The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  BRIT

  Violin II

  There was something nagging Brit, loping behind her more general sadness, and it was that she couldn’t remember having actually chosen to want to be with Daniel. And this was what made her current situation more painful and aggravating—her life felt like an old, warped record, her pain circling back around and skipping on her lack of intention. She was sad, and she was angry with herself for being sad. She didn’t like wanting what she hadn’t intended to want as much as she didn’t like being denied what she hadn’t really wanted in the first place. She thought there was enough to be sad about without adding on the unfulfilled wishes at the edge of your life. For instance, a slightly wider left hand, a better violin. For instance, your parents to be alive again.

  Brit couldn’t deny she had been attracted to Daniel when they first met, and she knew he had also been drawn to her. Sitting on opposite sides of the table that first day in Counterpoint II, they’d noticed each other noticing each other. He hummed with nervous energy, quick to raise his hand to answer a question, possessing a spastic agility that betrayed his insecurity. A boyish face with large, nervous eyes and a nose not to be missed. And she caught him staring—at her face, her breasts, her mouth (her crooked eyetooth, even?)—when she offered answers to the professor’s questions about the tonic pattern in Don Giovanni. She whispered to Jana, “I think that cellist is staring at me,” and Jana rolled her eyes and said, “Not everyone is staring at you, Brit,” but she tucked a strand of Brit’s hair behind her ear when she said it so it wasn’t entirely mean.

  But he had been staring at her. Nearly two years later, after they’d formed the quartet and just before the difficult conversation in which they all decided the quartet would be what they’d pursue together, she asked him about it, in bed, in that postcoital moment where one feels free to say anything because nothing could be more embarrassing or intimate than what has just transpired.

  “Yes,” Daniel said. “I was watching you all the time then. I always thought you were pretty. You must know that you’re pretty.”

  Brit hadn’t known. Some girls grew up that way, knowing they were pretty, using it. Brit felt she hadn’t been pretty until very recently, and the change made her uncomfortable; she was unused to men looking at her, seeing something she could barely see herself. In the mirror she looked how she’d always looked: pale skin, nearly blue-vein translucent; a puckered, downturned mouth (that tooth); oddly spaced features (nose too narrow, eyes large and far apart—like a cow, she’d once overheard a girl cruelly say); long hair, a dull shade of blond, boring, exasperated with itself.

  “I don’t know that,” she said. What she meant was, Tell me more about how I’m pretty.

  They were lying on their backs in bed, the sheets yanked up above their chests, staring at the ceiling, their fingertips touching down near their bare, damp thighs. Daniel had been exactly as she’d wanted him to be—kind but primal, and relentless in his pursuit of her satisfaction. She’d been fine, she assumed. She’d been lost, in a good way. She was cold.

  But he didn’t tell her more about how she was pretty. Why didn’t men do that? Was it because she wasn’t really, except if they were having sex with her? Or was it because they truly believed she knew she was pretty and didn’t need convincing? Or was it because they believed by virtue of their having sex with her, she would come to understand her physical beauty? What Daniel did instead was swing his thigh over hers and bring his rough hand to her belly, which he began to rub. He said, “This is fun.”

  “But we shouldn’t rush things,” she said, an answer to a question he hadn’t asked.

  “No, casual is best,” he said as he worked his hand across her torso. Then he paused. “Do you think there’s something wrong with me, that women don’t want to date me?”

  “Perhaps it’s that you don’t want to date them?” she said, smiling.

  Daniel was an unlikely playboy. He was awkwardly large and small at the same time, shorter than average and a little stocky, disproportionate, with a curiously handsome face. There was something solid and undeniable about his body, everything tightly packed in there. Something glinting and playful about the way he carried himself, light and dangerous as a tumbleweed, apt to cut and suddenly whisk away. But he always had girls around, even if they never stayed long enough to matter, and Brit suspected his catch-and-release pattern would continue long after he let her go.

  “Would we be good together?” she asked, and paused to consider the question, but she couldn’t conjure up an image of the two of them, walking on a day-lit city street, holding hands, or trekking up a mountain somewhere, throwing backward glances at each other, teeth shining in the alpine air. She wanted to see it, to hear a soundtrack—maybe something like water running over a plate of glass, violins, sixteenths at the tip of the bow at the edge of the string near the bridge—but she couldn’t. It wouldn’t form, it wouldn’t hold.

  “No.” He resumed his pawing. “We’d be . . . just awful together.”

  “You’re right,” she said, arching her back and winding a leg through his. “I agree with you completely.”

  Brit half believed they wouldn’t work together. She’d often thought this, when he stubbornly scrutinized sheet music from behind the Coke-bottle glasses, or when he infuriatingly answered a question by analyzing in detail each side before settling on a studied waffle, or when he obsessed about the correct position on anything, everything—the history, value, and diversity of grace notes; the exact amount of wear an ebony frog could take before it needed to be replaced; the salty sting of the air in San Francisco, where they rehearsed, versus the air in (more affordable) Oakland, where he lived, and its effect on the wood of his cello. His compulsive precision made him an exceptional lover and a disastrous mate, an outstanding musician and an exhausting friend. Nothing unquantifiable could be perfect enough for him, and it was starting to become clear to Brit that unquantifiable things were the only things that had value to her.

