EARLY MUSIC.(Short Story)

As soon as he came in the front door, Rodney went straight to the music room. That was what he called it, wryly but not without some hope: the music room. It was a small, dogleg-shaped fourth bedroom that had been created when the building was cut up into apartments. It qualified as a music room because it contained his clavichord.

There it stood on the unswept floor: Rodney's clavichord. It was apple-green with gold trim and bore a scene of geometric gardens on the inside of its lifted lid. Modelled on the Bodechtel clavichords built in the seventeen-nineties, Rodney's had come from the Early Music Store, in Edinburgh, three years ago. Still, resting there majestically in the dim light--it was winter in Chicago--the clavichord looked as though it had been waiting for Rodney to play it not only for the nine and a half hours since he'd left for work but for a couple of centuries at least.

You didn't need that big a room for a clavichord. A clavichord wasn't a piano. Spinets, virginals, fortepianos, clavichords, and even harpsichords were relatively small instruments. The eighteenth-century musicians who'd played them were small. Rodney was big, however--six feet three. He sat down gently on the narrow bench. Carefully he slid his knees under the keyboard. With closed eyes he began to play from memory a Sweelinck prelude.

Early music is rational, mathematical, a little bit stiff, and so was Rodney. He'd been that way long before he'd ever seen a clavichord or written an (unfinished) doctoral dissertation on temperament systems during the German Reformation. But Rodney's immersion in the work of Bach pere et fils had only fortified his native inclinations. The other piece of furniture in the music room was a small teak desk. In its drawers and pigeonholes were the super-organized files Rodney kept: health-insurance records; alphabetized appliance manuals along with warranties; the twins' immunization histories, birth certificates, and Social Security cards; plus three years' worth of monthly budgets stipulating household expenses down to the maximum allowed for heating (Rodney kept the apartment a bracing fifty-eight degrees). A little cold weather was good for you. Cold weather was like Bach: it sorted the mind. On top of the desk was this month's folder, marked "FEB '05." It contained three credit-card statements with horrendous running balances and the ongoing correspondence from the collection agency that was dunning Rodney for defaulting on his monthly payments to the Early Music Store.

His back was straight as he played; his face twitched. Behind closed eyelids, his eyeballs fluttered in time with the quick notes.

And then the door swung open and Imogene, who was six, shouted in her longshoreman's voice:

"Daddy! Dinner!"