Here was his pristine Vuitton luggage, here were his damp European-sized swim trunks, here were the loafers he had worn without socks during the master class, lined up neatly in front of the mirror. And here she was in the mirror, an imposter, a poor girl from the cracked Los Angeles suburbs, a woman whose mother wouldn’t have understood what Fodorio did or was, if she even cared to ask. And here on the dresser was Fodorio’s wallet, textured black leather, falling open in her hands: $327 in cash, four credit cards, a New York State driver’s license in which he appeared bloated and old, and a worn two-by-three-inch photo of a small girl with dark, blunt bangs, a school portrait, the neon teal background clashing with her fuzzy green sweater. She smiled big and toothy, and had fat dimples Jana recognized from Fodorio’s face, a feature that made his smugness charming. She turned the picture over, and written on the back in cursive that seemed ancient, Gisella, 6. The writing a promise the girl’s life would be so long and full of pictures that reminders of name and age would be necessary.
When Fodorio had coached the quartet earlier in the week, he’d criticized the tidiness with which they’d played Beethoven’s “Serioso.”
“Do you know what this is? This piece?” Fodorio asked, standing in front of them on stage. A few peers and teachers were scattered in the audience, waiting for one of his infamous eviscerations.
“Yes,” Jana had said. “It’s Beethoven’s first push toward the more complicated composer he became later in life.”
“Mmmm, not quite, my dear. It’s this unconscious mess, like the tortured man he would become later in life. There’s a difference. There’s something tortured about it, and something that resists that darkness, no? Like here.” He pointed to a passage in the middle of the movement, a run of difficult sixteenths that she shared with Brit. “You’re playing these like they’re unison sixteenths, but they’re not.”
“What are they, then?” Brit asked.
“They’re agitato, a race against each other, almost angry at each other. They’re competing. Here, let me show you,” Fodorio said, putting his hand around the neck of Jana’s violin.
His fingertips touched hers then, callus to callus. Startled, she let go of her instrument. He motioned for her to get up and when she did, Fodorio sat in her chair. He perched on the very edge of it, more off the seat than on, and peered at Brit from beneath large, trembling lids. With barely a breath, he started the passage, and Brit caught the downbeat expertly. Fodorio’s notes landed a millisecond before Brit’s, and his accents were irregular, poking at Brit’s syncopations. Jana stood aside, awkwardly useless, the air emptied out of her. He was better than she was, yes, of course, but he was also better with Brit, with the group, her group.
Now he was on his stomach, naked still, lightly snoring, his arms curled uncomfortably, under him, a mere human. He looked unabashedly, embarrassingly, like a man, and when she tried to shimmy her arm out from under him, his heaviness confirmed it. Just a man, a body thick all the way through, unconscious on a bed. How disappointing, Jana thought, that someone capable of such intricate movements and sonic perfections could be just a pile of human hanging off a hotel mattress. That this collection of muscles and blood and instincts made up a father, one who likely had forgotten to call his faraway daughter.
Jana worked Fodorio’s arm out from under him, and he snapped awake with a start, his fists curled up like a cartoon version of a boxer. Jana couldn’t help laughing, but when he didn’t think it was funny, something in her warmed. She took one of his hands and unrolled his fingers, one by one. They were slender, as they should be.
She held up Gisella.
“It’s her birthday,” he said. “She’s six.”
“She’s seven,” Jana said.
“Oh,” he said, rubbing his eyes, sitting up. “Yes, seven. I meant seven. Oh, God, that makes me sound like a terrible father.”
“I just know because . . .” she said, flipping over to the backside of the picture.
“I love her,” he said, as though trying to convince Jana, and then angry that he had to convince anyone. “I don’t live with her, but I provide for her in other ways. I can’t see her that much because I have to travel to provide for her. And her mother wanted it that way—she was the one who gave me the ultimatum, she was the one who first brought up divorce. They could have traveled with me. But her mother made the decision, and what was I supposed to do?”
He went on, but Jana had stopped listening. It sounded like a speech he’d given himself in his head many times before, the slightly tinny, desperate tenor of his voice, the insistent diction, the rapid, uneven cadence, as though he was trying to get it all out before she could say anything. In any case, she didn’t care whether he lived with his daughter or not, or whether he sent money, or whether he saw her only on holidays or two weekends a month. She cared, however, that this—this girl, this seven-year-old—could inflate and deflate him so. Moments before, he was a plain man on a bed, and here he was now, distracted entirely from the top of her breast peeking out of her robe, her messy hair, the smell of her damp skin. A child could do that to a person, a daughter to a father. She didn’t know this firsthand, but here was evidence.
He continued to talk, and she tried to reach up through him to his center to flip some switch, to turn all his attention back to her, to be the object, the subject, the motif, to turn anything she wanted, to win.
To win.
He didn’t seem to think they’d win at Esterhazy, but Jana saw he also made decisions like a musician, committed in each second to the possibility that everything could change, depending on the nearly invisible but distinctly audible movements of the violist’s bow, or the edge of the cellist’s tempo. Remain agile. Stay in the place where everything could fall apart—isn’t that what he’d told them at the master class? That was where he lived, and though Jana did not (perhaps she was another breed of musician), she understood it. And could use it.
So while she was reaching up inside him in her imagination, she was also touching him on the bed, and her robe slipped off her shoulders, and her mouth swallowed his talking, and he melted easily into her, moving like a fish from one girl who would elude him to another.
But Jana pushed him down when he tried to roll her over, dug her short nails into his collarbone. “No,” she said. She straddled him and his face blossomed beneath her. She rocked down close to his ear and said, “I want to win.”
“Okay,” he said, smiling. “You win.”
“No,” she said. “I want us to win. At Esterhazy.”
He stopped smiling. His arch lifted her up. She held his gaze for as long as she could. She vacated her face, she inhabited only her primal self. She could have been anyone, she felt like anyone, but also felt most like herself. This is what she knew how to do—be the physical embodiment of a determined act of aspiration. This time she was a bundle of frenetic energy atop him, a woman held loosely in that place between triple forte and unbridled chaos. And in the final waves she let out a sob before collapsing onto him, she was small now, he was large again, their bodies were cold with sweat—just bodies that could, from time to time, do incredible things. She could have wept there into his metallic neck at the plainness of it all.