Virtuosity

by Jessica Martinez

  Instantly, Diana was by my side, hugging, kissing, crying, and Jeremy faded away into the horde.

  Chapter 17

  Live performances can’t be rewound. Listening to a concerto isn’t like reading a book where you can flip back to check on some detail, or pause the flow of music just to think. Live music has to be ingested linearly, in one sitting, understood on the musician’s terms, in the time and progression the composer ordered. Daydreaming? Miss something? Too bad.

  “Focus! Focus! Focus!” Yuri said it all the time, whenever he sensed my mind might be wandering. Somehow, saying it in triplicate was supposed to make it magically easier to do.

  I needed life to be less like a concerto and more like a book. I needed to flip back several pages, maybe several chapters, and find out how things had happened. Clues had been missed. I’d been sleeping, and now everything was racing by too quickly.

  We drove home in silence. I stared out the window. Diana just drove.

  I had every right to be elated. I was elated. But there was something else too, something I couldn’t ignore. Guilt maybe, except that wasn’t it. I didn’t feel bad about playing my best. I felt bad for Jeremy, that plastic smile holding his face together, but that wasn’t it either.

  Something wasn’t right.

  “Congratulations, honey.”

  I looked up. We were home. Diana turned the key and pulled it free from the ignition. “You’re almost there. Friday night is all yours—neither of those guys can hold a candle to you.” She couldn’t stop smiling. She looked happy for the first time in weeks.

  I nodded and smiled too because she was right, and because seeing the real Diana again was a relief. I’d missed her. But I couldn’t ignore what had happened either. “I don’t understand how Jeremy didn’t make the finals. It doesn’t make sense.”

  She sighed. “Just enjoy the good luck.”

  “But he’s phenomenal. I know. I heard him play.”

  “But Carmen, you didn’t hear him play today! He must not have played his best, and that’s what the Guarneri is about—not how well you played last week, but how well you play in the competition.”

  “I guess.”

  “Let’s not ruin the night by arguing about Jeremy King. That’s over.” She gathered her purse and pulled her cell phone out of the pocket. “Let’s try Clark again. He’s going to be so proud of you.”

  We walked into the house, and I took off my heels and hung up my coat while Diana left another message for Clark.

  “I’m so tired,” I said, more to myself than to Diana.

  She flopped down on the couch, tossing her purse beside her. “Me too. What an exhausting day.”

  “I’m going to bed,” I said.

  “That’s a good idea. I think I’ll do that in a few minutes too.” She got up and started to pour herself a drink.

  “Good night, Mom.”

  “Good night, honey.”

  I had just climbed into bed when I heard her phone ring. It was probably Clark, still stuck at the office. I was too tired to talk. I’d talk to him tomorrow.

  I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, but something pulled at my memory. It was the sound of Diana’s ringtone. At night. That phone call I’d overheard—how long ago had it been? It felt like months, but it wasn’t. It was two weeks ago, the night after I’d first seen Jeremy behind Rhapsody. I couldn’t even remember what she’d said, just that it had been so bizarre and secretive. Something about money.

  I changed into pajamas and crawled into bed, but as tired as I was, sleep wouldn’t come. Something about money. Something about money. Wiring money. She’d told someone to wire her money, but what could she need money for? Clark made plenty of money, and my record sales and competition earnings brought in a good chunk of change. As my manager she earned a fair percentage of that, and as my mother she had access to all of it. But maybe she needed a lot of money, and maybe it had to be a secret….

  I heard Clark come in around midnight, rustle around in the kitchen for a few minutes, then go to bed. The house was perfectly silent. Everyone was asleep, but the more my mind ticked, the further I was from joining them.

  Jeremy didn’t make the finals. Jeremy didn’t make the finals. I kept forgetting and then remembering, and each time the realization came with a shock. It didn’t make sense. But that one hot kernel festered and festered in my brain, and gradually, a terrible idea began to form around it, and the bigger the idea got and the more I tried to avoid thinking it, the more I couldn’t hide from it, because it was too ugly and too big and it was swirling around and around, and when I couldn’t stand the vertigo for one more second, my mind started screaming it: What if Diana had paid the judges?

