The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  Henry searched for words. “I don’t remember,” he said. “I think it’s just acting up because of the weather. Or the longitude.”

  “The altitude,” Laurent said.

  “You don’t have to be a jerk about it,” Henry said.

  Laurent smiled, a smile like a sliver cut through his face.

  Jana was still wearing the same clothes she had been wearing on the plane, all black, but her face had the opened-up look of someone who’d just been kissing or laughing. She had an Ace bandage in her hand. Laurent hovered around Henry like he was a potentially dangerous creature. Daniel stayed back.

  “Jesus,” Jana said. “Our first concert is tomorrow, and you tell me about your hand now. No, you didn’t even tell me.”

  “It feels temporary.”

  “Tomorrow, Henry. Are you going to be okay by tomorrow?”

  “Hey, settle down. I just wanted some food,” Henry said, looking to Daniel for sympathy and finding none. “It’s gonna be fine. It’s easy. We’ll play fine.”

  “We have to play more than fine,” Jana said. “Don’t you understand? I thought you understood. You’re drunk and—and injured. This matters.”

  “You’re the one with this oaf all night,” Henry said, sweeping his good arm toward Laurent, catching a few fibers of Laurent’s sweater on his fingertips. The light in the room seemed to dim. He could hear Daniel breathing.

  Laurent stepped forward. His mouth had a knife-edged glint to it, the smile gone. “Maybe you should just go to sleep.”

  “Oh, great,” Henry said. His voice was coming out hysterical, shrill. “Taking tips from this piece of work.”

  Laurent appeared to puff up, like a peacock Henry had seen once.

  Jana put her hands on her hips, angry now.

  “This guy’s probably here for sabotage purposes,” Henry said. “This guy’s group needs it. Have you heard them play? This guy. Their Mozart is—”

  “Henry, stop,” Jana said, quiet and sad.

  “—it’s downright embarrassing, sounds like the ‘Dissonance’ quartet, but an accident.”

  “This is ridiculous.” Jana put her head in her hands. “Just leave, Henry.”

  “Leave what? The room? The quartet?”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” Daniel said. Finally, Daniel stepping up to the plate. A feeling like a warm water balloon being punctured spread in Henry’s chest.

  “You want to talk about being an asshole? You? King of assholes? Which evidence should we bring in first? Lindsay or Brit? Me? Kimiko? Jana’s the only one who’s not mad at you and that’s because maybe you two are peas in a blanket.”

  “In a pod,” Jana said.

  He turned back to her. “They can’t play for real, Jana. They’re a novelty, something to look at. Like French quadruplets. We don’t have to be our best to beat them.”

  Looking at Laurent straight on was like trying to discern people in the streets from a low-flying plane. There were the cars moving about, funny yellow cabs and robotic headlights, but where were the people? Laurent’s absurd attractiveness momentarily amused Henry, though he still felt like crying. There wasn’t much difference between the two emotions. He smiled, his eyes grew wet.

  “Go ahead,” Henry said to Laurent. “Being a goon is the only thing you’re really good at anyway.”

  Laurent just stood there, shiny like a prize. But Daniel stepped forward. “And what are you good at, exactly?”

  “That’s the problem,” Henry said, smiling. “I’m good at everything.”

