Sounds Like Titanic Read online

  His request for manual labor floats thick on the hot August air, blending with the noxious fumes from the RV’s exhaust pipe and the faint scent of ruined birthday cake. I look at Harriet, who looks at Stephen. Without saying anything, we understand. The Composer can replace us with musicians who are even more desperate for work than we are—new immigrants from Russia, Hungary, Romania, China. The world is full of starving musicians.

  Harriet picks up a heavy, dusty bag full of extension cords. Stephen helps Patrick lift a film projector, and The Composer deadlifts an amplifier. I lug a cardboard box full of The Composer’s CDs and stumble under the weight of it, teetering in my concert heels. We make several trips back and forth from the RV to the concert room. By the time we are finished, our concert clothes are smeared with sweat and sawdust. My feet are bleeding from lifting boxes in high-heeled shoes, but my concert dress is long enough to hide the damage.

  ACT II: WHAT IS UNHEARD

  The Composer enters stage left, bouncing toward his electric piano with childlike exuberance, waving and beaming at the cheering audience. Two violinists and a flutist follow him onto the stage. He sits down at his piano while his musicians stand behind three microphones. Without pausing to tune, they lift their instruments and begin. Two film projection screens on either side of the stage light up with images of an eagle swooping over the Grand Canyon.

  The audience hears the soaring sound of a pennywhistle—a recorder-like flute that produces the high-pitched wail made famous by Céline Dion’s ballad “My Heart Will Go On” from the film Titanic. The audience also hears the sounds of the violins and piano. But no one except the three musicians can see The Composer press the Play button on a portable Sony CD player he bought that morning at a Walmart for $14.95.

  ACT III: WHAT IS UNNOTICED

  Halfway through the concert The Composer introduces us to the crowd. He says, “The woman here with the biggest, most beautiful smile is Harriet. Doesn’t she have the biggest smile? Give her a hand!”

  Then he gestures to me and says, “This is . . . uh . . . Melissa! Melissa on the violin, everybody! Isn’t she great? Give her a hand!”

  Audition

  New York City, 2002

  “Is this Jessica? Jessica, the violinist?” The voice on your dorm telephone is Becca Belge, assistant manager of the The Composer’s Ensemble. Can you come to the office for an interview? Yes. Can you come right now? Yes.

  The office is a few blocks away and you race down Broadway in what you consider to be your most job-interview-worthy outfit, a red-sequined blouse and white skirt, your violin case strapped to your back.

  You have been working two jobs that summer in the never-ending quest to pay your college tuition, but you are coming up short. It is already June and you have less than two months to come up with $8,000 for the fall semester of your senior year. So each night, after working at your second job, you have taken the subway home, eaten a $2 slice of Sicilian pizza, and searched the Internet for a third. And each night you have noticed there are very few well-paying jobs available for twenty-one-year-old college students that do not involve sex work.

  But then you came across a posting on a student LISTSERV:

  Seeking violinists and flute players to perform in award-winning ensemble that has performed on PBS and NPR and at Lincoln Center. Must be able to work every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. $150/day with potential bonuses. Send résumé and demo tape to Becca Belge, Assistant Production Manager.

  You had never seen an advertisement like this. Professional ensembles, whether classical, folk, or punk rock, do not place advertisements on college LISTSERVs, and they hire by audition, not by an open call for demo tapes.

  You read the ad again and again. If you got this job, you would double your current income. More than that, you would become what you had spent your childhood dreaming of becoming: a professional violinist.

  One problem: You aren’t very good at playing the violin. You dropped your music major shortly after arriving at college. Your freshman dormitory alone housed dozens of better-than-you violinists. Looking at the strange job ad, you began calculating how many better-than-you violinists might exist on the Upper West Side (hundreds), in Manhattan (thousands), and all of New York City (millions?!).

