The Practice Room

Scott had learned that Thursday afternoons belonged to the music building.

Laura had never told him this as though it were an appointment he needed to remember. He had simply begun to notice the rhythm of her week, which was itself evidence of how much time they were spending together. Business classes occupied most mornings, studying took up portions of the evenings, and meals and coffee happened wherever they could be fitted between the two. But on Thursday afternoons Laura disappeared into the music building for nearly two hours, and whatever else might be happening seemed to arrange itself around that fact.

“You have another lesson?” Scott had asked the first time he noticed.

“Practice.”

“There's a difference?”

Laura had looked at him with the patient expression she sometimes used when he had said something particularly uninformed. “There's a very big difference.”

He had accepted the correction without understanding it.

A few weeks later Scott crossed campus toward the music building near the end of Laura's usual practice time. He had no particular reason to meet her except that he knew when she would be finished and wanted to see her. This too had become part of their routine. Neither of them made elaborate plans anymore. They had become comfortable with simply appearing in one another's day.

The music building was quieter than most of the campus. The main hallway smelled faintly of old wood and floor polish, and closed doors revealed their occupants mostly through sound. Scott passed someone playing scales on a trumpet, then a violin repeating the same few measures with enough persistence that he was glad not to be the person practicing them.

Farther down the hall he heard a piano.

At first he paid little attention. Pianos were hardly unusual in a music building. He had almost reached Laura's practice room before something about the playing made him slow down, and then he realized it was her.

Scott knew Laura played piano. He knew she had played since childhood and that music scholarships helped pay for college. He had heard her talk about practicing and lessons often enough that piano occupied a perfectly reasonable place among the things he knew about her, along with horses, the ranch, her father's engineering, and her tendency to finish assignments before he had seriously considered starting his.

But knowing she played was not the same as hearing her.

He stopped outside the door.

The music coming through it had none of the hesitation he associated with someone practicing. There were passages that moved quickly and others that seemed almost to wait, but Laura moved through all of them with an assurance that surprised him. He could hear the discipline in it without knowing enough about music to identify what was difficult. More than that, he could hear familiarity. The piano did not sound like something she had learned to operate. It sounded like something she knew.

Scott leaned against the hallway wall and listened.

When the final notes faded, he waited a few seconds before knocking.

“Come in.”

Laura turned on the bench when he opened the door, and her expression changed when she saw him.

“What are you doing here?”

“I came to meet you.”

She glanced at the clock. “I'm almost done.”

“I figured.”

Then she looked at him more carefully. “How long have you been standing out there?”

Scott hesitated just long enough to make lying pointless.

“A little while.”

Laura laughed. “You could have come in.”

“I didn't want to interrupt.”

“You wouldn't have.”

He stepped into the practice room and closed the door behind him. There was barely enough space for the upright piano, its bench, and a chair pushed against one wall. Music crowded the rack above the keyboard, several pages covered with pencil marks whose meaning Scott couldn't decipher. A metronome sat on top of the piano beside books worn soft at the corners.

“I knew you played,” he said.

Laura waited.

“I didn't know you played like that.”

For once she didn't have an immediate answer. A little color came into her face, and she looked down at the keyboard.

“My mother started teaching me when I was three.”

“Three?”

“She was a wonderful pianist. There was always music in our house.”

Scott tried to imagine a three-year-old Laura sitting at a piano. “Could you even reach the pedals?”

“Probably not.”

“That seems like a design flaw.”

She laughed. “I grew.”

“That was fortunate.”

Laura rested her hands lightly on the keys. She wasn't playing now, but Scott noticed how naturally her fingers settled there.

“And you just kept doing it?”

“I loved it.”

The answer came easily, without the qualification Scott sometimes heard when people described things their parents had made them do as children. Laura told him about lessons and recitals, and about the years when practicing had sometimes competed with horses and everything else she wanted to be doing. She told him that eventually she'd earned music scholarships that helped pay for college and that she now taught a few beginning students herself.

Scott looked at the penciled music again. “So this is a pretty important part of your life.”

“It always has been.”

There was something in the way she said it that made him wait.

Scott was good at that. Laura had noticed it beside the river on their Saturday drive and on other occasions since. He didn't treat every pause as an empty space he was responsible for filling. If she stopped talking, he generally assumed there was a reason.

She appreciated that more than she had told him.

“Do your parents think you'll become a concert pianist?” he asked.

Laura smiled. “I don't think anybody expects that.”

“What do they expect?”

She started to answer and then stopped. Until he asked, she wasn't sure she had ever tried to put the expectation into words.

