Migrant Workers

I was born with eighty-eight fingers, Yevgeny liked to say. He liked to talk about his father, a jeweler with whom he’d come to New York from Ukraine when he was seventeen (from Uzhgorod by the river Uzh and the borders of Hungary and Romania), about his father’s hands, the fingernails “čísto,” “clean as virgins,” the fingertips blackened from jeweler’s rouge.

Yevgeny’d been asked to appear at an American debut—a young pianist from rural China. Reviews were lavishly inane—her ability “enchanted . . . her fingers unlock spirits that rise to meet her.” Exaggeration sells the best seats in the house, Yevgeny said. To his friends he’d say, This century, Chinese will eat Russians alive.

“What do you think of her?” Judith said. Yevgeny milled in a reception room with potted plastic ixia and principal donors, mostly East Coast Jews, the women wearing rubies on their crumpled hands.

“What do I think?” Yevgeny said.

“Of this girl, the youngest woman in the world.”

There were many couples in the room—As numb as Friday night audiences can be, he had said before to Judith, as if pulled from beds, from televisions.

“I hope she should live as long,” he said.

“You do hope that, don’t you? At our age . . .” She’d been married half her life to a surgeon who, to appease her, had given large sums to the symphony. “I only admit it to you,” she said, “but I don’t like young musicians. They feel they should have some, what? They should have some persona. But it’s very artificial. They should have careers.”

“At my age, finally you can enjoy rewards.” People noticed Yevgeny’s w’s and r’s, lightly rolled, little whirrs. He’d played under all the greats, had won the Tchaikovsky competition in his twenties, which brought a precocious agent, a recording contract, a few men’s wives. Almost more than all of it, he valued the attention of women. He’d married once, a few years; though his father had called her “a mental case,” an English phrase he’d learned from television. He’d toured all over, had a house in Maine, a portrait of his father above the piano. It’s the parents, parents of musicians, who are due much more, Yevgeny’d said.

“What, you don’t practice anymore?”

“Of course I do.”

At the small bar set up at the back of the room, he felt another onset of dizziness. There’d been several moments, six blocks’ worth on the way in the taxi, he couldn’t account for—a hot spasm behind the eyes, a suddenly lit match, then a lack of air, near-claustrophobia. Taking a glass of champagne, he saw the crowd filtered through a matte, river-water lens, complexions merging with their hair and the wallpaper. On New Year’s Day, his housekeeper had found him—head on the table, blacked out over breakfast, face in the willowware, nose in the oranges, only a spell, he’d said, I’m obscenely healthy. He hadn’t told anyone: colleagues, friends. No one should doubt him. Now it was March.

“You’re here. I’m surprised,” said Harry, a board member, son and grandnephew of board members, his wife of one month talking with donors’ wives nearby.

“I wanted to hear Xi-wei,” said Yevgeny.

“Just said hello backstage. She’s ready to go. You know we can’t afford receptions anymore with the economy. I keep telling them that. Hello, Judy. But who wants to listen?” He kissed her cheek. “How are you?” he said to Yevgeny.

“Very well. I had a cold last week. You know what tastes like the economy? This champagne. Where’s your father?”

“Couldn’t make it.”

“And when do I meet her?”

“You’ll see her afterwards. She’s practicing.”

“A little late for practice,” Judith said, “Yevgeny could show her some things, I bet.”

“No one can teach,” Yevgeny said. His suit fit him poorly, he almost hadn’t worn it. This morning he’d stopped for a haircut and shave...