A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing

by Jessie Tu

  I wake up, shaking.

  I am alone and, in this aloneness, paralysed by a fear that feels strangely comforting. I wonder whether Olivia knows I am still dreaming about her, that she still exists in my mind, more powerful than when she was part of my life in the flesh. I can’t seem to draw a bridge across to the other side of this hurt.

  My greatest fears are realised in my other life, during my sleeping hours. I dream about Banks committing violence against me because I believe he dreams of this too. He must still be angry with me for what I did. For walking offstage and deciding my own fate, without consulting him or my mother. If I let myself think about it, return to that time, I see, finally, that it must have been shattering for him. Of course it would have been. He didn’t speak to me when I was in the States. The touring put cracks into his life. Thinned out his marriage. Of course it was all my fault. I destroyed the lives of the two people who cared about me the most. And tonight, it feels like this. A man I never loved wants to destroy mine.

  57

  The following week the orchestra begins a new concert series of works by Argentinian composers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: Bacalov, Panizza and Ginastera. It’s my final season with the SSO. I’d spoken to Bryce eventually and told him of my decision. He seemed happy for me. He makes a comment about the program I will finish with. ‘Good, don’t you think? Adventurous.’

  I nod. ‘They’re still all men though.’

  What lasts in art is what the general consensus declares to be ‘good’. The general consensus has always been old white men. Rich old white men. If your art does not speak to them and their narrow set of experiences it will be lost in the universe of abandoned things, erased from history. At times, I think about all those lost songs; melodies that were written at the beginning of a break-up, a breakdown; all the lines written and then unwritten because ‘the general consensus’ did not believe they were worth preserving. I wonder why none of the music I play has been created by a woman and whether that exclusion was deliberate. What is the point of being any kind of artist if your skin colour or gender excludes you from the choices of old white men, just because you don’t look like them and they don’t see themselves in you?

  During the performance, I look out onto the sea of bodies sheathed in night-time gowns sparkling in the stage lights. I see the women’s faces, their long dresses. I wonder if they think about our own cultural erasure.

  ‘Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are such an annoying classic white couple,’ Val says.

  On a free evening, we’re sitting on the couch with a blanket across our legs watching You’ve Got Mail.

  ‘I’m trying to fantasise my way into a better, nicer life.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. You only ever watch films set in New York. Have you noticed that?’

  I think for a moment, eyes fixed on the screen, watching Meg Ryan flirt with Tom Hanks in her bookshop. ‘I suppose.’

  ‘Her hair’s always kind of perfect, huh?’

  ‘Why don’t we watch Frances Ha after this?’ she suggests.

  ‘I saw that in New York with a guy.’

  ‘Which guy?’

  ‘Just someone in the orchestra.’

  After a while, she pats my hand.

  ‘Are you okay? Has he tried to call?’

  I shake my head.

  Val knows that since I broke up with Mark a week ago he’s been sending texts. I deleted the first few and then, when they kept coming, I blocked his number.

  Val lifts my hand to her cheek and squeezes it.

  ‘What did you want from him?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  She puts her arm around me.

  ‘Do you think it would help to write this all down? Perhaps in a letter? You don’t have to send it.’

  ‘Write a letter? You mean, to him?’

  ‘Well, to him, yeah. Or to whoever.’

  ‘F–O–X.’

  Meg Ryan is flashing her teeth, impressed by a five-year-old’s spelling.

  I recall my dream about Olivia. I want to talk to her again. Tell her about the dream.

  ‘What would I say to Mark? “Dear Mark, you’re a cunt. Stay away from me.”’

  She laughs, a short, muffled burst. ‘Yeah, sure.’

  ‘I guess he deserves it.’

  ‘He deserves so much of your contempt.’

  We sit for a while. I tell her about the other thing that’s been gnawing at me: the research project. My mother’s betrayal. No. My mother did not betray me. My mother opened herself; all her efforts for a life of her own were ravaged. When I was young, I felt this great love to be stifling because, at that age, there is no other way to feel love.

