In some societies, there is a name for this kind of unhappiness. In others societies they just bury women like herself up to the neck and stone them to death, and she thinks that perhaps that is what she deserves, not a pat on the head and a fistful of medicine to hide behind. She thinks that people constantly underestimate love as a force as powerful as antimatter, and there are such things as broken hearts and some cultures care for their sick, and some cast them away. There really is no medicine for the brokenhearted, but there are things to make you forget the mess you’ve made. Like the wine in front of her. Like little pills. The well-intentioned forces around her never could understand that the more future they saved for her, the longer road of despair there was to travel. All those hills and valleys to climb alone now, and all she ever wanted was just a flat stretch of highway with a river running beside it.
“How can anyone choose just one song?” she asks him. “Out of all the songs that have been written and sung and played on every instrument under the sun, how can I choose just one, and how will I know that that one song is the one song that I really, really want to hear right now?”
The man throws his head back and laughs. He has a beautiful throat and his skin is tawny and smooth.
“How about I just pick one and if you don’t think it’s right, I’ll stop.” he offers. He picks up his glass, and raises his eyebrows as he drinks. A silent lift of those dark eyebrows and she feels the question looming in the air, she feels like the oxygen is getting thin in the darkening bar.
“I lost my job today,” she tells him quietly, her words formed and out into the starved air before she can think.
I lost my job, and I am going to lose my home, and I’ve lost my children and my youth and my hope and I am thinking about ordering-in suicide tonight so why don’t you play something poignant and sad and tragic and yearning, something Russian maybe, that will bring me some truth or at least some answers to the questions circling my head like vultures, can you do that Mr. Piano Man?
The man is frowning in concentration at the piano keys. He seems geniunely pained and she is embarrassed again by putting unhappy words into the crystal silence of the bar.
“I don’t know what’s happening to this world, love” he says. He looks back up at her and smiles again.
He plays a soft high note. His fingers are long and made for piano keys. He turns to her.
“There are prisons of stone, and there are prisons of flesh and bone. You get to pick. Now me, I can pick a song out for you all day long for the next ten thousand years and I may never be able to play the one you most want to hear. But I don’t believe there is a right or wrong about any song except those that tell you life ain’t worth living.” He turns again to the piano.
All along she had wondered if it was true love that was missing from her world and if it would be true love that would save her, change her, make her real. And so when she meets Him (and it was only a minute in time in the scheme of things, not a second more) she feels all the love that existed in the world come together to play, all the love of lifetimes and history laid out before her like an epic. Ruin came easily to her, like a Tolstoy character, only there were no trains running nearby for her to throw herself under when He left her. She had prayed for death every day since then, desperate to escape the past that roared over her shoulder, remembering the casualties left lying casually about as she had scorched the earth behind her, throwing firebombs and molatovs and grenade fire, running towards a shadow thrown by a hollow man and falling through his emptiness like a stone to the bottom of a lake.
