One.
Alone. She

Stood alone. With

Music, yes. But

Really all by her

self. Alone. Be-

gan to play the

Harsh chords that

Begged help me

Out.

Beat one was a rest.

Silence turned to music,

Formal end of the silence

That had always come be-

fore. Chaconne began on the

Second beat, and once be-

gun, it wouldn’t stop un-

til it reached the very

End.

To scratch the strings for that first note was like beginning life: once
you breathe, heart pumps, it doesn’t stop till death. Margaret hoped
performing Bach’s Chaconne would be like that, a change, a brink, a portal.
She curved her pinky on the string; she found the chord; she took a heaving
breath. And looked for Annie. One. She dropped her bow across
three strings and its horsehair strip set them vibrating in a wobbly chord
that smoothed as it went, like a bicycle starting to roll.

That was it—there were no other rests in the piece, unless you counted the
silence after the last note. But that wasn’t a composed quiet, nor would it
be truly silent. The seconds would hold heater creaking, pew shifting,
breathing, the shimmery ringing of her final notes. Applause.

*

Margaret had once heard a piece composed entirely of rests. The pianist
stepped onstage, sat, and counted silently for what the program said was
100 measures. How do you measure silence? The audience waited. The pianist
stood, bowed, and people clapped.

“If that was music, then what isn’t?” Margaret said to John, her sort-of
boyfriend at the time. “Everything is…or could be. Maybe it depends on
whether you’re listening or just hearing.”

John wasn’t interested in the concert or what it meant. “Maybe silence is
silence,” he said. “Can’t you just enjoy life without trying to turn it
into something else for once?”

Margaret so often made her life into something else that she had come to
think of the transformations and distractions as the best part. Vladimir
Nabokov’s father won the duel—no, the duel was called off—near the gate
Margaret passed through on her way to work, the gate separating the grocery
store parking lot from the courtyard of the housing development next door.
The store was a mile away from Margaret’s apartment, all uphill, she
planned to tell her children. Sometimes, she wished she could just get
there and get home. But listening to a podcast of a short story made the
whole thing wonderful. In that walk, she lived parallel lives. The
undersecretary lunched with someone more or less important as Margaret
climbed the hill past the two-family houses—two front doors, gambrel
roofs—of Curtis Street. A boy pretended to read important books in city
heat as she crossed the bridge and watched her shadow on the sidewalk. And
there they were, Nabokov and his dad, every time she walked through that
gate, months after she’d listened to a Speak, Memory excerpt on
her iPod. This is how Margaret chose to see the world. Or not to see it.

*

Rest. TWO three

One TWO three

One TWO three

One two three

That was the rhythm of the piece, four-bar stanzas, each a variant on the
theme. The Chaconne had sixty-four variations. Life had rhythms too; Earth
and Sun in motion. Days and months and years. In life, you never knew how
many variations were left.

Hannah, in a white wool coat, sat in the front pew on the center aisle,
boots crossed. Her face was still round and rosy, and her lips, which
turned down at the corners, were open as in contemplation. The figure of
Hannah in Margaret’s head was that of girl in a party dress with
full-length poofy sleeves that wrinkled as she moved her bow arm. “One,
two, Mississippi hot dog, one two, Mississippi hot dog,” went the rhythm of
the minuet Hannah had played at that recital, the little phrase meant to
keep kids from rushing. Hannah had looked up to Margaret, four years older,
who had performed the Bach Double that year. Then their paths diverged.

*

It was a year ago that Margaret was walking to work, earbuds in, and the
radio said that Hannah Sharpe would play Bach’s Chaconne. At age eighteen,
Hannah was playing the most difficult, greatest piece of music written for
violin. Margaret smiled hard at people she passed, somewhere between
happiness and jealousy and trying not to cry. She crunched through snow in
bars of three, leaning first with one foot, then the other, as if stamping
out her feelings. By the time the piece reached its climax, she was
steaming up her scarf. And she was at the gate. Joe was getting carts in a
yellow fluorescent vest. He waved at her, and she winced back, then sharply
turned away and kept walking, over the bridge, away from the store: a
“no-show no-call.”

Margaret turned off her cell phone and turned up her iPod. Hannah played
well. Margaret walked past the river, up to the door, up the stairs, onto
her bed, onto her back. She would focus, at last, on her distraction.

*

The first eight measures gave the theme. Then the Chaconne began its slow,
convoluted development. Margaret could almost imagine some voiceover as she
started the second variation.

Chaconne two three

Bach’s opus

Written after his

Wife Maria Barbara

Died.

