by Jessie Tu
Rumours skip from desk to desk, then from bar to bar outside Geffen Hall. In the final weeks of the exchange, we tackle mainstream canonical works. Mahler’s 1st, Beethoven’s 7th and 8th. After a concert on Saturday night, four of us head to The Smith on Broadway to talk about what we’ve heard.
‘They’re only giving away one position,’ Tuba says.
‘One for each section?’ Katie, the flautist, sits back on her bar stool, arms folded, legs crossed at the ankle.
‘One in total,’ Tuba says.
‘That’s ridiculous.’
‘Why?’ I lean in so my voice carries across the noisy space. ‘It’s the New York Philharmonic. That they’re opening up a spot at all is unusual.’
Nobody knows about the brief conversation I had with Maestro. Perhaps he has had a private word with each of us, and they’re all pretending too.
We have another round and speculate some more but it’s clear that none of us knows very much. They make plans to return, though they’re also aware they have options. Europe is more conducive to such activities than Australia. They tell me I have options too. I was world famous once. Why can’t I leverage that history? I smile when I’m offered such dimmed advice. I smile and then move on. The girls head to a party in Bed-Stuy.
Tuba lingers while I strap my case to my back.
‘Can I go with you?’ he asks.
During sectionals on Monday, Frank pulls me aside and tells me about the position. He’s vague though warm, generally answering the questions I ask with the attention and care of an invested supervisor. In the lounge, we exchange violins and giggle like kids exchanging cards. He doesn’t ask me about Taiwan and I don’t ask him about China.
And then I continue to play as I always do—as though my life depended on it.
Our last concert falls on a Friday night. It is unremarkable, save for a man in the audience who has a heart attack during the last movement of Mahler’s 4th. He later dies in hospital. These things happen more often than people expect, but even in my time playing with orchestras, I can count the number of concert fatalities on my hands. The afterparty is a mandatory inconvenience. I am anxious about the twenty-four-hour flight home. The music is too loud. The crowd, too polished. I’d have enjoyed a gathering with fewer people. Good, meaningful conversation. Instead, there are five hundred guests in the foyer of the hall. We’re still in our performance blacks. Everyone is shouting to be heard, faces leaning close to each other. A live band is playing old jazz numbers. The musicians congregate in small groups.
Waiters weave through the throng with bottles of champagne, topping up glasses. I find myself shaking my head at each proffered bottle. They seem to think I want what everyone else wants.
Maestro pulls me into his conversation as I’m walking to the bathroom. He’s talking to a suit. ‘Jena, I want you to meet our new board member.’ To the board member, he says, ‘Jena thinks she might return to us next season as a permanent member of the orchestra.’
I look at him, startled. This is news to me.
‘Of course, we still have much to discuss,’ he adds. ‘You’re leaving when?’
The two men peer at me with expressions of paternal concern.
‘Tomorrow.’
The board member shakes my hand, congratulates me. ‘Stay here in New York. You won’t ever be bored.’
They resume their discussion. I excuse myself. In the bathroom, I close my eyes and see Banks’s face, his eyes, his disappointment souring everything I touch. He was part of every success. I want to be able to share this good news with him. But what does that mean? That I need his approval? Why should I need that now when I’ve done this all by myself?
Tuba and I leave the party together. We stroll along Amsterdam and then Fifty-Ninth and then the Hudson River Greenway to look out over the black river, the lights of New Jersey.
‘When does your flight leave?’
‘Noon.’
‘Will you come back?’
He talks to the ground. The path is empty, save for a few late-night joggers in their long-sleeved thermals, puffer vests and beanies. I clutch the ends of my coat together and peer up.
‘I don’t know. It’s pretty competitive.’
He stops by a ledge and leans over. We look across to the New Jersey skyline, which looks so small and tame compared with Manhattan’s.
‘You’ll probably get it. You’re the only one who was a child prodigy.’
‘I’m beginning to think that matters very little.’
At the turn into my corner, he leans forward, his mouth moving towards mine. I apologise, though I’m not sure what for.
‘Don’t try to kiss me.’
He pulls back and looks at his shoes. ‘I wasn’t going to.’
He opens his arms wide and I step into them.
A text from App-man. He tells me to get in contact if I return. It’s inevitable. After New York City, nothing will be the same. Or enough. The city is always pulsating, floods of light and people and traffic. This is the only place where I can be myself completely and not itch. It’s an existence that demands I am on all the time. The molecular energy in the air feeds me in a way I’ve not felt in any other city.
Like this city, I cannot stay still. At any hour of the day, someone in New York is making love, making art, making a historical account of what it feels like to be living, pouring their blood out somewhere publicly, and I have to be here to see it. To be part of its continuum. The stories are endless, and I will never want to stop being inside its wilderness. Its temperament. Its density. Its cruelty.
51
I spend the first few nights back in my room, watching videos of the performances we gave; Dvorak’s 9th, Brahms’ 3rd, Mahler’s 1st, Beethoven’s 9th.
There are close-ups of my face. I look coltish, unaware of the world. The camera zooms in on my bow hand, fades out of focus on my face. I have seen my face in magazines, on television, in books and newspapers. But I was a child, all those years ago. Looking at myself now feels disorientating. Like I am looking at somebody else. A less attractive version of myself.
