Dirty Wings (18 page)

“It's new,” she says.

They ride the train together. The subway is terrifying, all light and noise and filth, the trains thundering along their tracks, too many people rushing this way and that and running directly into her and giving her terrible looks. She gets stuck in the turnstile and nearly cries in panic and humiliation. “Jesus, go back to Kansas,” the man behind her snarls. Her father is happy as an otter, darting through the crowds, easily deciphering some arcane language of train numbers and lines. She runs after him, too proud to ask him to slow down. His dazed absentmindedness has fallen away, replaced by a sharpness and liveliness she's never seen in him before.

They come out of the train onto a busy street, cluttered with even more people. People hurrying back and forth, lovely people in lovely clothes, people on errands, people bustling, people shopping, people eating things as they walk quickly from one place to another. People yelling and waving their arms, people going in and out of apartments, people drinking in bars. There are more different kinds of people in a single block than in the entire city of Seattle: brown people, white people, tall people, short people, very beautiful people, funny-looking people, people speaking Spanish and French and English and Japanese and languages she doesn't recognize, old people, young people, people every sort of in-between. There's so much to take in her head hurts.

Her father leads her through a maze of streets at a breakneck pace. “Dad,” she says, “where
are
we?” and he looks at her, surprised. “The East Village,” he says, as if this is obvious. Why did she bother to ask? Whatever he says will mean nothing to her. There's an open space teeming with homeless people that she realizes belatedly is supposed to be a park; they walk past a man peeing nonchalantly against a garbage can next to a dispirited-looking patch of yellowed grass. Maia gapes, slowing, but her father doesn't even notice and she has to run again to catch up with him. At last he ducks into a tiny restaurant, only big enough to hold six tables. Most of one corner is taken up by an enormous statue of the Buddha with lit candles surrounding it and a little dish of tea at its feet. The warm, cozy room is quiet, a welcome relief from the chaos of the city outside its windows.

A smiling, grandfatherly man seats them, hands them dingy plastic menus, pours them tea. “Hello, hello,” he says, half-singing the words. Maia is charmed. He winks at her and withdraws to the counter that separates the restaurant area from the kitchen. From this position he looks out over their heads, watching the street with bright eyes, humming to himself quietly.

“This is the best Vietnamese food in New York,” her father says, beaming at her across the table. “You want me to order for you?”

“Okay,” she says. “Sure.”

The waiter has doubtless overheard this exchange; they'd have to whisper for him not to hear anything they say. He returns to their table, murmuring something to her.

“Sorry?” she says, “I couldn't hear you,” and he repeats it, louder, and she still can't understand him, and he says it again, and then she realizes, to her absolute horror, that he is speaking to her in Vietnamese. Her stomach clenches. He stops, fumbles with his pad in consternation, realizes he's made an error.

“I'm sorry,” she says, “I'm sorry, I'm not—I don't—” She makes a helpless gesture. Her father, ever the attempted gallant, nods emphatically.

“She's
adopted,
” he says loudly.

“
Dad,
” Maia says. “It's fine. It's not—”

But the waiter is mortified, apologizing over and over, and Maia is mortified. Her father is indignant, growing more so, and Maia has to put her hand over his hand and say “Dad, please stop” again, until he calms down. Her father points to some numbers on the menu. “NUMBER THIRTY-THREE,” he says, still shouting, over-enunciating his words. Maia winces. “NUM-BER THIR-TEE THREE. EX-TRA SPI-CY, and number thirty-six—do you want spicy, honey?—MAKE NUMBER THIR-TEE SIX EX-TRA SPI-CY.” The waiter retreats, palpably relieved. Whatever moment Maia had had before, with her singing friend, is gone forever. She'd thought he'd liked her for no special reason, for her her-ness, and now she doesn't know what it was he saw, and she never will know, because her father ruined it and because no one has ever taught her the tongue she was born to, the language of a home she's never seen and probably never will. What would Cass do?
Dad. Fuck off.
But for all the things Cass knows, she'll never know what it's like to feel like this. Maia stares at her hands, her fingers knotted together on the table, her hands that look nothing like her father's. The father who isn't her father at all. Her real father could be dead. He could be in Vietnam, he could be here. For all she knows, he could be the waiter. It could have been so much worse, she knows this. It could have been anyone who got her, any cruel or terrible fate. Her father loves her as best he is able, and her mother—her mother wants her to succeed, at least. That is almost a kind of love. She is safe and warm and housed and fed and she is a brilliant pianist, and she is here in this city staying in an expensive hotel about to audition at one of the best music schools in the world.
Keep your head, girl,
Cass says in her gravelly voice.
I don't know how,
she says back.
Oh princess,
Cass says,
come on. You were born to survive, just like me. Somewhere in there is a girl whose name is trouble.

