Refrains of the Heart
Table of Contents
Synopsis
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
About the Author
Books Available From Bold Strokes Books
Synopsis
Louise McAvoy lives an ordinary life: ordinary job, ordinary boyfriend. She’s grown so used to it that she’s forgotten how dull ordinary can be, until the day she sees classical pianist Jennifer Bellerose at a recital. The beautiful performance unlocks the artistic inspiration Louise thought she’d lost upon leaving art school three years ago. Inspired, Louise beings to paint again, her trademark rich abstract pieces bursting forth, and her life turns around and upside down in more ways than one.
A chance meeting leads Jennifer and Louise to form a friendship and connection that comes to a head when Jennifer asks Louise to paint her. Their connection and chemistry is something unexpected and terrifying to Louise—but if she lets it, it could be something beautiful.
Refrains of the Heart
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Refrains of the Heart
© 2016 By AJ Mars. All Rights Reserved.
ISBN 13: 978-1-62639-838-2
This Electronic Book is published by
Bold Strokes Books, Inc.
P.O. Box 249
Valley Falls, New York 12185
First Edition: March 2016
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
This book, or parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
Credits
Editor: Ashley Tillman
Production Design: Bold Strokes Graphics
Cover Design By Melody Pond
Dedication
For Ruth
Chapter One
Louise rubbed at her arms, trying to rein in her irritation. Mark had tried—she did want to give him credit for that at least—but it was the day after their anniversary. It was pretty obvious he hadn’t realized what day it was until yesterday and this was all he could find at the last minute. Mark had been doing this kind of shit increasingly, lately, like he thought they’d been together long enough that he didn’t have to impress her anymore. Sometimes it drove Louise crazy, but more often now, it just felt inevitable. She wasn’t sure which was worse.
It was cold as they walked through the campus to the recital hall, the wind blowing in from the lake cutting through the gaps in her wool jacket.
“Honey, you know I don’t even like classical music all that much.” She wondered if she could convince him to just go home and watch a movie in their warm apartment with some takeout, but his mouth tightened.
“No, Louise,” he said, hand tightening on her wrist. “It’s our anniversary, and this is romantic, and anyway I got these tickets on a high recommendation. She’s supposed to be amazing.”
By “high recommendation” he probably meant five stars on an online forum, she thought, perhaps a little meanly, but it was also probably true. Romance hadn’t had much place in their house of late.
“Fine,” she said, “but I’m blaming you if I fall asleep and start snoring.”
He pursed his lips at her, a moue of disapproval. “Come on, babe, at least pretend to be a little cultured.”
Oh, that’s rich, she wanted to say, coming from the guy who once called Pollock finger painting, but she kept her mouth shut. It wasn’t really worth the effort to have that argument again. Especially as she’d barely stepped into an art gallery—or picked up a pencil—since graduating with honors from art school three years ago and promptly starting work at her uncle’s bank.
Anyway. Mark wasn’t exactly a fair target for all of that. He only deserved some of her ire, she allowed, as the wind snuck in along her collar and made her shiver. She couldn’t blame him for all her discontent, though it felt easier to do that. A so-so relationship was par for the course for the woman who’d ended up with a so-so job and a so-so life in general. Other people were unemployed, her mother would have said. She should quit complaining. If she couldn’t find the balls to leave him—and nothing had quite pushed her to it—then it wasn’t fair to lay everything at his door.
She shook her head, as if it would clear her thoughts. “What is this anyway, a student performance?”
Mark opened the door to the recital hall on the east edge of the campus for her. “No, it’s a facility they use for lots of things. Student stuff, like classes from the university, but also guest appearances by professional artists like this one, and arts programs in the community—it’s been a multi-purpose building since it was established in 1975.” He sounded like he was reciting from the website for this part, too, but Louise let him have it.
The performance hall itself was open and pleasant, looking both functional and attractive. There was a light woody sort of scent in the air; it reminded her of the pervasive scent of paints and canvas in her art school. She imagined the smell of polish and resin was as ingrained in the walls of this place as the other smell had been at her college. It gave her an unexpected pang of nostalgia and she blinked it away, busying herself taking her jacket off and arranging it over the back of her chair.
The hall wasn’t full, but it wasn’t empty, a fairly healthy scattering of people filled the room with the light hum of chatter. Louise and Mark had seats second row from the front, close to where a gleaming black piano sat on the raised stage. It was sleek and long, the top lifted on a stand. Louise squinted to see the writing on the front, but it meant nothing to her and she abruptly felt uneducated. She scowled. It wasn’t her fault classical music had never interested her all that much.
Mark leaned over and pushed a glossy sheet of paper into her hands. “Just try and enjoy it. For me?”
