by Aja Gabel
“Well, Brit and Daniel,” he said.
“Yeah, but, they’re more, you know, into that kind of thing than us,” Jana said, and laughed. “I guess that guy from the St. Vincent asked me out, but . . . I don’t know.”
“The violist?”
A few weeks before, they’d played in a classical showcase and met the St. Vincent String Quartet. The two quartets shared a management company as well as career aspirations. The St. Vincents were from Montreal, all men, pretty and tall and sandy-haired, with varying shades of French accents. From far away, they looked more like attractive actors pretending to be in a quartet than actual musicians. Henry had found them difficult to tell apart. Of the eight groups they’d be competing against at Esterhazy, the St. Vincent was the best, though not better than them, at least by Jana’s estimation.
“Yeah. Laurent.”
“I can’t believe that’s actually his name.”
“I know, I know.”
“You should go out with him,” Henry said.
Jana frowned. “What’s wrong with you? You think I should date someone we’re going to compete against in two months?”
“Who cares?”
She put her sandwich down on her paper plate. “You need to get ahold of yourself.”
“Kimiko’s pregnant.”
He said it because he couldn’t not say it. He’d spent the whole afternoon saying it in his head, making it feel real. And now that it was real, not letting Jana hear him say it felt like lying. Especially Jana, someone to whom he never lied.
Jana’s sandwich sat on the plate on top of the ottoman like something from a different life, like an idea from a finished phase of their friendship they’d yet to mourn. The lettuce seemed to wilt immediately. Her mouth hung open, revealing a couple cavities filled with metal, and Henry could see her—see her in real time—scramble to think of a way out of this information.
“We’re going to keep it,” he continued, and Jana’s grimace deepened. He regretted saying that part.
Her hair was falling out of her ponytail in the back, wisps here and there. He wanted to put his arms around her, and would have, in that other life, that sandwich life.
“Okay,” she said. “All right. She’s practically a child herself, but all right.”
Henry didn’t say anything.
Jana asked a series of questions and then answered them herself. She said: “I mean, if you want to be a father at twenty-four, go right ahead. When’s she due? We’ll have to make sure we’re not traveling then. She’s going to live here? Here? You should probably get a dinner table. You should probably get a different apartment, actually. One with, you know, walls. Dividing the space. Won’t you need some more income? I guess it’s not like your parents won’t help you out. Also, you won’t have time for video games. You don’t have time now, as it is, but somehow you always make time.”
He patiently listened to her list, the halfhearted insults tumbling out of her mouth. Henry didn’t think Jana was a mean person; he thought she was a good person, with a meanness problem. And he thought, in general, she had good reason to be mean. She’d worked very hard. She’d had no help. She wasn’t tolerant of failure. Of anyone’s failure. But couldn’t she see he wasn’t failing her?
Jana stood and began to pace. The wicking fabric of her shorts rubbing together was the only sound in the apartment.
It occurred to him: he loved her, too.
In a different way from how he loved Kimiko. But love, nonetheless. They’d had no choice, if he thought about it. They’d been together so long, so intimately, that they had to love each other. Like family—which neither Jana nor Brit had. Nor Daniel, come to think of it. Henry was the one with a family. And now another one growing. He had an embarrassing abundance of family.
Henry did understand how they had become responsible for each other’s well-being, each other’s livelihood. When you were on your own, in whatever career, whatever you did affected only your own job. But with the quartet, they had to share a goal, distribute the dream between them, and trust that each of them had an appropriate sense of commitment. The commitment had a way of bleeding into their lives off stage, as well. There were so many ways to betray each other.
Jana stood with her hands on her hips in front of the window. The sun was all the way down now, but it still cast pale on the sky from below the horizon. Looking at her silhouette, Henry imagined how her upper body moved as one whole unit when she led the group. Like a baton, that firmness at her center the very source of energy for all of them.
