The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  “So you know, it’s not to do really with talent. It’s the way you play. You and the other two, the women, you all play the way you’re supposed to, like chemicals mixing together—no, no, it’s good. It wasn’t so good four years ago, let me tell you, it was a bit chaotic, but you must go there, to the place of chaos, if you’re to find the balance. And back then, it wasn’t awful, either. You didn’t lose because you were awful. You lost because there was almost too much energy, energy you all didn’t know how to use yet. Anyhow, you three, you’re like that, but Henry here, he’s got a different type of spark.”

  “I didn’t ask you,” Daniel said.

  Henry took a step toward him. “Don’t tell anyone else, okay?”

  “I won’t. I also won’t tell Fodorio about the tendonitis in your arm or your hand or whatever. He wouldn’t want to hear something like that.”

  Daniel left the room, trying with effort to slam the door, but it would not slam. He charged down the hall looking at his feet and ran roughly into Jacqueline, Henry’s sister, at the end of the hall. She was the opposite of Henry, short and dark and serious. The stark difference between them always surprised Daniel, no matter how many times he’d been around her.

  “Oh!” she said. “God, are you all right? Don’t tell me . . .”

  He touched Jacqueline’s arm. “I’m sorry. No, everything’s fine. Your brother’s in his room planning some kind of escape, but whatever.”

  Jacqueline laughed. “He always is. He’s the kid that goes into a room and looks for all the exits. He can’t feel comfortable unless there’s a way out. You know that.”

  Do I? Daniel wondered. How much did he know intuitively about his quartet members without consciously stating it? He knew Henry was a flake about being on time and also goofy and warm and brilliant. But did he know what Henry needed? Were they giving it to him? Could they?

  “Don’t worry so much,” Jacqueline said. “If there’s one thing I learned being related to Henry—hell, being related to anyone—it’s that you have to trust that they’re going to be there. That’s the only thing that motivates people like Henry. That’s where the binding-someone-to-you part comes in. Your faith that they’ll show up. Worrying doesn’t do shit.”

  “What about punching him in the face? Have you tried that?”

  She rolled her eyes and began walking past him. “Don’t worry,” she said again, like someone who was truly related to Henry.

  In his room, Daniel worked his way through the Shostakovich by reading the score. Technically, the Ravel was the more difficult piece, but they’d performed that before, many times. It had been the first really difficult piece they’d mastered. But the Shostakovich was less organized, or less obviously logical. It took an exhausting amount of concentration to pull the phrases together, to make the fragments and jumps compose a whole. You could not miss a millisecond in the piece. It was helpful to look at the score, which Daniel always had at his feet during rehearsal. It was helpful to see it all laid out like that. Sometimes he read scores like people read books, before bed, over coffee, for a good story. But reading the Shostakovich quartet scores was, for Daniel, much like reading a Russian novel: when you finally understood one desperate line, you then had to be able to see it twofold—first, as part of the larger tragedy, and second, as stand-alone grace.

  Once he’d played the whole piece in his head, all the parts, he closed the score and placed it on the desk. What did he know about staying or leaving? There were divorce papers to file, the paperwork a cruel punishment for having failed a government-aided promise. It all sounded like such a failure—divorce—and he’d never so frequently disappointed people as in these past several months. He was thirty-three, and so far, the most he’d ever felt about anything was about the absence of Lindsay, and what he felt was a light shining on the absence of himself. He felt more emotions about her departure than he ever did when he’d actually been with her, and that depressed him further. He could fall into passionate love with an outline of Lindsay, a Lindsay-shaped loss, more easily than he could with her.

  And even now, slowly getting ready for this important concert, he was trying to methodically run through his loss, to balance the emotional budget. Trying to work it out with a pencil and paper, talking to Lindsay in his head, trying to make sense of things. Trying to put these little pieces of their relationship into a mathematical equation, even if the result was always zero. This because this.

