Virtuosity (5 page)

I examined the puddles of melted snow on the toes of my boots so I wouldn’t have to watch. Not that they would have noticed. They were my age, but somehow … not. School. It had to be school that made them so different. Or not going to school that made me so different. Not that I was a weirdo or anything.

I gave them one last glance. It wasn’t just school. My life bore no resemblance to theirs. They weren’t worried about anything bigger than algebra tests. I lifted my toes and the puddles spilled off my shoes onto the rubber mats.

The packet. It called. I unzipped the music flap on my case, and fished around for it. Held together by a single staple, the pages were starting to come loose and
the corners curled. I’d read it at least twenty times. The papers’ edges were starting to split. I flipped to the list of semifinalists and read through the names again.

The twenty names could be categorized a million different ways. Thirteen men and seven women. Nine Americans, six Europeans, four Asians, and a lone Australian. Five teenagers and fifteen twenty-somethings. Eighteen hopefuls, two real contenders.

I turned to the schedule. Each of us had been randomly plugged into a time slot over the two days of semifinals. I had Tuesday two-thirty. Jeremy had Wednesday five o’clock.

When the packet first arrived and I told Yuri about my early slot, he had shrugged and muttered something angry in Ukrainian. And then, in English, “Tuesday sucks.”

Typical pep talk.

Yuri Petrov was many things—genius, tyrant, mentor, reality TV addict—but he was not a cheerleader.

Physically, Yuri resembled a troll. Wiry gray hair sprouted from everywhere except the top of his mole-covered head, bruise-colored bags hung below his eyes, and he had a pronounced hunchback. Actually, pronounced was an understatement. His back rose higher than his head, making him look like a human question mark.

When I was fourteen he made me drive him across the city in search of his favorite pipe tobacco (Smoker
Friendly Vanilla Cavendish instead of “the crap brand sold at corner store”). He didn’t care that I didn’t have a license. He didn’t care that I didn’t know how to drive, either. I gave in when he threatened to get behind the wheel. He’d just had double cataract surgery.

And then there was the time last year when he’d made me drink vodka until I was drunk, just so I could really understand Shostakovich, and all Russian composers for that matter, as well as the importance of saving celebratory drinking until after performances. I vaguely remembered him saying, “Friends don’t let friends drink and get onstage.” Then I watched
Dancing with the Stars
sideways, my head on his couch. He drove me home that night and handed me over to Diana with a shrug for an explanation. Diana didn’t bat an eye. With talent came eccentricity and she made allowances for it. She’d put me to bed, placed a glass of water and a bottle of aspirin on my nightstand, and told Clark I had the stomach flu.

The train lurched and slowed. The couple across from me stood, and I noticed the rings on the girl’s hand as she gripped the pole in front of me. She had two, plus a thumb ring. They looked cool: silver with funky oversize gemstones in different colors. I didn’t wear rings—taking them all off and putting them all back on again several times a day to practice seemed like too much hassle—but if I did, I’d get ones like that.

The doors opened and she let herself be steered off the train by her boyfriend, his hands on either side of her waist. There was something about her strut. She looked so sure of herself, even being guided through the crowd by her hip bones.

Yuri’s was the next stop. I took a deep breath. Mental preparation was everything.

Yuri could be terrifying, but only if I let him, and I didn’t do that anymore. I used to cry when he yelled. Shock, shame, anger—I cried from a combination of all three before I realized that crying just made it worse. I was too young to know better then.

The memory of being so easily hurt was humiliating. Being little and fragile and unable to keep the tears from spilling over my cheeks and dripping onto the wood, having to stop and wipe them up with my sleeve, wipe my runny nose too, and then put my violin back up and keep on playing….

Now, it was all a matter of control. I could tune out the insults, the way the fleshy pockets under his eyes turned purplish-red, how his gnarled hands clenched and shook. All that was unimportant. But what he was actually saying about the music—
that
was golden. He always knew exactly what needed to be done.

The train squealed as it slowed. I leaned into it, and the competition schedule slid off my lap and onto the
wet floor. A dark water spot bloomed over it and the names bled and blurred. Jeremy’s. Even mine.