Louise tried not to let her shoulders rise at the whine that entered his voice. She knew she was being unfair. She could feel herself turning into her mother every time Mark failed to meet expectations that she hadn’t even told him about, but stopping this slide into the middle aged discontent that her parents exemplified felt like holding back a glacier with a fingertip.
And the evening after her anniversary was the most inappropriate time to be getting herself down with these sorts of thoughts—or the most depressingly appropriate. Hell, she wasn’t even thirty yet. She looked instead at the program for the recital.
Jennifer Bellerose, it said along the top in scrolling script, classical pianist. There was a small square picture of a pretty dark haired girl in a red dress and a short biography about how Jennifer was born in Spain then moved to the United States as a young girl, her passion for Spanish classical music, her education at NYU Steinhardt majoring in Piano Studies complemented with Music History & Theory, her general existence in a world that meant nothing to Louise. She wondered if Jennifer would feel the same faced with a Louise fresh out of college, educated and passionate about a thing that drove her fiercely. In those days, she’d felt special, so buoyed up by love for something that the average person in the street would probably glide on by, knowing little about it and caring less.
She supposed it would be like that for anyone educated in any particular field, but she couldn’t imagine the passion that she used t
o feel for painting being the same as those educated in, say, economic theory.
Mark’s hand on her knee startled her out of her thoughts as the lights started to dim and the chatter in the room rose, then abruptly fell. A gentleman in a suit but no tie ambled on the stage and smiled broadly at the audience as he introduced the pianist, though it was all stuff Louise had just read in the program.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are very happy to present Miss Jennifer Bellerose,” he finished.
There was a polite smattering of applause and the gentleman walked off stage. Jennifer entered from the right. She stopped in the center of the stage, inclining her head with a shy smile, then she turned to the piano, carefully sweeping her dress underneath her. It was a vibrant blue, compared to the red dress in her bio picture, but it suited her just as well, the deep color contrasting well against her smooth olive skin and fall of gleaming black hair.
She rolled her shoulders slightly, then settled her fingers lightly against the piano keys and started to play.
It wasn’t anything Louise was familiar with, from either the music itself or the information on the piece in the program, but she found herself enthralled. They were close enough to see Jennifer’s fingers dance across the keys, the melody a complex and unpredictable thing that darted up and down. Louise couldn’t grasp onto a hook, any sort of clear repeated progression of chords, and she found she liked it, more than the fairly small sample of piano music she’d made an effort to listen to in the past. The notes piled up over each other and toppled down, and the pitch and volume clashed and contrasted. Jennifer’s hands were an almost violent chaos, juddering up and down and crossing over each other.
There was story and an emotion behind the music—it wasn’t easy, but it was beautiful in a way that reminded Louise of her favorite paintings, the vivid dripping colors of Dali and the blocky bright strangeness of the best mid-century Picassos. Louise had a print of The Persistence of Memory that she’d carted around with her since she acquired it as a college student, always finding something new in it. Mark had never got it. Mark liked paintings to “look like something” and poetry to rhyme.
Jennifer seemed like someone who would be able to see the abstract in things. Louise tore her gaze from Jennifer’s fingers to her face. Jennifer had her eyes half closed, in a look of dreamy yet intense concentration. Louise felt a childish openmouthed sort of awe at the speed and accuracy of her playing when she wasn’t even fully looking at what she was doing.
Jennifer’s mouth was slightly open, moving almost imperceptibly, and a crease dipped in and out of the smooth skin between her eyebrows. The emotions in the piece twisted out of the music and over Jennifer’s face.
Louise blinked when the piece ended. It felt like it had been hours and at the same time, not close to long enough.
Mark made a soft noise next to her. Louise remembered he was there and turned to look at him. He looked slightly disapproving. Louise frowned at him.
“I don’t know,” he whispered, “I thought she might be doing, you know, stuff I might know. Maybe…some Mozart or something.”
Louise shook her head and turned back to where Jennifer had stood up and come to the front of the stage again. Her left hand was twisting slightly in the loose skirt of her dress and when she spoke she sounded nervous. Louise couldn’t understand how someone that talented could possibly be nervous.
Jennifer stumbled through a greeting, then picked up in confidence slightly as she talked about the piece she’d just played, her love of classical Spanish composers who were rarely played and recorded, how the pieces evoked Spanish life, the notes so cleverly composed to call back to the sound of castanets or the flamenco guitars, the excitement of a parade through the town.
Louise closed her eyes when Jennifer sat down to play again, the chaotic medley of chords layering themselves and letting her hear, feel, and see what Jennifer had said. It stirred a part of her brain that she hadn’t used since school looking into art, underneath art, to see what made it up beyond colors and materials. Or here, what made up the piece beneath the notes on a page and the fingers on the keys.
