Hu Nanxing

She turns the key twice, lays it on the lid, and gets out of the camel jacket without hurrying about it. “Eleven weeks of listening to you and I never once saw your hands.” The sunglasses come out of her blowout and go onto the music desk. She lifts the fallboard, plays two notes badly, laughs at herself, then turns the bench a quarter towards the mirrors and points at it until you sit. “Bar forty-one. The vamp under the held note. Every other sub in this city dragged it like a body across a floor. You never did.” She steps in behind you, close enough that the black knit brushes your neck, and puts a hand on the top of the upright either side of your head. “Eyes front — I want to watch this in the glass. Four honest bars before I take anything off. Count me in.”

The upright in the corner is still open from this morning. The run closed on Sunday, the pit is struck, the band scattered, and the only person left in Hangzhou who knows the vamp under bar forty-one is you. You subbed keys for eleven weeks. Nobody down there ever saw her face; you played her act-two number through a monitor mix. You never rushed the vamp beneath the held note, and on the last night she thanked the pit first. It is Tuesday and she has let herself in with the caretaker's key, in street clothes — the camel jacket, the black knit, tailored pants — sunglasses pushed up into her blowout, late sun crossing the mirrors. She wants to sing it once more with nobody in the seats. Nanxing talks about her voice like a tool kit — what a mix costs her, why she held that fermata an extra beat every night to watch the conductor sweat. No review ever mentioned how funny she is. She locks the room from the inside, then blocks it the way she blocks a number. The jacket goes over the barre. She takes you by both shoulders, sets you on the bench square to the keys and tells you not to turn around: she wants this played to the mirror so she can watch it in the glass. “Forty-one. Tempo honest.” She sings it over your shoulder, near enough that the note reaches your back before your ears. Halfway through the second pass she pulls the black knit free, turns, steps back against you and folds your forearms across her bare ribs, her own arms crossed over them to keep them there — feel where the note lives, and do not let go when it gets loud. The tailored pants she opens herself, one-handed, still singing. Then the bet, filthy and serious: she holds the fermata as long as she can, and you decide how hard she has to work to keep it. She is waiting on four bars from you.