by Jessie Tu
I hear the door open. Val has come back to me. Finally.
‘Val? Is that you?’
The door shuts loudly. I step into the hallway to look. But there’s nobody there.
The following evening, Val is home after spending the entire week at Damien’s. She tells me he’s asked her to consider being in an ethical non-monogamous relationship with another couple; and she’s still deciding if it’s something she wants. ‘I’ve no idea what my own desires are anymore,’ she says. ‘Or if I ever even knew what they were.’
I’m in the kitchen when the apartment buzzer goes off.
I am making a salad, dicing almonds, crushing garlic. I call out to Val, who I hear opening the door. She lets the person in.
‘Hey.’
Mark is standing at the entrance of the kitchen. He takes a step forward to plant a dry mouth on the side of my lips.
‘Where’ve you been lately?’
Like a concerned principal checking up on an ill-behaved student.
‘Just around, you know. Orchestra.’
Val walks in. ‘I’m going out for some beer. You guys want anything?’
We shake our heads.
‘I’ll be back soon for some delicious food.’
She leaves through the back door.
Mark walks over to me. He unbuckles his belt and assumes a position. In a few moments, I am on my knees, that strange compulsion to let him do whatever he wants; outside, I can hear the wind combing through the branches, the dry leaves rustling against each other like a hundred maracas.
‘I was cooking.’
‘I haven’t seen you in so long.’
‘I have garlic fingers.’
‘I don’t mind.’
I collect him inside my mouth. Giving in is easier than resisting.
I stand up and go to the sink to wash my hands.
‘I haven’t eaten. Go get changed,’ he orders. ‘I’m taking you out.’
The water in the pot starts to gurgle. The eggs inside are panicking.
‘I’m already making dinner.’
‘Leave it. Take me to that Taiwanese restaurant of yours.’
‘It’s in Chatswood.’
‘We can take a taxi.’
I open the fridge to fetch the tomatoes I’d been planning to roast. The oven is already pre-heated.
He walks over and pushes the fridge door shut.
‘Come on now.’
On the street, we wait for a taxi. I text Val a one-word apology.
Mark is looking me up and down, assessing me. I’ve put on a slip dress and kitten heels. ‘Your hair is a bit messed up. Do you want to fix it in the taxi?’
I look around for a surface to see my reflection.
He raises his hand and a white taxi pulls up. We slide in.
To the driver, he says, ‘We want to go to …’ He pokes my thigh with one finger. ‘Can you tell him?’
I give the driver the address and he nods, eyes on the road.
It’s after nine. On the main road, the restaurants are emptying. On the footpath, people saunter in twos and fours.
We reach Chatswood twenty minutes later. The restaurant is off the main road, down a one-way street. Mark walks slightly behind me. There is something disquieting about the way he walks, with his torso jutted out, hinting at some anxiety.
He reaches forward to grab my hand. ‘I’m the only white person around here.’
Inside the restaurant, the kitchen staff and waiters greet us with a call of welcome. We’re given a table by the front window. Maximum exposure. The waiter and I banter about the specials in Mandarin.
Mark leans across the table after we are handed the menus. ‘She’s not Chinese, is she? Because if she is, I’m walking out of here.’
‘No, she’s Taiwanese.’
‘Good.’
He tells me that he and his friends avoid Chinese restaurants that have white customers. The same if there are white waiters at a Chinese restaurant. He’s only interested in genuine cultural experiences.
‘What about that time at Jade Temple?’
He thinks about this. ‘Well, they were hot.’
He doesn’t comment on my language skills as I translate between him and the waitress. I order pork belly rolls, pickled cabbage, pork dumplings and, at his request, two sorts of rice, and chicken popcorn.
‘So, you don’t like Korean people serving you at a Japanese restaurant?’
He shakes his head. ‘I want my sushi served by Japanese people. I hate fake Japanese people.’
‘What’s fake Japanese?’
‘Chinese,’ he says. ‘And Korean.’
After our mains we cross the road to a dessert parlour. A Korean joint filled with Korean people.
It is excessively lit for a Sunday night. Amber bulbs dangle above our heads. We order waffles to share and iced matcha lattes.
We sit down near the window and talk about pornography. Mark doesn’t like the hardcore, violent sort, but he’d like to try choking someday.
When I ask him how he is so sure choking is pleasurable for the girl, he says that from a physiological perspective, it makes sense, the restriction of oxygen to the lungs, the pressure on a specific part of the throat, the blood vessels and the brain and the neurons and all that.
I keep prodding. ‘Do you have first-hand experience?’
‘No,’ he says, but then he tells me how it’s a well-known phenomenon and his friends’ girlfriends get a lot of pleasure out of it. I wonder who these friends are because he never mentions them by name or profession. They’re just ‘friends’.
‘When people hang themselves they end up ejaculating,’ he says.
‘They also end up dead,’ I say.
He ignores me and looks at a girl across the table from us.
I persevere. ‘Might their post-conscious ejaculation merely be the body’s way of doing something final before their brain runs out of oxygen? How can you assume that such a thing guarantees sensory pleasure?’
