For Envy of Anne-Sophie
Sally was sitting on the piano bench, her back to the keyboard. Her blank stare was turned vaguely to the side, toward the floor. Her hands, acting from instinct, still held the violin and bow. If they had not functioned from habit, the instrument and its accompanying tool would have been on the floor.
She had made three attempts to simply set the bow to the strings, to play at least one note. With a sharp intake of breath through her mouth, she had raised the bow, and held that breath as the bow stopped in the air a few inches over the strings. Then she had forced it out of her and dropped her arm. On the third drop the end of her bow had glanced off the E string. The bow had pivoted between her thumb and index finger and the tip had formed an arc, just missing the foldable music stand. Her hand had docilely followed the movement, floating down and turning palm up. Then she had sat down with a thump.
Sally had never felt more discouraged, more estranged from all her dreams, more at the bottom of her courage. Her old habit of caressing the neck of this cherished instrument, either consciously or absent-mindedly, when she was not playing it, had shown no sign of waking up this time. Her hand was inert. There was a deadness in her which she knew was communicating itself to the music. But worse than that was a deadness of feeling in her toward the violin itself. This wooden object that she had cradled since a young age, lovingly and eagerly, no longer seemed to raise an answer in her. She was vibrating, but not with the instrument. She was vibrating from heartache.
She vaguely recognized, as she sat there staring, the completely abject state that she was in. She also vaguely understood that it had not come to her in a sudden onset. This had been building up for some time. There was no one event that had brought her there; it was a long series of small, incremental blocks, hurts, and struggles that had chipped insidiously away at her morale. The disbanding of the chamber orchestra. The refusal of the other musicians to form a quartet with her. The end of her alimony with her ex-husband's death. The school's refusal to negotiate a pay raise into the new contract. The dog running away.
Topping off all of these struggles was one discovery. Some family member, thinking no doubt that it would please her, had given her a CD by Anne-Sophie Mutter. Sally had heard of her, but had not heard her play. She had in fact felt a vague dread of the experience. In general, she avoided hearing the top professional violinists because her appreciation of good music could not over rule her deep jealousy. There had been a time when she - and others around her - had felt that her place was in front of the orchestra, that she could have been and should have been a fine soloist. And because she had not made it to that high place, she found it painful to listen to someone who had. She even found listening to cello concerti horrible, as that instrument was in the same family.
She had been particularly hesitant to hear this particular violinist. She often heard musicians discussing her and even using her as a reference. Her young age at her debut, her special relationship with Karajan, and her international concert activity were regular subjects of her fellow violinists' conversations. What was not a regular subject was the actual quality of her playing. At that point, the violinists would lose words. "Did you hear her latest CD, the Mendelssohn? It's just . . . " and the speaker would subside into closed eyes, smiles, and shakes of the head. Sally always read speechlessness in admirers as the surest sign of the high ability of a musician.
She had therefore especially avoided hearing Frau Mutter's playing. As soon as the radio announcer mentioned her, Sally would turn off the radio, refusing even to hear the first work if she was performing the middle work in a full concert in case she was not near enough to the radio to shut it off at the end of that first work. She made as total a blackout as possible of this acknowledged star.
However, once the CD had come into in her hands, she had felt compelled to play it. She had chosen an early evening, after an unusually good day of teaching and rehearsing. She had nonetheless placed the small plastic disc into its cradle with some trepidation. She had pushed the "start" button and immediately begun pacing, arms folded tightly to her body, shoulders hunched.
It had been even worse than Sally had expected. The clear, ringing sound, the flawless technique, the wealth of nuance and expression were more than she could bear. She suffered through the airy filigree and bold raciness of "Zigeunerweisen", the masterly changes of tone and mood in "Legende", the versatility of the "Il trillo del Diavolo". And of course Sally could barely stand "Tzigane". She insisted on listening through to the end of the piece, then took off the CD and put on some Bach motets. But the peace that the motets usually brought would not come.
It was exactly what she had been afraid of. She heard in every note evidence of the level at which she had felt once that she could have arrived but for three fatally wrong decisions that she had made while she had been a developing musician. There in that disc she heard the manifestations of her erstwhile inner passion for her music and her intense, deeply-felt musical choices. Her interpretations would not have been those of Frau Mutter, but she knew that she would have played them with the same conviction as the German woman did.
That evidence of like passions and capacities created the immense urge which had led Sally to some weeks of obsessive searching on the web and in back numbers of music magazines for any details that she could obtain on the life and work of Frau Mutter. She had downloaded or photocopied every article, interview, and review that she could find. The more she read the more she saw the parallels with her own erstwhile plans, aspirations, capacities, age, and training, and the more she felt that the place that she should have had was similar to that famous woman's.
