In Harmony(108)

“If you were to ace the recital, you could still graduate,” Harman said tiredly. “I suppose in theory, if you scored top marks on the improvisation…yes, Connor could too. But—no offense—that’s a big ‘if’. No-one’s ever scored that highly in the improvisation. Certainly not with your…unusual choice of instruments. With all due respect, Karen, I admire your determination, but I’d advise you—”

I leaned over his desk, all five foot four inches of me. “With all due respect, Professor Harman…I think it’s time I started making my own decisions.”



***



We had one week to not only nail the recital, but learn how to improvise together. We needed more than just rehearsals; we were going to war.

We chose Connor’s apartment as our bunker. Ruth had packed her bags and left, destination unknown. With Jasmine crashing at my place, it made more sense to work at Connor’s—besides, his neighbors were more forgiving than mine and we weren’t going to have time to be considerate about when we practiced.

When we arrived, I eyed the space. I’d forgotten just how small it was. Rehearsing there as we had in the past was one thing, but with two of us living there we were going to be crawling over each other. And yet somehow, because it was Connor…that didn’t sound so bad.

I drew up a planner. I couldn’t find a piece of paper big enough, so I drew straight on the wall, constructing a massive grid eight feet wide and as tall as I could reach, and then filling it in. “Rehearsals are light green through dark green,” I told him. “Lightest green for the first piece, darkest green for the final piece. Improv practice is yellow.”

“You think this’ll get us there in time?” he asked.

I gave him a look. “This is what I do.”

“What’s red?”

“Mealtimes.”

“What’s blue?”

“Showers.”

“What’s pink—Oh. Really?! You even scheduled—”

“I could take it off the grid if you want,” I deadpanned. “More time for rehearsing.”

He put his hands together in prayer. “Please don’t.”



***



In the improvisation challenge, we’d be given a basic melody and would have to compose around it—in thirty minutes—and then perform what we’d composed. There’d be no time for back-and-forth and second-guessing each other. We had to function as one, despite our very different instruments.

The first time we tried it, we’d barely strung together ten bars when we ran out of time and the cello and guitar never blended. Connor was better at it than I was—he’d had years of jamming in bars. I’d spent my entire life with organization and structure.

“I can’t do it,” I told him. “I can’t not know in advance what I’m going to do. I can’t walk in there without any idea of what the music’s going to be.”

He put his hands on my shoulders and made me look at him. “If there’s one thing you’ve taught me, it’s that we can change,” he said.

And so we practiced. We found an old kitchen timer and set it at random, behind our backs. When it went off, we had to stop whatever we were doing, turn on an old, thrift-store radio and listen to the music that was playing—whether it was rap or classical or a commercial for toothpaste. And then we had thirty minutes to come up with something based on that melody that didn’t suck.

We clashed at first, wasting time by arguing. Even after all our time rehearsing together, it was difficult to get past that, to stop thinking on our own and start trusting each other to do our parts. But we ran the exercise five or six times a day and, gradually, we got slicker. After a few days, we could use every second of the thirty minutes productively, him focusing on the flowing parts that could be winged and me focusing on the ones with heavy structure that needed precision. I was the tent poles; he was the canvas.

Meanwhile, we had to get the recital nailed. Playing through it again and again was like reliving the course of our relationship: the first pair of sections, written when we hardly knew each other, both of us separate and aloof. The second pair, when I’d written him into the music and he’d written me. And then the final pair, the ones written after we’d had sex. Mine a delicate blending of our two styles, intimate but romantic; his urgent and powerful, the guitar parts hard and almost brutal as the cello wrapped itself around them—

We were usually tearing each other’s clothes off within seconds of finishing that part.

We rehearsed on the roof whenever the weather allowed it, the music floating out across the neighborhood. We’d refuel on coffee and work late into the night, and then be too wired to sleep, talking or fucking until the early hours.