I hear him before I lay eyes on him, champagne sparkling on my tongue as the band strikes up to play some tired tune that will serve as the backdrop to this overwrought affair. But as they begin to play, the braying of conversation and thrumming of instruments all falls away, and what is left is his melodic voice, rapturous and clear. Right away, I can tell he is beautiful, and I turn to face him to confirm it.
He is a violin, and though he never utters a word, only the melody, still, I can hear his voice so clearly. I stand, entranced. When the strings wept, his tears flowed; when the bow smiled, his joy was so palpable it floated like iridescent bubbles on the humid air of the ballroom. Each note feels like silk caressing freshly bathed skin, making me shudder.
At the request of the bride – my old college roommate, Jewel – the Violin plays a song that was top of the charts twenty years ago, arranged for strings, of course. I first heard it when it was still new, when I was still new, and hearing it now makes my body transform into the girlishness of those two-odd decades ago, knob-kneed and filled with just as much longing as I am now. Only, I didn’t know any better back then.
When the set is over, I feel that some trace of my youth still lingers upon me—on my eyes, my lips, my breasts. It gives me the courage to go over and talk to the Violin while the rest of the band takes a break. As I approach, I feel something like déjà vu…I recognize the Violin.
“John?” I say from over his shoulder, my voice tentative.
“Maddie?” the Violin replies. He puts down his bar of resin and turns to face me.
“I go by my full name now. Trying to sound more adult these days.”
The Violin grins. “Madrigal,” he breathes. “I thought I might see you here.”
I smile back. “So, you’re a violin now?”
He unfurls his long neck and leans forward, bow extended, as if to take himself in. “Suppose I am. How do you like that?” he says, in the same joking way he had answered when I found him naked in my dorm room junior year.
“What’s the story there?” I recall he was a music performance major, but had been indecisive regarding his instrument of choice. He had once serenaded me wearing nothing but a saxophone strapped around his neck, but I could barely hear the tune over my own convulsive laughter, so I wasn’t sure if his playing was ever that good.
“To master your craft, you must become one with your instrument,” he says, intoning as if quoting someone erudite and long-deceased.
“Is that so? And have you mastered it?”
“Well-exceeded, which is why I’m playing weddings.” He gestures dramatically to the crowd with his bow. I raise my brows. “All joking aside, it’s a favor for Jewel. My gift to her for the big day.” His tone imparts a generosity that was not characteristic of him, at least not when we had been together. I squint at him, trying to see if he has somehow changed in the ensuing years.
“You know, I’ve heard about this.” I gesture at his polished wooden frame. “The Master-Craft thing. You’re the first person I’ve actually met that’s gone through with it. Well, besides my barista, who always has a line wrapped around the corner. She makes the best double espresso.”
“Oh, tons of people have gone Master! Remember Sonja?”
“She was doing comp sci,” I say, recalling a serious-faced young woman with bobbed chestnut hair.
“Well, now she’s a motherboard! And Julius, he’s a typewriter.”
“He was always old school like that.” I recall Julius with ink-stained fingers as he told us the latest machinations of his soon-to-be bestselling novel over sloppy joes in the dining hall.
“There’s almost no limit to what you can be! Microphone, camera, airplane, chef knives. Though there’s some people I’d rather not mention…”
This, of course, piques my interest. Without another word, I bide my time, knowing he’ll spill the beans without prompting.
“Tori…” he hints.
“Wait!” I shout. “Let me guess…he became a racecar.” Tori’s dorm room was plastered with posters of hot rods draped with bikini babes.
“Not quite. He became a, um, let’s call it a pleasure device.”
“No!” I clasp my hand to my mouth. “He didn’t!” John nods emphatically, eyes bulging.
“I thought he’d regret his decision, but last we chatted, he’s pleased as punch!” he says, his timbre going up an octave.
After we both stop laughing, I say, almost absentmindedly, “I wonder what I’d be if I went Master…” I feel the heat of John’s gaze on me, considering which tool could possibly suit the flimsy whims and bubblegum dreams of his old college girlfriend.
“Don’t answer that. Forget I asked!” I hold my hand up like a stop sign. With the same hand, I grab a glass of champagne from a passing waiter and swallow half the flute in one gulp. John giggles something high-pitched. “Did you want one?” I can feel the bubbles burn my throat, and try to wash the feeling away with the rest of the glass.
