The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  Dear Jana, he’d written, the formal salutation like he’d never spoken to her before. Montreal is: as I remembered it, steep and full of beautiful people and fresh mussels and a seediness that refuses the gentrification your Brooklyn seems to value. I find I’ve found myself here. And also, though not as an afterthought, it occurs to me in this cold northern autumn to tell you that I’ve met a woman, a Québécoise who doesn’t play music but teaches philosophy, which seems to me somehow related and yet excitingly apart. We are a more useful match, and you must know something like this anyway. It hasn’t become physically intimate between Michelle and me, and I hope you’ll send my extra violin via courier.

  I find I’ve found myself here. Jana had rolled her eyes when she read that. So like Laurent, to put together a sentence that could make a gesture toward meaning and end up meaning absolutely nothing. Of course you were there. That’s where you were. And the way he strung those last two clauses together in one sentence, as if the fact he hadn’t physically cheated somehow earned him the favor of her sending his second violin via courier.

  Laurent could never really stand that Jana was more successful than he was, and she could never really hide that she knew it. The imbalance didn’t bother her, but it was a fact, and it affected decisions, and she wasn’t going to apologize for it. They’d sealed the beginning of their relationship with the crack of Daniel’s punch to Henry’s face in that hotel room, but they couldn’t ever really reach that pitch again. When they broke up, Jana felt something like relief, at not having to constantly nurse an undercurrent of disappointment anymore.

  So it was particularly annoying when, at the diner (Catherine couldn’t spring for something that didn’t have mirrors along the booths, that didn’t have booths, whose menus weren’t coated in plastic?), Catherine and Carl sat across from Jana, expectantly. Did she have a man?

  “No,” she said. “No boyfriend. I’m so busy.”

  Catherine’s face fell. Well, it had already fallen. She was sallow by then, she wasn’t getting any parts, not even for mothers. She didn’t look good. “Oh, dear. You’re just like . . .” Who was Jana like?

  “You’re just like yourself, I guess,” Carl offered, digging into his breakfast-for-dinner waffles.

  “You were always like yourself,” Catherine said. “Just doing your own thing. I like to think I made that environment for you, so you could be so independent.”

  Everything Catherine said, even when it purported to be about Jana, was about herself. Jana wondered now if Catherine had ever had that moment that mothers describe, that flood of selflessness that comes in the seconds after you give birth. When your very self rushes out of you and love for this stranger being comes in to fill it, like water, every crevice. But then, so what if she had? For Catherine, even that feeling would’ve been a kind of self-love: look at what I created. And with that thought, her own self would come rushing back in.

  It made Jana angry, as though she had been swindled into loving a person who only craved her love. She could not now un-love her mother. Even after the diner, where Catherine drank too many tiny airplane bottles of red wine, when they stood outside by the cars, and Carl wandered off to buy an already out-of-date USA Today, Jana had said, with traffic zooming down Ventura Boulevard, “I love you, Mom.”

  “Oh, Carl loves me, too,” Catherine said dreamily, her fuzzy hair around her face, the lit-up street seeming to electrify her silhouette.

  She grabbed Jana’s hand and held it for a brief second, like she was squeezing a rosary, and then let it drop. It happened so quickly Jana didn’t have time to respond. Her mother composed herself and tossed her keys to Carl, who was buried deep in a story about the new millennium, and instead the keys landed on the windshield with a smack that cut through the traffic noise and startled Jana out of the moment. Later that night, Catherine would call Jana, crying hysterically, to tell her the windshield was breaking, had slowly grown spider cracks, veins against the dark sky, the whole way home. She was afraid if she got in the car again to take it to the shop, the glass would come shattering down on her. She was crying so hard it was difficult to tell the difference between words and moans. Jana could hear Carl banging around in the background. Her mother howled.

  “You don’t have to go in the car. You don’t have to go back in,” Jana said. “It’s okay. You can stay outside. You can.”

  * * *

  —

  This fucking church, Jana thought.