This conviction had furthered what the previous unfortunate decisions had begun, the gradual crumbling of her technique. To the combination of discouragement and stiffness that she had already felt inside her were added a strident sound in her playing created by the tensions that had grown from her anxiousness. Each fed off the other and spiraled upward, sending her confidence spiraling downward. Her left hand had developed an erratic element in it, causing her at times even to miss the string that she was supposed to be stopping. All of this had led to this moment: Sally sitting on the piano bench in her slightly shabby living/music room, staring at the floor and ready to drop to the ground the instrument that she had formerly had such affection for.
She was stricken with one of those moments of frenzied anger that would take hold of her when she thought about the comparison with Frau Mutter. The uselessness of playing and of pursuing her attempts at music overwhelmed her. She was torn between her musical soul and her searching, faltering fingers. Music had become a torment.
Still, great as that pain was, she knew that she would gladly multiply it by fifty if, by passing through that greater torment, she found herself in that life that she had so longed for: perhaps not fame, but a life with music every day, working with good musicians. Her anger was that much more augmented from knowing that such a change, such a return to the forks in her road, was impossible.
Now the frustration of it was finally too much for her. She dropped her bow, grabbed her violin by the scroll, and swung it, sending the music stand into the wall with a sideways blow. Then she raised the violin over her head and brought it down on the corner of the low upright piano. She had just enough time to feel astonished that it did not splinter, but bounced back up, before it hit her near the temple.
The pastel yellow walls of the room were suddenly hidden by a thick, magenta curtain, which spread itself very close to her eyes. It smothered her for a moment. She reached for the piano with her free hand to steady herself. Then the curtain slowly drew back to reveal to Sally a figure standing in the middle of the room. She took a moment to realize, first that a being was really there, then what that being was. There was something palpable in his presence that took away some of her doubt. And yet she did doubt; this being had appeared to her before only in her imagination, when she thought about Paganini, Daniel Webster, or Goethe . . .
The naked figure gave a saturnine smile and stood with one hoof cocked.
"You are in quite a perplexity," he said lightly, in a low, resonant voice.
"Yes," was all Sally could answer. By reflex, she took her violin by the neck with her left hand.
"You are aware of the solution that I could propose," he added leisurely.
Sally dared not believe what she was hearing. She shook her head.
"You're a hallucination." That was the only explanation that could come to her at that moment. With the way her head was aching, she was not surprised to be having one.
"Test me," he said calmly, with a slight movement of his head and eyebrows.
"I want a Stradivarius," Sally said impulsively.
Before she had gotten past the syllable "Strad", she felt the slightest of changes in the weight, balance, and feel of the instrument that she was holding. Discovering a bow in her other hand, she put bow and instrument together and replayed the Shostakovich that she had just been working on, from memory and with fire. The waves of music that came from the strings seemed to bathe her. She felt herself come alive again.
She lowered the violin and blurted out, "I want the career of Anne-Sophie Mutter."
"Now?" he asked, still in his unhurried style.
Sally had a sudden thought. "No, not now. Take me back, take away the last half of my life, take away the bad marriage, take away the car accident, take away the choice of New York. I'll go to Boston, as I should have, and I know I'll go up from there."
"You'll have to suffer, you know." Sally could hear the tinge of expectancy in his voice.
"I'll do it," she said immediately. "Give me anything - paralysis from the waist down, bipolar disorder, a husband who beats me - anything, as long as I have a real career in music."
"You shall have it, then," he answered calmly.
Another curtain, of deep purple and very stifling, covered Sally and corked her mouth. Her head began again to pound. She felt herself slipping downward as the purple changed to enveloping, clinging blackness.
She woke up with a jump and a cry. She felt completely disoriented, and looked frantically around her at the pale blue walls of some other room. She was in a bed with white frilly bedding. Stuffed animals were piled at the foot of it. It was barely day.
Sally focused on the windows showing her that day. No sun on the sill. Curtains, frilly. Sky, clear. Leaves, not close. The maple tree? That tree became the point from which her mind could recreate the scene in which she had just been thrown.
This was her parents' house. This was her bedroom while she had been living there. These were the matching bedding and curtains that her mother had given her for a birthday. Those were the stuffed animals that she received, one every birthday, one every Christmas. Those windows faced westward, and showed her the maple tree from which her brother had fallen and broken his arm. Or had he yet? She felt a great need to find out when she was, now that she had found out where. She was about to jump out of bed, then remembered that her parents' room was just under hers. Her mother would come to find out why she was up if she heard her. She decided as she slipped her feet out from under the covers to move more quietly. She sat up and rediscovered her pale pink nightgown with the frill-traced yolk. She remembered that it had been a favorite.
That rediscovery helped focus her time and place more clearly. She remembered that she had gone through a diary phase in her teens, and thought a moment. Ah, yes, the diary was in the bottom drawer of the old roll-top desk in the corner. She walked quietly to the desk, bare feet padding on the cool wood floor, and opened the drawer.
