Virtuosity

by Jessica Martinez

  The doors opened and she let herself be steered off the train by her boyfriend, his hands on either side of her waist. There was something about her strut. She looked so sure of herself, even being guided through the crowd by her hip bones.

  Yuri’s was the next stop. I took a deep breath. Mental preparation was everything.

  Yuri could be terrifying, but only if I let him, and I didn’t do that anymore. I used to cry when he yelled. Shock, shame, anger—I cried from a combination of all three before I realized that crying just made it worse. I was too young to know better then.

  The memory of being so easily hurt was humiliating. Being little and fragile and unable to keep the tears from spilling over my cheeks and dripping onto the wood, having to stop and wipe them up with my sleeve, wipe my runny nose too, and then put my violin back up and keep on playing….

  Now, it was all a matter of control. I could tune out the insults, the way the fleshy pockets under his eyes turned purplish-red, how his gnarled hands clenched and shook. All that was unimportant. But what he was actually saying about the music—that was golden. He always knew exactly what needed to be done.

  The train squealed as it slowed. I leaned into it, and the competition schedule slid off my lap and onto the wet floor. A dark water spot bloomed over it and the names bled and blurred. Jeremy’s. Even mine.

  Yuri’s apartment was the last door on the left at the end of a faded green hallway. The parade of food smells from the elevator to his door took me from China to India to Mexico, with steadily growing Ukrainian undertones. Garlic and cabbage trumped the most pungent odors any other cuisine could offer. For Yuri, it was a source of national pride.

  I stopped in front of his door and kicked it twice.

  Once, years ago, he had pulled the door open and caught me with my knuckles poised, ready to knock. “Never!” he had cried, and grabbed my fist with a purple-veined hand. “You are violinist! Use feet!” and he had demonstrated by kicking the already open door and putting a nickel-size hole in the wall behind it.

  The muffled sounds of TV continued. He had to have heard me. I waited a moment and then kicked again. Nothing. Was that a woman crying? What was he watching? Finally, the noise stopped, and the “swish-swish” of his slippers approached from the other side, followed by the clicking of the lock.

  The door swung open and he called, “Lock it,” over his shoulder, already shuffling back to his recliner and a half-eaten plate of cheese pierogies.

  “Rose ceremony,” Yuri said, already back in the recliner, but leaning forward and staring intently at the screen, where a man in a tuxedo was frozen midblink. He unpaused the DVR. The camera cut to a blonde with rubbery looking breasts and mascara dripping down her face. Yuri didn’t comment, but nodded his head, as if to confirm that justice was being served.

  I crossed the length of the apartment, past the La-Z-Boy and greasy kitchenette and dirty dishes, to the closed door of his music studio. That door separated worlds. Behind it, the air was always cooler. Dinginess surrendered to old-world elegance, clutter to simplicity. I closed the door behind me and looked around. Everything was in its place. The ebony music stand held the center of the room, its ornate back crisscrossed with stretching arms that looked like branches. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves of dark wood lined all four walls, packed with thousands of scores, millions of notes. Once when I was younger, inspired by a couple of multiplication problems Heidi had thrown at me, I had tried to calculate just how many notes filled the shelves. I started with the average number of notes per line, then line per page, the page per shelf, which is where things got too confusing. And then I started to wonder how many notes had been played in here, or even just how many I had played in here. Impossible.

  I took out my violin, tuned, played a few scales in case he was listening, and then played the opening of the Devil’s Trill Sonata by Tartini, my back to the closed door. It was the first piece of my semifinal program, the first thing the judges would hear me play. It sounded solid and crisp, each note biting the string just enough at its beginning, then becoming brilliant and sunny with the right speed and width of vibrato. The details were crucial, but they could strangle the music too.

  “No Tartini today.”

  I jumped, nearly dropping my bow.

  He shuffled around me and groaned as he lowered himself into the velvet armchair. His arthritic fingers picked an amber pipe by the stem from the rack on his desk. He rubbed the glossy bowl of the pipe in his left palm. “Why so jumpy? Are you stealing things again?” He opened the ornate box beside his pipe rack and rummaged around for his tobacco cube.

