'Glissando', by C.G. Dominguez
Sadie glides onstage, floating the distance from the wings to the podium. She takes the conductor’s warm, broad hand. He looks at her fondly, gaze warm and familiar as a chenille housecoat. She turns to find her instrument waiting for her; all chestnut-warm wood and feminine curves, propped up at the most inviting angle. She goes to it, embracing it like a lover would, like she was taught to do. There are no nerves, no fear
She does not meet the eye of the first chair cellist. She can’t. Not yet, not until the thing is done.
——
Before. A few weeks after the torrent of paperwork and press releases (...we ask for privacy in this difficult time etc etc) and she’s still getting used to the lack of a ring on her finger. It hadn’t sold for half as much as she’d hoped it would.
She’s on the sidewalk, distracted and running late, stepping around sloppy St. Patrick’s day puddles. Her agent has her on the phone. She’s had an offer for Cologne-Copenhagen-Stockholm-who-fucking-cares and was she interested?
She’s not interested, she couldn’t care less, she’s considering the merits of walking into traffic, until—
“I believe your old teacher is still there.”
That got her attention, like nothing else could.
——
Something she hadn’t expected, when she announced her intention to seek a divorce, was how many people were eager to direct her new course for her, just as she’d finally won the ability to steer the ship herself.
You’re much too busy, you need a break, your doctor said so. Take a sabbatical from touring, go record something nice, something new and obscure. Take lots of bubble baths.
She’s heard it from all sides. But there is no good advice to give the woman newly parted from a mad spouse. She’s standing ankle-deep in the stagnant floodwaters left by the storm of her own married life, and she’s growing tired of the smell. She’s not interested in doing what is sensible, or healthy, or what her therapist recommends.
She will do as she pleases. So she goes to Cologne.
——
Dvorak’s Concerto is a balm. The tune is simple, martial. It straightens the spine. Sadie is wildly grateful for it. She is also grateful for the picture she makes, in her cream-colored silk dress, like a wedding dress, set against the sedate black worn by the rest of the orchestra. She had in fact purchased the gown for that very reason, though her own wedding saw her in a smart grey suit at the courthouse.
She is incandescent, under the lights. But she only has so much time to capitalize on her youth, on this echo of du Pré that she presents. It’s a terrible thing, something no one would ever admit, but Sadie knows the truth: women don’t win the kind of name she has won for herself by being ugly, by aging gracelessly or too fast, letting the lines of their tempestuous lives show on their face. This too was a cruel lesson, learned early.
She sinks into her task, feels all the things her professional integrity demands she feel in that moment. She feels the beat under her skin, driving her headlong into the music, a furious need for speed. But she won’t run away from the orchestra. She isn’t one of those divas who refuses to hear the effort of the hardworking souls surrounding her, who thinks only of her own internal tempo. The boy-prodigies who play Rachmaninoff, for instance.
The geniuses, for instance.
Her ex-husband, for instance.
She lingers in her dressing room after the performance, telling herself she’s just afraid to brave the bitter winter air outside. Pretending she’s doing something other than waiting for her.
A knock at her door; she gets her hopes up, but it’s only someone from the Board, with roses. Disappointment floods her throat like gorge rising. She accepts the flowers. But behind the delivery boy, half-visible around the bend in the ill-lit hallway, there stands a long, lonely figure in black.
”Well done, my dear.”
Diane is smiling at her with all her teeth. Sadie’s mouth goes dry the way it used to as a girl, when she would bite into an underripe coral flesh of wild persimmon. She invites Diane in. The other woman looks just as Sadie remembers her.
“I’d hoped we could get dinner while you’re here. Catch up.”
But Sadie cuts to the chase. Did Diane like it? Did she rise to the piece?
“Did I like it?” She draws one hand down Sadie’s cheek, to her neck, to her jutting collarbone.
“You were transcendent, dear.”
——
Rehearsals, the next day. Sadie slips into the section for the piece to follow her concerto. Shostakovich’s fifth, a favorite of hers for its slithery secrecy, the way it threads the needle. Shostakovich only navigated his tumultuous time because of his ability to keep himself under wraps, to give nothing away. All the while Diane watches her, approving, approving, and isn’t that a change to rock Sadie’s sense of herself?
They go to lunch; just the two of them, and a hundred hungry businessmen. Cologne, other than most of the places Sadie’s lived, is a town that knows how to have fun. The old restaurant is full of good cheer, full of gemütlichkeit, and it’s just what Sadie needs.
Amid the din, they talk about Sadie’s divorce, or talk around it.
Diane, praise be to god, does not do what everyone else in Sadie’s life has lately done. She gives no advice. She makes no recommendations. Even better, she offers no illusory sympathy, makes no suggestion that Sadie should be going around feeling sorry for herself.
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” she says instead.
Later, Sadie asks after Diane’s own husband, and gets a sly evasion to rival Shostakovich’s own.
——
They kiss in the cab. A long, languorous scene. For a moment, it is as though no time has passed. Sadie is twenty one, as much the ingenue as her stage presence would suggest, and Diane’s stockings slip under her palms.
But the ride is all too short, and when they pull up to Diane’s belle epoque apartment building Max is there to open the door.
Sadie looks him over, observing him for changes. Diane’s husband, the wily professor, her husband’s great hero. Nothing escaped him, and nothing ever had. He kisses Sadie on the cheek when she steps out to see Diane inside, and takes her hand with a genuine warmth. She is, as ever, entirely confused by him.
On the drive home, she works herself off silently to the old familiar daydream; herself and her teacher, the two of them tucked away in a curtained box at the Met, stealing a march at intermission. She’s pictured the scene so often, she’s sometimes surprised to remember it never actually happened.
——
After the next performance, they both take her out, ushering her in through the door of a cocktail bar so exclusive it may well have been a Weimar speakeasy. They’ve done this, she’s shocked to learn, to apologize.
They ask for her forgiveness for things she’d never blamed them for. Introducing her to her husband. Throwing us together, she realizes. That’s what they think they did. Pushing us down their self-same path. Treating marriage as something to take refuge in, something to provide respectability and protection from scandal. Little had they realized that scandal was all marriage would bring her.
——
The summer season winds on, lazy and low-stakes. Two of the Board approach her with gifts and grand obeisances, asking her to stay on a while longer. She makes a show of hesitating over their offer, of pretending she has somewhere better to go, somewhere she’d rather be than here.
Max gets in the front row of the last performance of the program. This time, Sadie finds herself playing for him, playing to impress him as her husband was always trying to do. She’d like to earn it, she thinks. She’d like to earn what she’s stealing from him.
This time, they are both there to meet her in her green room.
C.G. Dominguez is a proud queer Boricua working and writing in the American Midwest. Her work has or will soon appear in Muleskinner, Greyhound Journal, Hofstra's Windmill, MISTER Magazine and elsewhere.
Photo of Lois Johnson, via Wikimedia Commons