Things that Endure

Short Strory by Amber Storms

1/5/2006 - Luke studied the bridge of his professor’s nose, quickly sketching her profile in his Literature notebook.  If he were to invent a system to translate line into melody, he wondered how her face would sound. Not even enough for a decent measure, he thought to himself. He wondered if any of his professors had music in them at all. This morning, it seemed they didn’t. Luke tried to make sense of the chaotic warbling in his head.  It had begun the night before. As he remembered how the curve of Julia’s waist had been host to an alien hand, he stopped sketching and closed his eyes. He needed to be alone in a room with a piano, not stuck in a classroom, suffocated by the linear droning of the hag with a doctorate but no one to tell her that her perfume stank like spicy, medicinal horse balm. Luke stuffed his notebook into his long-strapped canvas bag and left the classroom a half-hour early. It was no use, anyway. He could get the class notes from that pale, logical-looking girl, the one whose bra straps cut into her soft hide like economy-sized rubber bands. Luke’s pace slowed as he walked across campus on the spongy turf. The grass was calming in its infinite greenness, and the early morning smell of thick, cool, southern humidity steadied his thoughts. He remembered the way Julia looked when he first saw her. That afternoon, the practice rooms of the ancient music house had all been empty, except for number eight. Number eight was his favorite. It was a corner room with the best piano, and enough room to practice, and store, his cello. He had since bribed Dr. Corelli for the key, claiming it as his own private studio. Corelli had initially pretended to scoff at the proposal, but Luke had mysteriously found a key marked “#8” in his campus mailbox that very afternoon. Besides, Luke knew he was the old man’s favorite. That day, back in September, Luke had not planned to practice for so long.  Strangely, he had neglected to shut the door to his studio while he played; he assumed the music house was empty at such an hour, especially on a Friday. He had drifted somewhere inexplicable in the second movement of a favorite cello concerto, and had ceased to see the sheet music at all. It was something he could never quite explain, even to his music instructors. It was for this he lived. As his bow commanded the movements of his body, his breathing swelled and fell away like a secret accompanist. Luke’s body was taken captive by the living resonance that sometimes overpowered him, much as a sailor’s frame is softly subject to the lilting of the waves. His eyes were closed. His head swayed to the right and arched upwards as the measure surged with brimming tension. Then he saw her. Through the half-open door, he noticed a long slice of shadow suddenly shift on the wood floor of the hallway. Luke’s eyes had opened right at the potent break of the musical release, catching evidence of the stranger. In a moment Luke was in the hallway. The image of her, leaning there against the old window all those months ago, with the final scraps of daylight across her face, marked that day like a pressed flower marks the page of a book. Even after the flower is gone, its watermark has become part of the page’s substance, coloring the story behind the words. Hers was a color that Luke had never seen before. She was wearing a top that was the most exceptional shade of pink he had ever encountered. It looked antique, somehow. A type of creamy solid fabric lay beneath another translucent layer, which resembled some rare form of lace. The thing that most startled him, though, was her expression. The moment he saw it, he knew. Her eyes were shut, her head tilted up and sideways as it rested against the ancient, blurred windowpane; one knee was up, the other leg relaxed and straight before her. One hand absently clutched a few papers, forms from some forgotten errand.

  Whatever it was that dwelt inexplicably in Luke’s soul, that reverent longing that was not so much a love of music, but a passionate enslavement to it, was written all over the girl who sat before him.  It arrests. Its built-in reflex is unavoidable. Luke knew it well:  the heavy, invisible tones of painfully beautiful sound left him intensely helpless. Unless he himself played the piece, it would render him motionless, in still, ecstatic gravity that he never fully understood. He sometimes wondered if priests in temples, with all those robes and secret, gilded religious things, felt as strongly about their gods as he felt when his hands absorbed the living sensation from wood and bow, or from the keys of a piano.  When he rhythmically warmed the notes of his cello, it almost felt like some sort of worship. “It’s like undulating velvet,” Julia had said once. He had never tried to explain to her why he rested his forehead on the top of the piano while he played in solitude, or why the really stunning parts of a symphony made him want to cry. He knew she understood. She didn’t play an instrument; that was the funny thing. Luke had been with other girls before, even some with decent voices or commendable musical talent. He liked to think, and did think, that he could have almost any girl he wanted, even the really pretty ones. It was so easy. He knew how to make them laugh, and how to make them jealous, and that they fell for him when he ignored them just a little. If they heard him play, they would say things like, “Wow. You’re a good piano player.” But Julia was the only person that he had ever allowed inside his corner practice room. She wouldn’t say anything; she just sat on the floor across the small space and shut her eyes, even when he played for her in the dark. It was then that she was able to see the most of him, and she knew it. He would find her in the dark, and sometimes they wouldn’t leave until the night had turned a light lavender grey, casting a surreal glow on their faces as they walked home under the trees. 

