by Aja Gabel
Not that any wedding was as important as the concerts they would play at Esterhazy.
Anyway, it was two days until their first appearance at the competition, but Jana felt that it was too close to risk a full rehearsal.
Her hunch about a lackluster attitude proved true in their run-through. She felt so stuffed with that idea that she tried not to speak at all while they were rehearsing. Brit was clearly in a mood, and Daniel was just an okay foundation, not his usual vocal self. Henry tried to smile at her across the stands, but she scowled back. They ran a couple of known rough spots, which were smoothed out, if devoid of the life they were capable of applying.
At the end, when there was nothing else to run through, Jana couldn’t help it, the words came out of her mouth like a sneeze: “Bad rehearsal.”
“Not really a rehearsal,” Brit said.
“Well,” Jana said. “We could use one.”
“Bad rehearsal, good performance, isn’t that what they say?” Henry said.
The four of them looked at each other in a swath of silence. What they’d just done in rehearsal hadn’t made any sense, and no superstition was going to make Jana feel good about it.
The silence curled away like fog, and they dispersed from the chairs. As Jana put her violin in its velvet case, she heard Daniel clicking his case snaps shut and walking off stage, and Henry saying something quietly to Brit, trying to make her laugh a little. Jana didn’t turn from her violin. There was nothing to say. The space had the unnamable yet pervasive feeling of a holiday spent alone.
As she slung her case over her shoulder, she felt Henry’s presence behind her, and turned to find him smiling, joyful. “It’s going to be fine,” he said, holding out his arm. She slid hers through the crook and they walked into the wings, through the cold backstage, and out onto 19th Avenue. Outside, the fog had lifted, and a warm May afternoon alighted. The warmth was fleeting, though. It always was in San Francisco.
They walked north on 19th to Noriega, where Jana would tuck herself away in her apartment in the Sunset. Henry would continue walking, turn east along the park, to his apartment in the Haight. He liked walking. He had excruciating amounts of energy, and always seemed about to fly off the ground with it.
“So, what,” Jana said, cupping her hand around a cigarette to light it, “you never have . . . doubts?”
“About what?” Henry smiled down at her. He was so tall and wide-shouldered and lanky, with floppy brown hair and an elastic face—pointy nose, wide smile, expressive eyes. Too much of everything in Henry: height, hair, skin, money, optimism, talent.
“I don’t know. Don’t make me say it.” She exhaled.
“Say it.”
“What if we’re doing the wrong thing? What if we’re wasting our time when we should be booking gigs at Alice Tully? Are we happy? Are we even moving toward happiness? I won’t believe you if you say you don’t think about it. I just won’t. You’re an android if you say it.”
The street tilted dramatically up and they were slowed by a steep hill. Henry was unlike most people, she thought, totally unencumbered by pedestrian anxieties, never self-loathing and never too arrogant, exactly as confident as he needed to be, with an endless fount of warmth for music first, and musical people second. It was what she loved about him, and what made him so very different from her. She knew what he would say.
“I just don’t think about it,” he said. “I’m sorry. I can say what you want, if you’d like. If it’ll make you feel better.”
“It won’t make me feel better. You’re a bad liar.”
“I wake up and I think, fuck, I get to do a whole day, you know? Write music, play music, listen to music. Eat, dance, drink—”
“—take a ballerina home.”
“Take a ballerina home. Exactly. Though they’re not much for eating and drinking.”
“Right.”
“What I’m saying is if I thought about all the ways I could be unhappy, I’d be . . . unhappy. Not to mention exhausted.”
“So you just choose . . . not to think about it?”
“It doesn’t feel like a choice. But yeah, I suppose it is. A choice I made so many times that I don’t even have to make it anymore.”
“Everything’s going to be terrible.” Jana thought of Henry and the ballerina he’d been with two nights earlier. How easy it was for him, everything. Sometimes she thought maybe she crawled into bed with him just to suck some of that optimism out of his pores.
Henry unthreaded his arm from hers and pulled her close. “No. Some things, maybe.”
Like when you leave us, Jana thought, but did not say. Or when we win the Esterhazy competition because I slept with one of the judges. “Exactly,” she said. “You can’t tell the difference. So what’s the point?”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Life?”
“Are you seriously asking me that? Do we need to go to a hospital? Are you suicidal?”
“Henry. Come on. I’m serious.”
“You’re not. You can’t be. You can’t play the way you do and not understand the value of . . . pain.”
“Who said it—Mozart or someone? ‘With ease, or not at all.’ What if nothing’s easy?”
“Okay, one, I don’t think he said that. Two, if he did say it, he’s lying. And three, you misunderstand ‘ease.’ I think whoever said that means joy, not the quality of being easy. And difficult things can bring joy. And joy can bring ease.”
They were nearing the corner where they’d split off, and Jana would walk the remaining two blocks to her apartment alone. With ease or not at all, she thought. Would there be joy at Esterhazy? Could there be joy with suffering? And who would do the suffering, anyway? And what would they be suffering from?