  Suddenly my body felt empty and cold. Drained. My head ached from exhaustion. I just wanted to sleep, to not have that thought burning behind my eyes. But I couldn’t pretend it away.

  Jeremy should have made the finals. If Diana had anything to do with his elimination, I had to know. I had to have proof. I whispered the word in the dark. “Proof.” It felt like a mallet banging on my chest.

  I swung my legs out of bed and let the balls of my feet and my toes rest on the cold floor. Part of me wanted to curl back up and hide under my warm covers, but this had to be done now.

  Diana’s study was the logical starting point, but it wasn’t until I flipped on the light and surveyed the room that I realized I had no idea what I was looking for. The massive mahogany desk and file cabinet held too many files to sift through. I pulled on each of the drawers. Only the smallest was locked.

  There was usually a reason things were locked.

  But the key was not in any of the other drawers, or behind the computer, or under the keyboard. I slid my hand around the bookshelf ledges. Nothing. I pulled up the edges of the area rug. Nothing again. I sat down in her chair and stared at the silver-framed picture on her desk. It was of me, wearing a white sundress and crouching in a field of baby’s breath, holding the Strad under my chin, eyes closed. It was one of the rejects from my last CD cover photo shoot.

  This was stupid. And hopeless. I didn’t even know what I was looking for. If she’d paid the judges in cash there would be nothing to find, except maybe a bank withdrawal slip, which she would never have kept. But that was ridiculous. A briefcase full of money (I pictured tidy stacks of bills bound together with little paper belts) was straight from the movies. She wasn’t the mafia, she wasn’t a drug dealer, and she wasn’t in a movie, but how did people pay bribes in real life?

  I rifled through the accessible drawers. The only thing worth noting was the checkbook she used for my violin expenses. I flipped through each duplicate check. $240.42 to Mei-Ling Yee for gown alterations, $235.90 to Wolfgang’s String Instruments for a rehair and spare strings, $214.67 to Physical Therapy Associates for massage sessions. This was idiotic—did I really expect to find a copy of a check written out to a judge? I put the checkbook back where I found it.

  The phone call played again in my mind. Someone was going to wire her money. That was all electronic, but I didn’t have her banking passwords. She let me use her credit card sometimes, but there’d never been a reason for me to know any passwords.

  This was pointless because Diana was too smart. If she’d done it, she’d have done it so nobody—not the Guarneri officials, not the police, and definitely not some clueless teenager whose only investigative skills had been gleaned from Nancy Drew—would ever be able to trace it back to her.

  Her laptop sat closed on the desk in front of me. I opened it, pressed a button, and waited for the screen to flicker to life.

  Without warning, the floor above me groaned. My breath stopped, my heart stopped, my eyes closed, and I listened. Were those footsteps?

  I hit the power button on the computer and was out of the chair and to the light switch in less than a second. I flipped it off and stood trembling in the dark room, my head leaning against the towering bookshelf, listening to the blood pound in my ears.

 
; Why was I so scared? She was my mother. If I really wanted to know, I should be able to march into her room and ask her. I felt my body reel under the wave of adrenalin and the odd sensation of my blood actually running cold. My brain screamed Inderal! before I could tell it to shut up.

  Footsteps creaked slowly above my head, making their way across the master bedroom floor, then silence, and the sound of peeing. The toilet flushed, the pipes whirled, and the footsteps shuffled back over my head. I waited—two minutes, five minutes, fifteen minutes, I had no idea how long, but it felt like an hour—until my heart rate returned to normal. Then I sat down in front of the computer again.

  I should have wanted to confront her, but it wasn’t quite that simple. She was too smart. She’d lie and I might believe her, or worse, she’d admit to it and convince me it was the right thing, or at least the only thing, to do. I wasn’t ready. Even with everything swirling black, white, and all shades of gray, I had managed to sink my fingers into one thing: I couldn’t be part of this. If Diana had bribed a judge, I couldn’t play. I couldn’t win.