“Thanks, uh, thank you,” Jennifer said haltingly as she stood up before her final piece. The room filled with applause, louder than Louise might have expected from the fairly modest audience, but her own hands were starting to sting from clapping, so she couldn’t exactly be surprised.
“I hope you’ve enjoyed the pieces I’ve performed this evening. My latest CD has these and some other favorites of mine, from Spanish composers, so…” She smiled, but it looked uncomfortable, as if she wasn’t too used to promoting herself like that. Then her smile brightened, and Louise noticed the dimples that creased in her smooth skin, making her look both cute and mischievous. Louise grinned back, an automatic response even though Jennifer wasn’t looking at her.
“I’m performing here for the next week,” Jennifer was saying, “I’m also around to help out with some classes and as a guest speaker for some general interest talks. We have two or three talks scheduled this week on an introduction to musical analysis and theory—real beginner stuff, I promise—so if anyone’s interested in hearing about that, they’re free for students at the school or through the local community outreach programs for people who live in the greater Chicago area, so come check it out.”
The room applauded again and Jennifer smiled widely, then settled back down on her piano stool. Her face changed as she looked down at the keys, the smile fading into something content and focused; her eyes slid half shut in what was now becoming a familiar expression, her mouth softly open as she started.
It was a slower, more melodic piece than some of her previous ones. Louise watched the elegant dance of Jennifer’s fingers on the keys, watched the movements wave back sinuously into her body, the subtle roll of her shoulders, the tiny motions of her spine under the smooth fall of the dress. The music swirled around her, like it wasn’t coming from the piano but from Jennifer herself, from her very skin.
Louise blinked hard when the piece finally ended. The stage went dark and Jennifer walked off with a quick wave to thunderous applause. It took a moment to free herself from the reverie she’d fallen into watching Jennifer play and she looked around the room blankly as she took in where she was. She nearly jumped out of her seat when Mark put his hand on her shoulder.
“So,” he said, as the applause rose to a crescendo, then faded as people gathered their things and started to leave the room. “What did you think?” He pursed his lips. “I know she didn’t—”
“That was amazing—” cut in Louise. “I’ve never seen anyone play the piano like that. Okay, I haven’t seen many people play the piano at all, but it was obvious she’s insanely talented, and the pieces were just wow.” She knew she was smiling at nothing and looked a little deranged, but she felt almost giddy, like something had burst free inside her.
Mark tilted his head. “Huh. I thought you didn’t much like classical music.”
Louise shrugged. “Neither did I.”
They were selling Jennifer’s CDs in the lobby, so Louise bought one, framed her fingers for a moment over the photo of Jennifer on the front, her face smiling up at Louise. It wasn’t the wide smile with the dimples, but a smaller, private looking one. There was another picture of her playing the piano on the back, which Louise rubbed her thumb over contemplatively, remembering Jennifer’s face reflecting the music, the unbelievably agile play of her fingers.
Mark went on and on about Jennifer on the way home, about how pleased he was he’d decided to get them tickets, about how great she was, but it felt like he was just doing it because he knew Louise had liked it. He didn’t seem to have gotten it, not like Louise had. Which was maybe unfair, but just. Mark said things like, “it would’ve been nice if she’d played some recognizable pieces” or “I wonder why it was all the Spanish composers, it didn’t sound anything special to me,” and Louise wanted to say, “you idiot, would you want her to play things she wasn’t
passionate about?” Louise knew nothing about music, but she knew that Jennifer could have played the most well-known beautiful pieces of music in the world and it would have sounded flat and dull in comparison because her pieces were played with love and passion.
She nodded along instead, most of her attention on remembering the recital. Besides, she had to be grateful to Mark because he had gotten them the tickets and she had enjoyed it.
He reached for her that night with a smile, but her skin seemed to flinch away from his touch and she rolled to her side, saying she was tired and her head ached a little and she just needed a good night’s sleep. His eyes said, “but it’s our anniversary and I got you those tickets” and for a moment she sort of hated him for it or at least hated that expectation, that he should have her just because of that. She kissed away his pout and remembered when she couldn’t keep her hands off him and rolled herself tight in her half of the duvet.
Two hours later, Mark was snoring next to her, and Louise’s body was tired, but her mind was spinning away, bright and awake. She slid carefully out of bed and into the living room. She turned on the computer long enough to load Jennifer’s CD to her iPod, then searched in all the drawers in the living room and study as quietly as she could.
All she managed to unearth was a pack of brightly colored Pentel markers and an old sketchpad, half full of ancient scribbles—not ideal, but her fingers itched with the need to create with whatever she had.
She put in her earbuds and pressed play, closed her eyes for a moment, then uncapped the pens. She worked with the grain of the heavy paper, letting it shape her piece, and decided she liked the effect it had. A driven kind of ordered chaos, like Jennifer’s hands on the keys.