What she didn’t confess, but so badly wanted to: I blackmailed Fodorio into giving us a win, joy or no joy. Henry wouldn’t have understood. He didn’t see it the way she did, and not because he chose not to think about how hard it all was, but because he didn’t have to. He never had to. What she’d done was the opposite of ease. She would never tell anyone.
“We’re going to be fine,” Henry said.
“You always think that,” she said. “It’s easy for you to think that.”
“I love you, Miss Jana,” he said, kissing the top of her head. Henry was a different species from the rest of them, Jana thought. He would leave them because of it. Someday.
“Don’t leave your viola by a window today, genius,” Jana said. He let go of her and continued north, grinning back at her. “I love you, too,” she said, waving a suddenly chilled hand.
* * *
—
It was too easy for Jana to describe her mother as an alcoholic. That there was a name for what her mother was made Jana furious, as though reasons (and excuses) for Catherine’s behavior could be found in a medical textbook or a psychology course. Her mother was an alcoholic—and a pill popper and an occasional coke user and a pathological liar—but what she suffered from seemed to Jana to be more like self-delusion than any imbibed substance. And there was nothing easy about Catherine.
Before Jana was born, her mother had a spot on a heavily rotated detergent commercial, and she hadn’t risen in the ranks much after that. When Jana was ten, her mother landed a role on a soap opera, but her character became possessed by demons and was killed off within a month of episodes, quickly forgotten in the myriad storylines. In between gigs, Catherine waited tables or walked dogs or sold makeup at department stores in the Valley. She was always auditioning, though, and because she was auditioning, there was always the possibility that she was going to get a part, and for Catherine, possibility was as good as potential, and she told Jana only the truly great had potential. Jana took up the violin as a child mostly so she wouldn’t have to take the acting classes her mother pushed.
The other thing Catherine
was always doing was letting men move in. Jana saw a montage of men carrying their boxes into the apartment, and then carrying them out, one after another, except sometimes their things were in trash bags and not boxes, and some of them were angry and slammed the door behind them when they left, and some of them left behind things like uncomfortable leather couches or a bandanna collection or gaming consoles. They weren’t all so bad, though, and one of them stayed around awhile—Billy, who played Irish fiddle in a band every Tuesday at the Red Rose Pub, where her mother sometimes worked. Billy had a face full of stubble that always made him look dirty, and he picked up handyman gigs when he could get them. He tried to make Jana play Irish-style but she wouldn’t play that loose, or couldn’t, and by that time her Russian teacher had taken her on anyway, and he would have died if she’d told him she learned a jig by ear.
Jana remembered Billy liked war movies because he’d been in the war, and when Platoon came out, he dragged Jana to see it. She was sixteen and it was her first R-rated movie in a theater. Catherine refused to go, in one of her slumps after a string of bad auditions.
He elbowed Jana in the cold theater and whispered, “This guy’s my favorite—Willem Dafoe.”
Then Willem Dafoe’s character died. All his men were watching him from a helicopter when he was shot in the back. He kept trying to get up and run but he kept getting shot. The music of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, which Jana had played first violin on in chamber orchestra two years prior, swelled over the scene. Jana wondered what recording it was, was mildly bored by the violent visual that accompanied it. But when she looked over at Billy, the light from the screen flashing on his face, she saw that he was crying. Silent, masculine tears, but flat silver streaks down his cheeks for sure. He hadn’t seen it coming, not even with the swelling music. What a fool, Jana thought, but in a kind way.
On the ride home, Billy said, “Oh boy, that was a movie, huh?”
It must have been some days later—Catherine was home and happy again, having received both a callback and a very large tip at the restaurant—when Billy knocked on her bedroom door. He poked his head in. Jana was cleaning her violin of rosin.
“Hey, can you play it? That soundtrack from Platoon?”
“The Barber?”
“Sure, that.”
Jana nodded. “I could play it years ago.”
Billy sat down on the floor by the door, just inside her room. “Play it for me now?”
Jana rummaged through her sheet music. “It will sound weird without all the other parts.”
But she played it anyway. It required a pristine intonation, but with Jana’s perfect pitch it wasn’t so difficult. When there were rests in the music, she rested, and Billy didn’t move in the quiet. Finally, she reached the climactic climb up the E string, the soaring scale that accompanied Willem Dafoe’s death, and when she was done, she looked up and saw her mother standing next to Billy. She was holding two clear drinks, one in each hand.
“Baby, that was beautiful. Sad and beautiful,” Catherine said, bending down to hand one drink to Billy.
“It was from the movie we saw together,” Billy said.
Catherine frowned. “I don’t remember you two seeing a movie together.”
No one said anything because, yes, she didn’t remember. Catherine kicked absently at the doorjamb with her high heel. “Well, anyway. Maybe Jana can play in the movies one day. You know that’s where her name comes from, right? Jana Leigh? Like Janet Leigh. Janet Leigh is so pretty. Like Jana. Didn’t I make a pretty baby?”
Catherine had shown Jana Psycho when she was eleven, too young. Her mother loved Psycho, always got scared and huddled under a blanket, sometimes called their creepy neighbor “Norman Bates” as a joke. “Baby, your namesake,” Catherine would always say when they watched it. Jana didn’t tell her mother she didn’t like being named after a woman who was best known for being stabbed in the shower, or that she hated the screeching music that accompanied the murder scene. Couldn’t she have been Tippi? Grace? Kelly? Or someone from something with a dignified soundtrack?
