op (maldito) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-02-16 21:22:00 |
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Entry tags: | hook, river song |
Who: January Fischer & Chessie Maring
What: Music & meeting
Where: Turnberry
When: Recently
Warnings/Rating: Cuties.
Someone was playing piano. The song was slow, light and airy, and floated down the hall, offering itself, to Jan’s mind, as a source of inspiration for the opulent surroundings, the richness wrought into every surface - this was the music that had stirred the architects of Turnberry into motion, most certainly. He liked that image. The boy smiled somewhat dreamily as he passed by his brother’s door, and another, until he found the one he wanted. It was propped open. March, he was sure, would understand the need that drove Jan to find the pianist, even if it meant showing up a little later than he’d originally said. His brother was very understanding that way. A little meekly, a well-coifed head poked around the door. The room inside was large, cacophonous and mostly empty, save for a staircase that spiraled away to the right, a smattering of cushions and boxes, and, most notably, a piano, at which a young woman sat in the dark, opposite. Jan blinked in the low light and came inside a step or two farther. He didn’t want to interrupt. The woman looked to be playing from memory and he had no wish to disturb her. He just wanted to listen. Still, loitering in the shadows was definitely not something he was okay with doing - he didn’t want to frighten her, if she should glance up. Jan passed into the circle of light that ringed the hardwood floor and offered a harmless, very pleasant smile and a wave. The woman at the piano - Chessie - showed no consternation at sudden interruptions, at intrusions from the outside. The door was propped open rather than left ajar and the deliberate nature of the action was the small stone buddha that held it there. The emptiness of vast, bare floors and the wide sash windows with nothing at all but the wooden blinds that lipped their edges, gave the room a hollow feeling, as though it were bigger on the inside than the vagueries of architectural plans and Turnberry’s generous proportions. The sound bounced, it reverberated against plain painted plaster and the ceilings in a way that made the piano (not large but neither was it grand, it was tuned well but the sound that it made was an ordinary sort of thing) resound, the music made stronger in a way pleasant on the ear. The ceiling fans, great slatted wooden things, were silent and still but the windows were flung wide; beyond Turnberry’s expensive and expansive quiet, the faint sound of the city’s own music could be heard. The piano was a rippling thing, contemplative in its own right, even if she herself sat still behind the piano and looked at the keys - occasionally notes and phrases blurred slightly, if from loss of memory or the player’s own lackings and when Jan crept beyond the threshold, past boxes that had sat still not unpacked by the door long enough to be used as a substitute for a table (keys, tossed atop the nearest, shoes kicked off in the shadow of another) she looked up and she smiled, and she looked back at the keys to complete the phrase. "The door is open," Chessie said because he looked doubtful, as if the door might suddenly shut, as if she might desire privacy in the next minute and think poorly of him for walking in where there were no barriers to tell him not to, "Are you lost? Or am I disturbing you?" The music cut off, her hands stilled on the keys; Chessie’s attention was at once very focused upon him, from the well-groomed hair to the way he held himself, and there was something of embarrassment, of the gaucheness of having forgotten something in the worry there. No one but Jan (and March, for the brief bit he was around) ever touched the large, black, upright piano that took up the entirety of the northwest corner of the sitting room at home. Not even when his father had been alive and his mother happy. It was more a prop, a piece expected in the home of the intelligentsia, than something intended to entertain. But, Jan didn’t know that. He took lessons when he was finally old enough to ask for them and spent many hours banging out songs. He gained some competence as a pianist, but this - what he was listening to right now, in the strange cave of an apartment, was more than that. He was more than a little disappointed when the music died there on the keys. The woman was young - older than him, he guessed, but young, with loose hair of a color he couldn’t quite name and a shirt that hung off of her shoulder. She had a sort of warmth to her that was almost unexpected, and a little jarring, given the frigidity of the surroundings. (Jan placed a lot of personal importance on houses being homes, and that was defined by him as furnished and lived-in.) "Neither," he finally answered in a soft voice, none too bothered by the attention. Jan gave her another genuine smile. "Your playing is beautiful." Chessie smiled and the mid-color hair did not matter quite so much as she pushed it behind her shoulders to look at him properly. There was something not particularly American in the way she said, "thank you", without self-abasement or excuse; it was a quiet self-belief that did not require apology or aggrandizement. "There were some wrong notes." This, too was factual, delivered with a shrug of the shoulders, as if to say ‘so what?’