  It was ostentatious, like the flowers, and even if Catherine had been a good friend to people, even if she had been the most famous drunk in the Valley, the pews wouldn’t have been filled. And so it felt pathetic to have Jana and Carl on display in the first row, a smattering of people awkwardly seated behind them. She didn’t know how to look like she was appropriately grieving. She’d worn black, the same concert blacks she used to wear in the pit or in chamber orchestra. Black dress pants and a black blouse, her hair tied neatly back, off her neck, makeup caked on her violin hickey.

  There was one more request from Carl, whose belly poured over his belt like he did not care at all, who pushed it ahead of him wherever he went. A favor besides the flowers.

  “Would you play some songs?” he’d asked. “Your mother would have loved that. She told everyone about her famous violinist daughter.”

  Jana could count on one hand the number of times Catherine had come to see her play or even asked about her music. But funerals weren’t for the dead. They were for the living, and Carl was inhabiting this widower role as though at the end of it was some kind of prize. He spoke softly, in cadences that lilted toward sadness and then tumbled back toward gratitude. He held everyone’s hands in both of his hands. He sighed audibly and often. What was in it for him? Jana wondered. Certainly Catherine had no money. They weren’t even married. The house was a step up from the trailer, and the car, the one with the replaced windshield, was still cracked in other, less visible places. And now Carl would have to drink alone.

  She decided it wouldn’t hurt anyone or anything to play part of a Bach partita. A Bach partita never hurt anyone.

  Jana turned to survey the crowd and saw Brit in the back row, easy to spot with her blond hair pulled over one shoulder of her black dress. Brit had flown in that morning and driven straight to the church, and would have to fly back on the red-eye after the reception, because she had a slew of students to teach, before closing out her studio for the move. Brit took on more students than any of them, certainly more than Jana, who had one or two Juilliard students at any given time, students who didn’t really need her. It’d been nice of her to come, Jana thought. Surely Brit would cry before Jana did. Brit would cry so Jana wouldn’t have to. She waved her thin hand at Jana, and Jana waved back.

  Carl spoke first, his voice wavering at exactly the right moments, sliding up the scale just enough for him to catch his cry in a handkerchief. Jana sighed.

  “Catherine,” Carl said, as though calling out to her, looking up—actually looking up—at heaven, and then came a litany of lies, or what Jana considered to be lies. Catherine as a generous partner. Catherine as an endlessly curious woman. Catherine as an adventurer. Catherine as someone who took a chance on Carl, who welcomed him into her life, who took care of him. The woman Carl described was like a ghost, an outline of a person Jana thought she would like, a blank space that shot straight through her. She glanced around. Who were these people? What had her mother been to anyone else?

  Then came a few women Jana didn’t know, some of them present the night she drowned. Jana felt her palms dampen as Carl took the podium again to introduce her performance.

  “And now we’ll hear from Catherine’s only daughter, Jana, playing one of Catherine’s favorite pieces, Barber’s Adagio for Strings.”

  Jana couldn’t help the grimace on her face. They had agreed on the Bach. Had Carl misunderstood? Did he not know the difference? Had Catherine actually
told him about the Barber? Had she remembered? She stood and looked around, as though someone might rise from the pews to defend her. When she approached Carl, who had his smug hands folded across his belly, she whispered, “You mean the Bach?”

  He smiled and shrugged. “I put it on the program,” he said, gesturing to the printer paper crumpled in his hand.

  Jana sighed and took her violin out of its case, aware of dozens of eyes watching her, suddenly panicked at not looking distraught enough. But she couldn’t—she couldn’t be distraught while she played. She tapped the strings to make sure they were in tune and, with her chin clamped down on the chin rest, glanced at the audience. Were they an audience? Was that what you called attendees at a funeral?

  She found herself looking for Billy, but he was nowhere, missing. She was now older than he’d been when she last saw him. He would be unrecognizable. He could have been any one of those men.

  So she would play the Adagio for Strings. She couldn’t think of a good reason not to.