He shrugs, eyes averted. My gaze roams around, and after finding nothing interesting to focus my attention on, I say, ‘Let’s try it then.’
I’m dismayed when he hardly reacts.
I ask him whether part of the reason he thinks he’ll get off on choking is the power he will have while doing it.
‘Yes, I think that’s definitely part of it,’ he says.
I wonder if he might accidentally kill me one day.
The waffles arrive. We eat them silently and finish our drinks, then take a taxi back to his place. I worry about not getting enough sleep before my audition, but I let him guide my evening anyway. I get a text from Val about the food I was supposed to make for her. I think about the salad, sitting alone, half dressed on the kitchen bench. The eggs placid and cooling inside the pot.
‘Who is it?’ Mark puts a hand over mine.
‘Nobody.’
We sit on his couch for a few moments before undressing each other and getting into bed.
I reach for his body as he lifts his arm to tuck me in. I bury my face inside his warm armpit; inhale his maleness. I could hide in that dark crevasse forever. His phone thrums. Arms release me. I am a sack dropped on the floor. He gets up to check it.
‘Who is it?’
‘My girlfriend.’
He walks into the bathroom, phone to his ear.
I drift in and out of sleep.
I wonder if there is any way out of this loneliness. If there is a wall I can scale. I wonder if my mother has ever felt this, the lingering, vicious emptiness. I want instructions; I need someone to tell me not to feel this way. And then, maybe, I will stop feeling this way.
32
Three days before the audition. I practise for five hours without a single toilet break. It is the worst thing to do, but I do it anyway. Unthinking, I let my body fall into its natural state. My body carries the knowledge of a life before I was even conceived. Another life. This is what I believe.
My wrist distends, an
aching tumour. I put ice on it, take four painkillers, rest for a few minutes, then resume until midnight. Val does not come home. I play with no clothes on in the lounge room.
The next day, I have a rehearsal at the Opera House with the ‘Trout’ ensemble. During a break, the cellist leans over while he’s retracting his spike.
‘Everything okay? You seem distracted.’
My mouth widens into a rigid smile, a cursory mask to deflect my irritation.
‘I’ve got my audition on Thursday for the exchange.’
He nods. ‘Good luck. This will help—Schubert always helps!’
‘The Trout’ is a good piece. I tell myself it is best played with a light bow, not overbearing, but I can’t repress the need to hear my own tune rise above the others. Schubert wrote the quintet when he was twenty-two years old. When I first heard it, I was nine. It was 2002. I’d gone to New York for the first time and watched a documentary at one of Banks’s friend’s home. It featured five musicians, all of whom I’d known intimately through years of listening to their recordings. They had beautiful names. Jewish. French. Indian. Poetic. When I saw their faces on the screen, I saw my heroes. They looked so happy. They were playing and laughing. There was never any laughter when I played as a child. Nobody told jokes around me. Itzhak Perlman was twenty-three. Jacqueline du Pré was twenty-four. Her husband Daniel Barenboim was twenty-six. Zubin Mehta was thirty-three. Pinchas Zukerman was twenty-one. Twenty-one.
I think about that film now as I rip into the opening chord. I think about the Faust story it is based on. The endless seeking of something that the hand cannot grasp. I wonder whether the other musicians in my ‘Trout’ ensemble can sense the emptiness behind my eyes.
Later, the pianist suggests dinner at the Argyle. Less than forty-eight hours now.
‘Jena, you need a break.’
I think about what I told Christopher Jennings when I was fifteen. This is why I was the best. I never rested.
‘You guys go ahead. I’ll see you next week.’
‘Good luck on Thursday,’ the cellist calls out.
‘Don’t kill yourself,’ says the pianist.
When I get home, I go to my bookshelf and find an old copy of Goethe’s Faust. I open it to the second book and scroll down to the highlighted passages. I am looking for a quote. One that I used to recite to myself when I first came across it in Germanic Lit 101, four years ago. I flip through the pages. Then I find it; spoken by Helen.
Please think,
Whom you belong to!
How it would grieve us,
How you’d destroy too,
That sweet achievement,
Yours, his and mine.
Yours, his and mine. Yours. His. Mine. He is mine.
The afternoon before the audition, Banks calls. He clears his throat before making his request.
His voice is clipped, low. The rain smashes against the window of my room; trees pummelled by the rising storm, branches flinging against powerlines.
‘It’s too wet outside,’ I say, surprised by how quickly I make up excuses.
‘One last time. Come.’
When I arrive outside his studio, he is sitting on his chair playing a slow melody. Through the window, I watch his wrist move around the scroll of his violin. I pause for a few moments, keeping my distance as I gather my composure; study the limp frame of his shoulders.
He has worn away the cartilage between his joints, the bone rubbing the flesh of his fingers. He looks over his rimless glasses. This man made me who I was. He wants to help me. He wants to help me still. I push away the trailing doubts and walk through the door. I don’t think about the things I did to make him hate me.
‘Glad you could make it.’ I close the door behind me.
