An offshore hurricane brushed the coast of Georgia at the end of September. It was too distant to bring rain or clouds as far inland as Whitmore, but its wind field swept away the remnants of summer, leaving behind clear, bright days with cloudless October skies of purest powder blue, chill air that braced lungs and spirits, and the first tinges of rouge in yellowing foliage. Lest those harbingers of autumn go unnoticed, the ubiquitous staghorn sumac was already painting every roadside with its drooping fingers of maroon.
For Sarah and me, what had been a sense of novelty and uncertain potential between us settled into a feeling of normalcy. Secure in our couplehood, she projected a new self-assurance and low-key bliss, evident in her expressions and the way she carried herself, the things of which she spoke, and even the casually possessive ways she walked with me—a hand here, an arm there, seeking, sneaking a caress or delivering a playful rake of fingernails.
We walked many early afternoons, invigorated by the light and chill and the sense of promise the autumn brought with it. A creek ran not far from campus. That is, it was named Sweetgum Creek, though I knew lesser watercourses home in North Carolina that were named as rivers. A couple of miles south of town it widened to the length of a football field or more, shoaling into rapids one could often walk across by hopping rock to rock with a few adventurous leaps or wetting of feet. Just before the shallows, a weir held back a pool of water, popular in summer as a swimming hole. Barely visible as a lip from the downstream side, the dam kept the water high enough to feed a stone-lined millrace leading hundreds of yards alongside the rapids to the ruins of an antebellum factory, where an ancient rusted sluicegate moderated its outflow.
An abandoned road followed the streambank, leading out of town from a pile of asphalt and a chain between two cement posts, and continuing to the ruins and farther beyond them than I'd ever explored. It was on the mill road that we most often strolled, Sarah speaking at times of her earlier life, and of Engler, and of her frustrated desire for a performance career that her adoptive parents opposed. I was shocked to learn that two years before we met, they had forbidden her, then in her junior undergraduate year, and despite the urgings of several of her teachers, from enrolling in the International Chopin Competition—and even more shocked to learn that she had let them stop her. But it was only one of many details she confided to me about her home world during that luminous October.
Overhanging limbs canopied our walks, their backlit foliage day by day taking on increasingly vivid hues of yellow, orange and red. The light and color and sounds and scents of the season energized Sarah in touching fashion—she often inhaled them demonstratively, sometimes opening her arms and walking in slow, rapturous whirls. It was some of the most overt elation I'd seen in her, and contagious to me as well, stoic though I tended to be about such beauty, so that on occasion I even caught her up and swung her around.
Every such moment, every such afternoon, was its own self-contained totality, filled with immediacy, with intensity, with an awareness of
right-then-and-there undiluted by any other moment or place. For such was still our innocence of technology that we knew no other kind of outdoor moment than the immediate and all-consuming kind, its only connection to other places and moments consisting in our own footsteps and the celestial transit of the sun.
Autumn was my favorite season, I told her, the time of year when I had the most physical and mental energy and did much of my best work, and often took weekend camping trips to the foothills or mountains.
For her, she said, autumn was an inconstant friend. Some years were like the one we were living, when she was infused with energy and a joyful tension she could unwind only through playing, singing, and exertions of both the outdoor and more lately the indoor variety. Life felt so full of goodness in such autumns that she ached with it at times, to the point that she wondered how much goodness one could bear. "Like that hyper-climactic part near the end of the 6th
[1], you know?"—her frequent symphonic references were always to Beethoven—"where you think it can't possibly get any more ecstatic, but he piles on another layer, and then another, and it's so heartbreakingly beautiful that it just makes you want to cry?" The ache of autumnal rapture was especially strong that year among all the others of her life, as we had newly discovered each other and were still unwrapping all the layers of revelation and commonality and experience.
