Ela's Performance: A Romantic Wife-Watching Novel

by Arnica Butler

  She leaned forward and clamped her mouth on the straw that ended in a gigantic, fish-bowl sized margarita we were sharing. She squeezed her eyes shut as the frozen liquid gave her a brain-freeze. “Oh god,” she said again, but his time because of the pain.

  I turned back to her.

  “I don't see what the big deal is,” I ventured, not even sure what the situation was, other than what I had read from the appearance of the two who had passed us. “I mean...you and I are kind of...”

  Ela shook her head furiously, as much at what I was saying, as to rid herself of the pain of the frozen margarita she had downed. She tossed her napkin away and leaned forward suddenly, her eyes lit up and glittering with her love of proving a point.

  She held a finger up to stab at the air for each of her various points:

  “I mean, I know we had a thing when...but it's different, you're like....born in the same century as me.” Stab. “And now, you're nobody, you know? Not my TA anymore, I mean.” Stab. “That guy...she is going to be stuck with him for like three years.” Stab. “And plus it's just so.....cliched.”

  She fell back against the booth.

  “Ugh. And he's like....65. He's married.” She stabbed at the air again. “She's eighteen. And it's...god, it's really just such a fucking cliche.”

  She shook her head quickly. “Ugh. He's so ugly, too.”

  I shrugged. “I hear some girls get off on that.”

  Her face softened.

  I was, in fact, the sort of ugly, nerdy man that girls seemed to like precisely because I was ugly. It had taken me a while to realize this was an actual thing, and that I was good-looking in a way because of the gargolyed nature of my features.

  Ela's face softened and she leaned closer to me over the table. “Not ugly like you,” she whispered. “Not hot-ugly. Ugly.”

  I shrugged again. “He didn't seem that bad.”

  Ela threw her napkin at me, missed, and hit the man behind me in the back of the head.

  I didn't turn around. I watched her cover her mouth and widen her eyes and turn on all of her sweet, Natalie Portman look-alikedness. “I'm so terribly sorry,” she mucked. “I meant to hit my boyfriend with that. I'm so bad at sports.”

  I could feel the gaze of the man she had hit swerve onto me, hating me for being mean to a sweet girl like Ela, mean enough so that she threw a napkin at me.

  Ela shook her head again. “She's such a bad violinist,” she mused. Then she shrugged, and reached for the margarita again. Suddenly brightened, she smiled. “It's probably the best thing for her, really.”

  “So that's her...”

  “Prof. Oh god. Ugh. Like, seriously, every pretty girl ends up banging some old fart like that. It's so sleazy.”

  I twisted the straw in my fingertips. “Every pretty girl?”

  Her eyes slammed into me and burned with her answer.

  But Ela didn't know that I wanted to hear something else besides “no.”. That I was intoxicated by the idea that she had maybe done something naughty.

  “You've never done that?” I continued.

  Her eyes glowered at me over the margarita, but she finished sipping before she replied. “I don't need to.” Her eyes flicked back at the adjacent room and narrowed. “I'm a great violinist. I just don't understand philosophy.”

  Her comment was a good joke, and meant to wrap the whole conversation up.

  But it was eating away at me.

  It was eating away at me because there was just a tiny bit of me, still, that didn't quite believe Ela was as smitten with me as she claimed to be. A tiny bit of me that actually enjoyed the painful thought of her using me somehow – even though by now, there was really nothing I could offer her. A tiny bit of me that liked hearing about her previous lovers, her previous escapades.

  “But you never even had a situation where...you know? You could have furthered your career a little by...”

  Her eyes were annoyed when they came back to mine. “Every situation is pretty much like that in music,” she said. And then I could almost see her face change as she read something in my face. She seemed to get that there was more to my question than idle curiosity.

  Her mouth turned up a little on one side.

  But she waited for me to ask her for it.

