The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  She kept her plan a secret because it felt natural to keep it a secret. She told no one in case it failed. If she tended to it privately, it would remain sacred. This was, she imagined, what it might be like to actually be pregnant.

  Jana considered writing Laurent: I find I’ve found myself a mother. She didn’t, of course. But it was true. She’d found a mother: herself.

  * * *

  —

  Brit was the one who suggested a drive, before she had to get to Burbank for the red-eye, and Jana tossed her the car keys. The rental was a blindingly white Dodge Neon, the interior smelling of fresh Crayolas, and Jana rolled down the window and leaned her head out in the wind once they were on the 101. No one touched the radio. The wind was noise enough.

  “Where should I go?” Brit asked.

  Jana shrugged.

  “Take me somewhere cool,” Brit said. “Some part of LA that doesn’t seem like LA.”

  Jana remembered a dusty hike up Griffith Park with one of Catherine’s more outdoorsy boyfriends. She’d been small and she’d fallen, scraping her knees, and Catherine had picked her up and carried her, roughly at first, and then gently. She pointed out the Hollywood sign in the distance, through haze and smog even back then.

  Jana directed Brit east and Brit wordlessly drove. The road wound around the park and then through it. Technically, you weren’t allowed on the trails after sunset, but Jana didn’t think they’d be caught. Everything felt safe and new tonight. They parked at the base of the trail and got out of the car. Brit grabbed Jana’s wrist when they saw a coyote eye them through the trees.

  “Late for coyotes,” Jana said, and started up the steep incline.

  They followed the trail around a grassless mountain that had no view until it did, suddenly, opening up, revealing the whole canyon below.

  “What’s at the top?” Brit asked.

  Jana said, “Um, the sky?”

  The hike was tiring, and by the time they made it to the fenced landing—which required them to practically claw at the ground with their hands—they were both breathing hard and sweating, and a layer of dust coated their funeral clothes. They were limp with fatigue. Maybe they’d gone too fast.

  They stood at the top and looked out. For a good while they couldn’t see anything.

  “I can’t see anything,” Brit said.

  Jana knew what she was looking for, though, and said, “Wait.”

  The lights of the many clusters of office buildings burned below them. Which crop of lights was downtown? Jana had no idea. One looked like the other. A gray haze settled just above the buildings, and above that a few stars were visible. Otherwise, nothing.

  “Carl’s eulogy was stupid,” Jana said. “Delusional.”

  “Yeah?” Brit said.

  “Yeah. Will we be delusional when we’re old?”

  Brit scoffed. “We’re kind of old already.”

  “Older, then.”

  Brit sat down in the dirt and Jana followed. “That’s one way of looking at it. But maybe also there’s a way of looking at it like, that’s the gift your mom gave Carl.”

  “What, a descent into narcissism?”

  “Self-love, let’s call it. Maybe he felt important because he got to take care of her. Everyone needs someone who allows them a way to love themselves.”

  “Oh yeah? Is that what Paul allows you to do?”

  “We’re breaking up.”

  Jana laughed, but Brit didn’t. Brit rubbed her knees with her hands like she was shaping them. “Oh? For real?”

  “I think so,” Brit said. “The fat lady sang. The conductor put his baton down. The fermata over the rest faded out. Epic rest.”

  Jana considered Paul, a blond man with wide shoulders, a man in a suit, a man not quick to laugh, but quick to smile—a man whom, despite the years they’d all orbited Brit, she couldn’t say she really knew. He looked like he was related to Brit. He receded into the background.

  “I want to show you something,” Jana said, and got up, dusted off her legs. She led Brit back down the mountain, and at the halfway point, turned down a small, nearly invisible trail through bramble and scrub grass. In the dark, it was impossible not to get your legs scratched up. Brit put her hands on Jana’s shoulders at one point, and Jana felt with her foot for the next hold so as not to bring them both down. The bottom of this trail opened up into a field circled by a concrete walkway, and Jana paused so their eyes could adjust to the new dark.

  “What is this?” Brit asked. “We might get murdered here.”

  “It’s the old LA Zoo,” Jana said. “It closed in the sixties.”

  “God, it looks like everyone just ran away from it one afternoon,” Brit said.

  They spoke quietly, though there were no animals to wake. In a circle around the field were stone pens, weather-buffed former habitats for animals—ghosts of monkeys, tigers, emus—small enclosures whose bars had been removed so you could walk back into the shadowy recesses. They entered one, and the icy cold coming off stone hit their skin immediately. Brit grabbed Jana’s hand and held it as they walked farther, turning a corner into a cave, the place where the trainers must have entered the enclosure, curving steps leading back to a barred-off doorway. The stone walls were covered in graffiti, and beer cans crunched under their feet.

  “It’s the place that feels the oldest to me in LA,” Jana said, her voice tinny and sharp in the habitat. “Nothing really feels that old here, and yeah, you’re right. There’s something about this that feels preserved, like everyone just up and fled all of a sudden.”

  “What do you think happened?”

  “The animals died? Don’t know. Someplace better came along, probably.”