Did Bach pace the floor in threes, repeating variations on the pattern as
if hoping that something would change, or change back, if he kept trying,
praying, repeating? Sixty-four variations without rest. Alone.

The notes rang in the tall church like a struck tuning fork, the
high-pitched sounds that hang in the air as the music carries on. They rose
from the violin and gathered in the air and ears, and they mixed, forming
ghost-like chords. Margaret had once thought that the ringing of notes was
a sign. It was a magical sound. It felt right. Not silly.

*

“Remember how serious we were? God,” Annie had said to Margaret one day
during a college summer as they looked back on their childhood friendship,
the hours they’d spent near each other with a CD player, listening to
musicals.

“I know. In ninth grade, I wrote a whole essay about the relationship
between Jean Valjean and Javert.” Margaret really did love Les Misérables—the musical—loved it enough to carry around the
green library book, with its too many thin pages, for an entire year in
hopes of discovering in literature what she had already found in music.

“You had all the words memorized.”

“I still do. Remember when we listened to Phantom of the Opera in
the dark?”

“Yeah. It actually seemed scary then.” Annie paused. “Now I know they’re
not serious, musicals. They’re kind of silly.”

Margaret wanted to go along with her friend, but—

“But his voice filled my spirit with a strange sweet sound,” she
could have retorted, borrowing Christine Daaé’s lines from Phantom. “

In that night there was music in my mind. And through music my soul
began to soar.

” Music did that for Margaret.

During elementary and even high school, they had both taken “Les Miz” and Phantom of the Opera and Rent as
expressions of what was most important, most essential in life. Margaret
thought the same thing about all music. In a violin concerto, the minor
sections were sad or conflicted moments and the recapitulations, happy
endings. The beauty of music, supposedly, came from the way it expressed
the emotions of life.

Except music wasn’t like life. It was better. Not silly: transcendent. Like
Christine Daaé, Margaret loved a phantom: music itself.

No living person made Margaret shiver like Tchaikovsky’s music did. When
she thought of Bach’s Chaconne and tried to connect it to some life
experience, she ended up thinking of listening to Hilary Hahn play it, or
of trying to play it by ear herself, with the CD as her guide, pacing her
high-school bedroom. If the Chaconne made her think of any one person, it
was her violin teacher, hers and Hannah’s, who had given her the Bach CD as
a parting gift before she moved away. He had since died.

*

And Annie still wasn’t there. Margaret had texted her: “Door’s open. It’s
okay to come in late” before the recital started.

Now Margaret began a gentler variation. The melody itself told a story that
was, if not happy, bittersweet. The notes that accompanied this melody,
forming double stops, or two notes played together on different strings,
gave the music dissonance. It was not just sad; it was a pleasant story
marred by grief. Or loss.

Bach had gone on a trip, and when he returned, his wife had died, suddenly.
Then he wrote the Chaconne, a fifth movement added onto the partita’s usual
four.

Arpeggios implored the listener to pay attention. Margaret loved this part,
with its double stops, the melody entering on the lower of the two
simultaneously bowed strings, then answering itself on the upper half of
the following chord, because it was like playing a duet with herself. Her
fingers were in place. She lifted her bow from the strings after each
chord—“smile with your bow”—to let it ring. And so it did. But what did the
ringing mean? A nod of cosmic approval? An echo of notes played in tune.

A sultry, lazy, cat-like variation sliding into thirty-second notes, four
times as fast, running up and down the E string to transition to yet more
quick finger-pattering tones. Insistent. Somewhere past the middle of the
four-bar phrase, the notes would repeat themselves, then break out of the
pattern in desperation before beginning, resigned, the next variation.
Circling. The thirty-second notes formed broken chords spanning all four
strings. In each chord, one note stood out from the others, usually the
open D, the tonic. The notes that complemented that note would change, but
everything returned to it in the end.

A strident section. (What a word, she thought.) The music commanded itself.
Triumphant runs of thirty-second notes followed by solemn bangs on the
lower strings, those notes her teacher told her not to fear, just slam down
the bow. It seemed like the piece was about to end. It returned to the
beginning theme. Alone. She was alone.

And then, something magical. Did the audience notice? The piece didn’t end.
It switched to a major key. For a moment, the music was optimistic. As in
the beginning, the melody played on one string was accompanied by notes on
another. But this time, the accompanying notes were consonant. Not
strident; it had its own quiet glow, like someone standing in a corner,
content. The insistent notes, four repeated, were brighter: A instead of D;
dominant instead of tonic. In the moment, you didn’t know what it meant, if
it would end well or not, but you hoped. Margaret made her music as loving
as she could, for Bach, for Annie, for the air. Behold, behear, beloved.