  That was why that moment in bed after they’d had sex for the first time, I was watching you all the time then, she knew she’d remember what he said for a long time. She had been right, after all. There had been a mutual recognition two years ago, of something mathematical but mysterious between them, seen simultaneously, something totally invisible and unexpected, but natural. Like the molecules of the air had been dyed and made bright, electric, tangible. It gave her faith in so many things—her beauty, her instincts, possibility itself. Most of all, the thrilling freedom of being truly unable to predict your life.

  Which is how, she supposed, what happened happened. They continued to sleep together and told no one, especially not Jana or Henry. It was terrible fun. They played music, silly duets they hadn’t played since their Suzuki days and contemporary duets they found in the sheet music warehouse. They got drunk and found videos of famous performers and criticized their technique, rewinding and fast-forwarding, frame by frame. They stayed up late, clawing at each other between periods of dozing, with the frenzy of the first blush of infatuation, a blatant desire to know every single part of the other’s body, to exhaust that knowledge. They fell asleep on Daniel’s cheap futon, head to foot, legs tangled in each other’s arms, listening to Pablo Casals records, and woke only to the existential fuzz of a needle with nothing to play. They came to rehearsal sleepy, puffy with secrets.

  At night, she found the divots in his breastbone made by the point on the back of his cello neck, and the light bruises that appeared and disappeared on the insides of his knees, depending on how long their rehearsals lasted. He ran his fingers through her hair, asked her never to change it. On nights after they rehearsed, he carefully avoided the rust-colored welt on the left hollow of her neck, even with his breath.

  It could only go on so long.

  Two days before their graduation recital, after a particularly rough rehearsal, they’d made up similar excuses of exhaustion, and
Brit offered to drive Daniel home. There, she made him a late dinner—he couldn’t cook, and he so rarely went out to eat, always just scraping by—and they ate at his bachelor-sized table with a Janos Starker record spinning in the background. She argued for Heifetz instead, and he responded by repositioning the needle at the beginning of the record, insisting she listen again, for what exactly he didn’t say. She lit a candle she found in his dirty bathroom, and laid out cloth napkins, which were actually the soft towels she used to wipe rosin from her violin. When he wiped carbonara off his mouth, the napkin left a chalky white glint on his chin. She smiled and said nothing.

  Unlike Jana and Henry, Daniel and Brit had both gone to academic colleges for their undergraduate degrees, and Brit felt an outsider kinship because of this. But Brit’s connection to him went further, in that they both felt like they were missing families. He talked about his mother. Daniel was the second child from a generally loveless family in Houston, one whose struggles with money did nothing to bind them together, and whose peculiar, artistic younger son only furthered their cosmic expansion away from each other. His father worked on a construction crew that jumped from site to site, and his mother cleaned their small home in the affordable suburbs, occasionally cleaned other people’s homes, and prayed. They quietly tolerated each other, made ends meet, cared that Daniel was successful, and cared much less that he was a musician. What he did, he did alone.

  Brit was an actual orphan, though she didn’t describe herself that way. Her father died of a regular kind of cancer when she was in college, and her mother just simply gave out—there was no other way to put it—a year into Brit’s time in San Francisco. She had no siblings, either, no one to go home to. Brit was drawn to the story of Daniel’s family, how he had one and was still a kind of orphan. He didn’t seem sad about it, but matter-of-fact. They could share the same hurt, but in different ways. They bore the same wound, in different shapes. She learned to crave that dynamic between the two of them. She could be the fabric flapping in the wind; he could be the flagpole.

  “My mother believes in destiny,” Daniel said. “She thinks I was her destiny. And that mine is music.”

  “What, and you don’t?” Brit asked. “That seems like a fine thing to believe in.”

  Daniel shrugged. “Sure, if you don’t want to have any responsibility for your life. Or control. Or ability to make things better.”

  “Maybe that’s what your mother means, though, about you being her destiny. Don’t you think that’s why people have children?” Brit asked. “To make a better family than the one they grew up with?”

  “No,” Daniel said, too quickly. “I guess that could be a reason, but it’s not the smart one. Especially when you don’t have money to pay for that family.”

  Daniel was always talking about money, that was one thing. Money was never far from his mind, and he rarely paid for things, and he was always tired, working late at the bar he wouldn’t let any of them visit. He felt insecure about the quality of his cello and expressed this by always being the first to mention it.

  “I don’t know,” Brit said. “We didn’t have much money, but we were happy.”

  “Well,” Daniel said, “there’s a difference between your ‘not much money’ and my ‘not much money.’”

  “Really?”

  “‘Really?’ says the girl who got an inheritance to pay for this life here.”

