The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  She answered swiftly and calmly: “Because sometimes we need to suffer and break, and then be made whole again to be close to God.”

  Daniel hung up the phone.

  His parents were not coming to Canada to hear him play. His mother sent a good-luck card to him and had written beneath an embossed illustration of flowers that his father’s slipped disc was acting up again and she had to be around in case he fell. She enclosed a check for two hundred dollars. Daniel knew his father fell for reasons other than back pain, and he cashed the check without calling her to say thank you.

  In the corner of his hotel room farthest from the radiator heat, Daniel took out his cello and arranged himself. He heard nothing from the wall he shared with Henry, not even the crank of the ancient shower. This would wake him up.

  Daniel began with scales, as he always did, reliable and strong. When he was satisfied, he moved to the pizzicato portions of the Ravel, warming up his right hand, and then settled on the relentless triple stops in the Shostakovich. They were dissonant on purpose, but their dissonance had to be just so, or they would sound sloppy. Laziness in Shostakovich intonation was a classic mistake in these competitions—when you got tired, you thought you could hide in the noise. He started with the bottom notes and worked his way up, playing the three notes separately until they were the same exact pitch several times in a row, and then adding them up, perfecting the pivot of his bow.

  In his mind he commenced a one-way imaginary conversation with Lindsay. Depressing Shostakovich? Ha. This had verve and spark and limitless energy. It was subversive and political and breathless. It was angry, not depressing, Lindsay. No one answered but his own cello.

  He’d been playing the triple stops for ten minutes when Henry banged on the door for him to shut up, and when Daniel opened it, he recognized in Henry’s purpled eye, swollen nose, and sorry stench his own wayward bruise. In that tacit way, they apologized to each other, and forgave themselves.

  * * *

  —

  Brit looked at them like they were disfigured, and when she asked what happened, Jana said, “Nothing,” at the same time Henry said, “I made Daniel hit me.”

  Brit turned to Daniel. Daniel said, “It’s true.”

  “But why?”

  “Sometimes you have to be broken down in order to be made whole again, at least in God’s eyes,” Daniel said.

  Brit sighed. They set up quietly and started their run-throughs. What Daniel had told Lindsay was true—they no longer filled rehearsals throwing ideas around, debating and arguing over interpretations of phrases and tenutos and sforzando articulations. Instead, decisions were made with a series of subverbal cues: Brit’s taking over the melody in the second movement and Jana’s passing it to Henry in the fourth denoted who was in charge of that phrase; a slip of a bow tip could indicate ambivalence about the dynamic choice; and countless other movements were missives—a slight lean forward or back, a persistent attack at the frog, a certain brightness of tone, and when necessary, a furrowed brow, a frown, and a pause in playing.

  Which isn’t to say they didn’t speak. They did, of course. But it was no longer the meat of what they did. At some point it simply became irrelevant, extra.

  Brit’s hair was still wet from her shower, and her hands were white with cold. She’d always looked so wide-open to Daniel, open in the face. She had a regular face, but it had a naked quality to it, a tendency to appear recently unmasked. Pale and clear and patrician, a surprise of dark, mannish eyebrows under her long light hair. Blue eyes, a direct nose, a small mouth, and an alto voice with little range that always came out calm and considerate, even when she was angry, even when she was sad. In the six years they’d known each other, she’d changed physically, become leaner in the jaw, creased around the mouth, more upright in her carriage, and less loose in the arms. But the exposed nature of her face remained the same—plump skin, a dash of freckles across her nose. She would still be beautiful when she was very old.

  “You’re swelling up,” she said to Henry as they switched music from the Ravel to the Shostakovich.

  He grimaced, and then grimaced at the pain of grimacing. “I’ll ice it.”

  “Maybe makeup, too,” Brit said.

  “He’s good at icing things,” Jana said. “I think he should see a doctor about the hand.”

  “I don’t need to see a doctor,” Henry said. “It’ll be fine. It’s just stress.”

