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.I was already spending little time at Manhattan School when I won one of three oboe spots in the National Orchestral Association (NOA) in a highly competitive audition.NOA was a training orchestra for the crème de la crème of New York’s best young players, and I was honored to suddenly find myself among them.Founded in 1930 by philanthropist Mary Flagler Cary and maintained by the Cary Trust, the group even paid me and its other musicians a small amount, funding performances of several concerts at Carnegie Hall with soloists like Richard Goode and Ruggiero Ricci.Leaving NOA rehearsals, which met three afternoons a week at Juilliard, I discovered the real action took place at Lincoln Center.In the evenings, I’d seen Leonard Bernstein walking to work.It felt like I was watching a movie, especially when I saw the violin star Pinchas Zukerman racing across the plaza and Luciano Pavarotti gliding by in a stretch limo; none of that excitement infected Manhattan School.Here, clarinetists, violinists, and trumpeters rushed to their stage doors at 7:30 P.M.I couldn’t wait to join them.All those worlds collided at the Allendale, where students from Juilliard, Mannes, and the Manhattan School could fraternize with music professionals.On any night, impromptu chamber music parties erupted, given a little Mozart sheet music, some kung pao chicken from Hunan Balcony, and a joint.One night, I played through the Mozart Oboe Quar-with my neighbors, beers at our feet, and so it was not surprising when we all ended up in bed together.Much of New York’s classical music community did this with equal abandon, as the lines between music and passion blurred.Instrument players had a sexual style unique to their instrument.Neurotic violinists, anonymous in their orchestra section, came fast.Trumpet players pumped away like jocks, while pianists’ sensitive fingers worked magic.French horn players, their instruments the testiest of all, could rarely get it up, but percussionists could make beautiful music out of anything at all.One of them even specialized in making instruments from refrigerators, auto taillights, and other castoffs he’d found at junkyards.Oboists crossed an incestuous line, speaking a language of reeds, articulation, and the challenges of playing Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin.Because of our obscure shared experience, the relationship between oboists could be comfy as old flannel, giving the deceptive illusion of safety between competitors.I had first met Jayson at a reception for musicians of the newly-formed American Philharmonic.Twisting his wedding ring, he whispered to me that I should pretend to be an old friend, so no one would know that he’d hired me purely on the recommendation of my teacher, Joe Robinson.I felt privileged to have landed the gig and to be in on the intrigue of Jayson’s con game.Jayson would have done anything to make Robinson happy.As principal oboist of the New York Philharmonic, one of America’s five biggest symphony orchestras, Robinson was in a position to hire freelancers like Jayson to substitute in his orchestra on a week-to-week basis.Since New York Philharmonic players were also offered lucrative studio work before freelancers were called, Robinson might recommend Jayson for jingles and film soundtracks as well.The American Philharmonic gave its first performance in the autumn of 1979 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, under Rohan Joseph, a Sri Lankan conductor of questionable ability who had launched the orchestra.Fortunately, Rohan’s musicianship was counterbalanced by enormous talents of persuasion, as he schmoozed wealthy board members into bank-rolling his project and talked musicians into volunteering their services.I was too naive to understand how freelance musicians landed gigs through networking.What I did know was that the concerts I played at Carnegie Hall and Washington’s Kennedy Center over the following months trumped anything I’d play at school as a nineteen-year-old undergraduate.What’s more, I shared every aspiring performer’s dream: to join a professional orchestra that promises to grow.I overlooked the fact that by rehearsing for free (we were paid only for concerts), we perpetuated the classic scenario of artists subsidizing a performing arts group, the only way such a group can come close to paying its own way without substantial funding.Jayson, who like Robinson and me was also a Southerner, was extraordinarily friendly.At thirty-four he was considerably older, but had taken the job as a way of improving his résumé with a principal oboe position.In addition, other freelancers who might hire him for work would hear and see him play the prominent oboe solos in orchestral music.Although Robinson wasn’t particularly supportive of me or any of his other students, he liked knowing one of us was already playing at Carnegie.At the same time, Jayson flattered Robinson by taking a few oboe lessons.The two men became closer by playing golf afterward.Jayson was likable, and Robinson soon added him to the New York Philharmonic’s sub list.Jayson was moving in on me too.After rehearsing Anton Bruckner’s Third Symphony at a public school on West 77th Street one afternoon, he invited me to his place to make reeds.First, we shared drinks at the fireplace bar at One If by Land, a romantic restaurant housed in Aaron Burr’s historic coach house on Barrow Street.By the third Chivas, I had melted against him on the sofa, gazing at the candlelight reflected in his eyes.Winding down Grove Street, we climbed five flights to his walkup across from Chumley’s.His dancer wife was out west, on a six-month tour with American Ballet Theater.I unzipped my bag of reed tools.Jayson reached around, taking the kit with one hand while unbuttoning my blouse with the other.Ambidextrous but gym-phobic, he was all love handles and bad posture, but none of that mattered as we climbed past the makeshift closet, where his wife piled leotards and dance skirts, and up to their loft bed.We flailed away, laughing as we kept hitting the ceiling.I looked up to Jayson as an older mentor in love and work.The tryst was the first of a three-year affair.I devoured books about loving a married man: the tragedy and, for the lucky, the triumph.Every time we spent the night together, I got another gig shadowing him in the second oboe chair.With his wife gone half the year, it was only a matter of time until he left her.Jayson had something very different in mind.His marriage included an influential father-in-law, an iconoclastic architect who ran a utopian colony in Arizona, a man with social connections that would serve any performing artist well.I was simply part of his grand networking plan, though I offered fringe benefits that Robinson and his father-in-law did not.Our liaison was already unimaginably glamorous and romantic to me.At a fundraiser in the swooping modern building at 9 West 57th Street, Jayson and I swam nude in the skyscraper’s pool, taking in the glittering skyline.Tipsy and dripping, I joined him in a formal woodwind octet performance for couture mogul Xavier Guerrand-Hermès and his friends.When Betty hired us both for a Basically Baroque church gig, we spent our break making out on the chaplain’s darkened office floor.“The section that lays together plays together,” Jayson panted, his hairless chest heaving [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]