by Aja Gabel
When Jana crushed the cigarette under her shoe and stood, a perfect shiver ran down her spine, and she wished she’d brought a coat. She picked up the butt and walked it to a trash can on the sidewalk.
“I see you.”
Jana turned toward the voice. Fodorio leaned against a building, smoking his own cigarette. “But I won’t tell,” he said.
“I don’t smoke,” she said.
“I said I won’t tell.”
“You have the accent of a rich person,” she said. “A person who went to boarding school.”
“And now I’ve been found out,” he said.
“See,” Jana said. “I see you, too.” She leaned on the wall next to him. The May chill raised goose bumps on her bare arms, and he draped his jacket around her.
“I hear your group will be competing at Esterhazy this year,” Fodorio said.
“The rumors are true,” she said.
Was this against the rules, an entrant in the Esterhazy fraternizing with a judge? Surely not. There were seven judges and three performance rounds, and besides, who could keep one drunk professional musician from smoking with another, even if one was drunker and not exactly a professional yet?
“I want tacos,” he said.
“I know a place,” she said. “But we’d have to walk.”
They sneaked into the greenroom to grab her violin. Before she placed it in the case, he took the violin from her, their fingertips touching on the scroll, and examined it. “Nice axe,” he said, adding, “for a poor girl.”
As she covered her violin with the burgundy velvet protector and zipped up her case, his hand on her back was both a warning and a prediction. He did see her.
As they walked, Fodorio kept his arm around her waist, and she relaxed into it. It felt good to have a man touch her, though she would never admit that to anyone. He was such a man, though, older and larger and more forward than men in school with her at the conservatory, and for a moment an image of Catherine flashed through Jana’s mind—her mother, poured into a sample-size designer cocktail dress, opening the door to her date, a large man who smelled funny and whose forehead shone like plastic under the porch light. Jana remembered sitting on the carpet, looking at the man in the open doorway, and her mother’s own bare feet on the carpet, nervously squeezing the fibers between her toes. Catherine had let the man in.
Jana and Fodorio stumbled toward a taco truck Jana knew of, one permanently parked in a gas station parking lot, and they sat on the yellow curb and ate.
“Do you really think we’re good?” she asked, adopting a false, girlish uncertainty that was unlike her. Jana thought the fastest and surest way to success was confidence. It had gotten her this far. That, and not wasting time with distractions like men or friends.
“I think you’re young,” he said.
“We’re not young. Henry’s young. I’m twenty-four.”
“Well, your sound is young,” he said between bites. “Which is good and bad. It means there’s potential. But there’s not really room for danger.”
“We need more danger?” Jana laughed, her mouth full of taco. “Please.”
“Well, it’s true. A little too perfect, if you ask me. You did ask me.”
“We have to win,” she said. It was the first time she’d said that out loud, admitted it to herself, to anyone. “We have to.”
“What would you do if you didn’t win? What would you do if the quartet didn’t work out?”
She sighed. The tacos were gone. There were only two more cigarettes in her pack, and she gave him one. “I don’t know,” she said. “Teach? Record a bit? Orchestra? Try to play solos when I can?” Saying it depressed her, took some of the wind out of her.
“You could have a decent solo career,” he said.
“So I hear,” she said.
“But you don’t want to.”
“Not if there’s something better,” she said.
“Is there?” Fodorio dangled the cigarette out of his mouth and spread his arms wide. “All this. Nothing better than all this. I’m smoking and eating tacos with a pretty violinist who happens to be fucking talented, she wants to tell me how to get back to the hotel, maybe come up, order room service because the symphony is paying for it. I’m going to fly to Sydney tomorrow, where it’ll be yesterday, or today, or something like that. Now, what’s better than that?”
“Are you staying at the Omni?” Jana asked. “That’s right near here. You won’t get lost.”
“But I need you to show me the way,” Fodorio said, blowing smoke into her smoke, his hand back on her knee.
