Virtuosity (18 page)

He reached out and grabbed my hand. “Don’t,” he said, and I saw raw desperation in his face. He knew he was losing.

“Don’t touch me!” I shook his hand loose. I spun around and ran for the door.

“Carmen, wait …” I heard him call into the hall before it clanged shut behind me, but he was too late. He’d already lost.

Chapter 14

D
iana wasn’t waiting for me at Heidi’s apartment like I thought she would be. Instead, I found Heidi alone, sitting cross-legged on her countertop, eating warm brownies out of the pan with a soup spoon, a scared-rabbit look in her eye. Diana hadn’t called Heidi back after she’d spoken to me, and their first conversation had ended with Diana calling Heidi a liar and hanging up on her. I spent half the night reassuring her that everything was going to be fine, which we both knew was a lie, and then the second half tossing and turning on Jenna’s lumpy futon, waiting for Diana to show up and drag me home by the hair. It was masterful on her part.
She must have known the anticipation would be brutal. I left the next morning exhausted, with a headache and a thorny ball of dread in my stomach. It felt like I’d swallowed a ball of tinfoil.

When I got home Diana said almost nothing to me, which was, again, masterful. Bracing for a verbal onslaught was so much worse than just plain getting yelled at. There was a slight glimmer of hostility in her eye when she nodded hello, but that was it.

Confused, I did the only thing that made sense. I hid in my room.

Diana ignored me, but she finally did phone Heidi later that day. I had a fairly good listening spot, perched on the top step, just outside my room. I sat rubbing my calves nervously and waiting for her to drop the sugary tone and lose it on Heidi. She didn’t.

French and physics were discontinued—“Carmen has already completed the courses she needs for graduation and we need to eliminate distractions right now”—a vague invitation was issued—“Don’t let this incident keep you from feeling comfortable as a visitor. You’ve been such an important part of Carmen’s development, please come see her anytime. But do call first”—and of course career advice was dispensed—“Can I make a little unsolicited suggestion, Heidi? Go get some training in something more marketable. Have you ever considered becoming a paralegal?”

Once I’d been ignored long enough, restrictions were put in place. Lockdown measures were pretty severe. I was allowed to go to the bathroom. I was allowed to practice, sleep, and read. I was allowed to fix myself something to eat. That was about it. Everything else required permission and/or a chaperone. Iron fists, it turned out, come in all shapes and sizes. This one had a French manicure.

Diana may have been all poise and control on the outside, but I could see something else beneath. She was a mess inside. She was practically vibrating, the stress beneath her skin giving her a frantic glow. It was strangely satisfying to know it was all because of me.
I
was the catalyst for every nerve-twisting headache she suffered, and she did a terrible job of hiding it. Her mind was ticking like one of those game show wheels with spokes that clicked as the wheel spun, and each click was Carmen-related: keep Carmen from freaking out, keep Carmen away from Jeremy, get Carmen to her lesson, convince Carmen to take her meds, make Carmen listen to Yuri, keep Carmen from freaking out, pretend I’m not freaking out so Carmen won’t freak out, and so on.

The power was a nice surprise, like finding a candy in your pocket while waiting for the El in a snowstorm. It was still freezing, but at least I had something sweet to suck on. She could ground me until I was thirty, but I still was the one in control.

I wasn’t nice enough to tell her she was worrying about the wrong things. I wasn’t going to freak out. Semifinals were in five days, finals were in eight. I had more important things to worry about than how close to the edge I could push Diana. Like the look on Robbie’s face in that photograph, sad but willful, or the way Jeremy’s shoulders had slumped and his eyes had refused to meet mine after I’d said no.

I’d said no. I’d meant it. What he’d asked was unreasonable, unfair, insulting, ridiculous….

But none of that made me feel less guilty, or less used. Why had I actually believed he liked me? Diana had warned me. I should have listened. I just hadn’t wanted to believe her. And maybe if I was a better person I would have considered his request for longer than a second.

Apparently, I couldn’t even be trusted to take the train to my lesson. Clark offered to drive me with all the subtlety of a sumo wrestler in ballet shoes.

