Poisoning the Well

Patricia took it as a joke, which is how Jai intended it. While waiting for their afternoon session to begin at the conservatory, draped across neighboring park benches in the tidy city square, Jai told her about his dream from the previous night: the memory lapse, the paralysis, the laughter from the crowd as he leapt up from the piano and ran offstage. He’d hoped that Patricia would dissolve the dream’s terrifying power and confirm that it was just noise from his subconscious, too ridiculous to ever believe. And she did play along perfectly, laughing and chiding Jai for giving it a moment’s worry. But with a growing sense of unease, Jai realized that the process of grasping for words to describe his sense of utter helplessness on stage seemed to give the idea form and credibility. Simply uttering the words out loud had given his nightmare life.

Patricia arched back to look at Jai, with one hand guarding her eyes from the noontime sun. “Wait, you’re not really worried about bombing your recital, are you?”

“I mean, no. It just rattled me a bit, is all.”

Patricia shook his knee. “Jai! You’ve been playing that concerto since you were, what, fifteen? You own it. Nobody else here will even touch it. And now you think you’re going to forget where you are in the score and mess up your career, all because of a nightmare?”

It was exactly what he thought. In two nights, Jai would be performing Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto in the conservatory’s largest auditorium, accompanied by an orchestra made up of his fellow classmates—among the most talented musicians of their generation. The school tried to downplay the importance of the seniors’ capstone performance, but everyone knew it could make or break a professional career. Just the previous year, a percussionist had flubbed the second movement of her marimba concerto and lost her chance to audition for the San Francisco Symphony. At least, that’s what they said. Horror stories from earlier years abounded among the students.

“Have you ever thrown a performance before? Like, ever?” Patricia asked, but she stood up from the bench before he could answer. “Look, this is too stupid to even talk about.” In their friendship, she was the arbiter of what they talked about and for how long. If it didn’t deserve her attention, she moved along to something or someone more interesting. “C’mon, let’s go.”

Jai grabbed his backpack and caught up with her as she marched along one of the square’s diagonal paths toward the conservatory, which was stationed on a prominent corner overlooking the park. It was like an Italian villa that somebody had dropped amid the glass and metal buildings of downtown Philadelphia, with arched windows and ornate floral stonework around the doorways. The architecture had been a draw for Jai when he was considering schools. The musty conservatory, buried in the moldering old city, had felt ancient and quirky and enticing, like the perfect place to hone his skills and propel him into what he hoped would be a brilliant future.

After passing through the students’ entrance, they crossed through the lobby outside the main auditorium, where Jai’s fate would be determined in two nights. Everybody who mattered would be there, watching him flail and stumble through the challenging “Rocky 3.” The conservatory’s faculty, professional musicians, some assistant conductors from symphony orchestras around the country, agents who represented up-and-coming talent. All the friends he’d made since arriving in Philadelphia, which was a universe away from the Texas fishing town where he’d grown up. His parents, flying on an airplane for the first time, visiting him for the first time, to see him on stage performing with a real orchestra for the first time. Jai tried not to think of the recital as the culmination of everything he had worked for since he first tapped the piano as a toddler, but it was impossible not to pin the utmost importance on it.

“It’s all bullshit,” Patricia said over her shoulder as she pushed open the door to their musicology class. Everything was bullshit to Patricia. She treated the conservatory like finishing school, as if it didn’t matter whether she succeeded or failed because it was always secondary to her main goal. Jai couldn’t quite place what her main goal was, beyond escaping Philadelphia the moment she graduated and reoccupying her parents’ Manhattan penthouse. She was a talented pianist, sure, but she never put in the same amount of practice as Jai or any of her classmates. Music was a hobby to her, and the capstone recital was a joke. 

But for Jai, it was everything. If he couldn’t land a career as a musician upon graduating, he had no cushion to fall back on. His parents didn’t have a suite waiting for him back in their five-room bungalow. There was no backup plan.

