“Your students love you, though.” I know that much for a fact. Partly because it’s impossible not to love Shrishti, but also because I’ve been to her student recitals. I’veseenthose kids run up and fling their arms around her at the end of their sets, so happy to earn her pride and praise.
“I guess. It’s not really up to them, though, is it? It’s all about the parents.”
There’s not much I can say to make her feel better. And nothing I can do to make the money side of things suddenly not matter, short of entering her for every lottery in the city.
I hate feeling so helpless. It itches at me from the inside out, gnawing beneath my sternum.
“You have to go, by the way,” Shrishti points out, gesturing toward her smartwatch.
She’s right. I’ve only got about a minute left until I have to start my set. That’s just a few more sips of my drink before I’ve got to drop my tip on my napkin and head to the baby grand piano on its shallow dais at the center of the restaurant.
I’ve been playing at this restaurant since I started at Parker. Originally it was to make a bit of pocket change, but now it feels necessary—like if I didn’t have this place to anchor me, I might dissociate from earth entirely and just float away. It’s the only time that sitting in front of the piano makes me feel calmer, instead of more tightly strung. I exhale, the ivory cool beneath my fingertips. And when I play, the notes come easy.
My usual routine here is a blend of romantic nocturnes and classical sonatas—everything low and smooth, quiet enough that people can hear themselves talk, but lovely enough to lend the place a sense of grace and class. Listening to music while they eat makes people feel like they’ve been clipped out of the real world, cradled somewhere new and dim and beautiful. I like that we get to share this new microcosm together, me and the people who are listening. Even if they aren’t really focused on me. Even if they only hear the music in their subconscious, a soundtrack to their lives rather than a central feature.
It’s a feeling like listening in on someone else’s conversation, or reading a short story, or being on the outskirts of a party. I don’t have to participate. I don’t have to think. I can just exist in parallel to someone else’s life, and that is its own strange sort of intimacy.
My usual set is four hours, which is longer than it sounds like. A four-hour shift when I worked at Tractor Supply in Iowa was amazing on a day that you felt tired or under the weather. A four-hour shift of nonstop piano playing makes you want to cut your hands off.
I used to practice that long, once upon a time. Three to four hours every day, both before and after school. I felt like I was on some kind of hero’s journey, defying all odds in pursuit of animpossible dream. I would have done just about anything to get the hell out of that town and have the chance to make this my career. My classmates were cool with it, but I gotsomuch shit from people my parents’ age. Lots of vaguely homophobic comments and zingers aboutcity folksor knowing the value of a hard day’s work.
And here I was, playing to entertain the same kind of richcoastal elitesthat our neighbors despised, in a restaurant that would almost definitely earn a good old-fashionedWhat’s wrong with Olive Garden?Nothing, of course. Nothing was wrong with Olive Garden.
Iowa is full of good people. I knew that, logically. I had been friends with a lot of them. A lot of them are still there, with no desire to leave.
But another, fiercer part of me—the part that grew up angry and got angrier every year until my brother died—basks in the satisfaction ofhating fucking everyone.
I wonder sometimes if that hatred comes across in my music.
But unfortunately, I know it doesn’t.
Three Years Ago
Marigold Gensler played the final notes of her Stravinsky suite, and I was the first to clap, as if clapping loud enough and smiling hard enough would make her notice me out of all the students crowding the wings at Parker’s fall piano showcase. She bowed, and I could see the exhilaration coloring her cheeks even from here.
I wondered if Marigold had any idea the effect her playing had on her audience. Onme,to be precise. Because listening to her was like being transported to another universe. When she finished a piece, it was like coming up for air after a long time underwater, disoriented and gasping. And you desperately wanted to go back tothat place, to shove stones in your pockets and let yourself be dragged into the heady undertow of her music.
“That was fantastic,” I told her once she was offstage. I felt like one fan in a dozen, begging her to notice me.
“Thanks.” She looked embarrassed, which was completely incongruous with the Marigold I’d come to know.ThatMarigold was confident—not in everything, maybe, but in her music. And there was something incredibly attractive about a woman who knew her own skill.
Maybe it’s you,a sly voice whispered in the back of my mind.Maybe she’s nervous aroundyou.
But I didn’t want to get ahead of myself, or give myself credit when I hadn’t earned it yet. For all I knew, this crush was completely one-sided. I was keenly aware of the gulf between my judgment of what counted as normal behavior and other people’s. When I was in middle school, the pediatrician had even suggested to my mother that I might benefit from social skills classes, or even some kind of therapy to help me understand how to act in public. I remember the way my mom had reacted to that—how she’d snatched her purse off the chair and told Dr. Ebert that it wasn’t her son who needed to learn how to act. That if grown adults couldn’t figure out how to be kind to a shy little ten-year-old, then it was grown adults who needed to change.
She still sent me to the social skills classes, though. Which is how I knew that all these times when I felt awkward, I just came across cold. I wondered which version of me Marigold read.
“I think they liked it,” I said wryly, tilting my head toward the audience, who were still clapping even with Marigold offstage.
She rolled her eyes. “They’d better. I’ve only played that piece five thousand times at this point.”
“Well, now you’ve earned the right to never play it again. Or at least not for the next two years. Probably shouldn’t get your hopes uptoofar.”
She laughed, and I clung to that sound with both desperate hands. I knew damn well I was being pathetic, but it was hard not to be. I wasn’t about to judge myself for having good taste in women.
And Marigold…she was an incredible woman. Bold, passionate, kind, loyal. And beautiful, with that wildflower-honey hair and warm brown eyes. We’d been running in similar circles ever since we both started at Parker, partly because we shared a primary instructor and partly because our respective best friends were in some kind of on-again, off-again relationship that managed to drag us both into opposite halves of unnecessary drama. It was hard not to feel a kinship to someone after so many shared eye rolls.
We made our way deeper backstage, making room for the next musicians, who were anxiously milling in the wings.
