by Aja Gabel
“Oh, don’t cry about it,” Daniel said.
In the car, they were crowded by their instruments. Jana’s violin was up front with her, Brit’s violin shoved down by their feet, and Henry’s viola in the window behind their heads. Brit refused to touch anyone, Daniel’s bad mood was palpable, and Jana pretended to sleep. There was nothing for Henry to do but wait for the hours to tick by as the car bypassed the city he’d seen from the plane and climbed higher into the mountains. He wanted desperately to open the window to let in some air, but he didn’t, afraid of the altitude and the chill. He could hear his sister’s voice in his head: The altitude has already gotten to you, stupid. He felt, in the breast pocket of his coat, a piece of paper so manhandled the edges had gone all raw, a scrap onto which he’d copied down Fodorio’s number and the message from the business card Jana saw him eat, a scrap of paper he didn’t know why he kept, but which he kept nonetheless, and took out only when he felt confused or lost, to read the simple and straightforward promise on it, the barely legible scrawl on the back: Call me when you’re ready to go solo.
* * *
—
The hotel was reminiscent of a Swiss ski chalet, or what Henry thought Swiss ski chalets looked like: gabled with chocolate trim, a massive, crackling fire in the lobby, ballroom-height ceilings, bright-eyed attendants in patterned sweaters, guest rooms decorated with a mishmash of quaint quilts and throw pillows. The Esterhazy had switched hotels since their last appearance, and this one had more charm and character. Most guests in the hotel were there for the competition, whether to compete or to watch, and Henry kept an eye out for the St. Vincent quartet, those attractive, smarmy men from Montreal. The rivalry between the two groups existed only in Jana’s head, he was pretty sure, but her theory wasn’t helped by the fact that the four group members were tall, muscly men with French accents, who looked like they belonged on a rugby team and not in a quartet (they all probably had wonderful and appropriately thick Canadian sweaters). And they could win, maybe, which was really what bothered Jana.
With nothing on the schedule until the morning, when they would hold the rehearsal before their first concert later that evening, they retreated quietly to their adjacent rooms. Henry heard Daniel turn up the television in the room next to his. He walked to the opposite wall and leaned his ear against the cold surface: Jana made no sound. Probably asleep, he assumed. Brit was in a room on the other side of Jana. He sat on the bed to dial Kimiko.
The sound of her voice made him realize how wildly he missed her, how much he’d hated to leave her. He told her they made it fine, and Kimiko mumbled something he couldn’t hear, distortion he blamed on distance.
“How are you feeling?” he asked.
“Juice,” she said.
“You feel like juice?” he said, not sure if she had misheard or was simply being obstinate.
“What?”
“How are you feeling?”
“How are you feeling? Why do you always ask me that?”
Because you’re growing our baby, he didn’t say. “Because you sound weird.”
“You sound weird. I was asleep. Did something happen?”
“There was turbulence.”
“I was having a dream, too,” she said.
He assumed the connection was bad.
“What was it?”
“We were—we were swimming,” she said, summoning it up. “And singing at the same time. Swimming and trying to sing, but the water kept filling up our mouths, and I was choking. Or you were. I don’t really remember.”
“That sounds terrible.”
“It was sort of funny, actually. God, I feel like a smoke, you know?”
“Well, don’t.”
“It tasted like . . . wine. Or a wine cooler, something like that.”
“What? You smoked a cigarette?”
“No, the water we were swimming in. Maybe I wanted to choke because it tasted like wine.”
“Okay, all right,” Henry said. He felt his cheeks flush with the desire for a drink, and the satisfaction he felt at the idea that he could hang up and go down to the bar and get one.
“Okay, I’m going back to sleep,” Kimiko said. “I love you.”
“I love you, too,” he said, and let the click of the phone punctuate her goodbye.
* * *
—
Daniel was always up for the bar, especially these days, and Henry collected him for a trip to the stately one on the first floor of the hotel. They might as well try to get past whatever tension was between them before the concert tomorrow. If you play together, Henry thought, you shouldn’t also live together. The bar was lit like a funeral, orange and somber, and when Henry took out his wallet to pay, his right hand went jelly loose, like the tissue inside had just stopped working. He flexed a couple times, and pain shot up toward his elbow. He asked for a champagne bucket of ice on the side.
“You’re having hand issues?” Daniel asked, in a voice that was tinged more with anger than concern.
When the bartender brought the bucket, Henry dunked his folded-up hand in it, picking up his Manhattan with his left hand. He took big sips. It was more than his hand, but Daniel didn’t need to know that. “Don’t tell Jana. It’s not a big deal. I think it’s the altitude.”
“Yeah, not a big deal to you,” Daniel said.
“You’d think it’d be the biggest deal to me, on account of it being my hand and all.”
Daniel drank the cheapest beer on tap. He rolled his eyes. “When was the last time you screwed up in a concert? I bet never. You’re gifted and talented.”
Daniel was right. The last time Henry had messed up during a concert he’d been twelve, and he hadn’t hit an out-of-tune note, just the wrong one, and no one had really noticed.
“It wasn’t always so easy being . . .” Henry trailed off.
