The Bridge Across Forever: A True Love Story

She didn't catch the words, but she got the idea and turned it down.

"Thank you," I said. "Wookie, is that ... do you honestly consider-that-to be music?"

Had I watched carefully, beyond the delicious figure in the flowered bathrobe, hair tied and covered in a towel-turban to dry, I would have seen disappointment in her eyes.

"You don't like it?" she said.

"You love music, you have studied music all your life. How can you call that inharmony we're hearing, that rat sort of discord, how can you call that music?"

"Poor Richard," she said. "Lucky Richard! You have so much to learn about music! So many beautiful symphonies, sonatas, concertos that you get to hear for the first time!" She stopped the tape, rewound it and took it from the machine.

"Maybe it's a little soon for Bartok. But I promise you. The day will come when you will listen to what you have just heard and you will call it glorious."

She looked over her collection of tapes, chose one and put it into the machine where the Bartok had been. "How would you like to hear some Bach . . . would you like to hear your great-grandaddy's music?"

"You are probably going to throw me out of your house inverted for saying this," I told her, "but I can only listen to him for half an hour, then I get lost and a little bored."

"Bored? Listening to Bach? Then you don't know how to listen; you've never learned to listen to him!" She pressed a rocker-switch and the tape began; Grandaddy on some monster organ, it was clear. "First you have to sit right. Here. Come sit here, between the speakers. This is where we sit when we want to hear all the music."

It felt like musical kindergarten, but I loved being with her, sitting very close to her.

"The complexity of it alone should make it irresistible for you. Now, most people listen to music horizontally, following along with the melody. But you can listen struc

turally, too; have you ever done that?"

"Structurally?" I said. "No."

"Early music was all linear,'Vshe said over a landslide of organ-notes, "simple melodies strung out one at a time, primitive themes. But your grandaddy took complex themes, with tricky little rhythms, and spun them out together at odd intervals so they created intricate structures and made vertical sense as well-harmony! Some Bach harmonies are as dissonant as Bartok, and Bach was getting away with them a hundred years before anyone even thought of dissonance."

She stopped the tape, slid onto the piano-bench, and without a blink of her eye there was the last chord from the speakers in her hand on the keyboard.

"There." It sounded clearer on the piano than it had on the speakers. "See? Here's one motif . . ." She played. "And here's another . . . and another. Now watch how he builds this. We start with the A theme in the right hand. Now A enters again four bars later in the left hand; do you hear it? They go on together until . . . here comes B. And A is subordinate to it just now. Here's A entering again in the right. And now . . . C!"

She set out themes, one by one, then put them together. Slowly at first, then faster. I barely followed. What was Simple Addition for her was Advanced Calculus to me; by closing my eyes and squashing my forehead together with my hands I could nearly understand.

She started again, explaining every step. As she played, a light began to glow through an inner symphony-hall that had been dark all my life.

She was right! There were themes among themes, dancing together, as if Johann Sebastian had locked secrets into his music for the private pleasure of those who learned to see beneath surfaces.

"Aren't you a joy!" I said, excited to understand what she was saying. "I hear it! It's really there!"

She was as glad as I, and forgot to get dressed or brush her hair. She moved sheet-music from the back of the music-shelf on the piano to the front. Johann Sebastian Bach, it said, and then a thunderstorm of notes and sweeps and dots and sharps and flats and ties and trills and sudden commands in Italian. Right at the beginning, before the pianist could get her wheels up and fly into that storrn, she was hit with a con brio, which I figured meant she had to play either with brightness, with coldness, or with cheese.

Awesome. My friend, with whom I only recently emerged from warm sheets and voluptuous shadows, with whom I spoke English with ease, Spanish with laughter, German and French with much puzzlement and creative experiment, my friend had all at once burst out singing a new and vastly complicated language that I was on my first day's learning to hear.

The music broke from the piano like clear cold water from a prophet-touched rock, pouring and splashing around us while her fingers leaped and spread, curled and stiffened and melted and flickered hi magic pass and streaked lightning above the keyboard.

Never before had she played for me, claiming that she was out of practice, too self-conscious even to uncover the

keys of the instrument while I was in the room. Something had happened between us, though . . . because we were lovers, now, was she free to play, or was she the teacher so desperate to help her deaf one that nothing could keep her from music?

Her eyes traced every raindrop of that hurricane-on-pa-per; she had forgotten that she had a body, except that the hands remained, the blurred fingers, a spirit that found its song in the heart of a man died two hundred years ago, raised triumphant from his tomb by her wish for living music.

"Leslie! My God! Who are you?"

She turned her head only a little toward me and half-smiled, her eyes and her mind and her hands still on the music storming upward.

Then she looked at me; the music stopped instantly but for strings trembling harplike inside the piano.