* * *
Jason came over that night. My mother was home—we hadn’t spoken to each other—so I came out into the front yard to talk to him. When I saw him, my heart flooded with hope. He was here because he’d realized he was wrong; he had come to somehow mend it. But when I shut the door behind me and he said, “Hey, I think we should talk,” I could tell from his tone it wasn’t that at all.
“Great,” I said. “Let’s talk, then. What are you going to do? Everyone else seems to have their futures all planned out. Do you know too, and you just haven’t told me?”
He looked a little startled by my tone, but he recovered. “I don’t know yet,” he said. “Um—with San Diego or Irvine, though, I think those aren’t in the cards for me.”
I gave you everything, I thought. There was nothing in the world I wouldn’t have done for you.
“Okay,” I said. “Well—I’ll look into community colleges in Berkeley, then. Or—”
“I don’t think you should think about it like that.”
“You don’t think I should think about it like what?”
“I don’t think you should, like, factor in where I’m going at all. Go wherever’s best for you. Also, Beth—did you seriously get into Juilliard?”
“That’s irrelevant.”
“How is that irrelevant? Are you kidding me? I can’t believe you didn’t tell me.”
Why were we talking about this? Surely it was still too painful for him, and anyway, it didn’t matter. “I was only going to go there if you went. It was never—”
“That’s so messed up, though.”
“Did you just envision us like not even bothering to try to be close next year? Just ending up on different sides of the country or whatever, who cares?”
“Isn’t that kind of how it goes? I would expect you to do whatever’s best for you and not give that up because it didn’t work out for me.”
I thought of how it had felt between us all the night of Homecoming, how I had never had a stronger sense of belonging. I realized I’d been subconsciously fingering the necklace I was wearing, the one he’d given me, and I dropped my hand. “It doesn’t have to be how it goes.”
“I can’t believe you’re seriously standing here telling me you would even think about giving up Juilliard to commute from community college or whatever so—”
“Why is that so hard to believe? If you care about someone, you’ll sacrifice the—”
“It has nothing to do with caring about someone.”
“It has everything to do with that.”
That was the limit of his patience, apparently, with the conversation. His expression shifted then into something like anger. “Like how you apparently arranged my whole life without even telling me? What if I didn’t want to go to Berkeley? And what if I didn’t want you all to babysit me?”
“You always said you wanted to go there.”
“Okay, well, I didn’t realize I was committing my life to a secret plan when I said that, so—”
“Well, what was I supposed to do, Jason? You wouldn’t let me tell anyone about applying to Juilliard.”
“You weren’t supposed to do anything. That’s the whole point. When did I ask you to plan all that out for me?”
“But you’ve—”
“But I’ve what?”
“You’ve been acting like—” I cut myself off. “I’ve been so scared.”
“I told you to just forget it. Beth, you’re like—”
“But you’re pretending nothing happened!” I said. “What do you think it’s been like for me? What am I supposed to think when you just disappear, or you just seem really off and then you don’t pick up your phone, or—”
“You’re not supposed to think anything. I told you to just—move on.”
“It doesn’t work like that, Jason.”
I was flushed all over, and my limbs felt detached from my body; I had the strange feeling that if he touched me right now his hand would go through me, like through a ghost.
Jason cleared his throat. He looked steeled and a little nervous, the way he always did before a show.
“Listen,” he said, “this isn’t how I meant for any of this to go. You’re such an incredible person, Beth. I know it’s such a cliché, but I mean it. You—you mean a lot to me.”
The world started to spin around me, slowly at first, and then picking up speed. “Are you breaking up with me?”
He pulled air into his cheeks and then exhaled, scuffing the toe of his shoe against our front step. “I know this was maybe my only shot and I fucked it up. I just—I can’t keep doing this.”
“Is this about next year?” My voice sounded choked. “If I’d just gotten into Berkeley, would it have—”
“No. Beth—no. I swear. I just—it’s not the right time. It’s just me. I’m just not—it’s not the right time for me.”
“Did I do something wrong?” I could hear my voice going high-pitched, the tone my father always described in a woman as shrill. “I can—we can figure this out, if you—”
“It’s nothing you did.”
But how could he say that? All the ways I’d given of myself, all the times I’d swallowed back what I wanted to say, all the times I had tried to make myself easy for them and for him—I felt those sear across my skin. He had seen me—he had seen the most I had to offer anyone, the very best I could do—and I loved him, more than possibly anyone in my life, and none of that was enough for him.
“I tried to give you everything,” I said. “And there were things I never told anyone else that—”
“I know,” he said, and then at once he wasn’t angry anymore; his voice dropped. “The night we went to see your dad—that was when I realized—”
I stared at him. “Is that why you’re breaking up with me?”
“It’s not like that,” he said quietly. “Just—that night I realized—”
“Oh my God.”
He swallowed. A curtain was coming over my vision. I couldn’t see in the periphery; there were circles swimming wherever I tried to look. He said, “The thing is, Beth, I just—”
“Leave,” I said wildly.