“. . . a prodigy?” Daniel said. “Please. Tell me how hard it was to not even have to try to be good.”
“Well, it’s not easy now. I mean, just because you’re good at something doesn’t mean you necessarily want all of it, or even want to do it. Just because you have it.”
Daniel raised his eyebrows. “You don’t want to be in this group? That’s seriously what you’re saying right now?”
“No. I’m just saying that getting what you want isn’t always fun.”
Daniel sighed, his annoyance receding for a moment. “I guess.”
Between them, immaterial, was the ghost of Lindsay, tiny and furious, always furious lately. Was Lindsay what Daniel wanted? Daniel’s romantic desires had always seemed opaque to Henry. Henry briefly considered bringing up Lindsay, but thought better of it. What would he say to Daniel? Try harder? Be better to her? Be better to Brit? Go back in time and un-marry? Instead Henry said, “That’s a skill one could devote some attention to, I guess. Wanting what you have.”
Daniel looked up at him and his face reclaimed all of the dripping spite. “I don’t need gratitude advice from you.”
The drink wasn’t going as Henry had expected. He drank more of his Manhattan and ordered another. He’d just wait until Daniel stopped resenting him for something he couldn’t control. Hell, he resented himself, for potentially disappointing Jana, and for keeping his hand and arm issues from her. But he had to keep it from her. If she was worried about him on top of everything else, they’d have no chance tomorrow. Then they’d have no chance ever.
A girl punctured the silence between them.
“Get in a fight?”
The girl was so striking that he thought maybe he was the target of an escort scheme, or in the middle of some kind of prank. She was angular, with a chin that pointed straight down at the floor like she was making a judgment, doll eyes that took up most of her face, and a small, pert, smiling mouth. Her hair was long and dark and loose down her back. She wore a dress with a black lace p
anel over her chest, and she swirled a martini on the bar. He imagined she was the daughter of Eastern European immigrants, and he felt the Manhattan bloom in his stomach.
“Oh,” he said, gesturing to his hand in the bucket of ice. “No, I just—it hurts.”
“It’s no big deal,” Daniel said, not even looking at the girl.
“You must be musicians, then,” she said, shifting in her stool. There were three seats between them, which Henry eyed warily.
“Yes. Are you?” Henry asked.
She laughed. She had the sort of forward, masculine presence that some kinds of men fell for. Was he one of them? He had no idea. “No,” she said. “My family has a cabin up the mountain, and I forgot it was Esterhazy week.”
“You wouldn’t have come otherwise?”
She shook her head. “It’s a bit insane. I’d rather stay in sleepy Edmonton than wade through the crowd. But I guess I’ll get to hear a few good concerts.”
Her name was Lucy, and she was a medical student, and when he said they were in a quartet whose first concert—first of three—was the following evening, she slid across two seats to plant herself next to him. Daniel quietly drank on his other side, though he made a point of looking at her. Henry’s right hand was numb, which he felt was a good sign. Maybe when he thawed, the muscles might reset and forget all this business of hurting.
Lucy laughed easily, and asked questions naturally. She didn’t stand for awkward pauses. She was thoroughly charming. He felt so relieved by her presence—what was she relieving him of?—that he relaxed into it.
“So what’s wrong?” she asked.
He was nearly done with his second Manhattan.
“For one, I can’t stop crying.”
At that, Daniel looked up. “I’m Daniel,” he said, holding his perfect, working hand out across Henry. Lucy shook it.
“I meant with your hand,” Lucy said. “But okay.”
“Oh,” Henry said, wriggling his fingers in the ice. He’d truly forgotten the whole contraption was there. “I don’t know. I think I’m tired.”
“Your hand is in ice because you’re tired?”
“I’ve been playing for twenty years. I can be tired.”
“He was playing in utero,” Daniel said, nudging Henry so hard he had to grab on to the bar to steady himself.
She shrugged. “Maybe he just needs physical therapy. I don’t know about that crying thing, though. He might need therapy-therapy for that.”
“That’s what I’ve been saying,” Daniel said, though he hadn’t ever said that, not once.
Henry finished his drink and signaled for another. Three was too many on the night before a concert, he thought, but the thought quickly dissolved into the dim lights above him. “I only told you that because you’re a stranger. And a doctor. A stranger doctor. Diagnose me.”
“Well,” she said.
She uncrossed her legs and crossed them the other way. It wasn’t sexual attraction Henry felt the most then, though that was there. It was that she was so different from them. Lucy, someone who didn’t know anything about his world.
“Since you’re here,” she said, “I think possibly pressure has something to do with it?”
“I think it’s the altitude.”
“Maybe that, too. But I was talking about, um, career pressure.”
“This isn’t very scientific.”
“Are we talking about the weeping or the hand?”
“I didn’t say weeping.”
“Scientifically speaking,” she said, playing with the lemon twist in the fingers of her right hand, “evolutionarily speaking, actually, tears are meant to signal to others that you’re in danger. But it’s something only your intimates would be able to detect.”
“So it’s a cry for help,” Daniel said. “Pun intended.”