Yuri’s apartment was the last door on the left at the end of a faded green hallway. The parade of food smells from the elevator to his door took me from China to India to Mexico, with steadily growing Ukrainian undertones. Garlic and cabbage trumped the most pungent odors any other cuisine could offer. For Yuri, it was a source of national pride.

I stopped in front of his door and kicked it twice.

Once, years ago, he had pulled the door open and caught me with my knuckles poised, ready to knock. “Never!” he had cried, and grabbed my fist with a purple-veined hand. “You are violinist! Use feet!” and he had demonstrated by kicking the already open door and putting a nickel-size hole in the wall behind it.

The muffled sounds of TV continued. He had to have heard me. I waited a moment and then kicked again. Nothing. Was that a woman crying? What was he watching? Finally, the noise stopped, and the “swish-swish” of his slippers approached from the other side, followed by the clicking of the lock.

The door swung open and he called, “Lock it,” over his shoulder, already shuffling back to his recliner and a half-eaten plate of cheese pierogies.

“Rose ceremony,” Yuri said, already back in the
recliner, but leaning forward and staring intently at the screen, where a man in a tuxedo was frozen midblink. He unpaused the DVR. The camera cut to a blonde with rubbery looking breasts and mascara dripping down her face. Yuri didn’t comment, but nodded his head, as if to confirm that justice was being served.

I crossed the length of the apartment, past the La-Z-Boy and greasy kitchenette and dirty dishes, to the closed door of his music studio. That door separated worlds. Behind it, the air was always cooler. Dinginess surrendered to old-world elegance, clutter to simplicity. I closed the door behind me and looked around. Everything was in its place. The ebony music stand held the center of the room, its ornate back crisscrossed with stretching arms that looked like branches. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves of dark wood lined all four walls, packed with thousands of scores, millions of notes. Once when I was younger, inspired by a couple of multiplication problems Heidi had thrown at me, I had tried to calculate just how many notes filled the shelves. I started with the average number of notes per line, then line per page, the page per shelf, which is where things got too confusing. And then I started to wonder how many notes had been played in here, or even just how many
I
had played in here. Impossible.

I took out my violin, tuned, played a few scales in case he was listening, and then played the opening of the
Devil’s Trill
Sonata by Tartini, my back to the closed door. It was the first piece of my semifinal program, the first thing the judges would hear me play. It sounded solid and crisp, each note biting the string just enough at its beginning, then becoming brilliant and sunny with the right speed and width of vibrato. The details were crucial, but they could strangle the music too.

“No Tartini today.”

I jumped, nearly dropping my bow.

He shuffled around me and groaned as he lowered himself into the velvet armchair. His arthritic fingers picked an amber pipe by the stem from the rack on his desk. He rubbed the glossy bowl of the pipe in his left palm. “Why so jumpy? Are you stealing things again?” He opened the ornate box beside his pipe rack and rummaged around for his tobacco cube.

Once when I was thirteen he’d caught me trying to borrow his cake of rosin. I’d left mine at home and didn’t have enough on my bow. Four years later, I was still not to be trusted.

“Not jumpy. Just focused.”

He cleared his throat, unsatisfied, and began to work the tobacco into the pipe with his gnarled thumb. “No Tartini today,” he repeated. “Waste of time. You will make the finals. Tartini and Mozart are both good enough. It will all come down to finals.”

Jeremy’s face appeared again, the sneer, the arrogant stride.

Yuri lit the pipe and sucked on the stem, his wrinkled cheeks pulling tight around the wide Slavic bones in his face. “Play Tchaikovsky,” he said, smoke blooming from his mouth as he spoke.

I closed my eyes and tried to hear the opening phrase. I couldn’t. All at once, exhaustion sank into me. Had I slept at all last night? I couldn’t remember. I did remember exchanging hate emails with Jeremy King, playing my violin, a bizarre secret phone call to Diana—or maybe I’d dreamt all of that.

Yuri glared.

The Tchaikovsky was twenty-nine minutes long and the number of potential mistakes was probably up somewhere in the millions. I used to love it. When had that changed?

“So play it.”

