Musical Chairs

by Amy Poeppel

  Bridget was an excellent musician, while Will would describe himself as a highly competent one. He was dedicated, precise, careful. “Robotic” was the word Edward had once used when he’d heard the original Forsyth Trio play, doing a number on Will’s self-esteem. Will admittedly was at his best with Bach, where the beauty is in the music itself. He was worse with contemporary composers. Schoenberg made him want to stab someone. And musicians like Lang Lang—or the insufferable, pompous Gavin Glantz, their very first violinist, with all his drama and flair—nauseated him. Enough with the histrionics, Will wanted to yell. Just play the music. Gavin would whip his hair around in a ridiculous arc whenever the trio finished a piece. “He’s an outstanding player,” Bridget would remind him. “What difference does it make what he does with his hair?”

  She was right. But, of course, Bridget was more forgiving of flair. She was Edward Stratton’s daughter after all. And Edward’s flair was his signature. For conductors, a little drama was part of the job description. Unlike for an instrumentalist, the conductor’s job was all about interpretation, of infusing oneself into the music. If the conductor was lacking in personality, then a piece lacking personality was what the audience would get. Edward Stratton was brimming with personality. He was scintillating, informed, gregarious, and the most popular guest at any party. He was also one of the most narcissistic people Will had ever known.

  Gavin was the other. At the very first opportunity, just when the Forsyth Trio was getting recognition and high praise, Gavin left them to take a seat with the orchestra of the Sydney Opera House. It was rotten timing when he left. They’d gotten a great review in the New York Times from Alex Ross, who noted their “distinct sound” and “unparalleled vigor,” saying they were this generation’s Beaux Arts Trio and calling Gavin an artist “of precision and exuberance.” But in spite of the accolades, Gavin would insist on fishing for compliments from Will, even though reviewers usually highlighted him as the star of the trio. Gavin put on an act of being insecure even though he knew perfectly well he had no reason to be, and Will found the charade wearing and pointless. Good riddance, Will had thought when Gavin announced he was leaving.

  Their new violinist was a star; Will hoped Caroline’s personality was nothing like Gavin’s.

  * * *

  Jisoo had reached the end of the piece.

  “Well done,” he said. “Really, really nice. Remember: don’t accent the grace note, but rather the quarter note that follows.” He gave her homework for the following week.

  “Is the room free for the next hour?” she asked.

  “Keep on playing until somebody kicks you out,” said Will. “Hey, we should put that on a bumper sticker.” He turned to leave. “Jisoo,” he said, stepping back in the room, “are you good with computers?”

  She looked up. “Sure, I guess.”

  “Do you know anything about doing websites?”

  “Oh,” she said, “no, I’m not good like that.”

  “Yeah, me neither,” he said.

  “But I’m friends with a guy who’s super smart. You want me to text him?”

  “Who is he?”

  “A sophomore in the engineering school at NYU. He’s very techy.”

  College kids were usually cheap and brilliant. “Interesting,” said Will.

  She was already texting at lightning speed. “I shared your number.”

  “My trio has this website, but it’s a little—”

  “Brendan answered,” she said. “He says do you need a new website or an update?”

  “I need it updated. Or improved. I don’t know exactly.” The whole transaction was moving a little faster than Will was ready for. “Wouldn’t hurt to talk to him, I guess, right?”

  She was still texting. “Brendan says he’ll do it. He’s at work right now, but he’ll contact you later.”

  “Thanks,” he said, feeling excited about taking a positive step and advancing the trio’s next chapter. “A new website would be terrific.”

  He left to the sound of Jisoo practicing scales.

  * * *

  After a quick trip to pick up Mitzy’s groceries and a few things for himself, he walked down his beautiful tree-lined street toward home, stopping dead in his tracks when he looked up: there beside the cracked sidewalk—directly in front of his beloved building—was a large sign with the words For Sale.

  3

  Gavin was somehow lost.

