Yet how did Alice perceive herself? Double standards being what they are, I’m guessing her parents—perhaps in spite of efforts to avoid talking about it—made her feel like soiled goods, as though she would never appeal to any man now that she was no longer a virgin. What did the parishioners say about her? The members of her choirs? The neighbours? Perhaps they said nothing, and their silence roared in her ears as self-recrimination.
Or maybe Alice rejected their unspoken judgement, and felt furious that John’s lies—so many lies!—had damaged her reputation while he sailed clear away.
24
ON CAMPUS MY LOVE OF CONTEMPORARY jazz had all the social appeal of a cold sore. At the mention of jazz most people would stare at me, assume I was joking, and change the topic. ‘Doesn’t it all sound the same?’ asked one boy, who was obsessed with heavy metal, without irony.
In Sydney the word jazz conjured images of banjos and clarinets, white-suited horn players lifting their instruments in tandem from the seated front row of a big band. Somehow in the Australian popular imagination, jazz had become untethered from its African-American roots, cast off from its history of expressing the yearning for liberation from oppression. The recordings of John Coltrane and Dizzy Gillespie and Roy Haynes and Betty Carter that I listened to sounded nothing like the music I heard live every week, but nor did I expect it to. The gigs I heard were largely played by middle-class boys. White boys who longed to express themselves outside the rigid confines of rock and pop—and who’d grown up in a country that provided health insurance. While they might struggle to get a girlfriend and pay the rent, they had always been free.
On campus I wanted desperately to excel, but my English Lit essay results, like me, were unremarkable. An adolescence spent reading books and studying the piano had made me as useful for any real-world application as the pianists in the novels I had read. My anxiety at feeling out of my depth and my mediocre results sent me scurrying into hiding. I was too shy to ask for help, too afraid to turn up for an audition at the dramatic society or to volunteer for the Arts Revue, too self-conscious to become a member of the tennis club. I didn’t think that perhaps I had chosen the wrong subjects, or that possibly I wasn’t ready for university. Nor did I imagine that anyone else felt as stupid, shy and awkward as I did. I had long fantasised about meeting new people, but up close they terrified me. They might discover that nothing was going on beneath my polished surface, that the still waters I presented were in fact pretty shallow.
Instead I haunted the gloomy research stacks of Fisher Library; the grey metal shelves carried the burden of all the literary ghosts whose works rested there in peace. I clutched a paper scribbled with author surnames and Dewey decimal numbers like a scrap of hieroglyph, but I didn’t know what I was looking for. I had imagined my future would unfold like a pristine map, easy to read and the right way up at all times. I’d been wrong.
In that first year of university, I had a much better time off campus than on, reading books, studying for my piano performance diploma, working my volunteer and my three paid jobs. I spent my leisure time watching jazz musicians transcend self-consciousness to express themselves in public. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, the contemporary jazz scene in Sydney consisted of dozens of bands, around twenty-five musicians, and about five venues. In addition to the Basement, my live music orbit took in the Harbourside Brasserie on the western side of the Harbour Bridge, the brightly lit Real Ale Cafe on King Street, the underground bunker of the Soup Plus Cafe on George, and the velvet darkness of Round Midnight in Kings Cross. Finding this live jazz netherworld was like stepping through the back of the wardrobe in C.S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia.
Daniela and I now sipped gin and tonics. Between songs and sets, we enjoyed listening to other people’s conversations. One woman might complain to her friend, ‘It doesn’t sound the same as it does on the record,’ and Daniela and I would turn to each other and smile into our drinks. That’s the point—it’s called improvisation. The sly attentions of men we caught looking at us also made us laugh. In fact, we laughed about as much as we could. It staved off the anxiety.
There were almost no women jazz musicians. Why was that? They seemed to be everywhere in other styles of music, fronting rock bands, strumming guitars, singing backup. Had there been one woman in any of the jazz bands I saw during my late teens and early twenties, I would have gone up to her during a break between sets and asked her how she did it. How did she fight through the muck of self-consciousness to play to the best of her ability in public? Did she feel self-doubt and go ahead anyway? Did she have a secret trick to drown out all the self-criticism in her head as she played? Did she believe other people when they told her she sounded great? Why didn’t I?
Just as it had when I saw my first jazz concert at the age of six, live musical performance still seemed to be the best way to spend my time. But I was hung up on the dilemma of perfectionism. ‘To be a professional musician one must be schizophrenic, with a split mind, half of which knows it is impossible to play perfectly, while the other half believes that to play perfectly is