“Indeed,” she said, and as they smiled at each other across Henry, he suddenly felt like a guest on their date.
“Or there are some theories that say crying elicits compassion, so it’s a way to save a relationship in distress. It’s what endears babies to their mothers.”
“Or fathers,” Daniel said, looking pointedly at Henry.
“Sure, or fathers.”
“I don’t know what to do,” Henry said like a hiccup. And then he felt actual hiccups coming.
She leaned in. She smelled musky and warm but when she spoke her breath was all lemon. “Are you staying here?”
Henry couldn’t tell which one of them she was speaking to, and furthermore, it was coming: he was going to cry again. What version of Henry would have taken this opportunity? He tried to remember. He supposed he hadn’t really cheated on anyone before because he hadn’t really tied himself to anyone, not until Kimiko. But a version of himself, a younger version—a version more physically deft (ice clinking around his hand) and less subject to the gravity of choices (baby squirming in utero)—would have swept this Lucy up in his arms, taken her to his hotel room, and had quiet Canadian sex with her so Daniel wouldn’t hear through the wall. He tried to summon that will now, but it wouldn’t rise. What came instead was this goddamn crying. He blinked tears back furiously.
“I’m having a baby,” he said, as if just realizing it. “We’re naming her Clara. After Schumann.”
Lucy frowned and sat back. She uncrossed her legs and hooked her heels on the barstool like she was going to stand. “Oh,” she said. “Probably you’re freaking out about that, then.”
Daniel stood up to leave and Henry desperately wished he’d been the first to stand up. As Daniel walked away without him, he tossed back the rest of his drink. After a mumbled apology to Lucy, he left money under the bucket that was now full of ice water, and immediately the condensation started to bleed onto the bill.
“I’m sorry,” he said again. “That’s information you’re supposed to give up front. I’m a creep. I’ll get these drinks.”
She stood. She opened her mouth as if to say something thoughtful or stern or cutting, but then closed it, pursed her lips, and shrugged. Henry saw her decide he wasn’t worth whatever she was going to say. It made his head swim. He looked for Daniel, but he had gone.
He felt as though he was underwater. The halls were too wide, he decided, stumbling down a corridor the full length of the hotel before realizing his room was a floor up. It was like something had come loose inside his head and was actually floating around, knocking against his skull, a dumb fish. He tried to remember if there was a minibar in his room with snacks. What he needed was food. The halls were dark and old, and buried human noises pulsed through the closed doors.
His room did not, in fact, have a fridge, or even any crackers. And where had Daniel gone? He’d lost Daniel. Probably Daniel had lost him. Or that’s how Daniel would likely explain it. When had they parted?
He sat on his bed and held his hand up in front of his face. It didn’t hurt anymore. He couldn’t feel it at all, actually. But that was the same as not hurting. He examined the thin bones and ropy meat on his fingers, his knuckles automatically cascading down as if holding a bow aloft. He held his hand there so long that it seemed to detach from the rest of his body and become an idea of a hand, like a painting of a hand or a sculpture of a hand, even as he moved it, front, back, front, back. This was Henry—his amazing hands, his incredible poise, his perfect pitch. Or it was Henry. But now, what was he now? Almost a father, an irritating boyfriend, an exiled friend, a deceitful quartet member.
And still, no food. Food would fix everything.
He didn’t think of it as an excuse to knock on Jana’s door. He really was starving, and he really had lost Daniel. He was hungry like he hadn’t been in days. Since he could remember, maybe. An ability to measure time was slipping away from him. He knocked again, not knowing how long it had been since he last knocked. And then again, harder.
He heard a scuffl
e behind the door, and a bar of light streamed from underneath onto his feet. The door opened like a wave crashing over him, but in reverse, pulling and pushing him at the same time.
It was Laurent, as thick and well boned as he remembered him. Something snobbish about his look, even though his hair was a mess, his shirt wrinkled under his sweater. “Henry?” he said, infusing it with an accent so it came out “Hon-ri?”
The entryway was lit up, but the rest of the room was shrouded in semi-darkness, and at the border, where the light lost dimension, stood Jana. She was perfectly still.
“I was wondering if you had any cookies,” Henry said.
“What’s wrong with that?” Jana said, pointing to his right hand, lobster red from the ice.
He looked at it like it was new to him.
Jana pulled him inside and went into the bathroom, where she rummaged through the drawers for a bandage. Then, like someone Henry had dreamt into being, Daniel emerged. He’d been in this room the whole time? How long had it been since they’d left the bar? Henry gave up: there was no way to tell. And everyone here, without him.
“I didn’t know where you’d gone,” Daniel said, by way of explaining this strange collection of people in Jana’s room.
But Henry knew they’d been talking about him. His hand, the girl, the crying. Or was it worse to entertain the idea that they hadn’t been talking about him? That instead they’d been talking about something unknown to him? Perhaps Jana and Daniel had been bonding over what they shared, something Henry could never share, the hard work it’d taken to get there, the trying and the wanting and the failing. Henry had never had to try, had never thought to want or not want, and was unacquainted with failure.
Laurent leaned casually against the dresser. “Did you hurt it?”