She feared they were already too old. That they’d wasted too much time getting here, to the start of their career, and that now it was too late. It had taken Jana a while to figure out, and to accept, that her path wasn’t toward a solo career, but rather this webbed, collaborative endeavor. It had taken all of them a while, she supposed. And it almost hadn’t happened.
Jana and Henry met at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where they’d both been excellent soloists. Jana was drawn to Henry’s raw talent, and playing in a quartet with him was the closest she could get to the force of it. He’d been a bright, boundless light on campus, younger than everyone else, taller than everyone else, a better musician than everyone else, and eager to play anywhere and everywhere. He played with the confidence only prodigies had. She’d once witnessed him sight-read Stravinsky on violin while nearly blind drunk, and play it more flawlessly and beautifully than she ever could on a first go. The idea of failure had never gotten near him. He lived in a world without it. Jana loved that about him.
She’d met prodigies before, but she’d never met anyone like Henry. He always said yes. Did he want to play one more? Did he really like ensemble work? Did he want to go out after? Did he want to write music? Did he want to conduct? Did he want to try this new viola, this new restaurant, this new drink? Jana didn’t know what it was that made someone so fearless. He was enthusiastically up for anything.
Once, after they’d finished a night of playing with two other first-year players (neither as good as them) and began packing up, Henry asked Jana about her life before. He assumed their lives in music had been similar.
“I used to be really jealous of my sister, Jackie,” he said. “She didn’t play anything, ever. She didn’t even want to. The only thing I hated was all the stuff I missed out on because of practicing and lessons twice a week, like, I don’t know, intramurals? I would have been good at soccer, I think. Jackie got to do all that. Who did you study with in California?”
Jana said the name of the Russian violinist who’d taken pity on her when Catherine had arrived drunk to pick her up from lessons. He’d given her a deep discount on lesson fees, and even still she did office filing for him after school to pay the rest. A few times she had to go down to only two lessons a month, when it was all they could afford.
“When I was really little,” Henry said, “my mom wouldn’t come to my recitals. Because it would make her so nervous she would sometimes throw up. For real.”
Jana smiled and said nothing.
He went on. “But now she doesn’t care that much. She’s seen me play so many times. She doesn’t come to my performances, but not because she’s nervous. Because she already knows how I play.”
Jana couldn’t think of something similar to say. She struggled in the silence where she was supposed to respond. She finally said, “My mother’s never seen me play.”
Henry’s face changed, lost some of its brightness.
“She doesn’t really like classical music,” Jana said. “But also, she kind of only likes herself. And vodka. And I don’t know my father. So in a way, I guess it’s good. I had no one to impress in the audience but strangers. And myself.”
Henry put his viola case down. He studied her with a worried look. “Well, I heard you,” he said. “Back in first year. You were good.” And he hugged her, his long arms around her stiff body. One thing she knew for sure about Henry was that his talent was only matched by his tenderness. He hugged with his whole body, as though he wasn’t afraid she wouldn’t hug back. He hugged without needing someone to hug him back. She did hug him back, eventually.
So nothing bad had ever happened to him. That was it. That was what made someone unafraid.
Henry’s peculiar absence of fear made him very popular with women, though Jana never thought of him sexually, romantically. She had no interest in being one of the girls (always older and less talented) he fell into bed with. What she wanted, instead, was for her playing to be associated with his playing, for his playing to scorch her and change her and better her. And while Henry’s popularity at conservatory was far and wide, it hadn’t translated into real friendship for him. There were the girls and there were the players, and no one offered themselves up to him in the middle ground. No one except Jana.
While they both let the conservatory push them toward solo or orchestral careers, they privately built a friendship upon hours of playing chamber music together. The other players who rotated in and out of their groups saw it as an extracurricular activity, and always abandoned them for more promising paths. But Jana and Henry stayed a consistent pair. She knew a solo career was what you were supposed to want and what Henry had been primed for his entire life, but she also knew that both of them had always been more engaged and more creatively determined—and simply had more fun—playing in string quartets.
