Prose Fiction
This passage is adapted from the short story The First Sense by Nadine Gordimer (©2006).
She has never felt any resentment that he became a musician and she didn't1. Could hardly call her amateur flute playing a vocation. She sits at a computer in a city-government office earning a salary that has at least provided regularly for their basic needs2.
She found when she was still an adolescent that her father, with his sports shop and the beguiling heartiness that is a qualification for that business, and her mother, with her groupies exchanging talk of female maladies, did not have in their comprehension what it was that she wanted to do3.
A school outing at sixteen had taken her to a concert where she heard, coming out of a slim tube held to human lips, the call of the flute. The teacher who had arranged the cultural event was understanding enough to put the girl in touch with a musical youth group in the city. She babysat on weekends to pay for the hire of a flute, and began to attempt to learn how to produce with her own breath and fingers something of what she had heard.
He was among the Youth Players. His instrument was the very antithesis of the flute. The sounds he drew from the overgrown violin between his knees: the complaining moo of a sick cow, the rasp of a blunt saw. "Excuse me!" he would say, with a clownish lift of the eyebrows and a down-twisted mouth. Within a year, his exceptional talent had been recognized by the professional musicians who coached these young people. They played together when alone, to amuse themselves and secretly imagine that they were already in concert performance, the low, powerful cadence coming from the golden-brown body of the cello making her flute voice sound, by contrast, more like that of a squeaking mouse. In time, she reached a certain level of minor accomplishment. He couldn't deceive her and let her suffer the disillusions of persisting with a career that was not open to her level of performance4. "You'll still have the pleasure of playing the instrument you love best." She would always remember what she said: "The cello is the instrument I love best."
Sometimes she fell asleep to the low tender tones of what had become his voice, the voice of that big curved instrument, sharing the intimacy that was hers5. At concerts, when his solo part came, she did not realize that she was smiling in recognition, that his was a voice she would have recognized anywhere. She was aware that, without a particular ability of her own, she was privileged enough to have an interesting life, and a remarkably talented man whose milieu was also hers6.
He began to absent himself from her at unexplained times or for obligations that he must have known she knew didn't exist. She had suggestions for relaxation: a film or a dinner. He was not enthusiastic. "Next week, next week." He took the revered cello out of its solitude in the case and played, to himself, to her—well, she was in the room those evenings. It was his voice, that glorious voice of his cello, saying something different, speaking not to her but to some other7. The voice of the cello doesn't lie. She waited for him to speak8. About what had happened.
To trust the long confidence between them. He never did. And she did not ask, because she was also afraid that what had happened, once admitted, would be irrevocably real.
One night, he got up in the dark, took the cello out of its bed, and played. She woke to the voice, saying something passionately angry in its deepest bass. She knew that the affair was over9. She felt a pull of sadness—for him. For herself, nothing. By never confronting him she had stunned herself10.