“Wait, Beth, hear me out. I—”
But I couldn’t bear to stand there a second longer. “Leave,” I cried, and after I slammed the door I clawed at my necklace until the chain snapped and the pendant flew off. It flashed once in the light and then made a minute, tinny clattering sound when it hit the floor.
TO GET TO the Golden Gate Bridge from Congress Springs if you don’t have a car takes nearly four hours if you’re relying on public transit, and when I looked up the route on Google Maps it was so convoluted, with so many stops, I knew I wouldn’t be able to do it. Surely I would have a panic attack somewhere along the way and I would be alone and there would be no one I could call.
If I didn’t have the credit card, that probably would have been enough to stop me, but as it was I just got my own Uber account and walked to a corner a few blocks away from our home to be picked up. It was a Tuesday morning, and I was supposed to be in school, but in a few hours maybe that wouldn’t matter.
The driver, whose name according to the app was Paul, was a white tech-looking guy (North Face fleece, fitted jeans) who was probably in his twenties. I got in, and the articles my mom always forwarded me or that you’d see girls sharing online flashed through my mind—confirm the license plate, check for child locks, trust your instincts. But what good were my instincts? The people I loved more than anything, the people I had built my life around, had been the ones to ruin me.
“So what are you doing at the Golden Gate Bridge?” he said, meeting my eyes in the rearview mirror.
“Just visiting.”
“There’s not a race or something today?”
I shook my head. I wondered whether if I told him I had a boyfriend, he would leave me alone.
“So you want to know something interesting?” he said. “Everyone thinks the bridge is like, the Golden Gate
Bridge, like the bridge itself is supposed to be golden. The Gate Bridge, only gold. But then it’s orange, so everyone’s like, what the hell, right, that’s not gold. But actually the Golden Gate is the land strait where the Bay hits the Pacific. So it’s like, the bridge over the Golden Gate. That’s why it’s called that. Not many people know that.”
What was he even talking about? People always said you made new friends after high school, that you met new people, but then you met new people and they blathered on about inane trivia about bridges while you were trapped in their car. I could feel the bleakness of my future trying desperately to winnow some kind of sustaining purpose and intimacy from a hundred stupid interactions like this one. The gap between starting over and the world I’d shared with my friends was insurmountable.
Anyway, I’d known that about the bridge. We’d learned it in California history in fourth grade.
He talked for a while about how he’d moved here from Florida to work in tech but then worried he wasn’t finding himself, and he kept going as we got onto the freeway. I was trying not to listen, because this wasn’t the last conversation I wanted to hold in my mind. Already it was making me feel cluttered, and further and further away from the hour last night when, sleepless, I’d thought: What if I was just like Jason?
I wanted everyone to know what they had done to me. I knew what they thought: that it was all forgivable, that they were making reasonable choices, that I would get over it and accept it and move on. They were taking me for granted in that. On the way there, I imagined what they would say when they heard the news.
I felt flushed all over, and my heart wouldn’t slow down. I was starting to get dizzy.
“So what kind of music do you like?” Paul said as we slowed to a crawl in Palo Alto.
“I don’t like music.”
“What! That’s impossible. How is that possible?”
“I just don’t.”
“You’ve never heard good music, then,” he said. “You know why? I bet you listen to all the top-forty crap on the radio. All just mass-produced, commercial bullshit. I’ve been getting more into music theory lately—all just self-taught—and it’s pretty interesting. You should look into it sometime.”
“Maybe.”
“If you ever learn anything about classical music, you’ll gain this huge appreciation for everything else you hear. I have this really good Spotify station.” He turned it on—I didn’t have the energy to stop him—and we listened to the second half of a mediocre rendition of a Delibes operetta. There wasn’t enough brass; it sounded a little thin.
“It’s an acquired taste,” he said. “Like good wine. How old are you?”
I said I was twenty. I couldn’t tell if he believed me or not. He looked at me more closely in the rearview mirror, taking his eyes from the road. I wasn’t quite distracted enough that it didn’t make me uncomfortable. I wished I’d gotten into someone else’s car. I was starting to feel sick.
Except there was nowhere better I could be. I couldn’t be at home, I couldn’t be at school, I couldn’t be at BAYS—none of those places would ever be the same anymore. I had given all of myself, and to have that thrown back at me was so exquisitely painful I didn’t know how to live with it. That was the point; that was why I was here, why I would go and stand where Jason had stood, and see if, maybe, it was easier to just not go on. It would be terrifying, and it would hurt, but then it would be over. It would be a way out.
And then the next song on Paul’s playlist (Beethoven’s Fifth, which if I were in another mood might have amused me) ended and the next one that came on—it took me a little while to recognize it as a take on the end of Bach’s The Art of Fugue. When I realized what it was my throat went tight. I knew this song.