  He had always been attracted to the girls with tanned skin and pale, frosty eyes that made the pupils look like a startling pinpoint of black. Julia had dark hair and delicate ivory skin that flushed during prolonged one-on-one conversations, and deep russet espresso-colored eyes that seemed to contain and perceive more than other people’s. Luke’s thoughts became jumbled and dissonant as he watched still frames of her face flicker and mingle with other memories that remained imbedded in his mind. Luke remembered meeting Julia’s mother, Gretchen. The family resemblance was obvious.  Luke had studied the decayed shape of the aging woman’s body, and shuddered. Her form reminded him of overripe fruit that shrivels in spots and bulges in others, repulsive to discover at the back of the refrigerator. Julia’s dad had to work late all the time; Luke never met him. Her house had an old spiral staircase that groaned and squealed under his feet. She had mentioned once that it was built in the eighteen eighties. Her kitchen even had a portion that used to be servants’ quarters. The silence at her house was thick, and old. They had even spoken about it once. Luke pictured her, her smallness wrapped in his large black pea coat as the practice room grew chilly one night. “I never heard music growing up, except sometimes during Christmas,” she said. “Oh, and I remember watching my dad wax his Mercedes; he would listen to this oily little radio that sounded horrible. Man, he loved that car. One time he even took me for a ride in it with the top down. But that was a long time ago.”  Luke had seen the car once. It was the palest shade of yellow; it made him think of custard. He thought again about the pink color Julia was wearing that very first day. Strangely, in all the months they were together, Luke had never seen her wear it again. 

  By this time he had walked to the edge of campus. The early morning dew had soaked the bottom of his pants, and Luke felt the brightness of the air increase on his lightly freckled face. He could tell it was going to be a hot day. His hair was getting long enough to hang in his eyes, but he thought it looked artistic. It had been red when he was a child, but was dark enough now to almost pass for brown. As he turned down Torrey Avenue and headed east toward the music house, he stared at the bruised and trampled petals that coated the dark sidewalk. The slightest breeze would turn them loose from the blooming trees above, and thousands already stuck to the wet, cracked pavement, piled in transparent layers beneath his feet. The lilac color of the petals made him think of something else Julia had said once. When he sat with her after her art class one night, she was mixing a splotch of leftover paint on her palette, and distractedly said, “If I assigned a color to every musical note, I wonder what Beethoven’s Third Symphony would look like.” Luke slid his finger into the loop on the back of her painting overalls and gently pulled her backward, saying, “It would be a mile long, don’t you think?”  After a short pause, she continued, as if she had not heard him at all. “No, that’s impossible. Even if…no…it would all mix together and end up being brown. Harmony like that can’t exist two-dimensionally.” That was the thing with Julia. She always preferred Beethoven. Luke would expound on Erik Satie and how his music was misunderstood because it was so brilliant, so avant-garde. Luke would play Satie’s piano pieces for her in the dark; he memorized them by ear, because the notation had no bar lines or key signatures. That’s what he loved about Satie: no restrictions. Each piece was only about a minute long; they were beautiful and they explained themselves. That was another thing about Julia: she hated things without development and structure, like jazz. Luke loved jazz. She always wanted to go to another antique store, which he never understood, either.  She rarely bought something. When he complained, she would say stuff like, “There’s something intrinsically valuable about things that endure in a world full of chaos.” All the stores were over priced. No matter how hard he tried not to think of her, she still consumed him, especially since the episode last night. Funny, Julia was one of the tiniest people he knew, barely over five feet tall, but she seemed to overpower his will to think freely. When his chest ached, almost as if Julia’s spot there had been a part of his own flesh, he just reminded himself that he had made the right decision.