  For the first time in years, I feel a wariness unfurl inside me. I bury my face in my hands.

  ‘I’ve heard people talk about this stuff, experiments like this,’ Val says quietly. ‘I think attachment theories were popular when our parents were young. I mean, their parents grew up with that shit and they probably inhaled it from them. You know what they were about, right?’

  I can see she’s trying to distract me, and I nod to indicate for her to continue.

  ‘Baby monkeys were locked up in tiny cages and given the choice to go to two fake ‘mother’ monkeys—one was just this piece of metal with a cartoon face but it had a bottle of milk attached while the other had nothing but it was wrapped in a blanket. Guess which one the monkeys went to?’

  ‘The one with the milk?’

  ‘The blanketed one.’

  ‘Well, I’d rather not starve than be touched if I had a choice.’

  ‘That’s the thing. These experiments proved that our need for physical touch is just as strong, if not stronger, than our need for food.’

  ‘By our you mean monkeys, which we’re not.’

  ‘Sure, okay, it suggested. The researchers made up these crazy monkeys, models that looked nothing like monkeys, made out of metal, they looked like robots, basic kid stuff, with electronic arms attached and stuff that could fling the baby monkeys off, even punch them and shit. And the monkeys just kept going back. They liked the blanket so much.’

  ‘I thought they were just random pieces of metal put together.’

  ‘They were. But they were also wrapped in blankets.’

  ‘How can you want a blanket that’s uncomfortable?’

  ‘If I made you sit on a chair made of ten knives, I mean, it’s sharp and impossible, but the surface might feel good.’

  I’m not convinced. ‘So they made some grand statement about love based on these monkeys getting tortured in a lab?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘It’s just biology.’

  ‘It’s pretty cool.’

  I put a hand on her arm for apology. Desire, discomfort.

  ‘You’re saying the researchers thought this showed something about children and mothers and love? But it was done decades ago. You know how fast things change. Today they say one thing and tomorrow there’s something that’ll totally contradict what was said. I mean, is it love? Or is it infatuation? Maybe it’s just all in the language. It’s just some other kind of need. Calling it love is just a way to make more money. People love love.’

  Val moves strands of hair off her face. ‘Well, yeah. Love always sounds better.’

  I’d always known that desiring is harder than being desirable. I’d known that my mother told me once, before a big competition, that wanting was tremendous and powerful, but that if she got to choose, she’d choose to be the desired one, not the desiring. ‘There’s less to do being desirable.’

  I saw that she was virtuous, and good, but also that being virtuous and good made her unhappy. There were moments in the last few months, thinking about my mother and realising that perhaps I’d been too close to her all those years, when I saw that she’d given up so much of her life for my achievements. Achievements that now feel thin. I saw that those reasons came to bind her, too, and when she lost her husband, and then me, well
, I couldn’t imagine how she found the resolve to keep herself steady. I will always be too afraid to ask her about Banks.

  ‘Anyway.’

  Before bed that night, I sneak a look at my phone. An email from Olivia. The light from the phone illuminates my room. I read the message with my heart in my throat.

  I’ll be in Sydney next week. How are you?

  Val takes me out for breakfast the next morning. We drink our soy lattes in silence. My mind is preoccupied with the image of Mark chewing his bottom lip—he called it his ‘love face’; when he punctured my body he’d put on this face; like a little boy in the playground who was concentrating on smashing something.

  ‘Can I say something?’ Val leans forward. ‘Remember that time I quit my shitty studio job and I rang you right after? Do you remember what you said to me?’

  I roll my eyes and give her a weak smile.

  ‘Are you seriously giving me the cheesy post-break-up talk?’

  A tan pug strolls by, sniffs around my feet. I bend over, caress its neck. ‘I don’t know. Maybe I was lazy. Sometimes he made me happy. I don’t know. I don’t know if I was happy or if I was deluded or if I was feeling really powerful in bed, and you know, that felt good.’

