“Hey,” she smiled and backed up so I could enter her room. “You never use your key. Why?” She always gave me a copy of her room key when she had a room to herself. I always knocked, though.
I shrugged. “Just being polite, I guess.” I grinned and pulled her into a deep kiss. “Are you okay? You’ve seemed off since this afternoon.”
“Oh, you mean since you and my only friend on this tour almost got into a fistfight? Yeah, I’m fine. I just … needed a minute.” She walked over to the bed and sat up by the headboard, patting the space next to her.
“So, tomorrow night is it, huh?” I decided against asking her about Chicago, unsure if she was considering that over Moscow. I couldn’t be sure Nathan was ever telling the truth when it came to Savannah, and I wasn’t in a place where I was prepared to lose her to either city.
“Yep. That’s it,” she whispered.
I was aching with the need to ask her if she’d thought more about waiting for me. Or if she’d thought of it at all.
“Savannah,” I started.
But, she stopped me. Wordlessly. Extending her hand palm up and resting her head on my shoulder, she said all she needed to. Swallowing back tears I didn’t know I had, I wove my fingers between hers and closed my eyes, leaning my head back against the headboard.
She was saying goodbye.
Savannah
No matter how many times I’d either played it or heard it performed, Brahms’ Symphony No. 3 in F gave me chills. The melancholy crescendos and diminuendos were punctuated with an airy dance that left a smile on my face and a longing in my heart.
Irony is one of music’s cruelest weapons.
I couldn’t look at him. Not knowing if we were about to play on stage together for the last time. I had to keep it together because I knew my mother was in the audience. Despite how I felt about her or her personal life at the moment, I still wanted to make her proud. To make myself proud.
As the nearly fourteen-minute piece came to an end, I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, reaching for my sheet music. Tonight we were playing Clair De Lune. No one knew. We’d spent a couple of weeks with the pianist to work on turning the piano accompaniment into a flute harmony to compliment the cello. By the time we were through, we no longer needed the piano.
It was just us. And it would be beautiful.
“Knock ‘em dead,” Nathan whispered, patting me on the back as I stood. He knew the plans for our song and, while he had no use for Gregory, he was excited about me doing what I do best. Pushing boundaries and breaking rules.
How those parts of my personality manifested in my relationship with Gregory over the summer still left me heavily conflicted. But, I’d process all of that later. For now, I had to meet him at center stage and tune.
Middle C.
While that was the note we’d always tuned on, we typically mouthed it to each other beforehand out of habit. Not tonight. I simply looked at his hands and checked that they were resting on the correct strings. I hadn’t the faintest knowledge of how to play a stringed instrument, but I knew exactly how Gregory’s hands looked while they played. The position of his fingers for each note, and the way his hand would tremble in solemn vibrato at the end of the piece … always the same. Always perfect.
I’d spent most of last night and this morning in silence. Gregory and I were afforded the grace of being able to spend the night together the night before. We didn’t make love. We didn’t tumble breathlessly through hotel sheets. I’d spent the night with my cheek against his chest, listening to him breathe, never sleeping. His breathing never evened out fully the way it always did when he was in a deep sleep. He was awake, too, but we stayed in that position until the sun rose and we both pretended to wake up.
As a matter of practicality, I allowed my eyes to connect with his for the brief moment we needed to start the piece. He nodded once, we took a breath together, and then …
Piano.
I whipped my head to the right, finding the pianist in her seat, playing along with Gregory. But, it wasn’t to “Clair De Lune.” This wasn’t the right piece. It was … it was a piece we’d played only a few times. Rather, one he played sometimes at the end of our practices and I would sit and watch. And, try to breathe as he played the agonizing melody of “Nocturne” from The Lady Caliph.
We hadn’t put together any arrangement for this piece, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. He’d gone off the course of our program. His eyes didn’t move from mine as he played. He was begging me to say yes. To agree to a life with him that had no certainty, no clear future. Gregory stripped himself bare to me on that stage, going against his musical boundaries, pushing his personal limits, and he was asking me, again …
Say yes.
