LUC
It’s late when I get back after the meeting became more contentious than I’d planned for, though I’m sure my mood didn’t help. Things were smoothed over by late afternoon, and I’d thought it best to stay for pre-dinner drinks. To unruffle feathers and show how I’m not always an insufferable ass.
One dinner became two, and two became four, though I was able to extricate myself from the group by citing my children’s vacation.
As a family concern up until the ink dried on the contract, the members of the group’s new acquisition were sympathetic.
Not that it truly mattered. I’d leave regardless.
So now it’s late, I’m a few wines in, and I’m sitting at the piano with a glass of cognac wondering what the fuck I’m doing when my fingers drift to the keys of their own accord.
A handful of notes break the silence, hesitant but full of melancholy.
The tune is familiar, but the moment is not.
I can’t remember the last time I even looked at a piano, let alone played one.
Yet here I sit, coaxing music from an instrument I’d long since convinced myself I had no interest in.
My hand hovers over the final chord. I don’t play it, and the melody trails off too soon.
It’s an old song, and it isn’t mine. It isn’t even Allegra’s anymore.
I reach for my glass, and my heart swoops like a swallow surrendering to gravity, only to find itself carried upward again as I spot Primrose on the far side of the room.
I should stand, but if I do, I’m not sure what will happen, what I will do. So I ignore the dictates of etiquette and keep my seat, though my fingers are no longer on the keys.
It’s gone midnight. The house was silent. I thought I was alone.
“I’m sorry,” she says quietly from the arched entryway.
The hall behind her isn’t quite dark, the light from upstairs creating an almost ethereal glow over her golden hair.
She’s dressed, thank God. No shorts the size of underwear tonight.
Her arms are folded across her ribs. Not in defense but because she’s holding something.
A book, perhaps. “I didn’t think you were coming home tonight.
You said you were on the mainland tonight. ”
“Change of plans,” I say, my voice unintentionally gruff. I keep my eyes from hers not wanting her to know the truth. That I couldn’t stay away. “Did you need anything?” Don’t let your eyes wander. Don’t let your mind wander.
The way she folds in her bottom lip looks like reluctance. “I was looking for glue.” She tilts the thing she’s clutching, and I realize it’s not a book but a photo frame. A broken photo frame.
“What happened?”
“It was an accident,” she says brightly. Far too brightly for someone looking for glue.
“Primrose,” I chide. “Like I give a fuck if something is broken.” Provided it is not my heart.
“I give a f—I care. I need to fix this before the morning.”
“Let me see.” I hold out my hand.
She edges her way in, the frame hugged to her sternum the way you’d clutch something you’re worried might explode. She comes to stand next to me by the piano stool.
“It’s the photo of her mum.” Her gaze is everywhere but on me. “I was checking on Sylvie when I knocked the frame off her nightstand with my bum.”
She sounds so distressed, and as our eyes meet, she looks as though she’s expecting the worst. My anger, my pain, who knows. “I’m sorry.”
“Accidents… they do have a way of happening.” My voice is gruff as I take the thing from her white-knuckled grip.
“I’m so sorry.”
“So you said.” I smile to soften my words. “Anyone would think I’m an ogre.” I look up when she doesn’t reply.
“You really don’t want me to answer that.”
I suppose I am. I suppose I have been to her.
My attention dips to the frame again as I run my thumb over the fractured joint.
Cracks radiate across the glass from the same corner, webbing across the glass like a spider’s masterpiece.
It strikes me as odd that the image of my wife and child in the garden is the second thing I register, though I’m glad the photo remains untouched by the unintentional violence.
“Someone will order a new frame.”
“No, I’ll fix it,” she says. “I mean, I’ll fix it before she wakes up. I don’t want her to…” She shrugs.
“You can’t fix the glass. It’s fine,” I add, rubbing my thumb over the frame.
“I’ll go into the village in the morning,” she says, taking it from my hands. “There’s bound to be—”
“Primrose,” I say, touching her hand briefly. Ignoring the way it feels. “Sylvie will survive. Jose will source glass or a new frame. She’s not going to be upset.”
