Somewhere in the middle of beat three, in the coda of the second movement, Marcie stopped suddenly.

She sighed, pulled the cloth from her chin and rested the bow delicately on the music stand.

She turned, cradling the instrument, barely feeling the weight of it in her steady palms. She lowered it into the open case, wiping a bead of sweat off the body with her cloth. After closing the case and sending the latches home, placing it on the piano, Marcie stepped away from her practice stool, and swung around with her leg in a high arc, bringing it down on the end table next to the couch, sending her mother's porcelain lamp to the floor to shatter into countless splinters.

"God fucking shit DAMMIT!!Ó she screamed, still not satisfied. She kicked the table again, sending the cheap plywood piece trundling into the bedroom.

"Fuck." She crouched down to observe the galaxy of shards that was the carcass of her favorite lamp. "Mom's going to kill me."

Not bothering to clear the mess, Marcie stood again to stare at the page. The run of notes, so neat and logical on the staff, sloped triumphantly before her, the string of barred sixteenth notes transformed to a wicked sneer. It was not even that hard of a run, and so inconsequential to the flow of the piece, but the manual contortions it required had sent her crying from rehearsal, and now stumped her insurmountably as she pored over it and over it, unable to make the combinations work without her hands seizing up with hot blasts of pain. Her heavy breaths brought her down, as she rubbed her swollen wrist.

Two more days. Two more days before she went into the studio to record the piece, with a group of musicians she had only met days before, to feature a soloist she had never heard of. A soloist who wasn't even there for half the rehearsals. They quit early tonight, because of Marcie's consistent complaints about her wrist, and expressed their distaste with her openly.

"Maybe if you had taken better care of yourself, this wouldn't be a problem."

Marcie shuffled to the bathroom, and pulled the hydrogen peroxide from the medicine cabinet. Tipping it generously into a cotton ball, she stared at herself in the mirror, her cheeks still glossy and ruddy from tears. She brushed limp tendrils of hair from her face, and forced a feeble smile, her lips trembling from weariness. She dabbed the puff on her neck and winced. She had had these infections before, brought on by constant contact with the chin rest of her violin, but in the past she was able to let up on her practice to accommodate its recovery. Unfortunately, this time she had no such luxury. And now four days later and it still looks as bad. She recalled the words of her agent. . "I don't know, the producer said some bit about how he was concerned about you affecting the performance and the chemistry of the ensemble. . ."

"My bony ASS!" she hissed, still dabbing. It was all too obvious to her that there was no chemistry in this group, due in no small part to the shoddy planning, hackneyed organization and rushed schedule. They wanted this group to breathe as one, to be the glorious gilt carriage upon whose lilting clouds of celestial harmonies Ernestine Golouise, prodigal virtuoso violinist of age 19, could perch his pasty, overfed posterior, to grace him into international acclaim. The album's producer cajoled them to "bond together. . .you need to basically marry each other. .That's how together you need to be to properly complement Ernestine's genius. " And as usual, this comment led to not even one stop for coffee on the way home. The group could barely say goodnight to each other, and in just the last two days, had become caustic and candidly vocal about their frustrations with the project.

Marcie stepped from the bathroom to the tiny kitchenette, pulling her sizable bottle of Tanqueray from the top shelf. ". . .sweet liquor eases the pain. . ." she joked to herself, trying to keep her spirits high. Pouring a squat blue glass with hardly a finger of gin, she remembered the faces at rehearsal, saw them glare at her during the break, heard their whispers. . .

All this stress on a no-name label with a no-name soloist playing a no-name piece. Paving the road to obscurity, if playing in the classical realm isn't bad enough. Marcie knew from the start it would be tough, from the admonitions of her parents to the inserts in the college catalogues ". . .classical music is a very competitive industry, with many talented performers pursuing the same few opportunities. . ." The challenge never seemed to phase her. She had some good times, played in some musicals, for fusion albums. She even had a few solos on tape. But now she was thirty-two, still temping during the day and playing the gigging circuit, and coming to terms with the one variable she never expected. . .the simple fear that her playing days were over. Every knot in her hand reminded her, and every week without a call. The offers grew from spotty to seldom, her opportunities preempted by the new starlings of the New York scene, the cut and polished faces swept from the steely doors of Julliard and onto the fifth chair, churning out the Mendelssohn and Mozart like mass-produced pastry, with infrequent dabblings in Mahler, Ravel, and, of course Tchaikovsky, lest we forget the year 1812. The cannons still boomed, and the people still came, to sit in the sun while they hacked through the big ones, the inattentive smatterings of applause the performers' only affirmation that the common people still acknowledged their lifestyle, the romantic martyrdom that signified the lonely passion for their art. That was what had attracted Marcie from the start, her pudgy fingers fumbling through the ludicrous boldfaced exercises, dreaming of staring out at the great lawn and transmitting her deepest dreams through the simple frequencies which rocked and buffeted the air, bringing their gentle charge to the ears and hearts of the good people. That is why she endlessly rubbed her hands in Ben-Gay, and that is why, two days later, she crossed into the spotlit closets of the studio and into the walnut-lined room, to fidget on the cold steel chair and pray for one good take. . .one good take, her hands hot and numb from her treatments. She dreamed of the infinitely-speckled galaxy of faces, imagined the music quietly radiating from her like heat from the distant sun, the glorious product of complex natural dynamics, that crossed the empty infinitude to cast its gentle glow on the faces of the millions, to lull their heads back and cast a smile with its gentle ecstasy, their faces rosy and glistening from the nurturing tones. And as she mounted the elusive run in the coda , and skittered down effortlessly on the other side, thumping solidly into the conclusion of the piece, tears streaked her face, and urgent throes of relief and fulfillment racked her body, her breaths coming long and even, possibly for the first time in years. Marcie passed it off as sweat to the rest of them, stroking her face vigorously with her towel and basking in the possibility of a few more good years. They sat in silence as the playback loomed and throbbed in the space above their heads, a cohesive, professional recording of a sturdy chamber group. She had heard the like many times in the conservatory, and in the records of her own collection, and she stalked proudly from the building at a considerably timely 7:15, carrying herself proudly, watching herself live the life of a professional musician, violin stuffed in her armpit like a bayonet.

And sometime later, as the very same recording emitted effortlessly from the factory overstock speakers mounted on the high stucco walls of a nameless office building, the music spreading out to drape itself invisibly upon the heads of the muttering workers hunched over their desks, trickling down the steel and felt partitions in the acrid throb of countless fluorescent tubes, a Mr. Terkel would come bounding through the simulated pine doors, papers wadded in his bulging fists, and, emerging from his divergent stream of thought, bark ". . .and turn that shit off, willya? Put on something peppy, that crap makes me wanna take a nap, for Crissake!"