“It’s going to be like this anywhere I go.”
“I mean, maybe, but also maybe not, right?”
I dismissed it at first, but after that whenever I thought about it that maybe not was a beacon for me. Maybe I had made a mistake in coming here. I’d made a choice I regretted, and I had tried to stick it out and make it work, and it wasn’t. But I believed now that one thing didn’t have to define you; some things you got to leave behind. I stayed until the end of the quarter, and I lived through all those moments when fear felt like it might consume me, and then it didn’t and there I was on the other side of it. When the quarter ended, I unenrolled, and I went back home to reapply for music schools the following year.
Mr. Irving helped me prepare my audition tapes, and I’d spend mornings with him in the music room off his garage. At first I was clumsy; my body had forgotten. I had to relearn how to hear things again, how to sift through things like pain and rage and loss and from them cull what I could transfer into sound. But Mr. Irving was patient—we both were—and things came back, deeper, I think, and richer than before. His husband, Keith, a jazz pianist, would tiptoe in exaggeratedly to listen as I played. When I put down my violin, he’d applaud loudly and then offer us lemonade. At night, my mother would come in to listen to me practice, and sometimes we’d stay up late to talk.
I applied to eleven programs this time, was invited to audition at all eleven, and received offers of admission to nine. This time I got a partial scholarship to Juilliard, and maybe it would always feel fraught and weighted with history for me, yes, but still, I wanted it. When I told them, Grace sent me a package of cookies shaped like musical notes and Brandon posted a picture of me with the caption so fucking proud, which was especially touching given that no one in his new life—all those people in all the pictures he posted of parties and hikes and birthday dinners, who always commented on his posts—had ever met me. Jason, who I almost never heard from, wrote to say how happy he was for me. And Mr. Irving was ecstatic—he teared up when he found out—but I think my mother was the most overjoyed of all.
* * *
At Juilliard, playing felt electric with possibility. I was lonely sometimes even when I was with people, though, and everyone was so stunningly talented I often felt inadequate. But one day in Colloquium the teacher mentioned how normal it was to have impostor syndrome and afterward, London, who lived a few doors down from me, said, “I thought she was going to say, everyone here has impostor syndrome except for London, who we can all agree is a legitimate hack,” and we all laughed and it was a little better after that.
The panic attacks visited me there still, but less often, and when they did they were less familiar, a loud noise I could grit my teeth through. Sometimes when I was playing or sitting in class or going out to explore the city with friends I caught myself feeling that I belonged here, that I was enough. One night a little before Thanksgiving I was coming back to the dorms from practicing with my string quartet. There were never open practice rooms, so we’d waited over an hour and we were all cranky, but then the way all the parts had come together had been so transcendent I was still so absorbed in it that I was nearly back to my dorm before I realized it was raining. And then two things happened in quick succession: I registered that I was soaked, and I felt for the first time that maybe I’d be able to erase the feeling I’d carried with me since I was fourteen, that everything—everything—I could ever be or accomplish would be asterisked by how easy it had been for my father to walk away from me.
So maybe I was different now. But it turned out that in spite of that I still wanted the same things I’d always wanted: to play music, to hold on to the people I loved.
I was most of the way through my first semester when my mother called to tell me she’d had a minor heart attack, and I flew home immediately to be there for her bypass surgery. I’d barely finished messaging my friends when Brandon drove back from Berkeley. His father took off work, and they came with us to that first day of appointments, his father asking dozens of questions to the cardiologist and surgeon and then turning back to us and translating the medicalese.
The night before my mother’s surgery, Sunny came home and woke up at four to wait with me in the hospital. She showed up armed with a box of donuts, two cups of coffee, and a packet of personalized crossword puzzles she’d made me. It must have taken her hours. A week or so later, I found that packet in my suitcase, stuffed into a side pocket with a sterile mask and a Ziploc bag of stale almonds, half the puzzles filled in, in my handwriting. I stared at it—I couldn’t remember filling them out, somehow coming up with my audition piece for BAYS or the name of the land where The Adventures of King Brandon and Prince T-Rex took place. But I can perfectly picture Sunny—both tense and patient, bossy in a way I would’ve needed in that moment—coaching me, directing my thoughts away from the operating room with all its scalpels and monitors and needles and onto those neat, ordered squares, as she waited with me all that day.
And Jason flew back too, without telling me he was going to. There was a knock on the door when I was back at home my mother’s first night out of the hospital, sitting alone in the kitchen while my mother slept, and he was standing outside, holding flowers.
“For your mom,” he said, and handed them to me. “I don’t have to stay if you don’t want. But I thought maybe you’d want company.”
It was the first time I’d seen him since we’d left for college, but the surgery had drained me and he was right, I did want company. I hadn’t eaten all day and was starving, and so Jason and I went to get pho at the place on Stelling that was open late. I know a little more now about what it’s like to feel close to death, to peer out at the horizon and watch for its approach, and I know this: even though Jason survived, I still lost part of him that day he nearly didn’t. I wasn’t there for all the ways he pieced himself back together after that, and by the time I saw him that day back in Congress Springs, he’d changed.
