Chapter 2 Jamie
Jamie
“You should have seen the way Marigold looked at me when I told her I’d be playing in Stockholm,” I tell Shrishti right before she lands her famous left hook and sends me staggering back two paces. “Jesus. Want to calm down a bit? It’s just pad rounds.”
Shrishti swipes a sweaty black curl out of her face with her wrist and gives me a ragged grin. “Maybe you just need to pay better attention. Pretend the pad is Goldie’s face.”
“That seems unnecessarily violent.”
“Hello? What are we doing right now?”
I shift the pads to a lower position to catch her kicks as she moves into the next set.
Shrishti is a powerhouse; I’m not a small guy, but I still have to brace pretty hard for her round kick.
“Okay, sure, but I don’t want to think about what that says about me if I’m fantasizing about punching a girl in the face. ”
Shrishti hits me with a particularly hard one. “Listen. It happens to all of us. That one was for my boss, and he doesn’t deserve it nearly as much as Goldie Gensler.”
I’m not convinced that Marigold being infuriatingly rich counts as deserving it, but Shrishti’s clearly on a roll.
“You’re gonna destroy her,” Shrishti says, breathless at the end of her fifty-kick drill. “You’re way better than she is. She knows it, you know it, and most importantly, the competition jury’s gonna know it.”
I wish I had her confidence. “Easy for you to say. You dropped out of Parker last year. You have no idea how good she’s gotten.”
Shrishti shrugs and reties her hair with the pink scrunchie she always keeps around her wrist. “Yeah, maybe. But I know how good you are. I get to hear you play every Saturday.”
That isn’t the problem, but I’m not sure Shrishti would understand even if I explained it.
In any reasonable world, I would blow Marigold out of the water.
Note per note, I am a thousand times better than she is.
One time Celia, my one-on-one instructor, ran my recording through some kind of software and I got a 99% accuracy score—that’s a matter of taking a rest just a millisecond too long.
But Celia only ran that test to prove a point. I might be perfect, but I wasn’t great.
When Marigold plays, though, it feels like the universe itself stops to listen. You can’t focus on anything but her music. It burrows inside you and lives there, like her fingers are playing on your heartstrings every time she hits a note.
Celia checked one of her recordings, too. 94% accurate. Good—really good—professional-good—but it wasn’t 99%. And yet she is still better than me.
At the time, Celia compared her to Vladimir Horowitz, who was famous for the mistakes he made as he played.
Horowitz saw the mistakes as necessary sacrifices in exchange for his famously brilliant and overpowering performances.
No one cared about a missed note when Horowitz had them crying in their seats.
I am perfect. Vladimir Horowitz—and Marigold Gensler—are not perfect. And that is what makes them the best.
My body feels like it just went through a wood chipper by the time class ends.
I ball my sweaty clothes up in the bottom of my duffel and shower off, scrubbing both hands through my hair in an attempt to look a little bit less like a wet dog.
At least it’s still warm out, so the slog back to my dorm on campus won’t be as brutal as it will be in a few weeks once it’s properly winter.
My roommate always gives me some kind of look when I get back from Muay Thai, like he thinks I ought to be doing better things with my time.
But if I can’t afford my own apartment, at least I can have a social life outside of Parker—which is more than I can say for most of my classmates.
Tonight, Ken has his headphones on, busy fiddling with a new composition in Sibelius; I barely get a cursory look of disapproval before he’s back to messing around with crescendo placement.
I dump my bag on the floor and pull up on my tablet a recording of Bruce Liu—the 2021 Chopin competition winner—playing Concerto No.
1 in E Minor, Op. 11. But even Liu’s mastery, his hands tumbling over the keys like water over rock, can’t hold my focus tonight.
I know why. The Google Calendar alert is still open on my tablet; I haven’t been able to swipe it away.
Even though, Jesus Christ, I have a Google Calendar alert for the anniversary of my brother’s death.
I know how many hours it is until tomorrow, 1:43 p.m., the two-year anniversary of when Adam was declared dead on arrival at the local hospital.
Fifteen minutes after our mother found him, although he’d been dead a long time before that.
I pause the Bruce Liu video and grab my tablet and keys, mutter some useless excuse to Ken as I head out of the room.
I find an empty practice room in the basement and lock the door, just in case. FaceTime only rings twice before my mom picks up.
“Hi, honey,” she says. Her voice is already a little shaky, although she’s trying to hide it. She thinks I don’t know how early she starts drinking, in advance of tomorrow. She thinks being half a country away makes me oblivious.
But if I didn’t know my mother before, I know her now. I’ll never miss the signs again.
“Hey, Mom. How are you hanging in there?”