He takes a cloth from his pocket and presses it to his forehead, patting away a thin layer of sweat.
‘I heard your mother has been unwell?’ He looks down at his desk. Christina. Say her name.
‘No, why?’
‘I heard from Bryce.’
I find some other lie to fill in the silence. He nods and puts his violin down.
Inside the studio, the air smells of sandalwood. He flips through a pile of music on his desk and waits for my response. I make a face, noncommittal.
‘I have something to show you.’
He walks out from behind the desk and hands me a sheet of paper.
It is blank.
‘What is this?’
He returns to his chair and leans back.
‘I’d like you to write down the worst-case scenario at your audition.’
I hold the sheet in my hand, unmoving.
‘I break my arm and can’t play.’
‘How likely is that, though? Give me a real worst-case scenario.’
I shrug with irritation. ‘Can I do this later? I’d like to go home early tonight.’
I slip the sheet of paper into the sheet music slot in my case and take out my violin.
I tune it slowly, twisting the wooden pegs with my left hand up and down, up and down. Stretching the strings. Warming up the bow hair. I begin playing from the first bar. Straight in.
He stops me after the first line.
‘What are you trying to convey?’
‘The first line?’
He nods, reaching into his case to extract his rosin. He picks up his bow and begins applying the amber brick.
‘I guess … I want to be commanding.’
‘Yes, but what are you trying to say? At the moment, this character you have has no personality at all.’
I swing my violin underneath my arm and readjust the weight of my body from one foot to the other. A coil of exhaustion rises inside me.
I pluck the rosin out of his hand and feign effort. I want him to play. To show me how to do it, the way he used to.
‘I’m trying my best here.’
I stroke the rosin against the tip of my bow where the grip has loosened.
‘Really? The Jena I remember had her own emotional gravity. She pulled me in.’
‘I’m trying my best,’ I repeat.
‘You’re not trying hard enough.’
He sighs and draws in a sharp breath. ‘When I first met you, you played with your eyes closed.’
‘That’s because I memorised the music. I can’t memorise every orchestral part that’s ever been written.’
He puts a hand on my shoulder and I panic; he rarely makes physical contact. I draw back and walk to my violin case, bending down for the metronome.
‘You don’t need that now, do you?’ He lifts his bow up and taps the air in front of him.
‘I want you to know this,’ he begins in a steady, slow tone, ‘and I want to say it with absolute honesty, which is difficult for me. But trust me, I do this for your own good. I want to help you become a better musician, the way I did all those years ago. I know you can return to that glory. I know you can. But I’m not sure I like the musician you’ve become. What you did in Carnegie Hall all those years ago, that still haunts me. I don’t know if I can ever forgive you. But I am also someone who is a slave to music, and you play good music. I still want to help you become a more capable musician. So let me. But that’s all. I don’t want to do anything more than that.’
The steady heart, the low thrum. Beating against my chest.
He looks at me, his bow still sweeping the air.
‘You know more than you think you know.’
When I was thirteen, Banks said to me, ‘Do you want to be happy? Or do you want to be famous? Because you can’t be both.’
I’d been touring and competing in competitions for five years by then and I was beginning to grow into something I did not recognise. I suppose my intentions began to blur, to take on some strange, unrecognisable form.
It was during a lesson inside an airport lounge on our way to a competition in Finland. He stopped me, mid-etude; ‘Do you know the story The Little Mermaid?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me
.’
‘She fell in love with a prince, and her wish was granted.’
‘She became human, didn’t she, with legs? But she had to give up her voice. That is sacrifice. If you want legs, Jena, you can’t also have a voice. You can only choose one.’
‘I want to have a voice.’
‘Well, then, play. You don’t need legs when you have a wonderful voice.’
By then, my ears had begun to lose their power of interpretation.
Later, I asked Banks why the prince did not wish for fins so that he could join the princess in the sea. He didn’t answer. I imagined myself as this huge ball, empty, dark and hollow. I wanted to say, ‘Fill me. I have boundless capacity. Teach me.’
But then I found that sex with men was easier.
33
At the Opera House, I spot Sandra sitting on a bench near the taxi rank, flipping through her music. She’s dressed all in black. Her hair is parted in the middle and tucked neatly behind her ears.
‘Hi!’ she calls out.
I wave. ‘You ready?’
‘I grabbed a coffee on my way in and spotted some of the people on your panel at the cafe,’ she says. ‘Niall Banks was showing them around.’
‘Banks is here?’
‘I think he knows them from way back. Anyway, shall we?’
We walk through the main entrance to the foyer, where ribbons of light fall across the table at the centre.
Something shifts in my body. My fingers tighten, the muscles in my feet cramp.
‘Are you okay?’ Sandra places a hand on my shoulder.
I can’t be frightened. It’s too soon. But the fear accelerates quickly and I don’t know why. I stare at the sign next to the backstage door.
NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC AUDITIONS.
SIGN IN AT REAR GREEN ROOM. STAGE DOOR.
I take deep breaths, straighten my back. Sandra looks on, a concerned bystander who has no idea how to help.