  Once when I was thirteen he’d caught me trying to borrow his cake of rosin. I’d left mine at home and didn’t have enough on my bow. Four years later, I was still not to be trusted.

  “Not jumpy. Just focused.”

  He cleared his throat, unsatisfied, and began to work the tobacco into the pipe with his gnarled thumb. “No Tartini today,” he repeated. “Waste of time. You will make the finals. Tartini and Mozart are both good enough. It will all come down to finals.”

  Jeremy’s face appeared again, the sneer, the arrogant stride.

  Yuri lit the pipe and sucked on the stem, his wrinkled cheeks pulling tight around the wide Slavic bones in his face. “Play Tchaikovsky,” he said, smoke blooming from his mouth as he spoke.

  I closed my eyes and tried to hear the opening phrase. I couldn’t. All at once, exhaustion sank into me. Had I slept at all last night? I couldn’t remember. I did remember exchanging hate emails with Jeremy King, playing my violin, a bizarre secret phone call to Diana—or maybe I’d dreamt all of that.

  Yuri glared.

  The Tchaikovsky was twenty-nine minutes long and the number of potential mistakes was probably up somewhere in the millions. I used to love it. When had that changed?

  “So play it.”

  Yuri tossed the music onto his desk and it fluttered open to a page in the middle of the first movement. Staffs, stems, ledger lines, they looked like fractured railroad tracks, splattered with thousands of tiny black notes disfigured with flats and sharps. And then there were Yuri’s markings. He used a blunt-tipped sketching pencil that made heavy metallic lines, and graphite smudges. The words, in all caps with occasional expletives, cluttered every empty space.

  Something in my stomach tilted and rolled. Three pills was officially no longer enough.

  “Can I use the bathroom, please?”

  He rolled his eyes.

  I put my violin down, grabbed my purse, and hurried off to the bathroom. Thankfully I’d brought them. I fished the pills from my purse and took one with a gulp of tap water. Yuri knew I took Inderal, just not for lessons. I flushed the toilet, washed my hands, and took a few deep breaths before heading back out.

  “Should I go watch another episode of Bachelor, or are you playing Tchaikovsky today?” Yuri said as I took my violin and bow back out.

  Apparently I’d used up my allotted thimbleful of patience for this lesson. For a brief second, I wondered what it would feel like to take my bow and whack it against that elegant ebony stand. Probably pretty good. At first, anyway. I was sick of being in trouble, no matter how hard I worked. If I hated the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, maybe it wasn’t my fault.

  But I needed Yuri. I couldn’t win without him.

  I put my violin on my shoulder and played.

  SCARED?

  The ad featured the single word, white lettering over a black-and-white photo of a girl’s upturned face, her eyes large and searching, staring through me. She looked my age. It was one of hundreds of posters for Heart to Heart Adoption Services plastered on trains. I’d seen it plenty of times before.

  I thought about my violin lesson. It had been two full hours of trying and failing to do exactly what Yuri was telling me, while he got more and more frustrated. He had yelled, and then, even worse, he’d given up, shrunk back into his hunched body, and turned away. Dismissed me with a defeated shrug. I’d slunk out.r />
  I didn’t want to tell Diana about the lesson. Maybe she wouldn’t ask.

  In less than two weeks I’d be facing Jeremy King and the Guarneri.

  SCARED?

  I stared at the pregnant girl in the ad. She had no idea.

  When I got home there was a single email waiting for me. It was from Jeremy.

  Carmen,

  An ass? Wow. Bold of you.

  Jeremy

  P.S. I don’t need luck.

  Chapter 6

  Jeremy King’s bio was complete crap. Bios generally are (mine definitely walked the line between flowery and obnoxious), but his read like a good long swig of cherry cough syrup.

  I sat in bed and read it again. And again. I stared at the photo, hating that cherubic little boy grin, then went back to the lengthy description of his fabulous career. Ego dripped from every word. I closed the dog-eared program and lay back down.

