Virtuosity

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by Jessica Martinez


  I tried not to think about that, or him, that evening as I sat on the front porch swing with my mother, playing the aria game. The rules were simple—she hummed any aria, I had to name the opera it came from—but winning was impossible, since she knew every opera ever written from beginning to end, and, well, I didn’t.

  “Don Giovanni?” I guessed, trying hard to ignore the shame, the sourness that had been curdling in my gut since Jeremy had smiled at me.

  “Right composer, wrong opera,” she said, and went back to humming. Diana’s voice was both shiny and jagged, like crumpled tinfoil. It was the voice of a soprano with scars.

  “Just tell me. All of Mozart’s operas sound the same.”

  “I can’t believe you said that,” she said with mock dismay. She knew they did. She started humming again.

  “No really, just tell me,” I repeated impatiently. Apparently humiliation made me grumpy.

  She narrowed her eyes and her crow’s-feet appeared, flaws in an otherwise flawless face. “Le Nozze di Figaro,” she said. “You look stressed. Here, put your head on my lap and let me play with your hair.”

  I obeyed, and she started humming something new.

  “Madama Butterfly,” I said. “I really don’t feel like playing anymore.”

  She stopped. We listened to the porch swing creak as she unwound sections of curls with her fingers. Why did I have to be such a brat? She loved this game.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked after a minute. “Did you and Heidi fight or something?”

  “No.” I closed my eyes and saw Jeremy’s face.

  “So it’s just the Guarneri then,” she said.

  I didn’t answer. Just the Guarneri. The semifinals were in two weeks, and the finals were a couple of days after that. It was the most prestigious competition in classical music, and anything short of first place would be devastating. I was expected to win.

  Just the Guarneri.

  Diana knew better.

  “Let’s get you thinking about something else,” she said. “Do you want to go to a movie?”

  “Not really.” I paused, considering her mood. She seemed relaxed, and maybe just eager enough to indulge me. I forged ahead. “Tell me what it was like to sing with the Met.”

  She sighed, but it sounded more like surrender than frustration. She liked talking about her career. “I’ve already told you everything, Carmen.”

  I didn’t believe that. Not for a second. “So tell me again.”

  “Let’s see. I’d just moved from Milan to New York, and I didn’t know a soul. My English was pretty good, but my accent …” She laughed, remembering. “It was so strong I had to repeat everything at least three times. I thought Americans were all hard of hearing.”

  That part always seemed hard to imagine—my mother the immigrant. Now her accent was light and mostly masked by her gravelly voice. “Go on.”

  “So. I had been in the States for two months when I auditioned with the Met and got the position.” She paused and took another section of my hair to comb through with her fingers. It felt good. “It was my dream, but my head was spinning so fast it was hard to believe it was real. To go from being a poor student in Milan one day, to lead soprano with the New York Metropolitan Opera Company the next was … overwhelming. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t go to my head a little. I thought I owned the world.” She chuckled. “I did own the world.”

  “What did you sing?” I knew the answer, but did it matter?

  “My first season we sang Aida, then La Traviata and Tosca. Second season we sang …” She trailed off, waiting for me to fill in.

  “Carmen.”

  “Exactly. Then you came along nine months later.”

  Typically evasive. “Either you left something out or I was the product of immaculate conception.”

  She sighed dramatically. “You’re like a dog with a bone, Carmen. Fine. Jonathon Glenn was in the audience on opening night. His parents had season tickets, box seats if I remember correctly—still do, probably. That’s what people in their circle do to show the world how refined they are.”

  “Or they might just like opera.”

  “Oh, please. People like the Glenns live for dressing up in sequined gowns and tuxes just so they can see themselves in the society pages. Opera houses are full of them—people who have no idea what opera they are listening to, but who’ll drink champagne in the lobby and smile for anyone with a camera.”

  “All right, tangent explored, go on.”

  “Where was I?”

  “He came to the opening night of Carmen.”

