I was an exceptionally straightforward person. If I liked something, I said so. If I didn’t, I said that too. I had no talent for reading between the lines, and no ability to speak that way myself. People laughed at me for it and called me a child, but that was who I was. That was probably why I had such difficulty understanding what Astaire was saying. Astaire saw through me easily.

“What I mean is that I had ulterior motives for choosing that particular method.”

After staring at me for a long moment, Astaire smiled slightly and put it more plainly.

“Pardon? But……”

You thought of me as a child. If you hadn’t, you wouldn’t have kissed me like that. 

The words I couldn’t bring myself to say drifted around inside my mouth. I held them back because I was sure the moment I said them, Astaire would laugh at me. But absurdly, Astaire read even the words I had failed to speak.

“You’re no longer a minor, are you, Miss Danyu? I have never thought of you as a child. The reason I kissed you that day was because I saw you as a woman.”

My face flushed at the blunt words. I turned away to hide it, but Astaire was laughing in a way that said he already knew my reaction without having to look. It was that particular ease adults had, the kind I disliked so much.

I already knew how to stop adults from laughing. I walked slowly to the piano and began pressing the keys. By the time the music followed, the laughter that had been circling my ears was gone.

Strangely, whenever adults heard me play, they would always go quiet like this. Every one of them said there was something in my playing. What could possibly be in this playing, with no technique and no polish. I didn’t know the reason, but as long as it stopped their laughter, it didn’t matter.

“Your method had no effect at all, Astaire. I was startled for a moment, but that was all.”

I kept playing and slowly closed my eyes.

“Eight whole years. Feelings built over that much time can’t simply vanish overnight. It takes time to empty out what you’ve let in. But you got one thing right. I couldn’t stop playing piano.”

Piano Sonata, Pathétique.

The piece I had played at the practical examination. A succession of notes, beautiful yet desolate.

“You said it yourself, Astaire. That you had wanted to quit but failed. It was the same for me. Even with my heart aching, I sat down at the piano every day and kept pressing the keys. And then I realized. Even if that person disappears, it doesn’t mean all the time I spent at the piano disappears with him.”

Allegro di molto. Adagio cantabile. Allegro. My hands couldn’t stop through all those melodies moving between slow and fast. Only after pressing the final note that fell into the descending arpeggio did I finally return to the present.

“Every hour I put into this belongs entirely to me. It is all my life, and even if that person disappears from it, nothing changes. So I’m going to work hard at piano. Truly hard.”

Perhaps because I had lost myself in the music. My chest felt so full I couldn’t open my mouth. But the moment tears I hadn’t known were there fell onto my lap, I understood that it was not I who had been absorbed into the music, but the music that had resonated within me.

“I understand, Miss Danyu. I’ll do my best to help you. So please don’t cry.”

Astaire stood leaning against the piano with his eyes closed. He still wasn’t looking at me, yet he had noticed again that I was crying.

“I’m not crying.”

“I told you before. It’s endearing that Miss Danyu can’t tell a lie.”

“Isn’t it a gentleman’s duty to pretend not to notice such things?”

“If you’d like, I’ll play along, miss.”

True to that promise, Astaire left the salon without ever turning to look at me. In the spot where he had stood, a neatly folded handkerchief rested on top of the piano.

* * *

Astaire was as methodical a teacher as his manner suggested. His approach differed from Sio’s in many ways, Sio who had always pursued freedom, and I struggled for a time to adjust to his methods.

But absurdly, as time passed, Astaire’s once-unfamiliar ways began to feel more and more natural. That meant, in turn, saying farewell to Sio’s ways. Piano with someone other than Sio. It was something I had never once imagined, but people adapted to change faster than they expected.

I welcomed him as a matter of course, sat beside him at the piano, chatted quietly as we played the keys. Through those exchanges, we shared the small events of each week and came to know each other. For eight years, that center had been Sio alone, but over the past month, Astaire had taken that place.

Astaire was someone at ease with keeping a conversation going. When I talked with Sio, I had always been working to keep the conversation alive, but with Astaire I could laugh and talk without having to search for things to say.

Even so, Sio still held a place in my daily life. My childhood, when I had thrown everything toward him, had been Sio himself, and so wherever I turned, memories of him lingered. I had to make a conscious effort not to think of him. The moment I let my guard down even slightly, my feelings for Sio would push their way out, into my words, into my thoughts, into my chest, and put me in a difficult position.

“I hadn’t realized you were this unfamiliar with reading sheet music.”

“I knew an easier way, so I was always careless about studying the score. It’s simpler to learn by ear.”

Today was exactly that kind of situation. I had a good ear, good enough that even Sio Lieselotte acknowledged it, and I had always learned new pieces through Sio’s playing rather than through the score. There was no reason for my eyes to take in the score of a piece I had already learned by ear, so my ability to read music was poor for someone with eight years of study behind her. Astaire wanted to correct that.

“Astaire, could you play this for me? The score for this piece is too difficult.”

Knowing full well what he was trying to do, I waved the sheet music he had prepared and stuck out my lip. I slumped over the piano in protest, complaining that I couldn’t bear to look at another score, and Astaire gave me a light flick on the head with the face of a strict teacher. There was no real force behind it and it couldn’t have hurt, but I made a show of wailing dramatically, and a faint smile crossed the corner of Astaire’s mouth.

“Learning by ear is a bad habit. If you listen to someone else’s playing before you’ve developed your own interpretation, you end up following that person without realizing it.”

“But Sio……”

Sio’s name slipped into the words I muttered under my breath before I could stop it. I caught myself and went quiet, but there was no taking back what had already left my mouth. It wasn’t intentional, but the result was that I had openly compared Sio, my former teacher, with Astaire.

“So the reason Miss Danyu’s playing resembled Sio’s was because that’s how you learned.”

I watched Astaire’s expression with an uneasy look, but he didn’t react. Instead, he calmly took the sheet music from my hand, wrote something on it with a pen, and handed it back. The returned score had added notes explaining the passages where I had made repeated mistakes.

“I had thought it strange that even the small habits were so similar.”

Astaire’s voice reached me from above as I read the score.

“I couldn’t help it. His playing was the only music I ever really heard.”

I shrugged lightly and answered back, and he asked in genuine surprise.

“You’ve never listened to anyone else play?”

“No. I didn’t start piano because I loved music to begin with. I wasn’t particularly interested.”

Salons were held at our house, so I had caught bits and pieces in passing, but the only playing I had truly listened to was Sio’s. I had always been pressed for time, learning piano with Sio, practicing pieces to play for him, trying to arrange my schedule around his just to see his face, and so I had little interest in anyone else’s playing. For that reason, I had never even heard Astaire play, despite his reputation as Sio’s equal, so it was perhaps only natural that I hadn’t listened to anyone else.

“This is a problem I genuinely hadn’t anticipated.”

Astaire scratched his head with an uncharacteristically blank expression. His light blond hair scattered softly with the movement of his hand. Despite the slight curl to it, it fell apart as gently as loose thread, and my eyes drifted to it without thinking. I didn’t dislike my red hair, but soft platinum blond was a beautiful color any woman would want.

“Miss Danyu?”

His puzzled voice snapped me back. My hand had been touching Astaire’s hair without me realizing it.