by Jessie Tu
‘Okay, I’ll do it.’
We arrange to meet in a few hours. I go back to scanning the shelves. I can’t find what I am looking for. Non-latex. Ribbed. Scented. Citrus. Large.
I find a salesperson nearby. ‘Do you have those large, non-latex condoms?’
He looks at me as though I’ve asked him to take his penis out.
‘They’re in a sort … of reddish pink box.’ The salesperson pretends to not be fazed, but he is fazed. I have fazed him.
‘I’ll ask my supervisor.’
He walks away, then doesn’t return.
At the counter, I pay for two boxes of vegan condoms, three environmentally friendly lubes, a morning-after pill and a box of contraceptive pills. The pharmacist asks me to fill in a form for the morning-after. I count back the hours since I’d last had sex. The condom had broken while the man was inside me. Now, I am here, as if it is my job to clean up the mess.
On the train, I call my hand physio. She asks me to describe the pain.
I tell her I can’t.
‘What do you mean you can’t?’
‘I mean, I don’t know what words to use.’ She tells me she’ll be available in the afternoon.
At the Opera House, I find her in the green room with bags of tapes and cream.
‘It’s pretty bad, Jena.’
She squeezes the side of my wrist like she is navigating the remote control of a game console.
‘You’ll need at least a week’s rest.’
‘A week? I’ve got a concert tomorrow.’
She shrugs.
‘You can either rest it or damage it further.’
‘What about the anti-inflammatory tablets?’
‘They are not a cure.’ She frowns and hands them to me anyway. ‘No more than two in six hours or your muscles will spasm and you won’t be able to play at all.’
I swallow two pills as soon as she leaves then go into the communal kitchen for some ice. Physical injuries never stopped me from playing when I was the world’s best. Though back then, I didn’t do anything likely to cause injury. I didn’t do anything apart from play. My father wouldn’t even let me use a knife in case I sliced my finger. He was protective like that. My fingers, he’d say, were the most valuable part of our family.
My mother wasn’t so strict. When we were on tour, she would let me use a butter knife.
‘Don’t tell your father,’ she’d say. My mother and I found communion through shared lies.
I press the muscles around my wrist to test the pain. It had flared up early this morning when I was in bed with a man. I met him last night at a recording session for Noah’s band. A bass player. I invited him back to my place after and in the morning, I woke to his erection pressed against the small of my back. He slipped inside me without asking, moaning. At one point, I climbed on top of his body and put my hands on the headboard. A blunt pain shot through my wrist. In the climax of morning fucking, I held on, endured the pain. Gripped the wood tighter. Stayed silent. As he was getting dressed, he tried to make conversation.
‘Noah says you’re some hot shot violinist.’
He sat on the edge of the bed, pulling on his socks. I was sprawled on top of the covers.
‘Not really.’
‘He said you used to be, like, world-famous.’
I got up and reached for my shirt. ‘That was another time.’
It troubles me—how little I care. As arranged, I visit Banks at the Conservatorium, but take my time. I will play for him again. I will forget the pain I caused him. It’s cold inside his room. He never turns on the heating. It interrupts the sound. Damages the instruments.
‘How’s Monkey?’ he asks.
I take out my plush toy from the case and squeeze its neck. ‘Same.’
Banks slides the sheet music onto the stand and sits down. He smells of bacon and sweet milk.
‘Let’s hear the excerpts then. One by one.’
He does not look at me. His focus rests on the music.
‘I thought you’d want to hear the Beethoven?’
He shakes his head. ‘I trust you’ll do well. The excerpts?’
I wait for him to pick up his violin. He played with the SSO for several years in the eighties, chiefly as the concertmaster. When he retired, they kept him on the board and sometimes he plays with us on special occasions, small ensemble stuff.
I reach for my metronome. He does not move.
‘No metronome,’ he says. ‘I’ll count you in.’
The tip of his thumb and forefinger join—a hoop. He draws circles in the air. He hums the opening flute line of the Brahms 4th. Nods his head for me to begin.