There’s an interview of me talking about the exchange. The merits of living in New York. How we survived the winter. I go on and on about the ensemble, how much I love chamber music.
I am speaking to a young woman with red hair, around my age. She holds the microphone to my mouth as I’m answering the questions. I sound nervous. I don’t remember being nervous. My eyes dart from left to right. I look as though I don’t know where I am.
‘If you love chamber music so much, why are you not more active in quartets?’ she asks.
My face cracks open. ‘I love playing in big orchestras too.’
My door swings open and Val sticks her head in. ‘What are you doing?’
I shift to make space for her on the bed beside me. ‘Do I look a bit dull?’
She comes inside and leans over to look at the screen.
‘That’s you?’
‘Yeah, what?’
‘No, you just look so … pale.’
‘As in, white?’
‘You look starved. Like a child. They didn’t give you a make-up artist or something?’
‘It was just an interview for their website.’
‘Exactly. So many people will watch it. Hey, you ready for my opening tomorrow?’
I’ve returned just in time for Val’s solo exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art. An important American art dealer will be there. She reminds me to google him beforehand so I can appear informed when I meet him. He is a New Yorker. She wants to impress him with her entourage. Her exhibition is called ‘Adultphobia | Again’, a homage to her favourite artist, Yoshie Sakai, an American artist of Japanese descent who examines patriarchal society in Asian families. On my laptop, I read Val’s show notes.
Li uses the female naked body as the archetype of the ‘victim’, the used-up, washed-up Asian female body representing the immorality of human labour in China and other second wor
ld countries.
Washed-up Asian female body. Washed-up Asian. Washed up.
Art people are hunched together on the third level of the gallery, drinking red wine, looking at their phones. There are a few press people. Art writers. I recognise a man from The Guardian and a woman who once interviewed me for the Herald. They are crossing their arms and one of them is nodding at something the other is saying. There are eighty, maybe a hundred people, flitting around the relatively large space, pausing idly to study the works on the walls. Mostly, they’re interested in talking. Mike and Jacob arrive ten minutes before the speeches. They’re wide-eyed, polished, a little breathless. They’d just raced back from a wedding in Newcastle. They’re still in their suits. They look handsome, sleek hair oiled flat. We talk about their new works and they ask me about the US. It’s been a week since I’ve returned, but that life has quickly faded into a vestigial memory.
The curator of Val’s show makes a long and tangled introduction about the exhibition, the new trajectory the art gallery is taking, the new talent it aims to nurture. Val is a pioneer, and the museum will be the birthplace of a movement spurred on by artists including her. I want her to use the word ‘genius’, because I want the expression to circulate more widely among women, but she doesn’t. I believe my friend is a genius, but I have not told her.
Jacob clutches a glass of white wine and leans against the wall beside me, pressing his hip against mine every now and then. ‘It’s nice to see you again,’ he whispers. We clink glasses very softly.
When Val gets up to speak, we whoop and holler. Strangers glance back at us with tight, formal smiles. She makes a brief speech about the themes of her work.
‘What I want,’ she says, ‘is for all of you to see that we exist. And that we are just as complex and complicated as you are.’
The Asian woman.
When the crowd shrinks, the light from the ceiling falls across in blue, triangular shapes. Val approaches us, finally. We throw ourselves at her. We’re so proud. We’re prouder than her parents could ever be.
‘You relieved?’ Mike asks.
‘Not really,’ she mutters.
I hand her my wine and I take a champagne from a passing waiter.
‘It’s another white affair. Nobody’s going to take me seriously.’
‘The art will speak for itself.’
‘I’m deluding myself.’
‘It’s not something to spend your energy thinking about,’ Jacob says. ‘You’ve done something most twenty-somethings could never do.’
The boys leave soon after.
I turn to Val, whose baby blue jumpsuit glitters sadly against the gallery lights.
‘No one here tonight will write about my work with the seriousness given to a man. Or somebody older. Or somebody white.’
‘Have faith.’
‘I’m a woman artist. We are put into boxes that are hard to climb out of. The man is the norm, the rule, the universal.’
I want to roll my eyes. She gets all angst-filled when she’s nervous.
‘Yeah, but you’re more than that. You’re so much more interesting than a cis white middle-aged male.’
‘Pathetic comparison. Of course I’m better.’
I laugh into my champagne as she says this. ‘I know, Val. Everyone will see your work for what it is.’
The American dealer is making the rounds. People are circling him. Moths around a flame. He is older. Fifty, fifty-five. Maybe more. Dark chocolate skin. Thick neck. Imposing height. He is wearing a bow tie; bright yellow with pink spots. If his face has wrinkles, I cannot see them. I tell him about the exchange with the Philharmonic, and he nods, half engaged.
At ten, the gallery staff start making signals. Val, the American and I decide to have a few more drinks together. I notice he has a limp as we walk up the road to the Glenmore Hotel. While he goes to the bar, Val and I take a high table by the window.
I extract my phone from my bag and check my emails, hoping to hear something from New York.
