He arrived eleven minutes late.
I had been sitting at the piano bench for those eleven minutes, which is to say I had been sitting with my hands folded in my lap, listening to the clock, wondering if a respectable woman cancels before or after the agreed hour.
He didn’t apologize. He set his bag down on the chair by the window — not the one I’d placed near the piano, the correct chair — and looked at the keys for a long moment before he looked at me. As if the piano needed to be acknowledged first.
“Show me what you know,” he said.
I played the piece I’d been practicing for three weeks. All the way through. No mistakes worth mentioning.
He listened with his hands resting on his thighs. Not folded. Not tapping. Just resting, fingers loosely open, like men who have nowhere urgent to be.
Leo’s hands are never like that. Leo’s hands are always reaching, grasping, already on the next thing before the current thing is finished. I love this about him — I do — the way he moves through the world as if it keeps offering him things and he keeps accepting. But when I finished playing and looked at Lason, I noticed that he had not moved at all. He had simply been there, with me, for the entire duration of the piece.
He said: “You play it correctly.”
I waited for the but.
“You play it correctly,” he said again, “and you play it alone. As if no one else is in the room.”
I didn’t know what to say. No one else was in the room.
He came to stand beside the bench — not close, there was nothing strange about it — and set his right hand on the keys near the upper register. Not playing. Just resting there. His fingers are long. Not beautiful the way a sculptor would mean. Beautiful the way a question is beautiful, when you realize it’s the right one.
“The piece isn’t about notes,” he said. “It’s about the space between them. Play it again. This time — hesitate a little. Let it cost you something.”
I played it again. I don’t know if it cost me something. But halfway through I became aware, for the first time, that my breathing had changed.
Afterward he picked up his bag and said he would see me Thursday. He still hadn’t apologized for being late.
I told Leo about it at dinner. That I’d started lessons. That the teacher was fine.
Leo said, “I knew you’d enjoy it,” and put more wine in my glass, and that was the end of it.
I fell asleep thinking about the space between notes.