I take a breath. The hairs on my bow press into the steel strings.
‘Too loud.’
My exhalation is pronounced.
‘You’re breathing too loud. You’re part of a violin section. You’re not a soloist. You can’t breathe so loud.’
I begin again.
He raises a hand. ‘Now you’re playing too softly. Start again from the beginning, forte. But don’t breathe so loudly. You’re saying something with your breath, but don’t be so frank.’
I stare at the dead skin peeling off the back of his hands. Twenty-five years of European sun had done damage, but it was the last few years in Australia that had brought out the sunspots.
I raise my violin to my neck and begin again, this time, holding my breath.
‘Why are you doing that?’
‘Experimenting.’
‘Don’t waste my time.’ He stands.
There’s a knock on the door. Another student.
‘Come back when you’re ready to take this seriously,’ he says.
I slide the shoulder rest off the violin and begin packing in silence, stuffing Monkey back inside the small compartment in my case.
Before I leave, he raises a hand. ‘What would you like from me?’
I wonder how he sees me now. If he hates me for what I did when I was his best student. His most famous student. His reputation had rested entirely on everything I did. Maybe he still loves me.
Part of me wants to erase him. Forget the years he spent teaching me. But there is hardly a memory of a sound that does not include him. Without him, I am rootless.
I turn to face him. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m older. Less patient now. You need to clarify what it is you want. Otherwise I can’t help you.’
‘I think I want you to, I don’t know—contribute, somehow.’
He frowns. ‘Come back after the show. We can talk.’
‘You won’t be there?’
‘No.’
Walking to the station, I wonder if he’d planned to re-enter my life as strategically as he’d planned to exit, all those years ago. Why did he make it seem as if I was the one wanting something from him? Yet, it was he who asked me to come. I’d forgotten that momentarily. When did I become so uncertain about myself?
The following day, I arrive at the Opera House an hour before the doors open. The concert hall. Musicians in their seats. That old familiar sight. The conductor shakes my hand at the podium. He introduces me to the orchestra. Formalities. They all know who I am. He makes them act as if I am someone I am not. Someone I used to be. The travelling soloist. The prodigy everyone talked about. A cellist on the first desk smiles at me; no teeth. Perhaps gritting them behind a closed mouth.
We run through the concerto. Standard play. I’ve memorised the music in my bones. The notes fly out. Under the surface of each phrase, my heart pounds in my throat, drumming a beat that distracts me from the rhythm of the third movement, its giddy eruption some form of pure joy. Optimism.
During the break, the cellist hangs back and watches me loosen my bow.
‘What’s that?’ He points to Monkey, whose head is sticking out of the shoulder rest compartment in my case.
‘Oh, him.’
‘Your childhood doll or something?’
When I don’t respond immediately, he s
ays, ‘Aren’t you a bit old for that?’
I open the concert, just after 1 pm. I use more bow, tucking long phrases into one stroke. For the double stops, I am careful, hesitant about the intonation. Relax on the pressure. Later, the conductor tells me I was too soft. ‘Fuck you.’ If only I were bold enough.
I walk to the Conservatorium to see Banks.
I knock on his door and let myself in. He’s sitting at the piano, marking a score with a pencil.
‘It went well then?’
‘As well as it could. I made it to the end, at least.’
‘Tremendous.’
He has never used that word.
‘I won’t stay long,’ I say. ‘I need to work on those excerpts.’
‘Why don’t you play a little?’
‘The excerpts?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m not really ready with those yet.’
He smiles weakly. ‘Never mind. I’ll prepare for my next student then.’
He stands and gestures to the door.
Outside, I look back at him. But he has already turned around.
4
I miss Chinese New Year celebrations. My mother does not call to remind me. Intentionally or not, I tell her there is a concert on that evening. She doesn’t ask more questions.
