The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  “No,” he said. “I’m sorry. About before.”

  “It’s fine, you know,” Brit said. “I know what you meant.”

  “I don’t even think I mean that.”

  “Whichever. It’s fine. I should have told you that before we started playing.”

  Daniel said, “I almost punched someone else today.”

  “Oh yeah? Who?”

  “Fodorio,” he said. He drank some more, closed his eyes hard, screwed them shut.

  “Are you okay?” Brit asked. “Is it Lindsay?”

  “No, Fodorio, I said.”

  “No, I mean, maybe this thing with Lindsay’s got you overtired or something.”

  He sighed. “There’s nothing with Lindsay.”

  She drank the last of her wine. She tapped her fingers idly on her wet, empty wineglass and he wanted to flee. He fought the urge.

  “That’s what I mean,” Brit said. “It’s all right to feel bad about it, even if you wanted it.”

  “Wanted what?”

  “You tell me,” Brit said. She sprung upright. “Actually, I have to call Paul before it’s too late. Do you mind? Real quick. Don’t go.”

  She perched on the far end of her bed and dialed Paul. Daniel listened to her end of the conversation without pretending he wasn’t. She said nothing of note, nothing he would remember later, nothing that made his heart skip a beat, nothing that made him think of Lindsay or try not to think of Lindsay. Except at the end of the call, Paul must have said goodbye without saying “I love you,” and Brit said it quickly: “I love you,” with a miniature question mark at the end, a half-step higher in pitch that communicated something that made Daniel want to go sit next to her, hold her like he’d hold a cello, smell the rosin in her hair.

  He stayed where he was, though.

  He couldn’t hear if Paul had hung up before he heard her say it, or if he’d said it back and then hung up, but in any case Daniel waited a beat after Brit put the phone down to clear his throat. She looked at him as though she’d forgotten he was there.

  “Dating you,” she said, setting her jaw and mouth in hard, mathematical lines. “Dating you was like being in a desert, being really thirsty, like about-to-die thirsty, and seeing this oasis, a big, wide lake, and running toward it at top speed, and then when you get there, there’s just nothing. Nothing there. It’s just a mirage.”

  He leaned forward on his chair and clasped his hands together. “Oh,” he said. And then, “I’m sorry.”

  “Yeah, you said that,” she said.

  “So.”

  “All I’m saying is that Lindsay seems a little like that, too. Like, not all the way there. So maybe it’s just hard to have a relationship—a marriage—when both people are so similar like that.”

  Daniel knew she was wrong, at least about Lindsay. Lindsay had been there. Oppressively there. There in every moment, sucking it dry, asking each one to be the most important moment of all the moments. Daniel had been the one not there, unsure of where there was, undesirous of the longitude of moments that made up there. He’d thought her there-ness would make him exist. Maybe it had, but maybe too late.

  “Or maybe it’s hard to have a marriage when you’re also married to three other people,” Daniel said.

  “Or maybe she’s just tired of running toward you. Or you to her.”

  Brit moved around the room, taking her earrings off and placing them in a bowl on the credenza, removing her heels while standing, one leg bent behind her at a time, pulling her blond hair up into a high ponytail. He watched her, and she didn’t look at him once. She was a flamingo, a strange animal, partially see-through, partially solid, a new creature, uncategorized. She went into the bathroom, and she came out in sweats and a large Indiana University T-shirt, her face scrubbed clean of makeup. Her face was at once familiar and entirely out of his reach. The same freckles and open eyes, a vision from a part of his life that was quickly receding, or had already gone.

  “Well,” Daniel said, standing. “I guess you’re going to bed. I should, too.”

  “No, stay,” she said, and something inside Daniel leapt at her use of that word, again tonight, here as though she wasn’t saying, Daniel, stay, but the euphoric impossible: Stay, this feeling. “Tell me about Fodorio,” she said, clearly believing him to be making a joke.

