Just the Prélude
Un luth suspendu...
Cecilia's bedroom contained a perpetual fug of incense and cigarette smoke. The window was draped with bedding; cool darkness was her natural habitat, and so she avoided any possibility the sun should intrude on her morning slumber. The sill was crowded with candles and incense holders, and several heavily dog-eared books were stacked to one side. In the corner of the room, without a frame or box spring, lay her bed, surrounded by a floor-obscuring sea of sheets and blankets, shirts, skirts, and underwear. Steadily contributing to the atmosphere, a stream of incense smoke quivered slightly in a draft.
MacGill flopped with a dusty thud onto the mattress next to Daniel, who lay reading the copy of Listening to Music Creatively he'd found atop Cecilia's stereo. MacGill rolled back and propped himself on his elbows then lazily reached to the windowsill for a cigarette. Without looking up from the book, Daniel felt across the top of the low bedside table, which was covered with a thin, flower-print kerchief and littered with empty cigarette packs, lighters, empty matchbooks, and an overflowing ashtray ringed with misflicked ashes. Finding a lighter, he held it out for MacGill and tried five, six, seven times to light it before nonchalantly pitching it into a pile of clothes at the foot of the bed. Again he reached blindly.
"Don't bother," muttered MacGill, laying back. "Twenty lighters, not one works. She hates to throw shit out." Daniel replied with a hum. "T-minus fifteen minutes and counting," Jack yelled.
Cecilia, obviously flustered, rushed into the room with a towel wrapped around her head, holding a blouse in one hand and a skirt in the other. She clapped them up against herself and asked if the ensemble worked. Sure, yes, uh-huh, they both said, and she ran back out across the hall to her mother's bedroom. They heard the whirr of a blow-dryer then several brief blasts of hairspray before Cecilia returned with a different blouse and a pair of slacks. Would these work, she wondered—Oh, uh, hmm, they pondered, but she was off once more before they'd reached a consensus.
Roused by the cacophony of metal hangers jangling and grating against a metal closet rod, MacGill stood up and went into the hall, pausing at the door to the other bedroom. "What are you doing in here, anyway? You aren't even dressed."
She pushed him aside, returning to her bedroom with both blouses, the skirt, and the slacks. Holding the second blouse against the skirt, she eyed them critically then dropped the other clothes onto the bed. "We'll make it… Just hold on" was her delayed response. She slung the decided-on outfit over the back of a metal folding chair in the center of the room and with well-accustomed immodesty removed her T-shirt and jeans. She reached for the blouse but stopped dead, as though the thought of what she had been about to do had vanished utterly from her mind. But something clicked when she glanced at the sheet music on the chair. She kicked aside an obstructive pile of clothes then adjusted a nearby music stand and flipped open her copy of Bach's Cello Suite Number Four. "Just the Prélude," she said, "then we can go." MacGill sighed and flopped down again next to Daniel.
Daniel set aside the book and focused his attention on Cecilia. She shoved a few more articles of clothing out of the way with her foot then took her seat. Her cello leaned without its case against the protruding drawers of her dresser, from which erupted a frozen cataract of sundry garments. The instrument looked somewhat old but well-kept, despite a few scuffs on its antiqued varnish. The top was made of light-brown European spruce; the fittings were of rosewood; and the back, adorned with inlaid purfling, was of German flamed maple. Cecilia took meticulous care of it, but in the small apartment it was liable to get bumped and banged now and then. She bent over to retrieve the Brazilwood bow lying in front of her closet door, placed it across her lap, then pulled the leaning cello toward her. Carefully placing the endpin between her feet, she inched forward on the seat to straddle her instrument then checked the tightness of the tuning pegs and the frog. After pushing a stray strand of hair from her face, she straightened her back, poised the bow, and positioned her left hand upon the neck.
Daniel had been witness to her preparatory routine a few times. More often than not, when her friends came to her apartment after school Cecilia would direct them to the living room and leave them there, drop her bag in the hall, and begin disrobing on the way to her bedroom. She preferred to play without the constriction of clothing: she played either in her underwear or, when completely alone, naked. She routinely spent an hour practicing while her friends loitered in the living room watching TV or sat around the kitchen table listening through the paper-thin wall. Only once she had mastered a piece might she invite them to listen and watch from the doorway.
Daniel remarked on her particular way of snapping into performance mode. Once her legs touched the body of the instrument and the bow was poised over the strings, she became a different person. Her expression became inscrutable, and if she happened to open her eyes and look up at her audience it was with what seemed a complete lack of recognition. While she played, she was not there entirely; part of her got lost in the music.
The bow quivered slightly before making contact with the strings, drawing out a long low note then a cascade of lighter descending ones. Playing with the belly flat before her, the back against her chest, hugging the ribs with her knees and tilting her cheek almost against the scroll, she embraced her cello almost as though it were a lover reclining between her bare thighs.. From the first, her movements were confident and fluid, her presence commanding. Her fingers, arched and spread apart, seemed barely to be holding the bow as she pulled it across a long note, yet her grip was firm. Rocking side to side with metronomic precision, she seemed to strut in place with an elbowswinging stride combining manly force with feminine grace. Her every muscle was taut with the effort of holding, swaying, maintaining, elongating. The Prélude itself, simple and repetitive but elegant, moving, and emotive, required a kind of tempered vigor, a forcible placidity. Her playing seemed hard work—she took quick breaths through her nose like a runner and clenched shut her eyes—yet her vigorous labor was at once as effortless as that of a loom shuttling across the warp threads.
