Chapter Nine #2
“Don’t apologize,” he says. “You say what you mean. It’s refreshing.”
“Yeah, well, you won’t get a performance from me,” I say. “Just awkward, radical honesty.”
His eyes brighten with affection. Then, “In the spirit of radical honesty, are we going to talk about what happened out there today? With Jared.”
A chill goes down my spine, the same iron walls that Julian has been lifting humming with the desire to lock up tight.
It’s been eight years, but telling men about Eric always feels like handing them an instruction manual on exactly how to break me.
I drift away from the painting and toward the floor-to-ceiling windows, watch the city spill out at my feet.
“I…” The words get caught, and my next breath comes in a gasp. “I don’t know where to start.” At the beginning, when I first met Eric in the econ library, bent in half over a textbook? Or at the end, bleeding out on my bedroom floor as my calls went to his voicemail over and over?
“Somewhere easy,” Julian offers. His voice is a rumble against my back, and I feel it as much as I hear it. “How you’re feeling right now? In this moment?”
I let his question hang in the air unanswered for a moment as I process. Warm, I think. But also terrified. Like I’m most of the way across a tightrope with no harness, and I’ve just made the mistake of looking down.
“You first,” I say.
Julian laughs. His reflection in the windows is translucent, ghostly, and when I look up at it, I can almost convince myself that he’s not actually here with me. That the man behind me is the one who appears in my dreams.
“Helpless, I think,” he says. “I don’t like seeing you cry. I’m a person who fixes things, and I can’t fix this.”
“Is that what you want?” I ask. “To fix me, I mean.”
“No,” Julian says. “I want to know you.”
Warmth rushes fast to my cheeks, and I swallow against the squeeze of my throat. It feels natural to lean back against him, and Julian accepts my embrace, resting a hand on my hip.
“God that’s romantic,” I mutter. “Like, I don’t even know what to say to that.”
“I don’t know,” he says, his hand dragging slowly up to the nip of my waist. “Maybe that you want me to know you too?”
I close my eyes, letting myself exist in this moment. I’m surrounded by him so fully that I feel like I’ve crawled under his ribs to breathe for him, to fuel his body with my hummingbird heart.
“It’s not that I don’t want to talk about it,” I confess. “I just…don’t know how. You have this idea of me as this tough woman who takes no shit, and…I guess I don’t want to disrupt that.”
People don’t like tough women, but they do respect them. They don’t fuck with them without a posse and a plan, and I like being un-fuck-with-able. It’s so much better than being the frightened, fragile thing I was before. That I fear I might still be.
I can almost hear the gears in Julian’s head shifting.
“I want to show you something,” he says abruptly.
I drop my head back to give him a quizzical look, but he’s already stepping back, taking my hand before guiding me down the darkened hallway that bisects his apartment. I wonder, for a second, if we’re heading to his bedroom, but then he stops at a set of double doors and swings them open.
This room looks considerably more lived-in than his artfully cluttered living room.
Mounted records line the walls, and even more sit in stacks on the floor, in the bookshelf.
Three guitars, two acoustic and one electric, hang from the wall above a worn denim couch.
Two enormous amps double as side tables, and the walls are padded with what I realize is soundproofing material.
And in the center of the room, taking up most of the floor space, the prize: a sleek black baby grand piano. I can’t help it; I gape.
“Are you serious? A Bosendorfer?” I say, zipping to the bench. “I’ve never seen one of these in real life!”
Julian’s lips quirk in a smile.
“You’re an unusual woman,” he observes. “The quickest way to your heart seems to be through fancy pianos.”
I wrinkle my nose at him, almost annoyed by how rapidly he’s set me at ease. I lift the fallboard to run my fingers along the keys, and the sounds make me want to melt into the seat.
“Ugh, I’m so jealous. I have a console at home. Can’t fit a baby grand in my apartment.”
“As you can see, I can barely fit this one either,” Julian says, settling next to me. His piano bench is smaller than the first one we shared once, and so we’re wedged close, our arms welded together. “It takes up most of the space in here. Not exactly our room in Edison Mansion.”
“Our room, was it?” I tease.
Julian starts to play. I recognize the song within a few notes as “Gymnopédie No. 1.”
“I like to think of it that way,” he says. “Don’t you?”
I nod, biting back a smile. I like the sound of that too much, I think.
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 money playing 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 really together.
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 my favorite 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.