Pianorgasm.
Together, we lie silent. Inside me, I can feel Leo doing little somersaults. But this isn’t about him, right now.
I’ll need to say something, acknowledge what just happened.
“I love your father’s music,” I say, putting that tender jokey edge in my voice.
“Me too,” Will says, with no joke in his.
And he rolls away from me. He doesn’t hold me. There is no glory of my bump. I am not even there for him.
So I wonder, as we turn off our bedside lamps, whether he even knew the rhythm he was making love to. Whether he knows just how much Max is inhabiting – inhibiting – him. And whether it really all will be all right in the morning.
-Sophie-
Crotchets and quavers still remind me of the pall-bearers. Like black-hatted heads above the line of the coffin, they stand out starkly against the staves of the composition book. Whose book is it? I turn to the front. Oh, Emilie Beaumont. All très jolie with her blonde ringlets and big brown eyes, until the tantrums start. Then she turns red and cries and stamps her foot. How I hate children like her. So, yes, young Emilie’s quavers, malformed and straggly and in a major key as they are, do their funereal march across the page. I nearly didn’t even go to Max’s funeral, to see those pall-bearers. Nearly stayed away. Couldn’t face him being lowered into the ground. All those people, staring. Whispering their suspicions. Pointing their black-gloved fingers at us both, me and Guillaume. But it would have been more dangerous not to go. We’d have been conspicuous by our absence. And things might have been said. Things I couldn’t control.
And so I went. And what I remember most is that some awful organist tried to play an extract of Max’s work, but they played it so badly it was almost unrecognisable. I’d been silently weeping before, but I made it my job to sob big loud sobs when that music started, just to cover up the horror of what it meant, for Max actually to be dead, for his genius to be lost, for him never to play his own music ever again, just to be played badly by mediocre hobbyists. And little Guillaume, I think he tried to take my hand, but I wouldn’t let him. I wouldn’t let him. So that, besides everything else, gets added to the guilt list.
It’s not just notes, though, that are like death. Pianos, too, have their reminders of the mortality of Max. At first, I was not even able to look at a piano. It was not just their resemblance to coffins. It was that I felt I was looking straight at Max. But not live Max; Max laid out dead on the hospital bed. The keys were like the ribs of a skeleton, topped and tailed not by anything as useful as a head – just black nothingness at the end of the run.
But then when the realisation of his absolute final gone-ness hit me (appropriately, like a blow), I turned to pianos for solace. I liked to press my face against the keys, to hug the shiny wooden body, to run a finger along the red felt that separated the two. I was thrown out of several music stores. At the time, I found it heartless. On reflection, I suppose it may have been my unnaturally dilated pupils, that over-stimulated frenzy, and the fact I talked to the pianos, that meant the security guards were compelled to remove me. Little Guillaume would slink out behind me. Half the time, I wasn’t even aware of bringing him with me, but he’d turned up, all the same. It would have been so easy just to leave him in one of those piano shops. Open up one of the lids of a grand piano, stow him inside, then shut it again. Leave his head pressed against all those strings. Hammers coming down at his temples.
Arrête, Sophie – tu te rends folle. And I don’t want to drive myself mad. Madness would not be helpful. Madness doesn’t get you an income. Marking that little bitch Emilie Beaumont’s work would get me an income. Shut off the pain, the guilt, the feeling, like before. When you allowed yourself back into music again. Not to play professionally any more, not like when I met Max. My violin is well and truly shelved. Smashed, in fact. It had seemed like a good idea, at the time. I couldn’t sit in an orchestra again, hear that build-up of sound, the passion that went with it. Max’s piano would always have been centre-stage, in my mind. Like the first time, when I was part of the orchestra that recorded the first concerto. We’d joked, when he’d started his next piece (a quirky piano-only concerto), that he’d only written his earlier concerto with orchestra so that he could snare the first violinist. Now he had one, he could move on to solo work. Not that I was his first violinist. His piano had built up its share of notches.
I toss Emilie’s composition book to one side. It isn’t happening. I’m having a Max moment. If I can just engage in that, maybe I’ll finally get closure, put it all to one side. So, let’s psychoanalyse: did I feel rejected that he didn’t want my violin accompaniment, in that second concerto? Maybe. Maybe that’s why we argued in the run-up to that second recording. Or maybe it was still because of Guillaume, the distance I felt since he was born. Not just from Max, but from everything. The distance I tried to close by shouting. By throwing plates, sometimes. And, yes, make yourself confront it – other things. I would quite literally give anything for us not to have argued that evening. Had I known what the consequences would be.
So yes, maybe that’s why I put the violin to a violent rest. Pursued teaching, the ‘easier’ option. But then, of course, came the impact of the staves. The horror of those notes, their little black heads against the white and black background! How could they be innocently suggesting a tune? How could they not represent Max, lying on that black and white chequered floor? Follow the head, they seemed to be saying, follow the head as it moves about. Hit that note, get it just right, position it evenly on the line, strike it through. And worse, far worse, sometimes the heads had little tools next to them, the sharps, so shaped that they looked like –
No! It had been too much. And so I’d told all my students to do composition on blue staves in pencil. Found a little cheap supplier of poor quality composition books, whose staves had meant to be black but had turned out blue. Bought them from my own salary. Told the pupils that is how real composers work. They believed me; and their parents did too. They are professionals, not artists, those parents. What does a doctor or a lawyer know about music? I could almost hear them ignorantly boasting to their friends about the authentic musical education their talentless children were getting. Shame they also chose to talk about it to the Head of Music. He called me in to see him. He said he’d surveyed many composers and none of them had heard of my theories. Idiot. He didn’t know any real composers. Not composers like Max. Max didn’t care whether he wrote in pen, or pencil, or blood, on black staves or blue, or even any staves at all. He just created and played. But I couldn’t say that, could I? Couldn’t let on, about Max. It had been a risk, even putting my connections with that orchestra on my CV, even though I knew I needed to, to get the job, to validate myself. Didn’t mention Max’s name though. Just said I had led the strings section in the works of ‘various contemporary composers’. I’m sorry, Max. Again.
And now, there it is. The reason I don’t indulge in this. There is the familiar welling of sorrow. It will drag me down, down to Bois de Boulogne. And I can’t go that way again. Won’t. I’ve worked so hard to rescue myself. And besides, it wouldn’t even give me safety there, now. I’m not so young. Maybe I wouldn’t be at risk of rape. But now that I’m ‘older’ – I never was older, with Max, him being five years my senior – they would probably see an old lady, mug me. Take my bag, sell my identity, before I could buy a new temporary one from them and shoot it up into my veins.
So, instead, now, let us see what mes enfants terribles have concocted for me. Has little Emilie made any sense of my instructions? I wonder if when they compose, these children, they become the awful anti-social ogres that Max used to become. They certainly do