  Henry didn’t even see Daniel’s fist coming toward his cheekbone, but later he would understand the true measure of his own inebriation, and think of the events that occurred between his knocking on the door and Daniel’s punching him as chalk drawings on a blackboard that someone had leaned against and smudged out. The force of the blow was enough to knock Henry back onto the mussed bedspread of one of the queen beds, arms akimbo, his face reeling long after he was down. The smile that had been there when Daniel punched him was skewed, in a different world now. As he lay there, when the only thing he could see was the expanse of the ceiling above him and the only thing he could hear was Jana’s cursing, which was almost musical in its emotive content, Henry thought of three things in rapid succession. First, he thought of the coda that capped the first movement of the Shostakovich they’d play the following night—he used to love that piece—how it suddenly changed time signature and sped up, and everyone took a turn erratically sawing out the melody, and then they ended on this bizarre, optimistic ascending run—gentle plucked notes for him and Daniel, Jana and Brit on harmonics—like everything dissonant and off-kilter that had come before could be erased with three pastoral notes. They always nailed that ending, but it always felt strange, like it could go off the rails at any moment. That’s the way it was written. Second, he thought of Daniel’s hand, and how it would swell up if he didn’t get ice immediately, and how Jana would blame him for that swelling. And third, he thought, with a bodily force that, had he tried to describe it, would sound synthetic or exaggerated, of how purely, ecstatically good it had felt, being punched, how it had felt like a choice, being punched—how it seemed to match with perfect equality the force that had been gnawing at him from the inside, how it sucked any pain he felt from his arm or his chest or his core or his imperfect heart and planted it in a welt on his cheekbone. He felt gratitude. He felt warmth all over his face, from blood or tears, he didn’t know and didn’t care. He was officially broken.

  DANIEL

  Cello

  Daniel awoke from a dream like pulling himself out of a hot bath, the hotel alarm buzzing B-flat, his least favorite note (the second finger on the G string always wavering; the note never round, nearly accidental). What had he been dreaming? Something pleasant, he felt sure, something that had made him happy. But now the dream had escaped like smoke, disappeared into the atmospheric recesses of his subconscious, and he had no hope of recovering it. The unease he’d become accustomed to slid mercilessly back in, and he submitted to waking fully.

  The hotel room had a static dry heat about it; a light snow had begun to fall. Before moving from the bed, Daniel glanced at his cello case in the corner, strategically placed close enough to and far enough away from the radiator heat, and made a note to move it to the bathroom while he showered, to let the humidity loosen the seams of the wood panels.

  And then, of course, there was his hand. Sopping wet now, wrapped up in a makeshift ice-and-washcloth contraption that had melted through the bedspread. It was his right hand, his bow-arm hand, which, if there was going to be a fucked-up hand, was the one he preferred. That pain he could get through. If there had been pain in his left hand, the notes just wouldn’t make. There would be no charging through that. He set about unwrapping to examine the damage.

  Their dress rehearsal was in one hour, their concert in eight. Whatever subterranean feeling he’d had when he woke up, he was yanked out of it as though by a muscly tide.

  Henry. Lindsay. Henry. Lindsay. Which person he’d injured should he think of first this morning?

  Daniel pictured Lindsay in their apartment (was it now hers?), flipping through a design magazine at the small side table they used for eating, the window open, the sounds of an Upper West Side morning clanging through the room, sounds that, if heard discriminately or kindly, could resemble the leaf-crackling wholesomeness of an American autumn, but were really the unhinged dregs of a fleeting Manhattan October. No, she wouldn’t be up yet. It was Saturday, and Lindsay would be sleeping late. She would make pancakes at noon and take a walk to Fairway, buy blueberries, eat blueberries in the park and then maybe nap there, if the sun was still high enough. The day would have absolutely no point, and she wouldn’t care. She would think of one million things that day, and try to say as many of them aloud as she could, to whomever would listen. She would be as cheerful as the day was empt
y.

  If it was possible to feel both contempt and nostalgia simultaneously for the same thing, that’s what Daniel felt. Perhaps it was that feeling of being underwater—of being angrily helpless and helplessly drawn—that he associated with being with Lindsay. The amount of time they had been together could still be reasonably counted in months, and while it felt like an inevitable amputation, their parting, it also did feel like an amputation—missed and longed for in a second-degree kind of way, but gone for good.

  Are you really happy? He could not stop the habit of talking to her in his head, even though it had been so long since they’d actually spoken.