  Still, you decided to try, enlisting a friend who worked at the student radio station to help you record a demo tape. Before the recording session, you practiced for hours. You planned and replanned which pieces to include on the tape and in which order—fast tempo, slow tempo, fast tempo; Bach, Corelli, Mozart; technical, expressive, technical; a piece to showcase the fingers, a piece to showcase the bow, a piece to showcase the vibrato. You revised your résumé to make yourself seem more musical. You dropped your application into a mailbox, thinking to yourself: At least you tried.

  Three days later, Becca Belge hustles you into a dark two-bedroom apartment full of dumpy-looking office furniture. Stacks of CDs teeter on top of the stove’s burners, microphone cords snake around the kitchen floor, piles of sheet music overflow from the windowsills.

  Becca is a tall, round woman with red hair and a red face. She wears a t-shirt, denim skirt, and plastic flip-flops. She offers you a metal folding chair and you say, Thank you, Ms. Belge, and she booms Call me Becca while ransacking a file cabinet, flinging sheet music onto the floor. You sit on the folding chair with your violin case in your lap and attempt to steal glances at the sheet music. At any moment Becca will ask you to sight-read it, and you know that your lack of sight-reading skills will doom this audition, will separate you—the hardworking but untalented person who mailed in an acceptable demo tape—from the job applicant who is gifted, the prodigy who can perform any musical score at first glance.

  “Here it is,” Becca says, holding out a sheet of paper.

  What is it? Some impossible Dvořák concerto? A finger-twisting Kreutzer étude? A Bach partita that will make your chin crunch into your violin while you saw and scratch and reveal yourself to be an amateur posing as the real thing?

  But it isn’t sheet music. It’s a W-4 tax form.

  You’ve had enough jobs to know that filling out a W-4 means you are hired. But how can you be hired? You haven’t played anything. You haven’t even been interviewed. Becca isn’t asking you any questions. She is telling you to complete the W-4 and you are nodding and filling it out and she is asking if you have plans for the weekend.

  “Because if you don’t,” she says, “we need you to go to New Hampshire.”

  “Okay,” you say, as if going to New Hampshire is something you do all the time. You’ve been north of New York City once, for a night visiting a friend in Boston. New Hampshire?

  “New Hampshire!” Becca is saying, adding something about Yevgeny, a Russian violinist who is to meet you on a Manhattan street corner on Thursday night. He will drive you to New Hampshire where you will meet up with Debbie, a flute player. The trip to New Hampshire will be your “training weekend,” and it will be your job to sell CDs during the live concert.

  “So, should I bring my violin?” you ask, confused.

  “You probably won’t need it, and there won’t be much space in Yevgeny’s car,” Becca replies. “But if all goes well with the training,” she assures you, “you will work as a violinist the following weekend.”

  Becca hands you a stack of sheet music and nine CDs. The CD jackets feature bucolic scenes—a blossoming tree, a lighthouse, a meadow by a stream. Written across the top of every CD cover is the name of The Composer.

  “Who is he?” you ask.

  She gestures to the CDs. “This is all his music.”

  You have never heard of The Composer, but you don’t say anything to Becca. Instead you make a face like, “Ah, yes, of course! The legendary Composer!” Three years at college have taught you to avoid being, in the words of one future Rhodes Scholar and congressman, “that twit with the Southern accent.” Since then you’ve discovered that, thanks to the Internet, even a twit with a Southern accent can lear
n what she needs to get by.

  Who Is The Composer?

  What the Internet says:

  The Composer has sold millions of albums. His benefit albums for charity have reached No. 1 on the Classical Billboard chart. Hollywood A-list celebrities narrate his PBS specials, which have raised millions of dollars for public television. His conducting credits include the most prestigious orchestras in the United States and the world.

  He has performed with orphans in Africa and was sponsored by the U.S. State Department to spread goodwill in communist countries. He provides free CDs to American soldiers in the Middle East. His compositions stream through hospital speakers across America and are thought by many to have curative properties.