  Brit straightened her shoulders. He had a way of stinging that was quick and shallow. She would give all the money back from that small shack of a house if it meant having her parents around for just one more week, one more concert. She didn’t say that.

  The effect of his nastiness registered across Daniel’s face. He leaned forward. “I just mean that we used food stamps and my brother and I slept in the living room in one of our places, and I had to ask for tuition remission for everything—everything—and this thing I’m doing, it’s like the least profitable thing ever, and none of you have to worry about that.”

  “I worry about it,” she said. She did, but not in such a way that it influenced any decision she felt was imperative. And she worried about him, about the way his worry had made him hard at the edges, all that determination and self-doubt wrapped up in his obsession with money. “I worry that you would let something like money keep you from something like . . . having a family.”

  “I’m not sure I want children regardless.”

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “But why? Why would it be any better? Why add more people to the world unless you absolutely have to?”

  Brit stirred the pasta around her plate, making delicate, unappetizing designs. She had never thought of herself as one of those women who absolutely had to have children, could not identify with the girls from high school who so swiftly wrote in to the alumni magazine about their babies—The greatest Christmas gift I could ask for! or We are so in love with baby Isaac! (already? does love happen so fast, ever?)—and yet, even though she was a modern woman, she could not picture wanting to have a child outside of wanting to have a family. Being a mother seemed an entirely different enterprise from being part of a family, a real one. And that was what she wanted, she realized suddenly, over the middling pasta. A family again.

  “I always thought I’d meet someone who I’d love so much that that love had to spill out into another being. Lots of other beings. I want to have a child as an expression of love, I guess,” Brit said. “I’m saying I want to absolutely have to.”

  She was surprised to find herself embarrassed at her speech. She sensed Daniel across the table, also ceasing to eat, his wineglass empty, both of them on the verge of the next thing—leaving or staying. He made no indication he wanted her to stay. She tried not to show that she wanted him to want it.

  “I agree, I suppose,” Daniel said. “That would be a nice feeling.”

  “Do you think you’ll ever feel that?” Brit asked.

  Daniel drummed his fingers on the table in time to Starker, who had just begun the prelude to the third Bach cello suite. “You know that part of the Symposium? Where Aristophanes talks about how humans were split in two by . . . by—”

  “By Zeus,” Brit offered. She already knew the story, but she let him tell it anyway.

  “Right, by Zeus. And that desire is the pursuit of wholeness.”

  Brit remembered a bad translation from a college intro class, though she hadn’t thought of it in some time. “I like that.”

  Daniel leaned forward. “But don’t you think that’s a little reductive? That someone can only be whole with someone else? What about everything that can make you whole without attaching yourself to something like a parasite? What about hard work and accomplishment and . . . like, inner harmony?”

  “What’s inner harmony?” Brit asked. Daniel laughed, but she continued, “No, really. How can you harmonize with yourself?”

  Daniel stopped laughing abruptly. He folded his hands on the table. “Well, I don’t know about you, but I contain many pitches. It’s about moving from polyphony to harmony. People are so much music. People don’t recognize that enough.”

  “So you’re going to be alone forever because it’s too offensive to your dignity to attach yourself to someone else?”

  “You’re not understanding,” Daniel said. He leaned back, revealing to Brit small bits of sauce where the front of his shirt had touched the plate. “It’s not someone else. It’s the whole concept of fitting in someone else’s . . . construction.”

  Brit didn’t know how to say that it sounded nice to be contained in someone else’s construction without sounding stupid, young, naive. And anyway, even if she could have said it, he wouldn’t have come around to see it from her side. He was too busy with his hammer and pick, chiseling away at a perfect likeness, freeing his ideal self from stone.

  She could feel her face go slack, her chest hollow out. It was what she saw h
appen to Daniel’s body when he sat down to play.

  “Look,” he said. “I suppose it all comes down to biology, anyway. Maybe there’s a biological urge I’ll feel for children. Maybe not. What I’m saying is it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with love, not to me. And it definitely has to do with money, which, if you remember, I have none of.”

  His obdurate nature often presented itself in a refusal to really answer a question—he was more afraid of being wrong than of being nothing. He did this in rehearsal often, making Jana red in the face by not completely agreeing or completely disagreeing with her interpretation of a passage. It amused Henry, but Brit often stepped in to defuse the situation, which usually meant persuading Daniel to let Jana have her way. Daniel would play the passage the way that seemed best, anyway, which was always whichever way Jana articulated it on stage, and their instantaneous response in performance was a skill they had cultivated.

  “I don’t know,” Daniel said. “That whole narrative of love and children, it all just seems a little too much magical thinking to me.”

  Starker was climbing up the fingerboard, heading toward the breakthrough arpeggio that required a difficult thumb position. The preludes to the suites always had these passages, ecstatic arpeggios that fully expressed the major chord, and then backed away into a modulated scale, before ending in dignified triple stops or broken chords. But before the ending, those ecstatic arpeggios threatened to dissolve into chaos. They were Brit’s favorite parts.