And what would failure look like? A lack of: invitations to play, offers for management, post-conservatory residencies. An abundance of: years wasted, degrees earned, rehearsal hours clocked. Settling for: teaching private students who would, at best, be good in an extracurricular way (good for a future doctor), or clawing to a job leading a bad band at a junior high school, or (if she was a lucky failure) toiling away in the back of a violin section at a middling regional orchestra. In any scenario, there would be the slow shrug of dissolving a quartet whose union depended on other people wanting to be united.
Jana hadn’t invited her mother to the recital or Esterhazy. She wouldn’t have known where to send the invitation. Not really. The last time she’d seen her mother had been at a trailer park near Torrance, a nice one, with trees and children, but a trailer park still. Her mother had been drunk, thin, pretty in a sun-worn kind of way. A man was holding her up—Ray or something was his name. Catherine didn’t do anything in particular that day, nothing unusually awful. They went to lunch, Ray stared at Jana’s small breasts, Catherine drank four margaritas, and then they went back to the trailer to watch some television crime drama her mother liked. Catherine fell asleep during the show, and Ray said nothing until Jana stood up to leave. She thought her mother probably did not remember it very well.
It was easier not to contact her. She had Jana’s number anyway, or could find her easily enough. But it was too taxing, those visits, pinging between her guilt for being a bad daughter and her hunger for a mother Catherine could never be.
Was that pain? Jana didn’t know. It simply felt like the absence of something.
Here was Catherine’s number, scrawled in the corner of an address book, under several other phone numbers that had been scratched out, numbers to her apartments over the years, those of men she’d lived with. Jana held the book in her hand, plastic-bound with yellowing pages.
If she called now, there would be no way Catherine could make it from Los Angeles, but Jana would at least have told her. Would not have to feel guilt about that.
She dialed the number the way she’d finished the food, robotically, without knowing where the muscle movement was originating from.
A man answered, of course.
“Ray?” Jana said.
“Who?”
“Who is this?”
“Who is this?”
“This is Jana. Is this Ray?”
“This is Carl. Are you calling for Ray?”
“For Catherine. Is she home?”
Jana heard a hand muffle the speaker, but he still yelled loud enough for Jana to pull the phone from her ear. “Katie! Janet’s on the phone for you!”
Jana held her breath until her mother’s voice came on the phone, a whole half-octave higher than she normally spoke.
“Janet?”
“It’s Jana.”
“Jana! Carl, it’s Jana, not Janet. Oh, honey, so glad you called. I couldn’t find your number, and Carl said he was going to look you up, but I didn’t know if you lived in San Francisco or some other town, and maybe you aren’t even listed, so we couldn’t find you.”
“That’s okay. Hey, I’m just calling to say I’m competing in a big thing this week.” Jana heard her own voice quaver. She closed her eyes. This was a bad idea.
“That’s great, honey. Can I read about it? Will it be televised? Or on the radio?”
Her mother didn’t understand how any of it worked. It was some kind of miracle that Jana had ended up a classical violinist: a chance meeting with Dmitri at the LA Phil on a school trip, hundreds of hours wearing a stupid paper hat at In-N-Out Burger to pay for the violin, and a nearly crazed desire to enmesh herself in something foreign to her mother.
“No. It’s not that big a deal,” Jana said.
“If it’s no big deal, then why’d you call me? Sure it’s a big deal. Did I tell you that I got a callback for this PacBell commercial? My agent thinks I’ll get it.”
Jana resisted the urge to say, No, when would you have told me that, we haven’t spoken in two years. Instead, she said, “That’s great. Who’s Carl?”
“Carl lives with me now.”
“What happened to Ray?”
“Ray?” Catherine laughed. “Oh, baby girl, that was ages ago. I can’t believe you remember that.”
Tears sprang meanly to Jana’s eyes. She wasn’t surprised at any of it, and her lack of surprise was what saddened her. She blinked.
“I’ll send you a program. I have to go, Catherine.”
“Yes, send me a program. I’ll send you a copy of the commercial. If I get it.”
“You’ll get it,” Jana said.
“Thanks. You too, honey.”
She hung up without saying goodbye, and continued to stand at her sink, looking out the window for she didn’t know how long. What did Catherine think Jana was going to get? She made a promise not to reach out to her again, and felt glad in her stubbornness.
She could have said, I fucked a famous violinist so we’d win a major competition, and her mother would have understood. With that thought, it wasn’t shame or sadness that overcame Jana but anger that she had let herself be like her mother for a moment—let herself believe, foolishly, in the invisible, in the dreamy possibility of magic instead of the actual pursuit of greatness.
At some point, the sunlight in the square of window began to dip, and that was how Jana knew it was time to dress, pack, and rush to catch her—their—flight to Esterhazy.
BRIT
Violin II
After they ended their last rehearsal before leaving for Canada, Daniel walked off the cold stage without saying goodbye. Brit turned just in time to see his cello case on his back bouncing behind him as he disappeared into the unlighted hall. Henry, always aware of the subtle changes in other people’s emotions and totally unable to talk explicitly about them, walked over to her and made a joke, something about the difference between Irish fiddlers and violists. Brit didn’t exactly hear it, and laughed only to make him feel like he had indeed made her feel better. Being that attuned to each other’s inner emotional lives was the sometimes unfortunate side effect of playing music together.
Brit blamed her parents. They’d been amateur musicians themselves, her mother a cellist and her father a trumpeter. They had other jobs, careers, even, but they always made time to play in the shitty community orchestra where Brit grew up in Washington. They hadn’t been great players, but they were decent, and what’s more, they loved it. When it became clear early on that Brit would be a good violinist at the very least, they encouraged her to pursue it, set her up with too-expensive lessons, shuttled her from orchestra rehearsal to orchestra rehearsal. After they both died, Brit thought maybe she’d quit. It wasn’t too late to use her B.A. in English (she’d double-majored in music). She knew someone from college in New York hiring consultants—he wore heavy, fancy overcoats and said she’d be a “valuable advocate for the brand.” But at her mother’s funeral, a small affair with no one left to plan it but Brit, her mother’s friends hugged her too tightly and said how proud her mother had been of her musical career. Brit couldn’t tell them the truth, that without her parents pushing her along, she didn’t know how far she’d make it.