Chapter 6 Jamie #2
My usual set is four hours, which is longer than it sounds like. A four-hour shift when I worked at Tractor Supply in Iowa was amazing on a day that you felt tired or under the weather. A four-hour shift of nonstop piano playing makes you want to cut your hands off.
I used to practice that long, once upon a time.
Three to four hours every day, both before and after school.
I felt like I was on some kind of hero’s journey, defying all odds in pursuit of an impossible dream.
I would have done just about anything to get the hell out of that town and have the chance to make this my career.
My classmates were cool with it, but I got so much shit from people my parents’ age.
Lots of vaguely homophobic comments and zingers about city folks or knowing the value of a hard day’s work.
And here I was, playing to entertain the same kind of rich coastal elites that our neighbors despised, in a restaurant that would almost definitely earn a good old-fashioned What’s wrong with Olive Garden? Nothing, of course. Nothing was wrong with Olive Garden.
Iowa is full of good people. I knew that, logically. I had been friends with a lot of them. A lot of them are still there, with no desire to leave.
But another, fiercer part of me—the part that grew up angry and got angrier every year until my brother died—basks in the satisfaction of hating fucking everyone.
I wonder sometimes if that hatred comes across in my music.
But unfortunately, I know it doesn’t.
Three Years Ago
Marigold Gensler played the final notes of her Stravinsky suite, and I was the first to clap, as if clapping loud enough and smiling hard enough would make her notice me out of all the students crowding the wings at Parker’s fall piano showcase.
She bowed, and I could see the exhilaration coloring her cheeks even from here.
I wondered if Marigold had any idea the effect her playing had on her audience.
On me, to be precise. Because listening to her was like being transported to another universe.
When she finished a piece, it was like coming up for air after a long time underwater, disoriented and gasping.
And you desperately wanted to go back to that place, to shove stones in your pockets and let yourself be dragged into the heady undertow of her music.
“That was fantastic,” I told her once she was offstage. I felt like one fan in a dozen, begging her to notice me.
“Thanks.” She looked embarrassed, which was completely incongruous with the Marigold I’d come to know. That Marigold was confident—not in everything, maybe, but in her music. And there was something incredibly attractive about a woman who knew her own skill.
Maybe it’s you, a sly voice whispered in the back of my mind. Maybe she’s nervous around you.
But I didn’t want to get ahead of myself, or give myself credit when I hadn’t earned it yet.
For all I knew, this crush was completely one-sided.
I was keenly aware of the gulf between my judgment of what counted as normal behavior and other people’s.
When I was in middle school, the pediatrician had even suggested to my mother that I might benefit from social skills classes, or even some kind of therapy to help me understand how to act in public.
I remember the way my mom had reacted to that—how she’d snatched her purse off the chair and told Dr. Ebert that it wasn’t her son who needed to learn how to act.
That if grown adults couldn’t figure out how to be kind to a shy little ten-year-old, then it was grown adults who needed to change.
She still sent me to the social skills classes, though. Which is how I knew that all these times when I felt awkward, I just came across cold. I wondered which version of me Marigold read.
“I think they liked it,” I said wryly, tilting my head toward the audience, who were still clapping even with Marigold offstage.
She rolled her eyes. “They’d better. I’ve only played that piece five thousand times at this point.”
“Well, now you’ve earned the right to never play it again. Or at least not for the next two years. Probably shouldn’t get your hopes up too far.”
She laughed, and I clung to that sound with both desperate hands. I knew damn well I was being pathetic, but it was hard not to be. I wasn’t about to judge myself for having good taste in women.
And Marigold…she was an incredible woman.
Bold, passionate, kind, loyal. And beautiful, with that wildflower-honey hair and warm brown eyes.
We’d been running in similar circles ever since we both started at Parker, partly because we shared a primary instructor and partly because our respective best friends were in some kind of on-again, off-again relationship that managed to drag us both into opposite halves of unnecessary drama.
It was hard not to feel a kinship to someone after so many shared eye rolls.
We made our way deeper backstage, making room for the next musicians, who were anxiously milling in the wings.