A week later, in mid-February, she visits me in Newtown carrying a jar of home-brewed jasmine tea, her signature brew. She inherited the recipe from her mother, a native Taiwanese farmer, who got it from her mother, who got it from her mother, and so on and so forth.
Sitting on the edge of my couch with her knitting, she’s making a woollen cover for my violin, a new year’s gift.
Mike and Jacob’s pepper-sprinkled canvas rests on the wall beside her, unacknowledged. Warm blue sunlight. A rectangle of light on her forearm. Body erect, eyebrows drawn in dark coal, hair moulded and secured with hairspray. I wonder what she looked like at my age.
My mother doesn’t know about my latest interaction with Banks. I don’t tell her. Perhaps she wants to forget our history too.
I massage my wrist.
‘What’s wrong?’
‘Nothing. It’s just a bit sore again.’
It’s been a long time since my mother sat in a practice session. When I was a child, she was always around, watching, her face fixed in permanent anxiety. I grew used to her uneasiness. She’d even make me wait while she went to the bathroom. Each note had weight and significance. Each note had to be interrogated. She would watch me closely as I played, as though in a trance. Every time she heard something she didn’t like, she’d clap her hands, just once, and make me do it again. It annoyed my sister, Rebecca, who didn’t play an instrument—but she was beautiful and that made all the difference. I got used to the sudden explosion of claps. Do it again. Do it again. Now, my mother sits still and does not make a sound.
Part of me wants her to go away. After what I did. After what she did. All those years.
Since I took up the violin again at the beginning of university, my mother has become more animated. She calls at least once a week. Without the violin, we had very little to talk about. Perhaps it was welcome news that her prodigy daughter was making a comeback.
I fumble a tricky chromatic ascend and take a pencil to mark in fingerings.
She sits up, rests the needles in her lap, a question hanging off her lip.
‘Are you sure you’ll be satisfied with an orchestral role?’
Christina Lin, formerly Christina Wang, loves to push people. It’s a subtle form of emotional manipulation she inherited from her father. That’s probably what she’d say if anyone asked.
I keep playing, ignoring her fixed gaze. I’ve learned, only recently, that just because a question is asked doesn’t mean you have to answer it.
After a while, my attempt to perfect the Mozart ends in sheet-music-crumpling fury. I do it slow. Then at tempo. Then slow again.
I move on to the Brahms. Run through the high registers faster than the recommended tempo.
‘Slow down. It’s allegro, not presto.’ My mother’s hands are frozen on her lap.
‘I’m just getting my fingers automated.’
‘I thought you stopped doing that years ago. I never knew you to be so lazy.’
‘Maybe I am lazy.’
She stands and grasps my hand, performs a detailed inspection. ‘Are you using the cream?’
I pull my hand away and walk into the kitchen to pour some tea. She follows.
‘What’s all this mess?’
I’d forgotten to wash the dishes from last week’s casserole dish, which cost me two hours of practice time to make. It was good though. Mike and Jacob said they’d pay me in artwork if I made it again.
My mother unbuttons her cuffs and folds her sleeves back.
Despite my protests, she puts on an apron, slips on gloves, and begins to wash up.
During the week, she volunteers at a soup kitchen and occasionally helps the local church with bookkeeping. Her life is filled with small tasks. Mine is filled with practise, rehearsals and performance. Banks had a theory that everyone is born with a special frequency we either find very early on and stay with or move away from the older we get. My tuning went off when I was fifteen and I’ve spent the last seven years trying to find it again.
‘Do you think you’ll get into the SSO?’ my mother asks, wiping the floor with a tea towel.
‘I don’t know.’
When the floor is done, she walks out the front door and returns half an hour later with two bags of food. She spends the next hour chopping potatoes and apples. From the lounge room I can hear the thwack of knife on board. Her nasal humming of Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony.
‘Are you hungry?’ she calls. ‘It’s almost done!’
I sit at the dining table. She serves me a bowl of barley soup, then a plate of her potato, egg and apple salad with mayonnaise.
I lean across the table and give her arm a squeeze.
