An Unusual Courtship, Chapter 2

copyright Mael DelaVara

Audrey was glad that Michael had left, but she found no pleasure in her own company. It was as if the embrace that gave Michael an unaccustomed sense of peace also emptied her of what she needed to relax. Her fingers clenched and, involuntarily, she loosened them by tying her hair up into a bun.

She moved toward the the heavily used upright piano, an inheritance from her grandmother and a source of all her bliss and all her frustration. She lowered herself gently onto the stool, as if she had just been spanked, and felt her jaw tighten as she registered what she already knew. She could not reach the pedals. The stool would have to be shifted unnaturally close to the instrument. She did not have the heron-like legs of a ballerina. Her brows furrowed, and the lines deepened as she glanced at the sun-faded cover of the Schirmer edition of Beethoven's music for solo piano.

She wanted to pound the keys in an ecstatic play-through of the "Hammerklavier" sonata, but she was incapacitated by a sudden fixation on her hands. Her fingers never had the reach to play the late Beethoven comfortably. She was built for Bach, but only physically, not emotionally. And she wryly recalled how in an E. M. Forster novel--was it "Howard's End"?--a supercilious male character opined that young women should not play Beethoven, indeed even listen to him, because his music posed a threat to their emotional well-being. And she began to fantasize about being Beethoven's pupil, and everyone knew what a grouch he was, and so what would happen to her if she hit a wrong note. She wriggled on the bench. Such fantasies were not healthy, she told herself, and she returned to look at her hands.

They were still dumpy. Pretty enough, to be sure, but the fingers lacked the extended elegance of those in Rossetti's painting aptly titled "La Bella Mano," a painting she adored yet resented. Whenever she visited the Delaware Art Museum, especially at the request of visiting relatives, she made a point of denying herself the joy of buying a reproduction. But she had come quite some way in accepting her hands as they were. Yes, her fingers were short, but they were powerful. They were made to grasp and to clench and to pinch . . . . and to smack. Yes, they may have cost her a concert career and consigned her to a life as a teacher and a church organist, but they also liberated her into a secret servitude--an obsession with bottoms, with squeezing them, and beating them, and reddening them, and . . . .

She felt herself getting light-headed, and she wondered if she had entered the wrong room after Michael left. After all, in a box beneath her bed, there was a well-thumbed stash of forbidden spanking literature. How she would now like to read some of Edith Cadivec's paeans to the joys of birching a shapely bottom. And how she would like to tread again the path that Harriet Marwood set out for her charge Richard. But she could not bring herself to rise from the piano bench. Instead, her bottom pressed relentlessly against its hardness, and she focused again on her hands.

They were a constant source of worry. Not just her livelihood, but her life--her very sense of being--depended on them. Her nightmares most often took the form of car doors slamming on disembodied fingers. What was she to do, she wondered, if Michael actually showed up on Saturday morning. He was not a football player, but he was a good deal bigger than she, and her hand alone would not make much of an impression, at least not without it getting swollen. She drifted into recalling that there was a major concerto written for a pianist for one hand--yes, the Ravel. And there were a few others. But how was that relevant, she snapped at herself.

Her shoulders clenched, and she doubled over, bringing the full weight of her upper body to push her bottom deeper against the bench. As she did so, her mind freed itself to roam over her duplex, and she began to see, in her mind's eye, wooden spoons and spatulas in the kitchen, a ruler in her home office, belts in her closet, a hairbrush in her bedroom.

But there was something missing. She did not have a bath brush, and she needed one. She'd put off buying an old-fashioned model, made in Vermont, that the Bed and Bath store at the mall had in stock because she was sure it would go on sale at some point. Who buys these things anyway? Now, however, was the time for a purchase. If Michael didn't show on Saturday, it would be his loss, she found herself thinking with a chuckle. At least she would still have an item she could put, with some reluctance, to its intended use. But who intends these things anyway. Now she was giggling, and she bounced off the piano stool to finish the glass or so of wine left in the bottle from dinner.