Virtuosity (3 page)

“For the next four months we were inseparable. He even came to my rehearsals. At first I was worried that he was going to lose his job because he was with me all the time. Then I discovered you can’t get fired from being the only heir to your father’s media empire.” She took a slow breath through her nose. When she continued it was in
a softer voice. “Back then, he was more than his parents, though. He really loved the music, and I thought he really loved me …”

“So why four months then?”

The porch swing creaked. She crossed her legs, displacing my head, and I nearly fell off the swing headfirst. That question never made her happy. “We weren’t right for each other.”

“That’s so vague.”

“Maybe. But it’s the truth.”

I sat up and stared at her face. People said we looked alike, but they were wrong. Maybe we had the same almond eyes and curly hair, but she had a delicate nose and fuller lips. She was beautiful.

“It wasn’t because of
you
, Carmen. I promise.”

“Did he know you were pregnant?”

“It all happened at once. Getting pregnant, breaking up with Jonathon, my diagnosis …”

And I’d lost. This was where the story always dead-ended, losing her voice. I knew the pitiful progression: vocal cord polyps led to multiple surgeries, which led to permanent scarring, which led to broken contracts and broken career and broken dreams. Somewhere in there she had a broken heart, too. This was where the fairy tale became a tragedy, and I knew from experience, if I pushed her now she would cry.

“As a musician, you should be able to understand this,” she said. “He fell in love with Diana the soprano, but suddenly I wasn’t Diana the soprano anymore. I was
just
Diana.”

“So he only loved you for your voice?”

“No,” she said. “He wasn’t a terrible person. He was just young and a bit of a womanizer. Probably still is, but that wasn’t the problem. It was me who changed. Imagine if you had to stop playing the violin. You wouldn’t be the same person, would you? My life changed overnight, and I was grieving and trying to recover from the botched surgery and then I found out I was pregnant on top of everything. I was a mess.”

I’d stopped listening. I was trying to picture myself without violin and saw … nothing.

“Let it go, Carmen. I know you’re curious about him, but it’s a pointless obsession. He will always be too self-absorbed to be any kind of father figure, and you have a dad. You know how much Clark loves you.” She paused and continued with the faintest shade of bitterness. “Besides, Jonathon may not be in your life, but his family’s money certainly is.”

It felt like an insult, even though I knew it wasn’t me she wanted to hurl it at. I thought about what the Glenns had done for me and felt vaguely guilty, as if I’d gone begging to them. I hadn’t.

At that moment, the SUV drove up. “Ladies,” Clark said, climbing the steps with a smile on his face, a briefcase in one hand and flowers in the other.

Diana stood and met him with a kiss, leaving me on the swing.

“Hey, Superman,” I said, “how are the tights feeling today?” It was our joke, the one I refused to let die and the one he always had a new response to. As he explained, when your name is Clark and you wear horn-rimmed glasses, you have to develop a healthy database of responses to Superman jabs.

“Itchy. Really itchy.”

“Ever think of washing them?”

“Nope. That would be bad luck.”

Diana was already holding her flowers and dragging him inside by the arm.

“Come inside with us,” Clark said.

“I want to sit out here a while longer. I’ll come in when I’m cold.”

That wouldn’t be long. I could feel the afternoon warmth dissipating in the air around me. The door to the house closed and the sounds outside seemed to grow louder: birds chattering in the newly budding oak trees that lined our street; a bike bell, shrill and sharp; the laughter of two little boys chasing each other down the sidewalk.

Alone, my thoughts became clearer. They always did. For some reason, when Diana was around, my brain was too busy reacting to what she said to function properly, and I ended up pushed into corners and firing at targets for no reason it all.

It didn’t make sense, for example, to be bugging Diana with questions about Jonathon right now. With the Guarneri looming, he was the least of my worries. And of course, she was right about not needing him. Clark
was
my dad. I was six when he and Diana had married, which meant there was almost nothing in the pre-Clark memory file.