She was a bit surprised to find in it a nothing book in bold blue; her memory had evoked pink-and-white books labeled "My Diary" and including a hasp and a key. Then she remembered that those were the first ones. She looked down, and then clearly recognized that she was not twelve years old; she was close to her fully adult figure already. She remembered that she had begun to go for the nothing books at about the age of fifteen. And that she had been given the frilly bedding for her sweet sixteenth.
She brought the book back to bed with her with a strong fluttering feeling in her chest. She settled the pillows behind her back, paused, took a deep breath, and opened the book. As she flipped it open, she saw a loose page in the front cover. It was the 1973 calendar, cut neatly out of a magazine. She turned to the first entry. The page showed her characteristic handwriting, which had not changed since high school; the date, marked in the international style that Sally had come to prefer after her ASSE stay in Koln, was 1 Jan 1973.
Sally breathed a long sigh of relief. She was in her senior year in high school. She flipped rapidly forward to find the last entry. It was "5 Apr 1973". It began:
"Got them both today! The two big acceptances I was waiting for, New York and Boston. I'm in!"
Sally now knew just where she was. She was at the first fork in the road, she could correct her bad decision to go to New York. The naked hoofed one had given her her wish. She slumped farther back into the pillows, aghast. Her head no longer ached, but it was spinning. She started to feel frightened. I have to start all over again! I have to get it right this time! What do I do next? She lay very still and tried to concentrate on her breathing.
A thought suddenly came to her. Shouldn't I be in school? Am I sick? Has the suffering started?
She quickly looked at the calendar again. If she had kept up her diary, today was Wednesday. She flipped ahead to the most recent entries again. Then she forced out another huge sigh of relief. She was on vacation this week. Then she remembered the arrival of the acceptance letters. Yes, it had been during her school vacation, and she had spent part of it neglecting her violin for once to shop for college clothes.
She took the time to steady herself. Then she forced herself to think carefully. She had to plan this, she had to make use of her time. She used that idea of time to focus her thoughts. First, this vacation time. That was the most important thing for the moment. Then the rest.
Sally told herself that she had until Monday to find her way back into this daily life. She could read her diary, talk to and especially listen to her family and friends, and look through her sheet music. That would anchor her. She probably had homework to do as well; that would keep until the weekend. More important was the letter to Boston, accepting her place in the school. She remembered that she had not learned to type yet; that would come when she was twenty, normally. She set her immediate priorities for that day: sleep; draft a handwritten version of the letter; practice. In the evening she would take a closer look at her sheet music, her diary, and her homework assignments. On Thursday she would start planning the next week, the months until she arrived in Boston, . . . and her coming life. She put the book on her nightstand, reset the pillows, and slipped back down under the covers.
She dozed through her parents' breakfast and departure for work. She had the impression that her mother had come to the bottom of the stairs, but had paused there rather than come up. Young Sally was not usually one to miss a meal. But she woke up in mid-morning feeling refreshed and not hungry at all. She made herself a cup of tea and anticipated enjoying the day alone. She had remembered that her parents did not come home for lunch, but wondered for a moment where her brother was. Then she remembered; he had begun college in 1971, and his breaks did not coincide with hers. He was already gone until May. She wrote her letters to Boston and New York, had a light lunch, and plunged into an afternoon of practicing.
Sally absolutely reveled in her rediscovered abilities. She nearly cried with the joy of feeling at one with her instrument again, with the natural way that the playing now came to her. She saw then how much it had been the reverse, how much she had been chasing after it for so long. She left aside for that day the careful work of constructing the Franck that she had been preparing in order to wallow in all her favorite pieces and reread some that she had forgotten. She was amazed by her own fingers and sank into their playing, letting them take complete control. Soon there were no fingers, no arms, just the music in the air.
She stopped for only a moment to turn on the oven. She had found a note on the kitchen table asking her to start the potatoes at five. Sally's throat had caught slightly at this. She had realized that she would have to live through five months of her mother's basic meat-and-potatoes cooking again. She gave herself courage as she went back to her practicing by remembering that she had been one of the few students who could stand cafeteria food.
She was still in her room when her parents came home from work, so she did not see them until her mother called her down for dinner. She went down, hopping at each step, feeling amused at the idea of seeing her parents younger. She stepped into the kitchen and stopped at the doorway to look at them. The biggest surprise to her was to realize that they were exactly the same people whom she had seen just last Christmas, in that other life, only not gray yet. They had the same still lumpiness, the same sparing, minimalist gestures, the same curling over the plate in quite absorption with the task at hand. She sat down without a word, as she had always done, and they gave her not a word in response.
As soon as dinner was over and they had done the dishes, Sally gave her draft letters to her mother to type. She was a bit surprised to see her mother show mild disapproval at the contents.
