The grandfather clock chimed the notes of Big Ben, then monotonously gonged twelve o’clock. Kendall was in jeans and a T shirt, sitting at the piano, practicing the second movement of a Stravinsky sonata, when a car turned into the drive, flashing headlights, like lightning, across a wall. His slender fingers careered down a particularly steep chromatic passage over and over, like a stuck record, until he was content with it. Then he looked toward the door and rose. Outside, a car door opened, screaking on its hinges, then slammed shut. Footsteps crunched in the gravel, then scuffled along the walk. Someone stumbled up the steps and crossed the porch.

At the door, Kendall said coolly, “Peter.”

He unlatched the screen. As Peter entered, Kendall peered into the night. Steam peeled from the street. Along the walk, liriope glistened, wet.

“Hope-you-don’t-mind-me-dropping-by-like-this,” Peter began, tearing through his words.

He spoke with a subtle lisp underscored when he became excited. If he had talked more slowly, the quirk probably would have gone unnoticed. But the faster he talked, the more the little th’s piled up in a considerable snakelike hiss.

Kendall studied him, then said calmly, “I do have to practice.”

“Oh,” Peter said vacuously, glancing at the red rug. Black leaves swirled through its fiery design. “Won’t keep you,” he said, hand to mouth. “Just happened to be driving by and saw the light. In fact, I could even see you at the piano.”

“Hot night,” Kendall commented, “for this time of year. Thought I’d leave the door open.”

Though twenty-eight, Peter was graying. His clothes had a homespun look about them, ill-fitted and mismatched. His pants’ cuffs rode high, and his shirt gaped, exposing a pale patch of hirsute paunch. When he moved, he stirred up a musty odor like dust. Kendall squinted, unconsciously trying to constrict his nose.

“Have a seat,” Kendall said, indicating the French blue fainting couch.

Peter practically leaped onto it, besides the piano bench the only seat in the foyer, a large hall with a staircase, the upright, and the tall pendulum clock. The walls were painted peach, which made everything—the molding, the pictures, the sconces—stand out as if floating. The overhead light, the upside-down lotus of a Tiffany shade, housed too small a bulb, staining the scene with a lurid sunset glow.

“May I get you something?” Kendall asked.

“I am thirsty.” Peter sounded as if he were forcing his voice into the overly earnest style of the unctuous. “Don’t mind if I do, Ken,” he said, too familiar.

Kendall did not show any expression.

“Glass of water,” Peter added, befuddled by Kendall’s blank stare.

“Back in a minute,” Kendall said, drawing back the corners of his mouth.

Peter watched Kendall’s bare feet squelch across the shiny hardwood floor, then quietly down a Persian runner past a large, white porcelain cat. From the kitchen could be heard a cabinet opening and closing, the clink of ice cubes, the frantic sizzle of the tap.

When Kendall reappeared, he asked, “What are you doing out at this hour?” He handed the glass to Peter, who swigged it down. “More?” Kendall smiled.

“Uh, no,” Peter said. “Thank you.”

He appeared to have amazed even himself. Then he looked as if he did not know what to do with the glass.

“Set it there,” Kendall suggested, flicking a finger toward a marble-topped lowboy by the door.

Peter shot it there, then, like a rubber band, snapped back. Kendall straddled the bench, an elbow in the keys.

Despite the muggy evening, Kendall looked fresh from a bath. His cheeks were rosy, his hair shiny black. And there was something peculiarly stark about him, as in an abstract. His clothes suggested it: a block of cotton white on a pedestal of denim blue, an aggressive effect somehow repeated in the clean lines of his thin face.

“Just off work,” Peter explained. “Had to talk to you, Ken.”

Again, Kendall’s blank stare.

“Had to apologize,” Peter said, starting to make, then dropping a gesture. “The way I acted. You know, it’s been almost six years.”

“Think nothing of it,” Kendall stated, his voice flat.

“You must’ve thought I was crazy, stopping you after class like that. Ken, you’re not even gay, are you? Telling you how God had talked to me. Well, I was crazy, wasn’t I?” Peter averted his eyes. “I’m well now. At least, I think I’m well. Getting there. You knew I had a…nervous breakdown, didn’t you?” he faltered. “Not long after I had that talk with you.”

Once more, Kendall’s stare.