  In less than fifteen years, The Composer has released over thirty albums of his compositions. He regularly appears live on the QVC shopping channel, where his albums sell by the thousands per minute. Purchasers of his CDs leave orgasmic online reviews like “my heart is tingling,” “the world’s most beautiful music,” and “this music is my personal opiate.”

  God Bless America Tour 2004

  Philadelphia to Atlanta

  The Composer spends most of his time in the back bedroom of the RV, composing. He has few reasons to emerge, for everything he needs is on top of his bed: a full-size keyboard, folding chair, two bookcase-length plywood boards, a dozen stuffed animals, enough dusty concert wires to amp the New York Philharmonic, a film projector, half-empty boxes of Cap’n Crunch, a crate of apples, a pungent pile of running clothes. While the rest of us sleep in hotel rooms, The Composer sleeps in the RV every night, presumably on top of the keyboard.

  Per The Composer’s orders, one of us—me, Harriet, Stephen, or The Composer himself—rides in the passenger seat with Patrick at all times in order to help him navigate and to DJ Patrick’s favorite road tunes on the RV’s sound system. His favorite road tunes, Patrick insists, are all of The Composer’s albums. As official Ensemble musicians, The Composer’s employees, and people spending most of our waking hours with The Composer, objecting to Patrick’s choice of music has obvious perils. Then comes our first thirteen-hour day on the road and Harriet (passive), Stephen (avoids confrontation), and I (wimp) threaten bloody mutiny if we have to listen to another goddamned note. The Composer stays mum on the issue, but I suspect that even he doesn’t want to listen to his music any more than he has to.

  Of all of us, Harriet has the best taste in music. When not on tour, she lives in Chicago, where she plays in symphony orchestras during the day, swanky clubs at night. She has rare demo recordings of Chicago musicians who went on to be famous. Everyone wants to hire Harriet as a violinist. She’s gorgeous yet old-fashioned, the sort of person who punctuates her speech with phrases like “Bless your soul” while flashing a killer smile. She’s agreed to the God Bless America Tour because she wanted to get away from a complicated situation with a man back home. It felt like the right time to go on a road trip.

  Thirteen hours in an RV is a lot of time to listen to music. As the RV barrels south into the hot yellow light of late August, we listen to country, rap, hip-hop, bluegrass, classical, jazz, classic rock, gospel, grunge, Broadway, indie, and blues. The trees get taller and leafier, the cornstalks higher. The soil turns blood red and we are in Georgia.

  Somewhere in rural northern Georgia, I decide to play the first movement of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The moment I push the Play button I hear The Composer flailing his way up the cabin toward us. He perches in the space between Patrick and me, listening to the music, the infamous swelling variations on da da da dah—perhaps the four most recognizable notes in human history.

  And then, The Composer asks me a question that—had it come from any other musician, let alone a Billboard-topping classical composer who has performed with the New York Philharmonic—I would have taken as a joke. But The Composer is sincere, speaking in the friendly just-making-obligatory-chit-chat-with-the-help voice he uses with me, the person whose name he thinks is Melissa.

  “I like this music,” he says of the opening to Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. “What is it?”

  Imposter Syndrome

  After your interview with Becca, you float up July-drenched Broadway back to your dorm, past the roasted-nut vendors, the incense peddlers, the sidewalk displays of used books for sale, the lone saxophonist outside the West End bar who plays the theme to Sesame Street over and over again. Sunny days . . . You clutch your sheet music and CDs, their plastic covers sweating in the heat.

  You have gotten the job. A violin job! You feel like a violinist in a way that you never have before, despite thirteen years of practice, lessons, and school performances. All of your years of practicing are going to “pay off,” that distinctively American phrase that conflates all work with reward, all positive outcomes with money.