  Another group noisily entered the hall, clattering down the aisle. Their time was running out. They had a luncheon to attend, and then a short afternoon free before the concert. Maybe he would ask Brit to take a walk with him. They hadn’t spent time alone in ages. Maybe years. Henry and Jana seemed so caught up in something, playing through netting, that he wanted suddenly just to have Brit around.

  They cut short the Shostakovich run-through, not even touching the final two movements. They usually felt a healthy dose of nerves before a concert, but this was different, perhaps having to do with Henry’s purple eye or Daniel’s cut-up knuckles or Jana’s refusal to discuss it at all, and they were nervous in a new way. It passed between them like a cold current.

  Jana stuck around to listen in on the other rehearsal, and Henry said he was going back to his room for more ice. Brit and Daniel walked out of the hall together and into the white morning. The dusting of snow had stopped, but the sky was still overcast. The vertiginous mountains towering behind the shops had the look of being both off in the distance and menacingly close, and something about their ghostly pallor and ragged outline, like a pencil drawing on the blank sky, added to Daniel’s nerves.

  “We should ski,” Daniel said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.

  “I’ll meet you at the top,” Brit said. She’d tied her blond hair in a braid down the side of her neck.

  “No, I don’t ski.”

  “Eh, me neither.”

  “Too expensive,” Daniel said.

  Had they truly not been alone in so long? In New York, it was difficult to be alone. Everyone was always running somewhere, trying to catch the subway or a bus, meeting someone on the next corner, running into a coffee shop or a bookstore or a bodega for a quick this or that before the next thing. It seemed to Daniel that they’d all simply matched the pace of the city, in both their personal lives and their career. The clip was fast, and because the city always gave you something to do, it was easy to fall in line. Keeping up was easier than trying to make space.

  But something about these mountains was slowing everything down. Even he and Brit walked more slowly than usual, ambling toward their hotel. The bottom of his cello thumped against the back of his thigh with every step, and he found it strangely pleasing. Brit was smiling, too, and she pulled a knit hat low over her head.

  “So you’re not going to tell me what happened?” Brit asked.

  “I was being a prick and then he was being a prick, so it just seemed like the thing to do.”

  “Okay. Hopefully that’s out of your system now. So we can play tonight.”

  “I hope so,” Daniel said, though he was not at all sure. The problem didn’t seem to be that something was in his system, but that something wasn’t. “I hope his hand is okay.”

  “Yours, too,” Brit said.

  “Well, yeah.”

  “I don’t remember it being so nice here,” she said. “I think I was too terrified to see how nice it was.”

  “It’s hard to imagine us then,” he said. “When I think back on that group that competed—us—it’s like . . . we were children.”

  “Well, we were something like children,” Brit said. “Now we’re having children.”

  “I was scared, too,” he said.

  “We weren’t ready,” Brit said.

  “I know.”

  She cupped her hands over her mouth and breathed into them. She had poor circulati
on, always. Daniel remembered long ago waking in his bed at night because her chilly foot grazed his in sleep. On good nights, in better moods, he would clamp both his feet over hers until they warmed. Other nights, she was gone before morning.

  All of that felt far away, though at the time it had felt very bad or good in an immediate and lasting manner. People just faded away, Daniel thought. Even Brit had, though he saw her nearly every day. You could learn someone’s circulation, you could wake them in the middle of the night to make their blood flow, and then you could just stop.

  “It’s good we did it, though,” Brit said as they turned the corner to their absurd hotel. “Competed when we weren’t ready. You know?”

  The walkway up to the lobby was long and steep. He stopped to take his cello off his back and roll it on its wheels the rest of the way. “Oh, you think? Why?”

  “Because,” she said. She was looking at the mountains. “It’s like we paid our dues.”

