The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  Henry considered saying, “But I don’t want to.” But he didn’t say it, because though he might not have wanted to play or continue playing, he could play, and he could do it quite well, swollen eye and all. He felt his brain inside his skull like a body of water in which deep sediment had come loose, and this thought—I don’t want to—breaking the liquid surface with a satisfying if mostly soundless pop.

  Daniel’s thoughts were more frightening. Someone could be dying, he thought. Someone was probably dying. Everyone was just organs and blood pumping along, and no one was free of that. No one was free. His panic morphed once more, this time into the idea that he had, indeed, walked through life disappointing people.

  Before they began again—and how grateful they were to be given the second chance, and how terrible the reason—Daniel forced himself to look at Brit, straight in the eyes. Perhaps that was why they’d all been so sloppy. The inside voices couldn’t even look at each other.

  She looked back at him, tilted her head, and as the houselights dimmed and the stage lights blinded, she mouthed something. He couldn’t quite see it, but Jana cleared her throat, and he began, and six and a half bars in—he would always remember this, six and a half bars—he realized what she had been mouthing: Love you. Not as a confession. Not as an insult. Not as a proclamation. But as a fact: I love you, even when you are your worst self, even if it’s you who takes this competition win away from us. I love you because we all love each other because we have to. It’s in some contract somewhere that no one ever saw or signed. A lived contract. I love you because if I don’t, there’s nothing, empty chairs, a dead man, fluttering paper music.

  Henry hadn’t remembered signing on to a contract, though. When had he made the choice? He could recall the choice to have the baby, to commit to Kimiko; standing in Central Park in August—sweating down his back, the way nothing moved the tree leaves, the heavy heat just sitting on top of them, suspending everything in resigned, observant stillness—he’d felt the switch flip, if he hadn’t already switched it himself: I choose this.

  But now the Shostakovich was already under way, Daniel having begun it with all of them this time. Henry played because that’s what they did. They played. They did it because they were good at it. Henry was especially good at it. But what if he was especially good at other things, too, things like being a partner to Kimiko, or a soloist, as she’d been prodding him to be, or a father? What if he was better at being a father than he was at playing the viola, or what if he was just as good? What if he was worse?

  Here were these people, one of whom had punched him squarely in the face the night before. How were these terrible, beautiful people worth excluding entire sectors of living? Why were they—once unchosen, regular people, colliding in regular ways with other regular people—now linked to each other inextricably, tied by old binds, each breath wound around the breath of three others, like a monster, like a miracle?

  Jana knew it was worth it. She played the Shostakovich knowing for sure it was worth it. But she’d been shaken this trip, not just by Henry’s strange behavior and Daniel’s emotional malaise, but by the handsome player from the St. Vincent, Laurent. He’d shown an interest, Henry was right, and if Henry was going to blow up his life with love, why couldn’t she? Being with Laurent could be willed, the way she’d willed this quartet into being, the way she’d willed them to Esterhazy a second time. It worried her, though, in a small way. She had never let in the external world before, not in the way Henry was doing, and she didn’t know if there was room in her career for it. During the Shostakovich, this time around, at least, there was absolutely no room for anyone else.

  Brit was also letting go of people. It was what they had to do to play. With her look, she’d released Daniel, but she had really meant to release herself. It had been years—years—that she told herself she was over him, and she was over him in all the ways it was possible to be over this man who sat next to her every day and played music. There was, she realized in that first Shostakovich movement, a piece of him that had grown into her, and likely the other way around, and that was how she knew they were doing well, professionally. It was how she knew he’d been hurt earlier in the afternoon, when she declined the walk, and how she knew exactly the moment he understood the words she’d been mouthing and that he was grateful, and sorry, and also unchanged. It was an admission—love you—she was done denying, and also done indulging.

  With Brit’s look, Daniel was released from who he had momentarily been, which, as the first movement (which Shostakovich had retitled from “Allegretto” to “Blithe ignorance of the future cataclysm” to avoid accusations of formalism) unfurled, made him consider who he had been, but he couldn’t access it anymore, and that was because who he had been was dark and closed and hard. He should be open—a familiar feeling, as music had always made him feel that way, bigger and fuller. It was because there was a story—one Daniel found so comforting—in the scores, where he was able to see it all at once, to see what he heard. Stories always filled you up.

  This was the story of the Shostakovich quartet, as Daniel saw it in the black conversation on the score in his mind: The first movement, Jana trying to convince the audience of a placid pastoral theme, and the supporting notes martial, marching always forward, and as the martial themes start to overtake the pastoral melody, Jana fights back, and at the end, in an accelerating coda, Jana wins, two soft notes plucked in time to two harmonic eighths. But then, in the second movement (“Rumblings of unrest and anticipation,” definitely not “Moderato con moto”), Henry’s plodding three notes repeat, relentless—Henry looking a little relentless himself, his face strained, his work showing for once, but his sound clear and exacting—and Jana’s extended solo, different now, not lining up with Henry’s three-note cycle, the notes manipulated so as to appear in a different time signature completely, and the melody not pastoral at all, but wild. Angry. Daniel saw the competing time signatures on the page. Shostakovich was a beast whose work was difficult for many listeners because his quartets could not be fit into a mold. They, too, wanted to be free.