But then, of course, though it’s harder to track in yourself, I’d changed too.
We talked a long time that night. It was funny, being there with him—it felt at once the same as it used to and also it didn’t. I asked him if he still played violin at all, and he told me how he’d gotten to know a group of people who met once a week at a house full of seniors that had a piano. Everyone brought something to eat or a six-pack of beer and an instrument of some kind, and they played jazz.
“I didn’t know you liked jazz.”
“Yeah, me neither.” He laughed. “Well, it’s probably not fair to call what I’m doing jazz. I’m terrible. The whole thing is pretty chill. One guy just brings a tambourine. It’s not the kind of deal where anyone cares if you’re good or anything.” He tore a leaf of Thai basil from the tangle of herbs in half, then another one, then placed them on the small plate in front of him. “It’s—really different. Sometimes there are parts of you where you worry if they were gone there’d be nothing else left over. But then it turns out there is.” He looked at me. “Some things, anyway,” he said, looking away again. “Not everything.”
Did he mean something by that? Maybe I was reading too much into it; surely he wasn’t talking about me. “Do you ever miss BAYS?” I said. “It’s funny because now I play, like, all day, and the teachers are mostly really amazing, but sometimes I still miss it.”
“What do you miss?”
“Playing with you guys, mostly. And Mr. Irving. But also some people at Juilliard are really competitive. Like whenever you play, you can tell they’re sizing you up or like, scheming how to make sure to stay ahead. Not very many people, but it’s definitely there.”
“Yeah, you’ve never been like that,” he said. “I think the thing I miss most about BAYS is how music then was like—it helped drown out a lot of other stuff. You know? When I was playing, I could try to make that louder than like, whatever else was repeating over and over in my head.”
“Does anything do that for you now?”
�
�Yeah, you know. You figure out ways.”
“You seem good,” I said. “You seem—happier. More settled.”
“Yeah, I think I just had to get out,” he said. “For a while I thought I’d just literally never come back home, but then the guilt got to me. First-generation problems, I guess. But it’s easier now that I’m gone. Also, I’ve been seeing this therapist.”
“Really?” I was surprised. “Like, of your own volition?”
“I’m trying to, you know, be better. Get better. All that.” He signaled to the waitress for another glass of water, thanked her, and then drank half of it in one gulp. “We talked about you.”
“Oh.”
He grinned at me. “You’re not going to ask what?”
“Would you tell me if I did?”
“You really think I’d bring that up and then not tell you?” He saw my face. “Okay, fair enough. But yes, that was an opening.”
“Okay. What did you talk about?”
“Mostly about how fucked up it was last year with us.”
“Well,” I said, lightly. “I’m so glad I asked.”
He laughed. Then he sobered. “Do you ever think about all that?”
“Well—” I paused. “Yes. A lot.”
“Really?”
“I mean—did you think I wouldn’t?”
“Yeah, I guess I thought probably you would. But I never really heard from you, so I thought—I don’t know. I didn’t want to force myself on you. I guess I hoped you were off being happy instead.”
“That would’ve been nice.”
“So—no, then?” he said. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
He drank the rest of his water, slowly this time. The only other people in the restaurant were a family sitting by the door, a mother and father and three school-aged kids, and Jason watched them.
“I’ve thought about this a lot,” he said. “After Christmas, I guess I thought if we went out, that would like—fix everything. It sounds stupid now. I told myself if I was with you I could just move on and forget everything. But then it was—it was kind of the exact opposite. It’s funny,” he said, “because I know you never thought of yourself as like, this angry person, and I know you were always so careful about it, but I guess I always felt like we had that in common. So it wasn’t fair what I was asking of you. Like—I wanted you to be angry along with me, but then also I wanted you to feel like everything was great. Except then when I was with you, that was like, the one place I felt like I actually wanted to just like talk about how shitty everything was, except I also just didn’t. And I knew it was messed up, but I kept thinking it would just get better on its own.”
There was a ring of condensation on the table from my cup, and he reached out and wiped it away gently with his thumb, not looking at me. “But then we went to see your dad that night,” he said, “and after that I couldn’t do it anymore.”
“You know,” I said, and then I almost stopped myself—it had been long enough that when I’d seen him on my doorstep I hadn’t thought we’d get into all this. But then here we were. “I regret a lot of it and I shouldn’t have tried so hard to fix you, and I’m not blaming you, because you can’t help needing whatever you need and all, but just—that night at my dad’s and how you would see that and then decide I wasn’t enough for you, either, after all—I don’t know how you could imagine I wouldn’t think about—”
“Wait, what?” he said, leaning forward. “Beth, no—that wasn’t—that’s not what happened at all.”
“You’ve said twice now that was why you broke up with me.”
“When did I say that?”
“Just now, and when you—”
“I never said that. Is that how it came across? Fuck, Beth, I’m sorry. I never meant that. All this time that’s what you thought?”