  She lay on the bed on top of the covers, two big pillows behind her. He sat back down on his chair.

  “Well,” he said. “He looked older and so shiny at the same time. Like an old shark. Well, actually, I’ve never seen a shark in person. Is that weird? Anyway, he was doing some wooing, trying to convince Henry that it would be best for him to leave the group. But Henry wasn’t falling for it. I don’t think.”

  “You don’t think? You don’t know for sure?”

  “It’s not important. What’s important is that he said we played alike.”

  “Who?”

  “You and me. And Jana. Us. That we play . . . together.”

  “Well, of course we play together.”

  “No, that we’re of the same—that we come from the same source. Or something. That we . . .”

  But he couldn’t finish. The words wouldn’t do it. He would continue to talk around it. In any case, he knew she knew what he meant.

  “He said it wasn’t that we were terrible last time,” Daniel said. “It was just that we hadn’t reigned it in yet. I guess we were too young.”

  “Do you think Henry’s going to leave when the baby’s born?” she asked.

  He shifted in his chair. “I think . . . I hope he’ll have a hard time leaving if we win this thing.”

  “I hope he doesn’t leave.”

  “Me too.”

  “Do you like Paul?”

  Daniel shrugged. “He’s all right, I suppose. I don’t really know him.”

  “You do,” she said. “You know him. That’s him, what you know.”

  “Do you like Paul?”

  “I love Paul.”

  “Oh,” Daniel said.

  “Come here,” Brit said, and then made a face. “Not like that or anything, but lie on the bed with me. This bed is so big.”

  Daniel took his jacket off and threw it over the chair, and loosened his tie. His armpits were still damp through his undershirt.

  He lay on the bed, but there may as well have been an entire bed between them, it was so big. His movements didn’t jostle her at all. They talked without looking at each other.

  “Would it help if you told me all the terrible things about Lindsay?” she asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “I didn’t think so. What about all the wonderful things?”

  “No, not that, either. That’s sort of not the point.”

  “What is the point?”

  “I’m glad Jackie’s okay,” Daniel said.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”

  “I’m glad she’s alive.”

  Brit’s eyes were closed. “You know, just because my parents died doesn’t mean that anything escaped me. Or that I escaped anything.”

  Daniel was starting to think that nothing escaped anything. He didn’t say it, but she knew. They lay there for a while, silent in the heater hum of the room.

  Daniel said, “So Lindsay has this tattoo of an eye on her palm.”

  “I know,” Brit said, her voice wandering.

  “With eyelashes and everything. But then she stabbed her hand with a piece of glass—on accident—and now it’s healing, and I think the eye is going to be all fucked up. Elongated.” He held up his own hand to show her where Lindsay’s stitches were, and where the eye was. Brit nodded wearily. “Or it’ll look closed or something. About that, she doesn’t even care, though.”

  “Hm.” Brit hummed. She was falling asleep.

  “She just doesn’t ca
re,” Daniel said again.

  Brit said nothing, her breath steadied.

  “It’s both things. Wonderful and terrible,” Daniel said. “Both things at once.”

