the mouth. It’s a long, deep kiss. Neither of us minds that she’s watching. I want her to watch. The kid kisses well. She says nothing at first, then, I want him to kiss me too. He smiles at her, and almost climbing over me kisses her on the mouth. Afterward she says she likes the way he kisses. Agreed, I say. But he smells of cigarettes. My fault, I say. You didn’t like the smell? he asks. I liked it fine, she replies. I kiss her. She doesn’t complain that I smell of tobacco. I’m thinking, Fennel. I want her to taste of his fennel, from his mouth to her mouth to my mouth, and back to his.

Later that night, I went to sleep thinking of the three of us naked in bed. We are hugging, but in the end the two are curled up against me, each with a thigh on one of mine. How easily it might have happened, and so naturally, as though both had come to dinner with little else in mind. Why so many schemes, and so much planning, and such anxieties when, hours earlier, I was standing the bottles in buckets of ice. I loved the thought of his sweat and hers mingled with mine. Yet all I ended up focusing on was their Achilles tendons. Hers, when she’d removed her shoes and put both feet on the coffee table, his when he walked in at the very start of the evening and I spotted him wearing boat shoes without socks. I had no idea how slim and smooth and delicate his feet were. Later, he too had taken off his shoes before placing both feet on the coffee table, one slim, tanned ankle over the other. Look at mine, he’d said, twitching the toes of one foot. We laughed. Boys’ feet, she said. I know, he replied. Once again he moved closer, placed a knee on my thigh, and kissed me.

I don’t recall what I dreamed that night, but I know that, all through the night and through countless flushed and fitful reawakenings, I had loved the two of them, together or separately I couldn’t tell, because there was something so thoroughly real in their unhindered presence in my arms that when I woke in the middle of the night clutching my wife, I felt, as I’d already imagined earlier that evening, that it wouldn’t be far-fetched to start preparing breakfast for the four of us in a kitchen that reminded me of a house in Italy.

I thought of Micol. She had no place in this. Italy was a chapter we never discussed. But she knew. She knew that one day—she just knew, and probably better than I did. I had once wanted to tell her about my old friends, and their house by the sea, and of my room there, and about the lady of the house, who years ago was like a mother to me but who now had dementia and hardly remembered her own name, and about her husband who, before dying, lived in the same house with another woman, who still lives there with a seven-year-old son I’m dying to meet.

I need to go back, Micol.

Why?

Because my life stopped there. Because I never really left. Because the rest of me here has been like the severed tail of a lizard that flays and lashes about, while the body’s stayed behind all the way across the Atlantic in that wonderful house by the sea. I’ve been away for far too long.

Are you leaving me?

I think so.

And the children too?

I’ll always be their father.

And when is this happening?

I don’t know. Soon.

I can’t say I’m surprised.

I know.

That same night, after the guests had left and Micol had gone to bed, I turned off the light in the entrance and was about to shut the French windows to the balcony when I remembered to blow out the candles. I stepped outside again, stood facing the river, placed both hands on the banister where I’d stood with Erica and Paul earlier in the evening, and stared out across the water. I liked the lights across the Hudson, I liked the fresh breeze, I liked Manhattan this time of year, I liked the sight of the George Washington Bridge, which I knew I’d miss once I was back in New Hampshire but that right now, on this night, still reminded me of Monte Carlo when its sparkling lights reach into Italy at night. Soon, it would be cold on the Upper West Side and there would be days of rain, but the weather always cleared eventually here and people still milled about the streets late at night when it was cold in this city that never sleeps.

I slid the deck chairs back into their place, picked up a half-empty wine glass from the floor, and spotted another, which had been used as an ashtray and was brimming with butts. How many had been smoking outside? The yoga teacher, Karen, Micol herself, the married couple I’d met at the conference on Jewish expatriates from the Third Reich, the vegans, who else?

Now, as I admired the view and kept watching two tugboats gliding quietly upstream, I thought that one day fifty years from now someone else would surely step outside on this very balcony and stand here admiring this same view, nursing similar thoughts, but it wouldn’t be me. Would he be in his teens or his eighties, or would he be my own age now, and would he, like me, still long for an old and only love, trying not to think of some unknown soul who, just like me tonight some fifty years before, had longed for a beloved and tried, as I caught myself trying and failing after all these years, not to give it a thought.

The past, the future, what masks they are.

And what screens those two were, Erica and Paul.

Everything was a screen, and life itself was a diversion.

What mattered now was unlived.

I looked up at the moon and meant to ask about my life. But her answer came far sooner than I was able to formulate the question. For twenty years you’ve lived a dead man’s life. Everyone knows. Even your wife and your children and your wife’s friend, and the couple you met at a conference on the Jewish expatriates from the Third Reich can read it on your face. Erica and Paul know it, and those scholars who study Greek fire and Greek triremes, even the Pre-Socratics themselves, dead two thousand years ago, can tell. The only one who doesn’t know is you. But now even you know.