One night during their last year, while they were playing late in a stuffy practice room, she brought it up. “What if we formed a quartet, like a real one?” she asked.
Henry needed some convincing. How could they find one person they liked, let alone two, and where would they find them? Why couldn’t they just go on as they were, and keep playing together like this when they had time? Jana had prepared for these questions, and produced the application for the chamber music certificate at the San Francisco conservatory. It would be only two years, three at most, and they’d meet people there who wanted the same thing, she was sure of it.
“Otherwise it won’t go on like this,” she said. “I know what will happen. You’ll be traveling or living abroad and you’ll be famous and busy forever. And you’ll forget about me.”
That was when he’d decided. Jana saw it. She’d so rarely been vulnerable like that with him, with anyone. But it was the truth: she was afraid his career would eclipse their connection. And he hadn’t ever had anyone outside of his family who valued his companionship over his potential career.
“Plus,” she said, “you’ll be lonely.”
So they left behind the years they’d put in, and veered off in search of a quartet. They’d met Brit and Daniel almost immediately, both of whom had wasted their own time at regular colleges—Indiana University and Rice. So their start as a group was late. That was undeniable. For Henry, time wasn’t such a big deal. He was young. But for Jana, the official commitment to the quartet was the beginning of the churning worry inside her that she would run out of time before she was ever successful, that she needed to ascend faster and more fiercely than normal, at Henry-like speeds.
That was what was on her mind the morning of their last rehearsal in San Francisco before the competition, instead of the sixteenths in Beethoven’s “Serioso,” which did need some attention, and suddenly she was anxious. She had the score in her lap and they were waiting for Henry to tune. He’d left his viola beneath a slightly open window in his apartment that morning, and the cold had contracted the strings and wood. He and Jana both had perfect pitch, so tuning could take forever to satisfy their testy ears. Daniel made no secret that he found this annoying and refused to sit for it, instead pacing the back of the stage. Jana knew he was just infuriated he didn’t have perfect pitch.
They were due to fly to Canada that afternoon, with the first round of performances the next night. Four of the sixteen groups would be cut then, with three more rounds to go. Just focus on round one, Jana told herself. They would play the Beethoven, which had gone more than decently at the conservatory recital a week earlier, but in the time since had started to feel brittle.
Now they were testing the sound on stage, as if it was going to matter. They’d already played on this stage during their recital, and Esterhazy was going to be on a different stage, thousands of miles away. And besides all that, if Jana had learned anything from relentless performing, it was that chamber music was made up of a hundred minute responses to even more minute changes in both the environment and each other’s bodies. Sometimes she was momentarily embarrassed at how well she knew Brit’s thin left hand or the elfin knobs of Daniel’s knees, perhaps better than she knew either of them.
In any case, Henry’s scroll was propped on his knee, and his ear was turned close to the wood, and Jana was still worrying about their age. She and Brit were both twenty-four. Henry was newly twenty (an ambitious, antsy prodigy), and Daniel somewhere near thirty—he didn’t like to discuss his age. The groups winning the Esterhazy competition were getting younger each year, some still in conservatory. Nineteen-year-olds. And there they’d been, toiling away at a master’s certificate in chamber music, as if it mattered to anyone but their teachers, whom they were too old to have any longer.
But she’d needed to study more, and they’d needed to find Brit and Daniel. Still, Jana often thought of how it would have been so much easier if they’d all found each other earlier, if they’d all gone to conservatory together the first time around. What Jana really wanted wasn’t to have studied more, but to have grown more as a whole group. To grow faster, now. Or to somehow turn back time to five years ago and start growing together then. If they’d solidified their connection earlier, they might be more comfortable now with these big performances. This biggest performance.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jana said.
Brit looked up, her eyes alarmingly wide. She’d been reticent all morning, making barely any noise but for her own private tuning. Her face was colorless except for a suddenly noticeable splash of freckles across her pale cheeks, her long hair tied back in a bun. Jana was annoyed. They couldn’t afford to be lackluster.