  She sounded like his mother. Sayings people clung to in order to make themselves feel better, good luck attributed to purposeful graciousness. But looking at Brit blowing into her hands, and at the postcard mountains behind the hotel, he wanted to be the same as her. Believing in good luck and grace would not only be easier (and anyway, being easy wasn’t such a bad thing), it would be freer, too. You could really make a mistake.

  He rolled his cello behind him, and they started up the hill at an even slower pace.

  “Do you want to go walk around after lunch? Maybe explore?” he asked.

  “Oh, no, I don’t think so,” she said cheerily, as though he were asking her something totally pedestrian and unrelated to him, like Do you like broccoli? or Are you a Virgo? He experienced one of those moments of social clarity that cut so finely that Daniel knew that when he thought of it later, he’d say out loud to himself, No, no, as if trying to erase the memory. Here’s who Daniel thought he was to Brit: someone with a shared history, someone interesting and comfortable with whom Brit might like to go on a walk. Here’s who he really was to her: someone with whom a walk would be incidental and ultimately unenticing. There were two Daniels—at least two—and he nearly choked at how clearly he saw it.

  When they reached the hotel entrance it occurred to him that for her, what he had asked was nothing—a friend, a cold walk, a casual question—while for him, it had been a gesture, an overture. An overture to what? He had no first movement in mind, no theme or motif. It seemed he should be able to go back, amend, erase. But there was no going back, only the electric pull of time yanking forward. He opened the heavy door to the hotel for her and she said, “Oh, thanks, Daniel,” and walked on through, away from him.

  * * *

  —

  The luncheon was boring—speeches from the committee, a bland fish patty no one could identify, handshakes with people whose names they wouldn’t remember—and Henry didn’t even show. Jana looked tired, shaken almost, and Daniel suggested in a general way that she get some sleep before the concert. She nodded and clutched his hand in a very un-Jana-like way before walking off with Laurent from the Montreal group.

  Brit wandered away, too, and he busied himself with looking at tourist maps in the lobby, but he couldn’t picture himself in any of the vistas. He couldn’t picture himself anywhere, really, not even standing in this lobby.

  He sat in a plush chair by the stand of brochures. He’d never been bothered by being alone. His brother had grown and married and left the house by the time Daniel was twelve, and the only person he’d ever lived with after leaving home was Lindsay. That he preferred to be alone had always been a problem between them. They didn’t have enough rooms in the apartment. He wanted a space where he could go and not be bound by some invisible string to someone else in the vicinity. He couldn’t be available for her every whim. She couldn’t stand for him not to be. But how were you supposed to love someone if you didn’t know what it was like to be away from her? Or what it was like to be just you?

  After a while, he made his way back upstairs, and thought he should check in on Henry, to formally apologize or let Henry apologize, or perhaps both. He knocked on Henry’s door, surprised at the quiet murmur of voices. Henry usually liked to practice in the afternoons, at least mess around a little with his own compositions. But the door pushed open at Daniel’s knock, and Daniel stepped in.

  “Henry?” he called, and the voices quieted.

  “Daniel?”

  But the voice that called his name was not Henry’s. Instead, it was accented and laced with mousse and arrogance, and belonged to Fodorio, whom Daniel found sitting on the chair next to the desk, opposite Henry, who was standing, running a frantic hand through his hair. Fodorio: it took Daniel a moment to place him, how little he’d thought of the man in the past few years. He remembered him less as a former competition judge or a one-time coach of the quartet than he did as the guy who always appeared in the photo ads for symphonies, his Crest-whitened smile announcing a high-profile (and highly paid-for) guest appearance. But here he was, Fodorio, sitting in Henry’s hotel room, on the day of one of their Esterhazy concerts.

  “Fodorio’s just visiting,” Henry said.

  “Well, yes,” Daniel said. “I didn’t think he was living here.”

  Henry smiled sheepishly under his bruise. He was so tall and lanky that his nervousness made him seem like a large bird from a different time, fluttering and trapped. “We were talking.”

  Fodorio did not stand, but offered his hand. “Daniel. I remember you. The troubled cellist, of course, of course.”

