The next morning we leave for Boise, Idaho. Harriet enters the RV, calmly removes a box of apples from the foldout couch, and takes a seat. But something in her demeanor is changed. She has a wild look, like, I dare you to fuck with me. I dare you to say I have the biggest, most beautiful smile. Just one more time. Just one more fucking time.
Anger
I saw The Composer get angry once. It was a Sunday afternoon at a run-down mall in Kansas. Kim and I played like robots for hours, but for once there were no crowds of adoring fans around the CD table. The Composer sat forlornly at the customerless sales table, gazing for hours into the storefront of a Sears, where shoppers examined lawn tractors. Eventually a few people approached our sales table, but they did so cautiously, as if afraid of committing to something. After all, buying music is not the same as buying a tractor. You cannot see it, touch it, examine its gears. Music is a tricky product. It’s abstract, effusive, intangible. Music makes no guarantees. At the same time, music is the easiest of purchases. Do you like what you’re listening to? If so, take it home and listen some more. If not, move on. But on that day our customers seemed reluctant to trust their own ears. They stood far away from the sales table and shouted questions about genre: Is this classical music? Sometimes The Composer said that it was. Other times he called it “instrumental music,” a term brilliant for its simultaneous accuracy and evasiveness.
All of a sudden my E string exploded into shreds. I instinctively stopped playing to survey the damage and unwind the frayed end of the broken string from its peg. Before I realized what was happening, The Composer cut the power to the music and marched toward me. He was furious. He came very close to me, inches from my face. For the first time since I’d met him, he looked me directly in the eye. His face had a coldness I had never seen before. I looked down, panicked with the too-late realization that my broken string had just jeopardized our entire charade. Even the least sophisticated Kansan would know that listening to flawless violin music while watching the violinist bust an E string was a sure sign of the Milli Violini.
In a different context, a broken E string could be a sign of genius. Take Midori Goto, the fourteen-year-old violin prodigy who made world headlines in 1986 when, as she performed a solo at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, she broke her E string, took another violin, broke that E string, took another violin, and continued the performance without missing a note. When the performance was over, Leonard Bernstein fell to his knees before her. The Midori story, which I read about when I was eight years old, a few months after beginning violin lessons, was a devastating revelation. For a few days after reading it, I wanted to quit the violin. The Midori story was my first encounter with the idea of prodigy, the idea that there are people in the world who can play the violin better at eight years old than most professionals can after a lifetime of practice. It was a shockingly un-American idea: No matter how hard you work, you’ll never be as good as someone who was born great.
The Composer had afforded me a career in which I could skip past the Midori problem, ignore the contradiction inherent in having mediocre violin skills, yet putting “Violinist” as my profession on my tax returns. But on that day in Kansas, as I stood with my head hanging in shame, my E string dangling limp and silent, there was no Leonard Bernstein kneeling before me in awe. There was only The Composer towering above me, hissing at me in a low, hard voice:
“MELISSA! Never, NEVER stop playing! NEVER!”
I wish I had said to The Composer that there was no way for any violinist, no matter how good, to prevent the occasional broken string. I wish I had said that in all of my time working for him, I had never received any explicit instructions for what to do if a string broke, that neither he nor anyone in a management position had ever acknowledged the fact that what we were doing was the Milli Violini. But I didn’t say any of this. I didn’t yell, “Fuck The Composer!” I didn’t even roll my eyes.
What I did, instead, was apologize. Perhaps I did this because immediate apology is the default female response to male rage (survival mechanism). Perhaps I did this because The Composer was my boss and I was his employee (The Money). Perhaps I did this because I was one of many young female musicians The Composer employed, many of whom were more attractive than me, and because of this I often felt unworthy of the job (life in the body).
Or perhaps I apologized because I hadn’t yet learned that I was capable of expressing anger. I didn’t know that if I was angry it need not be confined to the quiet pages of a private journal but could be screamed aloud (Harriet running toward the Space Needle).
