Chapter 20 #2
I sit and I think about the last time someone else sat beside me on this bench.
His hands on these keys in the dark, finding Scriabin by feel.
The warmth of his shoulder an inch from mine, close enough that I could feel it without touching.
The way the music filled the apartment and I stood in the hallway doorway and pressed my back against the frame and did not know what to do with everything I felt.
My hands are still on the keys. They remember the weight of his hands beside them. The body's own filing system.
I do not play the Chopin. Playing it would mean naming the feeling accurately, and I have the distinct and uncomfortable sense that the feeling, if named, is grief.
Not for a relationship lost. For a version of myself I found in a ballet studio eleven weeks ago and have since been systematically retreating from.
The girl who danced. Alive in a rented studio with no mirrors on the west wall. Crying without stopping. Not performing, not managing, simply present in her own body for the first time in a decade.
I cancelled the booking the morning after Victoria told me about the café.
I sit at the piano with my hands on the keys but I do not play anything.
My phone is on the bench beside me. I have been checking it approximately every forty minutes since Monday.
The notification arrives at nine-seventeen PM. Not Nik. A number I do not have saved.
I read it.
I know this might be inappropriate contact but I am watching my brother sit in a café at seven AM in Chicago in November because he is afraid that if he makes any move larger than existing in your general vicinity, you will read it as his father's behavior.
He has been afraid his whole life that he is his father.
It is the thing that has kept him from most people for most of his adult life, the terror that he carries the same capacity for damage and that love is therefore something he is not safe to offer.
He is the least Viktor person I know. He is also the most stubborn person I know, so he will sit in that café until spring if you let him, because that is what he has decided the situation requires and Astrovskys do not revise decisions under social pressure, which is one of the two traits he actually inherited from Viktor and the other one is cheekbones.
I am telling you this because someone should have told our mother. Not all men are the same. The ones who know they might be and are genuinely terrified of it are usually the ones who
aren't. Irina Astrovskaya spent twenty years in a house with the wrong kind because she had no one to tell her the difference looked like this: the wrong kind never asks. He just takes and explains the taking as love.
Nik has been asking your permission for everything since Chicago. I know you know that. I think you're afraid to trust it.
You don't have to respond to this - Katya
I read it twice.
The third time I read it slowly, the way I read financial documents that contain something I need to be certain I have extracted accurately - going over each sentence with the methodical attention of a woman whose entire professional apparatus is built on not missing what a document actually says beneath what it appears to say.
I set the phone down on the piano bench.
Beethoven has migrated from the windowsill to the arm of the couch nearest the piano without my noticing, which is his characteristic approach to proximity: incremental, sovereign, deniable.
I don’t respond to the text.
I close the piano lid. I turn off the lamp.
I go to bed at ten-fifteen. A deviation I do not note in the whiteboard tracking system because the whiteboard does not have a category for going to bed because you cannot trust yourself to sit alone in a lit room with your hands on a piano and a text message from a woman in Paris who just named the thing you have been declining to name for three weeks.
I lie in the dark. Billie is at the foot of the mattress.
Bowie is on the radiator. Beethoven, when I turn over at eleven, is on the pillow beside my head.
He has never done this before. Not once in three years.
He is simply there - a warm, solid presence pressed against the back of my head, entirely unbothered by the implausibility of it.
I lie awake.
I think about a man sitting in a café on Wabash at seven AM with an espresso and a laptop.
Not because it produces anything. Not because it moves any chess piece into any advantageous position.
Because he has decided that existing in proximity without demand is the only proof that has any value and he is giving it regardless of whether it is received.
I think about the ballet shoes in the frame on his wall. The risotto in my freezer. The letter I read four times and put in the drawer of my nightstand without deciding what to do with it.
I think about Ты не должна делать это одна. The Russian arriving before the English, soft and certain in the dark of my kitchen, the language of the version of me that existed before I decided that version was a liability.
I think about my mother's hands moving against the hospital blanket in the pattern of the nocturne. Playing the music without sound because the music never left her, not really, not even at the end. About what it costs to carry something that long in silence.
At four in the morning I am still awake.
I don’t call him, nor do I go to the cafe.
I lie in the dark with Beethoven against my head and the letter in the nightstand drawer and Katya's text unanswered on my phone, and I breathe in and out, steady and measured, and I try to locate the difference between protecting myself and punishing myself.
I cannot find it.
That is the most honest thing I have thought in three weeks. I hold it in the dark like something fragile until five AM, when the alarm goes off and I get up and put the kettle on.