Page 1 of Crescendo

Lydia

Melinda found me… not at my most shining moment. Half-drunk on cheap scotch just about drooling on a cello scratching out the same three staccato notes and telling it to do better wasn’t photogenic, to put it lightly.

I didn’t hear her coming into the house—even outside of my recording booth, the house was overall well soundproofed, or my neighbors would have killed me long ago—until she threw open the door and found me sprawled on the couch holding the cello on top of me like an illicit lover she’d caught me in a compromising position with, elbowing the back of the couch while I bowed the same G#-B-D melody over and over.

“Lydia?” she said, rushing across the room towards me. “Oh, god, look at you.”

“I don’t think I’m inclined to look at me right now,” I mumbled. “Melinda, I’m glad you’re here, bring… bring me the oboe.”

“You are not touching the damn oboe. Have you been drinking?”

I rolled my head back against the couch cushion. “The third shot… may have been a mistake. I’m not twenty-one anymore. What do you know?”

“Have you eaten?”

I gestured airily. “Do you want to hear a song? It’s the worst song that’s ever been made. From the worst musician who’s ever played. Listen to this.”

I played the G# again before she took the bow from my hand, the cruel woman. Ah… fate had abandoned me. It was over for me. I was no longer for this world.

“I’m ordering you food,” she said.

“Push me from the balcony,” I said. “Drop the cello on top of me. Make it look like an accident. Spike down, straight through the brain.”

“What do you want to eat?”

“Fried rice, please.”

I wound up before long at the kitchen table, the booze fading from the edges of my consciousness as the food arrived in record time and Melinda made sure I had about sixteen different drinks that weren’t alcohol.

She’d been a mixologist at a fancy restaurant for a few years one time, and the skills stuck with her.

Not like my skills. My skills had all abandoned me, and there was nothing left but spite, self-pity, and a craving for fried rice.

That last one, at least, I could address.

Melinda was an angel… if I weren’t a washed-up failure of a musician with no future and no prospects, maybe I’d write a song dedicated to her.

The fried rice helped, in one sense. Grounded me and took me out of the airy-fairy world where I was waiting for God’s angels to come down and lift me up towards the heavens, probably to gain momentum for the launch straight down to hell.

Instead, I found myself woefully located in the mortal plane, in front of an empty bowl and an empty career.

Maybe I didn’t want to be grounded right now.

It wasn’t the first time I’d had a breakdown in front of Melinda, my friend of nine years now who I’d met as a friend of a friend when I first moved to LA—the intermediary friend had abandoned me and moved to Texas for some godforsaken reason, but my friendship with Melinda had been the best thing to come out of it, both of us helping the other find their footholds in the film industry.

We’d both been young upstarts then, and while she’d done damn well, it had been me with the meteoric rise.

And the meteoric descent.

She still nurtured her dreams of being a director one day, but for now, she seemed happy working in cinematography, the head of a small team that had helped shoot some of the biggest movies of the past few years.

And I’d scraped the heavens with my score on the blockbuster franchise The Finders, making lists of greatest modern classical of all time, people talking about the transcendental writing of Lydia Howard Fox, like my name was a sacred invocation that, if you said it three times in the mirror, summoned a crashing, dramatic score that would move you to tears.

Well, I’d tried, dammit. Turned out nothing I said in the mirror helped. Nothing summoned anything. Except my friend, and fried rice, so actually, maybe it wasn’t all for nothing.

With the meal dwindling, Melinda looked across the table with her brows knotted in concern, and she got to the raw, bleeding heart of it. “They dropped you?”

“They dropped me, I dropped myself… it’s all the same.” I cradled my glass in both hands, sparkling apple cider with a touch of cranberry and lime. Melinda never did anything without going a hundred and ten percent on it. “It was more or less my recommendation to drop me.”

She pursed her lips. She had expressive features—another thing she and I didn’t have in common.

I was a tall, lean white woman, long hair, always tied up in a quick bun, usually dressed in loose tailoring; Melinda was a short, chubby Asian woman, short hair, always messy, usually dressed in a hoodie and jeans.

She had a smile like she’d just won the lottery.

I’d been told my smile looked like I’d been paid to do it, and not paid much.