The melody turned to broken chords, slower this time, two double stops
separated by a flick of the wrist in the same rhythm as the opening theme,
but in a major key now. This wasn’t the brokenness of injury; it was more
like enunciation. The chords were majestic and seemed to lead somewhere,
like a gate.

She heard something at the back of the church and crunched her bow for a
second. She stared harder at the Virgin Mary.

The gate swung open. Oh God, the double stops, in a descending scale.
Normally double stops happened once in a while, here and there; now the
melody had the richness of an accordion. The two parts sung together,
consummate. That longing that always seemed to swell midway through the
variation was there, but this time, it was fulfilled. Had Bach stumbled on
some joy? Margaret shivered so hard that her legs moved underneath her.

This section in this piece of music was supposed to be the peak of the peak
of her year. Those double stops were like nothing she’d experienced before
in life. Then again, there was one supposedly transcendent experience that
she hadn’t had. More and more, it embarrassed her. It used to be something
she didn’t consider important. But now, at twenty-three, she was starting
to feel that without having had sex, she couldn’t judge anything. Maybe all
that she knew was “lame” in comparison. She feared that the love she had,
for art, for her parents, for mentors she admired, was somehow glaringly
naïve. And she felt guilty both for her naïveté and for her faithlessness.

She didn’t believe it. Her love for Bach was real. Her goosebumps were
real. If orgasms were better…

The following measures were wistful. The music began to wander, hands in
pockets again.

*

“I don’t think I want to be in a relationship right now,” John had said,
moving his glasses up on his nose. And Margaret wasn’t disappointed. She
had met up with him the night he broke up with her, as on other nights, out
of a sense of obligation. She wasn’t really attracted to him. But then
again, she wasn’t attracted to anyone, and he liked her.

*

John was there now to watch her perform, and she still didn’t feel anything
but embarrassment at her lack of feeling.

Damn it. If she hadn’t been playing, she would have made an “ech” sound.
She thought of her book there on the front pew: Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Was D.H. Lawrence right? Was physical
communication the only kind you could trust? Were the other forms of
expression, the other signals sent and received, just “counterfeit
emotions?” The way she understood Lawrence, she’d never really felt love.
Bach, books, friendships—these were dildos. And she didn’t know what a
dildo felt like.

Well, she decided, she’d had aural sex. She was half serious.

Here near the end, a dramatic scale on the D string, with every note echoed
by an open A, that specter of a repeated note. But then somehow the music
picked itself up. Something in the repetition shifted from meek weariness
to something like gusto. A series of ascending arpeggios: the notes rapid
as they had been so many measures ago when it seemed the piece was about to
end. Triumphant bangs on the lower strings.

It really did end this time. Back to the opening theme. Five chords formed
a question mark. The last note was a D played as a double stop, the curved
fourth finger on the G string next to the open D, two parts united. But the
piece, which so clearly began in D minor, now seemed unsure what key it was
in. Is an open D major or minor? This ending could be happy or sad
depending on how she heard it or depending on which notes she imagined
accompanying that open D. There was hope. Was there?

The Chaconne began with chords like open wounds, and ended with ambiguous
peace. In her little story, there was hope for Bach. But as for Margaret?
Debatable. When she had walked away from the grocery, euphoric and jealous,
she had that feeling, so familiar, that this probably wasn’t truly the
right thing to do but that nothing else seemed any better.

She thought back to that first beat. That quarter-note rest was defined by
the sound that followed. Beat one was what came before beat two. She hoped
that performing the Chaconne would define and give meaning to all that had
led up to it. She wanted to look back on the last twelve months as the year
before everything changed. She’d been holding her breath, making a wish,
screwing up her eyes, and preparing to run at a brick wall in hopes that,
like with Harry Potter’s platform nine and three-quarters, it
would dissolve onto another world. Crazy. Whether or not it was crazy
depended on now.

*

The day after she quit her job, Margaret woke up and played her violin and
listened to music, happy, though she spoke only to herself. At 5 p.m., when
everyone was coming home from work, she left the house. She enjoyed the
fresh air on her face and the movement of the streets. Then she went home
and listened to Itzhak Perlman’s vibrating, sliding, drunk-with-drama
rendition of the Paganini violin concerto.

The money ran out. Since she didn’t play well enough to get paid for
performing, she started teaching violin students in her apartment. She
wasn’t that good at teaching, either. The only thing she was really good
at, if you could even consider it a skill, was listening to music and
letting it carry her from her life. Once music became her life, though, it
stopped being an escape. Everyday activities, then, became her music.

