Paris Twilight by Russ Rymer Page B

glass-flued hurricane lamps parked on a shelf, which is precisely why I was sitting by the window holding out a page to catch the last drops of daylight like a child catching snowflakes on her tongue. Considering that the apartment boasted the amenities of a cave dwelling, the bill, which was clearly someone’s error, seemed to have been mailed mistakenly not just to the wrong address, but to the wrong century.
    I leaned back into the bolster as I mulled over this mystery, my eye idly straying from the paper in my hand to take in the evening sky, the stalagmite landscape of chimney pipes and rooftops. The evening was of the sort in which night doesn’t fall so much as day ascends, lifting from the ground mist-like through a palette of finely hued heavens, from frost to orange to indigo, and above it all a single bright planet chased a newish moon across a china-bright dome that had become, when I awoke from sleep sometime later, richly black and densely peppered with stars.
    It had gotten quite cold in the room. I stood up to close the window sashes before I’d really surfaced into consciousness, before I realized that I didn’t know where I was. Haven’t you done this, woken up in a strange room in a foreign locale and felt yourself adrift without handholds in the silence of the place that is not the silence of any place you know? At the window, in the darkness, sight mingled with slumber, and it was as though I were floating above a city, moored by the least substantial coordinates, sounds, glimpses, impressions as precise as the individual stars: a lit window across the
cour
, a puddle of lamplight on cobblestones, someone talking in a room somewhere, and from somewhere else, the thump and clink of a table being set, and each of these things spilling into the air out of different lives (the lives being lived in this building) reached my perception from far and farther places, from different times in my own life, so that the scene below me became this intricate collage, a heritage quilt of misplaced moments. I surveyed the yard with great satisfaction. Could it be? Could they really all be here, all these prodigal memories finally summoned home again, as though my past had gathered to greet me beneath my tower, under the glistening sky?
    These benign bewilderings collided with wakefulness as I pulled the sashes to before at last collapsing into ordinary addlement. Then something happened that riveted my attention and drew all my reminiscences into one. Somewhere, in some unseen room, someone began playing a piano. I didn’t recognize the piece right away. The player stopped and started, practicing a passage over and over. What struck me first was the persistence of the music: alone among the night sounds, it didn’t dim when I closed the sashes and latched them. It still magically saturated the room and the darkness as though broadcast out of my own spinning mind. I think, in fact, that I located the melody in memory before I identified it musically, pinpointed it on a particular night before a particular doorway in Lower Manhattan where you and I stood listening on another cold hour full of comfort and wonder. Do you remember? Would you? Though the piece we overheard through the window that night was the whole thing, the full adagio, two pianos, four hands, an overwhelming culmination of sound and thought, and the playing infusing the darkness of Saxe’s apartment was only one side of the duet. Hearing it was like straining to recognize in profile someone I’d met only face to face, and it took me a while to comprehend the thing I was confronting, that this was our Brahms, or half of it anyway.
    You would remember, don’t you? Daniel, who could have thought we would make of that sidewalk, that marble stoop so sweetly hummocked with snow, our embarkation point? We were trussed up like Eskimo and alone in that bubble of brittle stillness that cold and snow imposes. We’d only just