4

“You changed it. It’s not the same. What did you do to it?”

“I just played it the way Liszt would have played it had he jimmied

around with it.”

“Just play it again, please!”

I liked the way he feigned exasperation. So I started playing the piece

again.

After a while: “I can’t believe you changed it again.”

“Well, not by much. This is just how Busoni would have played it if he

had altered Liszt’s version.”

“Can’t you just play the Bach the way Bach wrote it?”

“But Bach never wrote it for guitar. He may not even have written it for

the harpsichord. In fact, we’re not even sure it’s by Bach at all.”

“Forget I asked.”

“Okay, okay. No need to get so worked up,” I said. It was my turn to

feign grudging acquiescence. “This is the Bach as transcribed by me

without Busoni and Liszt. It’s a very young Bach and it’s dedicated to his

brother.”

I knew exactly what phrase in the piece must have stirred him the first

time, and each time I played it, I was sending it to him as a little gift,

because it was really dedicated to him, as a token of something very

beautiful in me that would take no genius to figure out and that urged me to

throw in an extended cadenza. Just for him.

We were—and he must have recognized the signs long before I did—

flirting.

Later that evening in my diary, I wrote: I was exaggerating when I said

I thought you hated the piece. What I meant to say was: I thought you hated

me. I was hoping you’d persuade me of the opposite—and you did, for a

while. Why won’t I believe it tomorrow morning?

So this is who he also is, I said to myself after seeing how he’d flipped

from ice to sunshine.

I might as well have asked: Do I flip back and forth in just the same

way?

P.S. We are not written for one instrument alone; I am not, neither are

you.

I had been perfectly willing to brand him as difficult and

unapproachable and have nothing more to do with him. Two words from

him, and I had seen my pouting apathy change into I’ll play anything for

you till you ask me to stop, till it’s time for lunch, till the skin on my fingers

wears off layer after layer, because I like doing things for you, will do

anything for you, just say the word, I liked you from day one, and even

when you’ll return ice for my renewed offers of friendship, I’ll never forget

that this conversation occurred between us and that there are easy ways to

bring back summer in the snowstorm.

What I forgot to earmark in that promise was that ice and apathy have

ways of instantly repealing all truces and resolutions signed in sunnier

moments.

Then came that July Sunday afternoon when our house suddenly

emptied, and we were the only ones there, and fire tore through my guts—

because “fire” was the first and easiest word that came to me later that same

evening when I tried to make sense of it in my diary. I’d waited and waited

in my room pinioned to my bed in a trancelike state of terror and

anticipation. Not a fire of passion, not a ravaging fire, but something

paralyzing, like the fire of cluster bombs that suck up the oxygen around

them and leave you panting because you’ve been kicked in the gut and a

vacuum has ripped up every living lung tissue and dried your mouth, and

you hope nobody speaks, because you can’t talk, and you pray no one asks

you to move, because your heart is clogged and beats so fast it would

sooner spit out shards of glass than let anything else flow through its.

narrowed chambers. Fire like fear, like panic, like one more minute of this

and I’ll die if he doesn’t knock at my door, but I’d sooner he never knock

than knock now. I had learned to leave my French windows ajar, and I’d lie

on my bed wearing only my bathing suit, my entire body on fire. Fire like a

pleading that says, Please, please, tell me I’m wrong, tell me I’ve imagined

all this, because it can’t possibly be true for you as well, and if it’s true for

you too, then you’re the cruelest man alive. This, the afternoon he did

finally walk into my room without knocking as if summoned by my prayers

and asked how come I wasn’t with the others at the beach, and all I could

think of saying, though I couldn’t bring myself to say it, was, To be with

you. To be with you, Oliver. With or without my bathing suit. To be with

you on my bed. In your bed. Which is my bed during the other months of

the year. Do with me what you want. Take me. Just ask if I want to and see

the answer you’ll get, just don’t let me say no.

And tell me I wasn’t dreaming that night when I heard a noise outside

the landing by my door and suddenly knew that someone was in my room,

someone was sitting at the foot of my bed, thinking, thinking, thinking, and

finally started moving up toward me and was now lying, not next to me, but

on top of me, while I lay on my tummy, and that I liked it so much that,

rather than risk doing anything to show I’d been awakened or to let him

change his mind and go away, I feigned to be fast asleep, thinking, This is

not, cannot, had better not be a dream, because the words that came to me,

as I pressed my eyes shut, were, This is like coming home, like coming

home after years away among Trojans and Lestrygonians, like coming

home to a place where everyone is like you, where people know, they just

know—coming home as when everything falls into place and you suddenly

realize that for seventeen years all you’d been doing was fiddling with the

wrong combination.

to be continued

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