“Listen,” I said, because putting this off even longer was not gonna help my nerves, “I was wondering…do you want to go and get a coffee sometime?”
I had to force myself to bite back No pressure, only if you want, haha awkward laugh haha and just let the question stand on its own.
I’d already been over this a million times at this point, but all my old worries surged up again in the seconds of silence that punctuated my words.
What if I’m ruining what could be the start of a friendship?
What if she secretly detests me? What if she says yes, and we date, but then it ends badly, and we have to spend the next three years avoiding each other in a department of just eighty emotionally incestuous students?
But Marigold smiled, a grin that lit up her entire face. “I thought you’d never ask.”
We made plans to meet up that weekend at a little café a few blocks from Parker. It was tiny and didn’t have Wi-Fi, but it did have mood lighting and coffee beans piled up in little wooden barrels, so it was aesthetic.
But I sat there for ten minutes…fifteen…I got up and ordered myself a cappuccino while I waited. Fifteen minutes turned into twenty. I texted Marigold what I hoped was a very chill, not-pushy inquiry, and got no response—not even the little ellipsis to say she was typing.
Thirty minutes. Thirty-five. I played so much Tetris on my phone that I never wanted to see an L-block ever again. Forty-five.
I waited for an hour, and she never showed up, never even bothered texting me back until another hour after that with some bullshit excuse.
Social contracts, I couldn’t help thinking.
That’s what I’d been taught by all those therapists.
We all exist in a web of unspoken social contracts.
And I might not be the best at understanding what all those contracts are all the time, but even I didn’t need this spelled out for me.
There’s a social contract that you don’t make an agreement, then ditch on it. You don’t say you’ll meet someone, then never show up. Definitely not without an excuse ahead of time.
And maybe I would have been able to let it go, if it was just the ghosting thing. Not immediately, obviously, but if she had a good explanation. If she’d bothered to make it make sense. If she hadn’t…well, if she hadn’t doubled down later on and made it worse.
So…
Fuck it.
Fuck it. If this was how it was gonna be, then…fine. Part of the social contract was picking up the hints that other people were putting down, and this wasn’t a hint, it was a goddamn billboard.
So fuck it.
Present Day
Only one exam left to go before winter break, and it’s the duet with Marigold, which means I’ve spent enough time with her over the past week that she probably wishes she’d never have to see my face again. (Although that might also be her default setting.)
We’re making progress, though. The piece is really coming together now—it doesn’t feel as much like we’re two instruments fighting for dominance.
We’re figuring out a careful dance, one delicate enough that it feels sometimes like the slightest breeze could topple it.
I find myself biting my tongue more than usual around her, like a single snappish word might cause the whole thing to shatter.
I wonder how it looks to anyone else, the two of us trailing after each other the past few weeks, all but inseparable. I’ve seen more of Marigold Gensler in the last fourteen days than I have my own roommate, although that might be because Ken’s got a new girlfriend sucking up all his time.
“Are you going home for Christmas?” Marigold asks me as we ascend the elevator together from the practice rooms up to street level. It had seemed stupid and petty to take the stairs just to avoid her.
“Nah,” I say. “I’ve gotta stay here and get ready for Stockholm.”
“Don’t they have pianos in Iowa?”
I shrug. Because the answer is obviously No, Marigold, I spontaneously manifested piano abilities when I arrived at Parker after never touching a keyboard before in my life, but also because she isn’t entitled to the truth.
The elevator spits us out into the lobby, and my phone buzzes in my back pocket right as we’re about to head outside. It’s my mom, on FaceTime, because once boomers discovered that particular technology, it’s like they forgot that not every situation demands a view of your kid’s face in 1080p.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Hi, honey.” As always, my mother looks harried, all under-eye circles and hastily applied lipstick. “How are exams going?”
I’m acutely aware of Marigold lurking just off-screen where my mother can’t see, pretending she isn’t listening in. It’s like having an overpowering itch that I can’t scratch.
“Fine. You know. Busy. How are you? How are Aunt Kim and Uncle Mike?” I hope she doesn’t notice the way I keep glancing off to the side, self-conscious. Telling myself Act normal is very much having the opposite effect.