“Fodorio,” Henry corrected him.
“Since when do you remember names?” Brit asked Henry, as Jana stuck out her hand to shake the famous violinist’s famous hand.
“The Van Ness,” he said in his thick accent. Where was it from? Somewhere in the Mediterranean? Jana had forgotten. He shoved past her outstretched arm and embraced her. Jana inhaled his scent: musk, tobacco, women. She smiled a gummy smile.
“I see our coaching session got you all far,” Fodorio said, moving on to Henry, whose hand he took in both his hands.
“We were doing all right before that, though,” Daniel said.
“He’s joking,” Jana said, shooting Daniel a desperate look. If he could not be an asshole now, that would be excellent timing.
“Am I?” Fodorio said, winking. Winking! He was now embracing a reluctant Brit, whose long blond hair fell around her shoulders like noodles. Angel-hair pasta when it spilled out of the box onto your kitchen floor. It annoyed Jana that she never put it up for performance. It was all anyone looked at on stage. It lent her a quality of accidental beauty, beautiful gold hair that just grew and grew as though she couldn’t help it.
It was true, their recital had gone well. But Jana had fully expected it to go well. Everyone had been prepared, infused with the right amounts of fear and confidence. But this recital hadn’t been the true test. While it was their graduation performance, and while all their teachers sat in the audience, grading them, and while a select number of talent agents and representatives from RCA and Deutsche Grammophon had also come to listen, it had really been a warm-up for the real deal: the Esterhazy quartet competition in the Canadian Rockies just one week away. If they won or placed there, it would be the beginning of the lifelong career Jana acutely wanted for herself, and for the ensemble.
They couldn’t afford to screw up, and Jana never let that knowledge fade.
Fodorio—the famous violinist, the prick, the winker, the soloist on tour—also happened to be one of the judges for the Esterhazy competition this year, a fact Jana had tacitly but firmly noted early on in his weeklong residency at the conservatory.
She slid her arm around his elbow. “Would you get me a champagne?” she asked.
Fodorio smiled. “Surely.”
“Oh, me too,” Henry said.
Jana frowned. “You’re not even old enough to drink, Henry.”
“Also, get it yourself,” Daniel said, peeling off to the makeshift bar. Brit followed seconds behind him, as though tethered.
Fodorio fetched two champagnes and leaned against a tall table with Jana. Henry had disappeared. Fodorio commented on Henry’s absence, then asked Jana, “Where is your family, dear?”
“Oh.” Jana shook her head, not wanting to explain. “In Los Angeles.”
Had the absence been that gaping? Jana wondered. Was it obvious, the space in the audience where Jana’s family was not? Then she remembered that neither Daniel’s family (too poor to travel, “not plane people,” Daniel had said) nor Brit’s family (dead, as they were) had shown up, and this brought her a private comfort.
“Your own concert went spectacularly,” she said, leaning closer. She’d gone to his performance with the San Francisco Symphony two nights before, though she usually didn’t like going to any concerts when one of her own was so near. It muddled things, took up aural space. Attending Fodorio’s had been a tactical decision. And she was only lying a bit now—she never used the word spectacular—but as she said, it had gone well. Fodorio was the kind of violinist who mistook his fame for rock stardom, and who played something like the Mendelssohn concerto as though he were Bon Jovi in tails. Jana didn’t know where Fodorio got off. Peering at him from her seat in the middle of the mezzanine, she had not wanted to like the performance, but in the end, in the final movement, with his aggressive flourishes and demanding tempo, she had succumbed to his allure. Fodorio had his thing and he wore it well, a persona that radiated through the tender wood of his bow down to the strings and out the soundpost into the concert hall. A little calculated, Jana thought, but so expertly performed (and rabidly consumed), it was seductive.
“Thank you,” he said. “I wasn’t aware you were in the audience. You should have come backstage to see me. We could have had quite a . . . time.”
Her champagne flute was empty. He was a magnet, two-sided, attractive and repulsive. Black curly hair strewn across his head in a way that seemed haphazard but was surely and entirely thought through. Cuff links, a salmon-pink dress shirt, a gray suit. He wasn’t contractually required to come to their recital. He’d fulfilled his duty with the one coaching session—it’s a love story—earlier in the week. Why was he here?
He reached a hand across the cocktail table to peel her fingers from her empty glass. His hand was strong and veined and covered with wiry dark hairs. Something about the brute strength of his grip won Jana over, an instantaneous reversal. What a player, with that hand.
“Really, though,” Fodorio said. “You’re excellent.”
“I know,” she said. “But not the way Henry is,” she said, almost automatically. She always felt a need to acknowledge Henry’s talent to anyone who complimented her, as if to say, I know what you might be comparing me to. I know my status.
“Well, no,” Fodorio said, and his admission burned her a bit. She wanted more alcohol, something stronger than champagne. “But you’ll have a great chamber career ahead of you. You could be much better, though.”
Jana took her hands away from the table.
“No, no,” he said. “I mean to say you will be better. With age.”
Jana excused herself to get another drink, hoping there was liquor. What did he know? Well, a lot, she conceded. Enough to be selected as a judge at the most prestigious classical music competition in the world. Keep that in mind, she thought, carrying two gin and tonics back to the table where he waited. Her torso grew hot from bottom to top, seeing him. She would also keep that heat in mind.
There was a flurry of other conversations: the director of the conservatory congratulating her, questions about her plans for the summer (play and practice, what else?) and the future (Esterhazy, what else?), the group (Henry getting louder as he drank more; Daniel and Brit in heated, intimate conversation in various corners)—but Jana kept Fodorio in her sights all night, and she could tell that he kept her in his, too. Toward the end of the night, some embarrassing number of cocktails in—it was a celebration, after all—she escaped outside to smoke.
She walked a block away from the conservatory, up the hill. She pulled a cigarette from her purse and lit it, making sure no one was around to see her. She didn’t know exactly why she hid her occasional smoking from everyone, but she did, and it felt good to have a secret from Brit and Daniel and Henry. Her mother had smoked, and the smell of it, of Pall Malls especially, calmed her when boredom led to an anxious jitter.