Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

I'll give you an idea of the kind of gentle joke I get from Slavi Rostropovich. When I'd signed and returned the contract for this performance, his concertmaster called up and said, "Slavi says you can have a choice, Nyla. The Sibelius or the Mendelssohn, which?" I couldn't help giggling.

It was the kind of joke that you have to have been around for a while to laugh at. It had a history. The previous time I played the National Symphony a newspaper feature writer caught me off guard. I guess I was tired. Anyway, I told him what violinists don't often talk about, but what every fiddle player since Paganini has known. There are concerti that are crowd-pleasers because they sound a lot harder to play than they are—like the Mendelssohn—and concerti that are tests of skill because they are a lot harder than they sound—like the Sibelius. So I told this woman that when I wanted to win cheap bravos from an unsophisticated audience I'd play the Mendelssohn, and if I wanted to show off for my colleagues, I'd do the Sibelius.

"Tell Slavi I'd rather do the Mendelssohn," I said to the concertmaster, grinning into the phone. Because, after all, I knew that it wouldn't be either. Sure enough, two days later I got a bunch of flowers with a note in Elena Rostropovich's handwriting that said:

"Not only talented—not only beautiful—but also very sensible! Slavi sends his admiring compliments and asks that what you really play is the Gershwin, since the President will be there."

I wired back that I would be delighted. I was. The Gershwin is one of the greats, as well as being the only violin concerto composed by an American fit to call pigs with. Anyway, I knew that President Reagan wasn't going to want to hear some foreigner's stuff.

Elena Rostropovich was a sweet lady, although I didn't always know what she was thinking. I didn't really know, for instance, if she knew about Dom and me. We were very careful to avoid gossip. Still, she never said a word to me, not even a wink. But when I got an invitation to a late dinner after a concert, I knew that an identical one went to Dominic's home in Virginia. Mine was always for Mr. and Mrs. Bowquist. Dom's was always for Senator and Mrs. DeSota. It didn't matter if our mates were back in Chicago, as Ferdie was almost always and Marilyn DeSota more often than not. So Dom would spend the night before in my hotel suite. We'd both put in a full day's work on the day of the concert, and at eleven o'clock that night we would "discover" each other, with expressions of cordial surprise, at Elena's party. Then she would suggest that, since we were both unattached for the evening, Dom take me home.

Which he unfailingly did.

Those evenings were the best kind of time Dom and I had. We were actually able to appear in public together. Then, later on, when we were in private, there was very little chance of either one of us being caught out by our mates. Anything we did like that in Chicago was pretty risky. There was always the chance of somebody one of us knew accidentally turning up at the wrong time-in a hotel lobby, or an elevator, or the restaurant where we met. Other cities, not much better. Sometimes by good fortune Dom could invent a reason to fly up to Boston or New York or wherever I was on the road, but we were always squeezed for time. No. Washington was the best . anyway, the best that I could see any way of our ever having.

Even that wasn't perfect. We knew people in Washington too.' Sooner or later, either Ferdie or Marilyn was going to hear a hint, or feel a suspicion. From that moment on it would be only a matter of time. Private detectives? Maybe. Why not? Betrayed spouses don't necessarily play fair.

And then the whole thing would come crashing down on our heads, and what would happen after that would be really nasty. .

But, please, God, not yet awhile. "Not ever," said Dom firmly, pulling on his socks at two o'clock one morning, when I had just said that to him.

"It has to happen sooner or later, darling," I said reasonably.

"It does not. We don't have to get caught." He paused in putting on his pants to bend to kiss my navel. "We can go on like this forever. Even if we did get caught—"

I headed off what he was going to say next. Or tried to. "President Reagan is going to be at, the concert," I told him.

"Yes? What about it? Oh," he said, nodding wisely as he zipped his fly. "I see the connection. You mean you wouldn't want to shock the President, right? But if we don't get caught, she won't be shocked, will she? And even if we do, there's always the alternative of—"

"No, there isn't," I said, before he could finish the sentence with "getting married." Because that was the one subject I refused to discuss, ever, with Senator Dominic DeSota. I could stand being unfaithful to a man who loved me. I couldn't stand the idea of throwing him out of my life, in public humiliation.

So I wasn't altogether sorry when Dom had to go off to New Mexico, because he'd been getting more and more insistent about that, and I was running out of easy ways to fend the idea off. And on the night of the concert, as I opened the concerto in that fast, syncopated "allegro hot" first movement, his seat in the third row center was empty.

What happened next was totally unexpected, and to explain what was going on I have to explain about the concerto.

Gershwin died young. He'd only begun composing violin music of any kind a couple of years before the taxi caught him crossing Fifty-second Street. Then, out of almost no experience, he produced this wonder. It was all his own too. In the early days Gershwin had had to hire Ferde Grofe to do his orchestrations for him, but by the time of the violin concerto he had mastered the art. The woodwinds and percussion were as much idiosyncratically his very own as those heart-melting violin themes.

It had something else to it that I liked, a trick he'd borrowed from Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn didn't want to take the chance that some dummy in the audience would think the pause after the first movement meant the whole concerto was over, and so start to clap. That's not awful in itself, but what makes it troublesome is that then half the audience is flustered because they applauded in the wrong place, and the other half is irritated because those dummies have held up the performance. So Mendelssohn doesn't let anybody make that mistake. There is a sustained note left over from the first movement that continues right into the opening of the second. There is never that moment of silence when the audience fidgets, and the men who are there because their wives insisted on it are looking nervously at their neighbors to see what's expected of them, and up on the stage you hear the rustle and the whispers and the muffled coughs. I've often wished that Tchaikovsky and Bruch and Beethoven had been that thoughtful, and I've been grateful that Mendelssohn and Gershwin had.

Funny, though. This time the soft, almost subliminal tattoo of the drums did not keep the audience from stirring. I saw an usherette lean past Dominic's empty seat to whisper in Senator Kennedy's ear. Slavi was already raising his baton for the start of the second movement, but that didn't keep Jack Kennedy from rising and slinking away up the aisle. As I counted bars to the beginning of my own part, I saw Jackie give me a smile and a tiny, spread-hands shrug of apology. With almost any other Senate wife I would have known that was just convention, but I knew that in Jackie's case she was personally contrite. She was the cultured one in the gallery of Senate wives. She would have made a fine First Lady, I always thought, if her husband hadn't been short-counted in Chicago in 1960.

The disturbance didn't end there.

With help from people like Jackie and Slavi Rostropovich—and, of course, from Dom—I had turned out to be pretty much Washington's favorite society fiddler. So the audience was what they call "social." Meaning, in Washington, governmental—diplomats, legislators, top people from the administration. Even President Nancy was there in her box, with her First Gentleman sitting as always urbane and self-assured beside her. That kind of an audience had special problems. The worst of them was that if something went terribly sour somewhere in the world, half the audience would have to be told about it at once.