  But his decision to marry Lindsay had been in part because this hadn’t equaled this. They were so unlike each other that it was constantly kinetic, sparking. His relationship with the quartet was similar in principle, but different in practice. It was also kinetic, but in the process of making music, the friction was quieted. Of course, they could never match perfectly on a personal level. And of course Henry was thinking about leaving. Someone always would be.

  Daniel ran into Henry and his family in the lobby. Henry looked less purple and swollen than before, and said nothing of Fodorio. Henry’s mother hugged Daniel hard, and he felt glad that someone’s family was here, at least. It made everything seem less high stakes, all that unmitigated love. Daniel saw that it wasn’t just an absence of money that kept him from having a fallback like the rest of them, but also an absence of family.

  The girls had gone ahead, so they walked with Henry’s family to the hall, their instruments on their backs. Henry’s mother asked all sorts of questions, though not the ones she shouldn’t have (about Lindsay), and Henry’s father made good-natured jokes about Canadians and Henry’s eye. How had Henry ended up such a man-boy with a family like this? Daniel wondered. But then again, Henry, six years younger, was actually still a boy.

  “Are you crying?” Henry asked as they broke off from his family.

  “Shut up,” Daniel said.

  “Well, I’m not. Hurts enough, though.”

  “Don’t tell Jana that. She’ll think it was the reason if we don’t win.”

  “Nah, I think it’s good,” Henry said. “It’ll fuel the fire, you know?”

  Daniel didn’t know.

  They had their own private dressing rooms, and Daniel practiced the tough spots in the Shostakovich, running through them seven, maybe eight times until they were perfect, until his fingers had memorized the positions once again, and playing it felt easy. He felt confident about the performance, at least the part in his hands.

  But he was still sore from Brit’s refusal to go on a walk with him earlier in the day. He couldn’t let it go, and it hummed annoyingly in his mind as he rehearsed. Was she punishing him for choosing Lindsay? Did he regret choosing Lindsay?

  He knew he didn’t regret losing Brit—they’d spent not even six months together, and all that time they hadn’t been together, not really—nor was he in love with her now. There were all sorts of reasons they weren’t right for each other, and she was no angel. She loved people too easily, for one. Daniel had always felt that when she touched him back then, he had to peel her hand off him, to remove himself from her gaze, if he wanted to get away. And she had a way of asking him too many penetrating questions—what had it been like growing up in Texas, why didn’t he believe in God, what time of night was he born—but not enough of herself: as in, she would never ask herself why she loved someone, or why she couldn’t simply decide not to feel bad if someone didn’t love her back. She didn’t think about things in ways that allowed her to make choices. She was always the victim. She also looked sort of bored when she wasn’t smiling, which was whenever she was playing or thinking, and you could tell she didn’t think about or practice what she said before it came out of her mouth, so sometimes it was difficult to understand her. And she over-pursed her lips when she made words with an oh sound, so as to hide the snaggletooth on her left side. That was annoying.

  They were also very alike, and back then Daniel thought their kindred nature would have a canceling effect, that one
would X out the other. They were easily excited by each other’s thoughts. Those few months they spent together, they often sat on the couch tangled in each other, the conversation between them like a car accelerating, gaining speed, shifting up and up, cruising. Daniel had never before been so excited simply to talk with someone. Sure, her long pale legs poked out of her dress and tucked under his, and they both knew they would end up in bed after the conversation burned out, but first there would be animated arguing about Heitor Villa-Lobos and South American folk music and the state of contemporary composers, especially the pretentious contemporary composers they knew, or whether Henry was ever going to grow up or compose something or conduct something, or if Jana really liked any of them—and how did Jana get that bright sound anyway, was it the action on her strings, was it her old-school Russian teachers, was it just the way she’d always played? Conversation had never been more thrilling or exhausting, and he’d never felt more exposed. As if he were talking to an original version of himself, a version who could see the layers of fakery and armor he put on to get through the day, the week, the part of life where he was trying to be something. Brit had been substance; she had been solid. She had been too much.