“Not that it had anything to do with you, Ken,” Peter said. “Didn’t mean that. I was well on my way. Overshot the mark, didn’t I? Kept telling Mother there was this gay-pride dinner at LSU and I just had to be there. I actually ran around, looking for it, asking people where it was. Everyone laughed. I couldn’t find where it was,” he said gloomily. “It wasn’t anywhere. What a bad dream, huh?” he grunted, the grunt a choked cough. “A gay-pride dinner at LSU,” he scoffed. “That’ll be the day.” He began stroking the index finger of his left hand with the thumb of his right. He seemed to be staring at a leaf of the plastic rubber plant in a corner. “And I kept having dreams,” he said. “Real bad dreams, not the waking kind. Really the same bad dream over and over. Ever see Blood of the Bull?”

“What?” Kendall asked.

“The movie Blood of the Bull. Remember the scene where they lop off the bull’s head? Kept dreaming about that. Only I was in it, and it had changed. Never should’ve seen that movie. No. Sometimes when I dreamed it, someone would put something on my head. Never knew what it was, but when I looked up, all around all I could see was gold. When I wore the gold thing, two men with nothing on,” he stressed, “dark-skinned men, would guide me down into this dark pit with bars on top. They’d leave me there, and I’d realize I was bare-ass, too. I’d peer through the bars and watch them kill the bull, hitting it with axes again and again, and the blood, like a shower, would splatter me till I woke, choking and rubbing myself all over, rubbing myself all over as if I was, in fact, all covered with blood. But it wasn’t blood,” he finished. “It was sweat. I’m on tranquilizers, three kinds: Thorazine, Benadryl—”

“Benadryl isn’t a tranquilizer, Peter,” Kendall said, interrupting him.

“And Travail,” he went on.

“Travail?” Kendall questioned.

“My doctor—I see a psychiatrist, have for years. Every week. Told him about you!”

The blank stare.

“Nothing bad, understand,” Peter assured him. “Only praise. I was in the hospital. Saw the doctor twice a week, now once a week. Says I’d be ten times as jumpy off my medication. I called Don not too long ago. He said I’d got it wrong. You didn’t hate me.”

“Why should I?” Kendall asked.

“Since I played the fool. Since I…approached you like that. Where’s Don? Asleep?”

“With Buddy at the hospital.”

“Buddy?” Peter asked.

“His friend.”

“You know, I thought you and Don were….”

Peter rocked uneasily on the edge of the couch. The clock broke the silence.

“Why’s B-B-Buddy in the hospital?” Peter stuttered. He looked as if he were trying to stanch a bout of nerves.

“He stabbed himself in the stomach with a butcher knife,” Kendall stated.

“Why?” Peter asked, visibly shocked.

Kendall fastened his eyes on him. “He doesn’t know how to live on his own.”

“Oh,” Peter said, obviously confused.

“Thought I saw you ducking down a hall at school last fall,” Kendall said, changing the subject.

“Didn’t think you wanted to see me,” Peter admitted. “Got my eyes fixed. Guess you noticed. Remember how you told me to be sure and have that done, if I ever got the chance? Well,” he said, apparently with little satisfaction, “I did. I did. Still didn’t think you wanted to see me.”

“What grade did I give you?” Kendall asked, staring under his arm at the keyboard. His fingers floated over, in a higher register, a few notes of the Stravinsky piece.

“A B. You see, I can be—I mean, I am a good student. I’ve learned sign language. See,” he said, signing, but Kendall failed to pay attention. “Sometimes I work as a translator over at the state school. Do you know signs?”

Kendall glanced up.

“I’m taking a computer course this quarter at East Baton Rouge Tech,” Peter said. “Mr. Hipe says, if I want to, when I’m through, I can get a job right there at the school.”

“Who?” Kendall asked, looking askance, his forehead creased.

“Mr. Hipe,” Peter said. “Took two classes from him.”

They glanced in the direction of a clink. A melting ice cube had shifted in the glass.

“How long did you say it’s been since you took my class?” Kendall asked.

“Six years!” Peter emphasized. A serious tone had briefly entered his voice, one of simple awe. “Hard to believe, isn’t it?” he asked. “I haven’t been lazy. I’ve also taken a stenographer’s course. Or two. I can do shorthand. Like to see?”

Kendall plucked some random notes, then shot him a stolid glance.

“Can you do shorthand, Ken?” Peter asked. “Helps me a lot with my class. With everything! My job, my—”

“You work at the supermarket,” Kendall said, overlapping him.

“The late shift. There at night. Drop by.”

“I have,” Kendall answered, arched over the keys, staring aside. “Didn’t know you were working there till last week. Don told me. Surprised I haven’t run into you.” Kendall aimed the next question at him point-blank. “Were you hiding?”