They grabbed seats among the cadre of friends that Patricia had assembled in her earliest months at school. Many were wealthy dilettantes like her—talented, but not standouts, with apartments in the luxury high-rises bordering the square and unlimited access to beach homes and credit lines. So many of his classmates at shown up at conservatory as flamboyant characters: men wearing summer scarves and fedoras, women in diaphanous skirts and artfully arranged hair, nattering to each other about the camps and youth orchestras they had in common across their childhoods. Jai had arrived in Philly with only three pairs of khaki trousers from J.C. Penney and a couple dress shirts with curled collars that were prone to wrinkling. Patty hadn’t even looked at him until the workshop when he took the stage to play Brahms. Suddenly, bewilderingly, he was sucked into in her inner circle, a charity case plucked from obscurity.

“He thinks he’s going to blow his recital,” Patricia announced to the row, but everybody in the classroom could hear. “Jai ‘Perfect Ten’ Nguyen thinks he’ll bomb. Can you believe it?”

Taking her cue, Patricia’s crew laughed and shook their heads, while Jai sank further into his seat and stared straight ahead at the stage where Professor Mather had arranged her plump behind on the piano bench and was unfurling a score across the stand.

“Hey, maybe it’ll make room for the rest of us schlubs,” Jonah said, to murmurs of agreement. 

“If the philharmonic doesn’t come calling, he’ll become the star of the South Texas Regional Orchestra,” said Glenda. Others chimed in with even more ridiculous positions. Jai laughed along until class started, when in the silence he finally acknowledged the escalating sense of panic that had been developing ever since he first uttered his premonition out loud to Patricia in the square. He was going to bomb at his recital, and what then?

# # #

The tuxedo was a bit long at the ankles, a bit wide at the shoulders, but the sleeves were short enough to not interfere with his hands, which was all that really mattered. Still, Jai tugged and adjusted and shifted his weight from foot to foot while watching Samantha race through the final cadenza of Prokofiev’s Third. Mercifully, from where he stood in the wings, he couldn’t see the crowd. His family was out there somewhere, probably baffled by the silence between movements and unnerved by the trappings of old Philadelphia wealth scattered throughout the hall.

Samantha nailed the landing, and the crowd showered her with applause as she bowed, acknowledged the orchestra and conductor, and bounded off stage left with a relieved grin on her face. Speaking into a microphone, the chair of the piano program introduced Jai, listing all the youth awards, the scholarships, the notable repertoire from his time at the conservatory.

“It’s not going to happen,” Jai muttered to himself.

He said it again, like a mantra. But he didn’t believe it.

What came next was a soupy haze: the darkened crowd, the grinning orchestra members tapping their bows on their music stands and shuffling their feet in acknowledgement as Jai somehow moved his legs to make it across the stage. He wiped down the keyboard with a handkerchief, poised his fingers over the keys, and nodded at the conductor. Just beyond the podium, Jai saw Patricia and her posse at the far end of the auditorium’s front row. She was giggling at something with the guy next to her, one hand obscuring her mouth while she slapped her knee with the other. In the auditorium’s silence, Jai heard each whack against her bare leg like a cymbal crash. She briefly caught his gaze. Rather than give a thumbs up or encouraging smile, she looked away, still chuckling.

The conductor’s hands snapped up into the air. Jai’s spine straightened on instinct, and he gently laid his fingers atop the ivory D-keys, one octave apart. The string section’s soft humming transported him into the lush, romantic world that Rachmaninoff had composed—that world where nothing mattered but technique and expressing the composer’s intention and above all else the sound, undulating above and below the orchestra’s swells. The concerto flowed from his fingertips in an uninterrupted cascade of controlled emotion, all the way to the final cadence, after which the crowd was clapping and the concertmaster was shaking his hand and he was practically floating off the stage.