There was no telling what kind of crazy orbit Diana and I would be spinning into if he hadn’t come along. Clark balanced us out. He was
not
a musician,
not
intense,
not
competitive—basically the yin to our yang. Clark cooked gourmet food. And he watched the weird indie films with me and boring dramas with Diana, even though I knew he’d rather be overdosing on one of his dorky sci-fi series.

I barely knew Jonathon Glenn. When I was little, visits had been sporadic and forced. Hardly memorable. I remembered a few lame outings, like an awkward walk in Central Park followed by a visit to some bookstore. Now the visits were pretty much nonexistent. He split his time between London and Beijing, or wherever else
work took him, and called on my birthday. Sometimes. I hadn’t seen him for four years, and we hadn’t talked since the Christmas before last.

I shivered and pulled my sweater around me. I couldn’t wait until summer. Just a couple more weeks and it would stay warm into the evening, and the Guarneri would be over. Almost summer. Almost over. I stood up and went inside.

Chapter 3

T
hat night, I lay in bed and tortured myself by replaying every brutal second of the Rhapsody fiasco until my stomach ached. Stupid Heidi, stupid lemon drop cupcake, stupid Jeremy King, stupid me. My room was too hot, my tank top had twisted itself nearly backward, and the comforter scratched my legs every time I moved. Or didn’t move. Maybe this was what hell was like, insomnia-fueled misery.

My bedside clock said 2:21 when I finally gave up, untangled myself from my sheets, and sat down at my desk. My computer whirred softly as I brought it to life and checked my inbox. One unread email sat at
the top of the list, bolded. The subject line read,
nice to meet you too.
I didn’t recognize the sender’s address, [email protected], but it had the mixed up look of foreign spam. I needed another hard drive clean-out and lecture from Clark about opening strange email like I needed a kick in the head. I selected it and let the cursor hover over the delete button for just a second. And then another second. Something in my brain turned, like a puzzle piece rotating into place. If I could stretch those letters apart there was something recognizable there. Yehudi Menuhin School. It was the most exclusive violin academy in England, possibly all of Europe. It was Jeremy’s school. Crap.

I opened the email.

Carmen,

Normally I would feel a little awkward emailing someone I’d never met and who hadn’t actually even given me her email address, but you were the one on a stakeout today, so if one of us should be embarrassed…. By the way, the CSO receptionist is more than happy to give out your contact info to anyone claiming to be a fan.

I’m curious—are you hunting down all the semifinalists, or just the ones who’ve got a shot at winning? Is precompetition stalking an American custom? Should I be doing it myself, or does this email qualify? I’ve always thought practicing scales and slow passage work was the best way to prepare for competitions, but maybe hiding behind bushes with binoculars would be a better use of my time. How is it working out for you?

Jeremy King

P.S. Good luck

I read the email six times. During the first reading I registered shock and shock alone. Second, humiliation. Third, humiliation. Fourth, humiliation with just a glimmer of anger. Then during the fifth and sixth readings the anger grew into rage, and I knew I was done when I was ready to put my fist through my computer screen.

My hands shook as I hit reply and began writing. I didn’t need to think about what to write. Fury, as it turned out, made me extra eloquent, or at least extra prolific.
Jeremy King had clearly not been told what an insignificant piece of crap he was lately—maybe ever—and I was just the girl to do it. It would be doing a disservice to him and certainly to humanity, if I didn’t cut him down to size.
He
was the one who needed to feel humiliated. Not me. My fingers could barely keep up with the insults my brain spewed. I wrote words I’d never actually said aloud. The feeling was beautiful.

I was several pages into my diatribe before I stopped to breathe. I’d lost sense of time. Sleepless nights usually inched by, but anger had eaten the last hour. Was it really after three already? I read over what I’d written. I sounded … insane. Like a ranting lunatic. I couldn’t send this. My index finger found the delete key and I watched the insults disappear one letter at a time.