The Art of Fugue was Bach’s last, incomplete work, and though I knew the story of the last part, the Unfinished Fugue, I’d never heard it played until a few years before at the symphony with my mother. The composition ends sharply in the middle of a measure, either because Bach died before he could finish or because—what I believed—he’d hoped others might continue it after he was gone. That day at the symphony, they’d simply stopped playing where the music stopped, and it had been stunning. You felt the loss in that abrupt silence, and even though I’d just seen them that morning and would see them the next day too, it had made me ache for my friends. And what had crystallized for me then was a specific dream: that we would write our own ending for this together. I remembered how I had messaged them at intermission to say so, and how with anyone else maybe I would’ve felt stupid but with them it was just another one of those promises we made: not just a promise about the future but a promise about the present, too, of the space we held in one another’s lives.
I was crying in the back seat of the car. Paul studiously pretended not to notice.
It would never be the same with anyone else. I knew that; maybe it was because I would never again be able to love so fiercely and unguardedly, or maybe it’s that everyone gets one great friendship in their lives, if they’re lucky, and that was mine.
I didn’t want it to end like this. Maybe it was too late; maybe this was already the end for the five of us, or me and Jason, but I didn’t want to die sad and angry and desperately lonely. Really, I didn’t want to die at all. I wanted things to be better. I just didn’t know how.
“Actually,” I said, and I had to say it twice to get his attention, “actually, I don’t think I want to go to San Francisco anymore. If you could just drive back to Congress Springs instead.”
* * *
A school and an orchestra are both places where it’s difficult to avoid people you don’t wish to see, not because they might try to talk to you—because mine didn’t—but because they’re so woven into the fabric of your day that even if seeing them is like a stab wound it will happen to you, over and over, relentlessly. You see when they’re all together for lunch looking as self-contained as you used to think they were with you; you notice when one of them (in this case, Jason) seems to stop hanging out with them and sometimes you see him in other parts of campus alone.
Later that week, Sunny and Grace were walking together in the halls before the first bell rang and we all saw each other, and it was too late to pretend otherwise. Your body is slow to catch on to things, and before I could stop it, I felt that little leap of joy I always did when I saw them, the way the people you love always look so beautiful to you, and that time—it was such a chemical response—I let myself hope. Maybe they would call me over; maybe things were fixable. But Sunny said something to Grace, and they walked away.
It was, it turned out, eminently possible to feel alone on a campus of two thousand after all.
My mother came into my room Friday when I was getting ready for bed.
“I finally worked things out with your credit card company,” she said. Her face was like stone. “And I paid your bill. They were going to send it to a collections agency. What on earth did you think was going to happen, Beth?”
“I was going to pay it over the summer. I thought it just meant you had to pay more interest.”
“I can’t believe you were so careless. We’re very lucky they were willing to work with me. Your credit score is going to be ruined for years.”
“I’ll pay you back,” I mumbled. I occupied myself buttoning my pajama top so I didn’t have to look at her.
“And I had to cancel Asheville, so you can take that off your calendar.”
I jerked my head up, stunned. “What do you mean you had to—”
“Beth, I don’t have an extra fifteen hundred dollars lying around.”
I thought the guilt would stop my heart. “Mom, wait, I can get a job—maybe we can still—”
“It’s too late for that.” She leaned over to lift the half-full plastic bag from my wastebasket and tied the top into a quick, angry knot. “Everyone’s born with a different number of chances in the world, you know. You’ll get more than I did. Don’t waste yours on stupid t
hings like this.”
* * *
The BAYS Senior Showcase, the last major performance of the year, was that weekend in San Francisco, three weeks before college decisions were due. I was glad, for the first time, that Jason wouldn’t be there, that Grace was several rows back. It would be easy enough to slip in right at the end of warm-ups and leave right afterward, and not have to see them. It would be worse to spend the time with my mother in the car, but I put headphones in, and she drove the whole way with her lips pressed tightly together, and she didn’t say anything to me either, even when halfway through I took my headphones and made a show of wrapping them up to put away. Maybe on some level she knew there was a part of me that had never felt alone like this before and that hoped beyond hope she would talk to me.
I still had barely been able to play. I had been going to rehearsals because it was easier than not going, I’d cast my ballot with the other seniors for which pieces we’d perform, though since hearing from Juilliard, going to BAYS had been physically painful. Each note throbbed in my chest. But I’d told myself that if that night there was even just a little of the old joy in it again—that would be enough. I wouldn’t consign myself to San Diego or Irvine and I would find some way to make Juilliard work, and that would be how I would start over, who I would be. I would fight for it.
When we filed onto the stage that night, I tried to take everything in, to hold it close—the scuffed wooden floor, the neat rows of us. The murmur of the audience before we started, the way even after all this time my heart wobbled like a rocking chair when the house lights dimmed. The show was in a converted old stone church we’d played in almost every year, and it should’ve been easy; I should’ve been able to go on autopilot. But as soon as Mr. Irving lifted his arms to usher us into the first song, everything felt wrong.
We played Bach’s Partita first. As we began the piece that night, I tried to imagine all the hundreds of thousands of people who had played this piece before me. I tried to imagine the former members of BAYS and what they might be doing now, how they’d have spouses and children maybe, houses and jobs, and I tried to imagine a younger Mr. Irving conducting it all those years before. This song could hold all those things, and tonight, I told myself, it could hold me, too.
When We Were Infinite Page 29