  He thought about his own parents. All the reasons his father had for marrying his mother had long since faded away. Luke could see it in the creases of his father’s face, and when his dad acted differently around young, attractive women. Luke was embarrassed by their mutual apathy and aversion towards one another. It was like curing smokers by forcing them to have one cigarette after another until they vomited or passed out, or like painting everything you own red because it’s your favorite color.

  The one thing Luke had seen which held more revulsion than death was the turning of the sacred into the mundane. It was for this reason that he played the most beautiful compositions sparingly, and only ate snow crab on his birthday. The first time he kissed Julia, it was indescribable. He had spent entire nights with other girls and not realized such a feeling was possible. But eventually, kissing her felt just as romantic as eating breakfast. They argued about some tedious errand one day and Luke wondered how he ended up with a needy girl who only seemed to cry all the time. So he got out. For the past few weeks, she had barely crossed his mind. He could breathe easily now. He never thought about her being with someone else, though.

  Last night, Luke had stopped by a new favorite spot, a used bookstore called the Red Trolley; it was shoved into a corner of downtown and crammed from floor to ceiling with old books. It was impossible to tell how big the place actually was; narrow, crooked passageways snaked in between precariously stacked shelves. It was a dimly lit maze of surprising section titles, scrawled with magic marker on laminated signs. As Luke approached the ‘Italian Composers’ section to aid his research for a Music Theory paper, he caught sight of an unusual shade of pink in the next row. The recollection of the scene was like a hot poker, jabbing Luke’s liver. He felt like smashing something, or throwing up.

  It was Julia.  She had never looked so good, and roundabout her slight waist was a foreign arm: the thin shirtsleeve was rolled, revealing a velvety network of protruding veins and a tattoo of a fret board from the wrist up the back of the whole arm. His name was Jonah Vitry. Luke had heard he was overseas studying journalism or something. Jonah’s bronzed hand moved comfortably about the small of her back, the shallow curves that used to belong to Luke. Suddenly Luke knew what the pink color reminded him of. It was like the pale soft shade that ballerinas wore, but aged, as if it had been sitting in an attic for fifty years. Shades of gold, mustard, and taupe, and even brown, had seemingly been added to the original pastel. It made his eyes feel warm and foolish for not seeing it before. It was beautiful. He thought of all the antique shops she loved. What had she been looking for, anyway? His face had blazed scarlet.  He left the bookstore with a sick, trembling sensation that made all real concentration impossible. His chest ached.

  Luke abruptly crossed the street. Patches of sunlight warmed the wet ground and drew the steamy midmorning mist up into pale golden bars between the shadows. He absentmindedly climbed the stone steps up to the music house and pushed open the heavy, mildewed front doors. All was quiet except for the sound of a solitary Grand. Someone was playing the first movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. It was Julia’s favorite. Luke moved slowly towards the sound, afraid to make a noise against the sacred tones emanating from the concert hall. He took a seat in the back; the hall was completely enveloped in shadow, save for the yellow stage light bathing the old man at the piano. It was Dr. Corelli. The final, heavy chords were still thick in the air when the light glinted off his wedding band, and without turning around, he spoke to Luke. “There’s a girl here looking for you. Said she had something to give you…” Luke was out the door before he could finish, racing down the ancient wooden hallways towards the practice wing. The tension in his stomach emptied to despair when he saw her. The pale, logical looking girl from his Literature class was sliding some papers under the door of his practice room. He stopped running. “I thought you might need the class notes,” she said. He realized that, after three years of classes together, he didn’t even know her name. She was one of Julia's friends. Dumbfounded, Luke muttered something, and she walked away. Luke stared at her back. “What’s your name?” he blurted, his voice ready to break. Startled, she turned and said, “Jasmine.” 

  “What do girls want?” he asked, ready to fall to his knees. He remembered giving a presentation about Satie in one of the classes they shared. After giving him a perplexed look, a smile crept slowly over her face. “Bar lines and key signatures,” she said, and walked away. Inside his practice room, he dug out some Beethoven sheet music. For the first time in his life, he felt like building something that would last.