Leave the Dirge for the Birds and the Bees

Anna plays the piano, and looks outside for inspiration, hoping to find something strange, tragic, beautiful, interesting. Maybe a suicide? But when the depressed man jumps out of the window, he floats down gently. He is perplexed at the outcome, and walks to the nearby cafe, never to attempt suicide again. Instead, he orders an espresso and reads the newspaper. A new railroad is being built somewhere in the west. “Perhaps I'll move to the west” he thinks, “and take up farming. No man can be depressed while he has his nose to the soil and works 20 hours a day. I’ll throw all my misery into the harvesting of squash and potatoes and leeks.”

Anna allows herself to daydream on and on in this fashion. Occasionally she leans back in from the windowsill and walks towards her piano. She sits down at the bench and doodles on the music sheet. Little pictures of the people she saw down below. It’s mostly a birds eye view so it's all hats and hair and the bulbous dresses of some of the women.

She thinks of the pedestrians, and suicide, and floating, and trains, and birds, and worms. And she thinks of all her former lovers, and her greatest enemies (and sometimes they’re the same), and still nothing brings her music. Nothing inspires her. She walks morosely back to her windowsill. A window opens on the building opposite hers. Out pops the head of a man smoking a pipe. His name is William and his hair is thinning but he is still very handsome. She knows that he plays the cello, and is quite talented. She watches the stream of smoke from his pipe curl around in the air. There is hardly any wind, as if the weather itself is uninspired. They greet each other.

“Are you having issues with your music?” He asks.

“I can’t string together anything. I’m all blocked up.” She says.

He looks down at the ground, watches a man hurry towards a woman waiting for him on a bench. The man apologizes profusely for being late and kisses her hand and cheek. He sits down next to her, and pulls out a gimlet, which he then proceeds to bore into her skull. She doesn’t seem to feel any pain. He pours spices from various vials into the hole and plugs it up with a cork. 

The pianist watched this as well. The couple stand up on the bench together and walk arm in arm along the street, then vanish around the corner. 

While staring at the corner where the couple disappeared from view, she says to the neighbor, “I just can’t seem to find any inspiration. That’s my problem. It’s like I have nothing to express.”

He shakes his head. “There’s no such thing as inspiration. You just work at it until good stuff comes out, like training a dog until one day they surprise you with a trick you didn’t even teach ‘em.” 

He thought about it for a moment, and took in the frown lines around her mouth. The budding bags under her eyes, the listless look in her eyes which doesn’t seem to take much in.

“Or maybe you just need to get laid. It’s often that simple.” he said confidently. 

Normally she’d be insulted and shut the window without even saying a word. But this time she stops herself. Maybe that’s why she remains uninspired. Maybe it’s the puritan in her that keeps her wrists writhing in artistic chains.

She smiles and looks over at her piano. She can see a multitude of dust motes swirling in the late afternoon air, frantically searching for a place to land. They’ll all get in the crevices of the keys. She can feel those same dust motes and skin flakes and microscopic pieces of dirt and spittle of street eschatology landing between the keys of her own mouth, till the music of her words are prosaic and stilted. She suddenly wants to floss, to freshen up, to do something. 

“I’m coming over!” she yells to him, loud enough to ensure that the pedestrians hear her. William simply lifts his pipe in acknowledgment and shuts his window. Then a few moments later, changes his mind and returns to open it but only a little, just enough to let in the air and let out the upcoming fuck. 

He sits by his cello and plucks the strings absentmindedly while waiting for the knock on his door. When it comes, he stands up, plucks a flower from the vase on his table and walks over. He opens the door and hands her the flower. 

“No, no courtship. None of that. Just put it back in the vase.”

He shrugs and tosses the flower on the floor.

She lifts up her long black skirt enough to maneuver herself over the threshold of his door frame and is about to step inside, but stops herself.

“I’ve never done this with a stranger before.”

“Am I a stranger?” 

“Well, you’re not quite a stranger. An acquaintance, perhaps. And even just barely.”

“Maybe our music knows each other better than we do.”

It was true. Some nights, especially the hot ones that demanded that the windows stay open, his cello playing and her piano playing seemed to come together in subconscious harmony.

“I don’t even know your name.” she said.

“Good. That'll help with the inspiration.”

“I thought you don’t believe in that”

“It doesn't matter. You do, right?”

“What name should I yell out while we do it?”

“You don’t have to yell any name out, but if that is your wont, then I think the first name that comes to mind would be sufficient.”

As he began to unbutton, uncork, unfasten, zip down, slide down, rip off, pull over, she wondered what name it would be. She could smell the pipe smoke all about him, and pretended he had climbed the very fires of hell to reach her in his lust. Her imagination was already unleashed, and she only hoped that the sex would transform it all into music. He took her hand and guided her into his bedroom. She looked over his shoulder through his window and into her own window. She saw just the very corner of her piano on the other side in her apartment, where those dust motes had finally settled and christened their new home.

Afterwards, he helped put her clothes back on and gave her a kiss on each part of her body before it was to be covered up again. The whole thing was strangely cordial, formal, and yet passionate. They each had a need, and had felt in each other a certain comfort to provide that need without any judgment, despite being (hitherto) acquaintances. They said goodnight to each other. There was no discussion of them meeting this way again, though it certainly wasn’t out of the question. He didn’t walk her to the door but instead went to the bathroom. As she walked out of his apartment she saw the flower on the ground from earlier and decided to pick it up. She carried it along as she descended the stairs, went out the front of the building and entered her own building.

She immediately sat down at the piano, blowing a big gust of air over it and freeing all the dust so that they may emigrate back to the chaotic realm of lightness and delicacy which resides in a place governed by austere gravity. She placed the flower on top of the piano lid. She needed a new music sheet. This one was already ruined with doodles. She hit the E and F keys a couple times while reclining her head in her hand. No music yet was bubbling out of her, but she was patient. She felt the night would last eternally. Then from the other side of the building she heard the sound of her recent lover's cello. It was something new she hadn’t heard before. Something sonorous and somnolent. Much later she would be surprised and excited to learn the name of that piece he titled, “The pianist’s lullaby.” She abandoned the piano for the evening, picked up the music sheet and pen and walked over to her divan. She stretched herself out comfortably and  listened to him play while sketching his face, his body, his cello, everything she remembered about him. She tried to sketch his self-assuredness and aloof attitude, but she never was good at capturing such complexities of character on paper. Then a melody began in her head, soft yet composed. She let it trail around in the back of her mind like the smoke of his pipe, which incidentally she was just putting the finishing touches on.

Suddenly she threw the music sheet in the air.

“The Cello Man!” she exclaimed. Then she laughed. 

“That’s what I yelled out, I said, ‘‘oh, Cello Man!’” she laughed again even harder and rolled over on her stomach to let the couch material soak up the tears. She was too tired to reach for the tissues, wherever they were.

“There’s my song”, she mumbled happily, then fell asleep. Her dreamself is already composing the piece. It’s mysterious, subtle, warm, and comforting, like a sudden blackout of electricity in a storm, or like William the Cello Man himself.