  He thought of Lindsay often, though not in the way he knew she wished he thought of her. He pictured her compact, pink body in their too-small, dirt-ringed bathtub, her legs draped over the side, laughing fitfully at some inane thing he’d said or done, some face he’d made, some way he’d been that was so easy—too easy—and had delighted her. He recalled the cold closed lid of the toilet where he’d been sitting, and the shape his hands made, curved like two parentheses holding the joke he’d constructed, and her face, freckled and sly and dotted with beads of steam and sweat. Of course that hadn’t lasted, he thought, but how good it had felt to be tethered to someone’s spotlight like that.

  Answer: She had been happy. But that didn’t mean she didn’t also need things from him to cobble together more happiness.

  Daniel unwrapped the last of the washcloth, and while his hand was red and wrinkly from the ice, it didn’t appear to be swollen. There were two red cuts like winks on his knuckles, and those were sensitive. He clenched his hand and the winks opened like eyes. Like Lindsay’s palm-eye.

  It was perfect, really, his injured hand for hers. On their last night together, Lindsay had ecstatically and drunkenly tried to saber a champagne bottle at a friend’s anniversary party (he’d reluctantly attended—in a resentful, perfunctory mood) and ended up with a jagged shard of a bottle of Veuve sticking straight through the webbed meat between her thumb and first finger, just left of the crooked eye tattoo on her palm. Her gin-loosened blood spurted briefly and then, when she held the hand above her heart as Daniel commanded, streamed down to her elbow and dripped onto her sandals and his slacks and the cab seat, all the way to Mount Sinai, where a pimply resident anesthetized her, extracted the shard, and stitched her up (four neat and dissolvable stitches, barely winks themselves) while she wordlessly looked on. It seemed not to hurt at all. Something about the way the halfhearted fluorescents lit their skin in the ER waiting room, or the way he’d crouched nervously next to the doctor, or the way she’d not cried once from pain or shock or the woozy speed of the cab ride home, or the way he’d held her by the waist like a stranger as they walked up the three flights of stairs to their apartment, or the way the apartment’s bottled-up air had felt like a crush of gravity when they swung the door open, or the way he’d watched her unwrap the already bloody dressing over the kitchen sink and rewrap it with cheap paper towels, never removing his own jacket, his arms crossed, waiting for her to look at him, willing her to ask him for help, to hold out her frozen, broken hand for his healthy, seamless one, even though he didn’t really want to help her, he just wanted her not to have done it in the first place—something about some part of it, or all of it, felt like one of those mosaics she was always tinkering with: cracked apart.

  She didn’t ask him for help. She kept her back to him like an indignant child, her shoulder blades poking through the straps of her dress. She didn’t need saving.

  Without turning around, she said, “You’re glad it wasn’t you, right?”

  He didn’t uncross his arms from his chest. “Sure,” he said, and it was true.

  “I saw you. You looked disgusted.”

  It was disgusting, he wanted to say. He had been horrified on an existential level. He’d thought of his own hand, and how he might never recover if something punctured it like that. How everything he’d worked for and wanted would be over. How fucked up it was that everything he’d wanted could be ruined by something so simple. He’d watched the thin arc of blood literally jump out of her impaled hand, like something trying to escape.

  “I ran to you, Lindz. I tried to help.”

  At that, she turned around, half-moons of black makeup smeared beneath her eyes. The paper towels stuck out from the recycled medical tape at all angles. The makeshift bandage wouldn’t last the night. “Exactly,” she said. “But you should have tried to help me before it stabbed me.”

  It stabbed me, he thought, ha. You stabbed yourself. It was her own bubbling, free-spirited whatever that had made her stab herself. But even her free spirit wasn’t free, at least not without injury.

  They didn’t even have enough left to fight it out. They undressed—though Daniel felt like she hadn’t really undressed, not with her hand all taped up like that—and got into bed. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t think of it, of turning her over, pressing himself against and into her, and proving how good and useful they were for each other by how their bodies could still want each other even when—in dire circumstances, in a hospital, in blood—they couldn’t muster their dissipating love. They used to do it like their lives depended on it, like the lives of lovers everywhere depended on their sexual sustenance; they were participating in an important life force. Daniel hated to say that was what tied them together in the first place, but it was, and later he would come to realize that wasn’t so bad. There were worse things than having a body’s pull match your own, and there wasn’t so much different when you tried to describe love in less physical terms.