  So I went on: “You've never had some...what do you call it? Master class? Where the guy is like, oh, Graciela, just hold your violin like this -”

  “Wrong hand,” she quipped, making fun of my pantomime of a professor wrapping himself around her, pressing himself up against her small, hard body.

  She laughed. Then her eyes dove into her burrito.

  Guiltily.

  She began to slice it into small pieces with her knife and fork.

  “Oooohhhhh,” I said, and a really delicious, really hot snake uncoiled inside of me. “So there was something.”

  Ela continued eating, and a silence draped the table for a long minute.

  She waved a fork at me suddenly, and with her her mouth still full of burrito, declared: “It was not my fucking prof, though.”

  As if the universe were entirely against me, a cake shedding sparkles came by, followed by the restaurant's noisy mariachi band and a trail of waiters, clapping and singing a Mexican birthday song. It was Ela's perfect out: she turned to the racket as though it were the most interesting thing in the world, and I never did get to pry into this prof who had not been her prof, but who had been something.

  Not that night.

  And not really ever.

  I knew from then on that she was hiding something, but it was never possible to get her to take it seriously. Never possible to get anything from her. Was he old? Was he young? Was he rich, fat, ugly, handsome? When had she done it? And why? Was he any good? Was he better than me?

  Sometimes she rolled her eyes, sometimes she changed the subject.

  Sometimes she turned it into a joke:

  “With a prof? Yes. Oh, you've caught me. But not only was he a prof, he was a big, manly man, like Bruce Willis. In fact, he was once in the Mossad. Violin teacher was only his cover. He was actually a secret agent...a mercenary.” And then, with a snort, because it was all so ridiculous: “And I was his muse.”

  B ACK FROM SCHOOL

  By five pm, on Ela's first day back to school, I could no longer restrain myself from calling her.

  I took out my phone.

  I mean, I was just being a good husband. Taking interest in my wife, and her life.

  I knew there was more to it when I called, though; I knew what I actually wanted to hear about was not her day – not new girlfriends, or what the campus was like after all these years, or how great it felt to be doing something new. I wanted to hear about how many men had watched her ass as she bounced along, under the canopies of trees on her way to the music building. I wanted to hear how she had joined a group of young men for a cigarette and let them soak up her plunging neckline and bare legs while she placed her plump lips on someone's smoke, taking a drag, making him think of his own cock and how her lips would feel closing around his cock like they were closing on the filter.

  I wanted to hear about her new instructors. How they had all asked to see her at the end of class, could she please come by the office? Close the door? You know that coming back to do a PhD in performance after such a long time is a difficult task, maybe you aren't up to the challenge, maybe you need some extra attention...

  This is why my throat croaked when she answered the phone, and instead of saying hi or something normal, I made a froggish, incomprehensible noise.

  “Hello to you, too. Yes, my first day was extraordinary. I am thrilled and all of my professors are hot, hot as a chili omelet on an Arizona sidewalk in July, as you predicted.” She let that sink in. “But seriously, I have to practice. Everyone has a lot of game. So do you want pizza or Thai tonight? Your choice, bring it home.”

  A pause.

  “You there?”

  “Yeah...I...” I cleared my throat. “I
was just...”

  “Calling to see how my day was,” she said, cloyingly. “I know. Thank you. It was all of the above and now I really have to get to practicing so...adios.” She kissed the phone, pressing her lips to where the microphone was embedded and make a terrible slurping noise as she did.

  Then silence.

  I held my phone in my hand and stared at it.

  What was wrong with me? I was infinitely dissatisfied with the conversation I just had with Ela, this much I knew.

  But why?

  There was nothing unusual in Ela's brusqueness on the phone. She was like this whenever she had something she wanted to accomplish, and there was no reason for me to think that she wasn't going to come home from her first day and have the drive to be better than everyone else, now that she had seen the competition. That was just how Ella was. It was what she did.

  But had her voice seemed more dismissive than usual?

  I shook my head, as though having a conversation with myself, where I could see myself and my own dismayed face. Idiot.

