“What about names?” Mia asks.
Back in the day, we always went for musicians; she’d choose an old-school punk female singer and I’d pick a male classical musician. Joan and Frederic. Or Debbie and Ludwig.
“You pick,” I say, because I’m not exactly sure how much of the past we’re supposed to be reliving. Until I see the names she inputs. And then I almost fall over.
Kat and Denny.
When she sees my expression she looks embarrassed.
“They liked to bowl, too,” she hastily explains, quickly changing the names to Pat and Lenny. “How’s that?”
she asks a little too cheerfully Two letters away from morbid, I think. My hand is shaking again as I step up to the lane with “Pat’s” pink ball, which might explain why I only knock down eight pins. Mia doesn’t care. She squeals with delight. “A spare will be mine,” she yells. Then catches her outburst and looks down at her feet. “Thanks for renting me the shoes. Nice touch.”
“No problem.”
“How come nobody recognizes you here?” she asks.
“It’s a context thing.”
“Maybe you can take off your sunglasses. It’s kind of hard talking to you in them.”
I forgot that I still had them on and feel stupid for it, and stupid for having to wear them in the first place. I take them off.
“Better,” Mia says. “I don’t get why classical musicians think bowling is white trash. It’s so fun.”
I don’t know why this little Juilliard-snobs-versus the-rest-of-us should make me feel a little digging thrill, but it does. I knock down the remaining two of Mia’s pins. She cheers, loudly.
“Did you like it? Juilliard?” I ask. “Was it everything you thought it’d be?”
“No,” she says, and again, I feel this strange sense of victory. Until she elaborates. “It was more.”
“Oh.”
“Didn’t start out that way, though. It was pretty rocky at first.”
“That’s not surprising, you know, all things considered.”
“That was the problem. ‘All things considered.’ Too many things considered. When I first got there, it was like everywhere else; people were very considerate. My roommate was so considerate that she couldn’t look at me without crying.”
The Over-Empathizer — her I remember. I got cut off a few weeks into her.
“All my roommates were drama queens. I changed so many times the first year before I finally moved out of the dorms. Do you know I’ve lived in eleven different places here? I think that must be some kind of record.”
“Consider it practice for being on the road.”
“Do you like being on the road?”
“No.”
“Really? Getting to see all those different countries. I would’ve thought you’d love that.”
“All I get to see is the hotel and the venue and the blur of the countryside from the window of a tour bus.”
“Don’t you ever sightsee?”
The band does. They go out on these private VIP tours, hit the Rome Colosseum before it’s open to the public and things like that. I could tag along, but it would mean going with the band, so I just wind up holed up in my hotel. “There’s not usually time,” I lie.
“So you were saying, you had roommate issues.”
“Yeah,” Mia continues. “Sympathy overload. It was like that with everyone, including the faculty, who were all kind of nervous around me, when it should’ve been the opposite. It’s kind of a rite of passage when you first take orchestra to have your playing deconstructedbasically picked apart — in front of everyone. And it happened to everybody. Except me. It was like I was invisible.
Nobody dared critique me. And trust me, it wasn’t because my playing was so great.”
“Maybe it was,” I say. I edge closer, dry my hands over the blower.
“No. It wasn’t. One of the courses you have to take when you first start is String Quartet Survey. And one of the profs is this guy Lemsky. He’s a bigwig in the department. Russian. Imagine every cruel stereotype you can think of, that’s him. Mean, shriveled-up little man. Straight out of Dostoyevsky. My dad would’ve loved him. After a few weeks, I get called into his office.
This is not usually a happy sign.
“He’s sitting behind this messy wooden desk, with papers and sheet music piled high. And he starts telling me about his family. Jews in the Ukraine. Lived through pogroms. Then through World War II. Then he says, ‘Everyone has hardship in their life. Everyone has pain.
The faculty here will coddle you because of what you went through. I, however, am of the opinion if we do that, that car crash might as well have killed you, too, because we will smother your talent. Do you want us to do that?’
“And, I didn’t know how to respond, so I just stood there. And then he yelled at me: ‘Do you? Do you want us to smother you?’ And I manage to eke out a ‘no.’ And he says, ‘Good.’ Then he picks up his baton and sort of flicks me out with it.”
I can think of places I’d like to stick that guy’s baton.
I grab my ball and hurl it down the lane. It hits the pin formation with a satisfying thwack; the pins go flying in every direction, like little humans fleeing Godzilla.
When I get back to Mia, I’m calmer.
“Nice one,” she says at the same time I say, “Your professor sounds like a dick!”
“True, he’s not the most socially graced. And I was freaked out at the time, but looking back I think that was one of the most important days of my life. Because he was the first person who didn’t just give me a pass.”
I turn, glad to have a reason to walk away from her so she can’t see the look on my face. I throw her pink ball down the lane, but the torque is off and it veers to the right. I get seven down and the remaining three are split. I only pick off one more on my next go. To even things up, I purposely blow my next frame, knocking down six pins.
“So, a few days later, in orchestra,” Mia continues, “my glissando gets taken apart, and not very kindly.”
She grins, awash in happy memories of her humiliation.
“Nothing like a public flogging.”
“Right!? It was great. It was like the best therapy in the world.”
I look at her. “Therapy” was once a forbidden word.
Mia had been assigned a grief counselor in the hospital and rehab but had refused to continue seeing anyone once she’d come home, something Kim and I had argued against. But Mia had claimed that talking about her dead family an hour a week wasn’t therapeutic.
“Once that happened, it was like everyone else on the faculty relaxed around me,” she tells me. “Lemsky rode me extra hard. No time off. No life that wasn’t cello.
Summers I played festivals. Aspen. Then Marlboro.
Then Lemsky and Ernesto both pushed me to audition for the Young Concert Artists program, which was insane.
It makes getting into Juilliard look like a cakewalk.
But I did it. And I got in. That’s why I was at Carnegie tonight. Twenty-year-olds don’t normally play recitals at Zankel Hall. And that’s just thrown all these doors wide open. I have management now. I have agents interested in me. And that’s why Lemsky pushed for early graduation.
He said I was ready to start touring, though I don’t know if he’s right.”
“From what I heard tonight, he’s right.”
Her face is suddenly so eager, so young, it almost hurts. “Do you really think so? I’ve been playing recitals and festivals, but this will be different. This will be me on my own, or soloing for a few nights with an orchestra or a quartet or a chamber music ensemble.” She shakes her head. “Some days I think I should just find a permanent position in an orchestra, have some continuity.
Like you have with the band. It has to be such a comfort to always be with Liz, Mike, and Fitzy.” The stage changes, but the players stay the same.