“I needed it.”
“You going back for coaching?”
“No,” I said. “I think I burned that bridge. I can just practice. I’ll get it.”
He slid two fingers inside me, and I pushed into them.
“You’ll get it.”
“Oh, say can you see…” I groaned.
“I was saving your cunt for last.”
“Take it.”
He carried me into the bedroom and made love to me, healed me, brought me back to center. No one could hurt me with this man at my side.
nine.
MONICA
If you’re told you’re fantastic enough times, you start to believe it. And it was becoming a problem. I was at a plateau. I’d found where I belonged and was getting recognition from people with the power to make my dreams happen. It was their job to make sure I was happy and satisfied so that I’d continue working.
Unfortunately, they were businesspeople. They weren’t artists or fans. They didn’t know shit.
I could sing like the sound of a car screeching on asphalt, and it didn’t matter to them as long as I made money. “Sell it, don’t smell it” was the rule on the western end of Wilshire. And because I’d been traveling around with Jonathan, no one criticized me. My artist friends were back in LA, and I was too busy to just sit around making work with them. No one told me where I could be better. It was ass kissing time all the time.
Truth be told, I was really happy coasting. But the thing about coasting is that at some point, the energy goes out of the work, and I would have to push or grind to a halt.
“Should I wait?” Lil called back to me as she pulled me up to Mrs. Yuan’s warehouse in Boyle Heights.
“Yeah. I’ll be a second.”
She put the car in park right in the red zone and opened the back door for me.
“You probably don’t even have to turn the car off.”
I could have sent her up for the music. I could have stayed home even, and sent her while I worked on the national anthem in the privacy of my home studio. But I went myself for reasons I couldn’t even tell myself. I wanted to touch where the pain of the day before had been.
Yep. Pain. On the elevator, I admitted to myself that I’d been hurt, and I’d been hurt because I surrounded myself with businesspeople who didn’t know how to be critical. I hadn’t sat in a studio with a producer and had my ass beaten in two months. I’d gotten soft, and I bruised easily.
The door to the big white room with the black grand piano was open. I walked in, my shoes echoing. No one was there, but my stupid sheet music was on the piano.
Behind the door Mrs. Yuan had walked out of, I heard the snipsnap of an Asian language.
And on the lid over the keys was the black box.
I put the music back and opened the box.
A tuning fork isn’t an expensive item, but it was nestled inside velvet as if it were a jewel. I tapped the worn ridge of the piano and listened to the hum of A four forty.
Singing the note wasn’t something I decided consciously; it was something I did out of compulsion. I had to mimic it. Had to try it again. I couldn’t just let the vibrations hover in the air without matching them.
I put the bar to my ear and sang it low at first, listening for the wave oscillations I could pick out with stunning accuracy on the viola.
I heard nothing.
I tapped the fork again and committed to doing this stupid, pointless thing. I wasn’t trying to prove I could, or that I wasn’t as bad as she thought. I wasn’t trying to get it right even. I was trying to hear what she heard.
I sang louder. Maybe that was the issue. Maybe I just needed to sing louder to hear it.
Could have been I was screaming, or singing loud enough for Disney Hall. When the inner door snapped open, my sudden silence fell like an anvil over the room.
Mrs. Yuan stood in the doorway in a pale blue wrap. The chopsticks in her hair had little fans on them, and her mouth was a straight red slash. “Why do you come in here to torture my ears?”
She strode into the room, making the seven steps in the time it took me to put the tuning fork back in the box. I snapped it closed when she held out her hand.
“You got worse. I didn’t think it was possible. What did you do to your throat?”
Jonathan’s dick had been down it, but I didn’t say that. “Sorry.”
She took the box. I grabbed my sheet music and walked out. I noticed the molding on the door was red on the white wall, which didn’t matter one bit. Just a simple observation I hadn’t made last time. Why hadn’t I noticed?
Because the last time I walked out, I’d been looking at the floor. This time, I was looking up, and by the time my hand touched the doorknob, I knew why.
I turned before opening the door. She was halfway back to the white inner door.
“Wait,” I said brazenly.
She didn’t have to wait, of course, and if she didn’t respect me at all, she wouldn’t have.
But she did. She stopped and turned to me.
“I dreamed my whole life of singing Dodger Stadium,” I said. “I grew up in Echo Park, and I could hear everything. Sometimes I dreamed I’d be a seventh inning act, God Bless America and all, and sometimes it was a whole concert, when I was feeling really ambitious. But this? I heard someone sing the national anthem eighty days a year, and they were always bad. Always. Even when they were good, between the sound system and the octave changes, the national anthem always sounds bad in a stadium. It’s a capella, and it’s like I’m naked. Everything’s against the performer. And I can’t bear the thought of not being the best. Which is why I had such a hard time yesterday.”
She folded her hands in front of her, still holding the black box, tilted her head, and said nothing for too long. “Everyone is bad, then?”
“Whitney Houston,” I said. “She was great. But she used weird phrasing.”
“You are not Whitney Houston.”
“No, I’m not.”
More silence. It hung at the perfect key for a new start.
“Can I come back?” I said. “I have two weeks. It’s not enough time to find perfection, but maybe I can get closer?”
She stepped forward. “You have nothing to do for two weeks but tone your voice. Nothing. You will think in scales. You will be silent unless you are singing. You will repeat repeat repeat. At home and with me to the point where your voice is tired, but not over that line.”
“Yes.”
“For two weeks, I own you. Is that clear?”
“Yes.”
“Now.” She straightened herself when I thought she couldn’t get any straighter. “I have twenty-one minutes to spare. Would you like to start?”
In my gratitude and relief, I had no other answer but, “Yes.”
ten.
MONICA
I bounced into the house. Jonathan was in his running gear, finishing up a puke-colored protein shake. I kissed his cheek and rinsed out the blender pitcher.
“What took you so long?” he asked.
“She gave me homework, and we set up a schedule for the week.”
“So there’s hope for you?”
“Apparently not, but she’s martyring herself for my sake.”
He pressed himself to me, pinning my hands behind me. “I’ll make you sing.”
“We need to talk about this for a minute.”
He let me go, and I turned to him. He pressed himself against me.
“Okay,” he said, picking up my shirt. Jesus, he had such a one-track mind. I tried to pull it down, but he shooed my hands away and yanked my bra up over my breasts. “Talk.”