“Um, I have to go up to the office anyway, and that’s good because you won’t get cold, right?” he said, and took my violin case right off my shoulder.

I almost pointed out that it was warm outside and Yuri’s apartment was in the opposite direction from his office, but why bother? My problem wasn’t with Clark. It wasn’t like being my prison guard was his idea. “Sure, I just have to get my music from upstairs.”

“Hurry. I’ve got a ten o’clock meeting.”

I checked my watch. There was no way he’d be on time after driving me out to Yuri’s. Diana must not have given him a choice.

I ran up both flights of stairs, two steps at a time.

“Slow down!” Diana’s voice called from her room. “Are you
trying
to fall and break your arm?” I didn’t answer. I did speed up though.

My music was on the stand where I’d left it. I paused to look down to where Clark was loading my violin into his trunk. The case was strong enough to withstand being run over by a semi, but he always handled it like it was a live bomb that might detonate at any moment. He shut the trunk, then walked around to the passenger side of the car, opened the door, and put what looked like a paper bag on my seat. I was too far away to tell for sure.

I ran back down the stairs, jumping three at a time, but Diana wouldn’t give me the satisfaction of yelling at me to slow down so I could ignore her again.

“What’s this?” I asked, picking the brown bag off the passenger seat and sliding into the car.

Clark just smiled and put the car into gear.

I looked inside. It was a little piece of sympathy, a secret gift between fellow hostages—a glazed doughnut.

Tears welled up behind my eyes. It was easy to keep it
together when I was at war with the whole world. Yuri, Jeremy, Diana—they couldn’t make me cry. But Clark … I suddenly wished I was going anywhere in the world except my lesson. “You’re the best,” I said, peeling off the wax paper it was stuck to and taking a bite.

“Sure.”

I had every reason to dread this lesson. Things with Yuri were going to be sticky.

First, there was the way my last lesson had ended—he’d practically thrown me out. And then I’d turned it all musically upside down on Saturday night by ignoring everything he’d been yelling at me to do for the last year. He was going to be livid about that. It wouldn’t matter that I’d given an exciting performance for the first time in a long time. In fact, that might make him even angrier, like I was tossing the things he taught me back in his face.

I didn’t want to think about the other possibility, the one even worse than him being angry. He might be completely indifferent. Detached.

I passed through the parade of food smells in Yuri’s apartment building, wishing I had somewhere to wash the sugary doughnut glaze from my hands.

His door was cracked open, just an inch. It was never open.

“Hi,” I called and walked in, then closed the door behind me.

The door to his studio was open too. He sat at his studio desk, pipe in his mouth, already puffing.

“Can I wash my hands?” I didn’t wait for an answer, just wandered around the mismatched furniture and piles of clutter to the kitchen sink, where I had to move aside a small mountain of dirty sauce pans just to reach the faucet. The water in this building took forever to warm up from ice cold, so I didn’t bother waiting.

“Did you know your door was open?” I asked, walking through the open doorway and into his studio. I put my case down on the chair.

Yuri blinked. “Open?” He looked completely bewildered. “Must have forgot.”

Most of the time Yuri seemed beyond age, so old he was timeless. But then he’d do something little, like leave his precious lock undone, his door open, and I’d see frailty. He was ninety-two. That was nearly a century. What if he was losing his mind?

“What are you staring at?” he said, pulling the pipe from his veiny blue lips.

Nope. Still himself.

“Nothing.” I started to unzip my case, but he held up a hand.

“Not today.”

I focused my eyes over his head out the window, bracing myself. He didn’t even want me to take my violin out—this was going to be bad.

“Sit,” he said.

I moved my case off the leather chair and lowered myself into it. It felt stiff. I could only remember sitting in it once before. I’d had mono and was feeling light-headed in the middle of the lesson, and maybe one other time when … No, there hadn’t been another time.

I took a shaky breath. Just one Inderal—I should have taken just
one
for this last lesson. I could have. Another bottle of orange pills had appeared magically in my violin case, compliments of Diana. I’d stared at it several times, but hadn’t flushed the pills yet. Not that flushing them would do anything. She probably had a stockpile of refills in her medicine cabinet.