We were also inverses of each other in that whenever she was in a career slump, I was in a high, and I helped pull her up with a pep talk, going out to the bar with her to let her wail and kick the bar and talk about how nobody would ever love her.

And whenever I was in a career slump, she was in a high, coming around to my house to make sure I wasn’t lying on a couch embracing a cello, talking to it.

“This was a huge-ass opportunity,” she said. “ The Quiet Ones is a massive franchise. Have you seen the fanbase?”

“And I’d rather bow out of it with dignity and grace than ruin the project for everyone by not being able to deliver. I may be a failure, but I’m at least a professional failure.”

She shook her head. “Lydia, you’ve been making incredible work. You’re just up in your own head.”

“I’ve been making trite nonsense. Contrived, hollow, meaningless.

All I’ve been making for a while now. God, Melinda,” I groaned, my head in my hands, elbows on the table, just about collapsing into my fried rice.

“I know this is the creative cycle. I know this is how it goes. But I don’t know what to do with myself.

It’s never this bad. It always gets better by now.

I’ve tried everything that normally makes it better, but there’s nothing.

I think I’ve just… finished. I had songs in me since I was born, begging to be let out, and I finally let the last one out. ”

“That’s not a thing.” She sighed, sinking back, raking a hand through her hair. “God, you’re a fucking disaster, aren’t you?”

“I am, yes.”

“Did they not like what you’d been working on? Or was it just you beating yourself up?”

I waved a hand in the air, equivocating.

“They liked bits here and there. José really liked the tunnel theme. But overall, it was mediocre at best. But it was really the main theme that stuck… I couldn’t do anything until I’d figured that out, and what I was working with was horrible.

Bland, clichéd, forgettable. It wasn’t worthy of the franchise. ”

She sighed, scrunching up her face. “You really did have it bad… you never told me you were having a block with it.”

I put my hands up lightly. “I thought if I didn’t acknowledge it, it would go away.”

“Uh-huh. How’d that work out for you?”

“Hm. It left something to be desired.”

“Do they have a replacement?”

I smiled thinly. “Natália. I recommended her, reached out to her, gave her what I’d been working on and told her to do a better job than me, and the execs were just happy to not have to figure out something else from scratch. This will be a great break for her, too.”

She sighed through a sad little smile. “That’s sweet… I know how much you enjoyed the mentoring program. And I do see a lot of your style in her, too. I’m sure she’ll do amazing, and I’m sure with the pressure taken off, you’ll get a second to breathe again and get your flow back.”

“Maybe I just gave all my talent to her. She does incredible things with ostinati. I’m a hack compared to her these days. The spirit of music has left my body and entered hers, and now I’m just a decrepit—”

“Okay, let’s not do that.”

“I am decrepit, though,” I muttered.

“You’re thirty-one and you’ve had one job go badly. Maybe you need to do some more mentoring again? Maybe that can get you some inspiration?”

I laughed bitterly. “What am I going to teach somebody? How to cry into fried rice?”

“Come on. You know you’re better than that. You’re Lydia Howard Fox, dammit. There would be a million people out there who want to work with you if you even floated the suggestion.”

“A million people I get to disappoint.”

“Lydia.”

I pushed out a short sigh, knocking back the rest of my drink and standing up. “Let’s get back to this conversation later. I need a walk or something.”

She stood up with me, instantly changing gears. She was a good friend like that. “Let’s pop down to the beach for a stroll. Water’s always calming for you.”

∞∞∞

Natália was doing a good job. Poor girl acted like she’d never scored in her life— The Quiet Ones was shaping up to be the biggest project she’d ever worked on, by a lot—but it only took her a day and a half to pound out a title theme that moved me to tears.

Might have just been that I was in tears grieving my own hopes and dreams. But I wouldn’t say something dramatic like that, would I? Not in a million years.

Melinda looked after me while I was a sad, anxious wreck.

My period showed up later in the day after the crash, which felt like insult to injury, even though I suppose literally it was injury to insult.

And it was a few days after, once I’d finished making lofty statements about filling a contrabass with stones and tying myself to it and throwing myself into the ocean, that Melinda had a clever smile on her face when I met her at our favorite local bar in Santa Monica.

