Reunion
She felt a cold sweat over from her hands, fearing to even pick up the phone after it signalled a message. At her desk, she sat down slowly in her large leather chair as if not quite intending to remain there, supporting herself on the seat's edge with legs planted on the floor. With a slight tremble of her hand, she grasped her phone, opened it, and stared aimlessly at the screen--the images and memories racing through her mind blinded all that lay directly before her. Only after a long exhale that struggled to let itself go, Cassandra finally fell into her chair that felt like a warm mattress that captured her as she was falling. She lifted the hem of her long skirt, tossing it up gently over her thighs, to give more room for her legs to cross comfortably, and let her hands fall down along the sides of her black leather chair which stood like a throne behind her desk. She unbuttoned her formal white blouse partially, and took off her turquoise bracelet, barely able to toss it on her desk.
As she let her arms relax, her phone fell out of her hand to the floor. Cassandra savoured this momentary release that was as short as it was intense, desperate to stretch out this instant like an elastic band just before its breaking point. She closed her eyes, letting herself shut down for several moments.
Then Cassandra's eyes opened abruptly, as if awakened by a loud noise or disturbance of some kind, when in fact, nothing at all had happened--other than the lightening strikes of her mind. She suddenly remembered, her phone was still on the floor. She noticed how alert and rested she became, realising that she fell asleep for a few minutes. With hands on her chair armrests, Cassandra lifted herself up swiftly, her long violet skirt falling back to its shape as she stood upright and stretched out her arms, permitting herself a long, luxurious yawn.
She held back from picking up her phone.
Ten years earlier, Cassandra's dream was to become a concert-pianist. After her parents' scandalous divorce, her mother supported her dream, even going into debt to finance piano lessons with a renowned pianist who happened to move into their neighbourhood a few years earlier. Much later, well into her adult years, Cassandra would continue being haunted by flashbacks of her father's ruthless screams, protesting her "useless dream" of music. Once, her father snuck away from home late at night and went to this teacher's home. He tried to bribe him into terminating lessons with Cassandra. "I'll gladly accept your bribe, if you accept mine--payment in exchange for never again intervening in our music lessons". The joke of this proposition didn't quite reach him, as he slowly exited the teacher's home, like a fallen soldier--startled at the teacher's ferocious slam of the door behind him.
While her girlfriends at school were being bombarded by constant knocks on the door by boys, with short-lived romances and gossip commanding the day, Cassandra was seeing only one man ; Mr. Messner. He held his cards closely to his chest, a man of so few words that when he did speak in his Czech contintenal sort of dialect, he struggled to utter them, as a kind of disguised protest against those who required words to understand the obvious. "Tolstoy said", Mr. Messner would remind, "that there are only three kinds of people : Those who read and understand nothing, those who read and understand everything--and those who read and understand what is not written".
Cassandra was among the few souls he recognised, since moving to the United States after divorcing his wife in Prague, as someone who understood in between the words--and later, in between the notes.
By this point, Cassandra's hair had grown dense, like thin, long strands of wool, and became darker from the lighter shades brown of her earlier years. Her cheekbones became sightly wider, her eyebrows grew richer and longer, curving only slightly downward along the corner of her large, hazel eyes. Cassandra's mouth was small, but with thick, fleshy lips which always remained slightly puckered up. For the first time in her adolescence, her blouses and tops had to be thrown out ; her chest became not only longer, but wider.
Her gait was awkward, almost clumsy, as if she was in a perpetual state of guilt, of embarrassment for who she was. Rarely wearing jeans or colourful shirts, in her school years she never dressed beyond different shades of black or grey, always either in a long casual dress, or loose shirts and pants more fit for a painter or carpenter. All these unflattering fabrics against her body highlighted still more sharply the hypnotic gaze of her eye, the striking whiteness of her pale skin that made her eyes darker--an unearthly beauty that was spellbinding to the one who could sense Cassandra "in between her notes".