  The pug nuzzles my ankles and then moves on to the woman at the next table.

  ‘You didn’t love him?’

  ‘I think I would have told you if we ever started using that word.’

  I play with the sourdough on my plate.

  ‘He never left his girlfriend,’ I say sombrely.

  ‘What does that have to do with anything?’

  I take a pinch of salt from the small bowl in the centre of the table, rubbing it between my fingertips. Val’s eyes are fixed on my face. Her penetrating stare like huge flashlights.

  ‘Maybe I never wanted him, in that way. I don’t know.’

  ‘You never seemed all that bothered by Dresden.’ Val shakes her head and leans back in her chair. ‘Did you ever think he’d fall in love with you?’

  I sip my water. She looks at me, waiting. How can I explain something I don’t even understand? How can this all mean something now, in light of everything that has happened?

  ‘I used to walk on this track near my parents’ place in Willoughby. There was one month when I walked there every day at around the same time, just before sunset. Some nights the cicadas would scream like crazy, and the next night it would be silent. Totally silent. Then the following night the noise would be back again, louder than ever. I thought maybe it had something to do with the weather, or a rise in humidity or air pressure. But I couldn’t come up with one reason why the noise was sometimes there and sometimes not. Maybe that’s how I feel about Mark.’

  A waitress comes by to collect our plates. ‘How was everything, girls?’

  ‘Great!’ we snap like automated machines.

  ‘Would you like anything else?’ she asks.

  Val looks over at me. ‘You want anything Jena?’

  I smile instinctively and shake my head. ‘I think I’m good.’

  That night, we watch Frances Ha. Val promises it will cheer me up. I have long wanted to be part of Frances’s world. Black and white. She occupies the space of the other world, one where everyone is brave. Where young people are able to lie in bed and think about which anxieties to focus on for the day.

  When Frances runs through the streets full of joy, her smile filling everything, Val claps her hands. ‘You do know this scene is plagiarised? It’s taken from a scene in a French film. Here, look.’

  She presses the space button on her laptop and opens up YouTube. A man is staggering along a street. It’s night-time, and there’s no one around. The soundtrack is David Bowie’s ‘Modern Love’, the same tune Frances runs to. The man starts running when the music picks up, leaping and cartwheeling, a strange mix of despair and elation on his face. It feels both exhilarating and painful to watch.

  ‘This is so beautiful.’

  Later, I think about the ways classical musicians have plagiarised all the players who’ve ever come before them. Doesn’t great art derive from other great art? We are the con artists. Some people are just better at pretending it’s all new. The better the deception, the better the artist.

  If I’d known this when I was six years old, would I have practised as hard as I did? I must have seen some meaning in it. I must have enjoyed it.

  I think about this as I’m washing my hair in the shower, feeling the old comfort of the familiar return to me. And it’s then, while rubbing conditioner in my hair, that I feel resolved—of course this is the right decision. Of course I must be in New York. There is no other alternative for this life I want. This life, I understand, could not have worked out any other way.

  58

  I spend the next few weeks packing, arraging things in order. In my occasional breaks from sorting boxes and bags and other junk, I scroll through Facebook, mindlessly passing hours. I pause on a new post from Olivia. A picture of Mark. He is in a suit, holding the hand of a woman dressed in a bridal gown. She holds a bouquet of pink roses. They are smiling. They are beautiful. Something cracks between my ribs.

  I call my mother, wanting a place to deposit my confusion. Wanting someone to analyse my strange despair. She knows nothing about Mark because I have never told her. I still wasn’t prepared to tell her the entire story. Perhaps in the future, but not now. Not when I am about to leave for another country.

  She’s tending to her garden when I call.

  I ask her what to do about Banks. Should I go see him? I reach for something when I call her but then something else surfaces instead. Was my confusion about Mark or Banks?