I did all I could do in that moment. I brought my flute to my lips, closed my eyes, and started playing. Gregory had no way of knowing that I’d spent many solitary hours working on a complimentary melody and harmony for that piece. I wanted to feel the way he looked while he’d played that piece, so I made it my own. And, I felt it. I don’t know if I’d ever intended to show it to him, but, now wasn’t the time to sort through intentions.
I couldn’t possibly stand to see his reaction, though, so I left my eyes closed until I turned toward the audience. An audience which was stirring, because many of them recognized that the music being played wasn’t on the program, and the ones closest to the stage had likely seen the confused look on my face.
During a long rest of mine that allowed for the cello solo to shine through, my eyes scanned the crowd inside Symphony Hall Auditorium and fell instantly on my mother. She was in the VIP section near the front of the stage, naturally. What was unnatural to me was that she was seated next to Malcolm. It hadn’t occurred to me that she’d be brazen enough to bring him along. Not because of the Opera News article, they were in a relationship and had no reason to hide it. But because she had no idea who I was as a person, and that seeing him with her in a place my dad should have been sitting would make me uncomfortable. And sad. My grandmother was sick, and my dad couldn’t make it to the concert. I hadn’t seen him in months and longed to find his bright eyes smiling back at me as I played. Watching Malcolm nod along almost approvingly to the song was enough to make my stomach churn. His smile turned up the corners of his mouth in a way that was neither genuine, nor calming. Screw him. And her.
The desire to please Vita left me like a swift kick, and I hastily brought my flute to my lips and played the last long, slow section of Nocturne. The last notes I’d ever play with Gregory Fitzgerald.
Inside of a few seconds I was shattered.
I couldn’t continue any sort of relationship with Gregory. Not with things the way they were. I didn’t make eye contact with him through the rest of the song, knowing the conversation I’d have to have with him once we got backstage.
Amidst the roaring applause, I bowed a poorly contrived bow toward Gregory, and he returned the gesture. I kept a well-practiced stage smile until I was securely in my seat between Nathan and Tim.
“That was …” Nathan’s wide eyes looked for answers.
I didn’t have any.
“Thank you.”
I looked to Nathan and watched him take me in for a few seconds. He opened his mouth twice, but never said anything. After a deep breath, he shook his head and readied his sheet music for the next piece.
There were no more words.
Gregory
I’d been performing in the Symphony Hall Auditorium for more than ten years ... night after night during the season, often twice a day. I knew this hall. Front and back stage. I knew the acoustics. I knew the moods of the crowds. I knew the way this hall lifted my mood and sometimes brought me close to a spiritual state of focus and clarity.
That only made it all the more disturbing now. Disturbing that from the moment I walked in, I was off balance. Despite my efforts, Savannah and I hadn’t been able to talk, and the one chance we might have had was disrupted by Joseph, when he insisted on talking with me before the performance.
I watched her as I started Nocturne. As I played my soul out for her without much planning other than handing Grace Daniels the piano sheet music a few minutes before I went on stage. She’d reacted the way I’d anticipated … initially. She scrunched her eyebrows together and raised one all at the same time, the way she always did when something seemed completely preposterous. But, despite reason, which had left us long ago, she took a breath, closed her eyes like I’d watched her do at her conservatory audition several years before, and played.
Damn it, she played right along with me. A perfect accompaniment.
Except she refused to look at me.
She was my perfect accompaniment, and I feared that I’d ruined that chance forever.
It was so clear, the second she made her decision. Her posture, the pain in the notes, the look in her eyes when she’d finally opened them. Savannah was done with me. And as we played our final duet together, it broke my heart.
I wasn’t ready to say goodbye. Not tonight. Not tomorrow. Not ever. So I watched her for the remainder of the concert. She never looked at me again, her eyes occasionally moving to the audience, to Joseph, to the music on her stand, but never once to me.