A Short Story
I don’t believe he ever recognized me. I usually sat in one of the last rows of the concert hall, way too far away from the stage to be noticed. But I was always there. I didn’t miss a single concert. Even when I was ill and had to wrap a huge scarf around my neck that muffled my coughing and sneezing, I still dragged myself to the box office and bought a ticket for the very back. I sat between all the middle aged men and women and felt like a rare animal as I was stared at from all sides. I knew what was happening behind the creased foreheads and the dyed perms. They were wondering what I was doing at a classical concert, if I could have gone clubbing instead. In the minutes that passed by until everyone had found their seat and the show could begin, I suffered a thousand deaths.
Their gazes were like curare-poisoned darts. Curare was the poison blue frogs produced. What was it like to be a blue frog surrounded by green frogs? It probably felt a lot like me. Sometimes I was very close to getting up and leaving the room immediately, but I always forced myself to stay seated, because as soon as the lights were dimmed and the curtain rose with a swoosh, I got my reward.
His name resounded throughout the land back then. He was celebrated as a sensation and his face decorated the title pages of the yellow press magazines our neighbour Miss Elliot liked to read. From time to time I helped the old woman to wash her curtains or to clean her windows. Then she rhapsodised about him as if he were her son in law and I smiled and said yes and amen as if I didn’t know him much better than Miss Elliot ever would.
He was in his mid-twenties and would have looked like any other twenty-five year old in jeans and a T-shirt – well, like any other good-looking twenty-five year old. He was slender but not lanky about 1.85 meters tall and brown-haired.
During concerts he always wore a black suit and a white shirt, the good old bourgeois uniform, which my friends viewed as outdated and ridiculous, just as his side-parting and his polished black leather shoes.
In the beginning I believed he also dressed like this in his free time and perhaps this had even been one of the factors which made me like him. He was different than everyone else I knew. Later, I had found out that my fairy tale prince did not live up to all of my expectation, but I already knew him much better by then.
I had attended the first concert involuntarily. My mother gave me the tickets for my birthday with the rationale I should get in touch with some culture again. I could have imagined a thousand nicer things to do on a Saturday night than to put on my uncomfortable trouser suit and sit on an even more uncomfortable audience-seat in second row listening to arduously annoying music.
Then the curtain rose and he stood there, completely relaxed, bow in one hand, violin in the other hand, and smiled into the audience. It had not struck me like lightning out of a blue sky though. It was a slow process which was set in motion in this very moment, when he smiled at the audience and his dark eyes caught my gaze. I am still not sure if I only imagined they lingered on me longer than on anyone else around me.
When the welcoming applause abated and made way for a expectant silence, he lifted the instrument to his chin and began to play.
It wasn’t his looks that convinced me, not his smile or the fact that I had always liked types that did not quite fit the norm. All of that would not have made me lose my heart to a complete stranger. No.
In reality, it was his playing which enthralled me from the very first note. I was carried by the music. Everyone around me just heard a melody which was interpreted masterfully by a young man, but I heard the story he was telling and fancied that he sought my gaze every time he opened his eyes between the phrases. I was unable to move and got entirely caught by surprise when the lights went on for the interval.
A man in a grey pinstriped suit asked me to let him through. I stood up and wondered that my legs were still obeying me.
The second part of the concert pushed me over the edge. It was no coincidence that all the newspapers sang his praises and called him an exceptionally multitalented artist. A concert piano was rolled into the stage and with each key-stroke, with each felted hammer which – incited by his fingers - hitting a string inside the massive wooden corpus, my heartbeat accelerated.
It should become even worse when he called another man on stage to play piano for the final piece while he reverted back to the violin.
During the final ovations, I was sure he had played only for me.
Ever since, I went to the concerts every single weekend. I didn’t sit as far at the front any more, didn’t want my chest to burst, needed the distance to survive. I could not have survived experiencing that same rush of feelings I had felt that first night once more. At the same time, I was addicted. Like a junkie, come Monday I already craved for my next saturdaily dose. He seemed to me a God, a superhuman being. I would never have dared to talk to him. Who was I, anyway?
I did research about him, found out his address, followed him home and felt ashamed because I knew my behaviour bordered on stalking. But even when I already knew he was just a human being, I was still scared of talking to him. I was afraid my illusions would burst like soap bubbles.
So I kept going to his concerts and wallowed in his music while I, as the blue frog, was constantly attacked with poisoned glare-darts by the green frogs around me.
I kept all of the tickets: all seventy of them. One and a half years in which I never went clubbing but in which I learned a lot about classical music. I am wearing my black trouser suit and a jacket which is way too thin for the current temperatures. My high heels which still hurt my feet at every step are clacking on the pavement. Eight steps to the entrance door. Eight steps made of stone which are ever so slightly worn out in the middle. The left door is never open but one can get inside through the right and the middle one. The woman at the box office looks at me weirdly when I buy a ticket for the last row and the cloakroom attendant stares at me as if she is questioning my sanity. I am the blue frog.