Cassandra's maturity at such a young age drew Mr. Messner to her, but in nothing more than musical and artistic ways which grew out of their piano lessons. He considered her to be a rare prodigy-- her musical ability was certainly exceptional, but even more was her capacity for understanding the invisible, the unwritten, the unspoken. In him, she found a kindred spirit and an artist who didn't need to be explained what she felt, who brought a kind of end to the loneliness that haunted her at school. Among hundreds of classmates, not a soul understood her--and here, was a singular man who read her entirely without the need for words. He gave her the tools to transform those intangible emotions into musical expression at the piano ; through Mr. Messner--a man younger than her parents--she learned a language that never required explanation. Nothing became more valuable to her than this unspoken language of music, especially during the darkest hours of her parents' divorce.
Pure adoration--it was almost by instinct, that she felt this for her teacher. While gossip was raging at school about her parents, Cassandra's playing at the school's concerts became her weapon--bringing down the house with her playing, even among those filled with jealous rage towards her. Cassandra quickly became the star of her school--impossible without Mr. Messner's fatherly guidance at the piano.
When Cassandra reached the point of no longer playing like someone who plays the piano, but playing as a pianist--a kind of artistic puberty--she would prolong her lessons with Mr. Messner. After he would give a signal to move onto the next phrase or to another piece, Cassandra would insist on repeating a given phrase still another time, and ask still more questions. She would feel a secret satisfaction of thinking that she'd fooled Mr. Messner into spending more time with her.
As virginities were being lost among her girlfriends, never again to be found in entropy's relentlessly single arrow of time, thoughts of Mr. Messner started to haunt Cassandra in ways well beyond music. She knew nothing beyond a few prepubescent kisses with boys in prior years. Now, while under her bedcovers at night, when her piano teacher would appeared from within the deepest buried layers of her mind, in the privacy of her bedcovers, she would slowly encircle her labia with her index finger. As her pulse would rise, making her eyes close tightly as if preventing the exterior world from ever intruding upon her, Cassandra's finger followed the path of least resistance--to moisture, pushing her finger slowly inward, discovering a wet, swampy interior, then exiting, then re-entering, quickly learning how tighten her vaginal walls around her finger since this make the friction tighter and wetter.
She would finger-fuck herself to sleep to dreams about her teacher.
Later, in the coming weeks of nocturnal fantasies, Cassandra started to feel as if her fingers, when held together in two's or three's, underwent a kind of transubstantiation into becoming Mr. Messner's penis, rubbing along the inner surfaces of her vaginal walls. Later, Cassandra discovered that she could bring herself to a stronger orgasm when she would tickle her upper vaginal wall with her index and third fingers, curving those same phalanges and fingertips that Mr. Messner touched so often to show her proper hand-positioning at the piano keys. In closing her eyes, she was entirely with him.
Mr. Messner, she thought, would not be disappointed with her rehearsals during these nocturnal practice sessions.
Her teacher always reminded her, that "To master the piano is to master the art of touch"--words that sang in counterpoint with her nocturnal self-explorations.
When touched artfully, the piano rings with a tone that is warm, velvety, rich--not the sterile, cold, and mechanical ring, produced by her phone, still on the floor, vibrating against her office's rug as it rang.
Cassandra's hand trembled as she picked her phone at long last ; she heard a long-awaited voice message :
--I'm finished Cassie. You can come in about 15 minutes.
He had just finished with a student, ready to welcome Cassandra for a visit for the first time in several years. Despite her painful adolescent years, and after finishing university in Singapore, she eventually moved back to her family roots which she wanted to replant after the pain of her earlier years.
She never recovered from her father's injurious attacks on her conscience and morale. This is why, despite her excellence in music, she instead chose a career in the sciences. As Mr. Messner's protégé, she knew that her decision would break his heart, as it did.
Contact was terminated between them, until this imminent moment, when Mr. Messner opened the door, as if greeting Cassandra for a lesson. As they exchanged what can only be spoken by eyes peering into each other, they gazed each other in a joyous, painful and arresting silence--the fermata over this silence broken only by Cassandra's sudden rise of her arms, rushing impulsively to embrace her former teacher. She held on to her breath to prevent from crying, as they held each other in a tight embrace for a still longer silence, broken again by her, as she cried. Cassandra saw her former teacher's guard completely break down, as he also could not look at his former student with dry eyes.
--Oh Mr. Messner, please, if you can--