  The point was that the old Brit and the old Daniel would have jumped at the opportunity to waste an afternoon taking a walk together in a ski village. He supposed those people were gone now, and he couldn’t afford to regret it.

  He played over the solo he had in the fourth movement, a haunting melody that spanned all four strings, required perfect intonation, little vibrato, and precise agility. Everybody was exposed in the Shostakovich, and he wanted to get this right. He had the music in front of him, but he closed his eyes while he played and pictured the score. Rests on all the parts but his, the long slurs across the staff, simple black notes, spaced a civilized distance from each other, and then Henry joining in, harmonics, and Jana taking over the melody. To see it was to play it.

  But when he reached for the F on his D-string, the wolf bowled out instead, and the shock of it set his hand off, and the next four notes were painfully out of tune. He opened his eyes. He stopped playing. He’d sounded terrible. He’d made a mistake.

  * * *

  —

  Once they were sitting under the warm lights of the stage, the welcome applause fizzling out, Daniel had completely forgotten how they’d gotten up there. He couldn’t remember it. What he could remember—even as they began to play the first few phrases of the Mozart—was arriving in the wings early and finding only Jana there, waiting in her narrow dress, looking at the dark stage, their four empty chairs arranged just so. In the shadows, he saw that Jana’s face had changed in the past couple of years. She looked grown now, the planes on her face purposeful and womanly, her brown eyes slim and focused. He was sure his own face looked older.

  “Did you ever think we’d be here?” Daniel asked, palming the neck of his cello in his suddenly sweaty hand.

  Jana looked at him. “We were here four years ago.”

  “No, I mean. You know, here here. Like about to do this.”

  “We haven’t done it yet. And after that rehearsal today, I’m not sure we’re going to.” Jana crossed her arms and looked at the floor, marked with white tape that meant nothing to either of them, yet she didn’t turn away. “But to answer your question, yeah. I did think I’d be here.”

  Daniel smiled. “Me too.”

  For a moment, they both looked out at the auditorium, mostly filled. Neither was looking for family.

  “I guess your parents aren’t here?” Jana asked.

  Daniel laughed a small laugh. “No.”

  “I sometimes forget about your family,” Jana said.

  Daniel said nothing, but he thought, Me too. Where would they be about now? His mother in the bedroom, reading the Bible among many cheap decorative pillows, his father parked in front of the television, unshowered, vodka in hand.

  “It’s not fair,” Jana said. Her voice was small, unusual. “That we had to escape those . . . the past, our families.”

  “No, it’s not fair,” Daniel said. “At least Brit’s past escaped her. She always acts like the victim of her situation, but in a way, she’s kind of lucky.”

  The houselights dimmed and he swung around to call for Brit and Henry, but there they already were, not five feet behind him, Brit’s white face like a ghost in the dark, stricken. He hadn’t known she was so close, that she could overhear him. He moved toward her as if to say something, but nothing came. I didn’t mean, I don’t think, I can’t say, I’m sorry, I love you. Though those sentiments were true, they would have sounded like lies, because here was a despicable, rigid, naked, malformed version of Daniel they could finally both see. But before he could say anything, the lights brightened, the applause started, and they were ushered on stage.

  The Mozart began, unkind to matters of human strife.

  The three others started the piece, Daniel tacet for the first few phrases, and it was comfortable, classic Mozart, if richer and fuller than his early quartets: Henry’s playful eighths under Jana’s high melody, and the familiar hints of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” sneaking in every now and then. It was a perfect piece to start a performance. Oh, the audience seemed to say, this is something we understand. It was joyful, though Daniel’s heart churned under it all. He could not bring himself to look at Brit, not even when they shared the same inside line, broken and dissonant.

  Someone had once told him that playing Mozart and Haydn quartets was like all your organs coming together in your middle—your solar plexus turning up into a smile. There was no smile at the center of the piece right now.

