by Jessie Tu
We arrange to meet on a weeknight. I cite my busy schedule; the concerts from Wednesday to Saturday, other commitments that I am vague about. Cleaning my room, going for long walks.
On the evening I’m due to see him, I throw on a pair of jeans and a T-shirt and pull my hair back into a bun. I arrive at the bar where we’d decided to meet on York Street a few minutes before seven. He’s already there.
When he sees me, he smiles, big, whole face changing the air around him. His suit looks a bit loose around his shoulders. I am impressed again by his height, his strong hands. He is happy. I can see it in the way he moves his mouth, and his gaze, steady. I’ve never seen him so happy. He is jubilant. How did I make an adult man happy?
‘Do you want to get out of here?’ I’m already turning to walk out the door.
Outside, he picks me up and swings me around. I don’t know what to do with my legs. We must look like two lovers reuniting after a long separation, which I suppose we are, but I’m not feeling what he feels.
We walk to another bar, smaller, quieter, frequented by young white women with ringed fingers and leather jackets and frameless glasses. EDM music pours out onto the street.
At the bar, he orders a jug of sangria and we sit at a table on leather-topped stools. I take out my phone and check my emails.
‘It’s good to see you,’ he says. ‘Come on, put that away.’ He reaches over and caresses my left cheek.
I love the feeling of being claimed in public.
The bartender carries over the jug of sangria and two tall glasses. Mark pours our drinks. He hands me a glass and we clink loudly. ‘To our beautiful reunion.’
I scull the drink. He laughs. ‘Impressive!’
I want to ask after his girlfriend. He does not mention her, just talks about his work; new clients he’s taken on, the cities he’ll need to visit in the next few months. He might be promoted to deputy chair by the end of the year.
I sip my drink, gaze at him.
He orders another jug of sangria and two shots of tequila.
‘Why are you drinking so much?’
He lifts his glass. ‘I feel good. Anything wrong with that? Anyway, we’re celebrating your return.’ He leans forward and presses his lips against mine.
I pull away. ‘Can we go now?’
‘Wait, you haven’t heard my news.’
I lean back.
‘Dresden and I broke up.’
He is watching me eagerly, waiting for some reaction. He reaches across the table and runs his thumb along my wrist.
I flinch. Suddenly, everything feels unctuous. Being here with this sad, unwanted toy of a man. I’m not sure what to say, so I give him the smile he’s hoping for. He thinks I’m happy. And I let him think what he wants to think. Is that not the definition of kindness?
Back at his place we lie in bed, exhaustion stilling our bodies. He rests his head on my stomach, puts his chin on my breast.
‘I’m so happy to see you,’ he says.
‘I know.’
We fall asleep, his arm my pillow.
At some stage during the night, I wake to feel his torso, bare, pressing against me from behind, rocking backwards and forwards.
I turn around and give him my mouth. We move our bodies in opposite directions. I can see the red lines on his back and along the sides of his body where the white flesh has loosened its grip on the bones. The red marks are clear and distinctive. Some girl’s sharp, manicured nails. I run my blunt fingers along the red welts, tracing their perfect clawed curves.
He rolls over and turns his face to me. He says something. A murmur.
He reaches over and grips my chin with two fingers, turning my face to his.
‘What?’
He sighs and turns his head.
‘Where are you?’ he asks.
‘I’m here.’
‘You’re a million miles away.’
‘I was just thinking.’ I rub my eyes.
After a pause, I look at him. ‘I want to go back.’
‘Back where?’
‘To New York.’
‘Well.’
I nod. I might be able to nod my way through this entire conversation. I roll across the bed and reach for my phone.
Still no email.
‘Stop worrying,’ he whispers. ‘You’ll get what you want.’
I throw my phone back onto the bedside table.
After a while, he shuffles a few inches away to get a better look at me, then asks, ‘Why?’
‘Why what?’
‘Why New York?’
I arrange my mouth into a polite grin. ‘It’s just people, they’ve found their solace there. It’s a refuge for all the lonely people.’
‘You’re not lonely.’
He looks at me intensely, waiting for an answer. He does not blink. He is studying me in a way I’ve never felt from him.
I half shrug, half smile.
He stands and heads to the bathroom to piss, doesn’t close the door.
When he comes back, he tells me he’ll need to head into the office soon. His voice fills the room like white noise. He keeps talking and talking and I find it comforting, reassuring.
I decide this must be love after all. Quiet, dull, still.
This is love, and it is enough. At the bar, I hadn’t wanted him at all. It was exciting, for a moment, to be the other woman. Now, there is no other woman.
He bends forward to meet my lips. We kiss, slowly first, then deeply and with feverish hunger. I lace my arms around his neck.
What a pathetic man. Useless, unwanted, lonely.
53
Sydney is wrapped in a smothering blanket of heat throughout April. I play at a lunchtime concert and fill in for the concertmaster. The orchestra members applaud as I take my seat before the rehearsal in the morning, and then everything is back to as it was before. I feel the rumble stirring inside. It is growing into a new sort of violence. I hide it behind my face and perfect technique. My deskie, a new girl, leans over and tells me I play with great fury and passion. We are doing Mahler’s 5th. There is no other way to play Mahler.
