by Aja Gabel
“I don’t think so.”
Lindsay sighed. He could tell she wasn’t drunk enough to really fight, but was too drunk to let it go. He could envision her angrily hailing a cab with her eye hand, leaving him alone on the street, something smart and nasty coming out of her mouth before she slammed the car door and zipped off into the night. He hadn’t said Brit, he was sure, but that’s what she’d heard, so he might as well have. She’d never before been jealous of his past with Brit, but lately it had been coming up more and more.
“I like talking it out,” she said. “That’s what I do. You have an obligation now.”
“I know,” he said.
“I like to be really happy sometimes and really fucking sad sometimes and all the things in between. That’s what I like. That’s what I require.”
Daniel wasn’t sure if there was all that much between really happy and really sad. He should know—he’d lived in that space his whole life. And beyond that, he was beginning to see that her free-spiritedness wasn’t so free. He couldn’t tell if he’d confused youth for freedom.
“Do you like what I like?” she asked.
How was he supposed to know? He could only remember her liking money and trips to Costa Rica. She seemed like a big blank page, unnotated staffs, no key signature. But he said, “I like you.”
“Yeah, well, I love you,” Lindsay said. “I love us.”
What he didn’t ask was: What is us? Were they married like us? Or did they just happen to find each other, two people who had built their lives entirely out of reacting to things they didn’t like, all the while failing to define what it was, exactly, they were?
When they finally got back to their apartment on Amsterdam and Eighty-seventh two hours later, they were beyond exhausted, bone-tired and swollen from the heat. During their walk, New York had felt like it had before he’d moved here. Like the idea of the city, like promise, like something that could be filled up by all your experiences. When Lindsay opened the door, she didn’t turn the lights on before grabbing him at the waist and pulling him onto her. He thought maybe she was crying a little, but when they began to have sex on the dust-bunnied floor—a cooler surface than the bed those days—it was difficult to tell in the darkness and humidity. They didn’t even stop for water. Daniel didn’t think about anything. Lindsay came like she resented it, crying out as if it was against her better judgment. Daniel’s knees ached from the hard floor, like he was doing penance. After, they remained on the floor, Lindsay draped across his chest pocked with cello neck divots. His insides were the texture of Cool Whip, he thought, which was basically nothing.
“Hey, Danny? When your mother prays for us, what do you think she prays for?” Lindsay said. No one called him Danny anymore. He hated it.
Daniel stared at the popcorn ceiling, trying to find a pattern. Lindsay’s voice was disembodied in the dark, but he felt her heedless warmth clinging to his, the eye on her palm boring into his skin.
“I think she prays we didn’t make a mistake,” he said.
Lindsay sighed and it was like he was sighing her sigh, as it blew straight through him. “I don’t think so,” she said. “I think she prays we did.”
October 1998
Calgary, Canada
HENRY
Viola
On the descent into Calgary on their way to Esterhazy, the plane fought through the worst turbulence Henry had ever experienced. It rumbled and dropped, and Henry heard the small child behind him retch into a bag while kicking the back of his seat in time to the convulsions. Henry thought first of Jana, who sat in front of him next to Brit, unfazed and reading a magazine; and then of Kimiko, back in New York, newly pulled out of the morning sickness phase and into the part of pregnancy that made her glow from the inside as though she’d swallowed a lightbulb; and finally of his expensive, insured-but-irreplaceable viola in its case in the overhead compartment, jostling around. He felt troubled by the order of his thoughts, and the plane continued to rollick. He settled back on his viola above his head, and envied Daniel and the extra seat they’d purchased for the cello, which was strapped in between them. He should have taken his instrument out of the overhead and held it on his lap, despite what the too-tall flight attendant had told him about stowing his belongings for landing.
The rough descent didn’t bode well for their trip to Canada. It was October, and this was their second and likely last chance at Esterhazy.
I’ll call Kimiko from the hotel, he said to himself. Tell her how much I love her. And the baby. Kimiko was sure they were having a girl. She was busy learning the Mendelssohn for an engagement in Tokyo in February, when she’d be seven months pregnant. Between now and then she would record her first album with RCA. Her manager didn’t know about the baby.