Peter tucked his lower lip behind his upper teeth.

“Thought it was about time I graduated from college,” he said, ignoring the question. “Why I stopped by.”

Once more, Kendall leveled his blank stare, and Peter, like a weary patient, seemed to surrender to it.

“One of the reasons,” Peter confessed.

“You want to enroll in one of my classes spring.”

“I could take the course from Dr. Phillips. He teaches it in the day. I like him, and I have to work at night. But I like you more, and I could make arrangements at the store.” Then he blurted, “I’d rather take it from you!”

Kendall was a statue. A car hissed by. In the distance, an ambulance was screaming down the highway, the siren echoing in the throats of the neighborhood dogs.

“Dr. Phillips and I go to the same, uh, church,” Peter explained, trailing off. He appeared to be retreating into himself, repeatedly clutching and unclutching the spongy edge of the couch. “Would you play something for me?” he asked, suddenly facing him. “What’ve you been working on?”

“Stravinsky,” Kendall stated.

“What is it?” Peter inquired, a false note of curiosity in his voice.

He rose, drawn to the piano. Kendall swung his leg over the bench, then braced himself at the keys.

“An early work,” Kendall said. “You’d hardly recognize it as Stravinsky, more like Chopin.”

“Play it for me,” Peter urged.

Cardboard stiff, Peter stood beside him. Kendall tilted forward and gently pressed his fingers into the first melodramatic rush up the scales.

“It’s as if the ‘lead’ in the music, the melody,” Kendall swayed, “is rushing forward to meet someone. Unfortunately, what he has to say to the person amounts to little more than a very old cliché, something as stale as his loved one’s name or the simple phrase—” Kendall caught himself.

Peter trembled and placed his hand on top of the upright apparently to steady himself.

“To make matters worse,” Kendall said, “he has to shout it over these incessant runs up the lower octaves, all the bustle of the callous world.”

Kendall slowly rocked to the music, back and forth, side to side, a boat swinging idly on a quiet swell. Absently, he stared over the piano at a pair of gilded sconces. Red candles shot from icy prisms. For the moment, he was content, lost in the scene the music conjured. Peter shuddered and furtively shifted his gaze from Kendall’s hands to his lap, ultimately fixing his eyes on his feet as they, veined like marble, worked the pedals.

“Obsessed,” Kendall narrated, “he repeats the message over and over.” Now he sounded as if he were lecturing Peter, slipping momentarily into a more professorial role. “As if through persistence he might win the day. But here,” Kendall observed, leaning into the notes, “the object of his affection, a rich snob perhaps, a fashionable flirt, apparently has scoffed at him. ‘He’s young,’ the person remarks in counterpoint, ‘young and naive and therefore,’” with an inharmonic clang, “‘incurably, unforgivably gauche.’ Too inept at life to handle anything as fragile as someone’s—”

When Peter laid his hand on Kendall’s shoulder, Kendall broke off, then began to feel his way through the keys again. The hand, in a sense, did not actually rest on his shoulder, only hovered just above it, in another dimension, the hand of a ghost.

“Heart,” Kendall said, finishing the sentence. “Then the inevitable unhappy ending.” His voice was perfectly flat, yet somehow ironic. “Our protagonist turns away, red-faced from his folly. Finally, he casts a last, impassioned glance over his shoulder, muttering to himself, in a flutter of notes, of disappointment, indignation, spite. He vows to vindicate himself, yet, in truth, secretly revels in the grand, ennobling pangs of his thwarted love.”

Kendall’s hands, like a surgeon’s, hung in the air just above the row of sallow ivory, his bare sole licked by the sostenuto’s tongue, till the thundering wires had damped out. He released the pedal, swiveled on the bench, and swung his shoulder free of Peter’s hand, which, for a second, levitated, wedged in place, like a mannequin’s. Peter plainly did not know what to say, could not break out of the music’s thick cocoon. The clock announced twelve thirty.

“Wish I could play like that,” Peter began tentatively.

“You have an organ,” Kendall said. The fine string the music had drawn taut inside him perceptibly slackened.

“Don taught me a couple of tunes on his,” Peter said, backing into the niche between the upright and the wall. “But I knew that if I really wanted to learn how to play, I’d have to practice on my own. Mother gave it to me.”

“Your mother,” Kendall repeated.

“An English teacher. You two’d get along. She knows everything, like you.”

“Everything?” Kendall asked coyly.

Peter nodded, apparently uncertain of Kendall’s drift.