  It was hard to get turned around in New York City, what with the grid and all, but there was an area around Astor Place, where Lafayette turned into Fourth and Bowery turned into Third and then Third and Fourth went off in different directions instead of staying parallel like all the other avenues in the city, where he always got confused.

  Getting lost in Manhattan reminded him of the joke the seniors told him when he first got to Juilliard from a middle-class suburb in Maryland: A lost tourist asks a New Yorker, “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The New Yorker says, “Practice!”

  Gavin would not ask for directions. Tourists ask for directions, and he was not a tourist. New York had once been his home.

  He kept walking south, knowing he could take a right on Great Jones (or what might be called 3rd Street, depending on where he was) and end up at Washington Square Park.

  Returning to New York City was a mixed bag every time. Gavin rarely had the time to visit his favorite old haunts (the deli on 93rd above which he’d lived or the café on Columbus where he’d learned to like coffee), but he also managed to stumble across places that held not-so-great memories. Even today, he happened to pass a street corner where he’d tried to make out with a girl who’d turned him down with the old I just want to be friends line; he’d pretended like he didn’t care. And now he spotted a club where he’d been the only one in a group of guys to get carded, and the bouncer had made him leave. Standing on the sidewalk outside that very place, which was now a pop-up clothing and jewelry market, he could still feel the bitterness and embarrassment. Gavin had been only sixteen when he’d started conservatory, and he’d frequently felt like he was playing catch-up to the other students. He had been inexperienced and naive but tried to play it cool. Kind of like he was doing now, pretending he knew where he was going when he didn’t, acting like his shoelace hadn’t untied when it had.

  On this trip Gavin made an intentional decision to have lunch at a pizza dive in the Village. A college student he once knew—an attractive soprano who was kind enough to let him lose his virginity to her the summer after he graduated from college—had worked there, back in the day when it was called Rico’s, and she gave him a free slice whenever he came by to say hello. The place had changed since then, unsurprisingly, and Gavin had to decide if he wanted to eat there now that the space housed a Sweetgreen, a restaurant he could go to anytime in LA. Disappointed, he went in anyway and ordered the kale Caesar and a chai tea and took his lunch outside to a table on the sidewalk.

  He liked New York, but he wasn’t sorry that he’d left. His life in LA suited him better in every way. Still, this was the place where he’d grown up, where he’d begun the long, painful process of figuring out who he was and who he wasn’t.

  A woman walked by his table and then stopped abruptly, slowly turning around. “Gavin? Gavin Glantz.”

  He looked up from his salad, his other hand on the brim of his plain, navy blue baseball cap. “Miriam,” he said, putting down his fork and getting to his feet. He kissed her cheek. “Good to see you. What are you doing here?”

  “Having a ball,” she said. “I’m an empty nester now, so my life is my own again. I came to see a show, do a little shopping. And now I’ve had my first celebrity sighting of the day. Are you performing?”

  “Tonight, yes.” He didn’t want to show off, but she was waiting for details. “It’s just a thing at Lincoln Center. Is Nicholas here with you?”

  “God, no,” she said, giving her hair a shake and lifting her shoulders so that her shopping bags were raised in the air.
“Haven’t you heard? We called it a day.”

  “What, really? I’m sorry to hear that.” He motioned for her to sit. “After how many years?”

  “Twenty-nine.” Miriam put her bags on one chair and sat across from him. “I finally got the hell out of England and bought a small house in Westchester. I can’t tell you what a relief it is to be living back in the States.”

  “Well,” he said, unsure of the best response, “you look great.” She did actually. Miriam had always been pretty.

  “That’s because I am not the injured party,” she said. “Nicholas is faring less well, from what I hear.”

  Nicholas Donahue was a professor at Oxford and a well-known theoretician, his research focusing primarily on contemporary British composers. He was one of the few musicologists who truly understood the mechanics of being a musician, perhaps because he was, in fact, a decent pianist in his own right. Gavin had gotten to know him over the years and liked him. Nicholas knew an endless number of funny and often scandalous facts about dead musicians, making him great fun to have a glass of whiskey with.

