Stephen Dixon - Late Stories

I didn’t use the door key to get into her apartment. I’d put the key ring back in my pants pocket while I was listening to her play. Then she opened the door for me. Big smile, happy to see me, and we kissed and hugged before we closed the door. I asked and she told me what she’d been playing—“I’ve just begun to learn it, so I’m not very good at it yet and probably never will be”—and what key and opus it was. She opened the door for me because I rang the bell. I rang it after she stopped playing — maybe a minute after, because I thought if she was going to play more of that piece, if there was more to it, or something else, then I wanted to hear it for a while outside her door. It’d disturb her playing, I thought, and probably stop her if I was inside the apartment listening to her play. But why’d I ring her bell instead of using the key? Good question. I hadn’t asked myself that before. It meant, for one thing, that if she was still sitting at the piano, she’d have to get up to open the door. She might not want to, I thought, at that particular moment. She might be resting a minute or so before resuming the piece she was playing or playing through it again or starting a new piece. So I’m really not sure why I rang. No, I don’t know. The reason seems to be lost or, I’ll say, escapes me. So think back. Maybe the reason will come back in my remembering the incident the second time around. Or third time. The first was when I wrote about it a few years ago.

I walked to her building from my building. It’s about a two-and-a-half-mile walk. I don’t remember if it was pleasant out. I do know I didn’t show up in her apartment wet and cold. Certainly not wet. We wouldn’t have hugged so quickly. I would have taken off my jacket or coat and cap. I went into her lobby, took the elevator to her floor. The elevator was definitely waiting for me when I walked into her building. Was its door open? If it was there on the ground floor, the door was almost always open. Whether I said hello to the doorman, I’m now not so sure. If he was there, I said hello. If he was taking a short break in the restroom in back of what we called the building’s office on the ground floor, which might have been what the building’s staff called it too, then of course I didn’t. I would have gone straight into the elevator, pressed the button for the seventh floor, and gone up. I first heard her playing the piano that day either while I was still in the rising elevator but close to her floor or just after the elevator opened on her floor and I got off. I know there was no one in the elevator with me. I’d say most times there was, and usually more than one person. The building was seventeen stories tall. Or sixteen stories and two penthouses, or roof apartments tenants in the building called them, which were reached by getting off the elevator on the sixteenth floor — that was as far as the elevator went — and walking up a flight of stairs. And, from the second to sixteenth floor, there were four apartments to each floor — the other two and their separate hallway and stairway you got to by going through a door to the right of the elevator. So I’m saying there were lots of people using that elevator in the front of the building — the one facing the entrance and its revolving door — and that I seldom rode up in it, it seemed, without another tenant or two or a deliveryman or visitor riding with me. There were two other elevators — one for the apartments in the middle of the building and the other for the apartments in the rear. But that has nothing to do with what I’m trying to get at with this except, maybe, to show how large the building was. Nah, knowing that doesn’t help anything. Why was I so sure it was Abby playing the piano in her apartment? Because who else could it be? I thought. She was taking lessons at the time — every Thursday afternoon after she finished teaching a Humanities course at Columbia — but took them in her piano teacher’s cramped studio apartment in the West Eighties. “She has two Steinway Grands,” she said, “which she gets tuned twice a year. Both are five times the piano my Acrosonic is, and playing the one she reserves for her students makes me feel I’m a much better pianist than I am.” Her piano teacher was who suggested she learn the Brahms Intermezzo and she eventually became a good friend of Abby’s and played at our wedding in Abby’s apartment three years later: the first prelude and fugue of The Well-Tempered Clavier.

