Re: [misha & jude: the capital]
[It's only art if it's new, yes, that sounded terribly right to Jude. New art or unique art, it was all the same when you were facilitating the copying of one artwork by proficient forger and exchange all on the nod-nod-wink-wink with a security guard easily bribed or drugged and an oligarch who had a hankering for an original, even if the provenance wasn't known. The deliberateness of needing new made people susceptible to being deceived, if they thought only the original could be beautiful. Jude had sucked the marrow from that particular set of bones and he smiled as Misha sang.]
I liked that one better than the first. [Classically trained, but Jude thrilled for poetry and wasn't that particular melody poetry all the same? But Misha gear-shifted and Oliver going to school and away with clean paint-brushes and fleeting presence on the end of a 'phone line didn't fit with narrative inevitable for boy who was bruised.
But Jude looked troubled, a shudder-breath from vice-tight and he didn't know why it felt like closing in, to be told once again that Oliver needed, even in absentia, even if playacting for audience who wasn't looking. Oliver needed, and Jude boxed up whatever it was that was consuming patience and attention and paid due course to small king demanding and Jude smiled to switch steps, toward living instead of shutting off.]
Living properly always looked like a rollercoaster. [Honest, from a boy thoughtful and slow, as if truth were hard-handled, venomous and surprising.] Ups and downs, plunges and dips. [It wasn't hospital stays mandated by the courts, but it was death and loss and cruelty and Jude had clipped strings neatly, one thing cleaved from other. It twined up together under the skin but on the surface, clean delineation.]
People used to believe in magic, in gods and spirits, demons and witches and then they decided it was all madness. It was untidy when man believed he could rule the world, sunshine. Whatever you have, it probably doesn't fit in a box.
[But the piano, the piano and Jude stood for span of seconds just looking rather than touching. It was a proper piano - proper indicating grandeur, for boy who had learned his chords on something a touch bigger than an upright, crammed into a room too small for it but no scrap of consideration to exchanging it. He sidled forward on sneakers, an unlikely musician to sit on squeaky leather and draw himself in. If he closed his eyes, and he did, fingers gently touching down on ivory without pressure enough to make a sound, then he could be back in front of his own, the mellow butter of a sound and nobody there at all.
Jude chose not classical at all, slow and then stronger. Music was tiny key for fast-closed lock and Jude smiled into clear distance, eyes open enough to see people who cared not a scrap that this was the first piano that had sounded right in two years' haphazard living.]