  “I’ll give him a call,” Gavin said.

  “As long as you don’t tell him you saw me. He’ll put two and two together and know I wasn’t here alone, and I don’t want to cause additional pain.”

  “Ah,” said Gavin, “I see.”

  She looked off to the side, somewhat shamed. “Nicholas found out I was having an affair, and that was that. I should have been honest about it from the start, but I was too much of a coward. The truth is I didn’t want my children thinking poorly of me.”

  Surprised she would share something so personal, Gavin made a conscious effort to be nonjudgmental. “You and Nicholas seemed happy.”

  “We weren’t well suited at all,” she said. “He’s so academic, and I never understood his humor. I was too dumb for him.”

  “No, I’m sure he didn’t think that.”

  “But I did.”

  Gavin felt a pang of guilt, knowing that he, too, had had that thought: that Nicholas was brilliant and fascinating, while Miriam was not a particularly deep thinker. There was probably sexism at work in that opinion.

  “The man I’m with now is an obscenely rich New Yorker, and the only thing he reads is Businessweek, and everything feels very right. What about you? Are you still with that young thing we met when we saw you out in California? A life coach, wasn’t she?”

  Gavin was glad to set Miriam straight: “That ‘thing’ is a well-respected psychologist who turned thirty-eight last week, published a successful self-help book, and yes, Juliette and I are very much together.” He held up his left hand and showed her his wedding band.

  Miriam’s mouth dropped open. “Gavin,” she said, “I didn’t think you were the marrying type.”

  “Why is that?” he asked, half hoping she would accuse him of being a playboy when, in fact, he’d had very few meaningless affairs. Just as well since they’d always left him feeling unsettled.

  “I didn’t think you were one to make sacrifices for someone else.”

  “We have a four-year-old.”

  Miriam’s eyes opened wide. “I’m shocked.”

  “Do you want to see a picture?” He clicked on his home screen where a photo of his darling, curly-headed child appeared.

  Miriam took the phone and smiled. “Cute,” she said. “Name?”

  “Daniel. Danny, actually.”

  “It must be tough keeping up with him,” she said, and then she smiled, adding, “at our age.”

  “Juliette’s an incredible woman and an amazing mother,” he said. “We’re a good team.” Miriam was right, though; Danny was exhausting. Juliette often used the word discovery when explaining his behavior. “He’s in a period of discovery regarding temporal restrictions,” she would say when he fought bedtime. “He’s discovering his voice,” she would say when he screamed. “He’s discovering his power,” she would say when he hit another child at preschool.

  Miriam returned his phone and showed her own home screen: a picture of three good-looking twenty-somethings, smiling on a beach. “The most noble thing Nicholas ever did,” she said, “was not to tell our kids why we split up. They found out anyway, of course. It’s impossible to keep anything a secret this day and age.”

  Gavin didn’t like the sound of that. “It is?”

  “Technology,” she said with a look of warning. “I was careless with my text messages.” She took the sunglasses perched on the top of her head and tossed them in her bag. “The timing was probably for the best, though, since Nicholas just started working on a new book. He’s spending the whole summer at a house in the Berkshires, doing research for his next tome. I’m glad I don’t have to be by his side through that nightmare.”

  “I don’t follow—”

  “Watching him write a book was torture. He talks to himself and gets obsessed with the subject matter, working day and night, and—worst of all—he used to ask me to read his chapters, and honestly, I wanted to light myself on fire the whole time I was pretending to read.”

  Gavin was about to laugh, given that Nicholas would probably win a Pulitzer someday, but he could see by her expression that she was completely serious.

  “What’s his new book about?” he asked.

  “Some kind of biography. Oh,” she said, sitting up. “Wait, who was that woman you played music with after college—what was her name? Brenda? Britney? You were in that trio together.”