"Mr. Patterson will be disappointed," was her first, quiet comment.
"I know, but I'm sure he'll accept my decision. He's taught me well in the summer schools, but I really feel Boston is the place for me."
Her mother paused, then said, "New York is closer to Saratoga."
Sally felt annoyed at this change of subject. "I'm not going to college to be close, mom, I'm going to make music and study, and I like the atmosphere at the Boston school better."
"You didn't spend enough time at the Boston school to know what the atmosphere is like," her mother replied.
"I spent as much time there as I did at the New York one. So I've got the same experience to base my impression on."
Her mother began looking at her strangely while she said this. Sally suspected that she was behaving out of character, and tried to remember how she would talk and act in those days and in that situation. Before she could find a mode that matched her high-school self, her mother said, "I'll ask your teachers about this before typing them up."
Sally felt hot rage then. "You will NOT ask anyone anything! I'm going to Boston! If you don't type those letters up tonight, I'll go find someone tomorrow who will!"
She saw real fear in her mother's eyes. She vaguely recognized that such decisiveness had not come to her at that age. She was definitely not being her high-school self. Sally made the snap decision not to care. She had her whole life to get right, and only she had lived through the bad one, only she knew the horror of it. She was not going to let whatever ideas her mother had get in the way of her following her path.
She continued, more quietly, but still firmly. "Bring the letters up to me before you go to bed. I'm going to my room to go through my scores and look at my homework."
Her mother made no answer as Sally left the kitchen, and was still wordless when she brought the letters up for Sally to sign. As Sally signed with her legal name, Sarah, she made a mental note to use only this name when she arrived in Boston. That would help her remember that she was on a new course there.
That night, as she was settling into bed, Sally thought about the conversation with her mother. It began bringing other memories into her consciousness. She realized that that bad decision for New York had come from a very similar discussion, but one in which she had allowed herself to be persuaded by her mother's clinginess to "stay close" and to "play it safe" with the violin teacher she already knew. Her forty-year-old mind identified and highlighted the lack of maturity that her eighteen-year-old self had shown, and the part her mother had taken in encouraging it. She thought of the animals lying at her feet and the frilly bedding. Other memories came into place - presents, choices for classes, the refusal to allow her to learn to drive while she was in high school - and showed her a pattern of infantilization in her mother's care of her that she had never noticed before. She had been treated like a little girl all during her adolescence, and she had accepted it, even participated in it. Looking back, she was surprised that she had made the small gesture of rebellion that involved changing from pink-and-white diaries to nothing books in bold colors.
Suddenly, she also began to see a pattern in her later adult behavior, a willing continuation of the process of retarded maturation. She could trace her job choices and moves from city to city in that late psychological arrival at the adult state. She determined to construct a true adult life for herself as soon as she reached Boston. She also determined to keep her mother at arm's length so that she could not cause any backsliding.
By the time classes started again, Sally had settled into this rebegun life. She continued to create surprises; apparently her behavior at school was different as well as her behavior at home. She was not entirely sure what the difference was, not being able to remember well enough how she had been as an adolescent and not finding enough clues in her diary. More vitally, she was not intent on rediscovering, let alone recreating, that old self. She wanted a new self. In the meantime, she noted that one great difference in that new self was that it was showing drive. Focused, consistent energy was indeed something that she had never shown, even as an adult. This second chance was giving her enough motivation for a quintet.
Sally was also sure that it was new for her to have practical ideas for her future. She enrolled in a summer typing course that she juggled with the summer violin workshop. She also enrolled in a driving school, over her mother's feeble objections. She was not going to wait for her father to "get around to it", as he had before, and only half-teach her. All the same, she had no intention of using a car if she could manage with public transportation. For the first time in both her lives, the idea of permanent residence somewhere in Europe suggested itself. Her ASSE experience had been positive, and she now realized the worth of capitalizing on it.
The time went quickly enough for her, then her parents drove her to Boston. Boston was everything that she had imagined it to be. The school was small and had a feeling of intimacy in the middle of the big city, and the teachers were very attentive to the students. It was now that Sally realized how much she had needed that attention before and had missed it in the European-trained professors in New York, who expected to work with young professionals rather than students still finding their way. She knew already how much she would drink in this attention and help, all while trying to find her own adulthood. She also made good friends, who loved to make music in and out of the school. Her reveling in music was matched by that of these enthusiastic young people, in marked contrast to the serious, snobbish musicians whom she had met in New York. These friendships helped her blossom, and she threw herself into them.
