The only thing I could process, really, was that he kept apologizing. As if he had done something wrong, like he had personally reached into my body and manipulated my immune system and told it to ruin my life.
I wanted to hang up on him. I really did.
But I made myself stay on the line and make hollow comments about how I understood, thank you, and yes, the fifteenth would work for me to come in for a follow-up appointment, great, have a good evening, okay. Goodbye.
When I hung up, I didn’t know what to do with myself. I guessed I had to tell my dad at some point. But the idea of walking back in there and devastating one of our last family dinners before I went back to school made me want to crawl into the most remote cave I could find.
I couldn’t just go up and hide in bed, though. That would be as good as a confession.
I sat down on the sofa and stayed there for a while. Maybe, I thought, if I stayed here long enough, he would call me back. Hecould have confused my chart with someone else’s. A Mary, not a Marigold. A Gershwin, not a Gensler.
But nope. My stupid name is too stupid. There’s only one Marigold at any clinic, anywhere.
Eventually, though, I had to go back.
I had to face my father. The man who had lost his wife to an autoimmune disease that ravaged her body and happiness until her kidneys finally gave up and took her away from us forever. The man who would now get to watch his daughter’s body fall to pieces, too.
I had to tell him the truth.
2
Jamie
“You should have seen the way Marigold looked at me when I told her I’d be playing in Stockholm,” I tell Shrishti right before she lands her famous left hook and sends me staggering back two paces. “Jesus. Want to calm down a bit? It’s just pad rounds.”
Shrishti swipes a sweaty black curl out of her face with her wrist and gives me a ragged grin. “Maybe you just need to pay better attention. Pretend the pad is Goldie’s face.”
“That seems unnecessarily violent.”
“Hello?What are we doing right now?”
I shift the pads to a lower position to catch her kicks as she moves into the next set. Shrishti is a powerhouse; I’m not a small guy, but I still have to brace pretty hard for her round kick. “Okay, sure, but I don’t want to think about what that says about me if I’m fantasizing about punching a girl in the face.”
Shrishti hits me with a particularly hard one. “Listen. It happens to all of us.Thatone was for my boss, and he doesn’t deserve it nearly as much as Goldie Gensler.”
I’m not convinced that Marigold being infuriatingly rich counts asdeserving it,but Shrishti’s clearly on a roll.
“You’re gonna destroy her,” Shrishti says, breathless at the endof her fifty-kick drill. “You’re way better than she is. She knows it, you know it, and most importantly, the competition jury’s gonna know it.”
I wish I had her confidence. “Easy for you to say. You dropped out of Parker last year. You have no idea how good she’s gotten.”
Shrishti shrugs and reties her hair with the pink scrunchie she always keeps around her wrist. “Yeah, maybe. But I know how goodyouare. I get to hear you play every Saturday.”
That isn’t the problem, but I’m not sure Shrishti would understand even if I explained it. In any reasonable world, I would blow Marigold out of the water. Note per note, I am a thousand times better than she is. One time Celia, my one-on-one instructor, ran my recording through some kind of software and I got a 99% accuracy score—that’s a matter of taking a rest just a millisecond too long.
But Celia only ran that test to prove a point. I might be perfect, but I wasn’tgreat.
When Marigold plays, though, it feels like the universe itself stops to listen. You can’t focus on anything but her music. It burrows inside you and lives there, like her fingers are playing on your heartstrings every time she hits a note.
Celia checked one of her recordings, too. 94% accurate. Good—really good—professional-good—but it wasn’t 99%. And yet she is still better than me.
At the time, Celia compared her to Vladimir Horowitz, who was famous for the mistakes he made as he played. Horowitz saw the mistakes as necessary sacrifices in exchange for his famously brilliant and overpowering performances. No one cared about a missed note when Horowitz had them crying in their seats.
I am perfect. Vladimir Horowitz—and Marigold Gensler—are not perfect. And that is what makes them the best.
My body feels like it just went through a wood chipper by thetime class ends. I ball my sweaty clothes up in the bottom of my duffel and shower off, scrubbing both hands through my hair in an attempt to look a little bit less like a wet dog. At least it’s still warm out, so the slog back to my dorm on campus won’t be as brutal as it will be in a few weeks once it’s properly winter. My roommate always gives me some kind of look when I get back from Muay Thai, like he thinks I ought to be doing better things with my time. But if I can’t afford my own apartment, at least I can have a social life outside of Parker—which is more than I can say for most of my classmates.
Tonight, Ken has his headphones on, busy fiddling with a new composition in Sibelius; I barely get a cursory look of disapproval before he’s back to messing around with crescendo placement. I dump my bag on the floor and pull up on my tablet a recording of Bruce Liu—the 2021 Chopin competition winner—playing Concerto No. 1 in E Minor, Op. 11. But even Liu’s mastery, his hands tumbling over the keys like water over rock, can’t hold my focus tonight.
