One Boat

by Jonathan Buckley

my mind slipped into another scene, a generic scene rather than one particular moment, and in that scene he was sitting beside me, in a concert hall, listening, leaning forward slightly, as he often did, with fingers meshed, listening acutely, not merely receiving the music, but reaching into it, concentrating as I might concentrate on a page of a document, whereas I was a recipient rather than a reader of the music that was being performed, taking it in as one might take in the view of a landscape or a perfume, and I think it came to trouble me, that my enjoyment was more superficial than was my husband’s, that he heard gradations of tone that I could not, just as some people can detect and identify a dozen intermingled elements in a perfume that to others is a single pleasing scent, and no matter that the very idea of ‘depth’, as he said, made no sense when the subject was the experience of sound, just as it would make no sense to say that person X saw crimson or cobalt more deeply than person Y, nevertheless it was in terms of depth that I tended to think of it, as if musical sounds were something like the sea, and I remained in the shallows, or on the surface, looking down, sometimes marvelling, but never within it.