  A few minutes of messing around on the computer told me what I already knew. Diana’s banking links were all password protected. Halfheartedly, I tried a few combinations of Clark’s name and my name. No luck.

  As an afterthought, I tried to open her email. The page came up without a password prompt. She hadn’t signed out, but why would she, on her own laptop, in her own home? She had a short list of unread emails that had accumulated over last two days, mostly spam, followed by older stuff, receipts for purchases, a few brief letters from Sony Classical execs about meeting and contract details, a handful of letters from friends. I clicked to the second page, which looked to be more of the same.

  Then I saw it. One name. It jumped off the screen and burned itself into my brain. Jonathon Glenn. It was dated twelve days ago. I hadn’t seen my dad in four years, hadn’t talked to him on the phone in eighteen months.

  I opened it and began reading.

  Di,

  It’s taken care of. Don’t worry, no paper trail. And you thought I was good for nothing …

  Jonathon

  Of course. Of course, of course, of course. The money came from my father.

  I reread the email. Was there any chance I was misunderstanding? No. What else has a paper trail? Nothing. Just money. And probably a lot of it. A large deposit and withdrawal into Diana’s account might look strange if someone was checking for something, but of course he would know how to do it so it never even went through her. A large amount of money taken out of a businessman’s account, and probably routed through several Swiss banks first—again, only in the movies? who knew?—that wouldn’t be suspicious at all. There would be no proof. Or no more than what I was looking at.

  I’d found what I’d wanted, but I didn’t feel relieved. My head ached, my throat felt dry.

  But how much? That depended on what winning was worth, which was impossible to calculate. A win would make me valuable for life. Every figure I imagined seemed too high and too low.

  “One million dollars.”

  I jumped, banging my knee into the edge of the desk, nearly slipping out of the chair. Diana stood beside the open door, leaning against the frame with her arms crossed over her chest, her charcoal silk robe draped over her thin body. Without her makeup she looked colorless and old, a faded version of herself.

  “You scared me.” My voice sounded weak. Scared.

  “One million dollars,” she repeated. Her face was expressionless. “That’s what you want to know, right? What you’re trying to find out? Or is there some other reason you’re snooping around in here in the middle of the night?”

  The weight of the number crushed me like a massive wave.

  One million dollars. “Why?” I asked.

  She looked at me with tired eyes. “Really? You don’t know why?”

  I did know. She wanted me to win and she thought I would lose otherwise.

  “I wish you hadn’t figured it out,” she said, taking a step toward me with one arm outstretched. “You didn’t need to know.”

  Was I supposed to go to her? Let her hug me and lead me back to bed and forget everything, because I didn’t need to know? I rubbed my bare arms with my palms, suddenly cold. I needed to think clearly, but I felt my body pulling in, shutting down.

  “Trust me, sweetheart. It had to be done, but you don’t need to worry about any of it. Your job is to make beautiful music and you did that yesterday. You’ll do it again tomorrow.”

  “But if I’d really done my job well enough,” I said, my voice trembling, “you wouldn’t have thought you had to.”

  She shook her head. “Jeremy King’s talent isn’t something you could have fixed.”

  “Maybe it wasn’t something to be fixed.”

  Her eyes turned hard and her lip curled into an ugly sneer. “Don’t. You. Dare!” She was shaking, and she lifted her hand like she was going to slap me. But she didn’t. She let it drop back to her side.

  “Do you have any idea of the sacrifices I’ve made for you?” she spat. “Do you ever stop and think about that, or is it always me, me, me? My entire life has been about your career. And for the Guarneri I had to go groveling to your father, sneaking around to the judges, begging and humiliating myself. You don’t get to be all high and mighty about what’s right. Just because you’re lucky enough to live on this adolescent plane where everything’s so easily classified as right and wrong doesn’t mean you get to judge me. I make your life possible. Don’t you dare turn on me.” She shook her head and rubbed her eyes, then muttered again to herself, “You didn’t need to know.”