A quavering smile passes over her lips. “Oh, you know. It hasn’t been a great week. But I’m happy to see your face. You look good.”
I’m not sure what the hell she’s seeing, because when I look at myself in the selfie window, I don’t see anything approaching good. My eyes look ravaged, crazy, like I haven’t slept in days—which I essentially haven’t.
“Thanks.” The house behind her is dark, the only light coming from the yellow glow of the lamp next to the downstairs sofa where she sits.
I hate to think of her alone in that big house—Adam gone, my father off with his new wife in Iowa City, me here at school.
Even from the other side of the screen, I feel like those shadows run too deep. Like there’s something moving in them.
“Are you doing anything tomorrow?” I ask, after the silence stretches on too long.
“The same as usual,” she says. “I’ll visit the grave. Go for my walk. And then I was thinking…I was thinking I might drive up to Dubuque to see your grandparents.”
“Dubuque? That’s really far. That’s three hours each way.”
“Well, what else am I going to do? I can’t sit around all day staring at my hands. I’ll go crazy.”
We never used to be this open with each other. Once upon a time, my mother was a fortress. She kept the house running seamlessly, never showing a crack of her own. Adam and I took it for granted. We assumed all grown-ups were like that: invincible.
She’s human now, and I still can’t decide if that’s a good thing.
Mom never got along that great with her own parents. I mean, they were fine. She never said anything to me about it—never gave the slightest hint that her feelings for them were anything but straightforward. But we only see them on holidays, and there’s got to be a reason for that.
“Do you want me to come home?”
I know the answer before I ask. I say this every damn year, and the response is always the same.
“No. No—it’s okay. You have to stay at school. You have to work hard.”
I can’t tell her the truth, because it would break her heart.
Whatever love I once had for piano, it’s gone now. It vanished to wherever Adam went, into the cold and dark.
One way or another, I have to get that back.
But it’s going to be an uphill battle. I’m not like Marigold with her rich parents, her father the principal violin in the New York Philharmonic, all that money funneling into private tutors and a place at the Juilliard Pre-College program before she even turned eighteen.
I had to work for what I have. Grinding day after day with the professors at Iowa State, paying for my trips to competitions with cash I made working tables.
I came to Parker and it was like everyone already had years of international competitions and famous teachers and awards under their belts.
When I applied for instructors, Celia was the only one who was interested.
My background just wasn’t shiny enough for anyone else, I guess.
Ever since, I feel like I’ve had to claw and beg for every accolade I’ve got.
And then there’s my mother. She spent half her alimony on my piano lessons, not to mention Adam’s unused college money.
She thinks I don’t know, but I saw the paperwork one day when I was looking through the filing cabinet for my social security card so that I could submit proof of citizenship to yet another national competition.
I can’t let that go to waste.
I’ll find my inspiration again.
I have to.
There are a few things that I know to be true.
One: Shostakovich is the best composer of all time. Mozart could only dream.
Two, scotcheroos are vastly superior to Rice Krispies Treats.
Three…I’m not, and have never claimed to be, a good person.
It’s the kind of statement that made my therapist back in Iowa sigh and insist that I’m young, I’m grieving, I need to practice self-compassion, etc. But this predates Adam’s death.
I’ve always been selfish. I never shared my markers in school.
I would go downstairs in the middle of the night on Christmas Eve to hunt through my and Adam’s stockings and make sure that if we were each getting a ChapStick, I got the cherry-flavored one.
I pretended I had piano lessons so that I didn’t have to go to a classmate’s funeral—the idea of being around so many black-draped mourners made me feel like a rat trapped in a glass box, frantically biting and scratching at itself in its desperation to escape.
So yeah, I’m a jerk to Marigold, probably because—as Shrishti says—I’m jealous.
I was a jerk to Adam while he was alive, too, and now he’s not alive anymore, and I’m left alone clinging to the same ambition that made me hold him at arm’s length, always too focused, too busy, and too driven to pick up the phone when he called or fly back for his birthday.
Always sitting at the fucking piano with my fingers on the keys and my nose in the score, fiercely denying that anybody or anything outside my own obsession mattered or existed at all.
While I was in New York winning prizes and lighting up the room with my talent, my little brother was sinking deeper and deeper into a pit so dark, he’d never emerge from it alive.
If I’d known—if some time traveler had come back and told me the truth before it happened—would I have stopped? Would I have even cared?
I know myself. I know the truth. My brother’s life had been one more obstacle, one more uncomfortable experience I had to shove aside as I chased my own euphoria.
Now he’s gone.
Now he’s gone, forever and for good, and all I have left is this fucking instrument that I thought was more important than my own family.
I got what I deserved.
So I guess I better make sure it was fucking worth it.