Free Irresistible Impulse by Robert K. Tanenbaum

could not see who was at the piano.
    They began. The cello voiced the weird, unbearably pathetic harmonics of the Andante of Shostakovich’s Trio in E Minor . Marlene listened, at first repelled, then captivated, at last devastated. She was still dabbing her eyes when Edie Wooten came back into the room. The other two musicians were talking. Real Life had resumed. Wooten shut the door, sat down across from Marlene, and sighed, wiping the dampness from her face with a handkerchief. She looked as if she had just run a mile.
    “That was incredible!” Marlene exclaimed. “Is that on a record?”
    “Yes, but not by us,” said Wooten, smiling. “You liked it?”
    “ Like is not the word. I’m dog food.”
    “Yes, it is a remarkable piece, isn’t it? Shostakovich wrote it during the war. Music to stack frozen corpses by. It’s what you write when most of your friends have been murdered, and the up side of your life is you work for Stalin, who killed them. The odd thing is, this … person, it’s one of his favorites. He wants me to play it. Actually, he, well, he demanded it in his last letter.”
    “And you’re obliging him?”
    “Oh, no! We’d planned to do the piece anyway. We’re at Juilliard next week as part of the New York Chamber Society festival. It was just a coincidence.”
    Marlene took a steno pad out of her bag. “So. When did this guy start to write to you?”
    A smile. “It could be a woman, you know.”
    “Yes, and with a little practice I could play the cello like you. It’s a guy, Ms. Wooten.”
    “Please … Edie.”
    “Okay. I’m Marlene. About when was it?”
    “Let me see. It must have started this summer, after we got back from Edinburgh. There are lots of letters, of course, from fans. I have a secretary, but I try to answer as many as I can. Most just ask for photographs. Then there are the critics, we call them ‘music lovers,’ people who have something to say about the actual performances. Praise mostly, in rare cases nasty—you’re not as good as … whoever. But this one was different.”
    “How so?”
    “Oh, it was personal.” A blush darkened the pink of her cheeks. “You know.”
    “I don’t know. You have to tell me.”
    “Well, like, ‘I could play your body like you play the cello. I feel your legs around me when you play.’ Like that.” She let out an embarrassed laugh. “It’s the position when we play. Women, that is. There’s that old joke, the conductor yells at the lady cellist, ‘Madam, don’t you realize you have one of the world’s greatest treasures between your thighs?’ And musical things too. He knows the cello literature. He writes lists of what he wants me to play at each concert, and of course, as here with the Shostakovish trio, sometimes he gets it right, and then in the next letter he praises me for playing the piece. He thinks I’m doing it for him. He says things like, ‘When you played the scherzo in the Beethoven Sonato in A , I knew you were playing only for me, my darling, our eyes met,’ and nonsense like that. And when I don’t play what he wants, he gets angry. Crude. He doesn’t want me to travel either. It’s like having a jealous lover.”
    “I’ll need every physical object he’s sent you.”
    “Oh, God, I didn’t keep any of it!”
    “Well, please do in the future and hand it over. We need it if we ever get to build a harassment case.”
    “He spies on me too,” said the cellist. She had twisted her handkerchief into a tight rope. “That’s why I called you. The letters are one thing, but the idea that he’s following me …” She shuddered delicately.
    Marlene looked up from her notebook. “How do you know he’s following you?”
    “He leaves things. A rose in my cello case at a recital. Notes in rehearsal rooms. I get phone calls and no one answers when I pick up. In one letter he said he liked my nightgown, so somehow he can see in my window, even though it’s sixteen stories up. And now I keep