The women begin to trickle in. Tita Pat pinches my cheek and says, “Hey, how’s the piano? Still playing?”
I give a silent, respectful nod and cringe. It’s all that’s expected — respect, silence. Docility.
A lola — not my actual grandmother — touches her cheek to mine and sniffs — a little perfumed air kiss.
I pull out a metal fork and a cloth napkin, a habit I’ve picked up from Paul. We waste too much paper.
I’m about to flee when my mother speaks into my ear. “Will you play for us?”
I stiffen. She just wants to show me off. “Do I have to?”
“Don’t you want to?” The smile on her face loses a touch of happiness. “I thought you needed to practice performing.”
“Well . . .”
“Please, Claire.”
“Oookay.” I dash to the piano, play a haphazard Mozart sonata — fudging a bit and cutting a full passage — but no one notices a thing. I’m hungry. And the ballade is waiting for me. I retrieve my stranded plate and squeeze in between the aunties.
“Ang galing!” says Tita Irma when I come back. “Wow. You are getting so good.”
“It’s hard to play it right, though, on this piano. It’s so cheap.”
I sink my teeth into the crispy skin of the lumpia, tasting its sweet, peppery pork. The oil has stained the plate.
“Merong piano teacher. A new one. Paul Avon,” Mom says. More Tagalog. I hear the word “competition” in the tangle of words. Second place. More words. She says Paul’s name again, as if she is in awe.
“Walang first?” says Tita Isabelle, who has never liked me.
Mom presses her lips together and shakes her head.
“But who knows? She’ll get first someday,” says Tita Anna, who does like me. She looks to me. “Right, kiddo?”
I blush. My mother says something defensive, quietly, in Tagalog, to brush the comment away.
So competitive, my aunties. If I got into Princeton, one of them would say, why not Harvard? I look at my mom and roll my eyes and she shrugs, though I see she’s a little annoyed, too.
The conservatory is off a narrow side street from the Civic Center station, so tall its shadow darkens the sidewalk on the other side of the street. Banners flutter down its sides. There are wide stone steps that lead up to the glass doors, with kids standing around outside them, instrument cases strapped to their backs. I take a selfie in front of its facade and go to post it. No, even with a filter, I look too cold and windblown. Delete.
Inside, the wooden floors gleam golden, and a wide flight of stairs spiral up the middle of the lobby. I pause at the door, expecting someone to ask me what I’m doing here, but I flash the card that came in the mail and the security guard smiles as if he already knows me.
My mother barely twitched when I asked her if I could go back to the city the next day. She just wanted to know what time I’d be home. She’s probably still annoyed with the aunties.
I find my way to the library on the second floor. It’s not that large, but it’s packed with books, and it has the kind of silence that’s full of thoughts. I like how everyone is preoccupied with themselves in libraries. No one cares what you do. I don’t have to pretend to be anything here.
Aisles of folios, carousels of libretti. Books of music whisper. Deeper in, records and more records, shelves crammed with CDs. I’m overwhelmed. I wish I could sleep here.
I pull out the list Paul gave me. It’s long, with specific pieces, specific orchestras and performers. Specific years. I’ve already marked which ones I can listen to on the Internet, but Paul of course was right — plenty of them aren’t available online.
I start searching the catalog, retrieve a few, but one, a string quartet from the thirties, doesn’t give a code. Just says SEE THE LIBRARIAN.
I head to the front desk. “They have so many records,” she tells me, going to retrieve it, “that a lot of them are tucked into odd corners, especially the older ones.” I check it out from her and head for the listening stations.
I plop myself into a chair beside the turntable, clamping the headphones to my ears. Tash would like these. They dampen the outside world, like being underwater. Carefully I slide the first one out, the one the library had tucked away. Beethoven’s Grosse Fuge, by a group I’ve never heard of. They must be long gone. The yellowed paper sleeve is fragile and slit at the creases. The record itself looks foggy, and I’m disappointed by its cloudy face. At its center, the word COLUMBIA is emblazoned — not the logo I see on new discs, but a dignified typeface in fat, clever gold letters.
I set the needle down. The tones are clear; I’d thought since its surface was scratched, it would be hazy. But it’s all there: the urgency, the agony. My chest warms and overflows. While the record spins, I take a little video of it and post it on my Instagram.
A boy looks at the album cover in my lap and smiles at me as he swings past my knees to sit down at a record player nearby.
I smile back before I even realize I’m doing it. Then I stop when I remember where I am. It seems against the rules to look at other people in libraries.
The quartet rises and falls. Maybe Paul wanted me to hear this because he wanted me to play like this, tragic and dark and charming.
The boy looks about my age. Maybe. Definitely cuter than anyone at home. A lankier young version of the pianist Glenn Gould — dark tousled hair, a brooding face. He reminds me of how Tash and I used to cross the Dumbarton with her mother to go shopping for books. She thought it a wholesome, academic thing, but really, we would go to look at the boys in Palo Alto and marvel at the difference in gene pools between Fremont and Palo Alto, where generations of trophy wives have created modelesque boys with curly hair and soccer calves and golden skin. Not a stained tooth in sight. We’d drink cappuccinos and pretend we belonged.
I probably seem too obvious. I try not to look at him again.
Strings weep. The room falls away. Bursts of joy are forged from the weave of instruments. Then it’s done. A sense of mourning pricks my skin. I take off my headphones and slide the record back into its sleeve with a soft zip. It’s only been thirty minutes, but I feel as if I’ve aged.
I’m shaking another record out of its sleeve when I hear a clear voice behind me. “It’s helpful to look at the sheet music when you listen.” It’s Julia, scanning the record cover over my shoulder. She keeps smiling at me out of her upturned eyes, like I’m okay and a perfectly normal specimen of a human being, but I’m too surprised that she’s even speaking to me to come up with anything to say. She waves at the boy, who waves back. He smiles at me. Another surprise.
“Does it?”
“Well, it helps me, anyway.”
It takes me a moment to absorb this. “Then you can see how they’re interpreting the music, I guess.”
“Yeah. And sometimes they make mistakes.”
“Really?”
“A lot of the older recordings have them.”
I wonder if she’d practiced extra for the competition, then decide not to ask. I’m afraid of knowing. I start to flush. She looks at me so steadily, I start to wonder if I look like I don’t know anything. “Congrats on winning,” I say, my jealousy a slight ache that can’t be ignored. But I want to mean it. There’s no point in not acknowledging I’m not as good as she is, is there?