“You don’t understand; it’s not him personally. I don’t even know him from Adam. It’s... how’ll I explain? Everybody has some sort of a hobby. Well, mine happens to be the trap drums. Every time I go to a show I try to sit as close to them as I can get, I love to watch them being played, it does something to me. I’m an addict of the trap drums, they’ve fascinated me ever since I was a child. I know it sounds crazy but” — she spread her hands — “that’s how it is.”
“I didn’t mean to be inquisitive,” he apologized, crestfallen.
She went inside. The ticket taker at the door had just come on duty, the usher had just come up from the locker room downstairs, she was so early. Whatever the status of the balcony, where the unwritten rule of being fashionably late did not hold sway, she was definitely the first patron on the orchestra floor.
She sat there alone, a small gilt-headed figure lost in that vast sea of empty seats. Most of her gaudiness was carefully concealed, from three directions, by the coat she kept huddled about her. It was only from the front that she wanted it to have its full lethal effect.
Seats began to slap down behind her more and more frequently; there was that rustle and slight hum that always marks a theater slowly filling up. She had eyes for one thing and one thing only: that little half-submerged door down there under the rim of the stage. It was over on the opposite side from her. Light was peering through the seams of it now, and she could hear voices behind it. They were gathering there, ready to come out to work.
Suddenly it opened and they began filing up into the pit, each one’s head and shoulders bent acutely to permit his passage. She didn’t know which one was he, she wouldn’t know until she saw him seat himself, because she’d never seen him. One by one they dropped into the various chairs, disposing themselves in a thin crescent around the stage apron, heads below the footlights.
She was seemingly absorbed in the program on her lap, head lowered, but she kept peering watchfully up from under her sooty lashes. This one, coming now? No, he’d stopped one chair too short. The one behind him? What a villainous face. She was almost relieved when he’d dropped off at the second chair down from her. Clarinet, or something. Well, then this one, it must be he — no, he’d turned and gone the other way, bass viol.
They’d stopped emerging now. Suddenly she was uneasy. The last one out had even closed the door behind him. There weren’t any more of them coming through. They were all seated, they were all tuning up, settling themselves for work. Even the conductor was on hand. And the chair at the trap drums, the one directly before her, remained ominously vacant.
Maybe he’d been discharged. No, because then they’d get a substitute to take his place. Maybe he’d been taken ill, couldn’t play tonight. Oh, just tonight this had to happen! Probably every night this week, until now, he’d been here. She mightn’t be able to get this same particular seat again for weeks to come; the show was selling well and there was great demand. And she couldn’t afford to wait that long. Time was so precious, was running so short, there was too little of it left.
She could overhear them discussing it among themselves, in disparaging undertones. She was close enough to catch nearly everything they said, to get in under the tuning-up discords that covered them from the rest of the house.
“D’jever see a guy like that? I think he’s been on time once since the season started. Fining don’t do any good.”
The alto saxophone said, “He probably chased some blonde up an alley and forgot to come out again.”
The man behind him chimed in facetiously, “A good drummer is hard to get.”
“Not that hard.”
She was staring at the credits on her program, without their focusing into type. She was rigid with suppressed anxiety. Ironical, that every man in the orchestra should be on hand but the single one, the only one, that could do her any good.
She thought, “This is the same sort of luck poor Scott was in the night he—”
The lull before the overture had fallen. They were all set now, light rods turned on over their scores. Suddenly, when she was no longer even watching it any more, it seemed so hopeless, the door giving into the pit had flickered open, closed again, so quickly it was like the winking of an intermittent light, and a figure scuttled deftly along the outside of the chairs to the vacant one before her, bent over both to increase its speed and to attract the conductor’s attention as little as possible. Thus there was something rodentlike about him even at his first appearance within her ken, and he was to stay in character throughout.
The conductor gave him a sizzling look.
He wasn’t abashed. She heard him pant in a breathless undertone to his neighbor, “Boy, have I got a honey for the second tomorrow! A sure thing.”
“Sure, and the only sure thing about it is it won’t come in,” was the dry answer.
He hadn’t seen her yet. He was too busy fiddling with his rack, adjusting his instrument. Her hand dropped to her side and her skirt crept up her thigh an unnoticeable fraction of an inch more.
He got through arranging his set-up. “How’s the house tonight?” she heard him ask. He turned and looked out through the pit railing for the first time since he’d come in.
She was ready for him. She was looking at him. She’d hit him. There must have been an elbow nudge beyond her radius of downcast vision. She heard the other man’s slurred answer. “Yeah, I know, I seen it.”
She’d hit him hard. She could feel his eyes on her. She could have made a graph of the wavy line they traveled. She took her time. Not too fast now, not right away. She thought, “Funny how we know these things, all of us, even when we’ve never tried them before.” She concentrated on a line on her program as though she could never get enough of its mystic import. It was mostly dots, running from one side of the page over to the other. It helped to keep her eyes steady.
She counted the dots. Twenty-four of them, from character name over to performer name. There, that was about long enough. That had given it time to work. She let her lashes come up slowly and unveil her eyes.
They met his. They stayed with his. His had expected them to turn away, frost over. Instead, they accepted his glance, sustained it for as long as he cared to give it. They seemed to say, “Are you interested in me? All right, go ahead, I don’t mind.”
He was a shade surprised for a moment at this ready acceptance. He kept on looking for all he was worth. He even tried a tentative smile, that was ready to be rubbed out at a moment’s notice too.
She accepted that in turn. She even sent him one back, of about the same degree as his. His deepened. Hers did too.
The preliminaries were over, they were getting into— And then, damn it, the buzzer signaled from back curtain. The conductor tapped out attention, spread his arms holding them poised. Flounced them, and the overture was under way, he and she had to break it off.
That was all right, she consoled herself. So far so good. The show couldn’t be straight music all the way through, no show was. There would be rest spells.
The curtain went up. She was aware of voices, lights, figures. She didn’t bother with what was going on onstage. She wasn’t here to see a show. She minded her own business strictly, and her business was making a musician.
He turned and spoke to her at the start of the intermission, when they were filing out for a rest and a smoke. He was the furthest over, so he was the last to go; that gave him the chance to do it undetected behind the others’ backs. The people next to her had gotten up and gone out, so he could tell she was alone, even if her conduct had left him any doubts on that point until now, which it certainly should not have.