Then she turned and faced an old program he’d tacked onto the wall next to the window. It wasn’t framed or anything, but he’d felt weird throwing it away, so he put it there, where it curled up at the edges in the humidity. It was the program from their graduation recital, which he’d been handed just before they walked on stage. There was a photo of the four of them printed in black-and-white on the insert—they’d had it taken professionally, but until that graduation recital hadn’t seen it out in the world. The photo, their first portrait as a group, had been taken on a cold day in February, and they’d been frustrated and restless. They were actually waiting for the light to change on Van Ness and McAllister so they could span the crosswalk, Beatles style, and Daniel was holding his cello by the curves, trying to shield it from other pedestrians. City Hall and the Ballet loomed in the background. In the photo, none of them was smiling, but they’d liked that shot the best. Something about the quiet waiting, the way they looked like they’d ended up crammed together on this sidewalk accidentally but were all of a piece, made them choose that picture over the posed one, where they were actually crossing the intersection, smiling awkwardly and looking at odds with their bodies. After the light changed, Daniel had rushed from the sidewalk, and when the rest of them failed to fall in line, he screamed “Fuck!” and a small child holding her mother’s hand cowered. But before the light turned, they looked like they’d made a kind of peace with the restlessness, or had finally caught up with the anticipation.
The night of the graduation wasn’t just the first time Henry had seen that picture in print, but the first time he’d seen them as a group presented so formally. It felt official. He had felt a part of something, which, though no one would feel sorry for him, hadn’t come easily in his life. When you were a prodigy, the defining principle was that you were singular, standout, alone. Here, he was not alone.
He watched Jana study the program and the photo on his apartment wall, in which he—barely twenty then—towered over everyone else, his cheekbones sharp and his hair looking less messy than it was in black-and-white.
“I think you need to cut your hair and shave your beard,” she said, finally.
He put his hand to his chin, felt the rough fuzz there. “Yeah, all right.”
They walked to the bathroom, humorously small, and plugged in his clipper. The mirror was splattered with toothpaste, the sink a well for his beard trimmings. Jana reached down and splashed her face with water from the faucet.
“Okay,” she said when she popped back up.
“Okay,” he said.
She started with his hair, sliding pieces between two fingers and trimming a little at a time. She worked around the sides and then methodically across the top. She shaved his face meticulously, seriously, knitting her eyebrows when it came to his upper lip, tilting her head at an unnatural angle to get under his chin. It seemed to take forever, certainly longer than he’d ever taken to shave himself. He’d had a beard since they moved to New York. At first he’d grown it because it was cold, but then it got warm, and then he was afraid to shave it off, as though he’d have a blank space where his beard was. Which he would now, he guessed.
Jana took it all off. She didn’t cut him once. He looked younger when it was all gone—he actually looked his age. There was his mouth. There were his lips. He couldn’t stop staring at himself.
Jana didn’t look in the mirror once, but she looked at him directly, and over time, her gaze changed from jilted to kind, and then content, or something close.
She did stay the night one last time. They went to bed early, and she wore one of his big T-shirts from Curtis, identical to a shirt she also had, in her own apartment across town.
“It’ll make you leave us,” Jana said.
She didn’t seem to require an answer. It wasn’t a question. Who knew where this ended? Not him. What he heard in Jana’s statement was not an accusation or a confrontation, but a confession: she saw this as the beginning of the quartet’s falling apart.
She turned on her side, away from him, and put her hands neatly under her head. He mirrored her. The streets below were eerily city-quiet, a spatter of pedestrian laughter or old brakes floating up to his window every so often, the desperate shudder of the window unit turning off and on. They slept with only a sheet on top of them, and Henry felt the pillowcase against his shorn cheek for the first time in he didn’t know how long. It felt like there was nothing between him and anything else. Jana suddenly seemed like a strange island in his bed, long-limbed and lanky and warm, emanating heat. How had he not seen her like this before? He curled himself around her anyway, and didn’t move, not at all.