Brit snapped back, “What’s wrong with you?”
“Tuned!” Henry announced, running a hand through his long hair. He beckoned to Daniel. “Tuned! Sorry, guys, forgot it was going to be cold this morning. It’s all good.”
“Could you please get a haircut before the concert?” Jana said to Henry.
“Why don’t you ask me five more times?” he said. “Call my mother and tell her to remind me?”
Daniel took his place again, stabbed his endpin into the rockstop. Jana cleared her throat. They agreed to run through only the openings of every movement of all three pieces. Jana had always been a firm believer that you have one good performance of any given piece in you a day, a superstition handed down by her first teacher, the Russian. Their conservatory coach had decried this idea, saying that if you don’t have more than one good performance in you a day, you shouldn’t be a professional. He’d have made them rehearse everything all the way through until their fingers were raw, then tell them to go zone out for three hours before coming back to the hall. But Jana liked the mysterious quality of keeping a full run-through of a piece until they were really on stage. It was like keeping a bride from her groom until she walked down the aisle—the groom knew what she looked like, but the deprivation made her appearance more sacred.
Not that any wedding was as important as the concerts they would play at Esterhazy.
Anyway, it was two days until their first appearance at the competition, but Jana felt that it was too close to risk a full rehearsal.
Her hunch about a lackluster attitude proved true in their run-through. She felt so stuffed with that idea that she tried not to speak at all while they were rehearsing. Brit was clearly in a mood, and Daniel was just an okay foundation, not his usual vocal self. Henry tried to smile at her across the stands, but she scowled back. They ran a couple of known rough spots, which were smoothed out, if devoid of the life they were capable of applying.
At the end, when there was nothing else to run through, Jana couldn’t help it, the words came out of her mouth like a sneeze: “Bad rehearsal.”
“Not really a rehearsal,” Brit said.
“Well,” Jana said. “We could use one.”
“Bad rehearsal, good performance, isn’t that what they say?” Henry said.
The four of them looked at each other in a swath of silence. What they’d just done in rehearsal hadn’t made any sense, and no superstition was going to make Jana feel good about it.
The silence curled away like fog, and they dispersed from the chairs. As Jana put her violin in its velvet case, she heard Daniel clicking his case snaps shut and walking off stage, and Henry saying something quietly to Brit, trying to make her laugh a little. Jana didn’t turn from her violin. There was nothing to say. The space had the unnamable yet pervasive feeling of a holiday spent alone.
As she slung her case over her shoulder, she felt Henry’s presence behind her, and turned to find him smiling, joyful. “It’s going to be fine,” he said, holding out his arm. She slid hers through the crook and they walked into the wings, through the cold backstage, and out onto 19th Avenue. Outside, the fog had lifted, and a warm May afternoon alighted. The warmth was fleeting, though. It always was in San Francisco.
They walked north on 19th to Noriega, where Jana would tuck herself away in her apartment in the Sunset. Henry would continue walking, turn east along the park, to his apartment in the Haight. He liked walking. He had excruciating amounts of energy, and always seemed about to fly off the ground with it.
“So, what,” Jana said, cupping her hand around a cigarette to light it, “you never have . . . doubts?”
“About what?” Henry smiled down at her. He was so tall and wide-shouldered and lanky, with floppy brown hair and an elastic face—pointy nose, wide smile, expressive eyes. Too much of everything in Henry: height, hair, skin, money, optimism, talent.
“I don’t know. Don’t make me say it.” She exhaled.
“Say it.”
“What if we’re doing the wrong thing? What if we’re wasting our time when we should be booking gigs at Alice Tully? Are we happy? Are we even moving toward happiness? I won’t believe you if you say you don’t think about it. I just won’t. You’re an android if you say it.”
