On a night in mid-November, a Friday when the rain came down hard against the windows and neither of them had anywhere to be, she played him everything she had of the elegy.
She had been composing it for two years, and there were four completed movements and the scaffolding of a fifth. She played it on her keyboard in the small living room of her faculty apartment, which was warm and lamp-lit, with rain on the glass, and he sat on the floor with his back against the couch — she had taken the couch cushion off and put it on the floor for him without asking, which was the kind of attention to his physical comfort that she provided quietly and without comment.
She played for fifty minutes. He did not move or speak.
The first movement was slow and searching, made of a melodic line that kept reaching for something just out of range, falling short, beginning again. The second had a different quality — restless, almost argumentative, the musical equivalent of pacing. The third was the one that undid him: a long, very quiet passage in which a single melodic line was laid down with great care and then, gradually, surrounded by harmonies that held it without overwhelming it — held it the way you hold something fragile, with the full attention of the hands.
When the fourth movement ended and she lifted her hands from the keys, the room was very quiet except for the rain.
He was crying. He had not noticed until he tried to speak and found that his throat was full.
She turned on the bench and looked at him with the same unsurprised, accepting attention she always brought to things that mattered.
'I don't have language for that,' he said, finally.
'You don't need language for it,' she said.
'What's the fifth movement?' he asked. 'The one you haven't finished?'
She turned back to the keys and played three bars — a resolution beginning, a sense of arrival, and then it stopped. 'That's as far as I've gotten,' she said. 'I know where it needs to go. I can't find the path.'
'What does it need to resolve to?'
'It needs to resolve to — acceptance,' she said, slowly. 'Not happiness. Not the absence of loss. Just the — the settled understanding that the lost thing was real, was here, mattered. The difference between erasure and absence.' She played the three bars again. 'I can hear it. I can't reach it.'
He stayed that night, on the couch, which turned into not the couch, and the rain continued all night, and in the morning the world outside was clean and cold and full of a light that seemed freshly arrived, as if everything had been washed into a new clarity.
He made coffee. She played three more bars of the fifth movement. Then she stopped and laughed and said, 'Not yet,' and put the keyboard away and came into the kitchen.