The Diva – Part 1: Dressing Room

The opera house was dark, the season finished, the cleaners gone. Isabella still had a key to dressing room number one, the star's room, with its brass-framed mirror, its velvet chaise and the faint ghost of greasepaint and roses. She had sung on that stage for twenty-two years.

She was forty-eight, magnificent and unapologetic. Theo was thirty-seven, her accompanist for nine years, a quiet, gifted pianist who had always, in the wings and the rehearsal rooms, stood a half-step behind her and been happy there. Last month he had confessed, over a bottle of wine, that he wished she would give him orders.

In the dressing room she sat at the mirror and turned to face him. "The terms, darling. Say them for me."

He read from the page she had written. No marks, no real humiliation, nothing beyond the night, no audience. A lamp on the dressing table, always on. The word was Curtain.

"And if you say it?"

"You stop. We have wine."

"Yes. And I shall ask, at each half hour, whether the performance should continue." She rose in a swirl of silk, a long black dressing gown and a diamanté pin at her throat. Her voice dropped into the deep, slow tones of the stage. "You are late for the rehearsal, maestro."

"I'm sorry, Madame."

"You will be." She circled him slowly, like a cat. "Stand there. Eyes forward. You will remain silent until I permit you to speak."

He stood in front of the mirror. She sat at the dressing table and began, with great deliberation, to remove her rings, one by one, laying them in a dish. It took four minutes. In that time she said nothing at all, and watched his reflection, and he felt his chest loosening.

"Are you content, Theo?"

"Content, Madame."

"Good. Then we shall begin the first act."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Curtain Call.