“I like to stay dry when I’m working,” he says.
“Really?” Now slightly cross-eyed, I take my time studying John, all the way from his chestnut scroll to his maple bridge and tapered endpin, before gazing into the abyss of his F-holes. I wonder if there was anything behind them, just like how I used to wonder what was behind the veil of the night sky.
“When I was 5,” I say, “and the teacher asked what we wanted to be when we grew up, I drew a picture of an astronaut. But it just looked like a scuba diver attached to a beachball with an umbilical cord.” I place the now-empty glass on the tray of a different passing waiter.
“That makes me think of Mira. Remember her? She became a spaceship.”
“M-31!” I gasp, remembering a factoid from Astronomy 101. “The closest galaxy to the Milky Way! I’ve always dreamt of going there. D’you think Mira’ll get to go?” I slur.
“Ah, actually, she’s never left earth. She never left home, even. But no one can take that away from her, right? Her hopes and dreams?”
I don’t know what to say, and feel suddenly deflated. No platitude seems sufficient in response to a dream deferred.
“Do you remember this one Sesame Street skit?” I ask him.
“Try me.”
“There’s these two creatures trying to reach the fruit in a tall tree.”
“They were purple puppets,” he says. “I remember.” What else does he remember? What else have I forgotten?
“The first one has arms that are permanently bent, like those old Barbie dolls.” I pantomime with my own arms bent at 90-degree angles like an Olympic power-walker. “It can never reach the fruit, no matter how hard it tries. The second one has long, straight arms, like a mummy. That one gets the fruit right away, but can’t bend its arms to bring the food to its mouth. Do you know what I mean?”
“You’re doing it again,” he whispers in my ear. The silk of his bow against my earlobe stops me in my tracks. “You haven’t changed at all.”
“So,” I say, taking a small step away from his orbit, “how long have you been a violin?”
“Maddy, I mean, Madrigal. You should know better than anyone. I’ve always been a violin.” I blink, and for the first time, notice he has no chin rest. “Enough about me. What are you up to?”
“I just work in an office,” I say, not ashamed, but not proud, either. “There was so much more I had hoped to accomplish by now.”
“Weddings make monsters of the best of us,” John says, smiling with encouragement. “Hit me, then. What’s on Madrigal’s to-do list?”
Consciously zipping my lips, I mentally scan through the possessions in my life. A kitchenette with take-out meals where a steady boyfriend should be serenading me. A pullout couch for weekend friends where children could have been. Belly fat stored in every pocket for a rainy day. A TV for a house pet, and a bat cave for a checking account.
“I dunno. It just seems like everyone’s living the dream but me.”
“There’s this guy I met in my Master cohort, name’s Ghufran. When he showed up, he had no sense of direction. Didn’t even know what he wanted to do.” ” John is more animated now, gesticulating with his bow. “You know what he became?” He doesn’t wait for me to guess this time. “He became a GPS. Completely turned his life around.”
His tone is flat, and I squint my eyes at him. “Are you making fun of me?”
The rest of the band begins to assemble, their break apparently over. “Let’s hang out after, okay? I’m in room 411.” He resumes his position among the musicians, just regular people holding their elected instruments. Everyone waits for him to count them in. As they start the next set, he winks at me.
I step away, and a song I can’t be bothered to name funnels through my ears as I pick at a tower of perfectly cooked shrimp. “The world is my oyster,” I tell a raw half-shell as I pluck its body from a bed of ice and slurp it down. Ugh. It’s disgusting, but it’s supposed to be good, so I eat another as I picture my old classmate, Mira-cum-spaceship, at this very wedding reception, bloated as a boat and with an American flag tattooed on her ribcage, unable to avoid small-talk from every well-meaning guest. Why, yes, I am a spaceship, but no, I have never been to Mars, or Cape Canaveral, or even past the Pennsylvania Turnpike.
How mortified she would be, and how burdened, to forever be hypothetically amazing, an actual friggin’ spacecraft – untested. Surely it was better to never have tried at all, than to forever be the spaceship who never touched the stars. Wasn’t it?
The music fades – the bivalve lodges in my throat. Panic. I see the sinister blinking of the conference line, faces trapped in squares on a computer screen, spreadsheets filled with garble. No! I cough, and the sound returns in stereo.
