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.