  But it isn’t just the money. You can tell your parents, your high school teachers, and all of the adults in your rural hometown who supported you—from setting up the folding chairs at high school concerts to driving you to auditions to sending you cards of encouragement (one from your eighth-grade science teacher: You have a real gift! We are all so proud of you! Never stop practicing!)—that all of their hard work, and all of yours, will amount to something. It doesn’t matter that you weren’t born a prodigy. It doesn’t matter that you aren’t as good as the other violinists at Columbia. It doesn’t matter that while those kids were taking lessons at Julliard and giving concerts at Carnegie Hall, you were performing solos in your school’s “auditorium,” which was also your school’s cafeteria and gym, the nearest real auditorium hours away over the mountaintops.

  None of that matters because you have worked hard and “made it,” another distinctive American phrase. And, If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere . . . Years later you will question the way this phrase has warped your consciousness. You will discover that “make it,” as an expression, emerged in the American vernacular during the Gilded Age. The wealth disparities of that era are reflected in “make it,” which evolved to mean both mere survival (make it through the winter) and wild success involving money, fame, and/or acclaim (make it big), forever linking these two vastly different outcomes in the American mind.

  But for now you simply think to yourself that you have “made it.” You are the kid from the rural South—Appalachia no less!—that twit with the Southern accent. Who has Beat The Odds. Start spreadin’ the news . . . You are it. You are proof. The real deal. (The money!) You are a professional classical violinist in New York City.

  Then you think No, this can’t be right. You aren’t good enough to be a professional classical violinist in New York City. There has been some horrible mistake.

  West Virginia

  1985

  The movie Sarah and the Squirrel is not about a girl having some carefree fun with her critter pal, as one might expect from the cartoon picture of a girl and a squirrel—both smiling—on the VHS case. Within the first few minutes of the video, Sarah’s village is invaded by Nazis, her family members captured and taken to a concentration camp. Sarah escapes the slaughter by hiding in an adjacent forest. It is under these circumstances of genocide, starvation, and exposure to the elements that she befriends (or perhaps hallucinates) a squirrel. In the cartoon’s last frame, Sarah wanders alone and barefoot through the snow. All of these events are set to violin music.

  You are four years old and watching the movie alone in the golden-hued living room of your family’s small, rented house. Your dad joins you on the foam couch for the last few minutes of the movie, just as the violin music reaches peak crescendo and Sarah’s fate as a Holocaust victim becomes clear. He begins to sputter explanations about bad people, good people, Anne Frank, sometimes people die, Jews, wars . . .

  “What’s the music?” you ask.

  “Violin music,” he replies, elated at the change in subject. “Maybe it was Brahms!”

  Your Dad was no classical music expert; he didn’t know Brahms from a wild turkey. He d
id know how to play three chords on the living room piano, an instrument utilized only by him, and then only as an alarm clock: “It’s time to wake uuuuuup!” he’d sing in a gleeful fake baritone on mornings before school or church, banging out his three known chords while you and your brothers remained in bed, giggling. “Why is no-bod-eee uuuuuuup!” But as this was the extent of his musical repertoire, you assume he got the name “Brahms” from one of those mail-order cassette tape compilations so popular in the 1980s—All the masterpieces of classical music in one box!

  You tell him you want to play the Brahms. You figure “the Brahms” must be something like the drums, but played on a violin.

  “And that’s when Jessica said she wanted to play Brahms,” is how he told the story for years afterward, as if you had pulled the name of a nineteenth-century German composer out of your head at four years old.

  Decades later, while working as a professional violinist for The Composer, you notice that parents of children who play instruments love to share early-musical-interest-origin stories, regardless of the child’s actual talent (or lack thereof). Such parents recite their child’s first response to music as if it were a holy event, like the moment in a hagiography when a saint first hears God: My son would bang on pots and pans. My daughter would bang on the piano. Before he could walk. Before she could talk. He would sing in the bath. She would sing in her crib. He’d smile when I played a Mozart record. Her face would light up at the sound of Beethoven.

  Your dad told the Brahms story in a similar fashion, as if it was proof, or maybe reassurance, that you were destined for greatness.