“What was I supposed to think?”
“Definitely not that. It had zero to do with not thinking you were enough. What happened was I guess that night I realized—I realized how shitty it is to start something with someone when you know you can’t live up to it. Especially when it’s someone you love.”
I felt the word make its way through me—a flush on my face, a tingling ribbon down my spine, and then an ache through my whole chest. It’s possible, it turns out, to miss someone who’s sitting right in front of you.
The waitress turned off the neon OPEN sign in the window. The family at the other table signaled for the check. After a while, I said, “I wish you’d told me that last year.”
“Yeah, well.” He tilted back in his chair so it was balancing on its back legs, a gesture so familiar that for a moment I felt us reinhabiting each other’s worlds. But the feeling passed. He looked a little older—his cheekbones had hollowed out so that the shadows on his face cast differently, and there was still a scar along his forehead from when he’d almost died. He ripped his napkin into little strips, then looked back up at me. “I wish a lot of things.”
* * *
Afterward I was planning to move back for my mother’s recovery. She would need round-the-clock care at first and then significant assistance as she regained strength and fought off complications, and I couldn’t bear the thought of her dependent on some health aide who was just putting in hours and watching the clock. I could take a leave of absence or just drop out, but my mother would have none of it. I didn’t want her to be alone for months, though, and so she suggested she would come to New York. The idea felt fantastical, but then Brandon’s father made some calls and got her in to see a cardiologist he’d known from med school, and then Mrs. Nakamura had a friend who had a rental in New York, in Midtown, and she found someone who could rent my mother’s house while she was gone too. So when she was cleared to fly, my mother came to New York to recover.
I stayed with her most nights. She was weak, easily fatigued, but the cardiologist was pleased with her progress. And it was easier there, somehow, between us, like in a new place we were unfettered from all our ghosts. Sometimes we’d stay up late talking. One night, when the table was littered with the remains of the Vietnamese food we’d ordered, spring rolls and bánh xèo and pho with tendon and tripe, I finally told her about Jason.
“I wish you had told me,” she said, reaching up to wipe her eyes. “I wish you hadn’t felt like you had to carry that alone.”
She meant well, I knew that. But she was wrong to think there was anything she could have done. And anyway—I’d never been alone.
When she got better, she started going out during the day to wander slowly around the neighborhood, sometimes shopping at the produce markets even though she was scandalized by the grocery prices here. She told me she’d always dreamed of living in a big city. She’d cook dinners, and sometimes she’d steam a whole salmon or simmer a whole chicken and then press me to invite my friends from school to come cram into the apartment and eat home-cooked food.
I missed her fiercely when she went back home. But I’d been giving private lessons to rich children in Manhattan and saving whatever I could, and when she was strong enough, I bought us tickets to Asheville. We had an incredible time.
* * *
My mother’s illness made the rest of the world recede for a while, like a tide, so that I only ever saw people there on the same shore. Which meant my mother, and those who made it a point to be there with me.
I’d thought Jason would disappear back into New Hampshire, but the opposite was true. The day I’d gotten back to New York he had revived our five-person group chat, and he and I started talking again too.
It was different this time: he was doing better now, and I was too. I always told him what pieces I was working on; I sent him posts and headlines, the things people said in class or on the subway, that made me feel rage and despair about the world. Once I called him when I was having a panic attack outside a restaurant where I was supposed to meet friends. I called him when my father messaged me out of the blue one evening to ask if I could teach violin to his manager’s daughter via video
chat as a favor to him because he thought it would help him get promoted and then was so furious I couldn’t sleep.
It was funny, sort of—now we could talk about anything. Most of his old walls weren’t there and when they were, I knew what was on the other side; I was less afraid of his anger because I was less afraid of my own.
Sometimes, because this was what I’d always hoped it could’ve been like, I wished we could start over. But he would’ve said it, I thought, if so—he had so many openings. The truth was that it was better now because when he’d left and healed over, he’d healed over from me, too.
That was painful, sometimes incredibly so, but the past is immutable, and anyway I was always so busy. When I was playing I thought often about what Jason had told me about letting the music drown out other voices, and I worked on that. Because you hear so many, ones that might want you to think you’re worthless or undeserving or cursed. The amount of freedom I had at Juilliard was staggering—maybe it always is when no one knows you—and I could try on different selves like new clothes.
I met Tag near the end of my first year. He was extraordinarily talented, a second-year in the acting program, and he thrived on all the posturing and social competition and networking whose inner workings eluded me. It wasn’t that I hadn’t known people who were ambitious, because everyone in Congress Springs was ambitious, but Tag expected things from the world in a way that was so new to me, and in a way that was exciting and fun. When I was with him, the future was all expansive possibility.
You’re going out with someone named Tag? Brandon said when I told them. Who names their kid Tag? Are white people okay? In fact Tag was half Chinese; his mother was from Beijing.
When We Were Infinite Page 33