  But the possibility of sex passed out of his mind and through the open window, lowered now to a sliver in the changing seasons. They both lay like injured prey in the dark. He felt connected to his wife (a word that so quickly reclaimed its foreignness) that night only in that he knew she, too, was jerked in and out of sleep—whenever he woke, she replied with a bodily sigh, and while he stared aimlessly out the window, she coughed and winced herself awake, clutching her hot wet hand against her stomach. He watched the silhouette of his cello in its case lose its hard outline when the sun rose. Later, he found bits of blood-damp paper towel stuck to the backs of his knees and inside his elbows.

  In the morning, she didn’t move from the bed while he packed. He slung the bag and his cello on his shoulders and stood in the archway of their bedroom, backing out in miniature steps, while they tried to out-look each other, to find reasons in each other’s faces to stay, to continue. What pained him most was that she looked at him from the mess of sheets not in any particularly unique way, but in an absolutely recognizable way. A way many women had looked at him before. The way Brit had looked at him from inside her dark car before she drove away from his apartment in San Francisco that night so many years ago (Daniel, you want the wrong thing). The way his mother had looked at him in Houston, full of God and pity, the friction of cicadas in the August night following as he’d driven out of town (Danny, you could be better). A look that was distraught because it was not entirely surprised. A look that said: I always knew you’d do this. And hadn’t he known, too? In that bedroom in Costa Rica, when he’d been the one tangled in the sheets, looking at Lindsay alight all over the room, hadn’t he told himself that he was marrying her because she would make him free and together they would be the freest married people ever, when really he was hoping freedom would mean he would have to give nothing? Hadn’t he known that she would want something from him anyway? And if he really was being honest, hadn’t he also known, in some seed-like way, that he wanted to give nothing because had nothing to give, nothing but his music, or the dogged pursuit of it anyway, that he was as full up of music as he’d ever be of anything, and that he would eventually end up here—staring at his life with Lindsay like it had been wrongly stitched onto him and wanting to run frantically from it, a man made strange to himself, a man made alone?

  Which is why he c
ouldn’t exactly say he regretted punching Henry. Who was Henry to have all the things one could want, that Daniel wanted—not one but two families, easy talent—and then go around crying about it? That attitude alone deserved a punch or two or three. But when his fist made contact and Henry’s smile skewed itself off his face, and the two of them were just bone to bone, there was an unexpected communion, Daniel’s rage meeting Henry’s crisis, both men the most angry at their misplaced selves.

  Daniel thought he wanted the right thing: to be better.

  He examined his cello, which he’d left in an open case next to the tub while he showered. Steam had coated the outside, and he pushed his fingers against the seams to seal them. His cello was finicky with dry heat, and the millimeter expansion of the wood exacerbated a wolf on certain notes, making a single F-natural sound like it was two reedy notes, one a true F and one the product of a small rent in the cello where a seam was pulling apart. He decided to practice here in the hotel room a little before leaving for morning rehearsal, just to solidify the jammy sound.

  In Henry and Kimiko’s small apartment, they had to shove his cello next to the TV like a potted plant. Daniel had called his mother when he’d been staying at Henry’s a week. He told her he was getting a divorce, though he and Lindsay hadn’t actually spoken the word aloud. It was just easier to explain it to her this way.

  “Oh, Daniel,” his mother said, no hint of surprise in her voice. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Are you?”

  “Of course I am,” she said. “I don’t want you to have to go through this.”

  “But you think I have to, don’t you? You’ve always thought I had to.”

  She said, “I always thought she wasn’t quite the girl you’d invented in your mind.”

  “Why can’t people want each other in the exact same amount that other people want them?” he said, finally, in a small voice. He’d never spoken to his mother about these things.