"Kelley Eskridge - Strings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Eskridge Kelly)

STRINGS
By Kelley Eskridge
****

SHE TOOK THE stage, head shaking. Her jaw and the tiny muscles in her neck
rippled in sharp adrenaline tremors. She moved her head slowly back and forth while
she walked the twenty yards from stage right to the spotlight; it was always the same,
this swooping scan, taking in the waiting orchestra, the racks of lights overhead, the
audience rumbling and rustling. She moved her head not so much to hide the shaking
as to vent it: to hold it until center stage and the white-light circle where she could
raise the violin, draw it snug against the pad on her neck; and at the moment of
connection she looked at the Conductor and smiled, and by the time he gathered the
orchestra into the waiting breath of the upraised baton, she had become the music
once again.

After the final bows, she stood behind the narrow curtain at the side of the
stage and watched the audience eddy up the aisles to the lobby and the street and
home. She could tell by their gentle noise that the current of the music carried them
for these moments as it had carried her for most of her life.

Nausea and exhaustion thrust into her like the roll of sticks on the kettledrum.
And something else, although she did not want to acknowledge it: the thinnest whine
of a string phantom music high and wild in a distant, deep place within her head.

“Excuse me, Strad?”

She jerked, and turned. The orchestra’s First Clarinet stood behind her, a little
too close.

“I’m sorry.” He reached out and almost touched her. “I didn’t mean to startle
you.”

“No. No, it’s O.K.” She felt the tension in her smile. “Was there something
you wanted?” Her right hand rubbed the muscles of her left in an old and practiced
motion.

“Oh. Yes. The party has started; we were all wondering…You are coming to
the party, aren’t you?”

She smiled again, squared her shoulders. She did not know if she could face
it: the percussion of too many people, too much food, the interminable awkward
toasts they would make to the Stradivarius and the Conservatory. She had seen a
Monitor in the house tonight, and she knew he would be at the party, too, with a
voice-activated computer in his hands; they would be soft, not musician’s hands.
She wondered briefly how big her file was by now. She wanted desperately to go
back to the hotel and sleep.
 “Of course,” she said. “Please go back and tell them I’ll be there just as soon
as I’ve changed.” Then she found her dressing room and began, unsteadily, to strip
the evening from herself.