Audition (fiction)

Double post!! This week I wrote a short story for my creative writing class, and I'm posting it here. It's a lot longer than my usual posts, sorry! I hope it's a good read.

The revolving door slowly slides to a halt behind her. Already the snow is beginning to melt off her jacket. She wants to bask in the warmth, but she’ll be lucky if she’s still on time. (Her phone died on the train, and she doesn’t wear a wristwatch.)

Five strides take her to the reception desk. The man lifts his eyes to meet hers, bored, disinterested.

“For the symphony audition?”

“Yes,” she says, shoving her gloves into her pockets.

“Name?”

A quick inhale, “Huckabye. It’s with a y-e instead of two e’s at the end.” She doesn't know if the other Huckabee is taking this audition too; the clarification is automatic. She waits as he inches his pencil down the list, painfully slowly. He reaches her name, makes a small, neat tick mark beside it, looks back up. “One more thing, do you have the time?”

He blinks. She taps her wrist.

“12:13.”

Shit. Twenty minutes.

“Thanks!” she calls, already halfway to the elevator.

On her way up to the fourteenth floor, she counts her breaths, counts the time it takes her to inhale and exhale, until her heart rate goes down. It really wasn’t her fault; she left plenty of time, but the snowstorm hit just when her bus reached the train station, and the ensuing chaos had her curled up behind her cello on the train, trying to narrow her focus to her breathing to avert a panic attack. It was only partly successful.

The elevator stops. There’s a smartly dressed woman with a clipboard, who frowns slightly and directs her to a room to warm up in. It’s very warm, and she hopes the hall isn’t drafty, before also hoping that she doesn’t sweat enough for it to freeze when she goes back outside.

She sits down on the adjustable bench.

At least two rounds, the application had said, and 150 in the first round. There isn’t anything she’ll really be able to fix in her playing now. And that’s the problem.

What did Geoffrey say, the evening he came over to listen to her play through her first round? Apart from all the details that she’s spent night after sleepless night obsessing over, only to then ignore when she’s sitting at the cello. He said -- well, he said he wanted to hang out more, but he should probably leave her alone to practice. He was smiling, but his eyes were sad. And she said no, stay for a little, give me some advice, and he said, “It's your choice, and you could use the practice time, but honestly if you don't fix the way you spend your time in the practice room, the hours you spend won't matter.” She must have looked confused or hurt or something, because he clarified that she’d be really good if she spent a little more time thinking about how she practices and less time just playing through things.

Except right now she’s sitting, unable to do anything, because whatever she does will be so far from perfect that she can’t let herself, and she’s paralyzed. She takes a long breath in and holds it, waiting to see if it will shatter her. She has to warm up, she has to, but she can't, and her hands, which started shaking imperceptibly a few minutes ago, are now shivering in the heat of the practice room.

She used to be unafraid of failing. Once, when she was twelve and still studying with Miss Josephine, she played in a recital with some of Miss J's other students. She played the Saint-Saens Allegro Appassionato and she played it badly but with conviction. After, she was standing waiting for her father, and she overheard some other parents talking nearby, their backs to her.

"...poor kid, the Appassionato is too difficult for her.”

"She's probably glad her parents aren't here, they would have been so embarrassed!”

Laughter, and among it the sweet, clear giggles of John Huckabee, who she thought was her best friend. Later she would cry, alone, into her pillow, after ripping apart the photos of the two of them that she used to keep on her nightstand. Now she gritted her teeth and strode over to the group, pushing through the wall of adults.

John was still laughing, leaning on his cello case, his hair flopping forward. His mother, standing next to him, nudged him, and when he turned his head, his face crumpled.

“V, I didn't mean it!”

She ignored this. Setting her cello down, she grasped the friendship bracelet he had given her when they were five and yanked. Blue and purple beads flew everywhere except at his face, which was where she really wanted them to hit. Years later, she would tell Geoffrey that she felt sometimes as if one of the beads had lodged itself in her heart.

That day was the beginning of the unraveling of her self-confidence as a cellist. She never got nervous before concerts before, and she finds now that sometimes she shakes so badly that she can't even make her bow touch the string. She often throws up before recitals, and has learned to plan time for cleaning herself up. John, in contrast, always makes performing look easy, and when asked if he gets nervous, he says, “I mean, I want to make my friends and my family proud of me. Doesn't everyone?”

Just once, she would like to make herself proud.

Someone knocks on the door. She opens it; it's time. She hasn't even unpacked. They walk to the elevator, the proctor making small talk, she responding as minimally as possible. In the elevator, she hyperventilates, quietly. He doesn't notice.

When they get off the elevator, he leads her through a maze of corridors to a door that says BACKSTAGE LEFT. There’s a music stand with the order: Don Juan, Beethoven, Brahms, Mendelssohn, concerto. She sets her case down, flips the latches, takes her cello out. “Can I tune?” She can’t hear anything from inside the hall.

He frowns. “Okay, but be quiet.”

She tries, but her ears aren’t working, and she can’t hear when she plucks, so she has to play the notes with the bow.

“Shh!” he hisses. She winces.

The door opens, and John Huckabee comes out. She looks down, letting her hair fall forward to obscure her face, hoping he won’t say anything to her, because she is so close to falling apart that she can feel the cracks in her skin widening as she hears him thank the proctor, hears his dress shoes thud on the tile floor as he walks away.

She walks in, her feet making no sound on the carpet that they’ve put down on the stage. The screen is huge and white and almost completely opaque. The chair is not adjustable. When she sits, she finds that it is just a hair too short. She slips her shoes off and wonders if the miniscule heel of her flats made a difference. The carpet feels prickly through her stockings.

“Whenever you’re ready,” says a voice from behind the screen. She rubs her hands on her thighs as if to scrub the sweat from her skin, but it keeps coming. She breathes in, imagines a conductor in front of her and just to her left, breathing in, raising her arms, giving an up beat and --

The downbeat launches the beginning of the excerpt, but she fumbles the first run, and she never fully recovers. She isn’t thinking ahead, she realizes, and she would be if she’d warmed up. She hits a high note just under where it should be, and she can feel the committee groaning, even though they don’t make a sound. She can’t ground herself. She can’t break the cycle of mistake, obsess, mistake, obsess, mistake, obsess.

She finishes the excerpt, and thinks that she should probably leave, she’s never going to be able to come back from that. She begins the next one.

Somewhere in the third excerpt, the Brahms, she lands on a G and almost sobs at how pretty it is. How is it possible for her to make a sound like that? But maybe it’s what Geoffrey was saying, that if she thinks more carefully about what she’s playing...it doesn’t matter what other people think, only whether she communicates what the music makes her feel. She’s not doing that right now, really, but she can. She has the tools. She just needs to use them.

Somehow she manages to get through the last excerpt and her concerto. She walks out, past the proctor, past another cellist who she doesn’t know, and packs up. Once the other cellist has gone in, the proctor says, “Results will be posted in the lobby at 2.”

She knows she won’t advance. She feels lighter because of it. She has the rest of the day to go home and start practicing better. She slides her arms through the sleeves of her coat, picks up her cello, and pushes the revolving door. She isn’t being honest with herself; she knows this. She won’t practice when she gets home. She’s been here before. The snowflakes are melting on her face, but her tears are freezing.