“You don’t know that. She misses her mother.”
“She doesn’t really remember her.” That fact used to make me sad but now I think it’s probably a blessing.
“She doesn’t need to remember to still feel her absence.”
“Yes, I’m sorry.” My heart knows that’s true. “Please, leave this with me.” I gently pry it from her hands and place it on the top of the piano. “I’ll find the glue and fix it. She probably won’t even notice, and if she does. Well, that’s okay also. We can explain.” We.
“Thank you.” Her lips part—a tiny pearl of a yawn—but she clamps it back.
I make her leaving easier for us both by putting my fingers to the keys, providing her with the perfect excuse. But she doesn’t. Not as I play mindlessly for a couple of beats.
“What was the song you were playing when I came in? It sounded like an old Elvis song.” I angle my gaze her way, and her mouth hooks up, as though she’s embarrassed. “It sort of sounded like it, anyway.”
Almost of their own accord, my fingers run over the opening bars of “Can’t Help Falling in Love”, which I immediately regret, so I launch into the song I’d been playing just before she appeared. Plaisir d'amour. “It’s an even older song.”
“It’s lovely.”
“Sit,” I add, though manage to curtail the instinct to say, I won’t bite this time. I’m repaid for my efforts when she perches on the end of the double bench stool. We’re not touching, more is the pity, as my fingers run over the keys.
She smells so enticing, like jasmine and warm skin, with a trace of something that’s harder to define. Temptation, my mind unhelpfully supplies. Forbidden fruits and their marketing.
She isn’t looking at me, rather watching my hands move over the keys. I become aware, quite suddenly, of the numerous bones in my hand, and the elegant mechanics of their movement in order to form the notes, and the melody. This as I ignore how my body hums thanks to her proximity.
The last time I felt this pinch of nerves I was twelve.
I had a minor crush on my piano teacher.
She’d study the placement of my fingers, which made them feel oversized and clumsy.
My heart would beat in my chest so hard, I was convinced she could hear it.
That she’d look at me, then look into my lap.
And know. And then, at least in my mind, my fingers would be much less cumbersome, the lesson twisting into something much more lurid.
Seems I haven’t changed all that much. I then find myself thinking of Felix. Twelve, also.
Watching porn. Merde. Now there is a conversation I’m not looking forward to.
“You play beautifully,” she says as my fingers slow. My attention moves to her face, pink washing her cheeks with regret. She makes a pre-emptive motion. “I’m sorry, I should—”
“It’s been a long time since I’ve played anything.” Delaying tactics that she’s bound to see right through. Not that it stops me from adding, “Do you play?”
Her eyes answer me before her mouth does. “I had lessons when I was younger. I think we all did, my brothers and sisters. I didn’t have the patience.”
I give a soft chuckle. “There’s a joke in there somewhere.”
Her brow furrows.
“Dr. Whittington.”
“Ah, patients,” she replies with a tiny smile.
“Most people assume playing well is about talent,” I say. “Mostly, it’s repetition. Hours spent doing the same thing badly until one day you do it less badly.”
Her smile turns teasing. “Inspiring.”
“I imagine medicine is much the same.”
Her nose scrunches. “Six years of doing things badly?”
“Six years of turning up when it would be easier not to some days.” I glance at her. “Eventually, everyone else calls it talent because they weren’t there for the work.”
“I suppose I gave up because I don’t like things I’m no good at.” An admission that speaks volumes, and as though she’d given too much away, she hurries on. “The song, does it have a meaning? Old songs often do, right?” She looks uncomfortable now.
“It’s about a woman who abandons her lover for another.
” I begin to pick at the keys again because now I feel like I ought to kick myself.
It sounds like a calculated choice. It could be a subconscious one.
“My wife, Allegra, she would sing it to Sylvie when she was a baby.” That is hardly a better direction.
Done with overthinking, I lift my hands and place them on my thighs.
Maybe I ought to shove them in my mouth.
“I know.”
I angle my gaze her way.
“I mean, Felix was just telling his sister that she’d sing a song to her. That he’d heard you playing it on the piano. He made it sound like it was a happy and a sad thing at the same time.”