But Billy didn’t answer, because he was still hearing the music. It seemed to Jana that around that time was when Billy stopped listening to his mother’s blathering altogether, which is why she eventually kicked him out, and it wasn’t like Billy was some saint—he didn’t even say goodbye to Jana—but Jana thought about him when she thought about the moment she decided to really leave home, to go to conservatory and not look back. She thought about the parade of men who fell in love with Catherine and then fell out of love with her when they saw how myopic and medicated she was, or the men who didn’t love her at all, the men who drank even more than Catherine did and broke lamps and frying pans and fences—and how she, Jana, didn’t ever want to be around those men again, men who either needed too much or not enough. When she thought about Billy, she always remembered him clutching at the carpet in her bedroom, listening to her play while Catherine flitted around above him, how he’d seemed lost but aligned with Jana, not like a father (she never felt that from anyone) but like a brother, like he was saying, Hey, we could be related because we both understand how special and exquisite this music is. But Billy wouldn’t have used that word—exquisite—and Jana wouldn’t have, either, not until she left two years later, and then she didn’t really think of Billy except for when she heard the Barber, which, now that she was a serious professional, wasn’t that often. It was considered schlocky, especially since Platoon, and after that afternoon, Jana never played it again.
Back at her apartment, Jana made herself food and ate it standing by the stove. While she chewed, she wiped up the crumbs around the range with a new sponge. Nothing had ever seemed so lonely before, though she’d spent days exactly like this many times prior. Days like this were the atomic structure that made up her life. She didn’t eat or drink with the voraciousness Henry had mentioned. She ate box pasta and pre-made salad mixes, and drank mineral water. She felt jittery and useless when she was not practicing or listening to music. So, in her non-music life, she learned to make her movements small and quiet, to lessen the guilt and assuage the nagging in her head. But why now, all of a sudden, was the pathetic deadness of her life revealed? Nothing had changed.
It wasn’t Fodorio himself. She wasn’t, like she thought Brit was, hungry for the attention of men. She was hungry to begin their professional life, and was it so terrible that she’d done something possibly against the rules for a leg up at Esterhazy? What was a small moral failing on the way to greatness? She could spend time convincing herself she had connected with Fodorio, seen in his wayward fatherhood a replica of the empty space inside her. She had let him talk, hadn’t derided his life’s choices, hadn’t bothered him with hers. She had helped him be temporarily less lonely. She had forgiven him his mistakes. She had provided him a service, so why was it so bad if he provided her with something, too?
She wouldn’t tell the group. Not ever, she decided. Brit didn’t have the same sort of ambition she did, and wouldn’t understand. Daniel would be angry with her, though really he’d be angry with himself, for not being good enough to win the competition flat-out. And Henry would think she was foolish, that they didn’t need help winning, and he would be right, but only about him—he could win it alone. Together, she wasn’t sure. And she needed to be sure.
This was the end of something, she thought, looking out the small square window above her sink at the top of Coit Tower in the distance. The end of their schooling, their student-hood, their tryout period. The period where they could fail. They’d fooled themselves into thinking it wasn’t the same as conservatory because they were earning master’s degrees, but it was simply an extension, a way to make it all right not to be good enough. But after this week, there would be no cushion, and the vertigo of that thought rushed through Jana’s body.
And what would failure look like? A lack of: invitations to play, offers fo
r management, post-conservatory residencies. An abundance of: years wasted, degrees earned, rehearsal hours clocked. Settling for: teaching private students who would, at best, be good in an extracurricular way (good for a future doctor), or clawing to a job leading a bad band at a junior high school, or (if she was a lucky failure) toiling away in the back of a violin section at a middling regional orchestra. In any scenario, there would be the slow shrug of dissolving a quartet whose union depended on other people wanting to be united.
Jana hadn’t invited her mother to the recital or Esterhazy. She wouldn’t have known where to send the invitation. Not really. The last time she’d seen her mother had been at a trailer park near Torrance, a nice one, with trees and children, but a trailer park still. Her mother had been drunk, thin, pretty in a sun-worn kind of way. A man was holding her up—Ray or something was his name. Catherine didn’t do anything in particular that day, nothing unusually awful. They went to lunch, Ray stared at Jana’s small breasts, Catherine drank four margaritas, and then they went back to the trailer to watch some television crime drama her mother liked. Catherine fell asleep during the show, and Ray said nothing until Jana stood up to leave. She thought her mother probably did not remember it very well.
It was easier not to contact her. She had Jana’s number anyway, or could find her easily enough. But it was too taxing, those visits, pinging between her guilt for being a bad daughter and her hunger for a mother Catherine could never be.
Was that pain? Jana didn’t know. It simply felt like the absence of something.
Here was Catherine’s number, scrawled in the corner of an address book, under several other phone numbers that had been scratched out, numbers to her apartments over the years, those of men she’d lived with. Jana held the book in her hand, plastic-bound with yellowing pages.