But she refused to date; she recognized that she would never meet her ex-husband here, but preferred not to meet another future ex-husband. The discoveries that she had made in this new life made her doubt her judgement and taste, not only in bedding and diaries, but in relationships. She chose to give herself a lifetime to find her way with people, and to develop warm relationships with them, but no commitments. She would be married to her music in this new life. The husband who beat her would therefore not be the form of suffering that was waiting for her. The one form that she experienced now was that women seemed to be very attracted to her. Fending off the aggressive ones and trying to keep the more yearning types from drunken phone calls or suicide attempts was already quite a trial for this time.
Sally also discovered the possibilities of working as a musician in order to pay for her tuition. She had no need for the ice-cream-parlor or record-store job. She could wallow in music for work, play, pleasure, fun and profit. She quickly realized that this was the ultimate stimulus for her, the missing element in New York, along with the good friends. The real chance to live and breathe music sent her on the trajectory that she had dreamed about in the young years of her preceding life.
By the end of her first year in Boston, she was able to say to herself that she had created Sarah. She had worked hard on her playing and on her wider knowledge of the profession and the world. In addition, she had come to recognize the futile self-absorption that had characterized her old life, and the unconscious shutting in and away that had resulted from it. She could see now how that nombrilism had come to interfere with an activity which, for all her striving for a solo career, would always be engaged in with others. She saw how much she had set herself apart from others in the past. Now she enjoyed people, learned them, lived and worked with them, and thus learned to appreciate and care about them.
By this very tendency to reach out to others, she left behind her parents. She could see her self-absorption as a version of theirs, their willingness to wrap themselves in their small lives. Psychologically, she continued the movement away from that stifling existence that she had started when she had stood up to her mother's attempts to influence her negatively. Physically, she did not move at all. She announced over the phone her intention to stay in Boston for the summer. It was presented as a practical choice - the chance to continue playing and to earn money as a musician - but it had a psychological dimension to it as well. Her newfound appreciation for others led her away from her parents, in whom she now basically found nothing in particular to appreciate. She felt gratitude to them for having given her a violin and lessons, but she could not value them as people. And, second to music, it was people whom she had come to value. During her years of study she only went home for Christmas, and only if there was no engagement for Christmas music in Boston. This set the pattern for the years that followed.
Music study led to prizes, prizes to engagements, and engagements to a full career as a soloist. Once Sarah had had her first experience of playing with a full orchestra behind her, she would crave it more and more. Her first years as soloist were busy, because she would accept any engagement that was offered, so excited was she just to be making music. Then after a few years she began to be a bit more discriminating, choosing the highest-level orchestras that invited her. Each year that level rose. Her career continued upward and upward, and she entered the ranks of internationally sought-after violinists. Her ASSE memories made her particularly favor the Germanic offers in her choices for engagements, but she was soon touring the world over.
All while she rose, she was amazed at the height to which she was rising. She had always dreamed of a life in music, she had asked for just this kind of career, but she had somehow not expected to have this much accomplishment. At the height of that career she was blissful; she was busy, active, and very involved in her art and her fellow artists.
But every once in a while she would think about the profession as a whole and wonder where Frau Mutter was. She had hoped to meet her while they were both still young, perhaps even to work with her. But she seemed not to exist in this other life. Sarah could not believe that she had not made it into the high ranks; how could a talent like that not receive notice? She had been too busy in this new life to hear about Anne-Sophie's famous debut with Karajan, or to do more than the occasional brief search for information about her in magazines or the Schwann catalogue, and later on the web. She began to worry that something bad had happened, like an accident. She thought of her own car accident, in her other life. That life had become distant, but she remembered the forks in the road and the pain of them, and kept them constantly in her mind to give her focus and direction. Had such a thing happened to Frau Mutter?
Thinking of accidents also made Sarah wonder when her "payoff" would come. The naked one had said that she would have to suffer for this new life, but so far she had experienced nothing more than recurring stomach problems, a side effect of the intensity of her feeling for music. Although the pain could be quite severe at times, it was only long-term pain if she neglected it, and she had learned from experience what she could or could not do. She had to avoid fried foods, rich gourmet meals, vintage red wines, and extreme spiciness. She took only simple, light meals, and had them in a calm atmosphere. But she certainly did not really count as suffering such privations, or the need to watch her sleep or traveling rhythm, or the care she exercised to find the right kinds and doses of medicine to take when she had had a few indulgences or the traveling became a bit more exhausting. It all seemed too mundane to be the return that would be demanded.
Sarah lived with this question of suffering in the back of her mind until her fiftieth birthday. It was a doubly important occasion for her. Besides being the usual milestone, it was the last birthday that she had celebrated before being offered this second chance. Through the day she received international best wishes from fans in e-mails and letters and telephone calls from Simon, Itzhak, Seiji, Anne-Marie, Paul, James, Jennifer, Valery, Daniel, Martha, Marin, John, and so many others - she had lost track by the end of the day. In the late afternoon she settled down to some herbal tea.
