Chapter 18 Jamie
Jamie
One perk of living with the daughter of a Phil principal musician: free tickets to any performance you like. Or better yet, rehearsal.
I’m a Chopin fanboy at heart, always have been—maybe it’s the music, or maybe it’s just reading too many old books and romanticizing the idea of a consumptive composer scribbling away in a dim room in nineteenth-century Poland.
I mentioned it to Marigold offhand once, and she must have immediately turned around and told her father, because the next night, she tells me that her dad got us in to watch a rehearsal. You know. If we want.
The Phil is still on tour, but one of the guest soloists will be at the theater this weekend practicing. So, it’ll essentially be a piano master class. Up close and personal.
“Sounds fancy,” my mom says when I check in with her over our weekly FaceTime.
“Well, it’s just a practice. But I’ll get to have the best seats in the house.”
She smiles. Maybe it’s the lighting, but her face seems wan, skin stretched too tight over bone. My heart does that familiar squeeze of guilt; she’d never allow it, but I know I ought to be there. With her. Helping her. If I were a better son, I would be.
“I’m so glad you’re getting these opportunities, Jamie,” she says. “I remember how badly you wanted to go to New York. It was all you talked about when you were a kid. Phil this, Phil that. And now here you are.”
“Here I am.”
I need to figure out some kinda way to detach my mind from all the baggage dragging it down.
Objectively, I already won. I’m at Parker.
I’m going to Stockholm. Teenage me would have been elated for half as much.
Instead, I feel like one of those same privileged, ungrateful assholes I always resented—getting it all, but always wanting more. Always bored of it.
If Adam were here…
Well, if Adam were here, a lot of things would be different. But he’d definitely tell me to pull my head out of my ass.
After my mom and I hang up, I toss my phone aside on the bed and stare up at the crown molding on the ceiling.
Winning Stockholm would matter, right? If I won Stockholm, it’d actually sink in that I did it, I made it, and let off just enough of that pressure that I can stop overthinking shit and just enjoy it again.
Maybe that’s my problem—maybe I still feel like I haven’t done enough to deserve being here.
Aaand that’s why I don’t need to pay for a therapist. I have a Psych 101 course credit and an anxiety disorder. I can psychoanalyze myself.
It’s deep winter, the wind scrubbing a flush onto Marigold’s cheeks when we leave for Lincoln Center. I reach over and hook our fingers together, and hers curl in tight against my palm, like she’d been waiting for it the whole time.
“Three days until Stockholm,” she says. “This time next week, we’ll be about to start preliminaries.”
“Yup. This time next week, we’ll be eating lingonberry jam by the spoon.”
Marigold visibly recoils. “Speak for yourself. That sounds disgusting.”
“Been a dream of mine ever since my first trip to Ikea. Microwaved meatballs and berry puree in actual Sweden.”
“Do Swedish people even eat that stuff?”
“I dunno. Probably. Or maybe they subsist off reindeer and smoked penguin. How should I know?”
Marigold gives me a look that reminds me, unpleasantly, of my seventh-grade teacher. “You should at least know that penguins live in Antarctica. And that you don’t eat them.”
“Why? Why is that something I need to know? Is there an oral exam component at Stockholm? Are they gonna quiz me on the appropriate habitat for avian would-be delicacies? I bet penguins are delicious. They look…meaty.”
“Do you enjoy being this gross?”
“Hey,” I say. “I am very charming.”
She elbows me in the side, and I elbow her back, and the closeness between us isn’t tentative now; the interlacing of our fingers feels solid, real.
Rehearsal is only just getting started when we finally arrive at Lincoln Center.
The pianist’s running through the standard warm-up exercises, a series of Liszt and Chopin études.
We sneak down to the middle of the orchestra section and claim our seats.
Marigold’s somehow acquired two copies of the program that’ll be used at the actual performance, and she passes one over.
I flip past all the ads for music lessons and fine jewelry to examine the set list.
“Chopin,” Marigold murmurs. “Why is it always Chopin?”
“I wouldn’t brag about disliking Chopin too loudly. I’d hate for people to realize I’m with someone who has such shitty taste.”
The pianist stops her warm-up mid-étude, which snaps both of us out of our programs to look upstage.