He poked Jana in the back of the head with his finger and she turned around, fixing her hair. “Hey,” Jana said. “Stop it.”
“Don’t fucking screw this up,” Kimiko had whispered in his ear when she saw them off at the airport. She pulled away from his ear and smiled. In New York, the fall sky was piercingly clear with a gust of erotic wind that lifted Kimiko’s hair from her shoulders, and he hated to leave.
“Are we going to die?” he asked Jana.
“Eventually,” she said, and turned back around to her magazine.
Brit shifted her head slightly to smile greenly at him. Kind Brit, he thought.
On the other side of the cello, Daniel looked tired and uninterested in Henry’s anxiety. He’d been staying with Henry and Kimiko the last few weeks, sleeping on their new couch in their new apartment together, and though no one had used the word divorce—Daniel hadn’t even really mentioned Lindsay—everyone knew there was something wrong. Daniel didn’t wear his wedding ring anymore, which was notable but not as conspicuous for musicians as it was for non-musicians. Henry was growing frustrated with Daniel, not only for taking up space on his couch, but also for sulking around the apartment like it was Henry’s fault he had to sleep there, and intruding on what was supposed to be a special time for him and Kimiko. Kimiko hated it, too. She thought Henry should leave behind the whole quartet endeavor, and had begun needling him with opportunities—to play with the Met, to pursue a couple of solo gigs of his own during her Tokyo trip, to try his hand at conducting, something he’d always been interested in. She thought their life would be more flexible if Henry wasn’t also attached to three other people, and here was Daniel, physically attaching himself to their couch.
There was also the issue of Fodorio. In August, Fodorio had wanted him to fill in at a recital series at Carnegie, for a young Russian violist who’d developed arthritis in his bow arm. “Bad ulna,” Fodorio had said. Henry had declined, as they had Esterhazy coming up, but Fodorio hadn’t given up (anyway, Henry made it sound like Esterhazy was the only reason he was demurring). And he hadn’t told anyone, not even Jana, not even Kimiko, that Fodorio was after him to make a recital debut. Fodorio would be here in Canada, no longer a judge, but an emeritus, and he wanted to have a meeting with Henry and introduce him to a few important international talent bookers. This made Henry nervous, not because he was afraid of the meeting, but because he was afraid of what Jana might say if she found out.
The quartet would give three concerts over the next five days. The circumstances weren’t ideal.
His stomach jumped to his throat as the plane dropped one last time, and then the modest night lights of the city revealed themselves. Beyond the lights were the peaks of the Rockies that surrounded the city, into which they would soon be driving two hours. It was only late October, and the city already looked cold. He couldn’t imagine how it felt down there, let alone up in the mountains. He wished he had brought a hat, or at least still had his beard.
The plane came in at an odd angle on the runway, or so it seemed to Henry, and it was only after the wheels smacked safely down and the engine roared in reverse that he let the t
ears spill down his cheeks. He’d been having a thing lately, crying jags that came out of nowhere—while he ate a greasy burger in Bryant Park, reading the paper, as the first fall leaves blew chilly onto his lap; when a middling undergraduate student made a breakthrough in a Beethoven sonata during a lesson (Control your vibrato, he’d said to the student a million times, and then all of a sudden she had); as he sat in a subway car parked somewhere in the bowels between Columbus Circle and Lincoln Center, the lights flickering on and off, unnoticed among all the bored commuters. Crying, always. Without warning, his throat would burn and contract, the muscles behind his eyes get syrupy, and he’d think of everything at once, everything sad and wonderful and potentially terrible, lost pleasures as well as felt pleasures. Just a glimmer of each, so that when he was crying, he wasn’t really crying about anything, couldn’t tell you if you asked him to—it was like trying to pinch a penny with Vaseline on your fingers. The quicksilver futility made him cry harder.