She looked at the ground between her feet. Where was Catherine tonight? Why was Catherine on her mind? It was the dark conservatory, how the pretty but closed façade had reminded her of Catherine’s face. Catherine, somewhere in Los Angeles, likely also drunk. It had been almost two years since Jana had spoken to her mother (a lazy abstention, no grudge in particular), but she felt sure she would know in some metaphysical way if Catherine were dead.
“All right,” Jana said, standing.
Fodorio had a two-room suite with fuzzy bathrobes and a Jacuzzi tub up against a clear glass pane that looked out over the bedroom. He made love like he only called it “making love,” when really, what she wanted was whatever the opposite of making love was—to fuck. His hair nearly vibrated off his head, his hands were coarse and perpetually moving. His lovely, expensive violin sat in its case, visible over his shoulder. She wanted it. She knew he knew she wanted it, wanted his sort of success. It wasn’t that she was particularly pretty (tall for a woman, unobtrusively thin and flat, an angular, slightly forgettable face) or that he was particularly attractive (too hairy, some might say, shorter than he acted). They’d chosen each other for the reason most people chose each other: to get closer to some quality they didn’t naturally possess. For Jana it was his accomplishment. For him, well, she supposed it was her hunger for his accomplishment. And here she was restless and tired and anxious and bored. While he roused himself on top of her, she thought: What was the thing the quartet was missing? How could they get it? How would she know when it was time to give up? Eventually Fodorio fell into a champagne nap, and Jana wrapped herself in a plush bathrobe and made herself a tourist of his hotel room, ambling and touching all his smooth things.
Here was his pristine Vuitton luggage, here were his damp European-sized swim trunks, here were the loafers he had worn without socks during the master class, lined up neatly in front of the mirror. And here she was in the mirror, an imposter, a poor girl from the cracked Los Angeles suburbs, a woman whose mother wouldn’t have understood what Fodorio did or was, if she even cared to ask. And here on the dresser was Fodorio’s wallet, textured black leather, falling open in her hands: $327 in cash, four credit cards, a New York State driver’s license in which he appeared bloated and old, and a worn two-by-three-inch photo of a small girl with dark, blunt bangs, a school portrait, the neon teal background clashing with her fuzzy green sweater. She smiled big and toothy, and had fat dimples Jana recognized from Fodorio’s face, a feature that made his smugness charming. She turned the picture over, and written on the back in cursive that seemed ancient, Gisella, 6. The writing a promise the girl’s life would be so long and full of pictures that reminders of name and age would be necessary.
When Fodorio had coached the quartet earlier in the week, he’d criticized the tidiness with which they’d played Beethoven’s “Serioso.”
“Do you know what this is? This piece?” Fodorio asked, standing in front of them on stage. A few peers and teachers were scattered in the audience, waiting for one of his infamous eviscerations.
“Yes,” Jana had said. “It’s Beethoven’s first push toward the more complicated composer he became later in life.”
“Mmmm, not quite, my dear. It’s this unconscious mess, like the tortured man he would become later in
life. There’s a difference. There’s something tortured about it, and something that resists that darkness, no? Like here.” He pointed to a passage in the middle of the movement, a run of difficult sixteenths that she shared with Brit. “You’re playing these like they’re unison sixteenths, but they’re not.”
“What are they, then?” Brit asked.
“They’re agitato, a race against each other, almost angry at each other. They’re competing. Here, let me show you,” Fodorio said, putting his hand around the neck of Jana’s violin.
His fingertips touched hers then, callus to callus. Startled, she let go of her instrument. He motioned for her to get up and when she did, Fodorio sat in her chair. He perched on the very edge of it, more off the seat than on, and peered at Brit from beneath large, trembling lids. With barely a breath, he started the passage, and Brit caught the downbeat expertly. Fodorio’s notes landed a millisecond before Brit’s, and his accents were irregular, poking at Brit’s syncopations. Jana stood aside, awkwardly useless, the air emptied out of her. He was better than she was, yes, of course, but he was also better with Brit, with the group, her group.