The street tilted dramatically up and they were slowed by a steep hill. Henry was unlike most people, she thought, totally unencumbered by pedestrian anxieties, never self-loathing and never too arrogant, exactly as confident as he needed to be, with an endless fount of warmth for music first, and musical people second. It was what she loved about him, and what made him so very different from her. She knew what he would say.
“I just don’t think about it,” he said. “I’m sorry. I can say what you want, if you’d like. If it’ll make you feel better.”
“It won’t make me feel better. You’re a bad liar.”
“I wake up and I think, fuck, I get to do a whole day, you know? Write music, play music, listen to music. Eat, dance, drink—”
“—take a ballerina home.”
“Take a ballerina home. Exactly. Though they’re not much for eating and drinking.”
“Right.”
“What I’m saying is if I thought about all the ways I could be unhappy, I’d be . . . unhappy. Not to mention exhausted.”
“So you just choose . . . not to think about it?”
“It doesn’t feel like a choice. But yeah, I suppose it is. A choice I made so many times that I don’t even have to make it anymore.”
“Everything’s going to be terrible.” Jana thought of Henry and the ballerina he’d been with two nights earlier. How easy it was for him, everything. Sometimes she thought maybe she crawled into bed with him just to suck some of that optimism out of his pores.
Henry unthreaded his arm from hers and pulled her close. “No. Some things, maybe.”
Like when you leave us, Jana thought, but did not say. Or when we win the Esterhazy competition because I slept with one of the judges. “Exactly,” she said. “You can’t tell the difference. So what’s the point?”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know. Life?”
“Are you seriously asking me that? Do we need to go to a hospital? Are you suicidal?”
“Henry. Come on. I’m serious.”
“You’re not. You can’t be. You can’t play the way you do and not understand the value of . . . pain.”
“Who said it—Mozart or someone? ‘With ease, or not at all.’ What if nothing’s easy?”
“Okay, one, I don’t think he said that. Two, if he did say it, he’s lying. And three, you misunderstand ‘ease.’ I think whoever said that means joy, not the quality of being easy. And difficult things can bring joy. And joy can bring ease.”
They were nearing the corner where they’d split off, and Jana would walk the remaining two blocks to her apartment alone. With ease or not at all, she thought. Would there be joy at Esterhazy? Could there be joy with suffering? And who would do the suffering, anyway? And what would they be suffering from?
What she didn’t confess, but so badly wanted to: I blackmailed Fodorio into giving us a win, joy or no joy. Henry wouldn’t have understood. He didn’t see it the way she did, and not because he chose not to think about how hard it all was, but because he didn’t have to. He never had to. What she’d done was the opposite of ease. She would never tell anyone.
“We’re going to be fine,” Henry said.
“You always think that,” she said. “It’s easy for you to think that.”
“I love you, Miss Jana,” he said, kissing the top of her head. Henry was a different species from the rest of them, Jana thought. He would leave them because of it. Someday.
“Don’t leave your viola by a window today, genius,” Jana said. He let go of her and continued north, grinning back at her. “I love you, too,” she said, waving a suddenly chilled hand.
It was too easy for Jana to describe her mother as an alcoholic. That there was a name for what her mother was made Jana furious, as though reasons (and excuses) for Catherine’s behavior could be found in a medical textbook or a psychology course. Her mother was an alcoholic—and a pill popper and an occasional coke user and a pathological liar—but what she suffered from seemed to Jana to be more like self-delusion than any imbibed substance. And there was nothing easy about Catherine.
Before Jana was born, her mother had a spot on a heavily rotated detergent commercial, and she hadn’t risen in the ranks much after that. When Jana was ten, her mother landed a role on a soap opera, but her character became possessed by demons and was killed off within a month of episodes, quickly forgotten in the myriad storylines. In between gigs, Catherine waited tables or walked dogs or sold makeup at department stores in the Valley. She was always auditioning, though, and because she was auditioning, there was always the possibility that she was going to get a part, and for Catherine, possibility was as good as potential, and she told Jana only the truly great had potential. Jana took up the violin as a child mostly so she wouldn’t have to take the acting classes her mother pushed.
