The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  “Why do you care? Let’s talk about this time.”

  Henry couldn’t think of a reason why it mattered, but he wanted to know. This bothered him. “I care.”

  “No one you know. A visiting cellist from Germany. He’s married, has kids of his own. He wasn’t even a very good player. Bad intonation. It was stupid.”

  “Oh, okay,” he said. “This isn’t stupid, right?”

  She stopped walking and abruptly turned to him. Her voice was small: “It’s not fair,” she said. At first he thought the wetness pooled around her eyes was sweat—God, it was hot, fuck this city, he hated it—but then he saw it was coming out of her eyes, and kept coming. Her face was trembling, every part of it at once, messily, inelegantly. He’d never seen her cry before. It made him want to cry, too, and he never felt that way, and now he felt it rising in his chest and throat.

  He cared. He cared about what had happened to her before he’d met her, about the babies she hadn’t had. He cared what happened to her in this park, if she tripped, if she cried. He loved her, if that’s what love was. They’d never been on an actual date. It was strange to sit in a coffee shop with her, to walk with her, without their instruments. But he loved her. Maybe because she was growing inside her a small pebble of a zygote half containing his DNA, maybe because she was the one for him, forever and ever. There was no telling. The choice to love her and to raise a child with her wasn’t rational or sense-making, and in that way it was like the only other choice he’d ever made in his life. It was the beautiful, musical choice.

  He put his arms around her, pulled her into him. She wasn’t small. He wouldn’t describe her that way, not now.

  “No, this isn’t stupid,” she said, crying a country-sized stain into his T-shirt, and that was how he knew she loved him, too.

  * * *

  —

  One way to say it was: when they moved to New York, Jana and Henry cut back on overnights because she lived on the East Side and he lived on the West Side, and she hated the crosstown buses and also walking across the park alone, especially with her violin, and there were so many people in their lives—so many people in New York City—that time alone became sacred and rare.

  Another way to say it was: they were older, had grown up and out of it, no longer needed the physical rampancy and secret comfort of each other’s bodies in bed after a blood-flushing concert or a brutal, prickly rehearsal.

  Another way to say it was: the practice had marched right up to the edge of being inappropriate, and enough was enough. They’d never had sex, not even close. There’d been nothing sexually charged about their relationship. Nothing really romantic either, unless you counted that feeling of mutual recognition when someone wraps her body around yours and you both go unconscious.

  And one more way to say it was: the context changed. They were no longer scrappy and trying to make it in San Francisco. Now they were “emerging,” as the Juilliard intern who wrote their bios liked to put it, though Henry wondered how long you could be “emerging” until you were simply just standing in a doorway of an empty room, emerged, yet unnoticed. At Juilliard, they were treated as professionals, serious adults with serious endeavors, and their habit of co-sleeping suddenly seemed a childish leftover from a past and lesser life.

  They had taken a little while to figure this out. The last time Jana had come over to Henry’s, it was a night in early December, right as the season was beginning to slip into winter. The two of them, having grown up in the wet but generous winters of California, usually felt giddy and quaint huddled under layers of thin blankets. Still charming was the way the streetlamps flooded bronze light through the windows even with all the lights off, casting an anemic pallor on their cold cheeks. Still eccentric was the incessant honking and yelping, the churn of lives always in progress just outside the apartment walls. But that night they’d fought, a fight that, in their nightclothes in bed in the middle of a city night, felt like a point from which they would not turn back.

  That evening they’d gone, with Brit and Daniel, to a performance of the Guarneri Quartet at Carnegie Hall. They’d had to go, really—their dean regularly invited them to concerts so they could meet other groups and become familiar faces to programming officers at the various venues. Afterward, there was a party in a small, narrow cocktail bar across the street. Daniel and Jana had charged forward into the crowd, always the determined, well-spoken face of the quartet, neither from that tony world but both able to talk to moneyed patrons with a studied fluency. Henry often ran out of things to talk about with these people after they were done marveling at his youth. He noticed Brit spending an inordinately long time at the bar deciding what to drink, and when she finally had a glass of red wine in her hand, she remained staring at the rows of liquor bottles, her back to the crowd. Henry walked up beside her.