Not expressing anger was what made me “a very easy person to work with.” I hadn’t yet learned I could be so much more than that.
God Bless America Tour 2004
Minneapolis
The first thing you notice about the Mall of America is the crowd of people outside of it, taking photographs. You have seen these types of crowds before, encircling the monuments in Washington, D.C., the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building. You’ve seen these crowds gaping over the ragged rim of that monstrous hole in Lower Manhattan, the one that reminds you of the diagrams in Dante’s Inferno, a nonmonument that you can’t bring yourself to visit, though you once glimpsed its crowds through a window at Century 21, the discount women’s clothing store where you bought a new black gauzy concert dress for your tour around America. Yes, you’ve seen these types of tourist crowds before, with their baseball caps and t-shirts and fleece pullovers and tiny backpacks and cargo pants and sneakers. But there is something different about the crowd on the sidewalk in front of the Mall of America; these pilgrims are more engaged in their series of rites. For the Mall of America is the national shrine at which it is most possible not just to see America but to do it, to perform its sacraments. To drink its caffeinated, carbonated blood. To inhale the national incense: french fry grease, fabric softener, the sour chemical smell of fresh ink on a sales receipt.
So you go to the least-American place you can find in the Mall of America, a restaurant in the middle of Minnesota called California Cafe, and you order the Merlot and the artisan cheese plate. But you’re fooling yourself, for in the very act of biting into your hard cheddar garnished with truffle honey you are only practicing another timeworn American tradition: acting like you are French.
Later that day, after you play “Atlantic Sunrise,” the penny whistle-spangled anthem that has launched a million CD sales, the song that sounds just like our national, pre-9/11 movie Titanic, after the eagle has flown over the Grand Canyon and The Composer has attempted to waltz with a woman in a wheelchair in front of a packed crowd of your applauding countrymen, you recross the Mississippi, a smaller, more ice-flecked river than the one you crossed a month ago in Memphis. And hours after this, after you have reentered the rolling hills where the grass is the lighter, zestier green that you now know can only be found in the East, after you have finished hanging your ragged clothes in a hotel in rural Wisconsin, you check your email and see a message from Jake, The Composer’s manager:
I have some unfortunate news regarding the Carnegie Hall show. The promoter has decided to cancel the show as of today . . . Feel free to give me a call if you have any questions.
But you will not “feel free to call with any questions,” because you know that asking questions is the surest route in America to getting your ass fired. You will certainly not ask the most important ones: Hadn’t Jake mentioned, a few months ago, that the concert had sold out? Was the concert canceled because the promoter figured out the performance wouldn’t be live? And if so, who spilled the beans? Was the integrity of our nation’s most prestigious concert stage saved, at least for this moment, by a tall Russian violinist who once studied at Moscow Conservatory?
Colder Than Russia
Yevgeny loved listening to techno and electronica music on our way to gigs. Moby was at the top of the charts in those early years of the millennium. We listened to “Go” in a January blizzard while drivi
ng to a convention center in Ocean City, Maryland, where we hawked The Composer’s CDs to stunned-looking women wandering desolate aisles of discounted Christmas wares. We ate chicken strips in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on a summer night and drove home smoking cigarettes while “Porcelain” rolled over us like a club drug. The places blend together in my memory, but the downbeat-laden dance club soundtrack is the same: A snow-logged New England town that had a Hawaiian restaurant with a room-size replica of a magma-shooting volcano. A steakhouse in Oklahoma City with a menu that promised a free meal to anyone who could eat five pounds of steak in one sitting. A lakeside bar in Cleveland where I drank too much of something called “Christmas Ale” and vomited fried cod in our rental car. A cosmetics counter in a Connecticut mall where Yevgeny watched as I spritzed myself with a pink-bottled vanilla perfume. My first glimpse of Niagara Falls, misting across the street from our craft fair tent.