  I was dissatisfied with Ela's dismissal of my fantasies, really. That she had said only that her professors were hot, but in a mocking voice, a voice that indicated she didn't really understand or care, or worse yet thought I was a little bit of a freak. A freak who wanted to hear about other men gawking at her. Other men being attracted to her.

  Her being attracted to other men.

  I tried to refocus my energy.

  Ela hated pizza. I wondered why she had offered it as a choice. She was the only person on earth I had ever met who actually hated pizza. Not because it was unhealthy: this was a girl who ate the worst forms of fried Tex-Mex like it was her last day on earth if you let her anywhere near it. She just...hated pizza.

  And Ela loved or hated things with bottomless passion.

  I pushed the remark out of my mind, but still it bothered me.

  I tired to keep my thoughts on clean things, like what Ela like to eat, but it all ended like a porno, with Ela placing a huge burrito in her mouth like an oversized cock, her lips stretching to accommodate it, her eyes batting flirtatiously.

  My thoughts drifted back to her short gray skirt, and her “hot-as-Arizonan omelets” professors, their eyes moving from her slender feet to her ankle, up her sculpted calf, to her thighs, and then letting their imagination fill in all that they couldn't see, the shapes that filled out her clothing and the colors that lay underneath it. And Ela, a finger in her braid, smiling with false shyness. “I'm your new student,” she would say.

  I decided on Thai. It was closer to home, it would require less time. I really wanted to be home, and I didn't want delve too much into why that was, within my own mind.

  But I knew.

  I wanted to see Ela. Make sure she was the same.

  God, Peter, what in the hell is wrong with you?

  What in the hell was wrong with me? I was obsessing about Ela, in ways I gave into only just before falling asleep.

  Occasionally, the way I drank whiskey.

  Now I was binging on thoughts of her being seduced. Thoughts of her seducing other men. Thoughts of swarms of men surrounding her and pawing at her until she simply couldn't resist...

  I was at the Thai restaurant, my windshield wipers swiping away noisily at a wet, early autumn sludge that was falling from the sky. The heat was on to the point of making me ill, because I had cranked it up and forgotten it. I had stopped the car in a parallel parking spot without any memory of doing so.

  My mind had been so absorbed by the thought of Ela swinging her hips through the hallways of the School of Music that I had driven all the way there and not even noticed.

  When I got home the lights were still out, except for the light in an upstairs practice room for Ela. I could hear her violin outside, repeating and repeating a phrase of music.

  Honestly, after a certain point, it all sounded the same to me. Good, clearly, and well beyond anything I could ever hope to do or imagine doing. But Ela's anger with some certain three seconds of notes, or her devastation after a concert about some place where she “cacked it,” were utter mysteries to me.

  I opened the door, and then I slammed it, so that the house would shake and she would know I was home.

  The phrase continued, uninterrupted and repeating.

  I wasn't sure what to do so I stared at the clock.

  After five minutes, the music stopped, and Ela's adorable, skittish footsteps pattered over the floor and down the stairs.

  “Oh hey, sweetie.”

  She looked a little like she had been lightly exercising, which is a thing I think few people understand about playing an instrument unless they've been around a musician: it's a heck-ton of a workout. Ela is a quiet and reserved player, compared to some, but she really gets into it sometimes and her whole body moves.

  “Thai?” she said, taking in the plastic bags on the counter. “Great. I'm starving.”

  I was a bit miffed, but of course I had no legitimate reason to be. Ela could not know that I had turned some weird corner in my life and was now obsessed with something I didn't fully understand myself. That I had spent the whole day thinking about her, that I imagined all afternoon the things she was doing with other men...but still, the casual way she grabbed the Thai food, as if it were any other day, was almost...infuriating.

  “How was your day?” I said sweetly.

  She ripped a box of noodles open and shoveled them into her mouth. “Terrible.”

  I waited.

  “God, I was so hungry.” Ela munched ravenously on her noodles.