“I think they've always assumed music would be part of my life.”

Scott nodded toward the piano. “Seems like a safe assumption.”

“No, I mean...” She looked down at the keys. “I think they've pictured a particular kind of life.”

“What kind?”

Laura thought about home, about her mother's piano and the years of lessons that had begun before Laura was old enough to decide whether she wanted them. There had never been a family meeting about her future. Nobody had handed her instructions. The expectations had been gentler than that, woven into ordinary conversation until they seemed less like decisions than the natural continuation of what already existed.

“I suppose they imagine I'll get married someday,” she said. “Have children. Teach piano. Maybe play at church.”

Scott considered this. “Do they want you to?”

“It's not really like that.”

“What is it like?”

Laura smiled. “That's the problem. I don't know.”

She had never felt trapped by her parents' expectations because they had rarely expressed them as expectations. They loved music. They knew she loved it too. A daughter who had played since she was three, earned scholarships, and begun teaching other students might reasonably be expected to continue. There was nothing objectionable in any of that.

But college had introduced Laura to the possibility that loving something did not necessarily determine the shape of an entire life.

Scott seemed to understand that she was still thinking.

“Is that what you picture?” he asked.

Laura looked at him.

“I honestly don't know.”

The answer surprised her a little, not because it was untrue but because she had said it aloud. She loved music. Sitting at the piano remained one of the few places where she could become so absorbed in what she was doing that everything else disappeared. She couldn't imagine a life in which music meant nothing to her.

But that wasn't the same as knowing what her life should look like.

Scott nodded, apparently satisfied.

“You're not going to tell me I have plenty of time to figure it out?”

“I was thinking about it.”

“I knew it.”

“You probably do.”

“Thank you.”

“You're welcome.”

Laura turned back toward the piano. “Do you want to hear what I've been working on?”

“I thought that's what I was doing in the hallway.”

“You were eavesdropping.”

“I was appreciating.”

She gave him a look.

“Quietly appreciating.”

Laura shifted on the bench and placed her hands on the keyboard. Scott moved to the chair against the wall.

This time she knew he was listening.

She had played for audiences before, including audiences much larger and more knowledgeable than Scott. She had performed in recitals and competitions where judges listened for mistakes he would never hear. Yet for the first few measures she was unexpectedly conscious of him sitting behind her. She wondered what he thought of the music, then became annoyed with herself for wondering and returned her attention to the piece.

Gradually the room narrowed around the piano.

Scott watched her while she played. He knew nothing about technique and couldn't have identified the difficult passages. He couldn't tell whether she missed a note, though once she made a small movement with her head that suggested she had. What he could see was the concentration on her face and the change that came over her when a passage unfolded the way she wanted it to. The Laura he knew laughed easily and talked readily. At the piano she seemed quieter without being less herself.

He liked watching her.

Laura reached the end and let her hands remain on the keys while the last sound disappeared from the room. When she turned, Scott was still looking at her.

“Well?”

He shook his head slightly.

“What does that mean?”

“I don't know enough about piano to say anything intelligent.”

“That hasn't stopped you before.”

“That's fair.”

She waited.

“I liked it.”

Laura smiled. “That's acceptable.”

They left the music building together a few minutes later. Outside, the afternoon had cooled, and maple leaves moved across the walkway whenever the wind caught them. Scott walked beside her toward the dormitory, close enough that their shoulders occasionally touched. Laura noticed each time and pretended she didn't.

Their Saturday drive had changed something between them, though neither had tried to define it. They still met for coffee and walked between classes. They still joked and argued about insignificant things. But Laura had become aware of the small differences: the way she looked for him when she entered the student union, how naturally she told him things she hadn't planned to tell anyone, and the fact that she now cared what he thought when he heard her play.

Halfway across campus, Scott reached for her hand.

There was no announcement beforehand. His fingers simply found hers as they walked.

Laura looked down at their hands and then at him.

Scott looked suddenly less confident than he had a moment earlier.

She could have teased him. Usually she would have.

Instead she moved her fingers between his and held on.

They continued beneath the maple trees without talking about what had just happened. There would be time later for names and explanations, if they needed them. For now Laura was content with the warmth of his hand and the quiet pleasure of knowing that neither of them seemed interested in letting go.

A few minutes earlier she had been sitting at a piano trying to imagine what her life might someday look like. She still didn't know. The future remained as indistinct as it had been inside the practice room.

But Scott was beside her now, his hand in hers, and Laura found that she didn't need the afternoon to tell her anything more.