. The music worked well enough with them, the sentiment conveyed regardless of pacing and phrasing. He wasn't tall but he was young, slight with the breadth of shoulders she had come to expect from America and its youth - young men who played football and drank milk and ate well, with none of the ill-health of countries she’d passed through. He stood in that bare room in his bow-tie and his immaculate shirt and he was nothing at all like Daniel who had sauntered in as if it was to be expected, anticipated. Her smile was a bright thing, and she turned at the piano, to switch on a light that had been hidden within the shadows and the gloom. It was a small thing, with a brightly colored paper shade that softened the bulb and it threw a rosy softness across the hardwood and the pale painted walls. "Do you play?" she asked, and it was a conversational tone, one that implied there had been the expected preamble and they could now converse without the necessary exchange of names, of polite interest in one another that was to come first. Chessie moved out from behind the piano, the battered wood and its scars visible only close-up in the dim light, and she was bare feet on cool floorboards and the glow of Vegas night at her back. "What music do you play?" "Maybe so, but it was still lovely," Jan replied gently as he came another step closer. A few flaws here and there added a human element to things that may have seemed otherwise otherworldly and that was something the boy could appreciate. Austere, ascetic surroundings, music as fragile as glass - all were as foreign and cold to him as the lifestyle they appeared to promote. Jan was undoubtedly human. He lived in a house filled with handmade knick-knacks and macaroni memorabilia, however kitschy and tacky, and that was how he liked it. He smiled again. The light came on, behind its crimped paper shade. It was soft, edgeless, and gauzy and gave the room another dose of yellow warmth. With bright and curious eyes, the boy gazed at the surroundings. He took in the piano and its few dings, the wooden blinds, the boxes-cum-tables, and the barefeet of the pianist. "I play some," admitted Jan, shifting on his own well-shod feet. It was so nice to meet other musicians, he thought. There was a kind of kinship there. "Right now, I spend most of my time singing over playing. But I used to play all kinds. Not often Debussy, but if the mood struck, I wouldn't deny myself the pleasure." "Singing?" Chessie’s smile was very bright, neon-tinsel at her back and the soft throw of the lamp enough to show if for what it was, a curious thing and encouraging. She showed no sign at all of noticing his speculation of the place, no sign at all that it was odd to be so visited and she moved away from the piano with a comforting little pat of the solidness of its wood, her fingers idly skimming over the smoothness of its surface. "What do you sing?" He had a mellowness to the way his words rolled together, a music of its own kind and particular to a part of America that sounded like molasses and slow, soft caramel. She had shrugged away the compliment, neither acknowledging it as due nor dismissing it as undeserved but the token nothing of a player who did not need audience nor acknowledgment for music to be played. She padded across on bare feet and she was not tall but neither was he, she stood with her loose hair and her soft, cotton blouse and she looked almost directly on a level with him, perceptive green eyes that gazed at him with interest. He watched her come closer with nothing but a smile, because if he was anything, Jan was pleasant. He liked to be polite and nice. He liked people. There was a certain playfulness in him, but it took a while to coax out. He was the happy medium between the very solemn Toby and the ever-mischievous March. "I'm an Elvis impersonator," said the boy with a grin, peering at the woman as she stood close to him. He liked the way she was so calm and sure of herself. It put him at ease. His eyes flicked to the piano, then back. "I'm actually here to see my brother, who I work with - um, his name is March. He's a musician too!" "March," she said, as if the name were something that could be rolled across the tongue and tasted, and Chessie’s smile shone with recognition. "I know him. I know of him. He is Cael’s friend. The musician - are you all musicians?" She looked at him, in his smart shoes on her bare floors and the neat tie knotted beneath his chin and she smiled because he was quite perfect and he had followed the music and she had no idea what an Elvis impersonator was before moving to Vegas and she still did not understand why they were so very important or virulent. "Are you a month as well?" He didn’t look like one; he looked as though his name would be a considered, solemn thing. But she had never named anything or anyone at all. Names ought to fit, but sometimes they didn’t. "I’m Chessie." Jan was bringing out the exclamation points. He was an enthusiastic kid, and now that he felt a little more comfortable with the warm darkness of the room and the woman in front of him, he could let that out more. The smile on - Chessie's face told him, before her words did, that she knew his brother. Everyone who met March liked him, after all; and though he didn't intend it to, his smile mirrored hers. "No. Our older brother's a psychiatrist," Jan said matter-of-factly. He held out a hand to introduce himself. "It's nice to meet you, Chessie. I am a month - I'm January!" She took that warm paw into her own and she shook it solemnly, with only the glint of her eyes for laughter as she gave him the ritual of greeting that there was in this country, with not a single mention of the alternatives that culture and country allowed for across the world. Chessie’s hand was cool and it was smooth, the nails were very short, clipped close. Her handshake was strong, the kind better suited to a man than expected of a woman and it was loose and it swung - a generosity of movement that was echoed in the shape of her mouth. "A psychiatrist and two musicians, does he analyze you as you play for him?" She looked very intent and very serious as she asked her question, but the curve of her mouth kept curling up, giving away the joke. "It is very good to meet you, January. Were you born then?" Jan laughed at her joke, an uninhibited expression of mirth that held none of his older brother’s restraint. He shook his head, chin tipped down, though