But other years, autumn could depress and even frighten her. Those years, the season filled her with a sense of decay and transience and futility, for the coloring of the leaves foretold their browning, falling, and withering into dust. As the days grew shorter and colder in such years, she withdrew more and more into herself, much as she saw nature curling in on itself. The beauty still touched her in moments, but it sapped her emotions, asking more of them than she had to give; and the falling temperatures stole more warmth from her slender body than she felt able to replenish. She fought such feelings as best she could—seeking out midday sun, dressing brightly, drinking hot, colorful teas and cocoa, spending evenings in brightly lit spaces with other people, taking deep, hot baths… But alone in bed at night those darker years, she still felt inadequate to the task of living, of surviving until a reawakening of nature that felt so distant and hypothetical. Some nights she would waken at 4 or 5 in the morning—the hour her grandfather was presumed to have passed in his sleep—feeling chilled to her core and wondering if he had felt the same. The phrase
icy fingers of death had once occurred to her during such a moment, and she'd sometimes wondered since then if it wouldn't be simpler to give herself over to them—to throw aside the covers and let the icy fingers take her, if they would, instead of burrowing deeper and tucking the covers more tightly around herself. Since then, she'd never been able to rid herself entirely of such occasional thoughts.
One autumn in high school, she had begun seeing a therapist for eight or nine months, nominally to treat depression. Her adoptive parents didn't 'believe in' psychology or secular psychotherapy, and would never have allowed it—at best they might have pushed her into pastoral counseling and guided prayer instead. But she had confided in her grandmother, who had arranged and paid for it all in secret, finding a sympathetic therapist who agreed, in the best interest of the patient, to let Nana act as designated guardian, contact, and signatory.
Therapy alone had gotten her through that winter and back into summer, she told me, and helped her adapt in ways that made her better able to survive her home and church life. On hearing her tell of this, I was inwardly amazed that her therapist had not, as far as I could tell, urged or enabled her to take a scholarship and declare independence from her home and church environment as soon as she could go off to college, but I didn't tell her that.
She asked if I thought less of her, knowing she'd been in therapy, but I assured her I did not. "I didn't really think you would," she said. "But I've never told anyone before. And I want us to know everything about each other."
While it was true I thought no less of her for that, I was nonetheless uneasy at times about the present, about the possible fragility of her bliss, and the extent to which it might depend on my commitment to her and my living up to her perceptions of me. "This is the happiest I've ever felt since my youngest memories," she told me at one point, oblivious to any potential effect of such words. Along with her increasing use of endearments, with which I was by habit and nature less liberal, it gave me at times an uncomfortable sense of being personally responsible for her happiness—which was true in a way in any relationship, but added to my perception of a fragility in her, and a possible dependence.
#
We believed we were making good progress on the Slavonic Dances. Sarah was satisfied that two of them, the 2nd and 8th—the two that Dr Bristol had heard before offering us the concert booking—were performance-ready. We had twelve months remaining to accomplish the same for the other fourteen, some of which were markedly easier. So we dove with confidence into polishing the 1st and the 9th, each the opening piece in its respective opus of eight, and two of the most challenging of the entire program.
"Crispness, articulation, and contrasts in dynamics and tempo," she harped almost daily. "It mustn't come to feel routine. All of these elements need to stand out, even to surprise a listener whenever we can."
Many of the rhythms were intricate and quick, and of course had to be precisely synchronized between us.
Count it, count it, count it was another of her mantras.
And always on the sub-beats. By counting the sub-beats, she didn't mean silently reciting numbers—though on rare occasions we resorted to counting a tricky fragment out loud—but hearing in our heads something like a clock ticking multiple ticks per beat. As the tempo constantly sped up or slowed down, it was this in-between ticking that guided it, telling us where each note fit. Playing in mutable tempo was thus rather like sketching a curve by marking isolated points along its path.