  “Are you as bored—”

  She jumped in her seat, tipping her glass and sending drops of red wine onto the front of his suit. “Oh, Henry,” she said, dabbing at his jacket with a bar napkin. “I’m sorry. This looks expensive. Was it expensive?”

  It was bespoke, but Henry hadn’t paid for it. His mother had, a gift upon learning they had landed the Juilliard residency.

  “It’s nothing,” Henry said.

  Brit frowned. “It’s sort of your fault, anyway.”

  Henry sat next to her and ordered a gin and tonic; the compact, buttoned-up bartender peered at him suspiciously but didn’t card him. Brit had been in a mood lately. Really, she’d been in a mood for at least three years. Though neither Brit nor Daniel had ever explicitly spoken of it, Henry and Jana knew there’d been something early on, a romantic scuffle, a fast fizzle, and a subterranean burn as it faded away. The topic hadn’t much come up during Henry and Jana’s overnights, either. What was there to discuss? It had been years since whatever had once been between Daniel and Brit appeared to settle into a semi-comfortable stasis, a slightly charged status quo, with Daniel’s rotation of forgettable girls (unremarkable two- or three-month relationships) and Brit’s steady, low-grade longing for him (dignified in the shadows when she was waiting, and girlishly undulating when he turned his attention to her in the intermissions). Though lately something felt like it was shifting with Brit and Daniel, probably not unrelated to Brit’s new boyfriend, Paul.

  “I was going to say you seem quiet tonight, but not with a mouth like that,” Henry said.

  “Why do people always say that to me? ‘You seem quiet.’ What should I say back? ‘Yes, that’s because I don’t want to talk’?”

  “Okay, well,” Henry said, standing.

  “No, no.” Brit put her hand on his arm. “Sit down. I’d rather talk to you than anyone else here.”

  “Oh, wow, thanks.”

  “I don’t mean that. I just mean”—she gestured across the bar, toward where Jana and Daniel held captive a collection of miniature elderly ladies in chunky necklaces—“them.”

  Henry could tell, even from this distance, that Daniel’s suit, the only one he had, fit even worse than the last time he’d worn it. The cuffs now revealed his wrists. Were Daniel’s irregularly long arms growing longer? Was that possible? Henry saw the seams were gray from years of pulling. When was Daniel’s birthday? Perhaps Henry could get him a custom suit of his own. No, he’d be resentful. Daniel kept taking off his glasses and putting them back on and taking them off. He hated wearing his glasses—he had once told Henry something about how they represented an evolutionary weakness—but he seemed to be squinting more and more these days, at things other than just sheet music. Jana, seen from afar, was all strange planes and angles. She was the sort of woman who was not exactly pretty but striking, not slender but skinny, someone who could look alarmingly different with the slight jut of a chin, a nose that could be pointed and regal in profile and unfortunately knobbed head-on, large eyes that were anime when tired but toothsome with the right smile. She was mut
able even down to her dark hair, which could make her look boyish when it was tied back or halting when it lay across her shoulders. It was just like Jana to deny anyone a firm hold on her.

  Brit, though, Brit always looked the same: freckles, plump skin, smile lines, pale and blond, sincere and kind, and Henry realized, sitting there, that he was grateful for her dispositional consistency.

  “This is their natural habitat,” Henry said. “They can be easily adored.”

  Once he said it, he saw it was mean, but Brit smiled a little. “Or they can become people who are easily adored. At these things I always feel like, when I’m talking to someone, I have to apologize for how . . . just . . . boring I am. I play the violin. What more can I say? Look, listen to Jana, you can hear her from here. That pitch is unnatural.”