  He probably hadn’t written it. I knew that. I certainly hadn’t written mine. But after yesterday, his pompous sneer was permanently imprinted on my brain, and I could just picture him sitting at a computer and stringing together sentences like, “His golden tone and tender touch have moved audiences across the continents to tears.” I was half-surprised it didn’t claim his vibrato could cure cancer.

  From a business standpoint, I got it. A bio has to tell everyone who just shelled out money for tickets that they’re about to hear the best violinist in the world. But that didn’t make it easier to stomach.

  I flopped back on my pillow and stared at the ceiling, then with just my left hand, played the opening measures of the Tchaikovsky into my mattress. My performance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was on Saturday. Jeremy’s would be tomorrow. The concert series was supposed to get the public geared up for the competition, but I was doubtful. This is a city with six national sports teams. The average Chicagoan doesn’t give a crap about a violin competition.

  According to the symphony folder I’d peeked into at the CSO office last week, Jeremy would be playing the Beethoven Concerto, which meant he was probably playing the same concerto for the Guarneri too.

  I tossed the program into the air, watching the pages fan and flutter to the floor. All Jeremy’s bio told me was the basics. He was born and raised in London, and he was a scholarship student at the Yehudi Menuhin School of Music. After that, it read too much like my own life. He’d won the British and European equivalents of the American competitions my own bio bragged about. We’d even made our solo debuts with symphonies at the same age—nine. None of that told me what I needed to know. Neither had seeing him walk out of Symphony Center or getting those obnoxious emails.

  A siren blared outside my window and then faded as it headed east toward Lake Michigan. Toward Symphony Center.

  I had to hear him play.

  Inderal had saved me. I hated everything about those powdery-orange hexagonal pills, starting with the bitter taste they left on the back of my tongue, but I didn’t have a choice anymore. The more I used them, the more I needed to be saved.

  It had started with Diana. No, that’s not quite fair. It had started with the worst performance of my life.

  Before Tokyo, I had never given much thought to stage fright. I had grown up onstage. Any problems I had with nerves had been worked out before the age of seven. Nerves were for the unprepared, or for the people who lacked talent and needed a scapegoat.

  But then Tokyo happened. It was last spring, the last stop on my first Asian tour and I was playing my new Strad. At first, I felt nothing unusual. I stood at the edge of stage left, waiting for my cue to walk on while Diana adjusted the purple lotus blossom in my hair and picked stray threads off my silk shantung gown. She fluttered. That was what she did, how she handled her stress. But it wasn’t Diana that rattled me.

  The Tokyo Philharmonic was tuning on stage as the audience filtered back in from intermission. The concert was sold out, but it wasn’t the audience that set me off either. Packed houses were the norm and audiences were too easily impressed to be scary.

  I closed my eyes, concentrating on the adrenalin coursing through me. That thrill, that plummeting-roller-coaster feeling, always hit right before. Trying to concentrate on something, to focus my thoughts, helped. I willed my index finger steady and traced my name in cursive on the red velvet curtain, almost like leaving graffiti on a brick wall. I’d never actually held a can of spray paint, but I understood the urge. It would be nice to change all the places I’d been. The audiences would leave and forget, but there was some weird appeal in making the concert halls remember me. Too bad finger-tracing on velvet wasn’t permanent.

  Then I turned and looked at the musicians, and everything changed. Some were looking at their music, others were staring out into the audience, a few were whispering with each other.

  But then my eyes fell on the principal second violinist. His violin rested on his knee, and his eyes bored right into me, expressionless. Why was he staring at me? What was he thinking? Suddenly, his face didn’t look expressionless. It looked angry.

  All around him, the throng of violinists continued their fidgeting, their whispering. What were any of them thinking? I’d never really wondered before. They had impossible-to-win chairs in one of the best symphonies in the world, but they weren’t the soloist tonight or any night. Of course. They’d all played the Sibelius Concerto, probably knew my part as well as I did. They’d probably dreamed of being the soloist their whole lives. But they weren’t. They were waiting to accompany me. They must hate me.