  She thought of a good reason not to the moment she began: it was an ensemble piece, an intimate arrangement. It made no sense without the other parts. Alone, the chords weren’t thickened and textured, and though the first violins led the charge for most of the melody, the piece didn’t quite have the richness of tragedy that it did when the seconds came in, when the violas were purposefully dissonant, when the celli climbed up to thumb position. When she was younger, when she’d played it for Billy in her bedroom, what he’d done was that thing you did with children. You filled in the empty spaces they couldn’t. You did a little magical thinking with them. You taught them about it, about how to do it—how to see and hear things that weren’t there. That’s why she had felt completely normal playing this piece for Billy solo, when it really wasn’t a solo piece. She had been just a child.

  Now Jana thought maybe everyone could hear it, the missing parts. Surely Brit could. She felt like an idiot, ashamed, holding the long whole notes, hearing the absence of the other parts.

  She finished, and her cheeks were wet. She didn’t know why she was crying, or she couldn’t say.

  * * *

  —

  Jana dutifully dragged all the flowers from the church to the afternoon reception, where she tucked herself into a corner of the coral-colored kitchen next to a bucket of white wine bottles, with Brit.

  No one knew what to say, so they said that: “I don’t know what to say.” Which meant Jana had to reassure them, which was a perverse way for this whole thing to work, she thought.

  Brit stepped in to save her sometimes, pretending to know Catherine, using the bits of information Jana remembered telling her over the years. She was a delightful actress, a woman who loved to laugh, a woman who loved love. Jana couldn’t see through Brit’s narrative, though she stared hard at her lips when she talked. Was Brit lying? Or just stringing together what good parts she did know? That was, after all, the way Brit seemed to see the world, as a bunch of good parts connected by gaps where the really bad parts were.

  “I was supposed to play a partita,” Jana said as Brit refilled her Sauvignon Blanc.

  “Which one?”

  “Three.”

  Brit frowned. “Hm. Not the most funeral-appropriate music.”

  “Yeah, but it would have at least sounded normal as a solo piece. What the hell was that, springing the Barber on me?”

  Brit filled her own glass now. “You didn’t have to play it. No one would have known the difference.”

  “Oh, but Catherine in heaven would have known the difference,” Jana said, pointing a finger up at the ceiling. Maybe she was a little drunk already.

  Brit didn’t smile, took a drink.

  “Well, no. Probably she wouldn’t have known the difference, either,” Jana said. “I would have known the difference.”

  “Sorry I was kind of late,” Brit said.

  “Oh, God, thank you for coming,” Jana said, a little too loudly. “I’m sorry—yes, thank you. You’re here. Jesus, if you weren’t here, what would I be doing right now?”

  “I was just held up because of the protests by the freeway. I would have been more on time if not for that.”

  “You should have seen me trying to get these flowers.” Jana gestured toward the arrangement crowding her hair. “I practically had to sign petitions to get through stoplights in Glendale.”

  “It was a beautiful rendition,” Brit said. “Of the Barber.”

  “Even without the rest of the music?” Jana asked.

  “Nah,” Brit said. “I heard it.”

  Jana shook her head to disagree with Brit, and the vase of flowers by her head began to fall in slow motion. First petals brushing her forehead, and then the weight of the vase against her hair, and then the briefest brush of thorns against her lips, and then a clump of dirt and pollen on her shoulders. Brit’s hands reached out to try to catch the vase, but too late, it had already crashed onto the coral kitchen tile, breaking into six or seven large, pretty shards at their feet.

  Jana brushed the hair out of her face and with it came a few stems and a single orchid bud, hard and unopened. She held the bud up to the light, and she and Brit looked at it for a while before starting to giggle. They were soon laughing so hard that they had to bend over, their faces over the vase shards, spilling a little wine on their shoes and the floor. Time slogged on into early evening, past the time when finger foods were appropriate, and then they were the only ones left besides Carl, and they were still giggling in the corner, darker and drunker now than when they’d begun.

