by Jessie Tu
‘So, movie?’ Noah asks me while Olivia is in the bathroom.
‘I’ve got stuff on, sorry.’
My first lie to Noah. I feel bad that I don’t feel bad.
6
I wasn’t always a dishonest kid. Though, I certainly wasn’t a typical kid either. I do recall the year or so I had a normal life.
Year one. I was Mrs R’s favourite student. In the classroom, I sat on the carpet with my legs crossed, back straight. When Mrs R gave an instruction, I’d bolt straight to it. I was always eager to be loved, especially by my teachers.
Jenny Lee was the only other Asian in my class. She was much prettier than me, though I didn’t know it back then. I just thought people preferred her because her skin was whiter than mine. I had darker skin back then. I was bark, dirt, milk chocolate. I didn’t mind it though. Sometimes people thought I was Native American, which made me feel special because I loved Pocahontas. She was dark-skinned and beautiful. A white man with a plain name fell in love with her. After seeing that movie, I began to believe that it was possible for someone like me to be loved. Or at least to be noticed by a man; the right kind of man.
Before Jenny Lee, before Mrs R, there was the violin. My mother told me I’d begged for lessons after I saw someone playing on television in preschool. I don’t remember.
By the time I started year two, I’d been playing for two and a half years and had competed in three competitions in Australia. My mother wanted me to stay in school, though she’d been told by her friends that a child with my talent should be sent away—‘To America! To Germany!’ Those places sounded like suburbs or towns I’d not yet visited because my parents didn’t have time to take us anywhere. I’d only seen the city a handful of times when my mother took us to my father’s dental surgery in Chinatown.
I forgot to eat sometimes, I was so consumed by practice. When it became really bad during the first year of touring—this was when I was eight—my mother kept a food diary to make sure I ate at regular hours. Her bag was full of muesli bars, tubs of nuts and dried fruit. I found toilet breaks distracting too. Every second away from the violin made me anxious. Later, they called me obsessive compulsive and tried to medicate me, but I refused to take anything in case it affected my playing. When I was six, I performed at a festival on an open stage. After my last note, the clapping started. I stayed and smiled and took several bows. But then my mother raced onto the stage and pulled me off. In the toilets, my stockings wet and warm, she asked why I hadn’t gone offstage.
‘The clapping was for me,’ I said. I was only six but had already acquired the language of self-abuse.
Mrs R often asked me to bring my violin to class, usually on Fridays. I was a stand-in for the kids who forgot to bring in their show-and-tells. I remember playing with half my mind occupied by what my hands were doing, the other half on the kids sitting cross-legged in front of me, chins in hands, backs curved. Some of them dozed off; some of them looked intrigued at first then quickly lost interest. I hated seeing how easily I bored them. I wanted to be like Stacey Williams who was a gymnast and showed off tricks in the playground, bending in unusual places, making her body do magical, wonderful things. I wanted to be liked the way Stacey Williams was liked, but my violin never gave me much of a chance. The violin is the instrument of the highly strung, alpha types—hard-working, obsessively disciplined kids. No wonder string sections around the world are dominated by Asians.
In the playground I was called Stringer. Violin Nerd didn’t have the same ring. Stringer followed me around that entire year. I was too scared to tell Mrs R about the name-calling. What if she told me to stop playing the violin? If I didn’t have the violin, I would be no one.
I worked hard to be good. Even before I could write an entire sentence in English, I could play all the Mozart sonatas. With my eyes closed. While the kids in my class went to the oval on Saturdays to kick balls, I was practising in my room.
I missed out on camps, discos and sports carnivals; instead, doing competitions, recitals and solos. My sister, Rebecca, entered competitions too, but those were different; modelling contests and beauty pageants. Her talent was being beautiful, which I thought was bullshit, because being beautiful isn’t something one works hard to get. She was just born with that face. What kind of talent is that? I was jealous of her face because it seemed to win people over straight away, while I had to work hard to get people to notice me. People only noticed me when I did something extraordinary which was only when I was the best.
7
The bass player arrives at my door after nine. Hair uncombed. Shirt collar flapped up.
For a moment, I am distracted by his height, which is impressive; he is almost as tall as Noah.
‘Hey.’
‘Hi.’
Although he’s been here before, he is shy, like it is his first time.
We retreat to my bedroom and fuck the way most people fuck. Grope around the usual places. Undress. Missionary. We assume our positions like seasoned actors on stage. Hands here. Mouth there. Legs at this angle, neck twisting.
In the morning, he uses more tongue, less fingers. We devise a way of telling each other what we like by squeezing the other’s hand when they’re doing something that feels especially good. I feel an orgasm coming while he glides the tip of his tongue along the side of my clitoris, but then the sensation, like a sustained pinch, disappears when he stops and thrusts his penis inside me. I am reluctant to ask him to go back down.
The following weekend he comes over and we fuck for three whole minutes. He rolls off my body then falls asleep almost immediately. I feel that old disappointment cave over my chest, the loneliness trapping me in some state of unfulfilled despair. I listen to his muted snores and stare out the window at the grey sky. There’s always a piece of steel in my chest. My life will never be enough. The hunger rises when things start to settle. And then I crave the attention of men. It feels more powerful to be desired than to desire. There’s safety in being wanted. No risk in being the desired. The last time I wanted something, I blew up the lives of two other people.
