Refrains of the Heart Read online

Colors marched and tangled across the page, unfolding like the ideas and excitement inside Louise. Although hearing the recorded piano music from her iPod wasn’t exactly the same as sitting in the room with Jennifer playing right in front of her, it still brought back the memories vividly, the swirl of notes sending colors and emotions through her, down her pen, spilling into paper.

  The touch on her shoulder, some time later, had her shrieking, whirling around, one hand brandishing the blue marker and the other yanking out her earbuds.

  Mark stepped back, hands up, palms out, eyes wide. “Wow, chill out, Louise. What are you doing?”

  Louise dropped her earbuds, pressed her hand over her rapidly beating heart. “Jesus, you scared the crap out of me.”

  Mark dropped his hands. “It’s four a.m. What happened to getting a good night’s sleep?” There was a snide edge to his voice.

  Louise leveled a look at him. “I couldn’t sleep. So I got up to draw. It used to help, in college.”

  His eyes flitted past her to her piece, a detached vague interest in his eyes. Louise resisted the urge to snatch the paper away and hide it from him. “What you drawing?”

  She carefully recapped the marker. “The recital.”

  He took a step closer. “How can you draw a recital? You mean…###into the much-frequented cafeLouise. C’mon, stop dicking with me. This is just scribbles.”

  Louise closed her eyes and started to count backward from ten, then thought, fuck it. “It’s not just scribbles, Mark, it’s my art. Do you get that? Do you know how much of a big deal this is to me? I haven’t drawn or painted in three years. I was miserable and I didn’t even realize it until I started to draw again, just now. I know it doesn’t look like anything to you, I know it’s scribbles on a page, but it’s really important to me, so respect that. Don’t stand there and look at me like the most important thing here is that you didn’t get to fuck.” She was shouting by the end of it, chest heaving.

  “Louise, Louise, whoa, babe, come on,” said Mark, palms up. “I think you’re overreacting. I think you just need to get some sleep, okay? Throw that out. Come back to bed.”

  “I’m so done with you dismissing me,” she seethed. Mark dropped his hands.

  “Well, I’m fed up with your moods and your tantrums. One day you’re sweet as pie to me, the next you treat me like I have a contagious disease or I screwed your sister or both. I never know when you’re going to bite my head off. Last week you were all crazy about what color curtains to get in the guest room, this week you’re up at four a.m. ranting about art. It’s something new every week.”

  “I’m not…ranting about art,” she said helplessly. She felt as though she was stepping back and watching the conversation careen off the tracks into dangerous places. “I’m an artist, and I have some inspiration for the first time in years. I’m trying to be happy about it. You know I’m an artist, you know this is important to me. We met when I was at art school! We used to stay up all night and talk about how I would paint and you’d design houses, and now look at us. We both work in an office.”

  Mark quirked his mouth in the beginnings of an indulgent smile that just made her angrier. “It’s called growing up, babe. Everyone has pipe dreams in college, then we get real.”

  “Don’t talk to me like I’m a child. I know it’s my fault I’m not drawing, but don’t dismiss it as something we have to forget about to grow up. This is huge, this is exciting. Don’t take this away from me.”

  “I’m not taking anything away from you. I just want you to be sensible.”

  “Sensible? Seriously? Did you even listen to what I’ve been saying?”

  He rolled his eyes. “What you’ve been saying is that you did one drawing and suddenly you’re acting like your life has changed. I know you, Louise, it’s not going to last.”

  “If that’s what you think you know about me,” she said, feeling numb, “then I really think you don’t know me at all, and never did.”

  “Louise, come on.”

  If there was anything Louise hated, it was being told to “come on” in that tone, as if everything she was saying could be put down, ultimately, to feminine irrationality. The whine in Mark’s voice, the be reasonable edge, was the last straw. She yelled as much back, he retaliated, and after that it was little more than a catfight, each of them throwing ancient grievances and half-invented slights back and forth until they were both breathless. It was nearly five before Louise gathered herself enough to say what she’d been thinking in the back of her mind all evening – hell, for longer than she wanted to admit.

  “You know, I think you should leave.”

  “Leave?”

  “Yes, Mark, pack a bag and get out. You know as well as I do this has been rocky for a long time, but I didn’t realize…I think we’ve been in really, really different places.” She paused. “Also, you know what, you’re being a dick. I don’t ask you understand this, but at least respect it and listen when I say something is important to me, don’t just tell me I’m not being sensible. It’s not just about the art. I don’t want to be with someone who can’t respect me or listen to me.”

  Mark’s eyes went hard. “Well, I guess you must be right, because I was definitely in a different place than you. I was in a place where we were adults making a proper life. But apparently you still need to grow up, so fine, let me get out of your hair for that. And don’t come calling when the art thing falls apart.”

  “Oh, I won’t be calling you. Look, just go. Please.”

  Chapter Two

  Louise opened her eyes the next morning to late morning sunlight pouring brightly across the room, an empty bed, and a blooming fizzy lightness expanding inside her chest.

  She walked into the living room and saw the art from last night. It was nothing, it was a piece of notepaper with markers, but it was her art and it was beautiful. There was a discarded sweater on the couch, Mark’s, and the living room seemed to say: this is what you swapped. Art for Mark.

