Toscanini and the Cellist

Leoni was standing on a stepstool driving nails into the wall for curtain rod holders. The sun blinded her, and she hit her thumb with the hammer and let out a yelp.

Her husband Jeff was sitting on the floor trying to make a shaky leg on a chair secure with a screw that was too short to hold the leg to the seat. He threw the screwdriver down and scattered sawdust off the newspaper onto the carpet.

"Can't you please just stop fiddling with that chair?" Leoni climbed down and dropped to the sofa, sucking her thumb. She was a slender young woman with long brown legs in denim cutoffs.

"Can't you please just stop using obsequious expressions like ‘Can't you please just�?" Jeff was a big blond man with a Harvard accent.

She looked down on his golden head. "Who, me? A well-bred person like me?"

"Do you want to see my mother sprawled all over the floor?" He stood the chair upright and it buckled.

"Oh, my no!" Leoni grinned.

He wiped his forehead with his shirttail and left a grease stain on the new green linen shirt that had cost $75. Leoni's grin faded. "Put it in the bedroom and let her sit on something else, and can't you please just get the sawdust up before you grind it into the carpet?" She climbed up on the stepstool again.

He switched the vacuum cleaner on and blew sawdust everywhere.

"That's the blower setting!" she screamed.

He turned the machine off and looked up at her. "You're imperious with a hammer in your hand."

She got down off the stepstool, laid the hammer on the piano bench, and looked him over. "And you're turning into your mother. The closer she gets to San Antonio, the more I hear her voice every time you open your mouth. Next you'll be telling me it's bad to be imperious, but it's better to be imperious than obsequious."

"Since you mention it."

"It's bad to be vulgar, but it's better to be vulgar than to be genteel. If I belch after dinner, that's vulgar, but if I say ‘excuse me�?for belching, that's genteel."

"Ella was lecturing me, not you."

"She was speaking to you, but it was for my benefit."

"Why do you take everything she says personally?"

"She flicks her eyes."

He laughed and switched the vacuum cleaner on again. He got all the sawdust up, but then there was a high, whirring sound. The edge of the newspaper was caught in the vacuum cleaner. Leoni darted around him and turned it off. She was breathing hard.

"And when she's not flicking her eyes, she looks around. She'll be looking around for signs that I'm still genteel after a whole year of living with you."

He unplugged the vacuum cleaner and tore at the paper. "Then we'd better get rid of the evidence. Should we take down the pictures of kittens with big eyes?"

Most of the paper had come away, but some of it was still caught in the machine. He flipped the switch and got the same high whirring sound. He kicked the machine.

"My mother gave me those pictures," Leoni said between her teeth, "and they’re on our walls because I love her. She may be genteel, but she never flicks her eyes. And kicking an inanimate object is just puerile."

He kissed the vacuum cleaner handle. "Forgive me, madame," he said to it. He swept Leoni up in his arms and set her on top of the grand piano.

He danced around the piano, played a few bars of "Stayin�?Alive," then seized her again and threw her on the sofa.

"Can't you please just stop pulling at my clothes?" She beat on his chest.

"Those kittens with big eyes turn me on. Your clothes are in the wrong place. I want to see those clothes on the floor."

"Well I don't want to see them on the floor. Let go of me."

He unbuttoned her blouse and tugged at the zipper of her shorts. She screamed.

His brows came together. "You don't want to make up?"

"Make up? You mean ‘shut up.�?Take your greasy hands off me!"

He let her go, and his face closed down.

She buttoned up, grabbed the hammer, climbed the stepstool, and beat on the wall. When she came down again, Jeff and the vacuum cleaner and the chair and the mess on the floor were gone. All was quiet except for the sound of the shower running.

She put the rod up and smoothed out the draperies. Violins, violas, and cellos floated on a sea of gold. "You looked classy in the store," she said to them, "but you look like kitsch on my windows." She sighed. "At least you’re hanging straight."

***

Jeff was sitting on the stone wall at the top of the Paseo del Alamo when Leoni caught sight of him. When she crossed the street from Alamo Plaza, Jeff leapt down, seized her, and swung her up on the wall. Her shopping bag bonked him on the head.

"What's this?"

"Wait till you see me in this dress. You'll say ‘Where’s my Leoni? Where’s my little wren?�?

"If you're in there, I'll find you." He set her on the ground, and with his arm around her shoulders they started down the wide stone steps toward the river.

Water cascaded in terraced troughs along the steps, and crepe myrtle bloomed on the stone walls. "It’s so sweet when it’s just us," she said.

"It’s always just us." They reached the River Walk at the lower level of the Hyatt Regency Hotel, where the river ran through the lobby.

She sighed and gazed at the river. "Men are so blind."

"Why can’t you just ignore the things about Ella that bother you? I do." Umbrella tables lined the sidewalks, crowded with tourists and natives on their lunch break. Shaded from the sun, they had drinks and food from the cafes and hotels on both sides of the river.

"When she criticizes you, it’s just mother talk. When she criticizes me, she means it." Along the river banks, live oaks and cypress cohabited with palm trees, whose spiky baby siblings prickled among ferns and shrubs with leaves of green and yellow and orange and red.

"When was that? What did she say?"

"She didn’t say anything." They were passing Kangaroo Court, a British pub with small round tables shaded by Union Jack umbrellas. Leoni glared at a man who was giving a baby in a stroller a sip from a long-necked Budweiser bottle. "What she said on the phone this morning was, ‘Leoni, dear, I saw a dress the color of your eyes, and I couldn't resist buying it for you. Can you meet a fitter at 10?�?"

They dodged three dogs on a leash that were dragging a breathless woman down off a curving stone footbridge.

"Give it back to her." It was a command.

"You give it back to her, but not until after the opera."

"You know how I feel about this."

"But you don't know how I feel. I won’t walk into that party and meet Ella’s high-falutin friends wearing my prom dress."

The sidewalk was clear of tables in front of Hu-nan’s Chinese River Garden, a long dark veranda lit by hanging lanterns shaped like butterflies standing on a reflecting pool.

"I thought we had the same values."

"We do. But we don't have the same clothes. You have a tuxedo hanging at the back of your closet. You don’t have to choose between spending money we don’t have and telling your mother you can’t go because you don’t have anything to wear."

"I’d go naked before I would take anything from Ella. I made that clear before I met you. And it includes you."

"This is for Ella. Do you think I want the bloody dress for myself? After tonight we can burn it if that will make you feel better."

At Boudro’s, a bistro imported from New Orleans, the umbrellas looked like warped yellow pancakes, with their brims turning up instead of down. Farther on, the umbrellas at the Lone Star Café were a modified version of the Texas state flag.

"I don't understand how this happened," Jeff said. They passed under a bridge that rumbled with cars on the street above.

Down the sidewalk a few yards Ella sat under a bright orange umbrella outside Casa del Rio. She waved.

Leoni lowered her voice and spoke in a rush. "How it happened was that she snooped in my closet and found my prom dress. She had to do something to keep her friends from finding out that her son’s wife is not presentable. She had two choices: rub me out or buy me a dress."

Ella was drinking iced tea. A sheer organdy dress with peach-colored blossoms draped her small, exquisite body. Her black hair was drawn back in a chignon, and a wide-brim straw hat drooped over the edge of the seat of the chair next to her. She dabbed her porcelain forehead with a napkin.

"Why does she do that?" Leoni whispered. "Ella doesn’t sweat. Every hair’s in place, even in this humidity."

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