  ‘He’s a stubborn man, Jena,’ she says. ‘But he’ll always want to see you.’

  ‘But I’m not a child anymore. Maybe he won’t be so quick to forgive me.’

  She sighs into the phone. ‘Have a little faith. You’ll be surprised.’

  On the weekend, I am lying in bed, rereading Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. The rain drums against the windows. Val returns from her studio. She stands in the doorway and tells me she’d bumped into Olivia on King Street.

  ‘She had news.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Mark and Dresden got married in Melbourne. It was a last-minute thing, apparently.’

  I knew this already, of course. I’d seen the pictures on Facebook.

  I close the book in my hand.

  ‘How was Olivia?’ I ask. The last time I’d seen her was—I don’t remember. I’d left her last email unanswered. The last time I’d seen Noah was the concert at Newington. The yacht.

  ‘Didn’t you hear?’ Val asks.

  ‘What?’

  ‘She broke up with Noah.’

  I hear the neighbours’ cackling laughs. A chorus of adult voices. The sharp clicking of bats beginning their nocturnal flight.

  Through the window, I see them silhouetted against the blue-black sky like pieces of ash above a fire, flickering, floating.

  I pull on a thread of my jumper. A sleeve is unravelling.

  Val leans against the doorframe, waiting for me to say something. My silence is supposed to encourage her to say more.

  I touch my stomach, the flesh above my belly button. Then I rush to the bathroom sink and retch. Nothing comes out. I feel like emptying my heart, everything inside my body.

  I type a message to Olivia.

  I’m sorry about Noah.

  59

  Banks calls mid-week. He has texted a handful of times since I got back from New York, updates about performance opportunities, most of which I turn down. He doesn’t mind texting; short, quick, like medical appointment notifications. Each time I write back, I tell myself to visit him. The dream of him striking me with a walking stick still haunts me at unusual hours of the day. Sometimes, I lie awake at night, unable to relax into sleep for fear of meeting him in my other life. He doesn’t try to call, until a Wednesday, a week before I leave for New York.

 
‘Can you do a concert tomorrow?’ he asks. ‘The Willoughby Symphony need someone to step in to do the Bach Concerto. One of the soloists has food poisoning.’

  A community orchestra.

  ‘It’s the Bach double.’

  ‘Who’s the other violinist?’

  ‘Olivia Gregory.’

  Olivia. Olivia. Olivia.

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘A problem?’ He waits for me to make a sound.

  ‘No, no problem. I’ll do it. I’ll definitely do it.’

  On the train to the Concourse in Chatswood, I rehearse what I’ll say to her. Single words. Nothing fully formed. Maybe she will only want to focus on the music.

  I walk inside the building and fold my umbrella. It smells like wet carpet and cheap cologne. The lights are dimmed in the green room. I hear the shuffle of bass stools on the stage. Rehearsal has started. I unpack my violin and pull out my bow, rosining rapidly. There is something missing in my case. Monkey. I’d pulled him out for a wash over the weekend and forgot to place him back inside my case.

  The stage door is right behind the second violin section. I slip through in a half-crouch to make my entrance unobtrusive. There is no subtle way of doing this when the stage lights are on. I can feel the heat of the orange light spread along my spine. The other musicians are still. Some turn their heads as I creep past.

  I see Olivia. She is standing in front of the first violins, holding her violin at its neck, swinging her bow gently. I look away. From where I am, I can see the conductor, the edge of his shirt, a dark patch under his arm.

  I make a sound, like a greeting. Wave.

  A sea of heads turns to gaze. I do my best to walk gracefully to the empty seat, weaving through the chairs and stands and bows poking in all directions, violin scrolls inhibiting my path.

  ‘Everyone, please welcome our other soloist, Jena Lin.’

  The bows tap stands and hands slap thighs.

  ‘We’ll just be another few minutes before we run through the Bach.’