The crying annoyed Kimiko. She would swat at him when he got on a roll, angry that he was crying when she was the one who suffered through months of vomiting and now had a slightly puffy look like she’d let herself go. Henry experienced the crying as a thing that was happening to him, though, rather than a thing he was doing, and she insisted he was wrong.
The plane’s interior lit up as they jolted to a stop. Daniel reached over and unbuckled his cello.
“Are you . . .” he said, looking at Henry like he was angry, like Henry had no right to cry because Daniel was the one whose life was falling apart.
Henry tried to roll his wet eyes. He shook his head. “It’s just a thing that keeps happening,” he said.
Daniel sighed and went back to cradling his cello in the seat like it was a baby.
A baby.
Henry was going to have a baby. Before the spring, due on the equinox, actually. They’d met with a doctor at Mount Sinai, a stern woman with cropped gray hair. Henry sat on the chair in the room, trying the whole time to hide his quivering legs. He sweat big rings in the armpits of his shirt. He was nervous, sure. Who wouldn’t be? But it was more than that, like earth shifting inside him, something essential breaking apart, changing.
Then there was another issue, something the crying was a distraction from. Sometimes when he was practicing, his bow arm just gave up. His left hand could do all the fingerings, but his right hand and arm felt weak down to the bone. It was all he could do to pull the bow across the string, to make a sound, and an unbeautiful one at that. The pain felt like his body was in mourning—some fundamental grief, source unknown. He’d told no one. It was unsayable. If it turned out to be a real problem . . . He had a hard time even finishing the thought. If there was a real problem, an unfixable one, he felt as though he would have to rewind to the beginning, and not just the beginning of conservatory, but the beginning of everything. If it was a serious injury and not just a temporary malaise, it had the potential to be nuclear, and Henry thought if he didn’t look at it right now, if he just powered through, it might morph and evolve into something he could live with.
It was just a phase, he told himself. A phase he’d probably pull out of, the way Kimiko had pulled out of morning sickness.
“Welcome to Calgary, or wherever your final destination may be,” said the bored steward over the intercom. Henry drew a deep breath. Daniel rolled his eyes. Everyone was nervous and trying to hide it. How could they not be nervous, after their last trip here?
Jana and Brit were already holding their instruments, waiting to deplane. The cabin was getting stuffy, or perhaps Henry was getting hotter. He hated this part, waiting for the flight attendants to do whatever they did to connect the door of the plane to the Jetway. How hard could it be? Just open the door.
Once Daniel carefully cleared the way with his cello on his back, Henry stepped into the aisle and reached for his instrument in the overhead. He pulled down his viola case and slung it over his shoulder. The four of them walked through the airport single file, with big spaces between them, and some people stared, wondering if they were in a band or famous; and the whole time Henry felt like an imposter, like inside the case under his arm was not a viola but something dangerous: a gun he wasn’t trained to use, an explosive he couldn’t stop from detonating, a small, foreign animal—scared, volatile, and hungry.
* * *
—
Henry had been a happy child, one of those insufferably happy ones, his mother had told him. She said his happiness was the sort that when friends came to visit and didn’t know what to say (you know, baffled friends without babies themselves, as his mother described them), a big look of relief came over their faces at such an obvious quality to remark on. Oh, what a happy baby. How did you make such a happy baby? Does he ever cry?
“You never cried,” his mother said.
“In fact, you laughed a lot. Too much, maybe,” his father said.
They were always going on about Henry’s babyhood these days, ever since he had called to tell them the good news, after only a few phone calls in which his father mispronounced Kimiko’s name and his mother demanded he send photos of her in the mail. His parents were good parents. He’d had an untroubled childhood, even as a prodigy, and had an untroubled relationship with his parents now. Life was too bright and too short to argue with family, he thought, especially when they were, on the whole, lovely people. His parents had never pushed him—in fact, they had rarely shown up to his concerts after a certain point, after he could drive himself, after there were too many, after they’d sat in the audience countless times before. At times he thought his parents were trying to make sure he didn’t get too big a head. His teachers and conductors would fawn over him and his unlikely, grown-up sound, but his parents, never. “Good show, Henry,” they’d say, and then ask him to tell them about the composer.