“Sometimes I play for my church,” Peter said.

A pause stretched between them like a long, sleek cat.

“Don sell his organ?” Peter asked, breaking the silence.

“Gave it to his nephew,” Kendall answered. “What course did you take from me?”

Peter dropped to his knees, grabbed Kendall’s hand, and plunged into a strange solicitation.

“Listen, Ken.”

Kendall stared at him calmly.

“A man at work,” Peter said. “He’s old and fat. One night after work, he asked me to go home with him. I did. He tried to get me to touch his manly parts with my mouth.”

Kendall almost smiled. His expression was, in fact, the archaic smile of early Greek sculpture.

“His m-manly parts,” Peter stammered. He seemed lost, and yet just a drop of bile now tinged his voice. “I wouldn’t do it. He’s ancient, not y-young like you. You know, I’ve always found you attractive, Ken. That’s why I took that class. Why I want to take this class spring.”

“I’m ten years older than you, Peter,” Kendall stated dryly.

“Nah, you can’t be. How old are you, Ken?”

Kendall only stared, asleep with his eyes open.

“Doesn’t matter,” Peter remarked to himself.

Kendall was wearing a silver identification bracelet, and Peter had absently hooked his fingers through the chain.

“There’s a boy at work,” Peter said, sailing off on another tack, “who’s so good looking I have to go to the john every day j-just to…calm down. That’s why I could never take gym,” he explained. “I’d g-get—You know,” he said, his eyes blind-looking. “Especially seeing their feet. I can hardly stand it when I see a boy with no shoes on. But the boy at the store,” he continued. “He’s not as good-looking as you. You’re slim and—You are gay, aren’t you?” he said, his sight suddenly restored.

Kendall jerked his hand from Peter’s grip, and the bracelet clinked off a wall, dropping to the stairs.

“Look what you’ve done,” Kendall said like a robot.

“I’m thorry, I’m thorry,” Peter whined, burying his face in his hands.

As Kendall rose to retrieve the bracelet, Peter grabbed his other hand.

“Oh, pleath forgive me, Ken,” Peter begged, peering into his face.

“Peter,” Kendall said without emotion. “My watch.”

Peter let go, his hands again suspended like a mannequin’s, his face for a moment utterly bare of hope. At this point someone stepped onto the porch.

Peter sprang toward the kitchen, but Kendall stopped him, a hand against his chest. Peter obeyed, dog-like, gazing at the hand.

“Yes?” Kendall asked, aiming his voice at the door.

He was so composed that he seemed to be merely going through the motions, the lines and gestures, of a tiresome play.

“The Big Bad Wolf,” the visitor said, his voice gruff, his face faint through the screen.

“Come in,” Kendall replied, picking up the bracelet.

One link, a broken spiral, lay shining against the chocolate brown of the step.

“Interrupting anything?” the visitor inquired, entering.

He looked in his late thirties, yet dressed younger in old Adidas, snug jeans, and a starched plaid shirt.

“Peter was just leaving. Peter, this is Todd.”

“Hi,” Todd said, offering his hand.

“Shake his hand, Peter,” Kendall said.

Peter took the hand. With the slightest caress of Peter’s shoulder, Kendall directed him, as he would a catatonic, toward the door. With his other hand, he casually jingled the chain.

Three-quarters hour struck.

“Stand here,” Kendall suggested, slipping the bracelet into his pocket. He wanted Todd to stand next to him so that Peter could see them together.

Footsteps crunched in the gravel. The car door screaked open and shut. The motor revved, and the Mustang backed from the drive, panting like a dog as it paused in front of the house. Then it moved off in a decrescendo.

“That kid’s missing a screw,” Kendall said.

They embraced lightly and gave each other just a feather’s brush of a kiss.

Todd was the All-American, Norman Rockwell type with a pert nose and freckled cheeks, except that tonight his face looked faded. Oddly enough, his eyes were at once both sparkling blue and bloodshot, the zinc-flecked irises cropped by thick, droopy lids. They suggested not only physical, but also emotional fatigue as well as, paradoxically, a certain indefatigable merriment. Tiny silver wires gleamed in his auburn hair so that, when he turned, it glistened, and there was about him, laced with sweat, a trace of freshly mown grass.

“What would you like, a beer, wine?” Kendall asked.

“Gave the little old lady across the street quite a thrill,” Todd remarked, nodding toward the open door.

“After all she’s seen?” Kendall asked.

“How ’bout a beer?”

