Good Advice
by Israela
Margalit
I had that
agent, straight from the storybooks: salt-and-pepper
hair, protective. He thought that he’d
discovered me, which he did—that is, I
knocked on his door and begged him to discover me
until he obliged.
He gave me all
kinds of advice. Never say you don’t know a
piece of music. If they ask you to play a
concerto that you hadn’t yet learned, say
thank you for the opportunity, then practice
around the clock. Another piece of advice was to
always be cordial to the assistants: the
assistant conductor, the assistant manager, the
assistant elevator boy. You never know where they’ll
end up. But his favorite advice was how to
comport myself with the maestros: ”Whatever
you do with the one, you’ll have to do with
the others. Favored nations! Don’t sleep
with a conductor unless you intend to marry him.”
So when I
played with a cute and irresistible conductor who
invited me to dinner after the last of three
concerts, and we slept together, I married him.
My agent advised me to no longer appear as my
husband’s soloist because that would smack
of nepotism and ruin my reputation. But soon we
found out that other conductors had lost interest
in me. They viewed me as fifth column, someone
privy to their shortcomings and behind-the-scenes
antics, and sure to report to the enemy during
pillow talk. My agent said that my new inability
to blindly idolize my conductors made me toxic,
and that he had run out of good advice. But just
as my career was being reduced to dust, an
assistant elevator boy became a sensational
maestro overnight, and—remembering my
kindness to him while he was a nonentity—booked
me as his soloist on a televised world tour.
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