The Elgar: Third Movement (The Wife Who Would Remember)

[Sorry for the long break in this series. If you need to reacquaint yourself with the previous installments, Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.]


“She fed him my tongue.”

Nobody but the girl responds. And she sounds sad. Always so sad with that one. A sad clown’s leaky balloon.

“Pfffffffft.”

The spit bubbles pop. She giggles, and searches the opera box for an audience.

Why did he bring her?

“Mrs. Donovan?”

It’s more than the poor thing should bear.

Her pale blue eyes float without anchor above a sea of ninnies below. Notes shadow her ankles like silver fish, but she walks on water (he says, he says), and will not permit them air.

“Papa?”

The scrap of bone and hair beside her pats her hands and whispers, “Mrs. Donovan, your husband has just stepped out for a moment. You’re at the concert hall, Mrs. Donovan. The concert hall. It’s the Elgar tonight. Marvelous, isn’t she?”

She snaps back her hand, fingering the opal ring Mother lets her wear on special occasions. “I know where I am, Uncle.”

Dirty old man. Serpents for hands.

“Snakes can’t smell without tongues,” she says. “And sirens can’t sing.”

“All right, Mrs. Donovan. Let’s not worry yourself about such things.”

This thing gags her. She must escape.

Scurry, scurry hermit crab
Look for food that you can grab.
Search for shells that fit just right
Hide in them when it is night.

Dipping forward to grab the umbrella he extends to shelter her, a heart pours out yesterday’s water.

Bobbing to its waves, her mouth spills open. Milky eyes track the sea’s shifting lights. Until they are upon her. Until she glows within their timeless grace.

Don’t work yourself up over a silly girl’s machinations, Penny.

Her tongue licks the sea salt from her lips.

There is nothing to it, my love. Just let it go.

Let it go.

And so she had. And so she—

“Mrs. Donovan?” the voice insists. “Penelope?”

Surfacing, she gasps for air, scanning the dark skies. The gaudy chandelier burns softly now, like a mariner’s distant galaxy. The girl’s notes wobble, so far from the hearth of home.

There is salt on her tongue. Is.

She rises.

“I thought she cut it out.”

I did, I did?

“And fed it to him.”

I did, I did.

“Of course, Mrs. Donovan. Won’t you have a seat now? This movement is almost ended.”

The blue umbrella explodes like birds’ wings, and she lifts it above her head, ready to set sail.

“But now I don’t know,” she says, staring down at the girl—this ancient child—with the opal in her cello. “I really couldn’t say who—”

A few in the audience look up as she drifts near the rail.


To be continued...


[Cello: Jacqueline du Pré; Conductor and husband: Daniel Barenboim; video courtesy of markvogue]

The Elgar: Second Movement (Flight of the Hummingbird)

Part 1 is here


She had noted his backwards flight.

And softens her forward thrust.

Her mind disengages as the bow arm flirts and hovers like the wing of a hummingbird. The membranes of her muscle pulse across this movement’s petals and thorns, while not far below, darkness jaws. She relishes this suppleness from herself, and others. Athleticism rouses her from a digital bolero of play, and repeat.

Her heart is a pump.

Her heart. Is a pump.

Her heart—

She ran from the cottage until she reached the water’s edge, his baton a white flame in her fist. The afternoon heat marinated the cut grass, while the lake drank deep from the sun’s nectar. Spring is the season of miracles, someone had once told her. But all she believed in was the mud sucking at her toes, the cool breeze impaling her breast, before she thrashed away.

Positioning the baton between her teeth, she turned to confront him.

“Did you call her, Catherine?”

His color was high, his voice a broken string.

“Did you tell my wife about us?”

She spat out his stick in her hand.

“I did.”

He seized her by the shoulders, and shook. For a brief, ecstatic moment, she coveted his fury. Aiming the baton at his heart, she started to lunge.

But flesh is so fond of surrendering, even during a blood charge.

Her legs collapsed, and he sank into her like a man falling on his sword. She watched the baton sail from her hand, and find its measure of rest. She rested, too.

And the dandelions sloughed their seeds as two bodies swam up one another in a current of silence.

And the scent of lilac chloroformed the air.

And a bird dropped to earth, in search of sticks for a nest.

But she was deaf to earth and sense and time.

When her eyes opened, there were tears on her cheeks, though her own eyes were dry. The war drum in her chest reminded her, with its imperfect beat, that only death survives such sweet, terrible silence.

And so the woman who did not believe in miracles pushed her lover away. Cruel enough for him to remember his wife again. So far that his tears might swamp a lake.

She stood to track a bird with a baton in its beak.

Straining for it to conduct her in birdsong.

Her heart is a pump.

Her heart is a pump.

And so, she thinks, as the hummingbird finally falls dead, this fluid staining my cheeks must be blood-red.


To be continued...


[Cello: Jacqueline du Pré; Conductor and husband: Daniel Barenboim; video courtesy of markvogue]

The Elgar: First Movement (The Man Doomed to Love)

A conductor tenses his baton. A cellist draws her bow.

In an opera box, the man doomed to love checks his breath.

The initial thrum only shocks the spine, but there is a next—and a next—and a next—all plucking at and plundering the white nerves within. He seizes, his knees splay, the clean line of him shredding underneath her assault. Leads sweat, and spark. Vision blurs. An aging body slathers itself with the heat of Pavlovian memory.

The Elgar. Their concerto. Of some twenty, muted years.

He twists the leather glove to restrain his hands from conducting her, from molding her, from beseeching her for that final encore. The fierce abstinence bulges and quivers his neck like the slim reed between her fingers. Those instruments of torment, slashing across his back and chest. How she had bruised and bludgeoned him.

In her pretty dress.

With her pretty, pretty song.

Scars split their seams, and the liquid adagio of a sluggish heart courses into his autumnal skin. Blood surging faster than notes. Sweet delusions, the speed of light.

Their first concert.

Applause like firecrackers.

Her hot kiss on his ear.

The dressing room after.

A crashing of cymbals.

The long reverberation.

An orchestra throbs its gorgeous agony.

He is on point. Vibrato.

Her writhing stokes a golden frenzy about her shoulders as she rocks and inflames the wood between her thighs. A house of longing straddles her strings. She opens her worldly eyes. And smiles at her maestro.

The man doomed to love bites hard on the leather.

And tastes her skin.

Crying out, he lurches to his feet. The cancer of his need wrests him back, back. Back past his wife with her chorus of tears, back past his friends with their requiem faces, back past the velvet shroud . . . back . . . back . . .

Back to somewhere before.

Some time.

When he was his instrument.

And she was his song.


Find the Second Movement here.


[Cello: Jacqueline du Pré; Conductor and husband: Daniel Barenboim; video courtesy of markvogue]