The lighting guy is already on his shit, dimming audience lights until the orchestra alone is wreathed in an amber glow.
The pianist lifts her hands over the keyboard, and I find myself holding my breath on reflex, a diver hovering at the edge of the block. And then the music begins.
The soloist is Nadeszda Cessyak, a Croatian newcomer who won the Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition a couple of years back.
Watching her career light up in the wake of that win had only fueled my obsession with Stockholm.
It had felt like a lens into one possible future, where a musician from some rural town nobody had ever heard of could rise from obscurity to fame with just a few perfectly played nocturnes.
I wasn’t at Busoni—I hadn’t qualified, and I wouldn’t have been able to afford tickets anyway—but I’d watched the videos online.
She plays as beautifully now as she did then: like the piano is an extension of her form, the music as easy a translation of feeling as if she were to cry, or laugh, or dance.
I pull out my phone and swipe over to my recording app, hit “start,” then pull out my notebook, ready to scribble down anything I notice that might help me claim just some shadow of the magic Cessyak has—but then Marigold reaches over and shuts the notebook in my hand, pressing her palm down atop mine.
She does it without even looking; her gaze is still fixed straight ahead, watching Nadeszda Cessyak play.
Maybe this is the difference between us.
We both hear beautiful music. I want to analyze it, deconstruct it so I can steal the power for myself.
Marigold just listens with a small, desperate smile on her lips, her eyes glittering with unshed tears as she falls headfirst into the universe Chopin made just for her.
I wonder if I used to look like that, too.
The entire set takes around three hours to run through when you factor in the times that Cessyak’s instructor stops to give feedback or to make her run through a few bars again.
But for the most part, it plays just the way it would onstage in an actual performance.
I feel like I could close my eyes and be transported to the evening show, surrounded by men in dark suits and women with long, glittering gowns—a kind of fantastical symphony where everyone and everything is beautiful.
“That was marvelous,” Marigold says when it’s all over, still misty-eyed as she gazes up at the stage, where Cessyak and her instructor are deep in murmured conversation about technique and performance.
“It’ll be you one day,” I say. “Literally.”
“I still can’t believe it.” She shakes her head slowly. “No way can I live up to that. Nadeszda is a once-in-a-lifetime kind of talent.”
“So’s Marigold Gensler.”
I live for the way she blushes when I say things like that. I wonder what the Jamie of last year would say if he could see me now. Old Jamie must have been some kind of sociopath.
“Come on,” she says, visibly fighting to keep her expression in check. “Let’s see if someone can introduce us.”
And they can, of course, because Marigold seems to know everyone in the industry, and the first guy she walks up to is more than happy to take up the task.
Nadeszda Cessyak herself is polite and gracious, but I have the feeling she’d rather be doing just about anything besides talking to two moony Parker students twenty years her junior.
At some point, Marigold and I get separated, drawn off into different conversations.
I stand by the piano and slide my fingertips along the sleek jet Blüthner’s case.
It’s cool to the touch, like a river stone.
“Nadeszda usually prefers Faziolis,” Cessyak’s instructor says, catching me off guard as he joins me, a small smile lingering about his lips. “But apparently she tried this one and fell in love, so it’s earned a starring role this season.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“If you come by this weekend, in the morning sometime, I’m sure they’d let you play it. I don’t know if it’s the same for you, but I can never resist putting my hands on a nice piano.”
I lift my head to smile at him, and when I do, I spot Marigold over his shoulder, talking to Ruoxi Zhang.
A cold blade slices through the pit of my stomach. Ruoxi Zhang is the artistic director of the Phil, and she also happens to be one of the judges for the Stockholm competition this year.
There are rules about this. Like, actual rules. You aren’t supposed to fraternize with the judges—or rather, they aren’t supposed to fraternize with you. It’s not a rule everyone adheres to perfectly; the classical music world is pretty damn small, after all.
Too small. Apparently.
I don’t know what I expected. Of course Marigold knows Stockholm judges. She knows fucking everyone, thanks to her parents and that Juilliard pedigree.
I had told myself I was gonna be cool about things like this. Marigold can’t help who her dad is. She can’t help her background. If I’d been in her position, I would take every advantage I could get, too.
But that gnawing feeling in my chest is back, a sick and acrid jealousy burning a hole in my sternum.