“So you are all grown up, no?”

I shrugged, wary of admitting to anything that could be used against me. “I guess so.”

“A few months more and you will be at Juilliard.”

“Yes.”

“New York will be good. It’s time.”

Speaking of time, why are we wasting it?
I wanted to ask. Juilliard was forever away, but the Guarneri was closing in. The whole concept of school in the fall had receded into something hazy, too distant to worry about.
At the very least, we needed to run through my semifinal program today.

“Nothing left,” Yuri continued cryptically, talking more to the wall than to me. Then he tapped his finger on his skull and stared at me with bloodshot eyes. Maybe he’d been drinking already this morning. Or maybe those were just the swollen eye sockets a lifetime of vodka had earned him. “Saturday was …”

I rubbed the curved wooden arms of the chair and held my breath.

“Saturday was Carmen.”

I let the air out and breathed in, the sweet and pungent smell of pipe tobacco filling my head.

“Every competition, every performance, every win, every recording—all perfect because you play like I tell you. Perfect, but not you.”

His gnarled fingers uncurled themselves from the pipe stem and rested on the desk. He stared at them. “Your fingers have been good since mine stopped working,” he said.

I couldn’t not look at his hands. I forced my mind to see them as they might have been when he was young, smoothing out the knobs and wrinkles, straightening the crooks. The image made my heart sore. Would my hands someday be like that?

“These last months have been like this,” he said and
brought two fists together, tapping the knuckles against each other like bulls butting heads. “My mistake. You were ready, but I pretended not to see. I thought I could stretch it out, the time for me to play through you….” He had swiveled his chair and stared out the window now. When he continued, it was to himself, more musing, “But I’ve been lucky. Two careers …”

I understood. Even with his vagueness and the accent that I could have sworn was getting thicker the longer he lived in America, he was clear. He was finished with me. It wasn’t how I imagined it—he wasn’t angry and it wasn’t a punishment—but that made it more real. More final, at least. It was a gentler kind of good-bye.

The tears I’d sucked back in front of Clark welled in my eyes again, but this time spilled over and rolled down my cheeks. Yuri didn’t notice, or did me the courtesy of not scowling like he would have done any other day.

Regret made everything ache inside of me. Why had I been so impulsive? I’d just tossed off everything he’d been trying to get me to do with the Tchaikovsky without even thinking how he’d respond. I
needed
him. And not even asking him for advice about stopping Inderal, that had been disrespectful and stupid.

My last ounce of hope produced one thought: maybe I could change his mind. But I knew it was hopeless. Begging would repulse him. He was back to puffing on
his pipe again, staring into the clouds of smoke as they thickened the air above us.

“This is not sad,” he said.

I wiped my wet cheeks on my sleeve self-consciously, and sniffed.

“You don’t need me,” he continued. “A week ago, how good was Tchaikovsky? Not at all. Now, the way you played on Saturday, you have a chance. You can’t win Guarneri playing for me.”

I nodded. It was what he wanted me to do.

“And not for Diana.”

I looked at my own hands in my lap. My fingers were skinny and strong, their calloused tips peeling at the edges and past the point of feeling.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“No. Be something else.”

“Then I’m grateful.”

He nodded and then his chin quivered, but so slightly I couldn’t be sure it had really happened. He brought his hand to his face and rubbed his eyes irritably. It was just one moment. When he took it away, his face perfectly calm again. “So am I,” he said.

Carmen,

Hey. I’ve been sitting here staring at the
bloody blinking cursor for at least a half hour. Not sure what to say. Do you hate me? I give you permission to.

J

I started my reply, deleted the first few words, then gave the cursor the same half-hour stare Jeremy claimed he’d given it. I may have been a relationship novice, but I knew enough to know I shouldn’t write what I was feeling (
I’m humiliated because I actually thought you liked me, angry because you used your dying brother to make me feel like crap, and oh yeah, I somehow still
do
like you, which means I have absolutely no self-respect
), but if not what I was feeling, then what? I looked at the clock. Too late to call Heidi. I got up and poured myself a bowl of Froot Loops, sat back down at my computer and stared at the cursor for another ten minutes.