his eyes remained on Chessie. "I hope not," he said as he took her hand in his. It was surprisingly cool in his own, but her shake was sure. His own was somewhat weaker - soft and genial, as far as handshakes could be genial. When she asked her question, one he received quite often upon introduction, which made perfect sense to him, Jan bounced a little on the balls of his feet. "No. December. There’s no sense to it really. They’re just names. The psychiatrist is named October. Our dad just liked months, I guess." He offered the information with a happy shrug. She pursed her lips, due and careful consideration layered over the concept. "Your father, he named you?" Naming was a heavy task, onerous in its own way. She had been Francesca before birth, before she had been a person to be named and it fit her the way family did, like an old thing long since discarded and something new shaped out in the emptiness that was left. "Your brother, when was he born? It does not seem very American," there was doubt in her voice, the ring of it careful and cautious. The truth was Jan didn’t know who had named him, but he’d always figured the silly idea to be his father’s, though he never knew the man. It fit well enough with the image he had of him, anyway, and since there was no one to tell him otherwise, it had become, in a way, fact for the boy. "September," laughed Jan with another shrug, to illustrate to Chessie that he had as little knowledge on the matter as she did. They were standing still in the middle of the large room. The boy vaguely wondered if he should text his brother, but he decided again that it wasn’t anything that was in dire need of doing. He was 100% certain that March wouldn’t mind. Jan gave a curious sort of smile, the corner of his mouth quirking with his brow. "What do you mean by ‘American’?" There was nothing defensive in the way he posed his question. There was just a simple sort of wonder, similar to how a child might ask, all big eyes and expectation. Jan had hardly ever left Las Vegas. He knew little of the world beyond the Strip. She shrugged and it was a small thing somehow expansive in its simplicity. It rid her of the world beyond the blinds, the tawdry-bright lights and the laughing hum of a city devoted to sin and selling it. It shrugged off cultural customs and picket fences and apple pie and working hours toward the Dream and it took in a tour of familial ties and all the ways they could be knotted together, the silk of obligation and love threaded tight. "American. Naming, did you know in Bali there are only four names a child is named? It is birth order, they are given from the beginning and they are their place in the world from the day they are named. Only four," Chessie’s voice was soft and it was wondering, as if she were inviting January to contemplate it along with her. "Naming is important there. They have meaning." There was meaning to names all over but he and his brothers, named for enjoyment, that was no custom she had come across. "Will your brother be missing you?" She tilted her head, looked at him directly. The question was neither an encouragement toward leaving nor plaintive, but it curled into being with childlike simplicity. His face was pure enchantment, though Chessie’s words were few. Because, no, he didn’t know. He didn’t know much, really. He knew about dancing and singing and playing instruments and trying to be the best person he could be and Toby and ...that was about the extent of it. Jan was far from a worldly person, and, when he encountered others who were, he was drawn to them like a moth to flame. He nodded slowly as the woman spoke, to say he understood, that there was meaning and that meaning was important. "Wow," was all he managed to say, and somewhat breathlessly at that, before he was reminded again of March. Jan glanced over his shoulder toward the door, as if his brother might come pushing through. He turned to face Chessie again. "No, I don’t think so. I was just stopping in before work -- and he would understand me coming down here to investigate pretty music, I think." He smiled. She liked him then, this boy with his uncomplicated smile and the gentle hands and she liked the echo there was to him, as if music knew him as a friend and stood there in the shadows that fell at his heels, that embraced him the way they were comfortable in the room. Chessie liked the way he breathed out enthusiasm for a culture she was sure he had never seen and doubtless never would and she held out hands to him that were impulsive and sand-smooth, reaching for his to squeeze his fingers tight. "You like music," she said, as if it were explanation and reason and answer all in one and she mirrored his smile, easy and free and giving of itself the way the light threw off its rosy glow. "You can come back, you know. Another time, when you are visiting that brother of yours who plays all the instruments." She remembered enough, of Cael and a man who wrote cheerfully behind printed words on a page. There was warmth to this January with his earnest enthusiasm and she liked it the way she liked solemnity and calm, those qualities that made a person more than who they were. "It is good to meet you." Jan grinned and nodded again, knocking a little sprig of hair - one single well-gelled curl - loose from his temple. He didn’t notice. He just agreed, wholeheartedly, with Chessie’s statement: You like music. Yes, he did! He did like music and it was nice to have met someone else who liked it too, who wasn’t his brother, and who could make things happen on a piano that called to him from down a long corridor. Her cool hand was on his again with just the slightest bit of pressure. He squeezed back and then, it was done. "It was good to meet you too," he replied keenly as he departed for the door, walking lightly across the room. Jan gave a small wave before discovering the stray hair. He pressed it down. "I will come back -- and thank you for playing." |