by Bonnie McCune

The spring clouds overhead bulge earthward like pregnant cows. They will loose their fecund gift at any moment. Cynthia Adams stops on the street corner, stands on her toes, and stretches one hand up toward the sky, feeling she could touch the clouds.

Cynthia is twenty-six — and sensitive, all her friends tell her. The heart of a poet is locked within her deep-bosomed, long-legged figure. The soul of a poet pours wonderful thoughts into her brain behind her bland blue eyes and Nordic complexion.

A poet treasures things that others scorn. Like rain brushing her face, Cynthia thinks, as the clouds fulfill their promise. Cynthia watches passersby scuttle away from the downpour. She tries on metaphors the same way she tries on dresses when shopping:

They scurry like crabs. No, too cliched. They tuck their heads in their collars like turtles. Still too common. They seek shelter like a sinner searches for salvation. Much better. And very alliterative.

Now thoroughly soaked but poetic, Cynthia pushes through the door of the coffee shop across the street from the symphony hall. An hour and a half till the concert. She looks in her purse for money. Enough for a hamburger. Cynthia may be a poet, but she still needs to eat, which is why she works as a secretary in a dull law office filled with dank books, dingy furniture, and dark-suited men.

Cynthia sits in a booth. The maroon plastic cover of the seat has an intricate pattern pressed into it, perfect for catching crumbs and dried mustard. Cynthia notices the griminess, but she prefers a booth because it’s less likely any strange men will try to strike up a conversation there. Cynthia has given up men since her divorce. Unless they’re gay. Her friends are sure this is a temporary aberration; Cynthia is too full of life to give up men forever.

What her friends don’t know is that Cynthia nourishes a secret passion. That’s why she squeezes out a portion of her teeny-tiny salary for symphony tickets. Her passion has a season ticket, too, in the lower balcony, at an angle from which Cynthia can brood over his fine profile.

At first she worried that he was committed. Involved. But the people in the adjacent seats changed with each concert, so now Cynthia is sure he’s available. She’s also sure he’s nothing mundane and boring like her ex-husband or the lawyers in her office. And he wears the same corduroy suit to each symphony, so he must be poor.

He leans forward to listen, absorbed in the music. Sometimes he closes his eyes. Cynthia imagines that he must be an artist, a struggling actor, maybe a journalist. She’s written several unsatisfactory poems about him.

Cynthia glances out of the rain-streaked window. She can see the auditorium building on the opposite block — the stage door to the symphony hall almost diagonally across from the restaurant, the main entrance farther down the street. In the growing dark, a man pauses, waiting for the stoplight to change.

It’s him! It’s he, Cynthia corrects herself. Her passion! She leaps up, wraps her damp raincoat around herself, throws some bills and change on the counter next to the cash register, dashes through the door, and then slows to a saunter behind the man, stopping when he does by the stage door.

***

Ed Pickle saunters to the stage door. He tries to look as if he’s there by accident, not design. Not at all sophisticated to be loitering around waiting for a glimpse of the girl, the cellist in the orchestra. He knows he’s a fool, a wet fool, to do this. He can’t help it — she’s so beautiful, so sensitive, with her long narrow face, her long narrow nose, her straight hair hanging to her waist. She reminds him vaguely of a high-strung thoroughbred.

He wishes he could get up enough nerve to introduce himself. But she’d probably start to laugh — Ed Pickle? Pickle? —then choke down the laugh out of politeness. What a curse to be born with such a strange name! What a legacy from his parents! Ed knows he was cut from a different cloth from his parents, in more ways than one (his father wears polyester). He may work for his father — Pickle & Son Roofing — but he’s gone to college, and he appreciates the finer things of life. Like symphonies. Like cellists. He deserves a better name. Orkov, perhaps. Or Longschamps. Something with a foreign, mysterious sound to it.

Ed looks around, then at his watch. Should be time for the orchestra members to be coming. Yes, here are several, in their black suits and black dresses. The cellist is not among them.

A shiny red Porsche pulls up to the curb, and the orchestra conductor gets out. Ed recognizes him because the man has a white fringed silk scarf draped around his neck. The scarf is a signature. The conductor wears it in television commercials promoting the orchestra, or one of his miscellany of profitable causes: housing developments, a bank, crippled children.

The conductor leans into the car to say goodbye to the woman who’s driving, a sleek thin thing with a face immobilized by plastic surgery. Then he backs out and knocks into a tall blonde woman who appears to be waiting for someone.

Typical dumb blonde, thinks Ed. Probably doesn’t know the difference between an arpeggio and an aria. The conductor whirls around, looks the woman up and down, and marches off through the stage door.