Todd sat at the piano, spread sheet music, and began picking his way through the Stravinsky piece, and yet the least cog in the simplest of his movements seemed painfully difficult.

When Kendall reappeared, Todd looked up and said, “Watched ’im humpin’ your leg.”

Kendall handed him the beer. He had also brought a glass of white wine.

“Thought I’d better cut in,” Todd said.

Kendall sipped the wine, then sat beside him.

“There’s the strangest chord in Mahler’s Tenth,” Kendall said, “which I think is the most pagan sound I’ve ever heard. Well, in music. A friend described it as Mahler’s first blow-job. I picture rounding a tree in a forest only to find yourself face to face with Pan. Apparently whatever explodes inside Peter whenever he sees—now get this—feet, especially mine.”

“Peter’s Pan,” Todd joked. “Who is he?”

“Peter Bethel.” Kendall took another sip, then set the glass on top of the piano. “An ex-student,” he explained, centering the score. “You play the bass,” he suggested. “I’ll take the top.”

“Why do I always have to be on bottom?” Todd joked, plunking slowly into the music.

Kendall patiently chimed in on cue.

“I had him six years ago,” Kendall said pensively.

“Had ’im?”

“As a student,” he said, correcting him. “One night after class, on my way to the parking lot, he stopped me and said he had a ‘wild hair up his ass.’ I’d never heard the expression, and the first thing that popped into my mind, believe it or not, was a hare, h.a.r.e. I thought he had a wild hare up his ass.”

“Peter’s rabbit,” Todd laughed. “Kinky.”

His voice had a calm, dovelike tendency as if used to talking to the ill.

Kendall smiled and nudged him in the ribs, yet the smile was slightly tilted. Happiness, it seemed, could not quite balance itself in his face.

“I had a good idea what he was going to say,” Kendall said. “So I told him, ‘Don’t worry about it, Peter. Spit it out.’ He’d dropped by my office for ‘conferences,’ and I thought I had his number, and he mine, to several significant figures. Well, what he said wasn’t exactly what I’d expected. He said,” Kendall mused, “that God had spoken to him. How do you say God in signs?”

Todd pressed his hands together as in prayer, pointing from the chest, then, in a backward movement, up.

“What did God have to say?” he asked.

“God had told him to give me his ass.”

“You’re kidding,” Todd grinned. He swigged some beer.

“He was serious.”

“What’d you say?”

“I told him God had made a mistake. I didn’t want his ass.”

Todd chuckled, took another swig, then dug into the keys, clumsily trudging through the notes.

“Imagine the power,” Kendall commented.

“To cross God,” Todd said archly. “What a mind-blow it must’ve been. For Peter, I mean. Not God.”

“God hadn’t been all that wrong,” Kendall confessed. “I would’ve abused the little bugger, crossed eyes and all, if he hadn’t lubed himself up with all that God talk.”

“Heap big trouble,” Todd noted.

“As in fired,” Kendall stressed. “He’s blabbed every last detail to his mother, preacher, and shrink.”

“What happened?”

“I told him I was his professor and he was my student and we’d better keep playing those roles, at least till the quarter ended. He’d simply have to wait. I’d talk to ’im then.” Kendall swayed above the keyboard like a bough in a breeze. “Every night after class, he’d be waiting in his car, watching me. I’d just get in mine and drive home. Thank God,” he quipped, “it always started.” He paused to sip wine. “The quarter ended,” he began again.

“And one night he dropped by,” Todd filled in.

“Guess I didn’t handle him right. My heart was in the right place. I assure you I never intended to steal his. His sanity, I realized, was as delicate as…an orchid, let’s say. Even if I didn’t bruise it—and I was trying not to—I knew that soon it would fade. I was nice to him,” Kendall coughed, clearing his throat, “but pretended I didn’t know why he was there. Wrong! Every time he’d come near the subject, I’d shift gears, pulling away. Then I told him I was tired. A year later, I heard he had a nervous breakdown. Sure you don’t know him? Never occurred to me,” Kendall added, “he may’ve been your patient. He was hospitalized for some time.” Kendall swept the keys in a sudden, harsh run setting all the strings humming. “That wasn’t the end,” he said. “Peter’s like the universe, no beginning, no end. I’d forgotten about him for five years. Then he popped up last quarter, taking a class from someone I know in sociology. Peter lisps. Stutters when he’s nervous,” Kendall added. “He called Don last week. Works nights at a supermarket. Guess he saw me there. Years ago I did have a fantasy about him.”