  Jana threw her head back and laughed, a shrill laugh that Henry knew contained seething just beneath the surface. She could communicate with this crowd, but she didn’t like it.

  “It’s not too bad,” Henry said. “At least we have them to do it for us.”

  “They’re not doing it for us,” Brit said.

  “Whoa, settle,” Henry said. “Do you have something you want to tell Uncle Henry? What about this new Paul fellow?”

  Brit softened and told him about Paul, how she could tell he cleaned his apartment before she came over, how she’d found a scribbled list of things from his day he wanted to make sure to tell her on his bedside table, how whenever she asked him a question he always asked her one back.

  “Sounds like a good one,” Henry said when she finished. “So why are you so angry right now?”

  “I’m not angry,” she said.

  “Is it because you’re angry at yourself for spending so much time pining for that guy? That guy in the bad suit over there?”

  Brit went silent, though she leaned her head into his shoulder, drank her wine at the side of her mouth. From behind, from Jana’s point of view, it must have looked like something else, at least fleetingly, because after the brief moments during which Henry felt tenderness for Brit’s blond head beneath his but before he could say anything more, Jana was there, behind him, her hand in his hair. His hair!

  “You both need haircuts,” Jana said, and Brit withdrew.

  Jana was scratching his scalp with her fingernails, sending white shivers down his neck, and the way the response was both automatic and charged irritated him. Now he linked the touch to Kimiko’s touch: a different woman, a different context, a different impulse. The point where the wires crossed was buzzing electric, and it stayed lit inside him all night. Later that night, in bed, after Jana scooted toward him, cold under the quilt, he said, “Don’t do that again, to my hair.”

  Jana paused. A siren wailed by. “I was just saying you need a haircut. I mean, seriously, you do. There’s a public face we have to maintain.”

  “People could get the wrong idea,” he said.

  “What, with Brit nuzzling you in a bar? Sure.”

  They volleyed back and forth a few times, their barbs getting hollower as they got meaner. This kind of meanness was meant for people having sex, people who could later expunge the meanness in the half-tender, half-violent act of merging.

  “Aren’t you sleeping with anyone?” he said. “You know I’m sleeping with Kimiko, right?”

  Of course she knew. Henry knew she knew. He also knew Jana had no intention of having a sexual relationship with him, and that his accusation was low and undermined years of tangled but necessary friendship—and that once he’d made it, the nights together were over. The dark room momentarily choked on itself. He actually coughed.

  Jana rolled over, her back to him. “You’re right. I don’t think I should spend the night here anymore.” And with that, she made it his idea and her decision.

  She fell asleep fast and easy—when Jana made a decision, she did not unmake it—and Henry lay awake most of the night. It was the right thing to do, for both of them, so why did it feel bad? There was life, right out there, sirens and clanking bottles and the crazy bellowing man in the building across the way. It couldn’t be more different from their life in San Francisco, all sky and studiousness and sea splash. Couldn’t she also see things were changing—had, in fact, already changed?

  The next morning, he awoke to Jana fully dressed (she’d smartly brought a change of clothes, black leggings and a black tunic, now cold and almost Slavic at this angle) and tiptoeing around his chilly room. What she looked like wasn’t slippery at all, he saw now. Her face was serious, the aquiline nose and the whittled jawline, but really, it was the face of a girl trying out expressions and postures, its origin withheld from him now. He watched her gathering her things but also lightly grazing his things with her fingertips, his clothes and his dresser and his records stacked on the floor, feeling for what he couldn’t say, feeling the varnish on his viola, the tips of the metal music stand in the corner, the molding around the doorway—Henry watched her know with her hands the stuff of his life, and then thought to himself, This stuff isn’t my life, my life’s out there, and he realized that his context had changed, but Jana’s hadn’t.

  * * *

  —

  So it was very unexpected when on the evening after he and Kimiko had walked in the park for hours, and he’d watched her dry-heave by the closed-down ice rink and thought, stupidly, My child is causing this, Jana called him and said she was coming over. Before he could ask whether “coming over” meant “staying the night,” she’d hung up.