“People shouldn't make assumptions like that,” her father says, still huffy.

“It's fine,” she says. “It was an easy mistake to make.” Her father shakes his head.

“Tell me about the East Village,” she says, and it's the right thing. He looks happier immediately.

“We used to have readings, at the bar down the street,” he begins, and she lets him natter on. The readings, the nights on the town, the poetry, the people he knew, all of them living in terrible apartments full of roaches, subsisting on white rice and canned beans, the bodega that still sold grilled-cheese sandwiches for a dollar, riding the ferry to Staten Island for the lark of it, all of them working on their novels. The publishers' cocktail parties, witty conversation and free drinks and all of them stuffing themselves with hors d'oeuvres because it was almost the same as a free meal. Maia imagines a roomful of desperate clones of her father, rushing a white-draped banquet table, forks aloft, like something out of a horror movie. Her father had won prizes back then, for his short stories. He'd had a story in the
New Yorker,
been named to some list of bright young things coming up. He'd come close to actually being somebody, she knows, and to hear him tell it now fame was a thing he was destined for, him and all his bearded, white, bespectacled friends from good families, toiling away nobly in their garrets. Some of her father's friends did in fact go on to make something of themselves; sometimes when she's in a bookstore with her father, he'll touch a cover reverently, his face equal parts envy and awe. “Michael sold the book at last,” he'll say, or, “Joseph. I knew he'd do it.” Her father still wears blazers with leather patches at the elbows and shakes his head at reviews in the
New York Times.
“Nobody knows how to read anymore,” he says, or, “Anybody can be a critic these days. It's a damn travesty.”

“And then you met my mother,” she says now, and the light goes out of his face like someone's slammed a door. She hadn't meant to be cruel, but the sight of his anguish makes her heart purr. Now they're almost even.

“And then I met your mother,” he says, and right then their soup comes, rice noodles and chunks of meat swimming in broth, and it smells like heaven, and once they are eating neither one of them talks at all.

The next morning he walks her from their hotel to the school, buys her coffee and a croissant along the way. She's too nervous to eat and worries the butter will sully her fingers; she hands it back to him and says, “It's okay. I'm not hungry.” She's clutching the music for the Ravel, though she knows the piece by heart. The pills Cass gave her are in her purse, folded into a napkin. She feels stupid in the black dress. Obvious. A hick. She has never been anywhere that made her feel so ugly so quickly.

The school is a big wedge of concrete and glass, rising out of a broad plaza like a Modernist tumor. Maia hates it on sight. There is a flat black reflecting pool, spotted with wishful pennies, out of which rises some sort of lumpy Cubist thing that is probably supposed to be a naked lady. Maia scowls.

“Do you want me to come in with you?” her father asks. He's fishing for a yes, she knows. It makes him feel good to be useful here, to be someplace where at last he is competent, where he knows what streets to take, how to ride the subway, where to find the right things to eat.

“It's okay,” she says. “I'll meet you back at the hotel.”

“You'll get lost.”

“It's ten blocks. In a straight line.”

“You might get turned around.”

“Let me do this, Dad. On my own.”

He looks down at her, owlish, his glasses slipping down his nose. She has thought, all her life, that she loved him, but what sits in her chest now feels more like pity, and she wonders if pity's what she's mistaken for love all along. Until now. Until Cass. He coughs.

“I—of course. I understand. I—you know your mother and I are so proud of you.”

Is that what you call it,
she thinks. “I know. Thanks, Dad.”

“Call the hotel if you need anything. Anything.”

“I will.”

He puts an awkward hand on her shoulder, leaves it there a second too long. She ducks from under his palm, crosses the plaza, and walks through the tall glass doors toward her fate.

