Didn’t You Want Me?

Chapter One: The Sunroom

The last student of the afternoon was a boy named Nathan Poole, eleven years old, who played the Clementi sonatina as though it were a chore he had been assigned as punishment.

Rebecca Darley sat on the second chair with her hands folded in her lap and let him finish. She did not interrupt students in the middle of a piece anymore. She had learned, over twelve years of teaching, that a child who is stopped in the fourth measure will spend the rest of his life stopping in the fourth measure.

When he lifted his hands, the sunroom held the silence for a moment. October light came slanting through the old glass panes, gold and dusty, laying itself across the floorboards and the worn Persian rug and the cabinet where she kept the metronomes.

"Nathan," she said. "What is the piece about?"

He looked at her with the flat panic of a boy who has been asked a trick question. "It's a sonatina."

"That's what it is. I asked what it's about."

"Nothing? It's just notes."

"Play me the first eight bars again and pretend you're telling me something you're not supposed to tell me."

He frowned, put his hands down, and played. It was still stiff. But in the third bar something shifted — a small lean into the phrase, a hesitation that had not been there before — and Rebecca felt the old flare in her chest, the thing that kept her in this room year after year.

"There," she said. "That. Whatever you just did, do it on purpose next week."

He grinned, red-eared, and scrambled for his books. She heard his mother's minivan idling at the curb, the door, the goodbye, the quiet.

The sunroom had been a screened porch when they bought the house on Chestnut Street in 1997, a stone-fronted place with a slate roof and a view, from the upstairs bathroom window only, of a gray sliver of the Ohio River. Peter had it glassed in and insulated the first winter. He had done it without being asked. He had measured the room three times and called two contractors and chosen the one whose references he liked, and when it was finished he had stood in the doorway with his hands in his pockets and said, "Now you have somewhere to put it."

He had never said what it was. Rebecca had never asked him to.

She closed the lid over the keys of the old Baldwin upright — a good instrument, not a great one, deliberately not a great one — and went into the kitchen to start dinner.

---

At six, Lucy came in from field hockey practice smelling like cut grass and cold air, dropped her bag in the middle of the hallway where everyone would trip on it, and opened the refrigerator to stand in front of it.

"Hi," Rebecca said.

"Hi." Lucy was fourteen and had recently developed the ability to convey an entire essay of grievance in a single syllable. She took out a yogurt she would not eat. "Is Oliver home?"

"He's at the church practicing. Their piano is better than ours."

"Everything's better than ours," Lucy said, and went upstairs.

Rebecca stood at the counter with a knife in her hand and did not move for a moment. Then she went back to the onions.

Oliver came in at seven, seventeen years old and six foot one and still walking as though he had recently been issued the legs and had not read the manual. He kissed the top of her head, which he had started doing at fifteen, when he became tall enough for it to be funny, and had never stopped.

"How is it?" she said.

"The Ravel is going to kill me."

"The Ravel kills everyone. That's its function."

"Scarbo is fine. Le Gibet is—" He made a gesture with his hand, a slow flattening. "It just sits there. I keep playing it like it's sad and it isn't sad, it's—"

"It's a body hanging from a gallows and a bell ringing on the horizon," Rebecca said. "Nobody in that poem feels anything. That's the horror."

Oliver looked at her. He had his father's face, mostly — the long jaw, the deep-set eyes — but the way he listened was hers.

"So I play it like nothing."

"You play it like something that has stopped mattering. It's harder."

He nodded slowly, absorbing, and Rebecca turned back to the stove because there were moments with her son when the pride was so large in her that she was afraid it would show as something else.

Peter got home at seven-forty, which was early for him. He had done two knees and a shoulder and a consultation on a fourteen-year-old pitcher whose father, he said, needed a longer conversation than the boy did. He hung his coat on the third hook, which was his hook. He washed his hands at the kitchen sink the way surgeons do, past the wrists, and dried them on the towel that hung on the oven door.

"Smells good," he said. Twenty-three years of marriage in two words.

They ate. Lucy complained about her history teacher. Oliver ate three helpings. Peter told a story about a resident who had mixed up two X-rays and caught it himself, which Peter regarded as the mark of a decent human being. Rebecca listened and refilled water glasses and thought, as she sometimes did, that she had been given a life she had no right to and that the price of keeping it was simply never letting anyone look too closely.

After dinner she went out to the porch to bring in the mail. It had come at three and she had forgotten it.

There were four pieces. A utility bill. A catalog. A solicitation from Oliver's school.

And a cream-colored envelope, heavy stock, addressed in a slanting hand she knew the way she knew her own signature.

She stood in the cold with the storm door pressed against her hip and looked at it for a long time.

The return address was Cincinnati. Not the apartment on Lafayette Avenue with the two pianos and the smell of cigarettes and lemon oil. A different address. An institutional one.

Inside the house, Peter laughed at something Lucy said. The sound came through the door thin and warm, like light under a hotel door in a strange city.

Rebecca went inside, put the other mail on the hall table, and carried the cream envelope to the sunroom. She shut the door. She turned on the small lamp by the music cabinet and not the overhead light.

Then she opened it.

My dear Rebecca,

I am told that I have between four and six months, and that the estimate is generous. It is pancreatic cancer, which is a coward's disease — it hides until it is certain of winning. I have moved to a hospice on Erkenbrecher Avenue. There is a Yamaha in the common room that is a quarter step flat and I have asked them to leave it that way, because a tuned piano in a place like this would be obscene.

I am writing about my affairs, which is a word I use with a straight face.

I am leaving you the Steinway. I know you will say you don't want it. I know you have not touched a serious instrument in twelve years, and that this is a thing you did to yourself deliberately, the way a man puts his hand in a fire to prove he can. You will take it anyway, because I am dead and you were raised well.

There is more to discuss and I would like you to come. I would like it very much. I have been thinking about the Barcarolle, and about the winter you were nineteen and could not play a trill to save your life, and about a great many things I have no right to think about.

I have never stopped thinking of your little girl, and I hope she has your hands.

Arthur

Rebecca read it once. Then she read the last line again.

Her hands began to shake. Not a tremor — a real shake, the kind that comes up from the shoulders. She put the letter on the music desk of the Baldwin and pressed both palms flat against the closed lid to stop them, and the lid rocked slightly on its hinge and made a small wooden knock in the quiet room.

She thought: he is dying and he has decided to be honest. There is nothing in the world more dangerous than a dying man who has decided to be honest.

She picked up the letter and tore it in half. The paper was thick and it did not tear cleanly; it left a ragged mouth down the middle of the second page, through the words *your little girl*.

She stood holding the two halves.

Then — and she would think about this later, would turn it over in Karen Claremont's office months afterward, would fail to explain it — she opened the drawer where she kept the tape she used to mend student music, and she laid the two pieces on the cabinet top and taped them back together, carefully, along the seam, smoothing the tape with her thumbnail the way she had smoothed a thousand torn pages of Czerny.

She folded the mended letter. She climbed on the piano bench, reached to the high shelf where the old folios lived — the oversized ones, the ones nobody took down — and slid it into the back of a Schirmer folio of Schubert impromptus, between the D 899 and the D 935.

She got down. She straightened the bench. She turned off the lamp.

In the kitchen, Peter was loading the dishwasher wrong, as he had for twenty-three years, bowls on the bottom rack facing the wrong direction. Rebecca stood in the doorway and watched him do it and felt the whole architecture of her life balanced on a single sheet of taped paper on a high shelf in the next room.

"Anything good?" Peter said, without turning around.

"Bills," she said.