I think Yevgeny admired the way that techno sampled authentic music and looped it into endless repetition—a perfect synthesis of the real and the artificial. It’s been many years since I’ve seen him, but the right music brings him back to me. Once, when we were on a gig—maybe in Cleveland, or Miami, or Connecticut—Yevgeny told me about the time he went on tour with The Composer and Kim, a few years before the God Bless America Tour. The three of them visited nearly every Barnes and Noble in the country, performing The Composer’s latest CD beside stacks of best sellers, competing against the roar of espresso machines. But instead of a modern RV, they drove an older model that was more like a trailer attached to a pickup truck. The Composer and Kim sat in the front cab while Yevgeny curled up in the trailer’s loft bed. The trailer didn’t have working heat. And during one long night’s drive through Montana, Yevgeny thought he was going to freeze to death.
I laughed. A Russian emigrating for a better life only to freeze to death in America. How Russian!
“I know it’s funny,” he said. “But I thought I was going to die. It was colder than Russia. Colder than I’ve ever been. That’s when I knew he didn’t care about me. If I had died, he would have been like ‘Well, we will have to fly another violinist to Montana.’”
I listened to this sympathetically. At that point in his life, Yevgeny was still in a precarious situation, immigration-wise. He had visa paperwork that had to be filled out. He had an accent. He didn’t have family or money to help if things went south. The Composer could have had him deported. What happened to Yevgeny could never happen to me. People—American citizens—would notice if I froze to death in the back of a trailer.
But years later I realized that Yevgeny hadn’t told me about nearly dying in Montana because he wanted my sympathy. He was trying to warn me, to tell me to be careful on the God Bless America Tour. I didn’t freeze to death, but I did suffer a constant fear—delusional, I had assumed—that I was in mortal danger.
I considered this further. Perhaps the danger had not been imaginary. Patrick, who had never driven an RV, was sometimes assigned to drive fourteen-hour stretches at a time. At night, he drank Irish whiskeys until he stumbled back to his room, only to rise the next morning and set out on the perilous road in an RV that was becoming more dilapidated with each mile. The Composer duct-taped the dangling side mirrors, ignored our complaints when the air-conditioning broke in the middle of the sweltering California desert. There were dozens of close calls involving narrow lanes and swerving tractor trailers. And there were other types of close calls, nights when Harriet and I escorted each other through the corridors of cut-rate motels, wary of the men who eyed us in the parking lot, men who followed us as we made our way to the laundry room, fitness center, snack machine. While I survived the tour physically intact, I lost my grip on reality. And no one really noticed until I returned from the tour and collapsed on the floor of my parents’ basement.
Yevgeny was able to state—simply and without fanfare—that The Composer had almost killed him. It would take me years of drafting and revising this book to say essentially the same thing.
Praeludium and Allegro
Virginia, 1998
Your last solo concert takes place in a similar setting to your first: a Christmas concert in an Appalachian gymnasium packed with the entire student body. But this time you are a senior in high school, keenly aware of the other students. They sit on the bleachers and in metal folding chairs. The girls pull out notebook paper and write notes to one another, and the boys spit sunflower seeds or chewed tobacco into plastic Mountain Dew bottles. The sleepy-eyed teachers stand at the ends of the bleachers, arms folded, watching for troublemakers. The PE teacher—wearing shorts even in the dead of winter—gazes longingly at the basketball hoop, his silver whistle resting silently on his broad chest.
You stand at the back door of the gym. Rhinestone poinsettia hair clips rein your wild black hair; your sleeveless, gauzy black dress grazes the freshly polished wood of the basketball court. You shift your violin from hand to hand as you wipe your sweaty palms on your dress.
The principal walks to the front of the gym and begins the concert by telling everyone to sit still and shut up. The band wheezes a half-hearted Christmas carol. A group of boys in the bleachers kick one another. The Spanish teacher looks up from her grading stack and shoots them a look.
