The monster never breathes,” the composer Berlioz supposedly said about the organ, but I found the opposite to be true. When I played, I felt alive and at one with the machine, as if exhaling the music. Tess and Edward visited the studio to hear the lengthening shape of my composition, and at the end of the performance my son said, “You were moving the same as I was breathing.” Over the course of a year, I worked on the symphony during what hours I could steal, regenerating it constantly from the desire to confess, seeking to craft a texture that would allow me to explain. I felt that if she could but hear my story in the music, Tess would surely understand and forgive. In my studio, I could take refuge at the keyboard. Lock the door and draw the curtains to feel safe and whole again. Lose myself, find myself, in the music.
By the springtime, I had secured a small orchestra—a wind ensemble from Duquesne, timpani from Carnegie-Mellon, a few local musicians—to perform the piece when it was completed. After Edward had finished first grade in June, Tess took him for a two-week visit to her cousin Penny’s to give me time alone in the house to finish my symphony—a work about a child trapped in his silence, how the sounds could never get out of his own imagination, living in two worlds, the internal life locked to all communication with outside reality.
After struggling for years to find the music for that stolen child, I finally finished. The score lay spread out across the organ, the scrawled notes on the staves a marvel of mathematical beauty and precision. Two stories told at the same time—the inner life and the outer world in counterpoint. My method was not to juxtapose each chord with its double, for that is not reality. Sometimes our thoughts and dreams are more real than the rest of our experience, and at other moments that which happens to us overshadows anything we might imagine. I had not been able to write fast enough to capture the sounds in my head, notes that flowed from deep within, as if half of me had been composing, and the other half acting as amanuensis. I had yet to fully transcribe the musical shorthand and to assign all of the instrumentation—tasks that might take months of rehearsal to perfect—but the initial process of setting down the bones of the symphony had made me giddy and exhausted, as if in a waking dream. Its relentless logic, strange to the ordinary rules of language, seemed to me what I had been hoping to write all along.
At five o’clock that afternoon, hot and wrung-out, I went to the kitchen for a bottle of beer, and drank it on the way upstairs. My plan was a shower, another beer with dinner, and then back to work. In the bedroom closet, the empty spaces where her clothes had been reminded me of Tess, and I wished she had been there to share the sudden burst of creativity and accomplishment. Moments after stepping into the hot shower, I heard a loud crash downstairs. Without turning off the water, I stepped out, wrapped a towel around my waist, and hurried to investigate. One of the windows in the living room had been broken, and glass lay all over the rug. A breeze flapped the curtains. Half naked and dripping wet, I stood there puzzled, until a sudden discordant hammering of the piano keys frightened me, as if a cat had walked across it, but the studio was empty and silent. I took a long look around.
The score was gone—not on the table where I had left it, not fallen to the floor, not anywhere. The window gaped open, and I ran to look at the lawn. A solitary page fluttered across the grass, pushed along by a thin breeze, but there was nothing else to see. Howling with anger and pacing the room, I stubbed my toe on the piano leg and began hopping up and down across the rug, nearly impaling my foot on a piece of glass, when another crash sounded upstairs. Foot throbbing, I climbed the steps to the landing, afraid of what might be in my house, worried about my manuscript. My bedroom was empty. In our son’s room another window had been broken, but no glass littered the floor. Shards on the roof meant the window had been shattered from the inside out. To clear my head, I sat for a moment on the edge of his bed. His room looked the same as the day he’d left for the vacation, and thoughts of Edward and Tess filled me with sudden sorrow. How would I explain the missing symphony? Without it, how could I confess my true nature? I pulled at my wet hair till my scalp ached. In my mind, my wife, my son, and my music were wound together in a braided chain that now threatened to unravel.
In the bathroom, the shower ran and ran. A cloud of steam billowed out into the hallway, and I stumbled through the fog to shut off the water. On the cabinet mirror, someone had fingered words on the fogged surface: We No Your Secret. Copied above, note for note, was the first measure of my score.
“You little fuckers,” I said to myself as the message vanished from the mirror.
After a restless and lonesome night, I drove to my mother’s house as a new day began. When she did not immediately answer my knock, I thought she might still be asleep, and went over to the window to look in. From the kitchen, she saw me standing there, smiled, and waved me to her.
“Door’s never locked,” she said. “What brings you here in the middle of the week?”
“Good morning. Can’t a guy come and see his best girl?”