A Love That Destroys Them - Part 5

Gabriel did not sleep. He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, listening to Elena's breathing beside him, and he thought of his mother.It was not unusual. He thought of her often, though she had been dead for six years, though he had stopped praying, though he had sold her piano to pay for the conservatory he would later quit. He thought of her because Elena was dreaming, and in sleep Elena looked like his mother had looked in the months before the cancer took her—small, determined, holding on to something she could not name. His mother had held on to the nocturne. She had played it every night at nine because her own mother had played it, because it was the only thing in the house that did not change when his father left, when the money ran out, when the diagnosis came. The nocturne was a door that opened only inward, and his mother had walked through it every night until she was too weak to walk at all.He was twelve when she died. His father, who had left when Gabriel was four and returned when Gabriel was eleven, took him to live in a house with a new wife and two children who were not Gabriel's siblings in any way that mattered. The new wife was kind in the way of people who had not chosen him. She bought him clothes that fit and food that was warm and a bedroom with a door that locked, and she never asked why he did not play the piano anymore. His father, who had once been a musician himself, who had met Gabriel's mother at a conservatory in Prague, who had abandoned music for accounting and then abandoned accounting for a woman in Cleveland, looked at Gabriel with a kind of baffled recognition. Like seeing a photograph of a place you had visited but could not remember loving.Gabriel did not play for six years. He touched no keys, heard no music that did not come through walls or car windows or the tinny speakers of convenience stores. He finished high school, graduated without distinction, and enrolled in a state college because his father said it was time to be practical, and Gabriel had learned that practical was the language of people who had already given up. He studied business administration. He wore khakis. He went to parties and stood in corners and learned to make his face into a shape that other people found acceptable.The piano found him again by accident. He was twenty, walking past a music store near campus, and he saw a used upright in the window, priced at three hundred dollars, which was exactly the amount he had saved from a summer job shelving books at a library. He did not know why he went inside. He did not know why he bought it. He only knew that when he touched the keys for the first time in six years, his hands remembered what his mind had tried to bury, and the sound that came out was not music but grief, pure and unadorned, the kind of sound that makes strangers look away.He practiced in secret. He rented a storage unit and moved the piano there, and he played every night from ten until two, the hours when the rest of the world was sleeping and would not hear him fail. He played scales until his fingers bled. He played Chopin until he could hear his mother's breathing in the rests between phrases. He played his own compositions, fragments that went nowhere, melodies that started with promise and collapsed into silence because he did not know how to finish anything. The not-knowing became a kind of faith. He believed that if he played enough, if he failed enough, eventually something would open. Eventually the music would tell him what it wanted to be.He transferred to the conservatory on a scholarship he did not believe he deserved. For two years, he studied with teachers who praised his technique and worried about his expression. They said he played like someone who was trying to escape a room with no doors. They said his interpretations were beautiful but airless, that he performed the notes perfectly but withheld the breath that would make them live. He did not know how to explain that he had been withholding breath his entire life, that music was the only place he was allowed to exhale, and even there he was afraid of what might escape.The breakdown happened during a recital. He was performing Rachmaninoff, a piece his mother had loved, and halfway through the second movement he looked at the audience and saw his father in the third row. His father had not been invited. His father had not attended a single performance in two years. But there he was, wearing a suit that looked expensive and a smile that looked borrowed, and Gabriel's hands stopped. Not gradually, not with a missed note, but completely, as if the tendons had been severed. He sat at the piano for thirty seconds of silence while the audience rustled and coughed, and then he stood and walked offstage and did not return.He quit the next day. He sold the piano, the same one his mother had played, the same one he had bought back from his father after her death, and he used the money to rent the apartment on the fourth floor. He took a job transcribing sheet music for a publisher, work he could do from home, work that required no performance, no audience, no risk of being seen. He played the nocturne every night at nine because it was the only thing left that connected him to his mother, and because it was the only thing he could still perform without fear, and because, if he was honest, he played it for the same reason his mother had: it was a door that opened only inward, and he had nowhere else to go.Then Elena knocked.He had not planned to answer. He had stopped answering doors, stopped answering phones, stopped answering anything that required him to become visible in the world. But the knock was different. It was not the knock of a delivery person or a neighbor or a landlord. It was tentative, almost musical, a rhythm that sounded like hesitation and hope in equal measure. He opened the door and saw a woman with eyes that had been wounded in a way he recognized, a woman who looked at him not with curiosity or desire but with the exhausted recognition of a fellow refugee. She said, You're the music, and he heard in her voice the same thing he heard in his own when he played the nocturne: the sound of someone speaking from inside a room with no doors.Now, lying beside her in the dark, listening to her breathe, he understood what he had done. He had not rescued her. He had not been rescued. They had simply found each other in the same locked room, and instead of looking for a way out, they had decided to furnish it. They had built a world so complete, so hermetically sealed, that the outside had ceased to exist. And now, when she said she needed to go back to her apartment, when she said she needed to remember what it felt like to be alone, he had told her he would follow her. Not because he loved her. Because he could not survive the love's absence. Because the love had become the room, and without it, there was only the empty space where the music used to be.He turned his head and looked at her. In sleep, her face was soft, unguarded, the face of the woman who had knocked on the eighth night, the woman who had not yet learned to need him. He wanted to wake her and tell her to leave. He wanted to wake her and beg her to stay. He wanted to play the nocturne until the walls dissolved and the building collapsed and there was nothing left but the two of them and the music, which would never end, which would play forever in a room with no doors and no windows and no air, because that was the only kind of forever he had ever believed in.He did not wake her. He lay still and listened to her breathe, and he thought of his mother, who had played the nocturne until her fingers could no longer find the keys, who had held on to the music because it was the only thing that did not leave, and he understood, with the clarity of a man drowning in the ocean he had mistaken for a harbor, that he was doing the same thing. He was holding on. He was playing the same song until his fingers bled and his lungs emptied and the room filled with water, because the alternative was silence, and silence was the sound of his mother dying, and he could not bear to hear it again.Outside, the radiator in 4A clanked once, a final protest, and then fell silent.

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