The other thing Catherine was always doing was letting men move in. Jana saw a montage of men carrying their boxes into the apartment, and then carrying them out, one after another, except sometimes their things were in trash bags and not boxes, and some of them were angry and slammed the door behind them when they left, and some of them left behind things like uncomfortable leather couches or a bandanna collection or gaming consoles. They weren’t all so bad, though, and one of them stayed around awhile—Billy, who played Irish fiddle in a band every Tuesday at the Red Rose Pub, where her mother sometimes worked. Billy had a face full of stubble that always made him look dirty, and he picked up handyman gigs when he could get them. He tried to make Jana play Irish-style but she wouldn’t play that loose, or couldn’t, and by that time her Russian teacher had taken her on anyway, and he would have died if she’d told him she learned a jig by ear.
Jana remembered Billy liked war movies because he’d been in the war, and when Platoon came out, he dragged Jana to see it. She was sixteen and it was her first R-rated movie in a theater. Catherine refused to go, in one of her slumps after a string of bad auditions.
He elbowed Jana in the cold theater and whispered, “This guy’s my favorite—Willem Dafoe.”
Then Willem Dafoe’s character died. All his men were watching him from a helicopter when he was shot in the back. He kept trying to get up and run but he kept getting shot. The music of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, which Jana had played first violin on in chamber orchestra two years prior, swelled over the scene. Jana wondered what recording it was, was mildly bored by the violent visual that accompanied it. But when she looked over at Billy, the light from the screen flashing on his face, she saw that he was crying. Silent, masculine tears, but flat silver streaks down his cheeks for sure. He hadn’t seen it coming, not even with the swelling music. What a fool, Jana thought, but in a kind way.
On the ride home, Billy said, “Oh boy, that was a movie, huh?”
It must have been some days later—Catherine was home and happy again, having received both a callback and a very large tip at the restaurant—when Billy knocked on her bedroom door. He poked his head in. Jana was cleaning her violin of rosin.
“Hey, can you play it? That soundtrack from Platoon?”
“The Barber?”
“Sure, that.”
Jana nodded. “I could play it years ago.”
Billy sat down on the floor by the door, just inside her room. “Play it for me now?”
Jana rummaged through her sheet music. “It will sound weird without all the other parts.”
But she played it anyway. It required a pristine intonation, but with Jana’s perfect pitch it wasn’t so difficult. When there were rests in the music, she rested, and Billy didn’t move in the quiet. Finally, she reached the climactic climb up the E string, the soaring scale that accompanied Willem Dafoe’s death, and when she was done, she looked up and saw her mother standing next to Billy. She was holding two clear drinks, one in each hand.
“Baby, that was beautiful. Sad and beautiful,” Catherine said, bending down to hand one drink to Billy.
“It was from the movie we saw together,” Billy said.
Catherine frowned. “I don’t remember you two seeing a movie together.”
No one said anything because, yes, she didn’t remember. Catherine kicked absently at the doorjamb with her high heel. “Well, anyway. Maybe Jana can play in the movies one day. You know that’s where her name comes from, right? Jana Leigh? Like Janet Leigh. Janet Leigh is so pretty. Like Jana. Didn’t I make a pretty baby?”
Catherine had shown Jana Psycho when she was eleven, too young. Her mother loved Psycho, always got scared and huddled under a blanket, sometimes called their creepy neighbor “Norman Bates” as a joke. “Baby, your namesake,” Catherine would always say when they watched it. Jana didn’t tell her mother she didn’t like being named after a woman who was best known for being stabbed in the shower, or that she hated the screeching music that accompanied the murder scene. Couldn’t she have been Tippi? Grace? Kelly? Or someone from something with a dignified soundtrack?