That was the moment when panic began to take hold of her. Of all the biological clocks, the existential clocks, this one was the one she dreaded. Mid-life was not worrying her. Childbirth had never tempted her enough. She was ready to confront arthritis, should it decide to appear, or early Alzheimer's, or cancer. But she still did not know which illness would strike, or how hard. Or perhaps which type of accident. More than the countdown to aging, illness, or retirement by themselves, the countdown to the moment when she would pay for her charmed life began to tick loudly.
From that day Sarah was regularly haunted by the threat of that suffering, as yet unexperienced but sure to arrive. She detected traces in her of a form of tension that she had not felt since leaving her previous life. It was as if a taut string had been strung through her somewhere deep inside, constricting everything that touched it and pulling her head inward, downward, toward her feet. She also began to feel anxiousness each morning and relief during each concert and each night when she was safely in bed. Then the thought occurred to her that nothing guaranteed that the "payoff" would not occur during a performance or in the night. From then on it was only during the actual moments of playing that she forgot the panic. Nothing pierced her once she laid bow to string. But the rest of her time was dominated by a vague horror. Her stomach problems worsened. She stopped driving completely, insured her hands at Lloyd's, and started taking yoga.
Later that year Sarah finished a series of concerts at the Tonhalle and was to go on to perform with the Bayerisches Staatsorchester. She had a little more than a week between the engagements, and decided to take the time to visit southern Germany by going along the train lines from one city to the other. She had not managed to settle in Europe, as she had once hoped to, but she was there often, and she still particularly enjoyed spending time in Germanic countries. She had even managed to develop a passable fluency in Danish along with her nearly native capacity in German. She had always found non-musical stays in Germany relaxing, and felt that this slow passage from one place to another would moderate her current rhythm, high until then with repeated concerts. She meandered through the Lander, choosing the train lines for the tourism rather than the directness.
It was during her stop in Tubingen that Sarah realized that the heavy German food was beginning to make her stomach act up, and that she was out of her usual medicine. She made a brief search in the main streets, found an Apotheke, and went in. For all her habit of Germany, German pharmaceuticals were unfamiliar to her, as she usually travelled with her own supply of drugs. She was not sure whether the type of medicine that she needed was sold on the shelves or behind the counter, so she stood in line to ask for advice from the Apotheker or Apothekerin, depending on whose turn it would be to serve when she came to the head of the line. There were two of each sex helping the customers in that busy pharmacy.
As the line moved forward, Sarah looked around at the different boxes and bottles. For some reason, she could not keep herself from thinking about some of the other products available in such stores. She remembered having read Madame Bovary in high school, with Emma's stealing of arsenic. There was also that rather unpleasant French film, in which a wife bought some kind of rat poison to put in her husband's wine. The notion that she could be sold the wrong product by accident suddenly seemed to her to be a particularly clever form of inflicting suffering. It would only take a dose just strong enough to make her sick or crippled for the rest of her life. She shuddered and wished she had better knowledge of the German products.
"Bitte?"
Sarah was startled to realize that she had come to the counter while thinking these fearful thoughts. She turned to the Apothekerin and attempted to smile through the anxiety that she felt must have been visible on her face.
The smile froze. There in front of Sarah, in this pharmacy in Tubingen, working in the pharmacy, was Anne-Sophie Mutter. Even if Sarah had doubted her memory of the face, the pharmacy smock wore the designation "A-S Mutter" on the breast pocket.
She saw a woman who was still beautiful, but who looked rather tired. The woman waited, an expression of professional conscientiousness on her face, as Sarah hesitated, trying to find again through her sudden numbness the question that she had intended to form. Sarah finally managed to murmur out her needs, and Frau Mutter proceeded to give her a careful technical explanation of the possibilities available. Behind the Germanic professionalism there was a slight touch of coldness. Sarah remembered her admirers from college, and wondered if Frau Mutter was taking her stare for one of flirtation. She lowered her eyes and concentrated on giving sober descriptions of her problems. Frau Mutter moved to a shelf behind her and took a small box from it, then turned back to Sarah and gave her a clear, efficient explanation of the use, the dosage, and the side effects of the medicine that she was recommending. Sarah gave her many thanks, still feeling numb, and left.
Sarah went directly from the Apotheke to her hotel room, took the medicine, and lay down on her bed to wait for it to take effect. It was a long and difficult wait, because the last thing that Sarah wanted to do right then was lie still and wait calmly. She wanted an explanation. She wanted to know what Anne-Sophie Mutter, one of the most acclaimed classical violinists, was doing working in a pharmacy. She could think of only one being who would have the answer, and she was not sure how to conjure him up.
Gradually, the medicine took effect, and as Sarah's stomach went from cramped to calm her mood went from consternation to distress, then from distress to anger. She began to find the gesture a crass joke. She got up and paced the room, then began to topple objects from their places as she paced. She used more and more strength as she continued, and finished by pushing her whole, full suitcase to the ground, then her violin case.