  Daniel lost sight of the score, which coincided with a realization of what Brit had always been trying to convince him of—that it wasn’t just music that made you bigger. People did. People gave you stories. People made you expand.

  And at the start of the fourth movement, Henry found his reason, too. Because these were the groaning sounds of one kind of family, the whoosh of blood, the gulp of muscles, the hiccup of veins. What else was there to do but make them?

  Daniel had no score, but a story. Here were those triple stops, played together but apart, and Daniel’s haunting solo, the solo a lament, the fourth movement mourning into the fifth movement, and the fifth—which Shostakovich retitled “Why? And for what?”—furious for a time until the very end, where that same pastoral theme that had begun it all was played once more, this time greatly diminished, barely audible, slower, uncomplicated—all that desperation giving way to, well, giving up. What was the original title, the Italian one? Daniel could not remember. The movement wound down and down until Brit guided Daniel and Henry to a series of slurred whole notes, one after another, so many and so long and so low that it was as if they were merely tapping into a seismic chord that made the earth vibrate at an otherwise unheard frequency, and at last Jana plucked her final two notes—Okay, I’m giving up hope, you can, too—and the notes didn’t end, but died.

  * * *

  —

  The result was unquantifiable. There was the way they felt during—lost, unreal, having dreamt the same dream in front of hundreds of people—and the way they felt after—depleted, used, but by each other—and the way everyone else felt after—elated, celebratory, brimming. It was hard to tell where their feelings ended and others’ began, not after the hour or so they’d spent on stage, tapping into each other, deliberately eliminating the boundaries between their bodies and their brains, making
porous their expressions.

  That performance exhaustion was why, as soon as they stepped off stage and the stage manager walked up to Henry with a fragile urgency and stood so close to him their noses practically touched—and told Henry it was his sister who had collapsed in the audience, who had been taken to the hospital, who had halted the performance, and it was her wife who had cried out, and that his sister was now in the hospital down the mountain, in some kind of condition no one knew, but his whole family was there (had missed the performance), and there was a car waiting for him, and his presence was requested immediately—Henry’s reaction was flat, unreadable. There was no expression left.

  The group stood around Henry, shoulder to shoulder, breathing the same hot breath for a few seconds before anyone said anything.

  “I’ll go with him,” Daniel said, and proceeded to give out instructions. Brit would call Kimiko and Jana would call their manager to talk about next steps. Jana took Henry’s viola out of his hands and packed it up for him, and it was only as Daniel and Henry walked out the back way, down an empty delivery hall to a town car waiting outside, that Henry said, “Wait. What? What happened to Jackie?”

  Daniel didn’t know, but he said, “Something with her heart.”

  The car was the same kind that had driven them there from the airport, and what had felt cramped then now felt too big and empty, the air steel-cold. Henry’s face fell into an impatient frown.

  “It’ll be okay,” Daniel said, reaching his hand out to the space around Henry’s knee, though not quite touching it.

  “I didn’t even know,” Henry said. “Someone should have told me. We should have stopped playing.”

  “I don’t know,” Daniel said. “Maybe. We did stop, I mean. But then we started again.”

  Daniel’s words, pointing out the obvious, hung in the air long enough that he thought perhaps Henry was going to lash out at him for saying, once again, nothing. For having nothing to say. For committing to nothing. But he saw, in the flash of streetlights as they approached the bigger town at the bottom of the mountain, that Henry’s face barely registered him. Henry’s face, and his mind and body, were in another place entirely, one Daniel couldn’t have gone to if he tried his hardest.

  At the hospital, Daniel waited outside the room where Jacqueline was while Henry went in. The blinds in the window to the room were partially open, though, and he glanced through. Henry’s parents and Jacqueline’s wife stood around the bed, and he saw Jacqueline, with a gray pallor to her skin but her eyes open, and she smiled when Henry broke the circle. He saw the side of Jacqueline’s wife’s face—what was her name again?—puffy and tear-streaked. Her name was Anne.

  Daniel sat on a bench next to a vending machine that buzzed with a bored but terrified hum. His dress pants were wrinkled, and his sweat-stained undershirt was starting to smell. He should call Brit or Jana, but he wanted to have something to tell them first. His fingers tingled with post-performance rawness. This was a strange way to come down. Usually after a performance, people handed them drinks and small plates of food and complimented them—and Daniel usually drank one drink more than the amount he should, and ended up strewn across the foot of a made hotel bed, drooling on the comforter until early morning. Here, there was no one, an empty hotel room waiting for him, a private family moment happening on the other side of a wall. He was on the verge of divorce, and had accidentally hurt Brit before the performance, and how was the performance, anyway? It was hard to tell out of context. He counted the flickers of the fluorescents, but found no regularity to them.