So I got off the elevator, had my key ring out probably from the time I got into the elevator and pressed the button for the seventh floor or maybe even before I went into the building and walked up to its revolving door, ready to stick the key into her door lock, when I thought Wait. Don’t go in yet. Listen to her play. This is a special moment. The music’s beautiful and she plays it so delicately. Stay out here for as long as the music lasts. I’d never heard her play this way, meaning with me on the other side of the door. I put the key ring back into my pants pocket. Or maybe I didn’t till the playing stopped and I decided to go inside. I’ll explain that in a moment. While I listened to her play I said to myself, How lucky can you get? Having a woman you love who loves you and who can play such beautiful music so beautifully? Something like that. Then I just stopped thinking, I could almost say. Just listened. Listened without thinking, I could almost say. The beautiful playing. The beautiful woman who was playing. That she loves me. That I love her. That she’ll be happy to see me when I finally open the door and go inside. Then I’m going to tell her I stood outside her door for however long it was and was mesmerized, enchanted, rapt — some word or words, but not one of those — by the music and her playing. So, actually lots of thoughts. But mostly, I just listened. Then her playing stopped. The piece seemed over. As I think I said, I don’t think I ever heard that piece before. Not just her playing it — that I know I’d never heard — but also the piece itself. I’ve heard it many times since. On the radio, and a recording of it and other Brahms’ piano pieces I bought a short time later. Rudolf Serkin. And, after the first time I listened to her play it from the hallway outside her door, she played it a couple of times while I was in the apartment and also a couple of times or more in the house we bought in Baltimore fifteen years later, after we had the piano moved there from our apartment in New York. I’m sure she also played it a number of times in the apartment when she was still learning it and I wasn’t around. Then, I don’t know why — I’m saying, after she finished playing it that first time and I waited to see if she was going to play it again or start something else — instead of using the door key she gave me, I rang the bell. Would I have stood behind the door listening to her play the piece again or something else? I’m not sure, but I think I would have, at least for a minute or two. Some movement appeared in the peephole a few seconds later and she opened the door. She was smiling, glad to see me as I thought she’d be, said “Hiya, Sweetie,” and held out her arms. We hugged and kissed. I told her I was outside her front door listening to her play for about ten minutes. “You played the piece so beautifully. I’ve said it before: you have a special light touch. But I never before heard you play a piece so beautifully and ethereally as you did.” “Oh, I don’t play well,” she said. “And I was only practicing.” “What are you talking about? You play exceptionally well. I was completely taken in by your playing. If you had started something else, and maybe even if you had played the same piece again and I was still in the hallway, I would have stayed out there and listened to that too. What’s the name of the one you played? I want to get a recording of it. Or maybe I won’t and I’ll reserve the experience of hearing it for when you play it.” “Get it if you want. It might be good to hear the difference of a real professional playing it and me. Brahms, an Intermezzo , opus one-nineteen, in—” and she gave the key it’s in. “But you’re only saying all this because of how you feel towards me, which is very nice; you’ll not hear me complaining. But you don’t have to, you know. I’ve no illusions about my playing.” “My feelings for you, sure,” I said, “though that’s not why I’m saying it. Believe me, I was truly entranced. The music, your playing, my being the only person listening: everything was just right.” “Oh, come on. Like some tea? I was just about to make myself some. And I bought chocolate lace cookies at Mondel’s this morning, and you like them, so let’s have cookies and tea.” “All right,” I said. And that was it. I’ve done this once before. I love remembering it. Those wonderful ten minutes or so. And then, of course, ringing the bell and her opening the door with a smile, because she’d looked through the peephole and saw it was me, and putting her arms out for me and me going into them and our hugging and kissing. One hug, one kiss. And then the cookies and tea and her asking, while we sat at the table, how come I rang the doorbell instead of using the key—“Did you lose it?” I said “I don’t know why I rang the bell. Maybe I just didn’t want to break the mood or something, and opening the door on my own might have startled you or been like barging into your apartment. Not that ringing the bell wouldn’t also jar things. So I really don’t know. It seemed the right thing to do at the time, and I was rewarded with your beautiful smile and outstretched arms and a kiss. Anyway, I don’t think music has ever had such an effect on me before. No, I really can’t think of anytime that it did. It didn’t make me cry but it sure made me feel good, and I still feel good. I feel great.”