But Billy didn’t answer, because he was still hearing the music. It seemed to Jana that around that time was when Billy stopped listening to his mother’s blathering altogether, which is why she eventually kicked him out, and it wasn’t like Billy was some saint—he didn’t even say goodbye to Jana—but Jana thought about him when she thought about the moment she decided to really leave home, to go to conservatory and not look back. She thought about the parade of men who fell in love with Catherine and then fell out of love with her when they saw how myopic and medicated she was, or the men who didn’t love her at all, the men who drank even more than Catherine did and broke lamps and frying pans and fences—and how she, Jana, didn’t ever want to be around those men again, men who either needed too much or not enough. When she thought about Billy, she always remembered him clutching at the carpet in her bedroom, listening to her play while Catherine flitted around above him, how he’d seemed lost but aligned with Jana, not like a father (she never felt that from anyone) but like a brother, like he was saying, Hey, we could be related because we both understand how special and exquisite this music is. But Billy wouldn’t have used that word—exquisite—and Jana wouldn’t have, either, not until she left two years later, and then she didn’t really think of Billy except for when she heard the Barber, which, now that she was a serious professional, wasn’t that often. It was considered schlocky, especially since Platoon, and after that afternoon, Jana never played it again.
Back at her apartment, Jana made herself food and ate it standing by the stove. While she chewed, she wiped up the crumbs around the range with a new sponge. Nothing had ever seemed so lonely before, though she’d spent days exactly like this many times prior. Days like this were the atomic structure that made up her life. She didn’t eat or drink with the voraciousness Henry had mentioned. She ate box pasta and pre-made salad mixes, and drank mineral water. She felt jittery and useless when she was not practicing or listening to music. So, in her non-music life, she learned to make her movements small and quiet, to lessen the guilt and assuage the nagging in her head. But why now, all of a sudden, was the pathetic deadness of her life revealed? Nothing had changed.
It wasn’t Fodorio himself. She wasn’t, like she thought Brit was, hungry for the attention of men. She was hungry to begin their professional life, and was it so terrible that she’d done something possibly against the rules for a leg up at Esterhazy? What was a small moral failing on the way to greatness? She could spend time convincing herself she had connected with Fodorio, seen in his wayward fatherhood a replica of the empty space inside her. She had let him talk, hadn’t derided his life’s choices, hadn’t bothered him with hers. She had helped him be temporarily less lonely. She had forgiven him his mistakes. She had provided him a service, so why was it so bad if he provided her with something, too?
She wouldn’t tell the group. Not ever, she decided. Brit didn’t have the same sort of ambition she did, and wouldn’t understand. Daniel would be angry with her, though really he’d be angry with himself, for not being good enough to win the competition flat-out. And Henry would think she was foolish, that they didn’t need help winning, and he would be right, but only about him—he could win it alone. Together, she wasn’t sure. And she needed to be sure.
This was the end of something, she thought, looking out the small square window above her sink at the top of Coit Tower in the distance. The end of their schooling, their student-hood, their tryout period. The period where they could fail. They’d fooled themselves into thinking it wasn’t the same as conservatory because they were earning master’s degrees, but it was simply an extension, a way to make it all right not to be good enough. But after this week, there would be no cushion, and the vertigo of that thought rushed through Jana’s body.
And what would failure look like? A lack of: invitations to play, offers for management, post-conservatory residencies. An abundance of: years wasted, degrees earned, rehearsal hours clocked. Settling for: teaching private students who would, at best, be good in an extracurricular way (good for a future doctor), or clawing to a job leading a bad band at a junior high school, or (if she was a lucky failure) toiling away in the back of a violin section at a middling regional orchestra. In any scenario, there would be the slow shrug of dissolving a quartet whose union depended on other people wanting to be united.
