Elizabeth F.A. Meaney
Cadenza
The concert hall had once been a barn. It was made completely of wood. The wood was dark, like pine. The walls and the window frames were both made of wood. The wood swelled when it rained. When it rained, the walls swelled and the room became smaller. At other times, the hall seemed hollow. It was cavernous. The ceilings were high.
But now he felt the walls around him.
People came in and shook the rain off of the shoulders of their raincoats and tamed umbrellas with both hands and removed hats and unzipped the raincoats of their children, bent on knees. People found seats and sat next to one another and sat next to one another’s children. People cleared their throats and shuffled their shoes.
He sat silent in the first row.
She sat in the first row, too. She sat six seats down from him. He could not see her face. He could not see her hair. All he could see from this angle were her hands. They were very small, still.
“This our daughter, Carina.”
The first time she had been introduced to him, he had noticed her hands.
“She is young.”
“Yes.”
“She has small hands.”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“She has a great love of music.”
“Yes?”
“Very much so, sir.”
“The piano requires discipline.”
“Yes.”
“Why doesn’t she sing?”
“She has a great love for the piano, sir.”
He had accepted, reluctantly. If he hadn’t.... How different things would be, now. She would not be in the first row. She would not have her focus on the grand piano now as if laying her fingers upon it would let her close her eyes and escape the swollen walls of the concert hall and the swollen walls of the world and the swollen walls of herself. He knew that look in her eyes. It had been purely his feeling until four years ago.
“Carina.”
When her name was called, she uncrossed her legs. She put each small foot on the floor beneath her chair. She hesitated shyly before she rose. She brushed her skirt underneath her with one hand. She stepped tentatively towards the piano. Her heels made a small ¾ waltz rhythm as she walked around the bench. He closed his eyes. That rhythm was familiar. The rain dimmed the sound.
The bench was already pulled out. She adjusted the angle of it. She lined her skirt up in the exact center of it. She sat down gingerly on the edge of it. Then she half-stood up and she tucked the longest layers of her skirt beneath her. Then she half-stood up again and she used the thumb and the forefinger of each hand to drawn the bench closer against her knees.
She sat with her shoulders squared and the vertebrae in her spine aligned, with the deep curve into her lower back. The curve was visible through her white dress. She held tension in her shoulders and in her elbows; she maintained fluidity in her wrists. She arched her hands and placed them so lightly on the keys that the reverberations of sound in the empty room did not even breathe a difference; she flittered her eyes from hands to music to hands to music and finally settled on music; she set her right foot onto the furthermost pedal underneath the instrument and her ear noted the barely-audible hum of the pedal’s holding.
She began to play. Her technique was flawless. The pulse of the song. Mathematically precise. The angles of her hands. Geometrically unprecedented. The count of each note. Never a fall out of step. Perfection was easy to teach. He had given her discipline.
But now he was torn apart by something beyond perfection. You couldn’t teach beyond perfection, that grace, that style, the flair of the sixteenth notes slurred into the half notes, the imprint of each individual key blended miraculously against the deftly soft hum of the pedal, the passion flowing from her shoulders, the intensity of her piano, the young playfulness of her allegro, the nameless, boundless joy in her runs up and down the keyboard, the supple ability to sway into a quicker tempo to complement the metronome of the raindrops on the ceiling, the elusive wisps of beauty in the sound, the mysterious eloquence of even her rested measures, the anonymous smoothness of it....
He had never been this good himself. People tried to sit still, but they still shuffled. The rain made it hard to hear the softer notes. He hated the rain.
She played a minor chord.
Minor chords were said to be tragic. In this one he found immeasurable beauty and a singing sadness that stirred everything inside of him. How he longed to rise up and cast away everyone around them, the people, the raincoats, the swollen wooden walls and the entire concert hall. He wanted to burn the hall and burn the people to their ashes on the ground and cross to her side and lay his futile, cursed hands in the golden hair all down her back, rippling, tamed hair like Florida’s fountain that would soothe his broken, worn joints, and he wanted her skin, her skin like blanched talcum powder, baby-soft, and those heartbreaking hands and those agile fingers to spin gold over the world and his eyes. She would cover him in baby powder and golden hair that she didn’t mean to and finely woven golden masks that she meant to and he would never see the sun set because all he would do would be to touch her again and again until he could trace her outline in sand and in fire and had memorized her skin and her hands and the rhythm of those blessed, Midas-touched, half-divine fingers, he would never see, he would never see again, but to touch her and to touch her hands.
He did not realize she stopped playing. Then she looked at him. He cleared his throat. He clapped. Everybody clapped. She half-stood up and turned her wrists and took the bench in each thumb and forefinger and slid it back six centimeters and stood up slowly and took a stiff, wooden bow. Her hair covered her face.
Her parents found him first.
“A beautiful concert.”
Her mother was small and bit her lip. Her father was large and ruddy.
“Yes.”
“You teach them beautifully.”
“They play beautifully.”
“She has changed so much, with you as her teacher.”
“She was.... there.... from the very beginning.”
He stopped speaking as she approached. She held on to her music with both of her hands. She kissed her parents. She shook his hand. Her fingers felt crushable in his. He wanted to crush them. Her parents were watching.
“You should have played tonight, yourself, maestro. You are one of the best in the world, after all.”
He shook his head at her father. He gestured to his own hand. It was crippled in four fingers and swollen at the joints.
“No.”
“I see.”
“Arthritis.”
He hated to say this in front of her.
“I see.”
“Thank you for coming.”
“Thank you, sir.”
They walked away. Every nerve in him urged him to look sideways after her, to soothe his ravaged self with the sight of her untouched skin, the wrist he could circle so easily with his hand. He was terrified she would be destroyed. He wanted to destroy her. He found her then, before she left, before she darkened, before she hardened, before she was wrecked. He listened for her sixteenth notes and the exact rhythm she had trilled so skillfully at the end of the piece, that monumental, trembling talent. It did not echo.