  My gut twisted up. My fingers turned cold and sweaty. They hate me. The stage manager’s earpiece crackled with static and he said something in Japanese into the microphone at his lips. Then he tapped my shoulder. His finger felt sharp on my bare skin, and he said, “If you please, miss,” with a nod of his head. He gestured to the stage.

  I didn’t please. The neck of my violin felt suddenly slippery in my palm. They want me to screw up. Why hadn’t I realized that before? I couldn’t play with my hands this shaky.

  A crowd had gathered behind me: backstage people, sound technicians, extra musicians who weren’t playing until the second half, and anyone else milling around who wanted to see what Carmen Bianchi, the child prodigy with the million-dollar Gibson Strad, looked like right before she went on stage, wanted to hear from the sidelines so they could go back and tell their friends, “She wasn’t that great, and her nose is much bigger in person.”

  But I had no choice. I swallowed and charged into the open space before me. At the sound of my heels on the stage, the musicians sprang to their feet and the audience erupted with deafening applause. My knees nearly buckled. I blinked against the harshness of the stage lights and forced my feet to keep moving, nearly tripping over an electrical cord as I passed in front of the violins. Smile, I thought, knowing Diana was silently willing me to look the part.

  At center stage, I shook the conductor’s hand, then the concertmaster’s. Their firm grips should have anchored me, but they squeezed too hard, and shook too vigorously. I nearly toppled over my own feet.

  The noise, which had been overwhelming, suddenly died. Silence was worse. The oboist’s “A” floated up from the woodwind section and I tuned, feeling every musician on stage listening, judging my ear already. I closed my eyes and swallowed, then nodded to the conductor to begin.

  The opening of the Sibelius Violin Concerto is supposed to sparkle like ice crystals. It should have been Finland at night, glittering with snow. It was the wrong concerto for this disaster. If only I was playing Brahms, I could come crashing out of the gate, fingers flying, strings snapping, then I could have hidden my nerves long enough to get control. Sibelius was too still, too transparent. On the first note, my bow skidded and bounced. My vibrato sounded too tight but I couldn’t loosen it, and then I overshot the first shift.

  That sour note hung in the concert hall, ringing in everyone’s ears. I could feel the disappointment of every musician in the house. No, not disappoin
tment. Satisfaction.

  More skidding, more awkward bow changes, more agony followed, until my heart stopped sprinting and slowed a little, and then a little more until it reached its normal pace. Eventually, my fingers grew steadier and autopilot took over so I could hide in the back of my brain and pretend I was somewhere else. Thousands of hours of practice drove my body through the performance. I barely remembered the rest.

  The postconcert hoopla was torture. The fake smiling and schmoozing dragged on and on, first with musicians, then the conductor, then with the rich patrons whose donations earned face time with whomever they wanted to meet. I was the emperor in his new clothes, and nobody would admit I had been naked. But we all knew. I’d sucked.

  Finally, when I climbed into the cab to go back to the hotel, I’d put my head in Diana’s lap and cried like a little girl. She hadn’t said much, but took the clips out of my hair and combed through it with her fingers, letting me leak mascara all over her white skirt.

  Diana had been smart. She’d waited for two weeks, until after we’d come home and the humiliation had dried. I’d spent those two weeks reading, going for daily runs with Clark, watching America’s Next Top Model marathons. I only practiced an hour or so a day. It was nice.

  “Chocolate?” Diana had asked, holding out a box of my favorites, Callebaut milk chocolate truffles. I was stretched out on the couch reading My Name Is Asher Lev.

  “Of course.” I took one and popped it into my mouth.

  “Haven’t you already read that?” she asked and sat down beside me, forcing me to bend my legs and make room for her.

  “Yup.”

  I let the truffle melt in my mouth and turned the page.

  “So, let’s talk about Tokyo.”

  She was trying so hard to be casual, but the words jumped out as if she’d snapped her fingers in front of my eyes.

  “Tokyo,” I said.

  “Yes, Tokyo.”