Now he was on his stomach, naked still, lightly snoring, his arms curled uncomfortably, under him, a mere human. He looked unabashedly, embarrassingly, like a man, and when she tried to shimmy her arm out from under him, his heaviness confirmed it. Just a man, a body thick all the way through, unconscious on a bed. How disappointing, Jana thought, that someone capable of such intricate movements and sonic perfections could be just a pile of human hanging off a hotel mattress. That this collection of muscles and blood and instincts made up a father, one who likely had forgotten to call his faraway daughter.
Jana worked Fodorio’s arm out from under him, and he snapped awake with a start, his fists curled up like a cartoon version of a boxer. Jana couldn’t help laughing, but when he didn’t think it was funny, something in her warmed. She took one of his hands and unrolled his fingers, one by one. They were slender, as they should be.
She held up Gisella.
“It’s her birthday,” he said. “She’s six.”
“She’s seven,” Jana said.
“Oh,” he said, rubbing his eyes, sitting up. “Yes, seven. I meant seven. Oh, God, that makes me sound like a terrible father.”
“I just know because . . .” she said, flipping over to the backside of the picture.
“I love her,” he said, as though trying to convince Jana, and then angry that he had to convince anyone. “I don’t live with her, but I provide for her in other ways. I can’t see her that much because I have to travel to provide for her. And her mother wanted it that way—she was the one who gave me the ultimatum, she was the one who first brought up divorce. They could have traveled with me. But her mother made the decision, and what was I supposed to do?”
He went on, but Jana had stopped listening. It sounded like a speech he’d given himself in his head many times before, the slightly tinny, desperate tenor of his voice, the insistent diction, the rapid, uneven cadence, as though he was trying to get it all out before she could say anything. In any case, she didn’t care whether he lived with his daughter or not, or whether he sent money, or whether he saw her only on holidays or two weekends a month. She cared, however, that this—this girl, this seven-year-old—could inflate and deflate him so. Moments before, he was a plain man on a bed, and here he was now, distracted entirely from the top of her breast peeking out of her robe, her messy hair, the smell of her damp skin. A child could do that to a person, a daughter to a father. She didn’t know this firsthand, but here was evidence.
He continued to talk, and she tried to reach up through him to his center to flip some switch, to turn all his attention back to her, to be the object, the subject, the motif, to turn anything she wanted, to win.
To win.
He didn’t seem to think they’d win at Esterhazy, but Jana saw he also made decisions like a musician, committed in each second to the possibility that everything could change, depending on the nearly invisible but distinctly audible movements of the violist’s bow, or the edge of the cellist’s tempo. Remain agile. Stay in the place where everything could fall apart—isn’t that what he’d told them at the master class? That was where he lived, and though Jana did not (perhaps she was another breed of musician), she understood it. And could use it.
So while she was reaching up inside him in her imagination, she was also touching him on the bed, and her robe slipped off her shoulders, and her mouth swallowed his talking, and he melted easily into her, moving like a fish from one girl who would elude him to another.
But Jana pushed him down when he tried to roll her over, dug her short nails into his collarbone. “No,” she said. She straddled him and his face blossomed beneath her. She rocked down close to his ear and said, “I want to win.”
“Okay,” he said, smiling. “You win.”
“No,” she said. “I want us to win. At Esterhazy.”
He stopped smiling. His arch lifted her up. She held his gaze for as long as she could. She vacated her face, she inhabited only her primal self. She could have been anyone, she felt like anyone, but also felt most like herself. This is what she knew how to do—be the physical embodiment of a determined act of aspiration. This time she was a bundle of frenetic energy atop him, a woman held loosely in that place between triple forte and unbridled chaos. And in the final waves she let out a sob before collapsing onto him, she was small now, he was large again, their bodies were cold with sweat—just bodies that could, from time to time, do incredible things. She could have wept there into his metallic neck at the plainness of it all.