Sometimes, after giving a tough lesson, she would walk to the grocery
store, past the Nabokov gates, pick up a recipe card, and buy the
ingredients for “chicken with harvest vegetables,” or something like that.
She was so happy to see her cashier.

“Hey, how are you?”

“Aagh,” Margaret said. “Not so great. How are you?”

“Doing very well, thanks. Keeping busy.”

There was a line of customers.

“Have a good day, Margaret!”

So she went home, chopped vegetables for soup, and enjoyed the feeling that
something was happening by virtue of the pot on the stove. After dinner,
she resumed her violin practice.

She also enrolled in a composition course. In her compositions, she put
together recorded sounds from life—squeaking wheels, the sound of sneakers
on pavement. And she scheduled a recital, rented a church, made plans to
perform the greatest, most-difficult piece ever written for violin.

*

Now it was over. She’d played the Chaconne. Margaret lifted her bow, felt
its weight in the air. She let out her breath. And looked toward the back
of the church.

Annie wasn’t there. Margaret hoped if she played well enough, and
concentrated, and didn’t look at the door, Annie would be there when she
finished. She had played her best for that rustle. But there was someone
else there, a man.

Next on the program was Margaret’s composition. She queued it up on the CD
player. It told the story of a week, seven variations on the day. Each
variation opened with the sound of an alarm clock and ended with the
silence of sleep. A knife scraping butter on toast. Water running in the
bathroom. There was the peculiar minor-seventh squeal of the subway leaving
the station. Before their fight, Margaret had asked Annie to carry a
digital recorder for a week and let her, Margaret, edit the sound.

Annie had been glad to do it at the time. Margaret had felt close to Annie
as she arranged the recorded noises into what she called music. At the same
time, she felt a sense of foreboding about creating this other, musical
version of her friend, as if an alternate were necessary.

The piece ended in a measure of silence. Then people clapped.

Now they formed a line down the center aisle. There was Hannah in that
spotless white coat, violin case on her shoulder.

“It was beautiful, Margaret,” Hannah said. “Such a great piece.”

“Thank you for coming. What are you up to now, Hannah?” Margaret asked.

“Oh, my chamber group is rehearsing at 5.” She looked at her watch. “I’d
better run, but it was great to see you! Thanks so much for inviting me.”

“Thank you for coming.”

And so it continued as people filed out of the church. The exchange:
compliment; acknowledgement; hug; goodbye. John congratulated her, and she
thanked him for coming. He was fine, he said: busy with work and with
contradancing, his main hobby. But no Annie. Whoever did come in midway
through the performance had apparently slipped out. It was a queue of
disappointments.

Margaret walked home from the church with her violin in one hand and the CD
of her friend Annie in her pocket. She’d played the Chaconne. A teacher’s
praise came back to her: “We’re so proud of you.” But then she heard
Annie’s voice, the recorded voice. Don’t think about it, she thought, and
slipped on ice. She cursed more than necessary.

And then she was home and unlocking the door. The wreath smelled good.
There was mail: holiday catalogues, the utility bill.

She took out her violin and played a waltz. From the beginning, this piece
was not about love but about regret, the memory of a waltz. She closed her
eyes as played and swayed from side to side, bending her knees and bobbing
up and down. She and John had danced together. They’d met at a contradance.
But this waltz was about itself.

Margaret opened her eyes.

*

They had been on a morning run around the lake, she and Annie. It was two
weeks before the recital. Margaret had earbuds in.

“My cousin’s wedding is next month,” Annie said.

“Oh yeah?” Margaret was listening to Paganini caprices, trying to memorize
them. She did the fingerings on her left leg as they ran.

“In New York,” Annie continued. “I’m thinking about going.” Margaret
fiddled with her iPod. The volume spiked.

“Are you listening to—”

“Paganini.”

“—me?”

Margaret knew her mistake as she made it, but that was too late. Annie ran
ahead. Margaret pulled out her earbuds and tucked them down into her sports
bra.

“Hey,” she said, panting. “I’m sorry. I was distracted.” She forced a
smile, as if the facial expressions of “no big deal” could make it reality.

“I’ll ask somebody else,” Annie said, not looking at her.

Margaret apologized the whole car ride home. Annie didn’t answer. Margaret
got out, and her friend drove away.

Itzhak Perlman was still playing away in her bra. Margaret had reached in
and shut it off.

*

At the conservatory the day after her recital, Margaret stamped the snow
off her boots. She signed in at the desk. She entered the lecture hall and
felt affronted by what was projected on the white screen: “Creating mood in
music.”