  The fact that it felt like a good trade told her it was the right choice.

  She called in sick to work, even though she should’ve been there two hours ago. She called through to her supervisor and told her she broke up with her boyfriend last night. She put a break into her voice, only feeling a little bad, and her supervisor, an angel in the form of a stern forty-five-year-old HR manager, softened like butter and told Louise to take as long as she needed—as long as the paperwork was still going to be all ready for Mr. Berger’s important client meeting on Friday.

  Louise agreed and reassured as necessary, and hung up, thinking, maybe I should quit my job. Sell this place, buy something smaller. A studio or something. Live off the sale money until I can figure something else out. It wasn’t as if there was anything wrong with the house itself, but something about it had always niggled at her, not the substance of it so much as what it represented. Buying a house was what you did after you’d gone to school and found a boyfriend. It was just the next step you had to take, a necessary element in the prescribed canvas of life. Except that Louise didn’t want to be part of that canvas anymore; she didn’t want to be one in an endless run of prints of the same subject. The house represented her and Mark, normativity and restraint, their seven uninteresting years together. The house had to go.

  It was a stupid thought to be having after one sleepless night of inspiration and one sketch after three years, not to mention on the heels of a breakup she wasn’t completely sure was going to stick, but it made her smile to poke at the idea in her mind anyway.

  She walked out of the house into the sunlight. Mark had taken the car—it was really his, like the place was really hers—so she walked three blocks to the bus stop and got the bus downtown to the university campus. She had no idea if she needed to enroll or register or sign up to anything in order to be able to go to the workshops Jennifer had mentioned last night, so she asked at the student services window in the music department.

  Maybe it was coincidence, or mayb
e one of those lines of fate that Louise believed align in your life every now and again for a moment, but she was directed to the lecture halls off the main recital hall, with her sign-up sheet ready to hand in, two minutes before Jennifer walked in to start the talk.

  The room was pretty full. There were a lot of students from the music school, but also a good selection of people who looked like they might be like Louise, interested locals in a range of ages.

  Louise almost didn’t recognize Jennifer when she came into the room—she was dressed down in jeans and a blue T-shirt, her dark hair swept up in a messy bun at the back of her neck, a couple of tendrils escaping to wisp around her face.

  “Hello,” she said. It took a moment for the room full of people to settle and pay attention. “Hi, class, I guess.” She giggled. “Sorry, I’m a little nervous. I prefer to talk with my hands, usually.” She held up her long fingers and wiggled them as if playing the piano. “But I was asked to give a talk on intro to musical theory, for the school and anyone else who’s interested. And that’s my second passion, after making music in the first place, is talking about it. So I said I would give a talk or two, so welcome, everybody. This is the first talk of the program this week, giving you a brief introduction to musical theory and analysis. And if this—if you like this, if it interests you, the night school here offers some really great community classes, and there’s a program of instrument lessons too if you wanted to learn to play piano or anything.”

  She looked around and Louise felt stupidly pleased when Jennifer caught her eye, even though she was sure she was doing that to a lot of people in the room. She was probably imagining the connection she felt, but she wasn’t imagining the warmth that bloomed in her chest when Jennifer smiled at her briefly before going on with her class. “Okay. I’m going to start off talking about what I think the most important thing about analyzing and thinking and talking about music is—the fact that every piece of music you hear has something more than the music itself that you have to take into account.”

  She shuffled some bits of paper, then shook her head and set them down, pushed her hands through the wispy loose bits of hair and launched into talking with an expression of bravery like she was jumping into an icy pool.

  “When I talk about music, when we start to think about how to analyze it, we need to realize what exactly we’re listening to. What a lot of people don’t really understand—maybe like some of you here who don’t have musical training and backgrounds—is that a piece of music isn’t just a piece of music. Music only exists by itself when it’s notes on a page. As soon as you’re able to hear it, there’s another player you have to think about—the performer. As soon as someone translates notes to an instrument, they are a part of the piece as people hear it. A performer brings out the visible music, the notes, but also the invisible music in the score, how they present it.”

  Louise had heard all this stuff before, in various contexts, but it had never rung so true before. Just watching Jennifer up there, talking about this thing she loved – it felt the same as it had the other night, watching her play and feeling her love and passion like a change in the air. Jennifer and her music were one thing, inseparable. Louise propped her chin on one hand and let herself look, drinking in the beauty of Jennifer’s dedication.

  “One piece,” Jennifer was saying, “the same notes on paper, can have very different performances even if both remain faithful to the notes and the score’s notations, instructions, the intent of the composer. I’ll play you an example.”

  Jennifer had a laptop set up at the front of the room and she played two pieces of the same music, but Louise didn’t need to hear the example to believe Jennifer’s point because she’d been convinced by seeing Jennifer play. The music had been good, but it was classical piano music and it had never appealed to her before. But Jennifer’s performance had hit her somewhere inside, resonated, burst open channels of art and brightness. That wasn’t the notes. That had been Jennifer, she was sure of it. Something about this woman’s interpretation of the music turned it into something amazing to Louise.