I was working daily on re-learning the D-flat major Nocturne as well. Thursday lessons gave way to a less structured approach, with Sarah listening in from time to time and making corrective or encouraging comments. In my own opinion, the only remaining rough spot was an ornamental run that flitted up the keyboard to a single measure of intricate treble filigree and then followed arpeggios back down. Sarah's comment: "You're outrunning yourself, then scrambling to keep up. Remember the marble rolling in its track. Ease it up to the top, then let it descend by gravity alone. The truth is, there are no difficult runs or figures in Chopin—there are only ones you're pushing faster than you're ready to play. When you practice something at a speed that feels difficult, it will forever feel risky, an accident waiting to happen. But if you practice at a speed that feels easy, no matter how impatient that may make you at first, it becomes easier and easier. And faster, if you wish. Once you've mastered a passage in that fashion, even at performance tempo it may not ever feel fast to you, subjectively."
After watching me play the problematic fifty-second measure several times, she played it a couple of times herself and wrote a series of finger numbers, both on the score and on an index card she took from her tote. "Try it this way for a few days, and see if that helps. You don't even have to look at the keys once you know them. Just focus on the sequence of fingers."
"But the fingering in the score is Chopin's own, isn't it? I think I checked the editor's notes about that."
She nodded patiently, as if having anticipated the objection. "Pianists of his time and even much later had quite rigid ideas about what constituted 'correct' principles of fingering, regardless of what might seem easiest in any given place. He did a lot to change that, but what are the chances your fingers are each the same length as his were?
"Also, show me again…?" I re-played the measure in question for her, and she took my wrist and hand lightly in her fingers. "Try positioning your wrist a bit more left, angling your hand a shade rightward, only a degree or two. And maybe round your fingers a bit more as well—or possibly less."
I did as she suggested, and found to my surprise that even my original fingering flowed more evenly than it had been playing to that point.
"It compensates a little for the difference in length of your middle finger and its neighbors," she explained. "But the main thing is always lightness. Keep the tension out of your muscles and move your fingers lightly. And until it flows naturally, be sure to practice often with your four basic four-note syncopations, to break down rhythmic dependencies between fingers."
Without mentioning it to Sarah, I had also begun working on the companion Nocturne of Opus 28, the C-sharp minor 7th—the first one she had played for me on Cioppino Night.
Her only comment: "Even in a serene section like this one, there's still that urgency of yours that we've talked about. You're good at building tension, but you're not so good at easing it without a climax. There needs to be a natural waxing and waning all through this part."
#
Our loveplay most often took place in the afternoon, after walking, while we were both flush with the freshness of outdoors. Afterward, Sarah would return to practice or classes, while I'd begin my day's work at the music lab. We often met again for a late dinner or a concert, and then I'd do some more work at the lab. Sarah more and more slept at my apartment, going to bed at a conventional hour, and I'd come home well into the wee hours to slip in beside her. She kept a long nightdress under the pillow, having concluded early on that she preferred sleeping in it to sleeping naked beside each other—for even with clean, dry skin, we tended after a time to adhere uncomfortably when entangled as she preferred to sleep. She conditioned herself to wake around dawn, when she slipped out and returned to the Jenkinses' house in case her mother dropped by early.
'Play' described it best. There was so often a playful undercurrent to our sex, an innocence and lightness that carried into afterplay. I was no longer surprised at Sarah's lack of inhibition or the easy ways that eroticism came to her, coming to take for granted they were inborn. She was possessed of an innate erotic intelligence, and appeared to know by intuition or keen perception how and when and how much to arouse, to tease; to soothe, to satisfy—and to intuit the effect of everything she did as though feeling it herself.
The fugitive kiss, the fading caress, the prolonged moment of anticipation… These and other teases were the smallest touch-motifs, the tactile sememes, in a sense, of Sarah's language of erotic expression. So often her unhurried musical phrasings reminded me of these and other elements of her erotic style, as parts of the way she played with building and releasing tension before and between peak moments. Our erotic play seemed full of the rising and falling tension, the changes of mood and tempo, the echo-and-chase of our Slavonic Dances. I came to recognize her erotic sensibility as one with her musical sensibility, each flowing naturally from the other, so that experiencing one put me increasingly in mind of the other.
(c) 2026, JK Alton
