“Do you think it was just a dream?”
“As opposed to what?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know how to say it. As opposed to the actual dead Anna actually wanting to say that to you.”
A pause fell while she thought it over.
“Here is what I think,” she said. “I think it makes not one bit of difference if those words came from the soul of Annaliese Schmidt or from the inside of my own brain. I think it only matters if the words are right.”
“Oh,” Raymond said. Then, after a time, “Are they right?”
“I think they are right,” she said. “Yes.”
She stepped up out of the subway, into the air of Midtown, with Raymond’s hand in the small of her back. Helping. She stopped on the top stair, almost level with the street, and lifted her chin high. As if there were some magical scent on the wind.
“Listen,” she said.
The cellist was still playing.
“I know,” he said. “I like it, too. I think it’s beautiful. Sad, but beautiful.”
“Can we please go closer and listen?”
They approached the cellist and stood quietly. While the man was playing, he did not look up. He seemed entirely lost in the music.
Raymond looked over at his friend to see her crying silently. Big tears, one after the other, dripping off the end of her wrinkled jowls and chin. It made him cry again to see it.
She leaned close to him and reached up on her tiptoes, bracing herself on his forearm. She whispered as close to his ear as possible. She seemed not to want to disturb the musician.
“Am I keeping us from what you wanted to show me? Where did you want to take me?”
“Here,” he whispered back. “This is what I wanted to show you.”
She sank down to her heels again. Brought her hands together in front of her face as if praying, then lowered them to her heart.
The cellist finished his piece and looked up at Raymond, breaking into a smile of recognition.
“You’re back.”
“I brought a friend,” Raymond said.
“Thank you. I’m honored. Most people pay very little attention. People are funny, don’t you think? I used to play for the philharmonic, and people would pay good money for those tickets. Big money. But I sit out here and play the same music, and most people won’t even flip me a quarter as they walk by. Same music. Just a different sense of how much they should value it.”
“You used to play for the New York Philharmonic?” Mrs. G asked, her voice tinged with awe.
“Oh. No. Not that philharmonic. Nothing that good. Smaller city. Now I don’t want to say what city, because you thought it was New York, so that would be a total anticlimax.”
They fell silent a moment. The cellist sat, and Raymond and Mrs. G stood, and he did not seem inclined to begin a new piece.
“My father played the cello,” Mrs. G said. “When I was a child. Then after we moved to New York, he never touched the thing. He brought it with him, but he never took it out of its case again, right up until the day he died. So it’s very emotional for me to hear the instrument played. But I don’t think I ever told you that. Did I, Raymond?”
“No,” Raymond said.
“It was just a coincidence?”
“I just thought it was beautiful,” he said. “Sad, but beautiful.”
“Yes,” the cellist said. “That’s what I love about the instrument. It imitates life perfectly. Just the right amount of beautiful. Just the right amount of sad.”
Then he raised his bow and began to play again. More tears rolled down Mrs. G’s cheeks.
Halfway through the piece a waiter appeared more or less out of nowhere, walking to them from a sidewalk café two buildings down. In his right hand he carried an intricately carved wooden chair with an embroidered fabric seat.
“I thought you might like to sit,” he said to Mrs. G. “Just bring it back before you go.”
They both thanked him, and Raymond took Mrs. G’s arm, carefully settling her into the seat. She sighed as she sat, almost a grunt. It was clearly a relief to get off her feet.
“This is so lovely,” she said quietly to Raymond, who squatted at her side. “This is like a concert being played just for me. I haven’t been to a concert in decades.”
She opened her purse and searched for her wallet. Opened the wallet and pulled up one end of a few bills.
“What denomination are these?” she asked him.
“All fives.”
“No tens in there at all?”
“No. Fives.”
She pulled two bills free and handed them to Raymond. “Put these in his . . . whatever he’s using to collect money.”
Raymond dropped the bills in the cellist’s hat.
The man stopped playing suddenly. Right in the middle of a note. He raised the hand not holding the bow and offered an expansive gesture of thanks to her, like the tipping of an invisible fedora.
“She can’t see that,” Raymond said.
It only just then struck Raymond that she had not brought her red-and-white cane. Maybe she had been too tired and dispirited to go fetch it. Or maybe she trusted him now to tell her everything she needed to know about the sidewalk in front of her feet.
“Did I miss something?” she asked.
“It was a gesture of gratitude,” the cellist said. He leaned one elbow on his knee a moment, seeming to have lost the will to play, or the thread of the piece he had abandoned. “Your friend here has an emotional reaction to the music,” he said to Mrs. G. “A lot of people do. It made him cry. I think he brought you here so you could cry, too. Just a guess. I don’t mean that in a bad way.”
“I didn’t assume you did.”
“I think maybe he thought a catharsis would do you good. But I’m only guessing based on my observations.”
“He may be onto something there,” Mrs. G said. “After all, the only thing that hurts more than tears shed is tears unshed.”
“Indeed,” the cellist said. “Now I’d better start again at the beginning. I can never pick up the thread of that piece once I’ve lost it.”
For nearly two hours they sat in the street and listened to him play, neither seeming to want to say it was time for the concert to be over.