  Louise wondered how her part as the audience differed from others, what her own analysis of Jennifer’s piece would be if she had the vocab and skill to analyze it as she had once done with art. What she might discover about her psyche by digging into her reactions.

  Jennifer turned off the piece, and the people in the room exchanged looks, nods, little murmurs of how they hadn’t realized how different two performances of a piece could be, not just in their sound, but their feel. Jennifer looked pleased.

  “Thinking about this is important, not just for listening to and understanding a piece of music, but for performing it. Once you understand that you are half of the performance, you can think about how you are affecting it, how you interpret the notes and how you can be faithful to the composer, but also make a piece of music your own.”

  Jennifer relaxed as she talked, her voice speeding up and softening the nervous edges. Louise didn’t understand everything, but loved hearing it anyway, watching how Jennifer’s hands moved through the air in elegant gestures, the way her eyes were bright as she talked through something she clearly loved, the way the soft dimples in her cheeks popped in and out.

  Louise raised her hand at one point when Jennifer invited comments and, unaccountably nervous, said, “And, um, I would guess—when you’re analyzing a piece of music—like with a piece of art—then the person doing the listening and analysis—yourself, you’ve got to take your own potential bias into account, right? Personal taste and knowledge and stuff.”

  Jennifer smiled wide. “Yes, exactly. Even if you try to do the most technical analysis possible, you can’t avoid your own biases coming into play. Some people, especially those who make an academic career out of it, like to divorce music from other art, make a science or an objective technical study out of it. And it’s true, a lot of music can be very technically and scientifically approached, and that’s a really huge and valuable part of musical knowledge, but to me, it’s art, at the heart. So like all art, personal taste and emotion cannot help but be a part of how you approach it, as a performer or as you said, an audience. I had a big falling out with an ex during college about that actually. I argued that emotional or personal bias informed any analysis, even technical, that music could not be seen completely objectively and she took that as an insult.”

  There was an awkward ripple around the room at Jennifer’s use of she. Although Louise was surprised, she was more bothered by the small wince Jennifer gave like she hadn’t intended to say that and the way her face tightened back up, eyes dropping down as murmuring rose around the edges of the room.

  Louise stuck her hand up again and waved it to draw Jennifer’s eyes. “So could you give us an example of something you’ve played where your personal bias and emotions have affected how you interpret your performance?”

  Jennifer smiled at her gratefully and Louise tried to not blush. “Yes, there’s one Bach piano concerto…”

  She relaxed more as she talked and Louise felt herself relaxing. She inwardly hated the rest of the room for acting like that was something that they could giggle and whisper about.

  Except she couldn’t quite leave it alone in her own head either. Jennifer didn’t look like a lesbian, which she knew was a stupid thing to think because who you liked to have sex with didn’t have anything to do with what you looked like or how you dressed. She knew that really, but she must have internalized some of that expectation that lesbians should look somehow butch or different. She found herself watching the movement of Jennifer’s mouth as she talked, or the gesturing of her slim fingers, and thinking that she’d touched and kissed other women with those. She jolted from her contemplation when Jennifer had stopped talking and Louise realized she could feel her cheeks thrum hot. Jennifer must think she was insane, sitting there listening to talk about movements and chords and thematic statements, blushing hotly like it was porn.

  She rubbed h
er hands over her cheeks and tried to tune back in, though it seemed like Jennifer was wrapping up the talk.

  “I hope it hasn’t been too dry and boring for you.” She gave a self-deprecating grin. “But if you’re interested in more, my next talk is on Wednesday, same time. I’ll have a few more examples for you, to show how we can talk about different ways composers can put pieces together and how we interpret their instructions.”

  Louise started clapping, then faltered for a second when she we realized she was the only one. Thankfully, the rest of the room caught up. Jennifer stayed at the front desk, collecting her papers and closing her laptop. Louise gave her an awkward half wave thing as she passed. “Thanks for the talk and for the performance last night.”

  Jennifer smiled and said, “Thanks,” but then the flow of people out of the room carried Louise away before either could say anything more. Still. It was exciting to have swapped words with her. Louise had never been a starstruck fan of someone before, even when her classmates at school had NSYNC posters and watched their videos religiously. But she was starting to get it, that excitable admiration and awe that churned in your belly. Just a few years past the age most people grew out of it.

  She went back to the bus stop, but not before going by the art supply store on campus.

  Back at home, she set up a three by three white stretched canvas and new oil paints and painted her first real painting in three years. It came easy—without the feverish sudden intensity of last night, but like she’d been painting daily for years, her shoulders moving loose and easy and the paint rolling onto the canvas so swift and smooth it felt like it was guiding her hand instead of the other way around.

  She painted the talk. It started off monochrome, black and white tones, then with sudden slashes of color, but regimented, as Louise thought about the things Jennifer had been discussing: the analysis of music, separating out the three parts of composer, performer, and audience, how they all interact. She used three colors intertwining over the black and white base, then her thoughts wandered. When she reached the other edge of the canvas, the colors had merged. Red and glossy black had surged to the forefront and a more sensual swirl with luscious curves and dips emerged.