“Today we are going to discuss how to evoke particular feelings through
art—music, of course,” the professor said, in his British accent. “I’m sure
you’re all familiar with the feelings of happiness, contentment, sadness,
and so forth, that music produces in the listener. They seem pure and
simple, eh? But for you, the composers, the task of evocation is not as
simple as ‘having a feeling’ and picking up your instrument. No, musical
emotions are engineered. And today, using our musical building blocks…”

People around her were taking notes. Margaret walked out.

As she opened the door to leave the conservatory, she heard a voice behind
her. “Hey, Margaret? Sorry to bother you.” It was Jonah from the front
desk.

“No.” She turned around. “How are you?” She whispered, conscious of the
lecture nearby.

“Good, good. Listen, I was wondering, I get off work in an hour. I was
wondering if you might like to do something.”

“Oh…”

“I came to your recital. Actually, I came in late. The door was open. It
was great!”

“Thanks. And thank you for putting up that flier at the conservatory.”

“Of course. I wanted to see you perform. I didn’t say hello or anything.
Guess I was shy. You must have been pretty tired after, what is it,
eighty-four variations? Hope you didn’t need help cleaning up.”

“Sixty-four—There was nothing to do, except maybe scrub the sound out of
the walls.”

“What?” He had a face like something out of Laura Ingalls Wilder, a
homesteader’s face. “No, it was perfect. I was sitting next to your old
friend—she introduced herself, what’s her name, Hannah? With the violin.
After you finished, she whispered ‘bravo!’”

“Really?”

“Of course really.” Jonah had a huge grin. “Listen, I live around here, and
I was planning to cook some enchiladas. You like Mexican food?”

“Yeah, that sounds great.”

*

Jonah unlocked the door to his apartment holding two grocery bags and a
six-pack of beer and motioned for her to go in. She was holding a bag of
pears. He seemed to be one of those people who could hold ten things and
still open doors for people.

They entered a dark purple room where a Phantom of the Opera
poster hung above a brocade sofa that was covered in round throw pillows. A
cat roused itself from the rug.

“Hey Ruby Foo,” Jonah said. “That’s my cat. Actually, the landlady’s. Cat’s
name’s really Penelope. I’m taking care of the place for this woman.”

“Is that your poster?”

“No, not mine. I haven’t even seen Cats. Why, are you a fan?”

“Sort of. I used to love it. Or I do love it, but it reminds me of
someone.”

The kitchen, to the right, was not the neatest room in the house. Jonah put
on some jazz. The falling leaves drift by the window… Jonah
offered her a beer and a seat at the kitchen table. Margaret wasn’t a jazz
connoisseur, but “Autumn Leaves” made her happy because Edith Piaf had
performed it: “Les Feuilles Mortes,” dead leaves. What beautiful death,
though.

“Can I help?” Margaret asked.

“No; I like to cook. Just make yourself comfortable.” She was very
comfortable. Her mind was empty, filled only with this feeling, like a
smile spilling over.

Jonah carried two glass bowls of salad over to the table and spooned the
enchiladas on top. Before he sat down, he flipped off the stereo. “I wanna
make sure I can really hear you,” he said.

“You know what interested me about you?” he asked her as they ate.

“What?”

“I like how you always sign your full name in the book, not just some
scribbled-off signature.”

“Hah. Well, I like the way you seemed so upbeat about everything. Like at
the fruit stand, you wanted oranges, but they had pears. So you bought
pears, and it seemed right, all of a sudden. They were three for a dollar,
so you bought three. It was just so nice.”

“You liked that? Well, you’re pretty upbeat yourself.” Margaret screwed up
her face.

“No, seriously. I remember one time, you came into the con with earbuds in,
and you just had this spring in your step, like you were dancing.”

She was smiling, still.

“What?” he asked, touching her cheek.

“That’s how I feel now.”

*

From magazines, it had seemed that sex was a visual art, the connection of
one beautiful body with another. But this was completely tactile.
Goosebumps. Warm skin. Slimy jousting. Fullness. Warmth. Pressure. Noses
bumping, cartilage jiggling. Pleasure. Gravity. Nearness. They lay next to
each other, tired, damp, glowing, but not for anyone to see. They engaged
in a sightless, sensual, wordless way. It was like music.

It was like playing violin, except that Margaret didn’t have to be in
control. It was like playing a violin that was also playing her. Skin
brushing hairs, hairs brushing skin, uncountable hairs brushing past each
other like bows on strings, tripping neuron upon neuron in the same way
that vibrations in the air bend hair cells of the inner ear to signal music
to the brain.