There is a closet in this house I have never once been invited into, and tonight she opened it and pulled out a hard black case I did not know existed, shaped like nothing useful, with a handle worn pale where a hand has gripped it many times before mine ever touched this house. I want that on record before anything else happens tonight, because I think it matters: this was not a new thing. This was an old thing that had been hiding.
She set it flat on the couch and undid two metal latches that popped like knuckles, and I got up on the cushion beside it to supervise, because that is simply correct procedure whenever a container opens in my presence. Inside was a wooden shape, honey-colored, with a long thin neck and six thin lines running down it, and a smell came up out of that case that I did not expect — dust, yes, obviously, but under the dust something warm and old, like a room that’s been shut up a long time with the heat off. I put my whole face near it to be sure. She didn’t stop me.
She lifted it out by the neck, which seemed like an undignified way to carry anything, and settled it against herself the way she sometimes settles me, except backwards, body tucked under one arm instead of held against her chest. Her other hand went to the thin lines and pulled one.
The sound that came out of that wooden box was, and I say this with no exaggeration whatsoever, deeply wrong. Flat and sour and a little bit sick-sounding, the kind of note that makes the fur along my spine want to stand up and discuss the matter. She winced too, which told me I wasn’t the only one who heard it. She turned a little peg at the top, plucked again, turned it more, plucked again, and the note crawled upward each time like something being dragged somewhere it didn’t want to go, until it finally landed on a sound that was merely strange instead of actively offensive, and she moved on to the next line and started the whole business over.
This took a long time. I supervised the entire process from the arm of the couch, occasionally leaning in closer to watch her fingers, because her fingers were doing something I have genuinely never seen them do — not typing, not the phone-tapping, not the kitchen-chopping, but a kind of careful pressing-down on the thin lines with one hand while the other hand did the pulling, both hands working at once on completely different jobs. I don’t fully trust anything that requires both hands doing unrelated things simultaneously. It feels like it shouldn’t be allowed.
Once all six lines were apparently acceptable to her, she started playing something. I use the word playing generously. It was four notes, always the same four notes, in the same order, over and over, and every third or fourth time one of the notes would come out wrong and she would stop, say something short and unkind to the air, and start the four notes again from the beginning. I counted — not eleven times, not any number I’m going to claim with confidence, but many, many times, enough that I began to recognize the shape of the correct version and feel a small private satisfaction whenever she got there without stumbling, and a small private dread whenever I could tell, a half-second before she played it, that the stumble was coming.
I don’t know how I could tell. I just could. Something in the way her hand hesitated over the lines before it happened.
At one point she stopped altogether and just sat there with it, not playing anything, looking at the wall in that specific way she looks at things she isn’t actually seeing. I didn’t like that part. The bad notes I could tolerate, even the repeating, but the stillness afterward had a different weight to it, and I got up and walked directly across her lap and the lower curve of the wooden box to let her know I was there, which is the correct move in situations like this and always has been.
She laughed, a short real one, and said something about how it had been a long time, and started again.
Eventually — and I’m not proud of this, but a diary with no honesty in it isn’t worth keeping — I put one paw directly on the thin lines myself, mostly to see what would happen, and what happened was a sound so chaotic and ugly that I actually flinched away from my own paw, as if it had betrayed me on purpose. She laughed again, longer this time, and moved me gently off her lap and onto the cushion beside her instead, not angry, just relocating the problem. I sat where I was put and watched the strings very closely after that, the way you watch something that has already proven itself capable of turning on you without warning.
The four notes kept going. Better, some stretches. Worse in others. There’s a particular moment in the sequence — I could point to it, if I had any way of pointing to anything — where her hand seems to have to jump from one spot on the neck to a spot much farther away, very quickly, and that’s where almost all of the mistakes happen. I started to brace for it along with her. I don’t know what that says about me, that I was keeping time with a piece of wood and some wire I’d never seen before tonight, but I was.
I don’t think this is a sad thing, what’s happening on this couch. I want to be fair about that, because at the start I thought it might be, with the stillness and the sighing. But her face, when she gets the four notes right in a row, does something I recognize — the same loosening around her eyes that happens when something has gone well after not going well for a while. So whatever this is, whatever the case has been hiding in that closet all this time, I think it’s wanted.
It’s still going on, as I write this, if a thing happening in the same room I’m sitting in can be called “as I write this.” She has moved on to playing the four notes slightly faster, which has reintroduced almost all of her old mistakes, which seems like a strange decision to me, but I am not in charge of the box or what she does to it. I’ve settled myself against the outside of the case instead, where the dust-and-old-room smell is strongest, and from here the wrong notes don’t sound quite as wrong. They just sound like something she’s in the middle of, the way I am sometimes in the middle of something and don’t especially want an audience for the part where it isn’t working yet.
The four notes catch, stumble, catch again. I’m not leaving until they hold.