Since returning, I’ve found it difficult to readjust to the routine; four daytime rehearsals during the week, four evening concerts. My senses are dulled by the beautiful harbour and the perfect weather. The 9 pm closing times. The quietness of everything. The stupid conversations about heels in rehearsal breaks. The women in my section are always talking about heels. I am so bored.
Finally, in the first week of May, I hear from New York—an email from the manager of the Philharmonic to arrange a time for a call. We settle for noon. After rehearsal, I race to the green room and lock myself in a private studio, my hand quivering. I have a good feeling. If they didn’t want me, they’d let me down with an email. It must be good news.
I dial the number. The manager picks up after the third ring. I can barely breathe. My heart is pushing hard against my chest. I gasp a greeting, the ‘hi’ catching in my throat.
‘I’m afraid I’ve got disappointing news.’ His voice is bureaucratic, dry. Quiet. As though he is in a library and he is trying to keep his voice down. ‘On reflection, we feel you might have more of a future as a soloist, not as an orchestral player.’
After a few more empty words we hang up. I sit there, motionless, heaving, then steadying my breath. I’ve entered a new reality, one whose operations I don’t know how to navigate.
I want to call someone who will commiserate, but I am ashamed. I text Val. She texts back a few seconds later. Something about fate. Ships.
I throw myself into things, expecting always to get what I want. And I always get what I want. Now it feels like I’ve failed all over again. Only this time, there’s no motivation behind it. I’ve just failed myself, and it hurts in a strange, unfamiliar way. The wound is deeper than anything I’ve ever felt.
54
The following Saturday, I drive to my parents’ place in the afternoon. On the radio, I listen to a man talk abo
ut overcoming the grief of his father’s suicide by learning to free-dive.
‘Are you trying to face death?’ the interviewer asks.
The man replies that despite what people think, free divers aren’t toying with death. They learn to be patient in the face of danger and risk. It’s okay to be vulnerable, he says. I remind myself to look into free-diving lessons the moment I get home. I want to learn to be patient when things fall apart.
My mother greets me in the driveway as I park the car. She’s wearing a faded baseball cap and a pink windbreaker. I think I recall seeing a photo of her wearing this in the newspaper once; we were on tour. Somewhere in Europe. I open my arms for a hug, but she leans in sideways and pats my shoulder with one arm. She suggests a quick stroll before we go in.
‘Where’s Dad?’ I ask.
‘Inside. Sleeping.’
We walk through the local park, where children play on the mini zip-line. They fling their heads back, laughing wildly.
I want to run to them, ask them to trade places with me.
‘It must be nice to be five,’ I say.
My mother looks over to where the children are being called to a picnic table.
‘You were hard to control,’ she says.
‘I’ve never liked to be controlled.’
‘I thought children were supposed to listen to their parents.’
‘Rebecca did.’
‘She was a good girl.’
We turn into a small street lined with apartment blocks and Moreton Bay figs. At the end of the street is a bush track. There’s a council sign; the rules—No Dogs, No Fire, No Camping—partly obscured by bird shit.
I let her lead. From behind, I notice the dry skin on the back of her legs. My mother has always had dry skin, especially her hands, which are always chapped and sore-looking. She frequently picks at the edge of her nails and sides of her knuckles. Every Christmas Rebecca buys her the most expensive hand cream, and every year she leaves them unopened on the bathroom vanity. I wonder why my mother refuses to make herself nice to touch.
We walk in a silence broken only by the crack of sticks underneath our sneakers and the calls of birds above our heads. Down a steep set of stairs. At the bottom, she pauses, steadies her breath. I put a hand on her arm.
She points to a picnic table nearby. ‘Let’s sit for a while.’
She walks slowly to the table, takes a seat on the edge. I sit opposite and try to read her face, wondering if she has brought me here for a reason. My mother has never been good at telling me what she’s thinking.
‘Do you remember how I came to be with your father?’ she asks. I shake my head, curiosity clicked open like a purse.
‘You’ve never told me.’
‘I thought it didn’t matter. It was such a long time ago. He was such a different person. Such a beauty. I didn’t care about anything else. I barely even knew if he had hobbies, anything like that. It didn’t matter, I just wanted him to be my husband. I wanted to possess him.’
She looks down at her hands resting on the table. Her fingers are slightly bent, knuckles pink.
‘I see now that was a stupid thing to do,’ she says, taking a deep breath and releasing it. ‘I might have done wrong by him. We are such different people.’
‘Is everything okay?’ I ask.
‘It’s fine. I’m just thinking out loud.’
I lean back in my seat. ‘You fell in love,’ I say.
‘The older I get, the more I’m convinced I know nothing about love.’
The light from the sky changes colour in an instant. The clouds part to allow columns of white onto the backs of our hands, like paint stripes. I raise my eyes to see the sky split, the thin grey separating like double doors opening to expose blue light. I look over at my mother, whose mouth seems to be lingering between thoughts.
‘I always thought the older you get the more certain you are about things like that.’
‘No,’ she says quietly. ‘I think it’s the opposite.’
