The Pianist

Isaac Graham never fancied himself the type of man that would cheat on his wife.
Really, though, he never fancied himself any type of man at all. He wasn’t sure he knew how. What about him merited a “type”? He could run down a long list of things, and the moment he thought maybe he could fit in somewhere, something else about him would contradict and cancel out whatever conclusion he’d just made.

For example, he enjoyed beer and football. He liked fall weekends with his friends, sitting on a couch or at a bar or what have you, sipping at whatever was put in front of him. The contradiction, here, was that he was also a piano player. Piano players were, by principle, not football fans and football fans were in no possible way piano players. Isaac would pretend for a few moments that he was content sitting there - just one of the guys - but the persona would be interrupted by a sudden, unavoidable urge to run through a piece in his head, which would invariably lead to him using the edge of the bar or the nearest table as an imaginary row of ivory keys. For a little while, he might try to do both - watch the game and think in notes and cadenza, but he would more often than not end up entirely wrapped up in one, and the other would be lost, lagging behind on broken legs. Isaac would shake his head and give up the balancing act because there wasn’t any way he could be both, but there wasn’t any way he could be one or the other, either. Just maybe one slightly more.

Isaac loved his wife. This was true. She, to him, was everything right and stable in his life.
Her name was Marie, and he’d met her in college. She’d been working in the library on campus, a pencil stuck in her hair and a sweater drooping lazily around her shoulders. Isaac had watched her for a time from his place in one of the glass-fronted quiet study rooms, where he’d been trying to scratch out a paper about General Custer, or some such thing. She had been returning books to shelves just outside the door, her back to him. It had taken him forty-six minutes exactly to actually stand, leave his glass room, and walk slowly up behind her. He remembered this number because he’d stared at the clock on the wall, watching every minute tick by, always thinking “Another minute, she’s bound to leave soon”. Isaac internally raged, hoping for thirty seconds that she would just leave so that he could return to his paper, but, in the next thirty before the hand on the clock twitched to cover another line, he hoped with a swollen throat that she wouldn’t because he was thinking about how it would feel to slip that sweater back off her shoulders right there in the library.

He’d known all along that he would, in fact, leave the study room and talk to her (he’d spent the last three of the forty-six minutes devising an attack-plan, of sorts, which involved asking here where the reference section was even though, as a second-semester junior, he already knew perfectly well). He’d also known that he would ask her how she liked working at the library. He’d make a joke here, a charmingly witty remark there. He’d ask her to dinner and she’d say yes.

The first time he’d gone to her empty dorm with her, she was wearing the sweater. All he could think about while taking it off her was General Custer and how he hadn’t finished that paper on time. He’d handed in a twelve-page mess, which probably would’ve been much, much better with a little more time in the library.

Marie was fine. Everything about her was fine. She cooked, she cleaned, she was attentive and loving. She was funny. Isaac thoroughly enjoyed her company, but, for some bewildering reason, he could never quite forget General Custer and that terrible paper, and, equally bewildering, some small part of is psyche, however removed, however suppressed, however irrational, chalked that failure up as a fault of Marie’s. There were moments when Isaac was gripped with a vomit-inducing rage over the whole situation, in which he couldn’t even look at Marie without feeling like he needed to break his hands hitting something. He never told her, never “rocked the boat”, so to speak. She remained constant, making breakfast in the morning and correcting papers for her English classes at night, while Isaac simmered for a moment or two.

Invariably, the anger would pass and Isaac would return to his mild-mannered self. He would smile over at his young wife, maybe get up to sit at his piano. He never could play, though, after an episode. He’d just sit and stare, feeling and thinking nothing, the ivory swirling into black, melted ice cream and bile. Sometimes he wouldn’t move for hours.

There were times, most often in those empty moments at the piano, when Isaac hated his stable life. He absolutely despised it, couldn’t think of anything that would kill him faster. He felt lost in a long string of mechanical lovemaking, roast chicken dinners, General Custer, and regrets. Adagio and nothing else. No peaks to reach for, to bottoms to plummet to. Just a straight line that disappeared before he could find the end. He hardly ever felt so hopeless as he did watching his life plod by with heavy, too-familiar steps.

Isaac never intended to become an adulterer. It hadn’t been a conscious decision on his part. He didn’t even like the sound of the word. It reminded him of seventeenth century literature and everything horrible his mother had ever told him. It scared him senseless, but maybe that’s what he liked so much about it; the occasional blips it caused in his life. Tiny little tremors that maybe wouldn’t be noticeable if not for the complete stillness of everything else. Ripples on a mill pond, he thought. Capriccio. Hastily thrown together, hushed and screaming all at once.

Isaac thought very carefully of the balance between the stillness and the chaos. He supposed maybe it was in the contrast between the two that he found himself, really found himself. It was somewhere between the shame and the feeling he got in the pit of his stomach when he thought of her - the other woman - where the deadness in him was cut away, leaving him raw and wide-eyed for the first time since he couldn’t remember when.
He hated the thought of Marie sitting home in their bed, correcting English papers with her pretty face soft and untroubled, while he, himself was out doing things he’d taken vows against.

Isaac loved his piano, but the only times the keys didn’t blend together like a mess were the times he was thinking of the one he wasn’t married to, of her pretty skin under his hands in the dark. He couldn’t be a pianist without being an adulterer. He knew this, but every time Marie smiled at him, he hated it.