What was his problem? It wasn’t like I had done anything malicious—
he
was the one who’d acted like a jerk with that salute. I’d just been embarrassed, but that was clearly a mistake. Jeremy wasn’t a nice guy. He was the kind of guy who saw weakness and then scraped at it, hoping to expose something raw and painful he could spit into. The tears were there, behind my eyes. I could coax them out if I concentrated, but crying always left me feeling weak and I didn’t want to feel any weaker.

Weakness. He thought I was weak, because that was how I’d acted today. Maybe not responding at all would
be better. An egomaniac like that—he’d probably be more annoyed by silence than anything else.

Unless he saw silence as more weakness.

I laced my fingers behind my head and bounced against the back of the chair. I needed to write something simple, something profound but totally void of emotion.

I started again.

Jeremy,

You are an ass.

Carmen

P.S. Good luck to you too.

Much better. Before I could talk myself out of it, I pressed send, a thrill running up my spine. Had I really just done that? It was so un-Carmen.

I didn’t even glance at my bed. It would take a combination of hypnosis and a fistful of sedatives to make my brain submit to sleep right now. Instead, I tiptoed across the hall to my practice studio. Tiptoeing wasn’t necessary. From the top of the stairs I could hear Clark snoring—his usual choking, guttural grunt-fest—which meant Diana’s earplugs were in place.

My violin case lay waiting on the floor in the center of the room, propped against the maple music stand. With just the moonlight from the window to see by, I crouched, unzipped the cover, and began the ritual preparation: unlatching the Velcro neck strap, attaching the shoulder rest, twisting the screw at the base of the bow to tighten the horsehair.

Just enough light shone in the window for the violin to glow. The amber wood formed graceful arcs and points, its grain darkened by centuries of being touched and played. It was still hard to believe it was mine.

They
had bought it for me. The Glenns. This was what my father was good for. Money. For the first twelve years of my life I had been the irritating detail Thomas and Dorothy Glenn hoped would disappear if they just ignored me long enough. I was the unfortunate by product of a fling between their playboy son and some opera singer, of all things, a woman just Catholic enough to refuse an abortion, or too much of a gold digger. According to Diana, anyway.

But then I turned sixteen and everything started happening quickly, too quickly for me to dissect and make sense of. I won the Grammy for best classical album and a week later my face appeared on the cover of
Time
magazine with the words “Virtuosity in America” underneath it. Right after the
Time
article,
Vanity Fair
did an interview
and photo shoot, and that was when Dorothy Glenn called to congratulate me.

Diana had thrust the phone into my hands and shrugged as if to say
good luck
. I didn’t know what to say. I hadn’t seen or talked to her since I was five, and the birthday notes—cards featuring mountain landscapes and bouquets of freesia and other stuff little girls don’t care about—had stopped at age nine. Was she trying to pretend we were close?

I didn’t even recognize her voice. “We are so proud of you,” she said.

I didn’t say what I was thinking, which was that I wasn’t really hers to be proud of.

After a fascinating discussion of the weather, she saved us both from any more pretending and moved on to the reason for her call. “Your grandfather and I have been discussing an investment and I wanted to consult you.” The stiffness in her voice had relaxed into something closer to smugness.

“With me? I’m probably the wrong person to ask about investing.”

“No, dear. You are definitely the right person.” She paused for what sounded like dramatic effect, but it was lost on me. I had no clue where she was going. “We’ve been thinking about purchasing the Gibson Stradivarius. Have you heard of it? It’s coming up for auction at Christie’s next month.”

A Stradivarius. The Gibson Stradivarius. Yes, I’d heard of it—it was one of the best violins in the world. At auction, the cheapest Strads were going for at least half a million dollars. The Gibson would go for a lot more because of its tone. It was one of the sweetest sounding violins ever crafted. In comparison, the perfectly respectable twelve thousand dollar German instrument I played was a tin box.

“Of course, we want
you
to play it.”

The silence that followed was thick with expectations. Dorothy probably expected a gasp, followed by confessions of my undying gratitude. What she got was the sound of the phone hitting the wooden floor and then bouncing down the stairs, followed by me scrambling after it.