find their voice, driven by manic stabs and jerks of arms and hands. I can’t equate the disarray of their employ with the sublime rapport of their strings.
Their sound creeps around the slotted pine panelling, stealthy as oil, settling against the skin during slow phrases, spirited away like a rising helix of bubbles during the fast ones. In this moment there are only two spheres of being: the music, and your presence; a silent proximity exerted by the loose arrangement of your clothes, the way your leg climbs over its partner, your left hand gently grips the right. I can smell your perfume (and, if I turn my head a little, I see the wet flash of your eyes and the threaded chunk of metal jolted by your pulse in the gulley between your breasts).
After Barber, after Bach, the musicians play Debussy’s ‘Sonata’ and you shift slightly, the hard edge of your forearm meeting mine on the intervening rest. The playing of music evolves on the stage in several layers, like cells in an animation: the man turning pages of music, the pianist, the cellist. The cello. I see details that might have eluded me at other times, but with this heightening of sensation it does not appear strange that I should notice the cellist’s hand: a white spider fleeing up and down the cello’s neck. Or the polished part of his knee where the bow brushes it at the limit of its stroke; filaments of horsehair; the muscles in the pianist’s arms.
Back home, you set about making tea. I riffle through your CD collection till I find Borodin’s ‘String Quartet No. 2 in D Major’. Lighted by candles, your room looks austere without being imposing. The first night I spent here, you and I looked at each other from opposite sides of the room for an age before you came to sit by my feet and hold my hand. This is what you do now, after placing the tray with the teapot and mugs on the table. I slip down on to the floor and you move between my legs, lying back so that your head finds the dip of my right shoulder. We don’t say anything.
There is a beautiful, haunting phrase that Borodin uses over and over during the Notturno . The cello’s voice is plaintive and hopeful, rolling around the other three string instruments like an invocation. Although you don’t move against me, I feel a settling of your weight, as if your muscles and bones have slipped beyond the threshold at which they find their usual repose. I become aware of your heartbeat and the measured journey of your breath. Everything is right for me in a way it hasn’t been for years. Slowly, with as much tenderness as I can muster, I place my hands on your shoulders and squeeze, allowing my fingers to work their way across your arms and the flat gloss of your chest. Your clavicle, the cob of bone at the back of your neck – I touch it all, trying to pass on something of my need for you: all my warmth and good feeling for you. Nothing is so important. Can you feel this? Eyes closed, I move my hands to the swell of the music, following the ebb and flow of the cello’s ache. In my touch is all the tenderness we’ve shared before. The raw centre of you is where I’m trying to reach, softly plucking and drawing upon the area that remembers the good times and knows there will be many more. I know this can work. Can you feel? I know this can work. This is love. Along with the charity of my hands, I send a message, forcing it through my fingertips and into the knot of pain and confusion we all carry at our centre. I won’t let you down .
You stay my hands. Bring one to your mouth and kiss the palm. This is love.
The first time: on the heels of a dovetail kiss, you moved over and sank upon me till I had no measure of where I ended and you began. The soft curtain of your hair moving pendulum slow above my face; the sound of the fountain outside the only thing pinning me to reality…
* * *
I was deciding whether to ruin my day with a third martini, when finally Knocker deigned to give me a
Their sound creeps around the slotted pine panelling, stealthy as oil, settling against the skin during slow phrases, spirited away like a rising helix of bubbles during the fast ones. In this moment there are only two spheres of being: the music, and your presence; a silent proximity exerted by the loose arrangement of your clothes, the way your leg climbs over its partner, your left hand gently grips the right. I can smell your perfume (and, if I turn my head a little, I see the wet flash of your eyes and the threaded chunk of metal jolted by your pulse in the gulley between your breasts).
After Barber, after Bach, the musicians play Debussy’s ‘Sonata’ and you shift slightly, the hard edge of your forearm meeting mine on the intervening rest. The playing of music evolves on the stage in several layers, like cells in an animation: the man turning pages of music, the pianist, the cellist. The cello. I see details that might have eluded me at other times, but with this heightening of sensation it does not appear strange that I should notice the cellist’s hand: a white spider fleeing up and down the cello’s neck. Or the polished part of his knee where the bow brushes it at the limit of its stroke; filaments of horsehair; the muscles in the pianist’s arms.
Back home, you set about making tea. I riffle through your CD collection till I find Borodin’s ‘String Quartet No. 2 in D Major’. Lighted by candles, your room looks austere without being imposing. The first night I spent here, you and I looked at each other from opposite sides of the room for an age before you came to sit by my feet and hold my hand. This is what you do now, after placing the tray with the teapot and mugs on the table. I slip down on to the floor and you move between my legs, lying back so that your head finds the dip of my right shoulder. We don’t say anything.
There is a beautiful, haunting phrase that Borodin uses over and over during the Notturno . The cello’s voice is plaintive and hopeful, rolling around the other three string instruments like an invocation. Although you don’t move against me, I feel a settling of your weight, as if your muscles and bones have slipped beyond the threshold at which they find their usual repose. I become aware of your heartbeat and the measured journey of your breath. Everything is right for me in a way it hasn’t been for years. Slowly, with as much tenderness as I can muster, I place my hands on your shoulders and squeeze, allowing my fingers to work their way across your arms and the flat gloss of your chest. Your clavicle, the cob of bone at the back of your neck – I touch it all, trying to pass on something of my need for you: all my warmth and good feeling for you. Nothing is so important. Can you feel this? Eyes closed, I move my hands to the swell of the music, following the ebb and flow of the cello’s ache. In my touch is all the tenderness we’ve shared before. The raw centre of you is where I’m trying to reach, softly plucking and drawing upon the area that remembers the good times and knows there will be many more. I know this can work. Can you feel? I know this can work. This is love. Along with the charity of my hands, I send a message, forcing it through my fingertips and into the knot of pain and confusion we all carry at our centre. I won’t let you down .
You stay my hands. Bring one to your mouth and kiss the palm. This is love.
The first time: on the heels of a dovetail kiss, you moved over and sank upon me till I had no measure of where I ended and you began. The soft curtain of your hair moving pendulum slow above my face; the sound of the fountain outside the only thing pinning me to reality…
* * *
I was deciding whether to ruin my day with a third martini, when finally Knocker deigned to give me a
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