  “Right. And then he came backstage after the performance to meet me. The cast was going out to celebrate, but Jonathon convinced me to go out with him for drinks instead. My friends were annoyed, but I didn’t care. He was good-looking and just so … I don’t know … confident. Like he knew I couldn’t possibly reject him.”

  She paused and squinted into the street, or maybe she was squinting back in time. Either way, the crow’s-feet reappeared. In the silence I could hear her fighting the familiar battle—trying to decide what to tell and what to keep back. Every time I pushed her to this place she revealed a little more, but I could see in her eyes the weight of things held out of my reach.

  “For the next four months we were inseparable. He even came to my rehearsals. At first I was worried that he was going to lose his job because he was with me all the time. Then I discovered you can’t get fired from being the only heir to your father’s media empire.” She took a slow breath through her nose. When she continued it was in a softer voice. “Back then, he was more than his parents, though. He really loved the music, and I thought he really loved me …”

  “So why four months then?”

  The porch swing creaked. She crossed her legs, displacing my head, and I nearly fell off the swing headfirst. That question never made her happy. “We weren’t right for each other.”

  “That’s so vague.”

  “Maybe. But it’s the truth.”

  I sat up and stared at her face. People said we looked alike, but they were wrong. Maybe we had the same almond eyes and curly hair, but she had a delicate nose and fuller lips. She was beautiful.

  “It wasn’t because of you, Carmen. I promise.”

  “Did he know you were pregnant?”

  “It all happened at once. Getting pregnant, breaking up with Jonathon, my diagnosis …”

  And I’d lost. This was where the story always dead-ended, losing her voice. I knew the pitiful progression: vocal cord polyps led to multiple surgeries, which led to permanent scarring, which led to broken contracts and broken career and broken dreams. Somewhere in there she had a broken heart, too. This was where the fairy tale became a tragedy, and I knew from experience, if I pushed her now she would cry.

  “As a musician, you should be able to understand this,” she said. “He fell in love with Diana the soprano, but suddenly I wasn’t Diana the soprano anymore. I was just Diana.”

  “So he only loved you for your voice?”

  “No,” she said. “He wasn’t a terrible person. He was just young and a bit of a womanizer. Probably still is, but that wasn’t the problem. It was me who changed. Imagine if you had to stop playing the violin. You wouldn’t be the same person, would you? My life changed overnight, and I was grieving and trying to recover from the botched surgery and then I found out I was pregnant on top of everything. I was a mess.”

  I’d stopped listening. I was trying to picture myself without violin and saw … nothing.

  “Let it go, Carmen. I know you’re curious about him, but it’s a pointless obsession. He will always be too self-absorbed to be any kind of father figure, and you have a dad. You know how much Clark loves you.” She paused and continued with the faintest shade of bitterness. “Besides, Jonathon may not be in your life, but his family’s money certainly is.”

  It felt like an insult, even though I knew it wasn’t me she wanted to hurl it at. I thought about what th
e Glenns had done for me and felt vaguely guilty, as if I’d gone begging to them. I hadn’t.

  At that moment, the SUV drove up. “Ladies,” Clark said, climbing the steps with a smile on his face, a briefcase in one hand and flowers in the other.

  Diana stood and met him with a kiss, leaving me on the swing.

  “Hey, Superman,” I said, “how are the tights feeling today?” It was our joke, the one I refused to let die and the one he always had a new response to. As he explained, when your name is Clark and you wear horn-rimmed glasses, you have to develop a healthy database of responses to Superman jabs.

  “Itchy. Really itchy.”

  “Ever think of washing them?”

  “Nope. That would be bad luck.”

  Diana was already holding her flowers and dragging him inside by the arm.

  “Come inside with us,” Clark said.

  “I want to sit out here a while longer. I’ll come in when I’m cold.”

  That wouldn’t be long. I could feel the afternoon warmth dissipating in the air around me. The door to the house closed and the sounds outside seemed to grow louder: birds chattering in the newly budding oak trees that lined our street; a bike bell, shrill and sharp; the laughter of two little boys chasing each other down the sidewalk.

