Nina nodded.
“Good,” Maura said. “Because there’s only enough room in this apartment for one of us to go crazy and, given the circumstances, I’m hoping I can reserve that right.”
Dear B,
Dear B,
I wish I had an answer for you. A coworker of mine （full disclosure: a long-stringer） spent our entire lunch hour trying to convince the table that the strings are actually a gift to humanity. He said that we’ve always been inundated with songs and poems and needlepoint pillows urging us to remember that life is short, and we should live each day as if it were our last, and yet nobody ever did that.
So maybe he’s right, and the strings really do offer a chance to live with fewer regrets, because we know exactly how much time we have to do it. But isn’t that still too much to ask of people? I can hardly count the number of lives I’ve led in my mind—equestrian, novelist, actress, world traveler—yet I know I’m rather incapable of pursuing most of them.
I suppose I should tell you now that I haven’t opened my box, and I don’t plan to.
Since the strings arrived, so many of our conversations are about such big, heavy ideas, literally life and death. And I miss talking about the little things, especially in a city filled with so many wonderful little things.
Last night, for instance, I was waiting for a cab outside my apartment, and across the street, I saw an old man leaning out of his window, waving goodbye to an elderly woman on the sidewalk below, as she was exiting the building. He kept waving to her as she walked away, and she kept turning around and waving back. On and on, they both continued waving like children, until the woman was nearly at the end of the block. And even when the woman stopped turning back and continued forward, the man still kept his head out the window, watching the corner where she disappeared.
Gertrude and her soldier, perhaps. Reunited and happily retired in Manhattan.
—A
Dear A,
Here’s a little thing: About a year ago, I was walking home around midnight, when an old song started playing out of nowhere. “Que Será, Será.” The original Doris Day version. My grandma used to hum it sometimes. The song got louder and louder, until I turned around to see a bicyclist riding down the middle of the empty street, wearing this outrageous purple jacket, with a stereo strapped to the back of his bike. And he just pedaled slowly past me, playing his music, as if he were any other cyclist.
I had forgotten about him until, just a few months ago, I heard the same music on the street, again in the middle of the night. “Que será, será. Whatever will be, will be . . .” And there he was again: the same man, the same song, even the same jacket.
Some might think New York is a greedy, selfish, aggressive place, and they’re not entirely wrong, but it’s also a place filled with generous people who share their spirit with the world. Maybe this man is on some sort of rotation, spending the quiet hours of every evening bringing music to a different corner of the city. And every few months, he ends up in mine.
It’s possible that he’s changed his choice of song since then, after the strings arrived, and the future now is ours to see, at least partially. But I like to think that he still does it. That maybe he believes in music, in its power to uplift and unite. Maybe he knows that we’ve always needed that—and we need it now more than ever.
—B
Jack
Jack’s mother loved music. It was one of the few things he remembered about her, the fact that she would whistle to herself in the kitchen and sing to him at night, both of them equally mesmerized by the sound of her soft, soothing voice.
After she left, Jack’s father said that he was too old for lullabies and refused to indulge his requests. His aunt Katherine at least attempted to sing to him, on the evenings she put him to sleep, but she only knew the same half dozen hymns from church, and eventually Jack stopped asking.
But it was still those memories of his aunt, perched politely on the side of his bed and crooning, shrilly, about God’s love and Jesus’s sacrifice, that made Jack feel like he had to say yes, when she asked him to attend the rallies.
“Uncle Anthony and I would so appreciate if you could join us onstage,” she had said. “You’ll look so handsome up there in your cadet’s uniform.”
And Jack had agreed, despite the knot in his stomach. In the Hunter family, “Yes” was the only acceptable answer.
Several cousins or in-laws usually joined him onstage, but Jack was the sole member of the Hunter clan who seemed embarrassed to be up there, squirming in his combat boots. He typically tried to position himself directly behind his aunt or uncle, blocked from the prying lenses of the cameras, wishing himself as invisible as possible.