  “I didn’t need to know?” I yelled, surprised at the volume of my own voice, but too furious to lower it. “Are you kidding? I didn’t need to know that I am a complete fraud?”

  “Stop! It’s time for you to grow up. You wanted to win because you were the best, and that would have been wonderful, Carmen, but that was not going to happen. Before you lose yourself in a tantrum, stop and think about what I’ve just done for you. I saved your career, your life, everything we’ve worked for.”

  It was true. We had worked for it. It had always been we.

  “But I deserved the chance to …” The words fell lamely between us. Chance to what? Lose?

  “Deserved? That’s a childish way of looking at life. We deserve lots of things. Life is not about getting what you deserve. You have to fight for what you need. I’m doing that for you.”

  “Not for me,” I said. Finally I understood. “For you. You’re fighting for yourself.”

  She shook her head bitterly. “I never got that option. When my career ended …” Her voice broke and lifted her fingers to the scar on her throat. “You don’t want to know what it feels like to lose music. I won’t let that happen to you.”

  She was talking in circles, about her career, about my career, or both, as if they were connected by a twenty-year-long string that was dragging me along. Or maybe I was dragging her.

  But she had something wrong. “I could have won it on my own,” I said. It was true. I knew it. Jeremy had sensed it too.

  She shook her head, but kept her lips pursed in a thin, tight line. Her eyes answered. No, Carmen. You couldn’t have.

  “You don’t know!” I was shouting again, but I was done trying to control myself. “I really could have. Everything is different without Inderal. I’m playing for myself now. I could have—”

  “I’ve been in the audience,” she interrupted. “I know things are different, but it isn’t all for the better. It’s more exciting, more passionate, but this is the Guarneri, Carmen. It has to be more than that. It has to be perfect, and it has been far from perfect. You do need Inderal, you just don’t realize it because you’re on such an emotional high when you’re out there, you aren’t hearing the little mistakes.”

  Tears spilled over onto my cheeks before I had time to stop them. Was she right? I didn’t know anymore.

  “You n
eed Inderal,” she continued in a softer voice, “but even with it, you couldn’t have beaten Jeremy King. His virtuosity …” Her voiced trailed off, and she reached out to cup my cheek with her hand. It was warm and steady. I reached up to hold onto it with both of mine.

  “But now I have no choice,” I whispered.

  She gave me a confused look. “With Inderal? When did you ever have a choice? I know you’ve had this illusion of it lately, of taking control of your own life, or whatever, but now isn’t the time for teenage rebellion. I put up with it because I knew you’d come around. I knew I’d be able to make you see what was best.”

  “I’m not talking about Inderal,” I said. “I have no choice about playing. About winning.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would you choose not to play? And why would you want to lose?”

  “Because it’s tainted.” I shuddered picturing Jeremy’s smile as he tried to convince me to stand for my applause. My hands still clung to Diana’s arm, her fingers were still splayed over my cheek.

  “I didn’t buy a win,” she said. “I bought an elimination. You still have to earn your win, Carmen.”

  “Who took the bribe?”

  “Half a million to Chang, and half a million to Schmidt.”

  “What about Laroche?” I asked. The image of her steel gray eyes and solemn face burned in my mind.

  She shrugged and dropped her hand from my face. “We didn’t go there. Schmidt and Chang were more than willing when we started talking numbers. The high and mighty Laroche wouldn’t have accepted it, anyway. At a certain age, money doesn’t mean much anymore.”

  It was all so sleazy. I felt sick. “What if they’d refused?” I asked. Suddenly I saw the risks she’d taken, saw everything she’d put at stake. “What if they’d turned you in, or what if you—we— got caught?”

  “I know what I’m doing,” she said calmly, smoothing my hair. “This is how things are done in the real world. Trust me.”

  “But I don’t want it this way.”

  “You’re shocked. You’re tired. Let’s talk about it in the morning.”