At the next recording session for the band’s album, I learn that the bass player has gone away on tour. He doesn’t get in touch.
A new sound technician catches my eye. He tells me I have great vibrato.
Noah overhears this and smirks. ‘Geordie, get a grip mate.’
He comes over and seizes my hand, tells me to stay clear.
‘Stay clear of who?’ I ask.
‘Geordie. He’s a serial fucker.’
‘But so am I.’
A faint warmth swims up into my chest. Noah’s warning feels strangely proprietorial.
‘Just don’t go there.’
My father used to express contempt for any boy who showed interest in me. The few times he showed interest in me.
I squeeze Noah’s arm. ‘I know how to look after myself.’
Geordie sends me a Facebook message the next day. His profile picture has him posing all smiles next to two black kids.
Two nights later, he takes me out for drinks and we return to my place.
Inside, he puts his hand on my waist as naturally as a hand to a wall.
‘I need to use the bathroom,’ I say, bolting down the hallway.
‘Can I join you?’
‘I need to do a shit.’
Perhaps it was a mistake to bring home a boy with a name like Geordie.
In the bathroom, I fix my hair and squirt coconut cream onto my legs.
On the couch, he is combing his moustache with a plastic comb. He brushes it three, four times. He makes me listen to his samples on his phone. I nod, pretend to care.
‘You don’t do this often, do you?’ he asks.
In the bedroom, his skinny jeans are tight and hard to strip. When he takes his shirt off, I am disappointed. His shoulders had looked broader with layers on.
‘Do you know what would make me come?’ he whispers hoarsely, pushing me against the bedroo
m door.
‘What?’
‘Seeing you come.’
He moves his face down level with my opening, frames himself, ears cupped by my inner thighs. He breathes, inhale, exhale, puffs of air. He talks at my vagina.
‘Am I driving you wild?’
I don’t even ask myself if I’m enjoying it. I just move my body, the way I’ve learned to move it; choreography inherited from somebody else. I moan. I slither like a performer.
We fuck in a total of two positions. Afterwards, I hold my breath to hear his breathing. I want to conjure up these men whenever I need, to draw them to bed, even though I never really like what they do.
In the morning, I offer him breakfast. He declines. Relief explodes inside my head.
I see him again on the first weekend of March. The tracks for the album are put into place and everyone heads home in their cars. This time, he gets in his car with somebody else and waves as he drives by. At home, I pull out my laptop and watch a girl in a blue school uniform being thrashed by her stepfather. Then his four friends. They’re large and old and white. They’re circling her small body on a rug in the middle of a room. I last a few minutes before reaching that tired, empty euphoria. I need those images. Moving body parts on the screen. It has to be violent. It has to be quick. I can’t separate the girl’s suffering from her pleasure. I don’t know if she’s crying from pain or pleasure. I’ve always reached for violence. The more violent, the better. The man needs to be much older. He needs to be in control.
I take a shower. Clean again. I think about the stepfather and the old white men. The small female body. Abandonment. Complicity. Love.
8
There are six categories of men. Within each category lie subcategories. The categories are arranged according to race: white (the plainest, yet most desirable, the default); Asian; black; Hispanic; Jewish; other. Subcategories include: big; small; northern European; southern states; alpha; beta; borderline; chapstick.
I created this taxonomy of men when I was living in Wayne, New Jersey, a deadbeat suburb of fifty-five thousand, three and a half hours’ drive from the centre of the universe.
In the two years my father and I lived there, he gave me all the relationship advice he thought I’d need: ‘Find somebody who likes you more than you like them’, and ‘Don’t be too easy. Men don’t like easy girls.’
At the time, I was seventeen and sleeping with three different boys, none of whom knew about the others. My father knew nothing of them either. My mother would call once in a while from Sydney. I never told her about that part of my life, though I suspect she knew I was not innocent.
After my breakdown, I delighted in the assortment of penises available to me. Having spent time in cities like London, Berlin, New York and Amsterdam, I was surprised by what I found. A feast of flesh. Chalked-up sneakers. Spit on the pavements. In many ways, I was still a little girl, charting my progress with the same diligence and precociousness as I’d recorded my violin practice. In the absence of acclaim for my musicianship, getting a boy into bed was as fulfilling and joyful as any other accomplishment.
I kept a journal called In the Land of Dicks where I would record the date, time and location of each conquest. I gave each boy a score out of ten for the following:
Length (circumcised Y/N?)
Texture
Balls
Temperament
Tongue
Lips
Pain (good / bad)
Attention to nipples
Nose size
Tempo
Phrasing
I took pride in my journal. Someday, I thought, someone might publish it. I made a list of all the men. The Slovaks; the Germans; the Americans; the Dutch; the Italians; the Poles; the Dominicans; the French; the Ticos; the Filipinos; the Haitians; the Greeks; the Brazilians; the Portuguese. The Australians.
