Saving Mr. Bell

Chapter Fifteen

Rudolf

In my dream, I was playing Mozart’s Allegro Sonata, and just like on that fateful night in Germany when even my talent had let me down, I couldn’t make my fingers do what they were supposed to. Playing the piano was like breathing, but that night, it had been more like suffocating. I’d been close enough to the audience in the front row to see their furrowed brows, to see them look at each other as they silently asked what was going on.

That wasn’t a question I’d been able to answer then, and weeks later, I still couldn’t answer it. I’d left the stage, and I hadn’t played the piano since, had barely even looked at one. Hell, I’d spent the last few days near one and hadn’t so much as touched a single key. So I wasn’t appreciating this dream. I wasn’t appreciating it at all, especially when dream me was mangling the notes even worse than I had in Germany.

Except, when I opened my eyes to the familiar wall of the cabin bedroom, the music continued. The other side of the bed was empty. Well, of course it was—the piano wasn’t playing itself. Although I couldn’t help wondering if it could, whether it might do a better job. Back when we’d made the documentary, I’d invited Arlo to play my piano, a Steinway worth an obscene amount of money. Arlo had paled, stuttered out an excuse that had been far from convincing, and I hadn’t offered again.

I rolled onto my back and tried not to listen. I’d pretend I was asleep and stay in bed until he got bored and stopped. That way, we didn’t have to discuss it. We could go about our day as normal. No stress. No strain. Exactly the way Arlo had intended when he’d brought me here. Which begged the question why, after days of respecting my wishes and acting like the piano didn’t exist, he’d decided to play the damn thing today?

Ten more minutes passed, Arlo moving on from butchering Mozart to Brahm’s lullaby. That one was easier, so it was a little better, but not by much. It didn’t, however, do as intended and lull me back to sleep. How long could he play? My subconscious laughed at the question when there’d been days where I’d played for hours straight without stopping for food or water, and had only dragged myself away when my bladder threatened a messy protest if I didn’t. That was different, though. Playing the piano was my life. It used to be your life.

When Arlo moved onto Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, I sighed and swung my legs out of bed, resigning myself to the inevitable. Once I’d pulled on sweatpants, I wandered out into the main room, taking a deep breath before sticking my head into the adjoining room. “Why are you torturing me?”

Arlo smiled, but kept playing. “Because I’m playing the piano or because I’m playing it badly?”

Both. “Because it’s too early for something this heavy.”

Arlo’s fingers stilled on the keys and he changed to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. “Better?” I winced as he played the next set of notes wrong. He grimaced. “Ignore those.”

More wrong notes followed. “What about those?”

Arlo flashed me a grin. “Those as well. I bet you’re realizing why I never played for you six years ago.”

“It crossed my mind.”

He stopped playing and shifted his weight back on the piano stool. “I didn’t want to see that look on your face.”

“What look?”

“The look that says you wish I’d had a better piano teacher when I was a kid.”

“You had a teacher?” I winced. Wow! That had been brutal, even for me. “I mean…”

“You said it. You can’t take it back. Poor Mrs. Shufflebottom will turn in her grave. Or at least she would if she was dead. Last I heard, she was still going strong, though, and had eight grandchildren.”

“You expect me to believe that was her name? She sounds like a Roald Dahl character.”

“She had certain similarities to one. If I could grow a mustache as magnificent as hers, I’d never shave. She taught me every Wednesday and Friday after school for three years.”

I couldn’t help myself. “And had she ever seen a piano before?”

Arlo shoved the piano stool back and stood. “We can’t all be born with magic in our fingers and music in our heads.” He swept a hand over the vacated stool. “Come on then, show me how it’s done. Put my playing to shame.”

I almost fell for it, Arlo’s maneuvering damn close to expert. No doubt he could play better than he’d made out. Maybe not much better. But he’d definitely fumbled a few notes he could have made . He thought that if he got my hands back on the piano keys that the universe would realign itself and everything would be alright. If only life was that simple. Instead of taking the seat offered, I took a step back. “I’m hungry. I’m guessing I’m cooking breakfast, that playing music took priority for you today.”