  Daniel took it. “I didn’t think you were on the jury this year.”

  Fodorio waved his hand. “Oh, I’m not. But I still come, you know, just to get away and see what’s what. More fun to watch if you’re not jurying, if you ask me.”

  The lines in Fodorio’s face were sun-deepened and definitely not present in the airbrushed photos he used for promotion. Gray stripes in the hair at his temples. Here, on this chilly afternoon, he wore a navy sport coat.

  Daniel sat on the edge of the bed. “Well, what were you talking about?”

  Fodorio leaned in, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped. “If you must know, you. You and Jana and that willowy second violinist.”

  “Brit,” Daniel said.

  “Yes, Brit. A silly name, but a solid player. Anyway, we were talking about options. Possibilities. The future.”

  “For us?” Daniel asked.

  Henry paced tiny steps next to the nightstand. “No, for me,” he said.

  Daniel said nothing. It was happening. Here it was, the moment Daniel first knew of Henry’s intention to leave the group. It felt terrible, a panicky kind of terrible, the kind of terror you feel when something is happening to you and you cannot escape its happening. His brain scrambled for ways to get out of it, for ways to reverse it. He imagined walking backward, out the door, into the hallway, back through the lobby, and going on that walk, seeing that lake, taking in that vista, alone. This would not have happened had he chosen to be alone.

  “Are you going to be sick? Do you need to lie down?” Fodorio asked.

  “No,” Daniel snapped. “I’m just—I’m taking in this information. That you’re trying to take . . . our violist . . . away.”

  “I’m not trying to take anything,” Fodorio said. “What do I have to gain? I’m advising him of his options is all. A talent like that shouldn’t waste away—well, not that the quartet is wasting away. But, you see, quartet playing for your entire lifetime, even for a short while, can warp your technique. You forget how to play solo, the careful nuance, the clarity, the bravado. You are never asked to use it. So it withers a little. A lot. I’ve seen it. And someone like your friend Henry here, his sound shouldn’t mute itself like that. And it will happen, sooner rather than later. One day, he’ll wake up, pick up his viola, and the sound will be three-quarters of what it was, no matter
what bow arm he uses. Then, a year later, half as bright. Then a quarter. Then he’s disappeared. Not that there’s much of a market for viola soloists, but there’s something.”

  Fodorio sat back, his point made, and recrossed his legs. His loafers were freshly shined and caught the mountain light peeking through the blinds.

  “We’re only talking,” Henry said.

  Daniel couldn’t remember the last time he’d played like a soloist. Fodorio was right, and that was what was really making Daniel feel sick, the way he agreed with Fodorio. Solo playing was different. It involved hardly any listening, no matter what teachers or professionals said, it just didn’t. The musical sensitivity was to yourself, mostly. Were you being your best Brahms? Was this your most glissando-y Gershwin? But quartet playing was almost all listening, sensitivity to three other people. You could not play alone, at your own tempo, or with your own idea—you couldn’t even breathe alone. So, no, he had not played with bravura in some time. The realization pinned him square in the gut, as though a sign had been tacked on: Nothing to see here.

  “We’re conversing,” Fodorio said.

  “Okay,” Daniel said. He wasn’t going to beg Henry to stay. There were so many things he wanted to say to him, about how they hadn’t really even made it yet, and he should wait for that, to see what that feels like, how he owed it to them to stay—for what, he wasn’t sure, exactly, but it seemed that if Henry left he’d be breaking off a corner of the group and leaving them lopsided and limping, and when had they ever left him lopsided?

  But perhaps Henry was leaving anyway, growing his own family. He was the only one of them with family here at the festival, after all. Henry had always been an outlier that way.

  Daniel stood. Fodorio held up a hand and said, “Aren’t you going to ask me?”

  “Ask you what?”

  “Why I didn’t talk to you about this kind of career?”

  Daniel swallowed. “No, I wasn’t going to ask you that.”