Intermezzo
I’ve written about this before. But maybe I missed something. I don’t think I did. Though maybe something small but important. Right now I can’t think what that could be. Anyway, I love remembering the incident. And that’s all it is, an incident, but one of my favorites with her. It was all in about five minutes. Six, seven, but short. I’d gone to her apartment building on Riverside Drive. Walked the forty blocks or so from my apartment on West 75th Street. This of course was New York. We’d been seeing each other almost every day for a few months. I said hello to the doorman in the lobby. The elevator was waiting for me, door open, and I got in and pressed the button for the seventh floor. As I rode up I took my key ring out with the key to her apartment on it, which she gave me a month after we met. I got off on her floor. Right after I got off, or maybe a second or two after the elevator stopped but before the door opened, I heard her playing the piano in her apartment. There were two apartments in the small hallway the elevator and stairway were on, one to the left of the elevator as you got off it and Abby’s to the right, so I immediately knew where the music was coming from. Also, I’d never heard music of any sort from her neighbors’ apartment, neither recorded nor being played by one of them on an instrument, and remember remarking about this to Abby. Arguments from that apartment — sometimes hysterical screaming from both the husband and wife — we’d heard plenty of times, mostly through the walls separating the two apartments but sometimes while we were waiting for the elevator to come. “Let’s walk,” I said once. “It’ll be embarrassing if they open the door and see us standing here.” Once, we even heard the woman say “You despicable filthy bastard. I feel like killing you, and one day I might.” And the man say “You kill me? Not before I kill you first,” which made no sense, but it was said with such venom that it didn’t have to. We had nothing to do with her neighbors except, whenever we saw them alone or together, to say hello. As for Abby, I’d heard her playing or practicing one piece or another before but never this piece and I’d never heard her playing while I was still outside her door. Later, I asked her what it was. “A Brahms’ Intermezzo,” she said. “So there’s more than one?” And she said “Three, all opus one-nineteen. This one’s in B Minor.” Or she said “This one’s in E Minor.” Those are the first two. The third one’s in major, though I don’t know what letter. I know the one she said I heard was in minor, but I forget if it was the B or E.
I didn’t use the door key to get into her apartment. I’d put the key ring back in my pants pocket while I was listening to her play. Then she opened the door for me. Big smile, happy to see me, and we kissed and hugged before we closed the door. I asked and she told me what she’d been playing—“I’ve just begun to learn it, so I’m not very good at it yet and probably never will be”—and what key and opus it was. She opened the door for me because I rang the bell. I rang it after she stopped playing — maybe a minute after, because I thought if she was going to play more of that piece, if there was more to it, or something else, then I wanted to hear it for a while outside her door. It’d disturb her playing, I thought, and probably stop her if I was inside the apartment listening to her play. But why’d I ring her bell instead of using the key? Good question. I hadn’t asked myself that before. It meant, for one thing, that if she was still sitting at the piano, she’d have to get up to open the door. She might not want to, I thought, at that particular moment. She might be resting a minute or so before resuming the piece she was playing or playing through it again or starting a new piece. So I’m really not sure why I rang. No, I don’t know. The reason seems to be lost or, I’ll say, escapes me. So think back. Maybe the reason will come back in my remembering the incident the second time around. Or third time. The first was when I wrote about it a few years ago.
I walked to her building from my building. It’s about a two-and-a-half-mile walk. I don’t remember if it was pleasant out. I do know I didn’t show up in her apartment wet and cold. Certainly not wet. We wouldn’t have hugged so quickly. I would have taken off my jacket or coat and cap. I went into her lobby, took the elevator to her floor. The elevator was definitely waiting for me when I walked into her building. Was its door open? If it was there on the ground floor, the door was almost always open. Whether I said hello to the doorman, I’m now not so sure. If he was there, I said hello. If he was taking a short break in the restroom in back of what we called the building’s office on the ground floor, which might have been what the building’s staff called it too, then of course I didn’t. I would have gone straight into the elevator, pressed the button for the seventh floor, and gone up. I first heard her playing the piano that day either while I was still in the rising elevator but close to her floor or just after the elevator opened on her floor and I got off. I know there was no one in the elevator with me. I’d say most times there was, and usually more than one person. The building was seventeen stories tall. Or sixteen stories and two penthouses, or roof apartments tenants in the building called them, which were reached by getting off the elevator on the sixteenth floor — that was as far as the elevator went — and walking up a flight of stairs. And, from the second to sixteenth floor, there were four apartments to each floor — the other two and their separate hallway and stairway you got to by going through a door to the right of the elevator. So I’m saying there were lots of people using that elevator in the front of the building — the one facing the entrance and its revolving door — and that I seldom rode up in it, it seemed, without another tenant or two or a deliveryman or visitor riding with me. There were two other elevators — one for the apartments in the middle of the building and the other for the apartments in the rear. But that has nothing to do with what I’m trying to get at with this except, maybe, to show how large the building was. Nah, knowing that doesn’t help anything. Why was I so sure it was Abby playing the piano in her apartment? Because who else could it be? I thought. She was taking lessons at the time — every Thursday afternoon after she finished teaching a Humanities course at Columbia — but took them in her piano teacher’s cramped studio apartment in the West Eighties. “She has two Steinway Grands,” she said, “which she gets tuned twice a year. Both are five times the piano my Acrosonic is, and playing the one she reserves for her students makes me feel I’m a much better pianist than I am.” Her piano teacher was who suggested she learn the Brahms Intermezzo and she eventually became a good friend of Abby’s and played at our wedding in Abby’s apartment three years later: the first prelude and fugue of The Well-Tempered Clavier.