Bassoon was circumcised, with a Length score of 3, Texture 3, Balls 2, Temperament 8, Tongue 8 and Lips 6. He had a biblical name. Something dull. I haven’t seen him since the closet incident—I mean, the funeral. I hear he’s now dating a trombonist with a lisp.
In Wayne, I liked being told I was an animal. I liked the idea of being an animal because I knew I wasn’t. I knew I was much more than an animal. I knew I was one of the best violinists in the world. Sometimes, though, it felt good to be slapped by a boy I hardly knew. Have him call me obscene names. Horse. Dog. Sloth. Eel. It always made me laugh.
Everything I did with these men was an ode to myself. A contradiction between my public life and private life; a chasm between Jena Lin, darling Australian violinist, globally adored by lovers of classical music, and Jena Lin, raging sex addict. I was gifted in more ways than one, and I needed those in power to understand. I never saw my thirst for sex as anything wrong, much less a disability. But the therapist who my father made me see once a week began using that word when I told her how accomplished I’d begun to feel.
Being gifted and being disabled are the same thing. I was told this by a professor who used me as a research subject when I was ten years old. Other children are scared of you, he explained. Nobody quite knows how to treat you, so they isolate you. They just don’t know how to be around you.
My mother preferred to think they were jealous.
They called me an aberration, even before I knew how to spell that word. And when they flirted with the label ‘prodigy’, my parents panicked. It happened right after my debut with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. I was on the front page of every newspaper in Australia. They called me a wunderkind, a freak, a stolen creature from the future. Or the past. I wasn’t sure what it all meant but I remember my parents’ hesitation.
‘I don’t want you to be a circus freak,’ my father said. ‘You’re not going to perform just because you can.’
‘But I want to.’
My mother placed her hand on my shoulder. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll perform.’ There was something savage in her voice.
My father worried I’d be burned out by sixteen, which is what happened, more or less. Perhaps that’s why at fifteen, I decided to move to that small suburb outside of New York City with my father. I needed to escape my mother. I needed to know what I could be without her. In her mind, she’d lost me. In my mind, I severed old wings.
Part of me wanted my mother to ask me to stay, but she was silent. Maybe there was some part of her that wanted to be freed of me. I wish she’d made a fuss. I wish she’d said something. Anything. She’d have been easier to love.
9
Olivia is late again. At the train station, Circular Quay, I fumble with my case to avoid crashing into the mass of bodies at peak hour. Suits and tourists.
Tuesdays are difficult for Olivia. She struggles to make rehearsals on time because the morning is spent with the carers who supervise her mother during the week. She rarely talks about her mother and I have learned not to ask.
‘Thanks for waiting.’ She gives me a quick hug.
‘We’d better get going.’
Overnight, we received an email from the manager of the orchestra, Bryce. The chief conductor has pneumonia. A replacement has been found. They will take over for one season. The announcement will take place today.
As we hurry towards the Opera House we speculate on this sudden onset of pneumonia.
‘There’s probably a sketchier reason he’s standing down,’ Olivia says. ‘He’s been getting pretty close to some of the flautists.’
‘How do you know?’
‘People talk. I hope they’ll choose a woman.’
‘More likely they’ll choose a turnip.’
Olivia goes on and on. Says that they must know diversity is important.
‘They don’t,’ I say. ‘That’s why they’ve only ever chosen men.’
‘They must know.’
‘Olivia, when was the last time you saw a black person in the Opera House?’
In the green room, the players are stretched out on the floor, rubbing their knees, kneading
their shoulders. Nobody looks up when we walk in.
We find two seats in the back corner. The concertmaster stands and makes introductory remarks. Then he introduces the new conductor.
It’s a man and he’s an American, a former professor at Curtis Institute of Music and assistant conductor of the New York Philharmonic. He gives a brief, genial speech and talks about the partnership between the two orchestras. He mentions a seasonal exchange for violinists; open to permanent members only. Golf claps settle across the room.
We go into the concert hall for a rehearsal.
He conducts the way most conductors do. Overemphasising the beat before the end of the bar. Moving their torsos too much. It’s always too much. They seldom seem to understand that less is more. Even the slightest twitch of a muscle in the face can change the sound of an entire orchestra. I often watch the face more than the baton. But these men follow each other. Same faces. Same gestures. Same sounds.
Afterwards, the new conductor invites the orchestra to the Opera Bar. In the green room, he approaches me as we’re packing our instruments. Long neck. Steely eyes. Forehead creased with lines. He’s wearing a grey polo, suit pants and navy loafers on his feet. Like Leonard Bernstein, if Bernstein had lived to be one hundred.
‘Jena Lin.’
‘Yes, sir.’ I stand to shake his hand. ‘Nice to meet you.’
‘We met when you were still a child in London.’
‘We did?’
He pokes my arm like we’re old friends, but I am sure I’ve never met him in my life.
‘Are you coming for a drink?’
I look over to Olivia, who is zipping her case. I wave her over. ‘This is Olivia.’
He glances at her. ‘Yes, second violin. Good bow arm. So, the bar?’
I wait for Olivia’s cue.
‘Noah’s working late so I’ll have to make dinner.’