  Daniel didn’t move from the bed, though he didn’t fall asleep. Inch by inch he scooted closer to Brit until there was a cello-sized distance between them. She slept with her lips slightly parted and her clean hands folded over her stomach. He resisted the impulse to lift one of her hands and match it with his. He turned on his side and clasped his hands under his cheek, pulled his knees up. Then he did something he hadn’t done but to music, perhaps ever: he surrendered. Even though she never saw him do it, he gave in, completely, to her presence. In half an hour, he could feel the heat radiating off her skin, like an ecosystem unto itself. After an hour, he felt sure if he touched her, she would give him first-degree burns. Her body was churning out heat, even from her faraway feet. He didn’t touch her; she no longer needed him to warm her. He lay there trying to catch some of what she gave off. He figured she must have moved out of a REM cycle when she rolled onto her side, toward him, crushing the invisible cello between them in the interim of her private dreams. She closed and opened her mouth a little wider—there was her one crooked tooth on the left side, he could feel it with his tongue just by looking—and she rubbed her feet together. He stayed there, waiting for her eyes to flutter open, and when they didn’t, when they refused in their tireless unconscious satisfaction, he got up and turned the heavy knob and walked out of the room, clicking the door shut behind him, leaving the imprint of his heavy body on the bedspread next to her. Though later this would be the night that was remembered for having pivoted their careers, for the performance that would begin every bio from here on out—“Winner of the 1998 Esterhazy String Quartet Competition”—a night remembered not for anybody’s black eye, or scuffed-up knees, or thermal skin, or punctured hand, or wounded pride, or even ragged heart, but rather for their raw, ringing renditions of Mozart, Ravel, and Shostakovich, it seemed one and the same to Daniel—the cycle through the classic, the romantic, and the tragic, or the movement from joy to hope to despair—which is why when he thought of this night, he always thought of Brit’s sleeping body next to his awake one, always went back there, felt her heat, and wished with each recall that he’d chosen not to leave but to stay, to remain in that moment, to honor it as it constellated all their shared moments that came before it: that he’d waited, that he’d believed that from that single moment something remarkable could happen.

  PART 3

  Adagio for Strings from String Quartet in B Minor, op. 11

  —Samuel Barber

  String Quartet in C# Minor, op. 131, no. 14

  —Ludwig van Beethoven

  String Quartet in D Major, op. 11, no. 1

  —Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

  March 2003

  Los Angeles

  JANA

  Violin I

  Jana found it annoying that Carl had chosen to have her mother’s funeral on the day after the invasion of Iraq. Of all the days. Not only did it represent a complete lack of a sophisticated understanding of the world and its goings-on—and it wasn’t that hard, just turn on a TV, for God’s sake—but it also meant getting around the city would be impossible. She was tasked with picking up the flowers in the morning (by Carl, Carl, she could not believe she was being ordered around by a man she’d never met before the previous night—a man who, for a time, thought her name was actually Janet), and it took an hour to get to the shop because of street closures. She felt guilty, complicit in something, as she drove past the angry young white people with signs that read Honk for Peace, and she didn’t honk, because it all seemed so self-important, so self-righteous, and she didn’t believe in it. Sure, let’s not invade Iraq. But no, my honking won’t stop it. And anyway, what was peace? And anyway, no one had ever made Jana feel part of something in this town, and she wasn’t about to help anyone else feel the benefits of community, not on this morning, on the morning of Catherine’s funeral.

  Jana had a secret, though. She was going to adopt a baby, a girl from Ethiopia, a girl who had been born two months ago, on January 1, but whose destiny had been in the making for two agonizing years. After the home visit and the endless amounts of paperwork here and over there, and then a waiting period in which it seemed like the only kind of motherhood she’d experience would be the tenderness she felt for that paperwork she’d spent so much time with, Jana had finally been sent a referral, two pictures stapled to a dossier that listed stats Jana couldn’t have cared less about—height, weight, gassiness—but the pictures, the pictures Jana kept in a cardstock envelope in her purse.

  In one photo, the baby girl was laid against a background of clouds made from cotton balls, wearing a full bear suit that was entirely too big for her, and Jana could only make out her small face, which was clearly on the edge of a crying fit: release me from this cage of a bear suit! Oh baby, she’d thought, I know how you feel. And in the second, the baby in normal baby clothes, belly down on a blanket, smiling, plump and with an optimistic tuft of black hair. She’d felt, as all the parents on the forums wrote, as though she knew the baby, this baby that did not come from her but was going to belong to her for eighteen years. Begrudgingly, she admitted it wasn’t possible, she didn’t know the baby, she just wanted to know her. But secretly, she thought her sense of kinship was special, unique: This baby and I are going to be found soon.