When she left the next morning, early and silently, he went back to bed to sleep for a few more hours. Just as he was about to fall asleep, however, the phone rang in the kitchen. On instinct he rolled over and reached for a pillow to cover his ears, but then he remembered he was now an expectant father, and that expectant fathers answered all phone calls out of fear. He tripped his way to the phone, but when he picked it up and said hello, it wasn’t Kimiko calling, or even Jana, to tell him she’d made it home, or Daniel asking to borrow rosin again, or Brit seeing if he wanted to get lunch.
“You haven’t called, and you’ve been in New York all this time!” said the man on the other end, his voice thick with a familiar accent.
“Hello?” Henry said again.
“I’ve been waiting. To make something of you. Let’s meet. Tonight? Something’s come up that you’d be perfect for.”
“I’m sorry, who is this?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s me,” said the man, as though Henry was foolish to question his identity. “It’s your old friend, Fodorio.”
DANIEL
Cello
Daniel married Lindsay quickly and also on the condition that they would approach marriage nontraditionally. “Let’s not be married like everyone else. Let’s be married like us,” Lindsay had said. She’d been naked when she said it, which made Daniel more amenable to the whole thing. They both came from families with parents whose marriages had failed in one way or another. Daniel’s parents seemed to be resigned to a husk of a marriage, a sloppy financial partnership that resembled a marriage, their union undergoing decades of hardship, food stamps, tag sales, and public housing, leaving them two people stranded ashore, with only Daniel and his older brother as common threads. Lindsay’s father was an enigma, a man living illegally in a knockoff Airstream in California with a woman younger than Lindsay, and her mother insisted on being more of a friend than a mother, making calculated life mistakes to repeatedly necessitate Lindsay’s girlfriend-like advice and care. She often took the train from Boston to the city to sleep on Daniel and Lindsay’s futon, “for a change of scenery,” she said. It was because all their parents were such complete failures at the entire marital endeavor that Daniel and Lindsay got it in their heads to get married on a whim—partly in spite, and partly in the young hope that if they did it differently, maybe it would work. Mostly spite, Daniel thought now, remembering smugly how his mother had simply changed the subject—talked about adding chips to casseroles—when he’d told her they’d gotten married.
The other reason was that Daniel thought he could hitch his wagon to some of Lindsay’s free-ness, not realizing that the quality of being free resisted the very idea of hitching, of attaching.
They’d taken an impromptu vacation to Costa Rica for Christmas a few months after they met, both bemoaning the idea of miserably going home to their families. The trip was paid for by a short series of catering gigs that Daniel kept secret from the rest of the group and his students, the money from which he was trying to save to have something to fall back on. But Lindsay said that money was for trips, and that they should fall back on the money now. Lindsay was petite, and tanned year-round, and had light brown hair that always had streaks of sun blond in it, as though she was perpetually blessed by good weather. She had an aggressively sunny spirit about her, too, that Daniel was at first exhausted by and then utterly addicted to. In Costa Rica, she wore the tiniest of rainbow-patterned string bikinis, purchased at a stand outside the airport—and sometimes only the bottom of the bikini at that. She didn’t care about any sort of trouble long-term, not enough to be bothered in a permanent way, but she cared intensely about everything that was right in front of her. She’d seen a coati in the street outside their hotel and wept, chased it down, touched the dirty animal like it was holy. Daniel thought it too closely resembled a raccoon with a long rat’s tail.
Lindsay was a social practice artist (for months Daniel didn’t quite know what that meant) with a day job as an assistant fabricator for a woman who made mosaics in SoHo. Lindsay never made any money. She’d played the oboe until college, which Daniel never told Brit or Jana or Henry because they’d never stop teasing him—all those reeds, the spit, the honking sound.