By the time Arlo joined me in the kitchen, I already had sausages sizzling in a pan. I didn’t look at him as he came to stand on the opposite side of the breakfast bar. “Sausage sandwich,” I said. “I thought we could use the last of the bread.”

“Fine by me.” Silence stretched on just that beat too long before he broke it. “I’m sorry, Rudolf. I thought if I could get you playing again… that you’d get over this stage fright thing.”

“It’s not stage fright.”

“No? Then… what is it? Talk to me. Tell me about Germany.”

I turned the sausages over before lifting my gaze to Arlo’s. “You’re expecting a traumatic story. Something somebody said, maybe. You’re going to be disappointed because I don’t have one for you.”

“So what happened?”

I set to work on buttering the bread while contemplating the question. “I used to love playing. Like really love it.”

“I know you did. I remember. While we were making the documentary, you lived and breathed music. Sometimes we’d be talking, and you’d get this look on your face, and I’d know you weren’t listening to a word I was saying, that you’d gotten an idea for a musical composition in your head and you were desperate to try it out. Your enthusiasm was…”

“Sad?” I suggested.

“Inspiring. I wondered if…”

The reluctance to end his thought had me searching Arlo’s face for clues about what he’d been going to say. “You wondered what?”

“I wondered if you’d ever look at a person the way you looked at a piano.”

There was a lot of information to take from what he’d said. I settled on humor first. “I can promise you I’ve never had sex with any of my pianos. No matter how much money anyone has offered me to film it.”

Arlo’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s a joke, right?”

“Well… no one’s actually offered me money to have sex with a piano. Yet. But people have offered me ridiculous sums to pose naked on top of one. So the good news is that even if I never play again, I have ways of earning an income. For a few years, anyway. I just have to get my cock out for the paying public.”

“I’m sure any photos would be more tasteful than that.”

“Probably.” I replayed Arlo’s comment about the way I looked at a piano and went down a different avenue. “Did you like me back then?”

“What?”

I could tell from his expression he knew exactly what I was referring to, but was buying himself some time. “Six years ago.”

“Of course I liked you.”

“Yeah, but did you like me?”

“You were seventeen.”

“I was a month away from being eighteen.”

Arlo rolled his eyes. “And that makes all the difference.”

I fixed him with a stare. “You’re avoiding the question.”

“Says the person who still hasn’t told me what happened in Germany that night.”

I pulled a face. “Fine. Answer the question and I’ll tell you as best I can.”

“Promise?”

I let out a weary sigh as I took the cooked sausages off the stove. “I promise.”

“If I say yes, I’ll sound like a pervert.” Twin flags of color had appeared on Arlo’s cheeks. They made him look so adorable that it was all I could do not to reach across and pinch his cheek like he was a kid and I was his auntie.

“Still not an answer.”

“Yes.”

It was so grudging that I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. “Pervert!”

“You’re not funny.”

“Good job I’m not a comedian, then.” I sliced the sausages and shared them out equally between the two slices of bread. “Sauce?”

Arlo shook his head. “Just pepper.”

I added a generous amount of pepper to both and then shoved one in his direction. After pouring myself a coffee, I joined him at the small dining table. The curtains were open, sunlight streaming in through the window. No fresh snowfall. Sun. The snow felt like an hourglass ticking away the days and hours. Or maybe it was hours and minutes.

“Germany?” Arlo asked after a few minutes. “I kept my side of the bargain.”

I blew out a breath. “I don’t think the story starts in Germany. I think it starts months before that. Maybe as much as a year before.”

“Go on,” Arlo urged.

“It’s simple. Somewhere along the line, I lost the love for playing.” I might have said it was simple, but my increased heart rate as I admitted the truth, and the slight sweatiness of my palms, showed that for the lie it was. “It was fine at first. I could go through the motions and nobody seemed any the wiser. I guess when you’ve been playing as long as I have, muscle memory takes over.” I took a bite of my sandwich, Arlo waiting patiently for me to continue while I chewed and swallowed. “After all, what does it matter if I’m not feeling it?”