# # #

Jai had to persuade his family to attend the afterparty at the upscale cafe across the street. They were proud, he could tell from his father’s tight smile, but they weren’t comfortable around the loud, ebullient people who crowded around them in the green room and out the stage door to the street after Jai’s performance.

It had been a smash. He’d hit every note as he intended. His stoic mentor had hugged him in the green room with tears in her eyes. His classmates, teachers, and even complete strangers heaped so much praise on him that Jai wondered if it had been the best performance of his life.

After making sure his parents had settled into a table with some food, Jai bounded out to the cafe’s second-floor terrace overlooking the conservatory and the square, where Patricia was holding court in a crush of tables near the railing. Jai had expected to see her backstage, but she must have gone straight to the bar. Her parents couldn’t make the recital since they were vacationing in Biarritz, but they’d sent her an outrageous bouquet that she’d paraded around the green room and that now dominated the cast-iron table where she sat.

“Hey Patty,” Jai called as he drew near. “Great job on the Haydn. Brilliant performance as always.” It had hardly been a challenge for her—a simple concerto that she’d mastered as a teenager—but it was enough to get her out of the conservatory and back to the people who mattered to her in New York.

She hoisted her martini glass toward him in acknowledgement, but she didn’t respond. She didn’t say anything about his performance. Jai thought Patricia would tease him about his ridiculous nightmare, or at least say a kind word. But she turned to the friends alongside her and resumed their conversation. Nobody moved to make room for him to sit down, so he stood there for some awkward moments with his hands thrust into his tuxedo’s enormous pockets, trying to join in on nearby conversations. Nobody showed the slightest interest in him. He was back to his first week at the conservatory, when nobody cared about the quiet immigrant kid in the frumpy clothing. His musicianship had been his passport into their world, and for some reason they’d revoked it after his biggest triumph yet.

After an hour moping around the bar, Jai urged his parents to catch the train back to their motel by the airport before it got too late. While settling the tab, he spotted Patricia heading to the bathroom and managed to intercept her on her way back to the terrace. “So I guess the dream was just a dream, eh?” he said, trying to strike a light tone that would get her talking.

“Was it?” she said.

“Well, I didn’t mess up, did I? I didn’t lose my place in the score.”

She nodded, but her attention was fixed over his shoulder on the terrace.

“Patty, what’s up? Do you think I played poorly?”

“No, no. Technically you were great. To us—” she gestured at her friends outside, “—it lacked the usual passion or, I don’t know… brilliance of your normal playing. It was kind of disappointing, to be honest.”

Jai straightened. “Well, everybody else I’ve talked to tonight disagrees.”

She patted his shoulder. “That’s great, Jai. You’ve got your fans.”

She started walking away, but she paused and half-turned to face him.

“In a way, the dream did come true,” she said. “You always seemed so calm and confident. But once you said you were going to bomb, once that idea started getting around the school… It was hard to hear your performance any other way, y’know?”

Jai leaned against the wall and watched her rejoin the rich and careless people who grouped around her. He should have been in the center of that circle, hoisted on their shoulders, the most talented of the lot on the greatest night of his life. Instead, his friendship with Patricia had been severed. He’d known from the start that she was only interested in his talent. He was a trophy she could show off to people who were impressed by such things. His exceptional musical ability gave her a reason to induct him into her high society and shower him with attention and invite him to extravagant prix fixe dinners around town. And he was happy to enter her swanky, intoxicating world. But his premonition had been a seed planted in her head that had taken form beyond his control. To Patricia, he’d choked, if he hadn’t. 

Alone, Jai began walking to his basement apartment a couple miles away, trying to suppress his sense of anger and betrayal. He’d done everything right and still she’d exiled him. Tomorrow he would take the train to the airport, where he’d hold his parents’ calloused hands and kiss them goodbye and pray that he’d never need to go home again. He might get the career and the accolades, but there would be no more champagne parties or trips to Bridgeport. He would never be a Patricia.

She was right, Jai realized. It wasn’t his best performance.