Nothing yet. I put my phone on the table, face down and glance at Val, who is looking nervously in the direction of the dealer.
‘Is he trying to fuck us?’ I ask Val, who is watching him at the bar. There’s a wet patch on the table. I lift the sleeves of my cardigan off the surface and slide my phone back into my pants pocket.
‘I don’t think so,’ she says. ‘He’s just trying to impress some young Asian girls.’
The dealer returns with three beers. I sip mine and stay quiet, careful not to disturb any connection forming between them. They discuss post-postmodernism and the growing trend of political anti-establishment art.
‘You ought to move to the States,’ he says. ‘There’s much more happening there.’
I am tempted to check my phone again.
When we finish our beers we exchange numbers. That is, the dealer gives Val his number and tells her to call him. Then he says to me, ‘And you should give me a call if you’re in New York again. It’s good for musicians to be around artists.’
As we’re walking out, I compliment his bow tie. ‘You know why I wear it?’
I shake my head.
‘So I don’t get shot.’
I raise my eyebrows in query.
‘So I don’t appear threatening. I’m tall. I’m black. Tell me you don’t see a criminal when you first see me.’
There is nothing I can say. I don’t say anything.
The thought of sleeping with the dealer does not cross my mind until the weekend, when we are sitting next to him in the Drama Theatre at the Opera House. Val is to my right. He is to my left. He rests his hands close to mine on the armrest. He’d been given free tickets and invited us.
The play is about paedophilia in the age of virtual reality. Twenty small screens hang above the stage, replaying footage of the audience as we filed in. There are a few seconds of me staring catatonically into space. Then one of Val as she’s furiously typing a text on her phone. The dealer chuckles into my ear, puts a hand over mine. It feels heavy, damp. I pull my hand away and tuck it underneath my thighs. It stays there throughout the show.
While sharing a pizza after the play, he tells us he is divorced. His wife has custody of the children. The court systems in New York favour the mother. It’s unfair. There’s no such thing as justice. We nod like sullen schoolgirls.
He has a few too many wines, and then he’s pressing his face too close to ours. Val and I glance at each other.
‘So, we’d better be going.’ I am not good at leaving. The announcement startles him.
I stand up and take Val’s hand, pulling her to her feet.
He frowns and stands too, grabs Val’s other arm, teeters unsteadily. For a moment, I think he might collapse on top of her. He leans against the table, steadies himself.
‘You should get to bed,’ says Val. ‘You look pretty wasted.’ She looks half frightened, half concerned.
His jaw juts out. ‘Here.’ He takes out his wallet and slides out a card.
Val looks at me, her expression confused at first, though this quickly fades when she sees the hotel key.
I put a hand on the dealer’s arm. ‘We’re going to catch a taxi home now.’
His eyes pinch small. He’s examining me.
‘I don’t want you,’ he says.
I clear my throat. ‘Well, it was nice to meet you.’
I pick up my handbag and walk out. Val follows.
Outside, she pulls on my hand.
‘Wait.’
‘You’re not seriously thinking about fucking that man.’
She crosses her arms, looks at her feet. ‘He could show my art in New York.’
The old panic rises. It curls from the bottom of my ribs. Automatically, I reach for my phone. Still no email.
‘Will you stop looking at your phone? You didn’t get the position, okay? You’d have heard from them by now.’
‘Don’t attack me just because I can’t give you what you want. And seriously,
is this worth your dignity?’
She raises her eyes. ‘Dignity? Since when did you care about that for yourself?’
A group of people walking past slow to watch, drawn by the spectacle. Two Asian girls arguing on the streets on a Saturday night. Val’s face is indignant. She’s repulsed. I am the thing she is repulsed by.
‘Val, I’m not trying to—’
‘What, tell me what to do?’
‘I’m just saying think about it.’
‘I am thinking! And I’m asking you not judge me while I think.’
I hold out my hand, wait for her to take it.
She turns and walks back into the bar.
52
The thought of seeing Mark hangs over me like a chore. I run out of excuses not to see him. It’s been more than ten days since I got back. I’m holding out. For what, I don’t know.
He texts a few days after the scene outside the Drama Theatre restaurant, right when I happen to be looking at my phone, flicking my thumb over the screen, refreshing my emails and refreshing again to see whether new ones have come in. I’ve become an addict, a mouse inside a box, pressing the lever over and over and over, waiting for a treat.
Perhaps Val is right. If I got the position, they’d have told me by now, wouldn’t they?
The morning after our argument, I knocked on her bedroom door until she opened it. I knew she’d returned home alone the previous night; I’d heard her come in. I apologised for being arrogant and hypocritical. I beat myself up verbally, so she’d know how awful I felt. Mostly, I don’t want to lose her. I cannot lose her. I’d been careless and no longer wished to be.
She stood at her door, arms crossed, barely looking at me as I spoke. When I finished, she said, ‘I would never have thought you were someone who would judge me or tell me what to do.’
I stepped into her space and put my arms around her.
I didn’t want to think about how close I’d come to losing another friend.
I don’t answer Mark’s first text. I don’t like this limbo state. Over the next few days he texts again, and again, and then he calls and calls before I finally agree to see him.