When he plays for me in his hotel room, it is the sound of his own voice, but it’s somehow more refined. Well-tuned, perhaps? Or is it the wisdom and maturity of years? I close my eyes and meditate on the music.
People always seem overly preoccupied about who they are, or what they should be. What do jobs or skills or salaries matter, anyway, when all of this is so fleeting? As soon as a note is played, whether poorly or masterfully, it has already dissipated, as diaphanous as a dream.
“Let me play for you,” he murmurs, “the way we used to…”
I take off my wedding drag and lay on the made bed, a blank sheet of staff paper. I let his notes land on my bare flesh like tender, moist kisses. He lifts his bow and plays my body like a forgotten symphony, and I close my eyes to revel in the sultry tone of his composition. We move in four-quarter time, and I feel the thread of my being unraveling, the strands of my toes loosening as invisible hands pick at the exposed frays. My spine tingles as unknown notes emanate from the core of my depths, and when I open my eyes I see my component molecules floating on air as musical notes, each one perfectly annotated. I watch as my elemental notes float away, each one weightless as helium and diaphanous as a bubble. With a drowsy curiosity, I blink as they drift past my vision. It is as if I am watching someone else metamorphose—but who, and into what?
“Go ahead,” he urges. Somehow, I understand his meaning.
As a quarter note drifts by, I inhale it with a gasp. It is unlike anything I have ever tried, effervescent and heady, making me swoon. I need more. I reach out and grasp the tails of eighth notes, the stems of crotchets and the hollow-middles of wholes, stuffing them all into my quivering mouth. The treble clefs tremble in anticipation of their fate, tremolando, but I don’t care. They feed a craving I didn’t know I had. I’ve never felt so – alive? That’s not it. I’ve never felt so…me. My bones and limbs hum as I become my own song.
Now, we entwine our songs together, and as we reach the brilliance of the crescendo, suddenly, John cries out, “Madrigal! I forgot how much I used to love you!” That’s when I know what I will choose to be: Loved. Nothing more and nothing less. Just loved.
I open my mouth to say so, to tell him, but the only sound I can make is a pitiful sputtering, like an untuned trumpet. I try again, saliva sputtering, but it’s more of the same. My heart hammers like a timpani, filling the room until the walls began to vibrate and my vision blurs.
John’s bow lifts to say something reassuring, but I can only catch snippets of lyrics: Don’t worry baby…the beginning of something magical…realize…babyyy. Baby? Baby?! I refuse to be—to be reduced. That’s when I realize: this score is the vigor of someone else’s dream, not my own.
“I can’t be reduced to someone else’s song!” I shout, squealing with the pitch of a piccolo. With all my will, I leap up, fleeing the room with only my voice. I’ve never sung in front of people before, but now I am running through the hallways of the hotel, belting at the top of my lungs. Lyrics burst like silk from the cocoon. “I AM MADRIGAL! I AM MAGICAL!” It’s a new song, wholly my own, words newly created from what was always there. I am the master of my voice. I am the master of my song.
As if on cue, guest room doors cascade open as I pass by. Faces emerge to listen to the impromptu madrigal, an audience to my transformation. Some begin to dance and provide backup as my own personal Greek chorus. “World, you got to realize, realize,” sings a trio in sequined bathrobes, “you got your own voice and it’s magical, magical. Madrigal, you’re fabulous, fabulous, aaaand…”
“I’m the master of my voice. Oh, yeah! I’m the master of my song!”
They witness as I head towards the light, my voice resounding through the hotel lobby and towards the revolving door that is both entrance and exit. I use the revolving doors’ spinning arms to propel myself into the open night, the limitless sky moonless and star-flecked. I can still hear them behind me as I climb, heavenward, untethered: echoes of applause, distant as a whisper, all saying, “Bravo! Bravo, Madrigal! Bravo!”
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Katie R. Yen writes fiction and poetry with a dash of magical realism. Her short fiction has appeared in MetaStellar and The Nonbinary Review, and her poetry in Fathom, America, Apparition Lit, and elsewhere. Her speculative poem was nominated for the Science Fiction Poetry Association’s 2024 Rhysling Award. For more of her work, visit www.katieyen.com and follow her @katiedowrite. |