Mara's River Nocturne premiered in April of the following year, at a larger venue than the elegy — three hundred seats, a full piano and string quartet, two sold-out performances. He sat in the front row for both.
The piece was different from the elegy in the way she had described it: lighter in orientation, a piece that understood sadness and had decided, without denial or sentimentality, to walk in a different direction. Where the elegy had been about the record of loss, the Nocturne was about the practice of continuing — the daily, ordinary, extraordinary work of remaining present to your own life after it has been changed by whatever has changed it.
The piano part was the voice of this practice: repeating, circling, but each repetition slightly different, slightly further on, as if each return to the theme was an act of remembrance that was also an act of becoming. The strings were the context — the larger world the piano moved through, sometimes supporting, sometimes resisting, always present.
He sat in the front row and let it do what it did. He thought of fog. He thought of moving through it. He thought of his father on a Saturday in Ohio with a lawn mower, and of his own hands on a steering wheel driving home from Ohio on a winter highway, and of a faculty lounge on a September afternoon with the light coming through the window at the gold angle of the season, and of a green bottle of shampoo on a bathroom shelf, eleven days of silence, and a woman in a blue cardigan with a hole at the left elbow, standing in the middle of the light without seeming to notice.
He thought of all of it and let the music say what needed saying, because music could say these things more honestly and more completely than any other language, and because that was the point of it, and always had been.
When it was over, before the applause, in the brief silence, he felt the resolution she had described. Not happiness. Not the absence of loss. The settled understanding that the lost things were real, were here, will not be forgotten. The difference between erasure and absence.
He thought he understood, now, why the elegy had been the first thing, and the Nocturne the second.
You had to record the loss before you could practice the continuing.
✦ ✦ ✦
After the second performance she came and sat beside him in the empty, de-populating hall, while the musicians packed their instruments and the staff folded programs.
She was still in the dress, a deep burgundy that he had not seen before, with her hair up and a smear of pencil on her left hand from where she had made notes on her program during the performance — a habit she could not suppress, apparently, even when the piece was finished, even when she was supposed to be listening without the composer's analytical ear.
'Well?' she said, when the hall was nearly empty.
'I think it's the most honest thing I've ever sat through,' he said.
She looked at the stage, the emptied chairs where the quartet had been. 'I think so too,' she said. 'I think it's the most honest thing I've made. The elegy was necessary but this is—' She paused. 'This is chosen. This is what it looks like when you decide to keep going.'
He put his arm around her. She leaned against him. They sat in the emptying hall for a while, and neither of them spoke, because what had just been said in that hall did not need elaboration.