On their last morning in Costa Rica, two days into 1998, they’d woken from a stupor and immediately gotten high, Lindsay still not wearing anything, tossing herself around the small room like an early human, clothes unknown to her. She had an Orion’s belt of moles beneath her right breast. Daniel was lying on the bed watching the ceiling fan whir, fighting the panic-turned-malaise that rushed in whenever he thought about going back to New York. He did not know yet that he was deeply unhappy there.
Then Lindsay brought up marriage, standing in front of the open window with its sheer curtains blowing in the humid breeze, a joint sizzling in her right hand, her left hand on her bare hip, one leg crossed over the other, partially hiding her illicit strip of pubic fuzz, her stance reminding Daniel of a magazine picture of Cindy Crawford, the first that had ever turned him on, the way she looked surprised to be caught half clothed, but also welcoming, as though she were saying, Hey you, come join me in this crazy, pants-optional land.
“We should get married when we get back. But let’s not be married like everyone else. Let’s be married like us.”
Lindsay had a body like a photographer’s subject—a torso the shape of a robust viola, down to the gentle s-curves around her abdomen, small, happy oranges for breasts—everything in its proper place, at once sexual and nonsexual in its naturalness. There was something untamed about her body, something mesmerizing about the way it switched from childlike to sirenlike and back again. She was the most unpredictable being he’d ever met.
“Everyone would think we were so careless,” Daniel said, propping himself up on his elbows, but he was grinning wickedly when he said it, and so was she.
Why did Daniel marry Lindsay? Because she didn’t ask anything of him. Because she didn’t care that he was poor. Because she liked to position herself against whatever was supposed to be. Because her body wanted to be free. Because she wouldn’t require anything of anything; her nature was to react, to take in, to tumble wildly back out.
On the way to his apartment from JFK, they stopped by the City Clerk’s Office and applied for a marriage license. The next evening, they showed up again—this time with Henry as a witness—and married each other, suddenly mortally serious when they were fed the standard vows. Daniel wore his concert suit and she wore a white leather dress. She was the sort of girl who had one of those lying around.
Henry was a good sport about it, and brought Kimiko out to the
Irish pub where Daniel and Lindsay celebrated afterward. It wasn’t until rehearsal two days later that he had to face Brit and Jana about it. Jana eyed the ring he’d placed on his right hand, his bow-arm hand, and rolled her eyes. “Okay, congratulations or whatever,” she’d said.
Brit was decidedly chillier. “Is there no waiting period for that?”
Lindsay and Brit had never actually had a conversation, not that Daniel had seen anyway. But Daniel and Lindsay hadn’t been together that long, and he and Brit didn’t have much occasion to hang out socially now. New York wasn’t like San Francisco, where their quartet life segued into a social life. With Juilliard and the upcoming Esterhazy competition, the obligation was deeper and more serious, and somehow that had an inverse effect on their friendship, requiring it to be somewhat shallower. The city itself was also a part of the diffusion. With so much more to manage—their expensive apartments and their complicated transportation and the never-ending crowds—it was easier not to see each other. He saw it happening with Brit, when she began to bring Paul around, a hedge fund manager whom Daniel found insufferably boring but Brit seemed to love. She said it all the time—“Love to you”—before hanging up their studio office phone after practice. Paul was nice, Daniel supposed. And that was what Brit had always appeared to want: someone hungry for her to say she loved him.
And now, not one year into his marriage—he cringed at that word, so stodgy and foreign still—he and Lindsay had stopped saying “I love you” to each other almost entirely. Or at least they didn’t say it when it wasn’t an insult.
Daniel thought maybe it was the August heat and their lack of an air conditioner (Lindsay said it was bad for the environment; they couldn’t afford one, anyway), but Lindsay seemed angrier than ever. The night before, she’d stood precariously on the couch in her underwear, tripping on the cushions, sloshing a glass of white wine in her hand, crying, angry at him for something he couldn’t remember, repeating, “I love you. I love you and this is how you treat me.” What did she love? Who was he? He wished she’d put some shorts on before fighting.