  Alone, my thoughts became clearer. They always did. For some reason, when Diana was around, my brain was too busy reacting to what she said to function properly, and I ended up pushed into corners and firing at targets for no reason it all.

  It didn’t make sense, for example, to be bugging Diana with questions about Jonathon right now. With the Guarneri looming, he was the least of my worries. And of course, she was right about not needing him. Clark was my dad. I was six when he and Diana had married, which meant there was almost nothing in the pre-Clark memory file.

  There was no telling what kind of crazy orbit Diana and I would be spinning into if he hadn’t come along. Clark balanced us out. He was not a musician, not intense, not competitive—basically the yin to our yang. Clark cooked gourmet food. And he watched the weird indie films with me and boring dramas with Diana, even though I knew he’d rather be overdosing on one of his dorky sci-fi series.

  I barely knew Jonathon Glenn. When I was little, visits had been sporadic and forced. Hardly memorable. I remembered a few lame outings, like an awkward walk in Central Park followed by a visit to some bookstore. Now the visits were pretty much nonexistent. He split his time between London and Beijing, or wherever else work took him, and called on my birthday. Sometimes. I hadn’t seen him for four years, and we hadn’t talked since the Christmas before last.

  I shivered and pulled my sweater around me. I couldn’t wait until summer. Just a couple more weeks and it would stay warm into the evening, and the Guarneri would be over. Almost summer. Almost over. I stood up and went inside.

  Chapter 3

  That night, I lay in bed and tortured myself by replaying every brutal second of the Rhapsody fiasco until my stomach ached. Stupid Heidi, stupid lemon drop cupcake, stupid Jeremy King, stupid me. My room was too hot, my tank top had twisted itself nearly backward, and the comforter scratched my legs every time I moved. Or didn’t move. Maybe this was what hell was like, insomnia-fueled misery.

  My bedside clock said 2:21 when I finally gave up, untangled myself from my sheets, and sat down at my desk. My computer whirred softly as I brought it to life and checked my inbox. One unread email sat at the top of the list, bolded. The subject line read, nice to meet you too. I didn’t recognize the sender’s address, [email protected], but it had the mixed up look of foreign spam. I needed another hard drive clean-out and lecture from Clark about opening strange email like I needed a kick in the head. I selected it and let the cursor hover over the delete button for just a second. And then another second. Something in my brain turned, like a puzzle piece rotating into place. If I could stretch those letters apart there was something recognizable there. Yehudi Menuhin School. It was the most exclusive violin academy in England, possibly all of Europe. It was Jeremy’s school. Crap.

  I opened the email.

  Carmen,

  Normally I would feel a little awkward emailing someone I’d never met and who hadn’t actually even given me her email address, but you were the one on a stakeout today, so if one of us should be embarrassed…. By the way, the CSO receptionist is more than happy to give out your contact info to anyone claiming to be a fan.

  I’m curious—are you hunting down all the semifinalists, or just the ones who’ve got a shot at winning? Is precompetition stalking an American custom? Should I be doing it myself, or does this email qualify? I’ve always thought practicing scales and slow passage work was the best way to prepare for competitions, but maybe hiding behind bushes with binoculars would be a better use of my time. How is it working out for you?

  Jeremy King

  P.S. Good luck

  I read the email six times. During the first reading I registered shock and shock alone. Second, humiliation. Third, humiliation. Fourth, humiliation with just a glimmer of anger. Then during the fifth and sixth readings the anger grew into rage, and I knew I was done when I was ready to put my fist through my computer screen.

  My hands shook as I hit reply and began writing. I didn’t need to think about what to write. Fury, as it turned out, made me extra eloquent, or at least extra prolific. Jeremy King had clearly not been told what an insignificant piece of crap he was lately—maybe ever—and I was just the girl to do it. It would be doing a disservice to him and certainly to humanity, if I didn’t cut him down to size. He was the one who needed to feel humiliated. Not me. My fingers could barely keep up with the insults my brain spewed. I wrote words I’d never actually said aloud. The feeling was beautiful.