  Henry felt panicked. Jana knew he and Kimiko had been spending more time together. It wasn’t a secret. But he’d have to tell her about the baby, and he’d have to tell her now. Fathers of unborn children didn’t share beds with other women, even if they were just friends.

  Jana arrived at his door, sweaty, just after sunset. She’d jogged to his place, though the heat index must have made it an unhealthy endeavor. Henry had never known her not to run. She was the type who couldn’t sleep without it, who made sure their hotels had gyms and treadmills when they were on the road. She wore blue dolphin shorts and a tank top that was soaked through. He let her in, and she kicked her shoes off by the window unit and stood there, pulling the fabric from her stomach to let the cool air in.

  “I have to stay the night” was the first thing she said. “I can’t go back out in that.”

  Henry gestured to the window and 102nd Street below, heavy with heat and quiet but for a few sedans. “You’re the fool that chose to run in this.”

  “Actually, the best time to run—when everyone’s gone to the Hamptons,” she said. Sweat trickled down the back of her leg. She looked up at him and grinned. “You’re the one with the facial hair. What?”

  “What, what?”

  She shrugged. “I don’t know, you’re acting strange. Did you get a prize or something?”

  Henry laughed. “No, I was just . . . standing here. Trying to think of what to eat.”

  “Good thing I’m an expert at eating.”

  Jana rifled through his fridge with a familiarity that bent Henry’s heart a little. She was his sister. She found some lettuce and bacon and tortillas, and made them something close to a BLT. While she cooked the bacon, they both sat on the floor by the window unit to stay cool. They ate on the floor, too, with an old ottoman as their table. Jana’s sweat had dried and she had started to smell like girl sweat, like two-day-old perfume.

  “Doesn’t the heat warp your records?” Jana asked, pointing toward the milk crates of records against the wall.

  “Oh, I put all the nice ones in storage in Queens,” he said. It was one of the first things he’d done when he moved to New York. He’d paid to ship his records out here, before he realized how insane it looked to have them lining all the walls of his small apartment. But he couldn’t let go of them. He’d been collecting since he was a child: the rare recording of the Hoffmeister viola concer
to, every major recording of the Bach suites, even obscure limited pressings of contemporary Chinese composers he’d once wanted to emulate. Getting rid of his records would be like saying all those years spent gathering them were over. And they weren’t over—he was still in the midst of them.

  “Well, that seems impractical,” Jana said. “You should just sell them.”

  “I can’t sell them. Why would I sell them?”

  “Because if they’re in storage, you’re obviously not listening to them.”

  “But I could. If I wanted to. Jesus, Jana.”

  She raised an armpit, a bit of bacon hanging out of her mouth, and sniffed. “Are you offended?” She looked genuinely worried.

  “No, no.”

  “What’s wrong with you? Are you worried about Esterhazy?”

  For a moment Henry didn’t recognize the word. He hadn’t thought about the upcoming competition all day. He’d thought about traveling, and leaving Kimiko, but he hadn’t actually thought about what they were rehearsing for Esterhazy—a Shostakovich, a Mozart, and the Ravel they knew so well. It would be their second time at the competition, having made the smallest of splashes—like a hand slapping a pond, really—their first time, earning no prizes, but falling apart in the first round to the point of crashing the entire performance. It had taken them some months to recover from that, but by winter they’d gained management and the residency at Juilliard. This year was the year they were supposed to be in the Esterhazy game, for real. The board had changed the competition a bit—not only did they move it from May to October, but they pre-scored and seeded competitors, so that any incidences of extreme stage fright or freak accidents wouldn’t be weighted as heavily.

  “Oh, I basically forgot about that,” he said.

  “Mm.”

  Behind Jana’s head, if Henry squinted and focused, he could see a wedge of the Hudson.

  “Are you seeing anyone?” he asked.

  She pointed to her mouth and chewed. “Who has time?”