Her words came slowly because she was afraid, but the slowness lent them a sense of confidence. Tempo was always a strength of hers. She said: “If you don’t help us, I will tell everyone that you said you’d help us win if I slept with you.”
There was a pause, some counting of beats, a breath.
“Okay,” he said, his hands on her back, patting her like she was a pet. “Okay. All right.”
After he fell asleep again, this time noisily and deeply, she dressed silently and picked up the picture of Gisella from the carpet beneath the bed, where it had slipped, and tucked it into her purse before clicking the door shut behind her.
It was predawn in San Francisco, the hour when the city felt most like a small ocean town, morning sea birds swirling in the purple sky. But it was cold, and Jana walked briskly, regretting the choice not to wear tights. She found a lonely cab idling on the corner and hopped in.
At the door to Henry’s building in the Haight, she leaned on his buzzer until he moaned into the speaker. She hummed back the exact pitch of the buzzer (D-flat) and he let her in.
Jana climbed the three floors two stairs at a time and nudged open the already ajar door. Henry’s apartment, paid for by his rich parents in Napa—who were also kind, generous, witty people—was chilly. Beneath her feet crunched blank music sheets Henry had tossed to the floor, scribbled with phrases of a piece he was writing. Lined along the walls were crates and crates of classical music records, the only belongings besides his viola that he really carried around, city to city. He was attached to them in a way that made Jana feel tenderly toward him, like watching a child be protective of his toys. But at the same time his attachment also frustrated her. The records cluttered his life—he never unpacked or organized them, and he was forever searching for the right one when he needed it. It was just another way his life was needlessly wild.
She stepped out of her shoes and into Henry’s bed, into the familiar comma made by his long body, and found the spot warmed, perfumed, raw. There’d been someone else here.
“Who?” she asked, elbowing him.
“Off-duty ballerina,” he said into the pillow. “You?”
“No one,” she said. “That stage guy and I went out to a gay club downtown.”
He tightened
his arm around her. “You spent a bunch of time with Ferrari tonight. How was that?”
“Just like you’d think it was.”
“He give you his card, too?”
Jana lifted her head from the pillow and turned it toward him. “He gave you his card?’”
Henry didn’t open his eyes but reached his arm across her to paw at the nightstand, where he produced a folded-up card with Fodorio’s name on it. Jana sat up in the bed and unfolded it. On the back, Fodorio had scribbled: For your John Lennon moment.
“Your John Lennon moment?” Jana said.
“What?”
“What he wrote on the back. For when you want to leave the band.”
“No one’s leaving the band,” Henry mumbled.
“Then why did he give this to you?”
Henry opened his eyes and propped himself up. “Because he’s an egomaniac who wants to feel like he’s helping me do something I don’t even know I need yet?”
Jana rubbed the folds in the business card between her fingers. “Then why did you keep it?”
Henry looked at her like he felt sorry for her, but not in a pitying way. Tenderly, his face matching her meek timbre. At that, she would have let it go, dropped the card to the dirty floor and fallen asleep. But then he took the card from her hand and tore it into tiny squares. He popped the squares into his mouth, chewed quietly, and washed them down with a glass of water from the nightstand.
“Sleep now?” he said.
“Okay.”
Together, they fell into a platonic slumber, as they’d done many nights before: a mess of tacos, sweat, rosin. They were friends, Henry like the brother Jana had always wanted. They were kindred in their prideful loneliness, the stubborn fermata held blankly in their centers that could just go on forever. They pushed their fermatas against each other, and were something close to satisfied. Is there anything better? Fodorio had asked her of his life, and she hadn’t answered. She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t so far away from the failures and disappointments scattered on the floor of his life, but at least she had this, someone else’s fermata. Jana dreamt of nothing. As for Henry, he slept with a dashed-off smile across his face, and she never could tell.