You are going to perform Fritz Kreisler’s “Praeludium and Allegro in the Style of Pugnani,” the piece another violinist once chose as the best possible music to entertain Truman, Churchill, and Stalin at Potsdam. It’s that kind of piece. The minute you heard Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg’s unparalleled recording of it, when you were eleven, you knew you had to learn to play it. It took you six years to untangle, note by note, measure by measure. It is one of the flashiest, most attention-grabbing, most look-at-me pieces ever written for the violin—the kind of piece that movie directors choose when they want to show someone is a violin prodigy (the violinists in Prince of Tides and Sea of Love play it). The piece garners a specific type of audience response, one that could be called “The Holy Shit”—that deep silence that fills a room after a musician does something that seems physically impossible and therefore magical. That’s what you are going for here; you are aiming for The Holy Shit.
Years after this performance, your mom will tell you what one of the high school teachers said to her about this concert: “I was afraid they were going to laugh at her. You know how kids are.”
You have learned a lot about “how kids are” since your first concert, nine years earlier, when you stood in a different school gymnasium in a different part of Appalachia and played “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” Since then you have begun to learn what it is like to live life in the body. What it’s like to despair so much at the prospect of life in the body that you almost chose to end that life. “Jessica has big lips,” says a boy in your seventh-grade pre-algebra class. “That means she gives good blow jobs.” Life in the body means that no physical part of you—not even the lips that you have no choice but to bring with you into prealgebra class—is left unseen, unremarked upon, uncalculated for sexual potential. By ninth grade, girls lived the quiet, starving denial of life in the body while boys scribbled a simple acronym on the chalkboards, the lockers, the desks—an acronym all the students knew the meaning of, but the teachers did not: GOYK. The boys held up pieces of notebook paper reading: GOYK! You walked into your tenth-grade chemistry classroom and there it was on the chalkboard: GOYK! “Why don’t you just GOYK?” the boys asked the girls in the high school hallways. GOYK! read the inscription on the door to the girl’s bathroom, the backs of the school bus seats, the undersides of the desks. GOYK was spelled out in garlic powder on the windshield of your dad’s old Nissan, which he let you drive to a party one night. (The garlic was a nod to you being Italian American. Boys call you “the dark one,” half Star Wars joke, half ethnic slur. And when you rinse off the garlic at a car wash before returning home, it drains into the heating vents leaving the Nissan to smell like a zesty Italian restaurant forevermore, a metaphor for
the impossibility of escaping life in the body, even in your own car.) GOYK! they wrote in your yearbook. “GOYK!” they laughed as they slapped one another’s backs.
GOYK. Get. On. Your. Knees. (And suck my dick.)
You’ve learned a lot about kids laughing at one another, all right, more than you could have ever imagined when you were eight years old and playing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.” And you’ve learned how to avoid it, have developed dozens, maybe hundreds of strategies over the years. You wear the right socks. You curl your hair. You shave your legs, your underarms, your bikini line. You hide pimples under pressed powder. You beg your parents for certain dresses, certain skirts, certain shoes that you see in the catalogs for teenage girls that arrive in your rural mailbox. You exercise for hours each day in an attempt to be as skinny as possible. You sunbathe. You track your period so it doesn’t end up on the back of your shorts. You learn how to laugh when the boys say GOYK so they think you’re cool and down with it and on their side and leave you alone. You learn how to flirt and be a little quieter than you are. You learn how to surround yourself with other girls, to run in a pack. You date popular boys, even though you can tell they don’t like you very much, even though they routinely cheat on you, because in the cold calculus of high school social dynamics, dating popular boys elevates you beyond a status you could achieve for yourself, and not just in the eyes of your classmates, but in the eyes of some of your teachers, too. You catch the quick but unmistakable flashes of appreciation on their adult faces when they see you standing in the ambient light that radiates off of the six foot two inch rock-solid figure of future-Docker’s-khakis-model Fernando, some ancient, nostalgic longing for the magnificent teenage sex they imagine you’re having. And because you have not yet developed feelings toward yourself (other than negative feelings about your body), you see yourself only as a reflection of what other people think of you.
Sounds Like Titanic Page 19