“It matters,” Arlo said quietly. “It’s like any job. If you start hating it, then it becomes torture.”

“I didn’t hate it. I wouldn’t go that far. It just didn’t feel the same as it once had. Maybe that’s inevitable, and it happens to everyone.”

“Your schedule was too busy. Your management should have known that.”

“Maybe,” I admitted.

“How many documentaries do I make a year?” Arlo asked.

I hid a smirk behind the rim of my mug. “You don’t know?”

“Two or three. I made four one year, and it made me want to go and live in a cave for six months. It was too much. It made me hate the process. Just like you playing too much robbed you of the joy of it. I vowed to have a better work/life balance after that. Luckily, I can do that because there isn’t anyone to tell me what to do. No one I listen to, anyway.”

I contemplated his words while I made inroads into my sandwich. Was it that simple? “I don’t know what happened in Germany,” I admitted. “I’d been out the night before, but it wasn’t what I’d call a wild night. I’d had a few drinks, but no drugs. I’m not an angel, but I don’t do drugs nearly as much as the media make out. I hadn’t picked anyone up. I’m not a complete idiot. I knew I had a concert the next night.” My fingers curled around the table edge while I did what I’d avoided doing ever since that night: recalling it in vivid technicolor. “I didn’t want to go on stage, so I guess I already knew something was amiss. Jade told me not to be so stupid, that I couldn’t let the audience down, that it would be a logistical nightmare she wasn’t willing to deal with in terms of ticket refunds and media attention.”

Arlo snorted. “I’m rapidly coming round to your way of thinking that she’s a bitch. And I haven’t even met her.”

“I guess if I was being kind, I’d say she thought I was throwing a tantrum, that she was doing her job and reminding me of the consequences of my actions. It wasn’t like she could have forced me to go on stage if I’d really dug my heels in.” Arlo’s facial expression said he didn’t agree, that there was more than one way to force someone to do something they didn’t want to do.

“Anyway, I went on. And it was fine at first. There’s always an energy that comes from the audience that helps no matter how tired or rundown you are.” I took another bite of my sandwich. I hadn’t cooked it to let it go cold while I rambled about Germany. “I did a show once in… I think it was Portugal. Or maybe it was Spain. Definitely a Mediterranean country. I had flu and I was running a temperature. I felt like absolute shit and just wanted to stay in bed. Yet, I played better with the flu than I did in Germany. I just couldn’t seem to find my groove. And the harder I tried, the worse it got. I’ve never experienced anything like it before. I could have kept playing, but the audience deserved better. And the next piece I had coming up was Chopin’s Ballade No. 4, which in case you don’t know is challenging at the best of times. God knows what I would have done to that piece of music. So I bailed and left the stage.”

“Have you played since?”

I wanted to lie. I wanted to tell Arlo that of course I had, that I wasn’t a child scared of my own mind. Knowing he’d see straight through it, I shook my head.

Arlo took a sip of his coffee. “You’re burned out. You know that, right? All the alcohol, the drugs, the”—his lip curled slightly—“one-night stands are about you self-medicating. It was your way of trying to relax when what you really needed was a break from everything.”

“Maybe. But how pathetic is that? I sit on my arse and play the piano, for God’s sake. I’m not negotiating multi-million pound deals or running into burning buildings to save lives.”

Arlo was already shaking his head before I got halfway through my speech. “I’ve seen the way you play and you give everything. Heart and soul. It’s physically and emotionally draining. You can’t do that night after night for years on end and not expect it to take its toll. How many concerts did you do last year?”

I shook my head. “I have no idea.”

“You averaged three a week,” Arlo informed me. “I worked it out. And that doesn’t include all the personal appearances or charity events, or—”

“I get it,” I said, worried that listening to a long list of things I did would make me exhausted just from hearing it. “I need to do less.”

“That, and you need to find the joy in it again. You need to remember why you did it in the first place.”

When Arlo stood and held his hand out, I knew exactly where he was taking me, a pit opening up in my stomach. I took his hand anyway because I trusted him.