  Jana liked the old zoo because no one came here. No one talked about it as a place to visit, no tourists mobbed it. It was too far east for most people to care, and tucked inside this huge park with lots of other hiking trails. But it was a living ruin of the place where she was from, its grounds a little bit decrepit, always dirtied from high school students or vagrants passing through. It was a ghost of itself, one whose walls hadn’t yet crumbled.

  She led Brit farther up the path, to the line of cages, ten or so, which curved around the hill. The cages were human-sized, and the bars were made of thick iron. Jana opened one cage and walked in. Brit stayed outside.

  “Monkeys,” Brit said, threading her fingers through the bars. “No, birds. No, I don’t know.”

  The ground beneath Jana’s feet was thick in leaves and dirt. There was a back exit to the cage, but that lock was sealed shut. She traced her fingers over it anyway.

  “So,” Brit said. “I really didn’t think the Adagio was so bad.”

  “Please. It was like a sixth-grade recital up there.” Jana turned back to Brit, slung her arms through the bars next to her.

  “It was like the missing parts were—”

  “Missing,” Jana said.

  “Right.”

  “I’m going to tell you something now,” Jana said.

  “Okay,” Brit said, taking her hands out of the bars and coming around to step inside the cage with Jana. “It’s weird there’s nowhere to sit in here.”

  “I’m having a baby,” Jana said, and then held her breath, waiting for a response. She’d never said that sentence before, not even to the social workers and agency staff she’d met with.

  “Oh,” Brit said, touching her own stomach. She was still whispering. She was looking at a spot in between the two of them, as though Jana had conjured something. “Oh.”

  “I’m getting one, I mean. I’m adopting. A girl from Ethiopia,” Jana said.

  “What’s her name?” Brit asked.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Not Catherine?”

  “God, no.” Jana laughed. “That would have made Catherine feel so old.”


  She laughed again just thinking of it, the mixture of horror and confusion Catherine would have expressed upon hearing this news, and in the middle of her laugh, Brit lunged at her, arms open, and embraced her. Brit hugged her partly as though she was the one who needed the hug, with that kind of super-conscious physical force. Brit’s face was buried in Jana’s neck, her arms wrapped tightly around Jana’s back. It was a raw force of warmth, this embrace. Brit had a slight floral scent and her hair was soft and in Jana’s hands no matter where she placed them. Jana could feel Brit’s chest expanding and contracting against her own as she breathed. It occurred to Jana perhaps for the first time why men loved Brit—why people loved Brit: she was able, in a way that most people weren’t, to give and receive goodwill. In Jana’s whole life, she could not recall ever having been hugged like this. This one was all-encompassing compassion. Brit was an equal planet to Jana, and the two of them were temporarily merging, gravities combining. Jana accepted the kindness.

  “I’m so happy for you,” Brit said into Jana’s hair.

  When the cage latch creaked in the wind, Brit’s grip loosened, and they pulled away from each other. They looked around for animals, ghost or real.

  Jana could tell Brit really did feel happy for her. The baby wasn’t even with Jana yet, and Brit already felt the happiness of the thing that was to come, the very idea of it. She believed in invisible things, in possibility. In that way, she was like Catherine.

  It was strange in the dark to feel so seen. Jana could barely see Brit, but she could feel her there, breathing hot into the space in the cage, her own body still warm from the embrace. In that absence of actual vision, Jana allowed herself to accept something most people spend their days running from. She stood in the knowledge that there were people who saw the parts of her that she did not want to see herself—the anxiety buffering the nastiness, the desperate quality to her ambition, the tarnished sheen of her past—and that one of those people was standing right in front of her, seeing her be seen. It felt awful, like her skin had been peeled away and whatever was beneath was burning against the cold air. But it also felt like family.

  Jana reached through the dark to take Brit’s jaw gently in her right hand. She tilted it a soft twenty degrees and brought Brit’s lips to meet her own. Whoever said women’s lips were pillowy was wrong, thought Jana. Here they were two parts of a hot, slick organ, an open cage for a sound that took seconds to form, build, and travel through the body, cousin to the tongue, translating something that was untranslatable and lawless.

  What happened wasn’t sexual, but Jana knew it would be impossible to tell anyone else about the experience without misrepresenting it that way, and so she vowed right after to never say anything. It was, however, about intimacy. She’d wanted to be as close as possible to the person who saw her—in the moment when this feral, empty part of her past met this specific, warm part of her present. She’d wanted to merge. But what she discovered was both disappointing and comforting: the kiss was nothing as intimate as the years they’d already spent together, the furious making and unmaking of music, the knowledge of each other’s nonverbal, preverbal, extraverbal selves. She should have known better than to connect their lips; their callused hands were closer to the truth.

  When Jana pulled away—it wasn’t exactly pulling away as much as coming to the end—Brit’s lips were shiny in the dark. Neither of them apologized.

  They left the cage together and walked back up the hill, back toward where they’d come from. They walked silently, though Jana was sure Brit had more questions about the adoption, and the reasons for its secrecy. But she didn’t ask, and Jana was grateful.