  * * *

  —

  Jana was barely sad when Laurent didn’t return, and she did send his violin via courier to Montreal with a note: I’m glad Montreal is: as you’d remembered it. Good luck with yourself.

  She’d been alone since. Her aloneness felt like both a result of her stubborn persistence (something she was doing to herself) and a burden to bear (something everyone else was doing to her). After a certain amount of time, it began to seem like no one could understand her as well as she understood herself, and the longer that was true, the more deeply it was true. Though the longing was there—sure, it would be nice to have someone else cook her breakfast every once in a while, or kill the cockroach, or help carry the groceries up the stairs, or occupy the sometimes frustrating and useless expanse of sheets—the aloneness had carved a canyon so deep and wide, it swallowed and dissipated any romantic possibility. At a certain point, it became easier to go to bed early with a book or a movie and a potent sleeping pill, maybe a glass of wine if she had gone running that night, and sleep in the mild unhappiness that would one day just feel so regular it could be confused for happiness.

  The quartet filled her life, anyway: the traveling and recording sessions and negotiated engagements, the EPs and the teaching, the way New York zigzagged your life around so it was possible to become distracted from the general emptiness of it, especially after 9/11.

  And then there was the physical pain to deal with. A knot in the base of her spine had been tended to by doctors and spinal specialists and acupuncturists and chiropractors and massage therapists. She used a ridiculous buffer pad behind her when she rehearsed and sweat through the pain during performances. She’d had all kinds of MRIs and scans, and no, there was nothing tumorous there (and for a brief moment she’d been disappointed—the path would have at least been clearer, choices made for her), just a nagging disc out of place. The doctor said she’d been sitting upright and twisting her core around for thousands of hours more than the average person, and that this was bound to happen.

  They all had some version of their bodies bearing the weight of their work. Brit’s violin hickey was continuously infected, and she slathered lotions and creams on it to quell the burn. Daniel had recurrent shoulder problems and his own personal massage therapist, Erica, whom Jana suspected he’d slept with. And Henry had te
ndonitis in his right elbow and wrist, to a degree he hadn’t explicitly said, but the ravages of which Jana had begun to notice in the bow pressure of his fortes, which were a little louder and stiffer these days.

  Jana’s lower-back problem felt like a little patch of suffering come to colonize her tissue and fuse with her bones. She knew she wouldn’t die from it. But it felt like death, giving in to the pain. Which is when she began to look into adopting. Which she wouldn’t say was the opposite of death, but all the doctors and the meds got her thinking about the pills her own mother took—and also just about her mother, and what it was like to be a mother, and how could you do that in so much pain, or on so many pills.

  Jana couldn’t imagine it.

  Especially not with her back twisted up and a relentless travel schedule and a tiny apartment in Brooklyn. But a calm had come over her professional life, or a tamped-down anxiety, now that the quartet had reached a point where they no longer had to hustle for gigs, and they had a manager and a publicist who reviewed paperwork and provided arrangements, a rehearsal space they never worried about paying for, priceless instruments on loan, wealthy patrons, the stamps of Juilliard and Esterhazy, years of experience that had slowly matured into confidence.

  Though there may not have been a clear reason to have a child—no husband, no family to speak of—there was no longer any reason not to.

  Henry made it work. Why couldn’t she? As she spent weeks and months sifting through information and scrolling through potential adoptees and reading adoption narratives, a new version of herself began to emerge: a Jana who went to bed tired not from a pill but from exhaustion at having carried a child all over the city, who bought small clothes for the small human, who decided what the child would wear until the child began to decide for herself, who marveled at that child’s transition into sentience, who grew a little thicker around the middle (not that she couldn’t use it) eating cupcakes with the child (or maybe the child would like salt, she didn’t know yet), who met other adults who did not play music but held jobs in offices, but who knew Jana the way you know someone who has suffered like you have—even a Jana who grew angry with the child, maybe most days became angry, at least at first, but then at least the anger was directed at someone else, someone of her but not her, not her lithe, spackled, alone self.