Frederik Pohl - The Coming of the Quantum Cats

24 August 1983

4:20 P.M. Mrs. Nyla Christophe Bowquist

I should have been on my way to Rochester for preconcert publicity spots. I couldn't leave Washington. The whole crazy day zipped past flick-blur, and my flight time came and passed, and Amy rebooked me on an evening flight, and I told her to cancel that one too. I did what I always did when hopelessly confused and shaken up and worried. I practiced. I propped up the piano reduction of the Tchaikovsky orchestra part in front of the television set, and I played the concert. Over and over; and all the while my eyes kept getting pulled to the screen, where every twenty minutes or so they repeated that insane broadcast from the night before and Dom— dear Dom, my love, my bedmate, my coadulterer Dom—was sitting up there with that greasy smile on his face, introducing that imitation President of the United States, saying those incredible things. Normal programming was abandoned, but there was no real news, either. The alien troops in New Mexico held inside their occupied areas, ours did not attack them, no one in Washington would say anything tangible.

I was not the only person wholly confused and disoriented in Washington that day. Even the weather was miserable; there was some kind of a hurricane working its way up the coast, and what we were getting out of it was muggy heat with spats of soapy rain.

The phone kept ringing. Jackie called twice. Both of the Rostropoviches called; so did Slavi's concertmaster, so did old Mrs. Javits—so did everybody who had any suspicion that I had a personal interest in Senator Dom DeSota, and none of them said anything embarrassing, and they were all very kind. Ten minutes after I hung up on each conversation I couldn't remember anything that had been said. The good thing was that the newspapers didn't call. That much of our secret was safe, Dom's and mine.

I spared a moment to be sorry for poor Marilyn DeSota, sitting in her penthouse with her phones going every minute, and wondering what the hell was going on with the man she was married to.

Yes, I spared a moment to be sorry for my lover's wife. It wasn't the first time. It was only the first time that I'd let myself dwell on it for more than maybe half a second—for as long as it took me to tell myself that Dom's infidelity was, after all, his responsibility and not mine.

I made myself believe that, usually.

And Amy kept coming in . . . with tea; with made-up questions about what dress I wanted to wear in Rochester, and did I remember I had a Newsweek interview scheduled for tomorrow morning in Rochester, and what the concert manager from Rochester had said when he called and I wouldn't talk to him.

I hadn't forgotten the concert, of course.

In a way, I was working at it harder than I would have been if I'd been on the scene. They were bringing in Riccardo Muti to conduct, and we had a difference of opinion. I wanted to do the Tchaikovsky, and he had agreed to that, but I wanted to play it without the usual cuts. Muti was resisting. That's a conductor for you. Get the damn concerto out of the way so you can get back to having the whole orchestra under your personal thumb, instead of sharing it with some damn instrumentalist. I'd had the same squabble every time I played the Tchaikovsky for a long time, and usually I gave in. This time I didn't want to.

So I played it all the way through, twice, and drank a couple of cups of cooling tea, and then I played it some more.

The trouble with that was that my fingers thought about the music, but my mind was flying in all directions. What was Dom doing? Couldn't he at least telephone me? Was it possible that this crazy Cathouse project he'd joked with me about was somehow real? And what was I doing with my own life? Every now and then it would occur to me that if I wanted to start having a baby, it was none too soon to get on with it. . .

But whose baby did I want?

I tried to make myself think about the music, while those sweet, lush, gut-stirring Romantic themes came floating out of the Guarnerius. Tchaikovsky had had his own troubles. With the concerto, for instance. "For the first time one must believe in the possibility of music that stinks in the ear," one critic had said at the premiere. How could you live after a review like that? (But now it was one of the best-loved concerti in the repertoire.) And his own life had been screwed up worse than mine, in the nonmusical ways—politics aside —maybe politics aside, because certainly there was a Byzantine flavor to the jockeying around the czar's court. He'd done worse with marriage than I had: tried it once, and had a nervous breakdown as a result. He'd had his twenty-year love-letter torrid romance with Nadejda von Meck without even once meeting the poor woman, running out of the back door of a house when she unexpectedly showed up at the front. Crazy Peter Ilyich! They said that he first intended to become a conductor. But it didn't work out, because he began leading the orchestra with the baton in his right hand and his chin held tightly in his left, because somehow he'd developed the conviction that if he let go of his chin, his head would fall off.

Crazy Peter Ilyich . . .

Sping went my E-string, the second one I'd broken that morning. I grinned in spite of myself, thinking of something Ruggiero Ricci had said to me once: "A Strad you have to seduce, but you can rape a Guarnerius." Only I'd raped it a little too roughly.

At once, Amy popped in the door. I didn't ask if she'd been eavesdropping. Of course she had. I handed the fiddle over to her, and she examined it carefully before beginning to take the broken string off. "Might as well put a whole new set on," I suggested, and she nodded. I went on daydreaming while she opened a fresh packet. Crazy old Peter Ilyich, I thought again—only what it turned into was, "Crazy Nyla Bowquist, what are you doing with your life?"

I sucked on my fingertips, thinking. They were sore. They weren't bloody—you can't cut my left hand's fingertips with anything much less than a chisel any more—but they hurt. I was hurting in a lot of places.

I said, "Amy, where do you suppose my husband is now?"

She looked at her watch. "It's pushing five here-going on four back home-I suppose he's still in his office. Do you want me to get him for you?"

"Please." Even when somebody else was paying for it, Ferdie didn't like me running up huge long-distance bills, so we had this special line to use-only Amy was better at remembering all the numbers you had to dial than I was. It took her a minute or two.

"He was on his way to his club," she explained, handing me the phone. "I got him on the car phone for you."

I looked at her in a way that she immediately interpreted correctly. "I'll finish this outside," she said, taking the Guarnerius and the strings and the polishing material, and I said into the phone:

"Honey? It's Nyla."

"Thanks for calling, dear," came the warm, soft old voice. "I've been worried about you, with all that's going on—"

"Oh, I'm fine," I said, lying. "Ferdie?"

"Yes, dear?"

"I—uh—it's pretty wild around here today."

"I know it. I've been thinking you might have trouble getting a flight to Rochester. I suppose the airlines are all messed up. Do you want me to send the company jet?"

"Oh, no," I said quickly. What I wanted was not very clear to me, but I knew that wasn't it. "No, Amy's got all that sort of thing under control. The thing is, Ferdie dear, there's something I want to tell you." I took a deep breath, getting ready for the next words.

They wouldn't come out.

"Yes, dear?" said Ferdie politely.

I took another deep breath and tried a different way. "Ferdie, you remember Dom DeSota?"

"Of course, dear." He sounded almost amused. Well, that was a dumb question! There wasn't anybody in the country who didn't know who Dom DeSota was this day, besides which Ferdie had always made it his business to know everybody with any kind of power in Illinois. "It's awful about him," he offered. "I know it must upset you to think about what he's involved in."