“How’s it going,” she said with the classic sup nod as I slid into the seat next to her.

“You look like you’re in a good mood,” I said. “That guy you were talking about finally text you back?”

She wrinkled her nose, waving me off. “Ugh, nah, forget that asshole. There’s this girl I’m kinda talking to now, but that’s not what this is. I’ve got something I want to see if you’re interested in.”

“Is it a sixth-story balcony?”

“Jesus, stop talking like that, you sick freak,” she laughed, kicking the side of my foot.

The bartender showed up with her cocktail—as usual, it was something I’d never seen before—and she’d ordered my dirty martini ahead of me, so I guess she was expecting me to be happy about the news she had. No pressure or anything.

“All right. Let’s hear it.”

She pulled up her phone while I sipped my drink, and she slid it across to me. An advertisement for a music program, from the looks of things, called Crescendo.

“You loved mentoring,” she said. “Why not step it up a little bit? This kind of… symphonic boot camp has been running the past couple of years, and it’s absolutely exploded.

They have their regular cast of teachers for each two-month session, but they make a big deal of the special guests they bring in to supplement the core staff each time.

If you were on the roster? People would lose their minds. ”

I frowned. “People would lose their minds from me trying to teach them and breaking down crying on a violin partway through… where is it?”

“You and I both know you’re too professional for that.

You’d pull yourself together for it and feel better after.

Like you always do. Where it is, that’s the best part,” she said, taking a shot of her cocktail.

“It’s a whole new scenery to help you clear your head.

South Kensington, London, not far from the Royal Albert Hall. ”

My heart ached, a sudden tight sensation in my chest, looking at the advertisement.

Melinda was a good one… the suggestion was clever, and she knew how to hook me in.

I’d only been to London once before, a quick trip to see a major performance at the Royal Albert Hall from legendary conductor Cynthia Altman herself, and it had been early enough in the rise of my career that it felt like a nostalgic piece at the base of my heart, a treasured feeling I didn’t dare go near for fear of soiling it.

London at night together with the group, all laughing and talking together, a bunch of us all sharing dreams that one day we’d end up like the way I’d apparently turned out now—and the sense of magic in the air seeing the show.

The way we were all left speechless heading out.

I don’t know how long we were like that before I noticed I was tearing up, just a little.

Melinda, ever the good friend, pretended she didn’t notice, but I could tell from the slight sympathetic smile and the more controlled way she picked up her drink that she’d seen it.

Still, she left the air open for me to be the one to speak, and eventually, speak I did.

“That sounds nice,” I said.

“I think it’d be good for you. And everyone would love to take your courses.”

I shook my head. “I won’t do it.”

“Huh—” She turned to me with a frown. “Dude, you were tearing up reminiscing about London and everything—”

I scowled. “Oh, now we are acknowledging it, hm?”

“—and now suddenly you’re not interested?”

I pushed her phone back to her. “I’m not going to teach,” I said. “How much does it cost to attend?”

She shot me a wild-eyed look. “Lydia Howard Fox. You do not need to go to music school. You are the music school.”

“Maybe I need to go back to the basics,” I said lightly, which was nicer than saying I just realized I can’t continue to make music with my dreams dead and I just want to walk the same ground where those dreams had blossomed in hopes the seeds will sprout again.

I didn’t feel like saying that out loud.

“You’d get bored. And everyone would just spend the whole time being like oh my god, you’re Lydia Howard Fox. You’d give the poor teachers impostor syndrome!”

I laughed. “Fair’s fair. I have it too.”

“People are going to think you’re insufferable,” she said. “ The Lydia Howard Fox herself, showing up to listen to lectures about things she knows?”

“That’s fine. Don’t really mind what they think of me.”

She raked her fingers back through her hair. “I can’t believe you’re doing this to me. I made a perfect suggestion and you’re doing this!”

“It is a perfect suggestion. I’ll… think about it,” I laughed, but—as wild as it sounded—I didn’t think I had to think about it that much.

Judging by the way my chest was already feeling so much lighter, like I could breathe again, and for the first time in some time, I found myself looking forward to something.

I raised my glass to hers. “Here’s to your perfect suggestion. ”

“Fuck you, dude,” she laughed, but she clinked her glass to mine, and we drank to that.