A helpful security guard directs her to the second floor. In the bathroom she shuts herself in a stall, digs the pills out of her bag, a mirror, a pen. She grinds the pills into a powder with the end of the pen, hunched awkwardly over the mirror, paranoid she'll drop the whole operation into the toilet. She props the mirror on top of the toilet-paper dispenser, tugs a bill out of her wallet, rolls it into a little tube, almost knocks the mirror off the dispenser, curses under her breath. The bathroom door opens and she hears the
click-click
of heels. She snorts the powder off the mirror, coughs loudly, yanks at the toilet paper roll, makes a noisy production of blowing her nose, wonders if she's blown the drugs all back out again. She can imagine Cass laughing at her, hands on her thighs, doubled over.
Shut up,
she thinks,
you dick.
Cass would be better at it. Cass is better at everything, except for the one thing Maia is good at. Is it best to be extraordinary at a single thing or competent at all of them? She puts the mirror away, flushes the toilet, emerges from the stall wiping her nose. A woman about her mother's age with jet-black hair slicked into a bun—the heels—is applying lipstick in the bathroom mirror. Maia washes her hands and the woman looks her up and down. She's wearing a black dress that puts Maia's to shame; silk and cut on the bias, it fits her like it was made for her, skims elegantly over her lean, toned body. Maia sniffs.

“Sick?” the woman asks.

“I think I'm coming down with something.” The paper towels are on the woman's far side and Maia doesn't want to reach across her. She wipes her wet hands on her dress. The woman's eyes widen a little and Maia wonders if she's done something untoward.

“A difficult day to be ill,” she says. “You are auditioning.”

“Yeah.”

“
Yes,
” she says, displeased. “You are the one playing Ravel.”

“Yes,” Maia says, chastised. She wrinkles her nose.
You'll feel the sparkle,
Cass said, and she can feel it now. Her vision's sharpening, the world around her blowing into a cloud of glitter. She can taste it at the back of her throat, that metallic tingle of her body coming alive.
Fuck this laminated old bitch,
she thinks. It's a thought she never would have had pre-Cass.

“The Romantics are not twentieth-century.”

“What, you want me to play Boulez? Sorry to disappoint. I have to go,” she says. “My audition is in a few minutes.”

“I know,” the woman says. “You are playing for me.”

“Well then,” Maia says. The speed is sparking through her and she is afraid of nothing. “I'll see you soon.” She walks out with Cass's walk, her back straight, her head high.

The audition room is low-ceilinged and ugly. There are no windows. A short row of three metal chairs faces two pianos. Two of the chairs are full: an older man with almost salaciously exaggerated features—great white mane of hair, too-big lips, jowly chin, watery blue eyes behind black-rimmed glasses—and another woman, this one pinched-thin and angry-looking. Neither of them regard her with anything like friendliness or welcome. The woman from the bathroom stalks in, letting the door slam behind her. “This is Professor Brook,” she says, indicating the white-haired man, “and Professor Hunter”—the woman. “And myself, you have already met. I am Professor Kaplan. The three of us will be judging your audition. You may begin whenever you are ready.” She says
ready
as if she's skeptical such an event will ever come to pass. She folds herself into her chair, her chin high.

Maia crosses the room, sits at the piano, pulls her shoulders back in a little stretch. Whatever the stuff is that Cass has given her, it's good; she feels it glittering around her like a forcefield, her fingers twitchy, the breath in her lungs charged and magnetic. All the people who have sat before her, trembling and craven with fear, the room stinks of it, she can smell it, a cloud around her, but she's not afraid, not now, not now, not now and not ever again, imagining herself onstage, somewhere, anywhere, Carnegie Hall, why not, here she is, better than everyone everyone everyone. She doesn't have to be afraid because she is so good and she can feel the music in her chest, the chords waiting, ready for the motion of her hands that will bring the notes tumbling out of the place inside her where they wait, spilling out of her fingers, exploding into this shabby classroom with its flickering lights and patina of despair. How many people have failed before her, how many, a lot, she can see it, she can feel it, she can recognize it in the laminated bitch and the jowly man and the other one, they are waiting for her to fail, they are bored, they are expecting to see her collapse in front of them, fuck up the first measure, burst into tears. What does she look like to them, some fucking yokel, she's no yokel, she's better than anyone who has ever played for them in this room, and she is
alive,
alive alive alive alive alive.
I am going to blow you out of the fucking water, you twits,
she thinks. She takes a deep breath, flexes her fingers, brings her hand to the keys and begins to play.