Daniel opened several matchbooks that lay about the table before finding one with a match in it. He lit a cigarette, took a drag, and passed it to MacGill so he could light another off the cherry. While Jack appeared eager to leave and relatively uninterested in Cecilia's last-minute rehearsal, Daniel wished they could stay all evening to listen to her. He could have lain all night on the bed, lulled by the reedy chordophonic tones of horsehair on catgut, smoking cigarettes and watching Cecilia sway. Being a foot from the instrument and feeling the sound waves vibrate through him was of another world compared to hearing it from a metal chair near the back of a drafty music school recital hall with poor acoustics. He closed his eyes and let the music wash over him and through him—he could practically picture the notes dancing through the air.
A quick succession of notes and then another longer one—Cecilia drew the latter out halfway, then suddenly stopped, snapping out of her musical trance. Daniel opened his eyes and looked up. "How's that so far?" she asked, slightly nervous.
"It's great," said Daniel. "Continue."
"Give me a drag of that," she said, and MacGill passed her his cigarette. She arched her back in a half-stretch and took a long drag, flicked an ash in the general direction of the bedside table, and handed it back. A little self-conscious chuckle and a muttered okay, and she snapped back into her trance to finish the piece. She played the last note as though she were hauling it out from the dark recesses of some musical well, then let the bow slide off the strings, holding it outstretched till the last sound resounded into silence.
"Lovely," said Daniel. Cecilia smiled and leaned the cello back against her dresser.
"All right," Jack said, "I'll put the cello in the case and take her out to the car. We have to leave in like five minutes."
Cecilia jumped up and grabbed her outfit from the back of the chair. She dressed quickly and ran off to apply her lipstick and eye shadow at her mother's vanity. MacGill packed up the instrument and lugged it out to the car.
Daniel sat in the metal chair and briefly examined the sheet music, wondering what it would be like to be able to hear a piece in his head instantaneously, to translate the ps and ds (some of them filled in as though by a bored student) and the Os between the lines into pure tones unadulterated by material means of making sounds. He imagined reading music to be, for the expert musician, an immediate symphonic experience of richly intoned ideas. He remembered nights when he had lain in bed listening to strange hypnagogic music flowing ex nihilo into his imagination's ear. Sometimes that music had seemed so real Daniel had sat up in bed and searched the darkness sleepily for some spectral orchestra. Where did such music come from? How could his unmusical mind possibly have composed it? Was it perhaps the random melody born of the mind-at-large, resounding from some other plane through interstitial silence and vast nothingness into his fading consciousness? Did others hear this music, too, as they breached the thin membrane between waking life and dream? Did it sound the same, was it just as rich?
As he stared blankly at the page, deep in these thoughts, for a second the lines and notations were transformed into the bird-dotted power lines that ran across the sky on almost every street in town. He blinked and brought the bars and notes back into focus. He glanced out across the hallway, and in the mirror on the back of her mother's bedroom door he saw Cecilia reflected as she sat on the edge of the queen-size bed, pulling on a pair of black thigh-highs. He stared unabashedly, absorbed for a moment in the image, which perhaps by a trick of reflection seemed static but starkly sensual. The image was overwhelming—a beautifully composed moment, it delighted him yet it sent through his whole being a slight pang of sadness. Her imaged figure adjusting the top of her stocking, the visceral resonance of denuded music, and his melancholic appreciation of the transience of both formed an indescribable chord of longing (a silent urge, a wordless ache, a faint blue flame). It was a subtle revelation of the sensitivity of his nature, and he recalled, without understanding precisely why, the lines by De Béranger that Poe used as an epigraph:
He turned away, pulling himself out of the frozen instant.
As Daniel lit another cigarette and walked into the hallway, MacGill came in the front door and called out, "We're ready!"
"No, we're not," Cecilia replied, brushing past Daniel on her way to the bathroom. She checked herself in the mirror then squeezed between Daniel and MacGill in the hall on her way to her room. After grabbing her sheet music and a book bag, she cut between them once more to return to her mother's room. She checked her makeup a second time and touched her neck and wrists with lilac perfume then ran back to her room to put on a pair of heels. Watching in amused silence, MacGill and Daniel dodged her each time she darted by. Finally, she checked her makeup a third time in the mirror on her dresser, wiped the slightest smudge of lipstick from the corner of her mouth, grabbed her cigarettes, and came to a stop in the doorway. She smiled broadly at the two of them. "Ready?"
Daniel nudged MacGill but when he missed the cue Daniel picked up his line:
"You look beautiful."
"Thank you," she said, and gave him a kiss on the cheek.
"Oh. Ah, yes…" said MacGill belatedly. "You look great."
"Little slow on the uptake there, Jack," Cecilia said with a laugh.