Ed pulls up the collar of his coat to ward off the rain. The cellist will be late if she doesn’t hurry. Finally, here she comes, panting a little from her fast pace and the large cello case she is carrying. Ed stops by the stage door as if by accident and opens it just as the cellist approaches. She thanks him, her large doe-like brown eyes downcast.

The euphoria created by her glance carries Ed into the auditorium and well into the first musical selection. Then he concentrates on the cellist’s playing. He wishes he could tune out all the other instruments. He watches her hands move. They are rather large but thin, with an awkward grace. She bends her hands at the wrists as she moves them up and down the cello’s neck, across the strings with the bow, fingers splayed. Ed leans forward, closes his eyes, imagines those hands fluttering across his body, that hair (which she impatiently pushes back from time to time) sweeping across his face.

***

The cellist tucks a long strand of hair behind her ear. What a boring piece, Regina Dunway thinks. No challenge at all. Something for the masses, as the conductor often says. She stares at the conductor while he keeps time, his baton flashing in and out of the stage lights. She loves concerts, even boring ones, because she can look her fill at the conductor without worrying that someone will notice.

Regina can just hear what her mother would say if she knew her daughter was in love with the conductor. “Ginny! A married man!” (Regina hates that childhood nickname, definitely déclassé, never uses it anymore.) Regina is sure that the conductor’s wife doesn’t appreciate him. She probably married him for status and money.

And she looks like a spoiled toy. Regina has seen her pick the conductor up — and has seen her in the newspaper photos of various social events. A tall, thin woman, a Vassar graduate, years younger than the conductor. She dresses in high fashion, with hems long when others’ are short, short when others’ are long. Always black. Much like the dress Regina herself wears now. That big “little black dress”. . .a graceful wrap that flows and clings in all the right places.

The conductor throws his head back, his silver-tipped hair swinging in time to the music. His hair is thinning in the back, and Regina feels protective, almost maternal about this small evidence of vulnerability. She wonders if the conductor’s wife knows that protein will reduce hair loss. She doubts that the wife cares, doubts that she even makes breakfast for the great man.

What wonderful conversations she and he could have, if only he were free. He’s so different from the boys her age, who are either stupid and shy (like the guy who opened the stage door for her that night) or sharp and aggressive. Not intelligent, gentle, caring.

Here come the strings’ harmonics. Regina knows the conductor will turn his intense gray eyes toward her, so she bends her head like the stalk of a daffodil in the wind, arches the arm that’s pushing the bow, pulls in her stomach under her new black silk dress, points her toe, pours her soul into her music.

The theme completed, she raises her eyes to the conductor. He nods briefly in her direction, and she is paralyzed by his glance. He’s noticed her dedication, her artistry, her sophisticated dress! Maybe he’ll even say something to her after the performance.

***

Thank God, the strings got through that part without embarrassing him, the conductor thinks. They are almost aural idiots. Especially that one cellist who never understands his directions the first time. He has to repeat and repeat for her.

If he could only he could move up and away from this second-class group. But he’s still a young man, he reminds himself, and conductors are a notoriously long-lived lot. Still, a relatively young man, he thinks, as he draws air into his chest, and expands it with the thrust and push of his arms. The thought of those semi-secret negotiations with the orchestra in Italy flicker warmth into a small corner of his mind.

Now the march. The conductor hushes the brass who think expression is synonymous with loudness. Will this piece never end? Boring, boring. For the bovine masses. But they wouldn’t come if they didn’t get their Tschaikovsky. And each seat filled represents a plus in the income column. The expensive seats are worth more than the price of admission, for they are filled by the monied — the men usually dragged to this cavernous chamber by their scrawny, snobbish wives.

The conductor is tired of small-breasted, thin, pseudo-intellectuals, like his wife, like the women at the opening night parties who crowd around him to debate the merits of Bartok versus Schoenberg. Or like the female members of the orchestra. They parade through his mind, an identical display of black-clothed, shiny-lipped, bony figures.

What he wouldn’t give for a change! Like the girl who was standing outside the theatre tonight. There’s a girl he could put his arms around! At the thought of what he could do with that tall, well-rounded blonde, his right arm stiffens and pauses out of sync. He recovers so quickly that the orchestra thinks he’s reinterpreting a musical phrase.

***

Crescendo, finale, applause. The conductor turns and bows, then raises his hand to signal the orchestra to stand. The audience leaps to its collective feet. In the upper balcony Cynthia claps and claps, head turned firmly toward the lower balcony — and toward Ed, whose face glows. Ed claps and claps, eyes on the profile of the blushing cellist on stage. Regina bends her head, peeping at the conductor’s back. The conductor bows again, his roving eye picking out a blonde here and there in the audience.

Photo by Sam Moqadam on Unsplash