He had a sister, Jacqueline, and Jacqueline was talented, too, but in a looser way that always seemed to Henry more creative. She could choose what to do—make a film, paint a painting, learn the guitar. Her talent wasn’t bestowed upon her. Now Jackie was a sous chef in Berkeley, with a wife and a dog and a backyard and neighbors who were professors with two babies and a chicken coop, an endless stream of eggs. When he told Jacqueline that Kimiko was pregnant, he thought he detected a hint of jealousy in her reaction, and he wouldn’t have blamed her. Henry’s life must have seemed glamorous and lucky to Jackie, the way Jackie’s life seemed calm and confident to Henry.
Henry wondered now, for the first time, why he was such a happy child. Jackie always reasoned that he was happy because he knew there was one thing he couldn’t fail at: music.
“The fear of failure accounts for the majority of anxiety and depression in this country,” Jackie had said on the phone when he told her what their mom had said. Like she was some kind of scientist. Actually, her wife was a clinical psychologist.
“I thought the fear of failure drove people to be high achievers,” Henry said, thinking of Jana, of Daniel.
Jackie huffed. “How would you know? When were you ever afraid of anything?”
He was afraid right now, Henry thought, as the quartet piled into a town car with an overly friendly driver outside the airport. He ran through a mental list: afraid of Daniel seeing him cry, afraid of crash-landing, afraid of Kimiko miscarrying, afraid of the pregnancy itself, afraid of telling Jana about Fodorio. But now, afraid of what? He wasn’t afraid that he wouldn’t play well, but that he wouldn’t play well with the quartet anymore.
The car door closed in a thick silence, and Jana leaned her head against the window in the front seat, closing her eyes. Brit sat between him and Daniel in the back, and Henry could tell she was trying to fold herself tightly so as not to invade their personal space. It was silly how Brit was always so careful about crossing lines, he thought. He’d been more intimate with her than he had with most of the other women in his life, except for Kimiko and Jana. Henry
thought he and Brit shared a profound surprise at the way people failed to simply and consistently be good. He recalled a drunken moment in a bar after a tepid recital in South Carolina, when Daniel and Lindsay had exited the bar after an ostentatious show of arguing and ogling and pawing, something cruel about Brit’s neediness tossed off in the middle of the fight (Lindsay to Daniel: “Don’t look at her”; Daniel to Brit: “And you, don’t look at me that way”). The door swung wildly shut behind them, and Brit looked at Henry across the Lindsay-spilled Guinness that was dripping into her lap, and her eyes welled up, and she said, “Why can’t he just be human?” and Henry said, maybe too lightly, “He wants to be more than human.”
In the car, he tapped his hand on Brit’s knee and she returned the gesture. She had no family to come to the concerts. His family would arrive the next afternoon, Jackie included. He was lucky.
“So what’s the baby name this week?” Brit asked. “Ludwig?”
“Johannes?” Jana said from her slumped position up front, never missing an opportunity to poke fun at his forthcoming fatherhood.
Kimiko had thrown around the idea of naming their baby Wolfgang before she’d decided they were having a girl, and Henry had made the mistake of telling the group at a rehearsal. When Jana made a joke about it at a Juilliard dinner party within range of Kimiko, she made him pay for it at home. “Fuck you,” she said, pouring a generous version of the glass of wine she allowed herself every couple of days. “Who is she to say that about our baby? It’s not like I go around telling other people how Jana is flat-chested and bossy.”
“Funny,” Henry said now. “If we had decided, I wouldn’t tell you clowns.”
They had decided. Their daughter’s name would be Clara Suyaki. Henry hadn’t really had a say in the matter, Kimiko believing she gave him a win by allowing the baby’s last name to be his (though hers was sneaked in there, too). If he told Jana, she’d think it was after Schumann’s wife, and even though it was in part—Clara Schumann was a composer in her own right, Kimiko would say—he couldn’t risk giving Jana any more sensitive information.