I am riding with Randall, my friend and my teacher, in the front seat of his car. We are running some kind of errand together. The twilight is spreading out over the sky to our left. I have a vague awareness that we have just come from his office in the music school, where we left his wife and their two-year-old daughter. But right now all I know is that I am here, in his warm and comfortable presence, and that his arm is around me as he drives. He is talking, his voice washes over me, so familiar yet subtly incongruous -- not teasing as usual but full of an exquisite tenderness -- and with a sudden jolt of something wondrous and terrifying, I realize that he is drawing me nearer, realize what it is that he is telling me. "There's a flame," he murmurs, "a flame that's been burning on this side for a long time..." I slide closer to him on the seat, and he pulls me in tightly. I lean down into the curve of his body, lay my cheek against the solidness of his chest, put my arm around his stomach. I can barely understand what is happening, yet suddenly it all seems perfectly natural, even inevitable: he has always wanted me, I have always wanted him. There is no way he can ever be mine, yet somehow I sense that he is, he will be, he must be.
Emily awoke then, with the murky feeling in her stomach of having discovered something dangerous and wonderful.
Until that moment, it had never occurred to her that she might desire him. Randall had been her cello teacher for the first year and a half of her studies. A year ago he had cut back his teaching schedule in order to take over conducting the community orchestra that met in the school on Wednesday nights, and she had switched teachers then but joined the orchestra when he encouraged her to give it a try ("It'll be a stretch, for a beginner," he said, "but I think it'll push you to great heights"). Not ten hours ago she had been in rehearsal with him, standing near him, chatting with him. He had laid an affectionate hand on her arm in the midst of a conversation with another teacher, smiled down at her and proudly referred to her as one of his best students. His protege.
She had known this was true. She, out of the entire orchestra, was special to him because the cello was his own first love, and she had taken it up at twenty-two and was pouring herself into it with great energy and some degree of success. His words had pleased her at the time, but only now, lying in her bed with the confounding warmth spreading through her, did the moment seem charged with a curious intimacy. Now she knew it was too late; not for a very long time would she be able to look at him without feeling the imprint of his body on her skin where she had dreamed that he was.
She did not want to get out of bed. She wanted to slip back into the dream, back into the front seat of that car, to rush headlong toward the horizon she had glimpsed there. But there was no time. It was seven-fifteen on Thursday morning.
The dream echoed through her head all day. She savored it like candied ginger on her tongue, sweet and fiery and secret. But even under ordinary circumstances she usually kept to herself, and no one noticed if she was preoccupied today. She was grateful when five o'clock came and she could focus all her attention inside her head, without having to divert it outward.
When she got home, she did not turn on the television or the stereo. She changed immediately into her pajamas, reheated a small container of yesterday's casserole, and ate it quietly and methodically at the kitchen table as she glanced over the mail. Generally, after dinner, she would spend close to two hours on the cello -- but tonight, as soon as she had finished eating, she got into bed, where she could finally let the dream overtake her.
She lay on her back, arms and legs relaxed, keeping her breathing shallow to disturb her body as little as possible. Then she tried to project herself back into the dream, at the point where she had lost it. She visualized the front seat of Randall's car, the street they were driving down, herself curled up against him; and she tried to remember the words he had spoken. She replayed the few seconds in her mind over and over, reconstructing every detail of his body -- the heat that emanated from him, the hairs on his neck that she could rub delicately with her nose if she raised her head just so -- until the threads of the fantasy became more and more loosely woven, and she could not tell when the dream took on a life of its own again.
***
I am in my old high school. Only I haven't been there for five years or more, and though I know it to be the same school, the building is completely unfamiliar. I am supposed to be heading for class, but I don't have a schedule because I'm not registered for any classes, and I can't figure out how to get to anywhere I should be. When the bell rings, the crowds in the hallway disperse, and instantly I feel conspicuous and vulnerable; the assistant principal will catch me standing around out there and get me in trouble. I duck down a side corridor where all the classrooms are dark and empty. But I need to get over to the music room, because Randall will be there and I want to be with him. The moment this thought occurs to me, I move out again toward the main hallway and peek around the corner. Randall is at the far end of the hallway, walking with another teacher, about to disappear down another corridor. His hair is unbound for once and cascades down around his shoulders, framing his long face. I step out into the main hallway and hurry after them, stiffly, willing myself to be invisible.
