Eveningsong

Can you hear the music?  It’s not constant.  It drifts to me on the lightest of breezes, a single note or a measure, sometimes most of a song.  I never hear it start.  Or end.  Far as I know, it’s ceaseless, transcending time and altering my reality.

It drifts over the graveyard by the church as the sun sets.  It follows in the wake of a passing SUV shuttling noisy kids to soccer matches and baseball practice.  It tickles the back of my ears.

Sometimes, I’m sure it’s a flute, but sometimes it’s something jazzier, a cornet or a saxophone.  I can’t really be sure if it’s the same song.

I asked the trash man about it.  He knows things.  I said, “Do you know where it comes from, the music I hear?”

He said, “Your head.”  And then he said, “Your heart.”  And then he said, “You’re crazy.”

“But do you know?” I asked.

He shook his head, then leaned closer to confide, “Do not follow the flute.”

“Ah, yes,” I said.  “Wait until it’s the fanciful flutter of the piccolo, I understand.”

“No,” he said.  “Not the piccolo, either.”

When the trash man left, I knew I would be waiting for the trumpet.

It’s always a single instrument, whichever it is, and every night I hear it I can almost decipher the message.  The song isn’t written for everyone.  It’s meant for an audience of one.  One night, perhaps, it’s for a twelve year old girl still in pigtails dreaming of New Orleans.  She’s got something of the dancer in her, and something of the poet, but after hearing, after listening, her soul will belong to the song.  Another night, it’s the twenty year old college kid struggling for grades, struggling for acceptance, struggling to figure out exactly who and what he is.  Maybe this wasn’t the right path for him.  Maybe he’s gay.  Maybe he’s too young to know anything.  Maybe, after the song is played for him, he’ll find his path, or the end of his path, and the questions will haunt him no longer.

Last week, the tune came for my neighbor.  An aging woman, white of hair but sharp of eye, and apparently of ear.  I saw her look, almost wistfully, toward the source of the music.  She didn’t know I was watching.  She didn’t know the wind brought errant notes to my ears, too.  I haven’t seen her since.  I’ve been picking up the mail for her.

I wonder, sometimes, if the piper once played Hamelin.  Do rats and children answer his call?

Tonight, I hear the most amazing thing: accompaniment.  I’m not alone.  A girl plays the violin, though not capturing the airy notes so well.  She makes it mourn.  She makes me cry.  She weaves between the notes I hear and the notes I don’t.  She seems to be in control of the rhythm, though I’m sure that’s only because I can’t always hear the flute.  No, the sax.  It’s definitely a saxophone, a soprano, crafting notes so impossibly high I cannot trust my ears.

But I can, and do, follow the violin to its source.

She sits in the window of a third story apartment overlooking the street.  There are no lights behind her, and only the vaguest hint of streetlamp reaches her.  Long dark hair, dark complexion.  Her eyes are closed.  The violin arcs into her apartment, so her neck is exposed to the night.  It’s a beautiful neck, elegant and long and perfect, and it seems to mimic the essence of the song in its subtle curve.

She plays a long while before I realize I can no longer hear the master of winds.  She pauses, briefly, opens her eyes, takes a breath, sees me staring up in wonderment, and she smiles.  She touches the bow to the strings again, caresses notes from them.  Tears leave cold streaks down the sides of my face.

Then, naturally but still suddenly, she’s done.  She brings the instrument down from her chin.  She looks out the window, smiling again, points at me with the bow.  “Would you like to come up?” she asks.  “For coffee, perhaps.”

“You hear the song,” I say.

“Yes.”

“I hear it too.”

Her smile remains.  “Someday,” she says, “I hope to hear it from the master of winds himself.  But this night, I think, it’s only you and me and my fiddle.”

“It’s beautiful,” I tell her.

“In the end,” she tells me, “he’ll kill us for his song.”

I think I’m in love.  I say, “I know.”

“Shut up,” she tells me, “and come on up here.  I have the feeling we’ll have much to talk about.”