Re: [misha & jude: the capital]
[There was a stretch between music captured and held crystalline in grand halls and men and women dressed expensively, as if music were a form of culture that could be strained until the upper echelons had something rarified to taste, like caviar - and the kind that was here on the sides of the streets. Jude liked it better when it came the way it was composed, when the feeling was vivid and the player loaned the listener just enough of what was inside to wrap 'round the notes and pull. Jude's own playing, it had strung between the poles. Jude didn't have much of a problem with sitting still in the usual frame of things but for music? Always, please and thank you.]
I never had the knack of it. Hearing music in your head to put down on paper or to play for other people, I never learned how. I tried but I found whatever was in my head belonged to somebody else and I'd just remembered it a different way. I don't mind an audience or none at all so long as I can climb inside the sound. [Which was not to say Jude was poor performer: he'd been on stage without curtains and footlights since small boyhood but the piano was more honest than Jude himself. He looked at Misha at his side.]
What do you think a musician is, if it's not a performer? What happened, that you came here from New York, if you loved performing there?
[Jude was beginning to come 'round to the notion he didn't know Oliver nearly as well as he thought he had. It was a fragment looked at through magnifying glass until you lost sight of the whole.] I was lonely with the house-full back before when he went off to college and I had people then. I've never had a place that's mine before, and I don't hate that, it's just easily lost.
[Misha made it sound as if the boy in the faded henley knew precisely who he was, enough that playacting at being anything else was cruel, would work in deep like a thorn under skin. Jude didn't remember ever having that clarity, precise focus under light.] Translation from my circular speech to yours: What helped you to face it? All of it?
[Jude shook dark curls in sunlight.] I admire it, the plain speaking. It's honest, sunshine.