My friend Francis couldn’t play the piano, couldn’t or simply wouldn’t, wouldn’t or just wasn’t, and whatever the reason was I didn’t like the sound of it, so we made a bargain: if he could not play for himself, I would call him every morning and he would play the piano for me. It would be my job to listen and his job to play, a mutual task, as I needed obligations, and he needed to leave his mind and return to his hands… Each of my calls with Francis began the same way—brief hellos, how are you feeling, then one of us would ask the other whether they were ready, and the reply was always the same. We were always ready. I had pictured myself writing as Francis played scales or practiced songs, but for the first few days his hands hardly remembered the keys, and I had nothing to work on, no thoughts worth keeping, hardly any thoughts at all. He played slowly, sometimes with a metronome, shards of chords or songs in parts for no more than a few minutes, but after a week he began, as if by some miracle, to sing, and I muted myself and folded onto the floor to cry, not for him and not for myself and not for anything other than the fact that any pattern can be broken, that there is no end of patterns breaking down. Weeks went by and months went by, and I called him from different cities, different rooms, and over time he could play a little longer, a little freer, songs he knew by heart and songs he was still trying to write. It was as easy as it was unusual, this distant company, this regular puncturing of our tendencies toward solitude and shut doors…
But then I thought of the mornings when Francis fumbled a note or fell short of his falsetto and how he used to shyly apologize, and how over time he stopped saying he was sorry and simply continued, allowing the errors to live.
— Catherine Lacey, The Möbius Book (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 17, 2025)
Notes:
- Image Credit: Catherine Lacey and the cover to her book “The Möbius Book.” (Granta Publications/Willy Somma)
- NY Times Book Review: June 15, 2025 – A Relationship Breaks in Two. So Does the Book That Explains Why.Catherine Lacey’s “The Möbius Book” is both an elliptical novella and a seething memoir. Decoding the connections is at once frustrating and exhilarating.
