The Audition(10)

“Why?” I challenge him. “If it all goes into my work, is there anything left?” I look at him boldly, and I cup my breasts. “What about everything else? Sex? Love? Life?”

My gesture is a blatant come-on, but he doesn’t respond to it. When he looks at me, there is darkness in his eyes. I get the sense that I’ve scratched at an old scab, one that hasn’t healed completely. After all, this is who I think Nikolai was before the accident. Driven and passionate, and everything in him was oriented towards his career and his music. I didn’t think there had been room for anything else.

And now? It occurs to me that I have no idea who he has become. I don’t know what he does for a living. I have no idea if he’s married or engaged, or if he has a girlfriend, or dozens of willing submissives.

I only know his address because he has sent me a Christmas card every year for the last six years, a gesture that always both moves me and infuriates me.

I know nothing about Nikolai, and he seemingly knows everything about me. “From what I hear,” he says, his lips compressing in disapproval, “you don’t seem to have any passion for life or love. You are hardly in a position to comment.”

My hands fall to my sides, and I press my lips together, chastened. I don’t speak further.





Chapter 5


I’m back upstairs, kneeling at Nikolai’s feet like a good little pet while he feeds me lunch. No surprise there. What is surprising is that he is an excellent cook. I’d heard him rattle around in the kitchen while I played, and when I came upstairs, there was a big pot of a spicy chili bubbling away at the stove, and warm slices of bread on the table.

I open my mouth and he feeds me spoonfuls of chili, blowing on the food to make sure I don’t burn myself. And when I’m not busy resenting that he’s treating me like a pet, I’m secretly enjoying being taken care of. Nobody has done this for me since my mother died.

We make small talk while we eat. We avoid all landmines. We talk about our favourite foods, we talk about movies we’ve seen lately. Nikolai confesses with a quick grin that he’s addicted to Japanese samurai movies. “Like Kill Bill?” I ask with a wrinkle of my forehead, and he shakes his head. “Like the stuff that Tarantino watches as inspiration for Kill Bill,” he replies. “We can watch something tonight if you’d like.”

Tonight. While his suggestion of watching a movie sounds really good, I also know that I’ll be sitting at his feet, and when we are done, I’ll be relegated to the cage in the dungeon to sleep. I’m self-aware enough to know that while I’m turned on by the way he’s treating me, I also don’t feel very respected. If this was something we did in a sexual context, I would be entirely okay with all of it. With the kneeling, with the leash, with eating morsels of food from Nikolai’s hands.

But he’s shown no sign that he’s attracted to me. All this is for him is a training method. His words from this morning come back to me. Perhaps treating you like an animal will help you remember how to survive.

I want to be more than an experimental subject to Nikolai, more than a student unable to reach her full potential. I want to matter to Nikolai.

***

I’m allowed a few moments to myself after lunch, while Nikolai washes dishes and cleans the kitchen, declining my offer of help. I watch him silently, admiring the economy of his movements as he efficiently fills the sink with hot water. As his hands dip in the suds, I shake my head. Those hands used to be so valuable that they were insured. Dishes seem like such a let-down.

“How did you cope?” I don’t know if he will answer my question, but I have a sudden, burning need to know.

His back is to me, his hands engaged in the mundane rituals of cleaning. But when he speaks, his voice is relaxed. “After the accident, you mean?”

“Yes.”

He doesn’t turn towards me. But his voice is meditative. “For three months,” he says, and I strain to hear above the sound of the running water, “I moped and pouted. I listened to my old recordings. I went to concerts, and I railed against fate, so envious of the pianists on stage. But then, I got over it.”

“How?”

“Was there a magic moment, you mean? One shining point that I could use and say – this, here, this was the moment?”

I nod, but of course, he has his back to me, and can’t see the movement.

“There wasn’t any,” he clarifies. “The hospital had a therapist on the staff, and we would talk. My mother was a pianist too, you know, until she needed to support herself and a child, when my father died in a mining accident. She should have been bitter and resentful at how life turned out for her, but if she was, she never showed it. She still played, every chance she got. And when she was at a piano, it was like there was a light inside her, illuminating her from the inside out.”