Control in C Minor

Raquel is forty-two years old and she has learned that loneliness does not go away when you move in with someone. It changes shape, that is all. Six years ago, when she was thirty-six and still eating dinner standing at the kitchen counter, loneliness was an empty apartment and a phone that did not ring. Now it is something quieter and stranger. Now it is being in the same room as another person and feeling untethered from her, like a boat that has slipped its mooring while the dock stays right there in view.

She thinks about this on a rainy Tuesday evening in Portland, sitting on the couch in the living room with her cello still in its case by the window. She has been home from rehearsal for two hours. She has not opened the case. That alone tells her something is wrong, because there was a time, back when she was building her name with the chamber ensemble, when a bad rehearsal meant playing until her fingers ached, working the thing out note by note until it surrendered.

Tonight she does not want to work anything out. Tonight she wants someone else to decide what happens next, down to the smallest part of it. Which is a confession she can only make in her own head, and even there it comes out sideways.

The rehearsal this evening had gone badly in the way that rehearsals go badly, nothing dramatic, just the second violin dragging in the third movement and the conductor looking at her every time the cello line came in, as if the problem were hers. It was not hers. She knew it was not hers. But she had spent the whole afternoon turning it over anyway, taking the blame apart and putting it back together, and by the time she drove home through the rain she was exhausted from a day in which nothing had actually happened.

That is the untethered feeling, she decides. It is not sadness. It is the absence of anything holding her in place. At work there is the music, the conductor, the parts written down in ink a hundred years before she was born. At home there is, in theory, Carla. But Carla has her own work, her own deadlines, her own sketches spread across the coffee table, and Raquel cannot exactly walk up to her and say, please, decide everything for me for a while, I have run out of decisions.

She has said it before, in her way. Carla has learned her way of saying it. That is one of the quiet miracles of their four years living together in this small two-bedroom apartment, that a woman who says almost nothing can be heard completely.

The radiator ticks. The rain keeps up against the window. Raquel pulls her knees up on the couch and stares at the cello case and does not move.

She hears Carla's key in the door a little after six. Carla is thirty-six, a graphic designer, and she comes home from work the same way every day, coat off, shoes by the door, a small sigh that means the day was long but survivable. Tonight Raquel tracks all of it by sound without turning her head.

Carla comes into the living room and stops. Raquel knows she is being read. The unopened case, the knees up, the untouched mug of tea going cold on the side table. Carla reads rooms for a living and she reads this one in about four seconds.

"Long day?" Carla says.

"Long day," Raquel says.

Carla does not ask what happened at rehearsal. She already knows that nothing happened at rehearsal, that the nothing is the point. She crosses the room, moves a stack of her own sketches off the couch, and sits down close, so that her thigh rests against Raquel's folded knees. She puts her hand flat on Raquel's shin and leaves it there.

"Do you need me tonight?" she says.

It is such a plain question. Raquel has heard it maybe a dozen times in six years and it has never once stopped landing the way it does, like a hand set down on the back of her neck. She nods. Then, because nodding feels like less than the moment deserves, she says it out loud.

"Yes. Please."

"Okay," Carla says. She rubs Raquel's shin once, slowly, and stands up. "Come with me."

Raquel unfolds herself and follows her down the hall to the bedroom. This is a walk she has made many times and it never stops feeling like the longest walk in the apartment, ten steps on old carpet with the rain behind her and Carla's back in front of her.

The bedroom is simple. Bed, two nightstands, a lamp with a warm bulb, the dresser Carla refinished the first summer they lived here. Carla turns on the lamp and leaves the overhead light off. Then she sits on the edge of the bed and looks up at Raquel, who is standing in the middle of the room with her hands hanging at her sides, already starting to feel the mooring line go taut.

"Before anything," Carla says. "Safeword?"

"Coda," Raquel says. It is a joke that stopped being a joke years ago, the musical term for the end, the final passage, and now it is just the word. It has never been used in earnest. It sits there between them anyway, every time, available.

"And if you can't speak?"

"Three taps on your wrist. Or I tap. Three taps means stop."

"Good." Carla pats the bed beside her and Raquel sits. "Colors."

"Green, yellow, red," Raquel says. "Red is the same as coda."

"Red is the same as coda," Carla agrees. She takes Raquel's hand and holds it in both of hers, thumb moving over her knuckles. "Tonight I want to use my hands on you. Spanking, mostly, maybe the paddle if you're up for it. I want your wrists tied, something soft, to the headboard. Nothing over your mouth, I want to hear you. Afterward I'll hold you as long as you need, water, the grey blanket, whatever it takes. That's the plan. Anything you want to add or take away?"

Raquel runs it through her head the way she runs a passage of music before playing it, bar by bar. Wrists, yes. Hands, yes. The paddle, she thinks about the paddle and feels something in her chest come down half a notch, the way a tuning peg slips into place.

"The paddle is fine," she says. "Have it ready. We'll see how far I get."

"You can safeword the paddle out mid-scene," Carla says. "You know that."

"I know that."

"Then we're agreed." Carla squeezes her hand once and lets go. "One more thing. You don't decide anything from here on. Not what happens next, not how long, not when it stops unless it's a safeword. You just feel what you feel and tell me the truth about it. That's your whole job tonight. Can you do that?"

This is the part that Raquel would never be able to explain to anyone outside this room. It sounds like nothing. Give up your decisions, tell the truth. But she has spent all day making small correct judgments, about tempo and balance and whose fault things were, and her whole body is tired of it, and Carla has just told her she can put all of it down. It is not nothing. It is the entire thing.

"Yes," Raquel says. "I can do that."

"Then get undressed and lie down on your front. Take your time, I'm going to wash my hands."

Carla leaves for the bathroom and Raquel stands up in the lamplight and begins. Sweater over her head, folded on the dresser. Boots, jeans, the rest, everything folded because Carla has never once asked for that and Raquel does it anyway, does it because folding gives her hands one last set of small correct judgments to make before she surrenders the habit of them.

She lies down on her front on the bed, cheek against the cool pillow, arms up over her head. In the bathroom the water runs. The rain keeps up against the window, steady and unhurried, and Raquel realizes that for the first time all day she is not thinking about the rehearsal at all. Her mind has gone quiet and wide, like the pause before a downbeat.

Carla comes back with dry hands and sits down beside her on the bed. She has a rolled strip of soft grey fabric in one hand, the ties she made herself a couple of years back, cut from an old duvet cover because the store-bought ones were too rough. Raquel has always found that detail funny, that the restraints in this house are recycled bedding, but it also seems right. Everything Carla uses on her is something Carla made or chose with care.

"Arms," Carla says.

Raquel stretches her wrists up toward the headboard. Carla loops the fabric twice around each one, not tight, snug enough that Raquel can feel the grip when she pulls, and ties them off to the slats. It takes her about a minute, unhurried, checking the give on each knot. Then she sits back and looks at what she has made.

"Pull," she says.

Raquel pulls. The ties hold. Something in her shoulders lets go at the same time, some final small stewardship of her own limbs handed over, and she settles her cheek back onto the pillow.

"There you go," Carla says, more to herself than anything.