My mouth goes dry. Maybe from the cognac.
“She was going to ask you to play it for her, but…” Her expression flickers.
“What?”
“He said not to because it makes you sad.”
“He’s right,” I admit.
“Because it reminds you of your loss.”
“It reminds me of her.” The admission sits between us for a moment.
“Do you want… do you want to tell me about her.”
I’m glad she doesn’t ask if I want to talk about it.
About loss. The elephant that lurks in most of the rooms. I feel my chest tense anyway, not sure why she’s asking—for her or for me—but I find myself inhaling anyway.
“She was—” The sentence disintegrates. How do I do justice to the woman who held my heart, the woman who brought our children into the world?
“She was fearless,” I say, after a second.
“She did nothing by half-measures. She loved, and she was loved, and she lived life to the full. She had this…” I search for the right words but come up lacking.
“Life force, I suppose,” which doesn’t capture even the shadow of her.
Primrose nods as if she understands, but how can she?
“She was beautiful,” I say, softer now as I ignore the dull-edged blade of shame when I try to explain what we had to another woman.
“Yes, she was,” Primrose offers, easing that sense of discomfort.
“Cancer.” I don’t need to tell her but it’s usually the next questions. “One minute she was here, and the next…” The room falls silent, but for the sound of cicadas and crickets beyond these walls.
“I’m sorry.”
I say nothing.
“She was beautiful inside and out. I suspect, just like you.”
“You don’t have to say that,” she whispers as her gaze drops.
“It’s not just my observation, Primrose.
Children have an uncanny knack of seeing to the heart of a person.
Also.” I suck in a breath. “I think you might be even more beautiful than Allegra. She wouldn’t mind me saying so.
” Not when she complained ceaselessly about the gap between her front teeth that I made her swear she wouldn’t change, and her ever-woeful lament over being pigeon-toed. God, I loved her.
“You must miss her.”
“Sadness wasn’t our whole story,” I reply. “Though for a long time, I believed grief meant I’d stopped wanting anything that might matter.” I turn to look at her and contemplate taking her hand. “But then you arrived.”
She moves her hand from my reach. “I’m not the first woman…”
“You’re the first woman I’ve cared to know to any degree. And that has infuriated me. You have infuriated me.”
“Same,” she mutters as her gaze slides away, but not before I see the corner of her mouth curl.
“And you intrigue me.”
“Same. Again.” She glances down at her hands, as though not happy with the admission.
“I’d almost forgotten I still could.”
“Could what?”
“Feel.” The whole world in those eyes of hers.
“Primrose, I’ve never been attracted to any woman like I am to you.
” Not even Allegra in those early days. I don’t remember suffering this fervor of fascination.
“But I must be honest with you. While I know it might be possible to have two loves in one life, I won’t risk loss again. ”
“You loved her very much.”
“I did.” And I could love you just as easily, I fear. Words I cannot admit and a risk I will not take. “I can’t promise you a future,” I add, daring to press my hand to her face. “But I won’t pretend I don’t long for what’s before us. No one can make you feel like I can.”
She doesn’t say anything, but she doesn’t need to because I see the truth of it there on her face.
“We could have a summer.” My thumb traces the shape of her mouth, everything tightening inside me at the heat of her breath. “A handful of weeks before life demands something different from both of us. Don’t refuse to bloom because autumn is coming.”
“Poetic.” She makes a small huff of the word. “Euphemistic.” Her brow furrows.
“I’m asking you not to sacrifice these weeks to fear.”
“Who says I’m afraid?”
“I think we’re both afraid, in our own ways.
We’re afraid of what might happen. Afraid of what we might miss.
But I want you. I want to be the man who gives you all that you’ve missed.
” I lower my head so slowly and, when she doesn’t resist, slant my lips over hers.
One sweet, tremorous slide before I pull back and drown in the blue of her eyes again.
What a way to go, I think as I turn back to the piano.
“Plaisir d’amour ne dure qu’un moment, chagrin d’amour toute la vie,” I whisper over the melancholy tune. The pleasure of love lasts only a moment, but the grief of love lasts a lifetime.