Jana hadn’t invited her mother to the recital or Esterhazy. She wouldn’t have known where to send the invitation. Not really. The last time she’d seen her mother had been at a trailer park near Torrance, a nice one, with trees and children, but a trailer park still. Her mother had been drunk, thin, pretty in a sun-worn kind of way. A man was holding her up—Ray or something was his name. Catherine didn’t do anything in particular that day, nothing unusually awful. They went to lunch, Ray stared at Jana’s small breasts, Catherine drank four margaritas, and then they went back to the trailer to watch some television crime drama her mother liked. Catherine fell asleep during the show, and Ray said nothing until Jana stood up to leave. She thought her mother probably did not remember it very well.
It was easier not to contact her. She had Jana’s number anyway, or could find her easily enough. But it was too taxing, those visits, pinging between her guilt for being a bad daughter and her hunger for a mother Catherine could never be.
Was that pain? Jana didn’t know. It simply felt like the absence of something.
Here was Catherine’s number, scrawled in the corner of an address book, under several other phone numbers that had been scratched out, numbers to her apartments over the years, those of men she’d lived with. Jana held the book in her hand, plastic-bound with yellowing pages.
If she called now, there would be no way Catherine could make it from Los Angeles, but Jana would at least have told her. Would not have to feel guilt about that.
She dialed the number the way she’d finished the food, robotically, without knowing where the muscle movement was originating from.
A man answered, of course.
“Ray?” Jana said.
“Who?”
“Who is this?”
“Who is this?”
“This is Jana. Is this Ray?”
“This is Carl. Are you calling for Ray?”
“For Catherine. Is she home?”
Jana heard a hand muffle the speaker, but he still yelled loud enough for Jana to pull the phone from her ear. “Katie! Janet’s on the phone for you!”
Jana held her breath until her mother’s voice came on the phone, a whole half-octave higher than she normally spoke.
“Janet?”
“It’s Jana.”
“Jana! Carl, it’s Jana, not Janet. Oh, honey, so glad you called. I couldn’t find your number, and Carl said he was going to look you up, but I didn’t know if you lived in San Francisco or some other town, and maybe you aren’t even listed, so we couldn’t find you.”
“That’s okay. Hey, I’m just calling to say I’m competing in a big thing this week.” Jana heard her own voice quaver. She closed her eyes. This was a bad idea.
“That’s great, honey. Can I read about it? Will it be televised? Or on the radio?”
Her mother didn’t understand how any of it worked. It was some kind of miracle that Jana had ended up a classical violinist: a chance meeting with Dmitri at the LA Phil on a school trip, hundreds of hours wearing a stupid paper hat at In-N-Out Burger to pay for the violin, and a nearly crazed desire to enmesh herself in something foreign to her mother.
“No. It’s not that big a deal,” Jana said.
“If it’s no big deal, then why’d you call me? Sure it’s a big deal. Did I tell you that I got a callback for this PacBell commercial? My agent thinks I’ll get it.”
Jana resisted the urge to say, No, when would you have told me that, we haven’t spoken in two years. Instead, she said, “That’s great. Who’s Carl?”
“Carl lives with me now.”
“What happened to Ray?”
“Ray?” Catherine laughed. “Oh, baby girl, that was ages ago. I can’t believe you remember that.”
Tears sprang meanly to Jana’s eyes. She wasn’t surprised at any of it, and her lack of surprise was what saddened her. She blinked.
“I’ll send you a program. I have to go, Catherine.”
“Yes, send me a program. I’ll send you a copy of the commercial. If I get it.”
“You’ll get it,” Jana said.
“Thanks. You too, honey.”
She hung up without saying goodbye, and continued to stand at her sink, looking out the window for she didn’t know how long. What did Catherine think Jana was going to get? She made a promise not to reach out to her again, and felt glad in her stubbornness.
She could have said, I fucked a famous violinist so we’d win a major competition, and her mother would have understood. With that thought, it wasn’t shame or sadness that overcame Jana but anger that she had let herself be like her mother for a moment—let herself believe, foolishly, in the invisible, in the dreamy possibility of magic instead of the actual pursuit of greatness.
At some point, the sunlight in the square of window began to dip, and that was how Jana knew it was time to dress, pack, and rush to catch her—their—flight to Esterhazy.