Three Notes Through an Open Window

On Tuesday afternoon, three notes came through the window while I was reading a sentence aloud. I stopped halfway through “a sense of arrival.” Someone across the courtyard played the notes again, reached for a fourth, and produced a thin squeak. I looked down at my document. The sentence had its own difficulties, though none quite so audible.

I was at the table in my Cobble Hill apartment, working through a short piece of client language. The window was raised a few inches. From where I sat, I could see a section of brick, two dark windowpanes, and the underside of a fire escape. The sound seemed to come from somewhere above that small view. I thought it might be a clarinet. This was based on a confidence in my musical education that would not have survived a second question.

For the next ten minutes, the same little phrase kept returning. Sometimes there was a pause long enough for me to resume reading. Sometimes the player began again immediately, as though trying to catch the troublesome note before it noticed. I closed the window. The sound became softer and less distinct, but the squeak still found its way in. Old buildings have firm opinions about what constitutes a private activity.

Beyond the sill

I finished the paragraph I was working on and went to put water in the kettle. In the kitchen, the playing was clearer. There was a low, rounded sound beneath the sharper ones, and I began to doubt the clarinet. I stayed by the counter long enough to hear the phrase reach its end. It was longer than I had thought. I had been attending so closely to the mistake that I had missed what surrounded it.

At my father’s events in Charleston, I sometimes heard musicians warming up while we were still setting the room. A few detached notes would cross the scrape of chairs. I rarely listened for long; I was checking whether the sound carried too loudly at one table or whether someone needed a glass of water. Music belonged to the list of things that had to be ready when the doors opened. I remembered those brief, unsettled sounds on Tuesday more clearly than any finished piece.

Across the courtyard, someone stopped and began again at a different point. There was no accompanying voice, no conversation I could make out. I wondered whether I was hearing a lesson, then caught myself supplying a teacher, a child, an impatient parent. I had constructed an entire household on the evidence of four notes. My work does involve making a great deal of very little, but I try to keep that within office hours.

I had constructed an entire household on the evidence of four notes.

It could have been someone my age. It could have been someone who had played for forty years and was finding this particular passage difficult. Even the squeak, which I had taken as evidence of a beginner, might have meant something else entirely. I knew that a person had enough breath for the phrase, that they kept returning to it, and that our windows were open at the same time. The rest was furnishing.

I carried my tea back to the table and raised the window again. There was a narrow breeze along the sill, cool against the inside of my wrist. I still had work to finish, and the phrase was still distracting. My sudden interest had not improved the acoustics. But I could hear the pauses differently now: a short one, a longer one, then a run of notes taken much more slowly. I found myself waiting at the difficult part, lips pressed together as though that would be of assistance.

The player got through it once. Or perhaps changed it; I cannot promise I would have known. A few more notes followed, then the whole thing began again. I had expected a stop after the successful attempt, some small acknowledgment that the obstacle was behind us. Apparently we were doing it twice. I smiled into my cup. Somewhere outside my view, a person was being considerably more thorough than their accidental audience required.

When the playing stopped, I noticed how much else had been going on beneath it. Water ran briefly through a pipe. A door shut. From an open window farther down came the blunt clatter of cutlery being put away. I returned to my sentence and read it from the beginning. By then I had forgotten the exact order of the notes. I could remember the breath before them, though, and the little hesitation where I had come to expect trouble.

Later, I leaned out just far enough to pull the window down for the evening. A light had come on across the courtyard behind a lowered blind. I had no reason to think it belonged to the person who had been playing. For a moment I heard a low note and held the sash where it was. It was a truck on the street beyond the buildings, changing gear. I closed the window, keeping my fingers clear of the swollen wood.