After Julian assures me that his downstairs neighbors won’t be disturbed, I reach for the keys, playing out the treble notes of Debussy’s “La Fille aux Cheveux de Lin” with my right hand. Julian takes over the bass, and we finish the short piece together, letting the final notes ring out into the night. It’s only when they have finally faded away that Julian begins to speak.
“Remember when you asked me if anyone had ever been serious for me, and I told you there had been one?” he asks. I am about to turn to him when he abruptly begins a Chopin piece, and I realize why he brought us here. When we are both playing, we can’t look at each other. It makes it easier to speak freely.
“Her name was Claire,” Julian says. “She was an incredible pianist. Taught music at an elementary school, but she made extra moneyplaying at lounges. That’s how we met. I walked in for a business meeting and botched it completely. I couldn’t focus. There was just…something about her, you know. The biggest hair I’ve ever seen. Skin shining in the dim light. Making the most beautiful music.”
I’m floored by the emotion in his voice, how it goes so quiet that I have to strain my ears to listen even from right next to him.
“I was just an okay pianist then. I wanted to be close to her, and so I hired her to tutor me. And, well. You can guess what happened next.”
“Sweet, hot love against the keys?” I guess, and out of the corner of my eye I can see him smile.
“Eventually,” he says. “Took a while. She was very serious about teaching me. Wouldn’t even let me take her out on a date until I mastered ‘Clair de Lune.’ ”
“Sounds like my kind of girl,” I say, and Julian bumps me playfully with his shoulder.
“You’re a lot alike, actually. I’m not sure if I would have ever wanted you in the same room. Who knows what sort of torment you would come up with together.” He straightens as if he’s just realized something. “I have a type, don’t I.”
I surprise myself by laughing out loud.
“Well, not to sound full of myself, but she sounds pretty amazing to me. Why’d you break up?” Next to me, Julian tenses, and I realize that I have once again broached sensitive territory. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to pry. You don’t have to tell me—”
“You aren’t prying. I’m telling you,” Julian interrupts. His voice is suddenly hoarse, like he’s using it for the first time in days, and he clears his throat. “We, erm, never broke up.”
It takes me a moment to process what he’s just told me. My first instinct is outrage, because why is he seeing me if he never ended things with her, then confusion, because maybe they were never reallytogether. It takes me a few more seconds to put together the context clues. The heaviness in his tone. The fact that all this time, he’s been speaking about her in past tense.
“She was an incredible person,” Julian continues, and I hear it now: his raw, raging grief. “Tenacious. Fierce. She dreamed so big and so loud, and she deserved so much better than what she got.”
“You loved her,” I whisper.
“So much,” he confirms.
“What happened?” I turn to him, try to learn him by the expression he wears, but his face is tucked down toward the keys.
“An accident,” he says. “She’s gone now.”
“Oh.” All of a sudden Julian is transformed in my eyes, not just orphan but widower, his youth eclipsed by the depth of the pain I now know he holds. I cup his cheek in my hand and find it quivering. “Oh, Jules. I’m so sorry.”
Julian nods.
“Your turn,” he says.
My tale of woe seems so small now. One terrible ex-fiancé from eight years back, and I still have panic attacks after seeing his brother. It feels like an inadequate offering in the face of what Julian has shared tonight.
But he’s let me know him. And I know what Winny would say: that I should let him know me too.
“Do you know ‘Passacaglia’?” I start. “I don’t remember who it’s by. Starts with an H—”
“Handel and Halvorsen,” Julian supplies. “Yes.”
Our start is about as clumsy as my words. But I still get them out.
“I met Jared’s older brother my first year of medical school,” I say. “I used to sneak off to the econ library to study, and he lived there. No matter how early I got there, he’d always seem to beat me to myfavorite desk. By the time I struck up the courage to ask him for coffee, I think I was already smitten.”
All these years later, I can still see him. Thinner than he was in our last years together, one hand always clutching an ear like he wanted to tear it off as he pored over his books. The sweet twenty-two-year-old girl who used to giggle to Winona about the cute guy she’d discovered in the bowels of a library across campus seems so unlike me that I see her in third person: marked white Air Force 1s, DIY crochet braids, an open, hopeful heart that she wore on her sleeve.
“He was sweet at first, you know. Did all the right things to woo a girl: bought me flowers, took me to nice restaurants. Told me he liked me for my ambition, liked that I planned to hold my own. I told him I didn’t want to get married or have kids, and he would go on these long diatribes about how ‘marriage is the stupidest financial decision you could ever make’ and how glad he was that I wasenlightenedenough to not want it.” I snort to cover my misery. “It’s so funny. The red flags are always so obvious in retrospect.”
Julian hums but doesn’t interrupt. Instead, he flips the page of the book of sheet music to a song I don’t know, and I squint at the notes, trying to decipher them as I do my memories.