“Oh?” Todd asked.

“He was so,” Kendall stumbled, “hungry for me, it seemed—seems—that I would fantasize about a modest dominant-submissive scene. Funny. To actually talk about it disconcerts me a little.”

“Is it true for you?” Todd asked earnestly. “Is that what your fantasy’s really about?”

“It’s just that I’ve never talked about my—”

“Desires,” Todd said.

“He seems so—”

“Hungry.”

“Yes, hungry for me. I think he’d do anything I asked. How many people do you meet like that?”

“You’d be surprised,” Todd said. He drained the beer. “What are we playing?”

“Stravinsky,” Kendall replied brightly.

“That I can see.”

“The adagietto from an early sonata.”

“Your recital is—”

“Friday,” Kendall said.

“Mark coming?”

“Yes.”

“The bass reminds me of someone walking.”

“It’s called a walking bass,” Kendall said. “I’ve thought of a scenario for it. I like to imagine little scenes to go with the music.”

“Another fantasy?”

“A walk through a park at night.”

“With Peter on a leash,” Todd teased. “Here, you take the reins,” he said, sliding over. “Tell me about it. I’ll play the shrink.”

“Thought we were playing Stravinsky,” Kendall smiled. “A wind is blowing through the trees,” he began, immediately slipping into the part.

“Uh-huh,” Todd said in mock analysis.

“A storm brewing,” Kendall said, a dim smile flickering across his face. “In Chicago, let’s say, huge clouds building over the lake, mountainous clouds complete with sheet lightning and muffled thunder. This trill here, a flutter of wings.”

“Pigeons,” Todd joked. “Ah-ha!”

“Or,” Kendall said, “a spasm of the heart.” His eyes lit up as he refurbished the story. “A spasm,” he repeated, “as subtle as a skipped beat.”

One o’clock pealed, melding with the music.

“OK,” Todd summarized. “So far we have a park crawling with rheumatic pigeons.”

“By a lake.”

“A big lake.”

“In the distance,” Kendall said, “beyond the shrub-lined border of the park, glitter street lights, traffic lights, headlights, a galaxy of urban lights. But the protagonist, the voice of the music—”

“The legato.”

“—is floating in a moody bubble.”

“The eye of all the restlessness,” Todd said, lapsing into the spirit of the piece. “Yes, I hear it, the counterpoint.”

“The lyrical line of his thoughts versus the staccato—”

“Of the real world.”

The atonal passage seemed to be drawing his fingers into the keys, as if the melody had always idled there in the ivory, quietly waiting to be played and set free. Yet at times the stroll, the bass, though aimless, was all that carried the work forward, the sole pursuit of the protagonist, for the moment his all.

“He’s trying to block something from his thoughts,” Kendall said, interpreting the piece. “Something painful, dissonant, gnawing at him. A paradox, a memory at once both as wracking and innocent as a girl in a doorway, waving goodbye.”

“Or a stranger with an anxious smile,” Todd interjected.

“At last, he yields, and the pain, when embraced, turns to joy. Here,” Kendall said, his fingers immersed in the keys, “a flood of images bursts into his mind. He whispers to himself, a whimsical gleam dancing in his eye. He drifts, cloaked, as it were, in the magic of the mood, blind to the path leading him up to a traffic circle, to a surprisingly simple, harmonic close, pianissimo, yes, faint as a memory, yet enough. His thoughts alone, enough for the night. Despite disappointments, there have been moments subtle, grand, and rare. And yet,” Kendall concluded, striking the final chord, “the movement ends in an unexpected tremor of discord. A sudden doubt, a car horn, startles him.”

Again, Kendall’s fingers, like a surgeon’s, hovered over the keys. Then he and Todd gazed into each other’s eyes.

“This is where you ask me,” Todd said, dropping his gaze to Kendall’s lips, “if I want another beer.”

“What does it mean?” Kendall asked. “The scenario.”

“Somewhere along the line I got caught up in it,” Todd said. “Write a script for every piece?”

“If I think myself through this way,” Kendall said, caressing Todd’s shoulder, “I don’t even hear the performance. It helps the expression.”

A car passed, slowly unzipping the street.

“I shouldn’t have shut him out,” Kendall said, glancing toward the door.

“Who, Peter?”

“Yes,” Kendall said. “He’ll be back.”

They sat perfectly still, the sway of the pendulum gradually emerging from the lull with a dreamy click-clank, click-clank.

[Click Here for Part 2]

© 2006 Ken Anderson - Contributor's Bio