  I opened my own box calmly. My stomach was, for some reason, twisting: I wanted to hear details about her day, and I wanted those details to be something specific, something I wanted. I knew it was unreasonable, and a little crazy, but I couldn't stop myself.

  “Terrible?” I repeated, robotically, not really understanding the word.

  She looked at me and smiled derisively. “Yeah. Really, really awful. Don't sound so fucking cheerful about it.”

  I shook my head. “No, god, sorry...”

  Ela interrupted me, suddenly flushed with real, genuine excitement, as if the noodles had brought her back from the dead.

  “You already asked me about this. No, it's great. I think I told you I wouldn't be able to work with Mark Casalis? That I got my second choice? Well, something got shuffled because one of Mark's students bailed because of a visa problem, and so I'll be able to work with him from the start. Isn't that great?” Ela was speaking so quickly her words were blending together, and her voice had acquired the lilting, valley-girl accent of most eighteen-year olds. Which was never something she had entirely lost, mind you – it was just so....prevalent now. She wound and wound her noodles around her fork in her excitement, and now she stuffed the whole fork, and the enormous pile of noodles, into her mouth and chewed furiously.

  I searched for a good comment. “That's great, sweetie!” I said enthusiastically.

  “This guy...did I tell you about him? I think I gave up after I thought he couldn't fit me in...but he's....”

  Ela's words disappeared into a slush of musical terms and names of orchestras, and I tried to fixate on what she was saying, but my mind was awash in craziness.

  Why so much craziness? I wondered.

  I was being a psychopath.

  My wife simply wanted to go back to school, to do her PhD, to be the talented musician she was and stand a chance of having her own real job, instead of running around playing shitty gigs. And I was being a psychopath who just wanted to hear about the men who were hitting on her.

  Ela was blinking at me. Expectantly.

  There wasn't much else to do here besides say uh-huh, not really, or I can't remember. Any of which were extremely risky.

  “Really?” I said, taking a venturesome leap.

  Ela's eyes closed, very slowly, and reopened, also very slowly. They were now on fire.

  “You weren't listening to me.”

 
Her voice was as cold as her eyes were superheated.

  “I just...” I said, and my voice sounded helpless. “I don't understand all your musical mumbo-jumbo.”

  I used “mumbo-jumbo” because it was one of the few Americanisms left that eluded my native English tongue, came out awkward as a result, and usually entertained the hell out of Ela.

  She sighed.

  “I have to get back to practicing,” she said, without amusement.

  “Sweetie,” I began. “I'm really sorry, I just...my mind is on other things. I have a big dep coming up, some really pesky clients, I'm sorry. I didn't mean to be...”

  My voice trailed off. Ela was scrunching up her nose. “Just winding you up,” she said. “But I really do have to get back to practicing.”

  She had warned me, when she began this path, that she would end up practicing six or eight hours a day. I hadn't really believed it. When I had first met her she had practiced a lot, but it had all been somewhere where I couldn't see her, or hear her. After I had graduated from my Master's program, she had gone to a program in Denmark and we had maintained a long-distance relationship. I had never really experienced her life as a music student.

  Now, I listened to the door click and the plucking of strings, a pause, and then a musical phrase starting up, then halted, then started again, then halted, then slower, then halted. And I realized, I was probably not going to see much of my wife for a while.

  No, it was probably just the first-day jitters. She was overcompensating, another habit of hers.

  I reasoned with myself: I didn't see that much of her anyway because she usually had gigs on Friday nights. And Saturday nights.

  It was all fine. I was not jealous. I was not going to be a dick. I had suggested that she return to school. I was just fine with all of it.

  In reality, I didn't have much to do that night. Or that much on my mind from work.

  What was on my mind was Ela. Her courses. The way she walked through campus to them, and the leering boys on the way.

  Her professors.

  Her peers.

  What was wrong with me?

  Ela gigged all the time with young guys. She stayed the night in some of the places they went to, she had been the violinist for a band called Clear Blue Wasteland for two years, and they had all been young, hipsterish, and away for days.