  It was a secret from everyone, even the quartet, even Henry. Not that Henry would have had time to help her with it. Clara had just turned four and Kimiko had recently given birth to a boy they named Jack, and Kimiko was trying to play and record semiconsistently, leaving Henry to run around like a maniac, arriving at rehearsals with child spit-up on his shirts and sour bottles in his pockets and sometimes—many times—babies in strollers. The quartet had just accepted a position in residence at a fancy university an hour north of San Francisco, where they would teach and play and run a chamber music series. It was a posh position in a lucky location, and Henry’s need for a yard and more bedrooms for his offspring, as well as his much-voiced desire to move closer to his sister, had been a large part of the group decision. There was also the matter of the way New York had changed in the last two years: now every city event was charged, every trip in and out of the city harried, the guilt that tinged the pleasure Jana felt when she left the city, and the way staying was a political statement. Even the concerts in the city were laden with intention and meaning that Jana thought obscured the real, pure underbelly of music-making. It was time for the quartet to move on, for more than a few reasons.

  So everyone was busy in the process of buying property or renting a place in California, of moving their things from New York back to the Bay Area, and in the middle of it, of course, Catherine died. There were conflicting reports about exactly how it’d happened. Catherine had been sickly for a few years now—no one who drank that much wouldn’t be—but she was still relatively young. She’d gone out drinking with friends one night and then left alone to try to find the LA River (the LA River? Jana had never purposely gone there and she’d grown up there). Catherine’s body had been found washed up under an overpass between Los Feliz and Atwater. It was an unseemly way to die, but not entirely surprising to Jana, or to Carl, apparently, who insisted on flowers and a late-morning funeral in a church Jana had never known her mother to attend.

  So, the flowers. Carl had ordered enormous tacky explosions of arrangements that Jana had to carry back to the car one at a time, wires and basket twine poking her all the way. Their fragrance made her roll down the window on the drive back, which meant she not only had to pretend not to see the protesters once again but also pretend not to hear them: “Don’t attack Iraq! The world says no to war!”

  The protesters peered into her window at the stoplight, and she tried to stare straight ahead. How foolish she must look, she thought, these flowers celebrating
in her backseat as bombs dropped in the dusk on the other side of the world. The morning was bright and clear and calm, Los Angeles in March, like Los Angeles in most other months. The protesters wore linen shorts and didn’t sweat.

  “Honk for peace!” one shouted into Jana’s window.

  Slowly, she turned her head to look at the protester, a woman with gray hair tucked behind her ears, eclectic tortoiseshell glasses perched on her nose. When Jana looked at her, the woman grinned—grinned like a girl, one side of her smile yanked up higher than the other.

  “Fuck this,” Jana said evenly.

  The woman didn’t falter. “Exactly,” she said.

  * * *

  —

  Catherine hadn’t been all bad, but she had been bad at knowing anyone other than herself. Jana did contact her again after that call before the first Esterhazy concert, a few times, and even saw her once, when the quartet swung through LA on their first western tour circuit. Jana had felt so exhilarated then. They’d given master classes in Salt Lake and befriended students afterward, really excellent students; they’d been the centerpiece of a festival in Portland, playing outdoors to a quiet crowd in a ridiculously verdant summer; and they’d made a triumphant return to San Francisco, their old teachers hosting reading parties late into the night. And in LA, they’d played Royce Hall, and Catherine and Carl had stumbled in halfway through—Jana saw them out of the corner of her eye during a rest in the Beethoven opus 133—and afterward Jana had let them take her out to dinner.

  But Catherine spoke only of herself, and asked Jana only one question: did she have a man in her life?

  Daniel and Henry, Jana wanted to say, but didn’t. She and Laurent had just broken up and it had been altogether uneventful, though they’d stayed together for two even years. He delivered the news to her in a letter sent from Montreal, where he’d accepted a teaching job at McGill, his own quartet dismantled after they failed to place at the Esterhazy where the Van Ness had triumphed.