She smiles. All those years we toured together, she didn’t cook a single meal. She takes a seat next to me. ‘Quick now, before the soup gets cold.’
5
On Sunday, Olivia hires a lecture hall at university to practise. We want to feel the sound of our violins in a large hall, to test the decisions we’d made about where to slide up the fingerboard and where to slide down, whether our bow changes are suitable. Ensure that the fingerings we’d marked out in the music are the most appropriate in a space similar to the concert hall where we will be auditioning.
It’s the first time I am back since graduation. I studied English literature; four years of my life I don’t remember well. I always knew I would return to the violin. Or, rather, I knew it would come back to me. It was unavoidable, like the rain. Before that happened, I wanted to escape the world of music and live among ordinary people. Ordinary, unambitious people. English literature majors are ordinary. Floaters. Wanderers. White. I wanted to surround myself with people to whom I could feel superior.
I met Olivia and Noah at orchestra auditions in the first week of semester in 2012. I spotted a girl with pale skin in a tangerine sweater from across the auditorium. The sweater was loud. Demanded attention. I knew I wanted to be her friend. When I approached her after the audition, I saw that she’d matched the sweater with jeans the colour of beetroot and R.M. Williams boots. I discovered she was an English major too.
As I walk into the theatre I look down at my faded black jeans. Ripped cotton shirt reflected in the sliding door.
Olivia is sitting in the front row, ankles crossed. She looks up from her phone.
‘Hey.’
The double door cracks open and Noah enters as if on cue. He’s carrying his clarinet and a plastic bag. I am relieved to see he’s also casually dressed; baggy grey sweater, brown cargo pants, thongs. As he comes closer, I see he hasn’t shaved in days.
‘Hi, girls.’
Olivia tilts her face up to meet his. He is so tall.
‘What’s in the
bag?’
He opens it. Shapes, Doritos, Mars bars and LCMs.
‘Were we meant to bring something?’ I ask.
His eyes lift quickly. ‘I thought we might go see a movie if we finish early.’
‘I’ve asked you to come play the clarinet,’ Olivia says. ‘Not distract us.’
He looks wounded.
He deposits his things on a seat and Olivia and I climb onto the stage. We align the stands, place the music on the metal plates, tune up.
She lifts her gaze. ‘How’s the practice going?’
I tell her I haven’t been documenting sessions on Google Docs like we promised we’d do, but I am following the exercises in the order we planned.
‘I can’t seem to practise after five. I’m just so exhausted. The humidity is killing me.’
I am interested in Olivia. I really am. But my brain turns off each time she complains about playing. I don’t understand her struggles. Instead, I give her my best sympathetic expression.
She clears her throat and rolls her shoulders.
We begin with Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3. A series of difficult passages in tenth position. I watch her lift the scroll of her violin as her fingers drop onto the E string, micro-millimetre shifts. Firm bow pressure, inching closer to the bridge.
Noah’s voice cuts in.
‘What?’ I shout.
‘I can’t hear Olivia.’ He looks at me, then down at the mouthpiece he is screwing onto his clarinet.
‘I can hear myself,’ Olivia says.
Noah walks up with sheet music clamped under his arm, clarinet in hand. ‘From where I was sitting, it sounded like you were playing forte and you were playing piano.’
‘There’s no specific marking,’ I say.
Noah points to the sheet music. ‘Dolce.’
Sweetly. Loud sweet? Or soft sweet?
‘I suppose maybe tone it down a little?’ Olivia blinks at me.
I’m not a soloist anymore. Why do I keep forgetting?
For the rest of the hour, I play with a dulled, weak force. I feel bad for my Strad, lent to me by a mining investor in Germany. It deserves to be heard only on its own. The idea of it being part of an orchestra is like asking Oprah to join the Today Show. Noah plays with the usual compliance of a tutti clarinet, blowing with mild interest. There’s a reason why all clarinet players are the same. No one who wants to stand out plays the clarinet.