It isn’t fair, and it doesn’t make sense. I shouldn’t care nearly as much as I do. I’m only doing this for Adam at this point—only grinding through because Adam thought I should, because Adam thought it would make me happy, and because I so desperately hope he was right.
If Marigold wins Stockholm, I should be happy for her.
But I won’t be.
And right now, knowing the kind of odds I’m up against…
I don’t stand a chance.
After the performance, we step out into the frigid night. Marigold, who has apparently decided to suffer with a cardigan instead of a coat, is shivering with both arms hugged tight around her middle.
“Here,” I say, shrugging off my own peacoat and draping it over her slim shoulders. “This should help.”
“Thanks,” she manages to get out, teeth chattering. “I’m such a weather genius, I know.”
The snow from yesterday hasn’t melted yet.
Instead, it’s gone gray and nasty underfoot, stained by days of car exhaust and grit and the relentless stamping of people’s shoes.
I know snowmelt will be even worse, because then you’ll inevitably step into a gross dishwater-colored puddle at the edge of a curb.
But I really need New York to move on from this winter bullshit.
Although, since it’s still just December, that’s not likely to happen anytime soon.
“Shall we go back?” I ask.
Marigold shakes her head. “I have a better idea.”
She takes me downtown, our fingers laced together the whole way, to a little pop-up bar in the East Village. A menorah glows in the window, and inside it’s covered in blue-and-white confetti, little toy dreidels hanging from the ceiling.
“Ta-da,” Marigold announces, spinning around with her hands out like Vanna White. “The only Hanukkah-themed holiday pop-up bar in New York. Do you like it?”
It smells so good in here. Like fried food and cinnamon, somehow both at the same time.
“Love it,” I say.
She grabs my hand again and tugs me deeper, the two of us weaving our way through the crowd to make it to the bar. There’s one of those obnoxious QR code menus, nothing tangible, but we both hunch over my phone to scroll through.
“I’m getting this cardamom cocktail, I think,” Marigold says. “What about you?”
“I gotta go with mezcal. You can’t beat the smoke in winter.”
We order and then retreat to one of the only available tables left, tucked away in a dark corner and lit only by a couple of little tea lights floating in a vase of water.
“Hope you don’t mind that I took the liberty of ordering us some latkes and sufganiyot,” Marigold says. “Not really Hanukkah without potato pancakes and jelly donuts.”
“I am absolutely not complaining.”
“Good.” She smiles. In the dim light, the candles’ glow dances across her features, casting shadows across her face. She looks golden and unreal, like a chiaroscuro.
When the server arrives with our drinks and food, I take a sip of my cocktail as an excuse to watch Marigold over the rim of the glass.
It’s hard to keep my eyes off her. Something about the holidays brings out a glow underneath her skin.
She looks sacred somehow, like a saint—although I’m not entirely sure Jews have saints. Doesn’t matter.
She looks holy.
Marigold tears a piece off one of the powdered sugar–dusted sufganiyot and eats it. The way she licks the sugar off her fingers after does something indecent to me, and I shift in my chair, crossing and uncrossing my legs.
“What do you think?” she asks, gesturing toward my cocktail and the latke on my plate, already half-eaten.
“I’m thinking this place should stay open year-round. Who says we can’t have festive Hanukkah vibes in July?”
She laughs, and I notice a little smear of powdered sugar on the corner of her lips. It only makes her more endearing. “I mean, yeah. You’re not wrong.” She points down at my plate again. “So? Did you decide? Team applesauce or team sour cream?”
“Team both,” I decide. “Especially at the same time. Gotta get that sweetness and the tanginess. Why divide ourselves when we can truly have it all?”
“Right answer,” Marigold says. She reaches across the table to stab her fork into my latke, finishing it off. “But you have to eat fast. They’re not very good when they’re cold.”
We spend the next hour there, finishing our drinks—then second drinks—and the whole time, I keep thinking…
I could do this forever. I could actually, literally, do this forever: our knees bumping companionably beneath the table, the sugar on Marigold’s cheek, the way she looks when she laughs.
The color of her hair in this light, like burnt gold.
The taste of applesauce on my tongue and the candles burning down to stubs.
And maybe I can, I think.
Maybe this doesn’t have to end.