  I was several pages into my diatribe before I stopped to breathe. I’d lost sense of time. Sleepless nights usually inched by, but anger had eaten the last hour. Was it really after three already? I read over what I’d written. I sounded … insane. Like a ranting lunatic. I couldn’t send this. My index finger found the delete key and I watched the insults disappear one letter at a time.

  What was his problem? It wasn’t like I had done anything malicious—he was the one who’d acted like a jerk with that salute. I’d just been embarrassed, but that was clearly a mistake. Jeremy wasn’t a nice guy. He was the kind of guy who saw weakness and then scraped at it, hoping to expose something raw and painful he could spit into. The tears were there, behind my eyes. I could coax them out if I concentrated, but crying always left me feeling weak and I didn’t want to feel any weaker.

  Weakness. He thought I was weak, because that was how I’d acted today. Maybe not responding at all would be better. An egomaniac like that—he’d probably be more annoyed by silence than anything else.

  Unless he saw silence as more weakness.

  I laced my fingers behind my head and bounced against the back of the chair. I needed to write something simple, something profound but totally void of emotion.

  I started again.

  Jeremy,

  You are an ass.

  Carmen

  P.S. Good luck to you too.

  Much better. Before I could talk myself out of it, I pressed send, a thrill running up my spine. Had I really just done that? It was so un-Carmen.

  I didn’t even glance at my bed. It would take a combination of hypnosis and a fistful of sedatives to make my brain submit to sleep right now. Instead, I tiptoed across the hall to my practice studio. Tiptoeing wasn’t necessary. From the top of the stairs I could hear Clark snoring—his usual choking, guttural grunt-fest—which meant Diana’s earplugs were in place.

  My violin case lay waiting on the floor in the center of the room, propped against the maple music stand. With just the moonlight from the window to see by, I crouched, unzipped the cover, and began the ritual preparation: unlatching the Velcro neck strap, attaching the shoulder rest, twisting the screw at the base of the bow to tighten the horsehair.


  Just enough light shone in the window for the violin to glow. The amber wood formed graceful arcs and points, its grain darkened by centuries of being touched and played. It was still hard to believe it was mine.

  They had bought it for me. The Glenns. This was what my father was good for. Money. For the first twelve years of my life I had been the irritating detail Thomas and Dorothy Glenn hoped would disappear if they just ignored me long enough. I was the unfortunate by product of a fling between their playboy son and some opera singer, of all things, a woman just Catholic enough to refuse an abortion, or too much of a gold digger. According to Diana, anyway.

  But then I turned sixteen and everything started happening quickly, too quickly for me to dissect and make sense of. I won the Grammy for best classical album and a week later my face appeared on the cover of Time magazine with the words “Virtuosity in America” underneath it. Right after the Time article, Vanity Fair did an interview and photo shoot, and that was when Dorothy Glenn called to congratulate me.

  Diana had thrust the phone into my hands and shrugged as if to say good luck. I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t seen or talked to her since I was five, and the birthday notes—cards featuring mountain landscapes and bouquets of freesia and other stuff little girls don’t care about—had stopped at age nine. Was she trying to pretend we were close?

  I didn’t even recognize her voice. “We are so proud of you,” she said.

  I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was that I wasn’t really hers to be proud of.

  After a fascinating discussion of the weather, she saved us both from any more pretending and moved on to the reason for her call. “Your grandfather and I have been discussing an investment and I wanted to consult you.” The stiffness in her voice had relaxed into something closer to smugness.

  “With me? I’m probably the wrong person to ask about investing.”

  “No, dear. You are definitely the right person.” She paused for what sounded like dramatic effect, but it was lost on me. I had no clue where she was going. “We’ve been thinking about purchasing the Gibson Stradivarius. Have you heard of it? It’s coming up for auction at Christie’s next month.”

 

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