The stairs of the concert hall are covered with thick red carpets that are cleaned by a tiny Hungarian woman on every post-performance Sunday morning.
I let one of the employees validate my ticket and go to find my seat. The upholstery is worn thin and the backrest is bent inward too much just as it is on all the other seats in the hall.
A man in a pinstripe suit sits down next to me, breathing heavily. He is shooting curare darts at me, but I am immune, just as some people become immune against pain killers after taking them too regularly.
Thirty minutes until the concert begins. I am way too early because I didn’t have to stop at any of the red lights on the way.
I am staring at the perm of the woman in front of me. She has the one-size-fits-all granny-hairstyle dyed brown with two centimetres of grey at the hairline. A string of ugly pink pearls is wound around her constantly shaking neck.
“Excuse me,” a voice behind me says and for a moment I daydream it’s him who is demanding my attention.
“I believe I have seen you here before,” he would say.
And I could answer: ”I was here for every single performance.”
We could have a conversation before the concert and afterwards, we could go and have dinner together.
I turn around and face the man whom the voice actually belongs to. He is around fifty and his hair is turning gray at the temples.
“Would you please let me through?” he asks and I get up so he can make his way to his seat.
There are poisoned darts flying at me from everywhere. Is it really necessary that I go through this every single week over and over again? For a person who doesn’t even know I exist? I glance at my watch. Twenty minutes. The thin sweep hand is moving excruciatingly slow. Without knowing why, I stand up, flip the uncomfortable seat up and leave the room: down the stairs, towards the exit. The cloakroom attendant almost has a heart attack when I ask for my jacket back. The woman at the box office scrutinizes me with raised eye brows from behind the glass that seperates her from the rest of the world.
I walk through the left hand door which you can only use to get out. The air is cool and I am freezing. Slowly, I walk down the eight steps.
‘Click’ my heels hit the stone, ‘click, click, click, click, click, click, click’.
When I walk towards my car, I meet a few more of the green frogs that are heading to the concert hall. On an advertising column close to the parking lot, his face is plastered across a massive poster. He is smiling.
I still have my ticket in my pocket. Before I close the door on the driver’s side, I let it slide through a sewer grate. On my way back I stop at every red light. I unlock the door and get rid of my shoes. My mum walks into the hallway from the kitchen, wondering why I am back this early. I tell her the performance was cancelled. In my room, my trouser suit ends up in a pile on the floor. I have just put on jeans and a pullover when the telephone rings in the hallway.
“Yes,” I answer it.
“Miss Brown?”
I don’t know the voice. It’s warm and a little hoarse, a male voice.
“Yes, that’s me. Can I ask who is speaking?”
“My name is Ian Henning, I missed you.”
I gulp, almost choke on my own salive, cough, cry, because the coughing makes the tears well up in my eyes.
“Miss Brown?”
“Yes,” I cough.
“Are you ill? Is anything the matter?”
“No, no, I’m fine.”
“Where were you tonight?”
I still can’t believe it. It’s him! He has called me. I look at my watch. Interval time. He just called me during the interval!
“I was...,“ I start.
„You left. I found out from Miranda at the box office. She also gave me the number you usually order tickets from, making me swear not to tell anyone.”
“I...”
“You attended every single performance I can remember.”
“I...”
“I played like an idiot tonight. They’ll rip me to shreds in tomorrow’s paper.”
Silence, sometimes silence feels good.
“I’ve been wanting to talk to you for quite a while now. You caught my eye a couple of times.”
This is impossible. This must be a dream! To be entirely sure, I kick the wall. “Ouch!”
“You’re hurt after all.”
“No. This might sound ridiculous, but I… wanted to make sure I am awake.”
“And?”
“My toes are of the opinion that this isn’t a dream. I might have broken at least one of them.”
He chuckles. It sounds adorable.
“I was wondering whether we could perhaps... Would you mind to meet me for dinner after tonight’s performance?”
Waves of main are moving through my foot and up my leg. I haven’t only broken a toe or two. I might have broken my entire foot.
“I would love to. Where?”
It’s still unbelievable that I am actually talking to him.
“The Italian Restaurant next to the concert hall? I guess you know the time the concert ends by now.”
I can hear the third bell chime in the background.
“I’ll be there,” I say.
“Good,” he says, almost sounding a little shy. “See you later.”
It clicks. He’s hung up. I stare at the phone, at my face in the hallway mirror, back at the phone. Perhaps I should kick the wall with my other foot as well just to be sure? No. If this is a dream, I don’t want to wake up right now.
My trouser suit is still lying on the floor in my room. Part of me considers putting it on again but I decide against it. I have enough of the masquerade the blue frog invented to stick out a little less among all the green frogs. From today on the blue frog will be proud of its colour, because without it, it would never have attracted attention.
The End