Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

Peter whispered something to the short-haired actress and handed her his papers. He held up his open hands to the audience in apology, ten pale, bony fingers, then walked around the people and out of the exhibit.

“The Gum Flew Away,” the woman read, the clarity of her voice a reassurance, a wiping clean. “By Sam Demarr. First, all the gum flew off, leaving Chicago in its spearmint dust. Then the department stores floated away.”

I thought of following Peter out. I’d done it so many times before, chasing him down as he stormed from a party, calling his name five times until he finally turned to look at me, tear-streaked or red-faced on the wet sidewalk. “He didn’t mean it,” I’d usually say, or “You’re just drunk,” or “We all love you.” I never said that I did. Just all of us, meaning everyone at the party, everyone he’d ever met, everyone who’d ever seen him from across the street. It wasn’t true anymore; the world didn’t love him, just I did, and I had the feeling that even if I could say that, it wouldn’t be enough. And if it were, then what? What would I do with that responsibility? And now Lauren, who was still my boss if I was lucky, was finally shooting me a look of conspiratorial relief. “ Actors ,” said her face. “I know,” said mine.

It hit me like cold water that I wouldn’t see Peter again, that he’d avoid my calls until he drifted to another city to try again and fail. Someone would hire him at a third-tier regional theater on the basis of his résumé, and he’d last one show, if that. He probably wouldn’t know how to give up.

After the readings, I propped myself up at the microphone and said my bit about membership and shortening the pledge drive with early donations, and Institute Steve said something I couldn’t follow in his nasal little whine, and I got a drink in my hand. It was cold enough outside that I wanted to drink just so I wouldn’t feel the bone chill on the way home. I chatted up as many people as I could stomach over the wine and shrimp. People didn’t want to talk to me, though. What they wanted was to meet the actors. “I saw you in Phèdre at the Court,” a woman said to one of the actresses, who smiled graciously. “It was just gorgeous. You wore that red dress. Tell me your name again.”

Another woman asked the actor who’d read the Stuart Dybek piece to sign her program. She didn’t seem to notice Dybek himself standing a few feet away, laughing with a friend and wiping his glasses on his tie. If the actor found the request strange he didn’t show it, signing his name on the margin of the paper. Peter would have written something like “Peter Torrelli is fabulous . Love and kisses, Pablo P.” Or the old Peter would have, the one who knew magic.

I felt the wine go to my head, and I felt relief that the whole thing was over. I drank more to shut out the suspicion that I was glad Peter had left. I got through the next hour and walked out into the cold, relieved to be drunk and half-expecting to find Peter there on the sidewalk, eighteen years old and scribbling in ballpoint pen on the knee of his khakis. He was gone, and there were just people waiting for buses and people waiting for taxis, everybody waiting to leave.

It was like that after our kiss sophomore year, the way I’d stood frozen thirty seconds and then ran after him into the cold night, one of my duck boots untied, my left palm bleeding in parallel paper-cut stripes. He was gone, and I stayed under the school’s archway entrance looking for his breath in the air, thinking it would tell me which way he’d gone. I thought, If he ran back inside I’ll follow him, and I’ll kiss him again. If he got a cab, there’s nothing I can do.

He had found a cab that night, as he probably had now. Or maybe he’d slouched all the way down Adams, his parka blurring him into the frozen crowd, the crowd sweeping him onto the train, the train shooting him up north and off the face of my earth.

This is the way it happens: First, my friend floats away, leaving Chicago in his dust. Then he leaves me — no breath above the concrete, no voice in the air to catch and hold. Then the Berghoff closes, and the radio stations all shut down. The school chapel folds its benches and windows and flies away. The frozen sidewalks peel up like strips of gum. The skyscrapers drift like icebergs into the lake, up the Saint Lawrence and out to sea. The citizens grab for things to rescue, but everything’s too cold to touch. Mayor Daley holds a press conference. “We can’t save it all,” he says.

In a month, they’ve all forgotten. Standing in the empty streets of their empty city, the people look up and say to no one in particular, “Something used to be here, something beautiful and towering that overshadowed us all, and it seemed so important at the time. And now look: I can’t even remember its name.”

I ’ve been calling him Bach so far, at least in my head, but now that he’s started wearing my ex-husband’s clothes and learned to work the coffeemaker, I feel it’s time to call him Johann. I said it out loud once, when I needed to get him off the couch before the super came up, but I’m not sure I pronounced it right, Germanic enough, because he didn’t respond — though I’m not sure I’d recognize my name, either, in the midst of someone screaming a foreign language. He got off the couch and went to the vacuum closet only because I practically carried him. No easy task, pushing someone so big and sweaty, even with the weight he’s lost since he got here. I’d take him out for some real German food, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned from the movies about caring for transplanted historical people, it’s never to take them out in public among the taxis and police and department store mannequins.

I’ve kept the curtains closed and the TV unplugged, but I did introduce him to the stereo so he’d have something to do every day while I’m gone. I’m proud of how carefully I did it: First, I dug my angel music box out of the Christmas decorations and played it for him. He seemed familiar with the concept, so I pointed back and forth between the angel box and the CD player, then put on some Handel. He was pleased, not at all scared, and now he’s pushing buttons and changing discs like he was raised on Sony. At first I only let him have Baroque, but recently we’ve been moving up in history. He’s fond of Mozart, unsurprisingly, but for some reason Tchaikovsky makes him giggle. When I played him “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy,” I thought he was going to wet the couch. Five minutes later he went to the piano and played the main part from memory, busted out laughing at certain phrases. If such a thing is possible, he played it sarcastically . He has a laugh, incidentally, like you’d expect from a pot-smoking thirteen-year-old, whispered and high-pitched. At first, when I thought I was making this all up, I wondered if I’d borrowed that bit from Tom Hulce in Amadeus . But on the phone the other day, my mother said, “Who’s that laughing over there?” At least she thinks I’m dating again.

He doesn’t seem to remember living in the piano. He never lifts the lid to look inside, which I would certainly do if I’d lived there ten days. The morning he came, I was in my sweats playing his Minuet in G — the one you know if you ever took lessons, the first “real” piece you learned by a serious composer: DA-da-da-da-da-DA-da-da. I was remembering that the day I learned to play it was the same day my father, the journalist who wished he were an opera baritone, first took interest in my lessons. I was seven. He would stand behind me and beat time on his palm. He even made up a little song for it, when I wasn’t getting the rhythm right: “THIS is the way that BACH wrote it, THIS is the way that BACH wrote it, THIS is the merry, THIS is the merry, THIS is the merry tune!” I’d keep playing even though it panicked me, and I’d think of the picture from my cartoon book about Beethoven, the one where his father stood behind the piano with dollar signs in his eyes. I wasn’t gifted enough that my father was thinking of money. Maybe he wanted me to entertain at his dinner parties, or just to be better than he was. Treble clefs in his eyes.