Yuri tossed the music onto his desk and it fluttered open to a page in the middle of the first movement. Staffs, stems, ledger lines, they looked like fractured railroad tracks, splattered with thousands of tiny black notes disfigured with flats and sharps. And then there were Yuri’s markings. He used a blunt-tipped sketching pencil that made heavy metallic lines, and graphite smudges. The words, in all caps with occasional expletives, cluttered every empty space.

Something in my stomach tilted and rolled. Three pills was officially no longer enough.

“Can I use the bathroom, please?”

He rolled his eyes.

I put my violin down, grabbed my purse, and hurried off to the bathroom. Thankfully I’d brought them. I fished the pills from my purse and took one with a gulp of tap water. Yuri knew I took Inderal, just not for lessons. I flushed the toilet, washed my hands, and took a few deep breaths before heading back out.

“Should I go watch another episode of
Bachelor
, or are you playing Tchaikovsky today?” Yuri said as I took my violin and bow back out.

Apparently I’d used up my allotted thimbleful of patience for this lesson. For a brief second, I wondered what it would feel like to take my bow and whack it against that elegant ebony stand. Probably pretty good. At first, anyway. I was sick of being in trouble, no matter how hard I worked. If I hated the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, maybe it wasn’t my fault.

But I needed Yuri. I couldn’t win without him.

I put my violin on my shoulder and played.

SCARED
?

The ad featured the single word, white lettering over a black-and-white photo of a girl’s upturned face, her eyes large and searching, staring through me. She looked my
age. It was one of hundreds of posters for Heart to Heart Adoption Services plastered on trains. I’d seen it plenty of times before.

I thought about my violin lesson. It had been two full hours of trying and failing to do exactly what Yuri was telling me, while he got more and more frustrated. He had yelled, and then, even worse, he’d given up, shrunk back into his hunched body, and turned away. Dismissed me with a defeated shrug. I’d slunk out.

I didn’t want to tell Diana about the lesson. Maybe she wouldn’t ask.

In less than two weeks I’d be facing Jeremy King and the Guarneri.

SCARED
?

I stared at the pregnant girl in the ad. She had no idea.

When I got home there was a single email waiting for me. It was from Jeremy.

Carmen,

An ass? Wow. Bold of you.

Jeremy

P.S. I don’t need luck.

Chapter 6

J
eremy King’s bio was complete crap. Bios generally are (mine definitely walked the line between flowery and obnoxious), but his read like a good long swig of cherry cough syrup.

I sat in bed and read it again. And again. I stared at the photo, hating that cherubic little boy grin, then went back to the lengthy description of his fabulous career. Ego dripped from every word. I closed the dog-eared program and lay back down.

He probably hadn’t written it. I knew that. I certainly hadn’t written mine. But after yesterday, his pompous sneer was permanently imprinted on my brain, and I could just
picture him sitting at a computer and stringing together sentences like, “His golden tone and tender touch have moved audiences across the continents to tears.” I was half-surprised it didn’t claim his vibrato could cure cancer.

From a business standpoint, I got it. A bio has to tell everyone who just shelled out money for tickets that they’re about to hear the best violinist in the world. But that didn’t make it easier to stomach.

I flopped back on my pillow and stared at the ceiling, then with just my left hand, played the opening measures of the Tchaikovsky into my mattress. My performance with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra was on Saturday. Jeremy’s would be tomorrow. The concert series was supposed to get the public geared up for the competition, but I was doubtful. This is a city with six national sports teams. The average Chicagoan doesn’t give a crap about a violin competition.

According to the symphony folder I’d peeked into at the CSO office last week, Jeremy would be playing the Beethoven Concerto, which meant he was probably playing the same concerto for the Guarneri too.

I tossed the program into the air, watching the pages fan and flutter to the floor. All Jeremy’s bio told me was the basics. He was born and raised in London, and he was a scholarship student at the Yehudi Menuhin School of Music. After that, it read too much like my own life. He’d
won the British and European equivalents of the American competitions my own bio bragged about. We’d even made our solo debuts with symphonies at the same age—nine. None of that told me what I needed to know. Neither had seeing him walk out of Symphony Center or getting those obnoxious emails.