Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

I was remembering all this, playing the Minuet in G pretty damn well despite a few glasses of wine, when I started to feel like something was stuck in my throat. Since my hands were busy playing, I didn’t cover my mouth — just turned my head to the side and coughed something up. I think I passed out then, although I don’t remember waking. There’s a bit of time I can’t account for. I remember being in the kitchen later. I remember making tea.

The next day I heard scratching inside the piano and figured I had mice again. I didn’t want to open the lid and poke them out with the end of a mop. I didn’t want them running panicked across the carpet, their terror feeding mine.

The piano’s an old upright, a cheap Yamaha that Larry, my ex, bought used right out of college, before he even bought a couch. Well, not my ex yet — my almost-ex. My ex-in-progress. I thought, If mice eat out the insides, it’s not the worst thing. An excuse to get something nicer.

The scratching kept on for almost a week, and every time I hit a note something would scurry around, hit against the strings. I stopped playing the piano. One morning I was sitting at my little glass table eating breakfast, getting my papers ready for the condo I was going to show, and the lid of the piano lifted up. I’m not a big screamer. In fight-or-flight situations, I tend to pick option C: freeze. I just sat there paralyzed, and out climbed what I can only describe as a small troll. It was about a foot tall, and it moved so fast I didn’t even notice its clothes or hair. It ran smack into the side of the couch, then out to the middle of the floor, where it scampered in smaller and smaller circles. I held my papers in front of my legs like a shield, chased it into the vacuum closet, and shut the door. Assuming it was a hallucination — what else would I think? — I tried to put it out of my mind because I had twenty minutes to find a cab, get across the city, and tell the Lindquists why they should invest their eight hundred thousand in a walkup with non-perpendicular hallways. I told myself I had to go because I was about two failures away from fired. It’s possible that I also wanted an excuse to get the hell out of there.

“It’s a beauty,” I told the Lindquists. “Very raw. And so close to street level! It’s almost earthy!” But Mrs. Lindquist tapped her pink nails on the mantel and said that it didn’t feel like home. I was sure everything would be better when I got back and saw the empty vacuum closet. I reminded myself I’d been dehydrated, that I should drink more than just alcohol and coffee. But when I got home I found my guest fully grown, just a little shorter than I am. He’d let himself out of the closet and was sleeping on the couch.

I had no idea who he was at first. His clothes looked ancient, but I’m not good at fashion history. All I could tell was old, grimy, European, too much lace at the cuffs for my taste. He doesn’t have a wig as in his pictures, just messy, reddish, greasy hair. But after I stared at him for half an hour, he woke up and walked to the piano and started to play. Just scales at first, like he was getting used to it — and then he launched into a couple of those Inventions that drove me crazy in high school. So I looked up Bach online, and it’s definitely him, the exact same fleshy cheeks, the same dark eyes pinched small between thick brows and heavy, sleepless bags.

I decided I should look respectable in the presence of a genius, so I started freshening my face every day in the cab on the way home, not just on the way out. I bought a whole pack of razors at Duane Reade and began shaving my legs again. I tidied the apartment, too. I cleaned out the freezer, all those Ziplocs of Larry’s chili, and I finally filled in the missing lightbulbs above the bathroom sink. It was startling to see my face so clearly there — loose skin on my eyelids that caught the green eye shadow in clumps, and my roots growing in gray. I’m only thirty-eight. Johann is supposed to be the one with white hair. I made an appointment for the spa.

I introduced Johann to soap and deodorant, and the other day while I was gone he finally changed his clothes. Now he’s wearing Larry’s gray flannel shirt and old corduroys. He looks so normal, sometimes I glance up from my magazine and forget it’s not just Larry sitting there, drinking his beer.

When I was ten years old, my father started the game You Can’t Get Out of the Car Till You’ve Named This Composer. He’d have hidden the cassette case throughout the drive, and he’d only pose the question as he pulled up to the curb where he was dropping me. I would ignore his conversation for blocks, knowing what was coming and concentrating on my guess. My older brother had a practiced method of shouting the name of every major composer in a rapid, memorized succession, a litany that started with “RavelRachmaninovSaint-SaënsBeethoven” and ended with “BuxtehudeChopinSchoenbergBernstein.” I took the more methodical approach, at least establishing a general period before naming my probable suspects. Once, when the answer was Smetana, I sat there until I was half an hour late for swim team. I suppose he’d have been proud of me, identifying Bach so quickly.

Johann, no surprise, is remarkable at naming composers. Every time we put in a new disc, I’ll say the name, loud and clear—“ Schu-bert ”—and he’ll repeat it. I’m not sure if he can read the CD covers, or if he’s used to a more gothic script.

He’s been learning English. I suppose this shouldn’t surprise me, when I consider that he is a great genius, and he has a good ear and so forth. I came home from an open house the other day and he started pointing around the room, doing nouns. “Table,” he said. “CD Player.” He must get this all from me. I’ve been talking constantly, the way you would with a baby or a dog, things like, “Now I’m putting the milk in your coffee, mmm, that will taste delicious.”

On my way out of the elevator the next morning, my super stopped me, bobbing her head and smiling. “Such piano you play! You are like concert!”

“Practice, practice, practice,” I said. And what propelled me out the door and down the street was a mixture of relief that I’m not crazy and panic that there’s a real human being up there who’s not just going to vaporize. So calling a shrink is out, but calling anyone else is out, too, because they’ll think I’m crazy. I find myself wishing the Ghostbusters were real.

That night, I started telling Johann about my life. I figured, if I can’t take this to a shrink, maybe he can be my shrink. All they do anyway is sit and listen. So I made us a nice meal, chicken with cream sauce and rosemary, and opened some Riesling. “Johann,” I said, “I understand you had something like twenty children. Babies.” I rocked my arms back and forth, and he smiled. “Not to bring up a touchy subject, because I know half of them died, right? Dead?” He looked confused, but just as well. “Back then people dealt with things and moved on. It wasn’t some life-halting devastation because it was the norm . No one went around wailing, ‘Oh, why me, why does God hate me?’ And that’s how I’ve always looked at things. So last year our city was attacked. Let’s just say they knocked down some castles.” I pantomimed it, idiotically, with my arms. “And we’re all terrified, and no one can eat, and no one can sleep. Granted. But to Larry, who didn’t even lose anyone he knew, it threatens his whole worldview, makes him question his religion. I say, ‘So your whole vague, lapsed-Episcopal belief in God was based on those buildings being there? On nothing bad ever happening?’ It was like he’d never previously registered that there was evil in the world. This is the man whose clothes you’re wearing. Clothes. And then Larry says I was more upset when we miscarried last year than when the towers got hit. True, true, but really that was the hormones. Johann, you would not believe how the chemicals can wash over you. Your wives never even had to deal with postpartum, did they? Just got pregnant again and squeezed the next one out.”