  In the space between the Mozart and the Ravel, where they shuffled their music and let their arms go slack (take this time to rest your muscles, he always told his students, breaks don’t come very often), he looked over at Henry, whose swollen eye made it look like he was winking, and maybe he was winking. He looked at Jana, whose stony face belied an undercurrent of worry. The Mozart had not gone off seamlessly enough to ensure the rest of the performance. In fact, it had felt like something apart from them, like seeing a long-departed ex-lover, how you recognized the great big swath of love you once felt, though you were no longer compelled by that love.

  They began to play the Ravel, the opening of the first movement requiring a light, liquid touch, the phrase starting as if joining in on an already-begun elemental melody. Here, they were ramping it up. The piece was beautiful but also tragic, building to angry, aggressive moments and then backing down again to the Monet-like theme. Even in the second movement, when everyone was pizzicato, it was a symphony, each attacking their instrument, but in time and in song.

  But did they play it that way? Daniel had no way of knowing; his brain was still back in the wings, frantically searching for a way to erase that look from Brit’s face.

  The final movement of the Ravel, Vif et agité, short and exciting, ended on an optimistic F-major chord, but it was a different kind of F major from what they’d need to begin the Shostakovich. They waited a respectful amount of time to let the air clear between pieces. Daniel could see Jana sweating, the sheen around her hairline. He was sweating, too. He tried to catch her eye, but she was staring at the first page of the Shostakovich, and he knew she was trying to hear it in her head before she led the opening. He needed to catch her eye. If they didn’t connect—if someone didn’t connect—this whole thing would fall apart.

  And then she looked up, but not at him. Instead, through him. He looked at Henry, who was staring back, and Daniel remembered with a start that he was the one who began the piece, with a lone version of the somber melody. He began, and Henry entered midway through his phrase, his version a smidge quicker. And when Brit entered, and then Jana, completing the round, each tempo was subsequently different, an attempt to correct that only amounted to disjointed time. But everyone kept playing. There was no other choice. D
aniel heard it: they were each playing as though playing alone, together. They hadn’t played like this in years.

  Panic swelled in Daniel’s chest, his hands growing damp, and when he heard the sounds—a primal moan followed by a woman’s scream—he thought it was simply the aural manifestation of his insides.

  But it wasn’t. A few other high-pitched shouts sounded from the audience, and Jana abruptly stopped playing. The rest of them wound down like a toy turning off. Jana shielded her eyes from the stage lights and peered out over the audience. The stage manager stepped out of the wings and held up a hand to Daniel, pressing a finger to his earpiece. “Wait,” he said. “We’re figuring out what’s happening.” And on his cue, the houselights brightened. Daniel saw, in the very back left side of the theater, a group of people standing up, bending over something, someone.

  Jana sat back down. “Are we supposed to just sit here?” she whispered.

  “No one’s looking at us,” Brit said.

  “Well,” Jana said. “I guess we get to start that over, but not play it like a piece of shit this time.”

  She stared at Daniel, and Daniel looked down at his feet, his scuffed black shoes that used to be shiny, felt his tux jacket pull on his back as he slouched. It had been his fault that they’d started the Shostakovich badly (slowly, lazily), but it wasn’t entirely his fault that they hadn’t found a way to fix it. None of their whole selves had been there. They’d all left parts of themselves somewhere off stage tending to preoccupations, worries, betrayals. The brazen Shostakovich revealed what the Mozart and the Ravel had kindly hidden: they’d been not at all the cohesive group they’d found so easily these past years.

  That realization was frightening for everyone in the group. For everyone but Henry. Henry felt it with a wave of relief so thorough he had a moment of nausea. He was free.

  The stage manager came back on, crouched in between Brit and Daniel, one hand on each of their arms, and delivered the news. There’d been a heart attack, he’d heard, or something like it, and all involved parties had exited the theater and gone on to the hospital. No, they didn’t know if the victim (was he a victim if he wasn’t dead? what did one call someone who merely suffered from a heart attack but lived?) was okay. And yes, they should begin the Shostakovich over, and the part of the piece they’d played before the incident would not be judged as part of the competition.