Sitting on a bench, Jana swung her legs around and turned back in the direction she’d come from, so the conservatory came into view, unassuming in its darkness. When Jana was a young girl, her mother—called Catherine, even by Jana—had often promised to take her to the symphony. She never did. LA Phil tickets were expensive, and Catherine said classical music was boring, anyway. Once, in high school, Jana took herself on a student rush price, lying to her mother about where she’d been. Jana told her she’d gone to a movie with friends, some blockbuster with Catherine’s favorite actress. That was something Catherine could understand. Catherine sometimes worked and sometimes didn’t. Jana could recall her waitressing and working at the jewelry counter at Mervyn’s (and also being fired from Mervyn’s), but more clearly she recalled the days she came home from school to find her mother still in her silk robe, smoking long, thin cigarettes on the back patio and practicing lines for a commercial audition she wouldn’t get. Once, Catherine got a bit part playing a cashier on a soap opera, and she had recorded the clip. The VHS tape, marked “Reel 1” in her mother’s thick cursive, sat in the center of the coffee table like a flower arrangement until it became sun-bleached and was no longer playable.
When Jana crushed the cigarette under her shoe and stood, a perfect shiver ran down her spine, and she wished she’d brought a coat. She picked up the butt and walked it to a trash can on the sidewalk.
“I see you.”
Jana turned toward the voice. Fodorio leaned against a building, smoking his own cigarette. “But I won’t tell,” he said.
“I don’t smoke,” she said.
“I said I won’t tell.”
“You have the accent of a rich person,” she said. “A person who went to boarding school.”
“And now I’ve been found out,” he said.
“See,” Jana said. “I see you, too.” She leaned on the wall next to him. The May chill raised goose bumps on her bare arms, and he draped his jacket around her.
“I hear your group will be competing at Esterhazy this year,” Fodorio said.
“The rumors are true,” she said.
Was this against the rules, an entrant in the Esterhazy fraternizing with a judge? Surely not. There were seven judges and three performance rounds, and besides, who could keep one drunk professional musician from smoking with another, even if one was drunker and not exactly a professional yet?
“I want tacos,” he said.
“I know a place,” she said. “But we’d have to walk.”
They sneaked into the greenroom to grab her violin. Before she placed it in the case, he took the violin from her, their fingertips touching on the scroll, and examined it. “Nice axe,” he said, adding, “for a poor girl.”
As she covered her violin with the burgundy velvet protector and zipped up her case, his hand on her back was both a warning and a prediction. He did see her.
As they walked, Fodorio kept his arm around her waist, and she relaxed into it. It felt good to have a man touch her, though she would never admit that to anyone. He was such a man, though, older and larger and more forward than men in school with her at the conservatory, and for a moment an image of Catherine flashed through Jana’s mind—her mother, poured into a sample-size designer cocktail dress, opening the door to her date, a large man who smelled funny and whose forehead shone like plastic under the porch light. Jana remembered sitting on the carpet, looking at the man in the open doorway, and her mother’s own bare feet on the carpet, nervously squeezing the fibers between her toes. Catherine had let the man in.
Jana and Fodorio stumbled toward a taco truck Jana knew of, one permanently parked in a gas station parking lot, and they sat on the yellow curb and ate.
“Do you really think we’re good?” she asked, adopting a false, girlish uncertainty that was unlike her. Jana thought the fastest and surest way to success was confidence. It had gotten her this far. That, and not wasting time with distractions like men or friends.
“I think you’re young,” he said.
“We’re not young. Henry’s young. I’m twenty-four.”
“Well, your sound is young,” he said between bites. “Which is good and bad. It means there’s potential. But there’s not really room for danger.”
“We need more danger?” Jana laughed, her mouth full of taco. “Please.”
“Well, it’s true. A little too perfect, if you ask me. You did ask me.”
“We have to win,” she said. It was the first time she’d said that out loud, admitted it to herself, to anyone. “We have to.”
“What would you do if you didn’t win? What would you do if the quartet didn’t work out?”
She sighed. The tacos were gone. There were only two more cigarettes in her pack, and she gave him one. “I don’t know,” she said. “Teach? Record a bit? Orchestra? Try to play solos when I can?” Saying it depressed her, took some of the wind out of her.
“You could have a decent solo career,” he said.
“So I hear,” she said.
“But you don’t want to.”
“Not if there’s something better,” she said.
“Is there?” Fodorio dangled the cigarette out of his mouth and spread his arms wide. “All this. Nothing better than all this. I’m smoking and eating tacos with a pretty violinist who happens to be fucking talented, she wants to tell me how to get back to the hotel, maybe come up, order room service because the symphony is paying for it. I’m going to fly to Sydney tomorrow, where it’ll be yesterday, or today, or something like that. Now, what’s better than that?”
“Are you staying at the Omni?” Jana asked. “That’s right near here. You won’t get lost.”
“But I need you to show me the way,” Fodorio said, blowing smoke into her smoke, his hand back on her knee.
She looked at the ground between her feet. Where was Catherine tonight? Why was Catherine on her mind? It was the dark conservatory, how the pretty but closed façade had reminded her of Catherine’s face. Catherine, somewhere in Los Angeles, likely also drunk. It had been almost two years since Jana had spoken to her mother (a lazy abstention, no grudge in particular), but she felt sure she would know in some metaphysical way if Catherine were dead.
“All right,” Jana said, standing.
Fodorio had a two-room suite with fuzzy bathrobes and a Jacuzzi tub up against a clear glass pane that looked out over the bedroom. He made love like he only called it “making love,” when really, what she wanted was whatever the opposite of making love was—to fuck. His hair nearly vibrated off his head, his hands were coarse and perpetually moving. His lovely, expensive violin sat in its case, visible over his shoulder. She wanted it. She knew he knew she wanted it, wanted his sort of success. It wasn’t that she was particularly pretty (tall for a woman, unobtrusively thin and flat, an angular, slightly forgettable face) or that he was particularly attractive (too hairy, some might say, shorter than he acted). They’d chosen each other for the reason most people chose each other: to get closer to some quality they didn’t naturally possess. For Jana it was his accomplishment. For him, well, she supposed it was her hunger for his accomplishment. And here she was restless and tired and anxious and bored. While he roused himself on top of her, she thought: What was the thing the quartet was missing? How could they get it? How would she know when it was time to give up? Eventually Fodorio fell into a champagne nap, and Jana wrapped herself in a plush bathrobe and made herself a tourist of his hotel room, ambling and touching all his smooth things.