No thick curtain came across her eyes this time, but she could feel a presence on the other side of the bed. She stopped pacing and turned to look at him. He was unchanged, and looked at her with a subtle smile.
"More perplexity?" he asked in the same mild tone that he had used the time before.
"'Perplexity' is a ridiculous understatement!" Sarah trumpeted out. "That woman I saw in the pharmacy."
"Yes?"
"That was Anne-Sophie Mutter?"
"Yes."
"The world-famous violinist?"
"No."
Sarah's head snapped backward.
"What do you mean, 'no'?"
"I mean just that. She is not a world-famous violinist."
"Why not?"
"Because you are."
Sarah began pacing the room again. This strange situation had suddenly become stranger. She tried to take hold of her agitation in order to think clearly. She had been thrown into a lake and could find no shore to swim to.
Then she thought to ask for that shore. "I want you to explain this, from the beginning."
"The beginning was your wish to have Anne-Sophie Mutter's career."
"Yes," she answered with an attempt at patience.
"So I gave it to you," he continued simply.
"But what about Frau Mutter?"
"I took care of Frau Mutter."
Her patience gave way. None of this was to the point. "What do you mean, 'took care of Frau Mutter?" she asked insistently.
"Obviously, I had to take her career away from her so that you could have it."
Sarah was shocked. She stopped dead.
"I have her career?"
"Yes," he answered calmly.
"And she doesn't?"
"Precisely."
Sarah's thoughts whirled as she tried to shift her thinking to take in this new fact. She forced herself to concentrate by thinking of that long-ago wish.
"But . . . wait . . . no . . . that's not what I meant. That's not what I asked for. I didn't want her career, I wanted my career, but like hers."
"That was not possible," he answered in a tone of patience. "Creation - not being mine - is imperfect. It only allows a certain number of such lives. For you to have this life, I had to take it from her."
"You mean, only one of us could be brilliant?"
"Precisely."
Sarah sat down hard on the bed. She gripped the bedspread, the way she would have gripped her firework feelings if she could have.
"So what's happened to her?"
"She has that nice little job in the pharmacy here in Tubingen. And she does a little fiddling with friends as a pastime."
Sarah went still. She could see in her mind the web pages that she had read so long ago, presenting Frau Mutter's charitable activities and her foundation, mentioning her children, showing her life. She needed time to take in the fact that all of that no longer existed. She vaguely remembered the remarkable playing that she had heard on that CD. She could not believe that it also was gone. All of those joys and achievements had been eliminated, for her, Sarah, by her wish.
She held those past web images up mentally against the tired-looking woman whom she had seen that afternoon. She felt that she could recognize in that tiredness the reaction to living a dull everyday life. She could feel the weight of the monotony. Frau Mutter obviously still had great intelligence, if she was able to work as a pharmacist, but it was clear to Sarah that preparing medicines and serving customers did not make for a fulfilling day for her.
Then Sarah thought of the pain that she had felt in her original life. She remembered the sharpness of it, and how some of it had come from the hours that she had spent not making music - correcting homework, going to meetings, functioning as secretary of the chamber orchestra. Those hours had always felt slow, empty, pointless. She tried to match that pain to the possible pain in this Tubingen existence. And she thought about the pain of the music. The frustration at lost opportunities, the despair at the worsening technique, the heartache at the faltering expression reawakened in her. That memory was sharp; it brought he head up and a new question to her mouth.
"Has she suffered in this life? Has she felt that she's missed her career?"
"That I may not say," he answered, still in his unhurried way.
Sarah was thinking too much of the predicament to become irritated with his calmness.
"Why not?"
"Because that is her difficulty, that is her life. It is not yours."
"But if she's miserable?"
"That is her affair," he said firmly and quietly.
"I have no way of determining her pain?"
"Nor any need to. You have your life, your career, your music, and she has hers."
Sarah's head drooped. She was nearly sick again, but not from stomach problems. She felt sure that she had robbed Frau Mutter of enough music to make her unhappy. Nothing that this being could say to her would change that conviction or take her attention away from it.
Sarah thought again, ruefully, of her own previous life. She remembered more and more vividly her yearning and heartache. She remembered her frustrated ambitions. She was convinced that the tiredness that she had seen hid similar thwarted dreams. And she felt that she herself was the cause. She had given another the hurt that she had once borne. She could not for a moment believe that Anne-Sophie Mutter had no idea of the life that she could have had. And she herself was responsible. She felt her throat tighten and her stomach clench from the mere thought of such a life. She looked up again, with decision and resolution.
"I want to go back. Take me back to my little life, my teaching job, my shabby living room, and give Anne-Sophie Mutter back her career."
"That is impossible," he said calmly but categorically. "The agreement has been fulfilled. I have given you the life that you wanted. You cannot return."
