desireearmfeldt

Inara’s fingers caress the strings of the dulcimer, teasing out the longing notes with each precise pluck.  Her spine is straight but supple, her arms curved just so; her hands hover over the instrument like waterbirds suspended in the moment before the dive.  Her head is bowed just enough to create a graceful line of shoulders, neck, hair; just enough to suggest demure submission without making her look shy or hiding her face from an audience.  No matter that she’s alone in her room at the moment; posture and deportment are as much a part of making music as playing the notes correctly.

Her fingers know this song so thoroughly that Inara doesn’t need to glance down.  She could play it note-perfect while discussing philosophy.  She could probably play it in her sleep.  It’s a lament, dating back to Earth-that-Was: the song of a lover left behind, yearning for the beloved who has gone away to war.

Technical precision, by itself, leaves the listener cold.  To do justice to the music, and to the audience, the performer must express the music’s soul, touch the listener’s heart.  From the first touch of the strings, Inara takes the song inside her, breathes it, lives it, sends it forth again like a bird, like a kiss, like a whisper close by your ear.  The trickiest thing is to do this without opening too much of her own soul.  The paradox at the heart of the Companion’s art is that she must share a little of herself with everyone, because intimacy cannot be one-sided; both partners must be present and open.  But at the same time, a Companion cannot let too much of herself be seen.  Allure depends partly on mystery; performance on illusion.  No one truly wants to see the hands and strings behind the puppet curtain.  And then, too, to open oneself to each client would leave the Companion’s soul worn and frayed from so much traffic.

Inara thinks she has grasped the secret of how it’s done, though she hasn’t yet mastered the doing of it.  To be open and screened at the same time; to let your heart speak in ways that can be felt but not understood.  It’s easiest to do through music, which is so abstract that it offers up emotions directly, unfiltered and unexamined.  She lets herself become the woman looking up at the mountains at sunrise, remembering the shape of his back as he trudged away from her, remembering his touch in the dark.  Knowing that he will never return, his death already seen in the silver clouds that float on the horizon.  She offers these feelings—hers/not hers—up to the music, to the empty room.

As Inara’s hands drift easily, carefully above the strings, her eyes rest on the sad little pile of wood and wire that sits by the foot of her bed.  She found it waiting there for her when she returned to her room to change her clothes before dinner.  Even shattered, there was no mistaking whose instrument it used to be.

Her mind’s eye can clearly see the wild grin on Nandi’s face as she lifts the dulcimer in her beautiful hands and smashes it into the wall with a twanging crash, the delicate wood splintering, strings whipping and curling.  Inara can’t contain the smile that creeps over her face as she imagines, instead, the dulcimer coming down over the instructor’s shiny, bald head.  Shards of wood cascading over his shoulders, his thin lips sputtering in dumbfounded outrage.  Nandi with her head thrown back, her unbound hair tumbling around her face, laughing from the belly, laughing with her whole body.

The dulcimer is a versatile instrument, but its voice is soft and polite, even at its most passionate.  She lets herself entertain the fantasy of holding a digital guitar in her hands, its neck pressed close between her breasts, its body cradled between her legs.  It shrieks like a banshee, its wails making her whole body vibrate, shaking the ceiling down, metal and plaster raining down and the white stars winking down at her, while here in this room, her posture never wavers and her hands coax out aching notes that hang in the still air like tears on a porcelain cheek.