  “Bridget,” Gavin said. He sipped his iced tea, trying to mask his discomfort at hearing that particular name. “Why… why would Nicholas write a book about Bridget?”

  “No, not about Bridget, silly. He’s writing a book about her father.”

  * * *

  After Miriam left, Gavin picked at his salad. He had a concert that night; he couldn’t afford to get distracted by thoughts of Bridget Stratton. He finished his tea and decided to take an Uber back to his hotel to do some of the mindfulness exercises Juliette recommended.

  Sitting in the backseat as the SUV headed up Sixth Avenue, passing the red brick Jefferson Market Library, he saw him. Older, yes, but there was no mistaking his friend, who was walking right by the car. Astonished, Gavin rolled down the window. “Will,” he shouted. He turned to the driver. “Could you stop the car for a second?”

  The driver turned down the music. “Sorry?”

  “Could you pull over? To the left?”

  Gavin leaned out the window. “Will,” he called again. Will was headed in the opposite direction of the traffic with a big dog on a leash, headphones over his ears. Gavin tried not to resent his full head of hair. Will was moving quickly and suddenly disappeared in the crowd.

  Gavin felt like he’d been rejected, which might or might not have been paranoia. It was possible Will despised him, but he tried to dismiss that idea. Besides, if he wanted to see Will so badly, he could text him the next time he was coming to town, not accost him on a sidewalk. But he never had texted him, in all the times he’d come to the city. Will had never texted him either.

  He rolled the window back up, wondering if he’d ever be as comfortable in his own skin as Will had always seemed in his.

  4

  Driving into the courtyard of Edward’s estate, Bridget saw that Edward’s grass was freshly cut, as usual, in a manicured crosshatch pattern and the indigenous landscaping was impeccably groomed. There was no trace of the storm that had blown through the night before other than a slight dampness to the steep slate roof and the copper flashing. The house had the look of a fortress. Will called it “the Castle,” and for good reason. Mother Nature didn’t stand a chance here.

  There were four cars parked side by side, and she considered leaving; the last thing Bridget wanted was to have lunch with actual people. It was bad enough having to face her sister and father in sweatpants. A quick look at the cars, however, convinced her that she wasn’t getting pulled into a photo op: a beat-up pickup truck, Gwen’s Range Rover, a minivan, and, on the f
ar side, a Subaru with a half-ripped-off I Brake for Chipm— sticker.

  In an effort to primp, she tilted the rearview mirror down, checking her face and trying to run her fingers through her unbrushed hair; it was a lost cause. She got her purse and phone from the passenger seat, and walked across the cobblestone courtyard to ring the bell. It made a deep, soft gonging sound. Bridget had never had a key to the Castle; there was always someone manning the door.

  The door opened silently, and her sister, Gwen, appeared on the other side. Gwen smiled, put her finger to her lips, and pointed down the hall to the living room, where Mahler’s Fifth was playing on Edward’s fancy sound system. Bridget stepped out of her shoes and left them in the row next to all the others, as Gwen took her hand and led her barefoot into the kitchen. Not until the heavy swinging door closed behind them did Gwen say, “You’re here!” giving Bridget a hug with her perfectly toned arms. “Welcome to another summer in crazy town.”

  Bridget, assuming Gwen had been stuck in the living room for one of Edward’s famous listening session slash musicianship lectures, said, “Did I just rescue you?”

  “No, he’s wrapped up with some musicologist from, I don’t know, Yale or Harvard probably,” Gwen said. “Nicholas somebody. They were talking for at least an hour when I heard this nightmare start playing.”

  Bridget laughed. “Nightmare?”

  “I hate Mahler, always have. And don’t try to shame me. Do you think they’re going to listen to the whole godawful thing? It’s making my teeth itch.”

  “At least it’s not as long as the Second Symphony, so be grateful.”

  Checking the time on her phone, Gwen said, “I wish I’d known you were coming. I made plans.”