The setting sun was on my face and catching my attention until the music found my ears, and the jazz tunes pulled us from the golden street through the green velvet curtains. We had been walking up the Via Roma to a dinner appointment, and we had not meant to stop.

Tom and I sat down on a velvet two-seater, and my coat stayed over the arm of it. Tom’s whiskey sour arrived on a deck of cards. A chess board was set by the window across the room, a game already in progress. The piano by the bar was already being played.

The pianist was a man well over seventy, playing when we crossed the threshold and still playing as we were shown to our table, his hands moving across the keys without looking down. He finished a tune, and in the gap that opened between one song and the next, a woman at a table near the piano leaned forward and whispered one word across to him. Summertime. She was loud enough for our table to hear and quiet enough that it felt like overhearing rather than listening, and he nodded once and began it. She did not lift her head. She sang along under her breath, just loud enough for the man she was with to hear, and he watched his glass, and I was secretly very happy.

Summertime is the kind of song a person carries privately and occasionally hands to a stranger. Gershwin composed it as a lullaby for a mother singing to her child, and it has been played so many times in so many rooms that it no longer belongs to anyone in particular. A lady in a jazz bar at sunset does not ask for it the way a person orders a drink. She names a song that has been following her all day, and she asks a stranger to play it back to her.

He finished Summertime, and in the gap that followed, the bartender was shaking a whiskey sour at the bar. The pianist heard it first. He turned toward the bar and found a rhythm the ice did not know it was keeping, settling into his own groove, the kind a body of seventy settles into rather than performs, and he leaned toward the bartender the way you lean toward someone you are playing with, and he launched into an improvisation in the same key. The shaker became his percussion. The bartender kept shaking. The drink was ready long before the song was, and the shaker kept going anyway, and the pianist played to the ice and the ice held the time. We shared a laugh, the whole room, the first sound in the bar louder than a whisper since we had arrived.

That was the moment I understood what a seventy-year-old has that a thirty-year-old does not. The ear that finds the song already present in the room, rather than the ego that wants to make one.

He finished the improvisation, and the bartender poured the drink, and the pianist stood up, not with any ceremony. The maître d’ walked over and closed the piano, and the lid came down without a sound. We clicked our fingers. Someone at another table said bravo, quietly. Clapping would have been too loud for the room, and the room knew it before we did. The pianist walked back through the green velvet curtains and out into the street, and someone handed him a drink at the doorway, and I did not look to see what it was.

Only after he was gone did I look properly at the room. Il Club was a high room, taller than it needed to be, walls the green of a very old bottle, with two crystal chandeliers hanging from black twisted cords. The tables were onyx marble. The lounges were deep leather, and ours was a velvet two-seater, the only piece of furniture in the room built for company. On one wall, a grid of small agricultural tools in red-velvet frames. On another wall, wooden tennis rackets with their strings gone slack. On a shelf near the bar, a set of rosary beads. Above the leather lounges, two large oil portraits in gilt frames, a man and a woman in period dress, watching the room the way the painted always watch. The quiet in the room was not an absence of sound. It was the sound of everything continuing without anyone playing it.

A man came in through the curtains a few minutes later. He walked to the chess board, studied the position, moved three pieces, and walked out. He did not sit down. He did not order a drink. He did not speak to anyone. The pieces he had moved were waiting for someone we never saw…

We finished our drinks and left for the restaurant. On the Via Roma the sun was almost gone, and the stone still held the warmth of the day. Tom took my arm. A pianist I would never see again was somewhere behind us, holding a drink at a doorway. We walked the rest of the way in the kind of quiet that stays between two people after they have seen something they cannot quite describe yet.

Thanks for drifting with me.

If you pass through Siracusa at sunset and you hear a piano coming through a green velvet curtain on the Via Roma, step inside. The bar is called Il Club, which is the plainest name for the most beautifully dressed room on that street, and the plainness is the point. The room will still be there, the game still running. Tell them I sent you, I would like to know how it goes.

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