  He should call someone, he thought again, but he didn’t. And here’s why: He was, in some small corner of his tired, crooked body, satisfied that something terrible had befallen Henry. Henry, to whom nothing terrible had happened in his entire life, who was given—without asking—talent, love, family, purpose, ease. And Daniel understood, ultimately, that this would not alter Henry’s life—that he would continue to receive blessings from whatever Henry reservoir of Henry goodness existed—but here, now, he was in pain, a real kind of pain, not a pain Daniel knew (Daniel, whose family hadn’t suffered from physical illness, but from a kind of illness that came with communicating across separate planets), but it was a tangible pain nonetheless. He would be temporarily broken, and when Daniel thought about it, he imagined that he and Henry might recognize each other in a new way.

  After some time, Henry’s father, gray-haired, his face pocked with smile lines, came out of the room, put his arm around Daniel, and explained that Jacqueline had fainted, possibly due to undiagnosed cardiomyopathy, they weren’t sure yet, symptoms brought on by the altitude and drink. It was an issue with her heart muscles, a long-latent disease now affecting the way those muscles constricted. She should be fine with medication and a slight lifestyle change.

  “No more heavy foods for her,” he said, chuckling a little, actually chuckling. “Gonna be hard as a chef.”

  “I’m so glad,” Daniel said. “I’m glad she’s going to be all right.”

  “Me too, son,” Henry’s father said. “You should go now. We’ll be fine. Go celebrate. That was one hell of a concert.”

  “Was it? It’s hard to tell.”

  “Oh, no, I think you know,” his father said, and winked. A world where fathers winked. Henry’s father hadn’t even heard the whole concert, and he was saying this. Daniel felt a crushing in his own chest, like two icebergs meeting. He wanted to hug Henry’s father.

  Before Daniel could make a decision about the hug, Henry and Anne came out into the hallway, animated, and Henry’s father walked back into the hospital room.

  “She’s okay,” Anne said, and repeated all the information Henry’s father had just reported. Anne, whom Daniel had met only once before, hugged him. She was small, built like a child, and her whole wiry frame clutched on to him. When she let go, she said, “Thank you for coming with Henry. He can be kind of unreliable in getting places, as you probably know.”

  Anne left to go grab coffee from the cafeteria, and through the window to the hospital room, Daniel saw Henry’s parents embrace over Jacqueline’s bed.

  “Go back and tell the girls, and I’ll be at rehearsal tomorrow morning,” Henry said. Daniel had never heard Henry speak with such calm conviction before. “I’m going to . . . stay.”

  He’d tripped over that word: stay. Daniel looked at him, trying to decipher this new version of Henry.

  Henry went on. “Listen, Fodorio made an offer, and it was really good. Like really good. But I . . . turned it down. For now. I’ve gotta deal with”—he gestured to his right elbow. “I think it’s tendonitis, which should be fine, right?”

  “Should be fine,” Daniel said, having no idea. It depended on how much scar tissue there was, how long he’d been ignoring it, how badly he wanted what Fodorio had to offer.

  “But I’m gonna stay here tonight. You go.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes,” Henry said, touching his eye. “If you don’t leave, I’m going to punch you in the face.”

  The icebergs were melting into each other. Daniel’s whole body felt cold, then hot. He knew that if he spoke, he would cry. Something was changing.

  * * *

  —

  Once back at the hotel, Daniel found the post-concert reception winding down, and he found Jana at the bar, chatting with a festival organizer. He told her about Jacqueline’s condition, how Henry was staying the night there, and that everyone was all right. Jana seemed tired, but relaxed for the first time in a very long time. Daniel asked if it was the wine. No, it was the performance, she said.

  “We played really, really well,” she said, touching his arm. How rarely they touched, the two of them. And then, because she knew why he was there, she said, without him asking, “Brit went up to her room, but she wanted you to come find her once you were back.”

  Daniel stood outsid
e Brit’s door for a full minute before knocking, imagining that he was trying to think of what to say, though he wasn’t. Nothing was coming. The space in his head where he would have been planning out his words wasn’t exactly empty, but wasn’t full of anything he could name, either. He knocked.

  Brit opened the door looking sleepy and invited him in. She was still wearing her concert blacks, and she had a half-empty glass of wine on the nightstand. Her room was a mirror image of his, the bathroom on the opposite side, and she had a king-sized bed instead of his two queens. She poured Daniel a glass and he told her about the hospital, and Henry, and Jacqueline.

  “Cardiomyopathy, something where your heart muscle is too small to pump blood,” he said, settling in on the reading chair opposite her bed.

  “Actually, it’s where your heart muscle is too big,” she said absently. “Still, same difference.”

  He was regularly surprised by the things she knew. He supposed it was because she read so much. “Why would your heart muscle being too big make it not work?” he asked.

  She shrugged. “I don’t know. I just remember the doctor trying to explain something to me about it when my mom died. Basically, the blood that isn’t pumped backs up into your whole system, your lungs and stuff. You drown in it. That isn’t what happened to my mom. Well, not exactly. But similar.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” Daniel said, feeling useless, like a stuffed animal on the chair.

  “It’s okay,” she said.