The Pianist, Lover, and Philosopher

After the concert

The window was half-open to the sea and all the goodness of the French southern coast. The breeze carried in the scent of bay laurel. It lifted the curtain. The concert was over. The night slid into the comfort of nostalgia and curiosity.

He stood at the window, shirt unbuttoned, sniffing a 20 year old port. The glass was his reality now. He held it handsomely as if posing for the cover of one of his albums. She lay on her belly on the bed, head up and forward in her black dress. Her feet were up without her shoes. The hotel refrigerator hum was unhurried and even pleasant.

“You played as though. . . I don’t know,” she said. “Almost like you weren’t there. What happens in your mind when you play?” Her feet continued to tease each other in the air as though they were playing an imagined keyboard.

He smiled without turning. “You asked that last time. I don’t . . . know.”

She laughed softly. “That’s why I ask. It’s like a painter saying he doesn’t know what color is.”

He sat down beside her on the bed. His skin smelled faintly of sweat and the detergent of his white shirt. “Maybe it’s not knowing. Maybe it’s forgetting myself,” he said. “When I play, I forget the self—well, not exactly, but there is free range of access to memory, emotion, pictures, abstract thoughts. But, yes, come to think of it, the self is there.”

“That kind of forgetting is a kind of knowing too,” she said. “Is it knowing how to forget? I’ve been reading that paper you mentioned. The one about the internal and the external. The philosopher says that there is no internal. All of that . . . emotion, memory, and so forth . . . can be explained externally by all the causal forces. Is that what you do? You make what’s inside audible and external?”

He lay back on the bed. The ceiling fan moved in lazy circles. “No,” he said. “I don’t make it audible. I make it physical. That’s different.”

“How?”

He sat again just to take another sip and let the liquid rest on his tongue. “The sound doesn’t come from my thoughts.” He lay back again. “It’s the other way around. The sound is what lets me think.”

She stretched beside him, her head resting on his arm. “What about when you’re practicing, do the notes just flow in?”

“They come in, yes—but not passively. They enter like guests who must be greeted properly or they’ll leave offended. You can’t just let them wash over you. Each note has to find its place, its weight, its meaning in your fingers. You invite it in, you give it shape—active and passive.”

She traced the back of his hand with her finger. “So you’re hosting the notes. They come into the mind, and then what?”

“Then I forget them again,” he said leaning back again. He had almost kissed her. “When I practice, I learn them like a language—grammar, syntax, all of it. But when I perform, that all dissolves. It’s a kind of trust. They’re old familiar friends you don’t have to think too much about.” He was tired, but enjoyed her questions.

“That sounds like faith.”

He thought for a moment. “Yes. But not religious faith. It’s bodily faith. The fingers remember better than the mind. And it’s not only faith. It’s knowledge—the primitive kind where with perception we become what we perceive, if only for a moment. Music is a constant flow of moments. Hold on and it will be gone.”

“That sounds paradoxical,” she insisted.

He rolled onto his other side then back again. “It’s not paradox. That sounds like paralysis. It’s creation that feels like discovery.”

She smiled. “You contradict yourself beautifully.”

He shrugged. “It’s late.”

They lay there in silence. The sea swooshed below, rhythmic and unhurried. Somewhere down the promenade a car passed, its headlights flaring briefly against the wall.

She whispered, “Do you ever think about me when you play?”

“You?”

“Yes. Me. Well, us. Anything outside the music.”

He was quiet for a long time. “Sometimes, yes. I think about all of my life. But not the way you mean. It’s not like I think about my life—it’s that my life and the music mingle into something new. The music reveals my life to me. A phrase might feel like childhood, or the way you smell when you first come out of the shower, and it’s only then that I realize what that memory or smell is to me. But it’s not thinking—it’s just recognition of a texture, a contour. And letting go. Or not. Haha.”

“So the mind isn’t separate from the body?”

“Never,” he said. “When I practice, I think about my hands. Their warmth, their tension. I think about gravity and the wrist. Thought is physical. That’s the scandal, if you want one.”

He kissed her on the lips briefly, and ever so softly—pianissimo.

“Does that make sense? My thoughts could be impacted by this moment with you. The port.” A line crept into his forehead.

She looked toward the open window. The air smelled of bay laurel. She stayed focused. “So maybe this new philosopher is right. Maybe there’s no real internal—it can all be causally explained externally. It was never inside to begin with.”

He smiled. “Or maybe it’s both. The mind is like this room. It has a window and a door. Sound comes in, light comes in. But without walls, nothing would resonate. You need the enclosure.”

She laughed softly. “You sound like Heidegger.”

“God forbid.”

She rolled on top of him, her hair brushing his face. “No, you do. You make music into a kind of dwelling. Dasein at the keyboard.”

“I suppose.” He ran a hand down her back, feeling the curve of her spine, the faint tremor of muscles in his fingers that had not yet forgotten the concert hall. “But we can’t live in that dwelling all the time.”

“Would that be so terrible?” she asked.

He kissed her shoulder repeatedly. “Yes. Someone has to turn on the lights, pay for the piano tuning, buy the polish.”

She laughed. “You’re hopeless.”

“What do you mean? Hopelessly empirical?” he asked. “That’s the pianist’s curse. Every truth passes through the fingers.”

She sat up, her dress pulling further off her shoulder. “Tell me one more thing,” she said. “When you play—really play, not practice—what happens to time?”

He stared at the ceiling fan. “It thickens,” he said. “Like honey. Each moment holds the next inside it. You could live there forever, but only by dying a little each time.”

She searched, now, deep into his eyes.

He looked at her. The lamplight caressed her features.

“Maybe consciousness is like that too. Always oscillating between presence and loss,” she said, pulling the pin out of her hair.

The waves were steady now, as though the sea itself were performing.

She looked at his hands remembering how they’d hovered over the keys that evening, not commanding but listening, drawing out phrases like whispers overheard. She’d seen something in his face then, not ecstasy exactly, but a kind of concentration that seemed to be his disappearance. It was that absence she both loved and feared: the man she lost to the music and who, when he returned, seemed older each time, as though the act of playing had cost him something irretrievable.

He turned toward her. “You’re thinking too much,” he said.

“Maybe.”

“What are you thinking?”

“That when you play, you go somewhere I can’t follow.”

He touched her cheek. “That’s not true. You’re in it too. Every phrase I play, you’re there. You’re part of the gravity that holds it together.”

She smiled faintly. “That’s just a lover’s lie.”

“A necessary one.”

He switched off the lamp. Through the window they could see the dark silhouette of the laurel trees.

After a silence, she said, “Do you ever wish you’d chosen another life? Something easier?”

“No. Though sometimes I wish the music didn’t ask so much.”

“Ask?”

He sighed. “It’s jealous. It wants all of me. It doesn’t leave room for much else.”

She pressed closer. “Then let it be jealous tonight,” she said.

He smiled in the dark. “You see? You externalize me.”

He could tell she was smiling too as he kissed her again. The refrigerator was humming along with the universe. The waves kept folding into themselves. And between the lovers’ breaths the question lingered—where, in all this, does the mind end and the body begin?