Disclaimer: This story is hereby disclaimed. Word.
"Music expresses that which cannot be said, and upon which it is impossible to be silent." –Victor Hugo
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Liebeslied
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They're in their thirties, they've left Japan and moved to New York, he plays in the pit of the Met, she gigs all around town and someone at Sony has just signed her for her first kids' album. She has a knack with a tune. She writes the songs and hires someone to translate the lyrics. Speaking of kids, they have two: Ludwig and Clara. (Named after Beethoven and Schumann, on Nodame's insistence.)
Sometimes they see Chiaki's name in the trade journals or the message boards. Sometimes they buy his albums.
Sometimes she gets a little sad over him; when this happens she goes to the baby grand they've got in the apartment and bangs out a mad fugue, or else a slow and thoughtful Chopin, and she feels a little better. And then Ryutaro comes home, the kids come home, and she's the star of the show, and everyone's laughing, jokes are made, craziness ensues, and she feels like herself again…
But she can't quite forget him.
Every morning she wakes up and stares at Ryutaro's blonde head and tells herself that there was no choice to make, this is love, anything that came before was a crazy girl's silly crush. It's easy to believe when Ryutaro's right in front of her.
It's not so easy to believe when she's home alone.
She can almost believe it was a crush. But one night of her past stops her, haunts her, makes her wonder what might have been.
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Nodame knows the weird rhythms of memory. That's why she's here, studying piano, instead of somewhere else studying early childhood psychology, even though her long-term interests veer much more kid-ward, and this place and this dream are just an island of ambition in her weird, disorganized life.
She didn't really plan on falling in love either.
She's wanted, all her life, to be unique, but the truth is that all musicians have the strangest love affairs. In many ways they speak a language no one else can understand. Their priorities are skewed with unusual gusto. The most inconsequential things – a breath, a moment of doubt or hesitation, spilled coffee on a sheet of paper, a finger forgotten in a door jamb, an imperceptible crack in a reed – can cause the most monumental landslides.
Likewise, the tiniest moments of perfection can bring monumental joy.
And for a musician, time is a tamed beast. They divide it into bars, explicate it with thirty-second notes, massage it with long passages of cantabile melody, underscore it with a walking bass. They divide their lives into movements, often messily, like bad composers. Your childhood is a lyrical andante. Your youth is a wild scherzo.
Nodame is at the apex of her scherzo.
She knows that in the future, all she will have to do to call up a memory of this time is to play the bars of music that were its soundtrack.
For a too-short time they played together. That Mozart sonata was only the beginning. There was one duet that meant more than the others.
Nodame and Chiaki-senpai, he playing the left hand, she playing the right, reading through all of Chopin's opus 10 at around 2:00 am in one of the smellier basement practice rooms, to all the wrong tempos, the rhythms completely off, the fingering improvised, the tenutos hardly tenuto and his pedal utterly out of sync with her hands. They don't usually play this badly. They were distracted by each other: the glancing brush of his sleeve against hers. His leg budging hers out of the way to reach the damper. A moment looking up from the music to muse over his profile. A caught breath where there was no breath in the music. She'd been staring at him for months. That was the first time she felt like he was staring back.
But the music will keep moving on – music, after all, isn't something that is, it's something that happens. Time will leave these moments and these etudes behind them, and they will branch away from each other, find new places, new duets. Even the opus is only so long. Time is a tamed beast, but it's still a living one.
And instead of rainy memories, instead of coy glances or long conversations or nights in bed, instead of spots of human time, all they will have between them is memories of music. Years will pass, they will look back, and instead of reminiscing over those things, they will say to themselves: we'll always have that etude.
There are so many things you can say with music that you can't say with a glance, or a conversation, or a night in bed.
Musicians have the strangest love affairs. The strangest and the best.
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She wakes up and reminds herself that this is life and that is music, and while she was different as a girl she has grown enough to understand that they are two separate things. She still has the music somewhere in her, and memories of music too.
Ryutaro's always been shy, in his way, about the whole matter. He knows she made music with Chiaki, a pianist, and no matter how many times she and Ryutaro play the Spring or Kreutzer sonatas it's not going to be quite the same.
But then, at the same time, she has something with him that she never would have had with Chiaki: respect, and affection (not stolen but given), and there's still music in the air, and singing voices, and kids.
She loves both at the same time, the same way she loves Beethoven and Chopin at the same time.
They each belong to different movements of her life.
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Fin
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