When I turn the next corner, I am in the teachers' lounge -- a forbidden place, although no one makes any move to throw me out. In fact, no one really seems to notice that I don't belong there. The person Randall was walking with has turned into his daughter, Annabel, who is sixteen years old here (despite the fact that I am still twenty-five and he thirty-seven). The room is not that crowded, but I can't seem to get any nearer to Randall because more people keep getting in my way as I approach him. I start dodging around them like obstacles, I don't want to talk to any of them, it's a cocktail party and I am carrying a glass of white wine that I want to bring to him. Finally I come up next to him and hand him the glass. He turns to me and puts the glass to my lips so that I can drink from it. I don't really taste it, but I feel a kind of trembling rising up from my knees, both from the wine and from being so close to him. Annabel has disappeared, and Randall takes me by the arm and says cheerfully, "Come on -- it's time for your lesson." He guides me through the crowd, which is now very dense, and back out into the hallway.
We are heading for the music room. Randall navigates with great sureness, holding me by the hand, but the hallway has become immensely long and we walk and walk without seeming to get very far. I want to stop walking and take him in my arms, pull him down on top of me to the cold stone floor -- but I know I can't. There are people all around us and it's an impossible fantasy, I will never have him, I don't dare let him know what's in my head. But I try to put my arm around him as we walk. Abruptly he makes a left turn, gliding past me (through me?) toward a doorway, drawing me with him into a rehearsal room. It is a soundproof space not much bigger than a closet, with a bench, a chair, an empty music stand, a fluorescent light humming overhead.
"I don't have my cello," I say anxiously. I can't remember where it is. Have I mislaid it somewhere?
"You're going to be the cello," he says. He sits down in the chair in front of the music stand and beckons for me. I kneel in front of him, my back to him. He grips my waist between his knees, wraps his arms around my body -- I feel his hands on my breasts, my stomach -- and bends his head down over my shoulder. Suddenly the light gets brighter, unbearable, I feel myself begin to fall down through the floor --
***
She jerked awake, disoriented, until the room came into focus, the weak sunlight of early morning seeping in around the blinds. Cursing it, she sank back onto the pillows and let the tension run out of her body. Just when the dream was taking her to the places she wanted to go, it was gone. Unbelievable. She knew it was no use trying to call the experience back now. Not this morning, anyway. Not until tonight.
That night being Friday, she went to bed early again, and stayed there through most of the weekend. She found that she could fade in and out of a hazy sleep for hours at a time, until she could no longer cling to the dream-state and had to get up and stretch. Then she would get out her cello and her étude books. After the first hour or so, when her fingers seemed at last to be homing in by instinct on the notes, she would work on their Beethoven concerto, bowing now fiercely and now with a quivering delicacy, willing her fingers to flow into the melody. She wanted to be supremely ready for next Wednesday's rehearsal: her timing flawless, her fingerings impeccable, her command of the first movement outshining anyone else in the strings.
When her ears were exhausted with Beethoven, she switched to Bach's Unaccompanied Cello Suites and imagined stirring Randall with the nascent soulfulness of her playing. Eventually her left arm would grow stiff, her right arm impossibly heavy, her eyes dry and achy, and she would drink a glass of something and crawl back into bed. The relentlessness of this cycle -- sleep, practice -- began to lend her waking hours a more unreal quality than the dreaming hours.
Randall did not appear in all the dreams; sometimes she dreamed things completely unrelated, and sometimes she knew that the dream-Emily was searching for him and could not find him. But the deeper she drew into the dream-universe, the more adept and confident she became at manipulating it. Gradually she internalized her sense of control, so that she could shape any situation she wanted just by deciding it was going to happen.
***
I arrive at rehearsal. Most of the orchestra is already in place; Randall is conferring with Diane, the concertmaster. Ordinarily I am afraid to interrupt them. But I think to myself, This time he'll want to be with me. I lay my cello case at my chair and go over to stand near him. Without breaking the flow of their conversation, he reaches out for me and pulls me close to him. I press my face into his neck and twine my fingers into the curls hanging between his shoulder blades. Finally he pulls away, looks down into my eyes and says with a wicked grin, "You, Emily, are driving me absolutely crazy. You know that." He steps down off the conductor's platform. Diane goes on talking to the space where he was, as if she does not notice he has moved away. But he is leading me out of the auditorium, into his office, which is somehow bigger than in real life and has a grand piano where the desk ought to be. I am enfolded in his arms and we glide gently to the floor, under the piano, his mouth is on my body everywhere at once, I feel him surround me and fill me.
***
Of all the instruments in the orchestra, the cello is said to have the timbre most like that of a human voice. Randall had once said, grinning, that the cello gripped people on a subliminal level because of its androgynous sexuality: a man's voice in a woman's body. Emily did not see it quite that way. When she played, she felt the cello's voice was her voice; and now when she pictured Randall playing she could feel as if its body was her body, encircled in his arms, its rosewood curves her curves, its strings humming like the fibers of her nerves under his fingers. He was so tall and long-legged that he held the cello almost vertically, leaning slightly forward as if to press his cheek against the instrument's neck, dipping and swaying it in his embrace.