You’ve been disloyal.

To what, to whom?

To yourself.

I remembered that a few days earlier, while shopping for boxes and tape, I’d spotted someone I knew across the street. I waved at him but he didn’t wave back and kept walking, though I knew he’d seen me. Maybe he was upset with me. But upset about what? Moments later I saw someone from my department headed to a bookstore. We crossed paths by one of the fruit vendors on the sidewalk and, though he too looked in my direction, he failed to return my smile. A while later I saw a neighbor from my building on the sidewalk; we normally exchange pleasantries in the elevator, but she didn’t say anything or nod back when I acknowledged her. It suddenly occurred to me that the only explanation was that I had died and that this was what death was like: you see people but they don’t see you, and worse yet, you’re trapped being who you were in the moment you died—buying corrugated boxes—and you never changed into the one person you could have been and knew you really were, and you never redressed the one mistake that threw your life off course and now you were forever trapped doing the very last stupid thing you were doing, buying corrugated boxes and tape. I was forty-four years old. I was already dead—and yet too young, too young to die.

After shutting the windows, I thought of Bach’s Arioso again and began to hum it in my head. In moments such as these, when we are all alone and our mind is altogether elsewhere, facing eternity and ready to take stock of this thing called our life and of all we’ve done or half done or left undone, what would my answer be to the questions good old Bach said I already knew the answer to?

One person, one name—he knows, I thought. Right now, he knows, he still knows.

Find me, he says.

I will, Oliver, I will, I say. Or has he forgotten?

But he remembers what I’ve just done. He looks at me, says nothing, I can tell he’s moved.

And suddenly, with the Arioso still in my mind and yet another glass and another of Karen’s cigarettes, I wanted him to play this Arioso for me, followed by the choral prelude, which he’d never played before, and to play it for me, just for me. And the more I thought of his playing, the more the tears began to well in my eyes, and it didn’t matter if it was the alcohol still speaking or my heart, for all I wanted was to hear him now, playing this Arioso on his parents’ Steinway on a rainy summer’s night in their house by the sea, and I would sit close to the piano with a glass of something and I’d be with him and no longer be so thoroughly alone as I’ve been for so many, many years, alone among strangers who did not know a thing about me or about him. I would ask him to play the Arioso and by playing it to remind me of this very night when I snuffed out the candles on the balcony, turned off the lights in the living room, lit a cigarette, and for once in my life knew where I wanted to be and what I had to do.

It would happen as it did the first time or the second or third. Make up a reason that’s believable enough to others and to myself, take a plane, rent a car, or hire someone to take me there, drive up the old familiar roads, which have probably changed over the years or maybe not so much, and that still remember me as I remember them, and before I know it, there it is: the old pine alley, the familiar sound of pebbles crunching under the tires as the car slows to a halt, and then the house. I look up, I think there’s no one, they don’t know I’m coming, although I’ve written that I am, but sure enough, there he is, waiting. I’ve told him not to wait up. Of course I’ll wait up, he replies, and in that Of course, all our years rush back, because there’s a trace of muted irony, which was how he spoke his heart when we were together, meaning You know I’ll always wait up, even if you get here at four a.m. All these years, I’ve waited up, do you think I won’t wait up a few more hours now?

Waiting up is what we’ve done all our lives, waiting up allows me to stand here remembering Bach’s music playing at my end of our planet and letting my thoughts go out to you, for all I want is to think of you, and sometimes I don’t know who’s the one thinking, you or I.

I’m here, he says.

Did I wake you?

Yes.

Do you mind?

No.

Are you alone?

Does it matter? But yes.

He says he’s changed. He hasn’t.

I still run.

Me too.

And I drink a bit more.

Ditto.

But sleep poorly.

Ditto.

Anxiety, a touch of depression.

Ditto, ditto.

You’re coming back, aren’t you?

How did you know?

I know, Elio.

When? Elio asks.

In a couple of weeks.

I want you to.

You think?

I know.

I won’t come up the tree-lined alley as I’d planned. Instead, the plane will land in Nice.

I’ll pick you up by car, then. It will be late morning. Same as the first time.

You remember.

I remember.

And I want to see the boy.

Did I ever tell you his name? My father named him after you. Oliver. He never forgot you.

It will be hot and there’ll be no shade. But the scent of rosemary will be everywhere, and I’ll recognize the cooing of turtledoves and behind the house there’ll be a field of wild lavender and sunflowers raising their befuddled big heads at the sun. The swimming pool, the belfry nicknamed To-Die-For, the monument to the dead soldiers of the Piave, the tennis court, the rickety gate that leads down to the rocky beach, the whetting stone in the afternoon, the unending rattle of cicadas, me and you, your body and mine.

If he asks how long I’m staying, I’ll tell him the truth.

If he asks where I plan to sleep, I’ll tell him the truth.

If he asks.

But he won’t ask. He won’t have to. He knows.