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.