***
And then it was Wednesday night again.
Emily usually streaked into rehearsal at exactly seven o'clock. Today she found herself in the building a good fifteen minutes early. Feeling the blood pounding in her ears, she made a leisurely circuit around the hallways, upstairs and downstairs. She took a drink at the water fountain three doors down from Randall's studio, but did not go any closer, because she could see that his light was on, and if she passed his door there was the danger that he might see her.
By the time Emily entered the auditorium, her stand partner was already there setting up. They were about the same age and height, but Tamara was a lifelong cellist whose playing was technically expert if not, Emily thought, especially passionate. Emily always wanted to feel as if she were dancing with her instrument, as if at any moment it might sweep her right out of her seat. When Tamara played, only her arms moved; the rest of her body sat primly upright, practically motionless. She had sleek dark hair and had gotten engaged in the fall; Emily never found it easy to make small talk with her. But she always had a kind or encouraging word for Emily, and useful advice like how to smooth out the shifting of her fingering hand by thinking of drawing little circles in the air with her left elbow.
"Hey," Emily said, taking off her coat.
"Hi there!" Tamara answered cheerfully. "How was your week?"
How to answer that? "It's been all right," Emily said, and took her bow and rosin out of her cello case.
More and more people filtered in, and just before seven Randall appeared at the side door. Emily's heart constricted in her chest. But she found, curiously, that she was able to behave as if nothing was different. It was like having two selves in one body: the dream-Emily silently, keenly soaking up the sight of Randall at the conductor's platform, while the flesh-Emily worked like always at paying attention and getting the right notes off the page.
During rehearsal Randall's wife Nina came into the auditorium, with a sleeping Annabel in her arms, to listen for a few minutes. Nina was an art teacher, and tonight was wearing one of her art-teacher dresses, long and empire-waisted, with a scarf tying back her dark ringlets of hair. She was of medium height, delicately boned, with clear olive skin. Randall, facing the orchestra, did not see them enter; but Emily watched Nina gazing fondly down at him. She felt a strange pang, looking at her. This was the woman that Randall loved. The woman he had given his life to. And that child was his child. He had made that child with this woman. How odd it seemed to be in the same room with them.
***
That night Emily could not bring on sleep, not even lying flat on her back and counting backward from a thousand. She eventually got as far as six hundred, turning over and over in the bed for nearly an hour, until it was past eleven o'clock.
She realized that the insistent urge she felt was to go out looking for Randall, just the way she had sought him in so many different dreamscapes. His house -- on the other side of town, she knew exactly where it was, she had just been there in December, for the orchestra's Christmas party. She expected he ought to be home at this hour, and she felt something propelling her near where he was, just to get within a certain radius of him.
Feeling strangely detached from her body, she got out of bed. Dressed. Went out of her apartment into the cold March night. Waited for one bus, then got off and onto another, gazing out the window into the darkness. Got off near the Victory supermarket and walked four more blocks into a quiet residential neighborhood, up to Randall and Nina's house.
It was a two-family house, and they lived on the left side. All the downstairs lights were off, but the front and side windows upstairs were lit. Emily's breath caught in her chest. She stood across the street so she could see into the front window better, and wished briefly for binoculars.
In the front room, she could see Randall sitting near the window, working at a computer, surrounded by what looked like several stacks of books. His hair tied back, he was wearing an old T-shirt and gazing intently into the computer screen. Emily remembered hearing that he was working on another graduate degree now, in English literature, just because it was something he wanted to study. She wondered what it was that he was so hard at work on.
Then she crossed the street to get closer to the house, for a glimpse into the side window. The light in there was dimmer, but she could make out Nina standing in a pink glow. Annabel's nursery. Nina had Annabel in her arms and was pacing thoughtfully, comfortably, around the small room. She passed closer to the window, and Emily suddenly noticed, from the way she was cradling Annabel above her stomach, that Nina was pregnant. Their second child.
Emily was astonished, and wordlessly ashamed, at not having known. She remembered Annabel being born, for God's sake, just after she'd started with Randall, before she'd ever met Nina. She should have heard about this earlier, should have been tuned in to this major event in Randall's life.
It occurred to her, then, how little she actually saw of his life. What could she possibly know, outside of the two and a half hours a week she was in his presence -- most of that now at a distance -- and then the details she had invented for herself?
What did she want of him?
The side window went dark.
Emily stood there under the waning moon for a few more minutes; then she started walking back to her bus stop. When she got back to her empty apartment she climbed into bed again, and this time she fell into a deep sleep and did not dream at all.