My mother comes into my old room after dinner. I’m folding some clothes into a garbage bag for donation.
Leaning against the doorframe, her face shadowed by the lamp in the hallway, she watches me move about the room, then glances around at the trophies on the shelves, the framed certificates. Things that seem to belong to someone else.
‘Did I ever tell you that you took part in a research project when you were a baby?’
She steps forward and takes a hoodie from the wardrobe, begins folding it. She can’t keep still.
‘When you were growing up, your father had friends who worked at National Taipei University. Sociologists. They used to describe their research to us. We had many friends. We entertained a lot. That was before you got so busy.’
She keeps her eyes on her hands, straightening the corners of some towels.
‘We,’ I say, glancing over at her.
‘What’s that?’
‘We got busy.’
‘Right, I suppose so. Yes. Before you started the violin, our lives were full in other ways. We had a lot of friends who worked at the university. Researchers, academics. They talked about new studies that were changing the way we saw the world. New theories, that sort of thing.’
I kneel down to readjust the pile of clothes inside the garbage bag. My mother continues.
‘One of our friends was a woman who worked in immunology. Often, she told me that touching your own child could stunt their development.’
She pauses, as though waiting for a sneeze, holding her cupped hands ready in front of her face. The sneeze doesn’t come. She glances at me, then continues folding a T-shirt.
‘It’s ludicrous to think that now. But this was more than twenty years ago. It was such a different world. In Taipei, everything we consumed was from America and the researchers at these American colleges said that touching your child could contaminate them with diseases, could ruin them. We believed everything they said.’
I hold a pair of torn jeans between my hands. ‘I rarely believe what other people tell me.’
Her eyes expand, flowers opening up. ‘What are you talking about? Of course you do. That’s what you’ve always done. That’s why you were so good at the violin. You were brilliant because you were a good listener. You always did what the teachers told you to do.’
I put the jeans in the bag and straighten up to fold my arms. ‘That’s different. I was learning skills. I was trying to be better.’
‘As was I. But I was so angry at your father. And my father, who was always so far away. I didn’t want you to turn out like him. You know that. Your grandpapa was consumed by his music. He let his family rot. He was not a good husband and he was not a good father because he neglected his obligations. I didn’t want a child like him. I don’t think I was cared for very well by either parent. I think my mother suffered a lot for it. It seems so obvious now, but I don’t think I was asking the right questions back then, when they were still alive. Your grandpapa, I can see it now. He suffered too. He craved the attention from the world. And that, of course, was never enough. The world was too small for him and I didn’t want that to happen to you. But then …’
She puts the T-shirt she has been clutching into the bag, then reaches for another item of clothing. She does not meet my gaze.
‘These friends, they told me I could earn a bit of money by participating in research. Your father was working all the time and I hardly saw him. I wanted to be more useful, not just to look after you and Rebecca.’
‘What about your accounting job?’
‘This was before I got that job. Your father didn’t want me to work when you girls were small. Anyway, when you were about two, a friend from Taiwan returned from Boston with a research assignment. He asked if I wanted to be involved and I said yes. They wanted children under the age of three.’
She moves slowly towards the single bed and sits on the edge, hands assuming the choreography of a tired labourer.
‘They recorded
how long it would take babies to start crying after their mothers left the room. I took you in. We were all put into a waiting room together, about fifty mothers with their babies. They gave us biscuits wrapped in plastic. You know the sort. And tea and coffee.’
I nod, not sure what kind of response she wants.
‘I was nervous. The other women were very chatty. We were at the end of the list, so I waited all day.’
I tie the top of the bag together slowly.
‘You were such a good baby. You were always so patient.’ She looks up at me, her eyes soft. ‘They saw us finally at six or seven at night. Late. A man told us to go into the room they had set up and play with the toys. Fancy toys. You liked them. You took to them very quickly. Then they said we had to look out for a blue light above the door, and when that blue light went on I was to stop playing with you immediately and leave the room. I was so worried. I kept asking the researcher what they were going to do with you, and they kept saying, “Nothing, nothing, nothing,” and I was even more confused. I didn’t believe them. To reassure me, they let me watch the mother before me go in and do it. I saw her sit by her baby, and they were playing with some Lego. And then a light came on above the door, and the mother got up to leave. Her baby started crying even before she’d reached the door. The researcher told me that this was what had happened all day. The babies immediately started crying when their mothers left. So I assumed that you’d do the same.’
She stops talking.
‘And?’ I say. ‘Did I cry?’
She drops her gaze to the floor.
‘I didn’t cry, did I?’
After a while, I feel her stare, but I can’t look at her. I am too afraid of what I might see. The disappointment in her eyes. The trauma of a need, a love, an expectation, unfulfilled.
I stare down at my socked feet. Those feet she massaged before concerts in my hotel room, to calm me.
‘You didn’t cry.’
I open my mouth to say something but the words disintegrate somewhere between my stomach and throat. I press my lips together tightly, wondering what I can say to change history.
‘You were a baby,’ she says. ‘Babies cry. Most do. Most babies cry. But you didn’t. You didn’t need me.’