"She can't have her glory back."
"In this existence she never had it to begin with, so there is no point in talking about 'having it back'."
"She can't have the joy of all this music."
"No, she cannot. It is yours."
"But I don't want it any more."
"But you already have it. You have had ample time to take possession of this life and to enjoy the benefits of it."
Sarah tingled with electric desperation. "You took it away from her. Why can't you take it away from me?"
"Another imperfection of creation." He took a few steps along the bed. "Anne-Sophie came to that other life in a form of natural progression. You ordered, then appropriated this life. You have made it yours, in a way that, in a sense, Anne-Sophie would never have done. Or have had to do."
Sarah looked all around the room at nothing in particular. "I'm trapped!" she shouted.
"That's what they all say," he said, almost wistfully.
Sarah's feet and shoulders jerked. She was nearly convulsed.
"I'll go and tell her!" she shouted.
"Tell her what?" he asked in mild amusement. "That you made a pact with the devil and stole her life from her? She's going to reach for a different medicine to give you then, isn't she? She'll think you're suffering from schizophrenia."
Sarah jumped up from the bed and began pacing again.
"I'll move here, to Tubingen. I'll take her under my wing. I'll give her every chance to make all the music she wants to."
"That would be excellent," he said, with a satisfaction that almost succeeded in being more than mild. "Either she would find you patronizing but would be too polite to refuse you, or she would blindly and blissfully believe in all your encouragements. Either way you would push her beyond her capacity and give her a nervous breakdown. It would be exquisite."
Sarah stopped, revulsed.
"No! I won't do this so that you can enjoy her pain!"
"Oh, hers would be only a portion of the whole. Yours would be by far the greater part."
She knew that he was right about that. She felt already in her chest the corkscrew twist of horror that would squeeze her lungs if she actually saw Anne-Sophie's frustration. Anger at him rose in her.
"Yes, I would suffer more. That surprises you, doesn't it? The notion of feeling something for others. Yes, it would hurt, terribly. It's practically worse than the suffering that you've already been planning for me."
She abruptly stopped talking as she saw a languorous smile slowly appear on his face. Then her mind stopped. She gaped and stared into his half-closed eyes. The old speculations - illnesses, husbands, accidents, insanities - lightninged through her mind like strobe flashes. Then that mind stopped again, on the one new thought.
"No," she said, forcing the syllable out through a half-strangled throat.
"Exquisite," he repeated.
She tried to shriek, but only a quiet thin whistle, as from a tea kettle on a low fire, came out of her wide-open mouth.
The news of Sarah Jefferson's sudden cancellation of her concerts and retirement from the concert stage shocked the classical world. A wealth of press articles recapitulated her past and her achievements, but none reported on her present state. She gave no interviews, answered no telephone calls, and left everyone, from friends and colleagues to fans and ten-year-old future orchestra members, speculating on her sudden abandonment of such a stellar career.
All that was known was that she had returned to her apartment in Boston. Her closest neighbors, next door, wondered why they never heard the violin that they used to hear, sometimes for hours. All the neighbors would see her going in or out of the apartment building once in a great while. She looked pale and frail. Some wondered aloud if she was anorexic. They told each other how amazed they were to discover that a person who had become that thin and worn so quickly could still be alive. Others said repeatedly that they thought she had had some kind of nervous breakdown. After watching her for a few months, they announced they felt that their idea was confirmed. Most of the time, when she came out of the building, she only walked to the corner post box. She would go with a letter clenched in her trembling hands, then come back still carrying it. She looked nervous or panic-stricken when going, completely defeated and despairing when coming back. The knowing neighbors nodded their heads and insisted that the letter was the big clue.
One day two unknown older people came into the building. They knocked on the door of Ms. Jefferson's apartment. It opened. There was a pause, then the two people went silently in. The neighbors heard nothing more. If there had been any talk in that apartment, it was quiet.
Over the next several days one or the other of the older people would go out and come back, sometimes with groceries, sometimes with documents, sometimes with another, professional-looking person. Then one day a neighbor, coming home from work, saw some men in work clothes putting boxes in a truck. The older people stood by watching. The neighbor went into the building, up the stairs, and past Ms. Jefferson's apartment.
The door was open. Through it he saw her, emaciated, sitting on a piano bench. More boxes sat on the floor around her, but nothing else was visible and the rest of the space gave out the echoey feeling of emptiness. She was completely inert. Her face, downturned toward the door, was expressionless. The hand gripping the bench clutched a very crumpled envelope.
The neighbor heard steps on the stairs and moved quickly away so as not to be caught staring.
Jennifer says: You have a good premise for a solid short story, but you have "told" us everything and "shown" us nothing.
Plot - 20
Characters - 20
Mechanics - 21
Enjoyment - 19
TOTAL - 80
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