And When the Music’s Over, What Then?

Nicole Dao ’23

It’s winter when she tells me. The sun has been setting earlier and earlier, so it’s dark out—feels as though it’s been night forever.

I am washing the dishes, and staring at the radiator heater with contempt. It glares back—the stiff, metal accordion. The water is too hot, but the pain is welcomed against the cold of my apartment. Metal Accordion doesn’t do much for heat (only glares, ticking every once in a while so I know how warm it is), unless I come within three feet of it, which I can’t do, because I have found myself with about a week’s worth of dishes to wash (I know it’s a cliche—careless college student can’t find it in them to wash the dishes).

When my phone rings, I reach for it, press the screen a few times, gingerly, soapy water leaving behind a trail of bubbles that float on the screen before bursting.

I bring the phone to my ear, cradle it between my shoulder and the side of my face. A bubble slides across my cheek, warmth dissipating. I shiver.

“Have you heard?” a loud, brassy voice comes through. (I haven’t.)

I sigh. “Hi, Mei.”

“She quit playing, sold her cello and everything.”

My hands still in their scrubbing. Hot water flows over the side of the pan I’m washing, and I hiss as it scalds me. I turn the water off and notice a particularly aggressive piece of food sticking to the pan. I scrub harder. “Who?” (I already know.)

“Emma.” Right. “I couldn’t believe it when they told me,” she continues, but I don’t hear her.

Blonde hair, I’m remembering, and green eyes. Or gray? I could never tell. She stopped playing?

“You know, I always thought that was what love sounded like,” she’s saying.

“What—a high school girl on a cello?” I laugh—or try to.

The phone crackles in her silence, and I stop scrubbing to listen. When she speaks again, she is smiling. “And a certain someone on a piano. It was like crying.”

She hums a few bars of Antonín Dvořák. It’s gravelly and cracking and whines through the phone, and—somehow—I can hear the cello in her voice.

Going home, going home, I’m just going—

I set the phone down and put her on speakerphone.

“I mean, you two didn’t even need any orchestra.” She laughs, and it bounces in the empty cold. She sounds tinny, far away.

“Or any choir,” I say. I dry my hands, and step away from the sink of dishes, leaving them for another day, a silent apology to myself. The cold creeps into my fingers, and I flex them absentmindedly. She stopped?

“Right? It sang for itself.”

“It sang for her.” She would give that up? I pick up the phone and take her to sit on the floor next to the heater. It’s warm. She always had the melody. My teacher told me: “It’s called a duet, and you’d think that would mean equal–” he gave me a knowing smile, “–but the piano part is always the more difficult.” I’d asked her, anyway. Let’s play together. See if they’ll let us perform for the concert. And she’d indulged me.

“You remember that time you rehearsed in front of us?” “Mmhm.”

It hurt to pull away from that final chord, warm and full. I would’ve let it spin on forever if I could, and I knew she’d feel the same, had she been given the last note. Our friends stared at us, in silence. Mei was the one to break it. “You two are gonna make me cry when you perform that.”

She looked embarrassed. “What would you do that for?”

I smiled, watching her, and knew why.

She’s silent again, and in the latency I hear the radiator ticking. “You know—I was waiting for one of the guys to fall in love with her,” she says, “waiting to see which one couldn’t help himself. What a cliche that would have been.”

I smile, and then remember she can’t see me and stop. “Yeah.”

Her hands, one against the neck—holding the body like a woman between her legs, one gripping the bow—an extension of the self. We didn’t know what it meant. We didn’t know how fleeting it would be—not yet. I knew I was too proud to hold on tight.

“How is everyone else?” I ask.

“They’re fine—all doing their own things. Can’t believe you all went off to college, left me all alone here.”

“That’s what you get, for tagging along with your older sister’s friend group. We were always going to grow up faster than you.”

“Ha!” she says. “They were my friends, too.”

“So they were.” It hurts—the way I knew I would never hear it again, the way I’d been holding on anyway.

“Are you—” For the first time, her voice falters. “Are you coming home soon?”

“I don’t know.”

She hums, and I see her nodding to herself. “Mom and Dad—they miss you. I miss you.”

“Mm.”

I hear her exhale, and even though the phone isn’t pressed to my cheek anymore, I can feel her breath, warm against my ear. “Well, I’ll let you go. It’s late—over there, I mean—isn’t it?”

I nod. “Uh huh.”

“I love you, Jamie.”

“Love you, Mei.”

I won’t realize until the next morning that I never ask why she stopped playing. I guess I already know. As for me: I never thought of the piano as my lover, and besides—my hands are too cold now to do it any good. The only instrument in my apartment is the space heater.