  “I see it!” Jana said, stopping, pointing, finally not whispering. “Do you see it?”

  Brit stood on her tiptoes, and the tilt of the earth almost sent her flying. Jana held her hand until she righted herself. Jana pointed through the muck and the smog that had cleared for a minute, and across the canyon, up at the edge of the horizon, was the blurred-out Hollywood sign.

  “Oooh,” Brit said. “There’s the other LA.”

  “If we had our violins, we could play that song at the beginning of the Paramount Pictures—”

  “—with the clouds and the stars—”

  “—and the mountain.”

  “We’d need a drum kit.”

  “And some other things.”

  “I think we could do it. We should learn it back home. Henry’s kids would like it.”

  “Let’s go to it. The sign.”

  Jana smiled in the dark. “Sure.”

  But no one moved.

  * * *

  —

  There was another kind of pain, too, one more difficult to name.

  Laurent’s letter had arrived in late August of 2001, as the quartet was preparing for the start of the concert season in which they would tour nationally, a tour that would start with their debut at Carnegie Hall and take them around the perimeter of the country, hitting all the major classical music cities. Their debut at Carnegie was scheduled for a Thursday in late September. Jana took Laurent’s final departure as a sign that things were clearing out for the start of the new phase of the quartet’s career. She was truly free now to focus on their tour program, the centerpiece of which was ambitious. The musically complex, physically exhausting, emotionally wrought, somewhat inaccessible, and absolutely relentless Beethoven opus 131. Perhaps the most well-known of the late Beethoven quartets—those written when his deafness had begun to close in on him and drive him mad—the 131 was infamously difficult. Seven movements played straight through attacca, with no break, it was nearly forty minutes long, demanding of both the players and the audience. But if they were going to debut at Carnegie Hall, they’d reasoned, they might as well do it in a big way.

  She’d been mired in the score that morning—Daniel had purchased one for each of them so he wouldn’t be burdened with being the only one to have a score this time—the morning of September 11, having gotten in the habit of waking early and, before doing anything like showering or eating or even changing, listening to the most recent recording of her private practice or the quartet’s rehearsal while reading along with the music. She was sitting at her desk with her headphones in (thanks to the complaints of her neighbors, another terrible thing about being a musician in New York), reading through the last few pages, trying to figure out how they could move from the frenzied sawing of the final minor burst to the understated C-sharp major of the ending in a way that sounded less like an accidental arrival at a major key and more like purposeful consternation. She’d been sitting there in her pajamas, thinking this through, backtracking and listening, marking up the score with better fingerings for the transitions, when the sounds of Daniel’s pounding on the door broke through.

  They’d all moved to Brooklyn for more space and cheaper rents in the past year (except for Brit, who stayed with Paul in Manhattan), but Daniel actually lived in Jana’s neighborhood, two blocks south. He couldn’t get through on the phone to anyone, and he’d run over to her apartment. She didn’t have a TV, so he took her by the arm, so tightly he left a pale yellow bruise, up to her rooftop, where they watched the plumes of black smoke across the water and the towers fall, one by one. Jana couldn’t remember them saying anything to each other. For a while afterward, she tried to construct a narrative out of it, what she thought and when she thought it, and when the thoughts changed. But eventually she gave up, and the memory of watching it happen was like a wide gray space in her brain. Then she thought of it as something akin to attending a massive funeral of someone you didn’t really know: at a certain point, it was all just faceless pain, making your own experience of it unimportant.

  Rehearsals after that ceased for a few days, as they couldn’t even get to their rehearsal space, let alone focus on the music. For Jana—and she would never tell anyone this—she would always connect the Beethoven 131 with th
at helpless feeling of watching the towers burn and smoke and collapse, the inability to make sense of the transition from the minor to the major, the way the story resisted her in the chaos. She grew to hate the way the 131 ended in a major motif that felt suddenly out of place, outdated, a pathetic imitation of optimism, now rendered truly stupid after all that had come before.

  It was Brit who suggested a dry run of the 131 in public a week before the Carnegie debut. She’d heard about a vigil at a cathedral in Brooklyn Heights that would welcome a performance from them. Jana thought they might spoil whatever magic they’d have at Carnegie with a free concert for a bunch of people in mourning, but she couldn’t figure out a way to say that without sounding cold and heartless. It was arranged. They would play the entire piece as people walked up to a makeshift shrine and lit candles or placed prayer cards.

  “But this isn’t exactly a meditative piece,” Jana said, leaning over to Brit before they were about to begin playing.

  “It’s just music,” Brit said. “They just want music so it’s not quiet when people are crying.”

  Which seemed to Jana like the worst reason in the world to play music. But as they played, with no one really listening, or not just listening but listening and paying tribute, or listening and weeping, or listening and praying, or listening and thinking, or listening and trying not to think, Jana saw that yes, it was just music, and that was perhaps its best attribute. It was art as part of the landscape, movable, livable art, and what these people needed was that, an apparatus of art to hold them up for a while.

  And for the quartet as well. It took some of the pressure off, with no one really focusing on their performance but simply experiencing it. So they experienced it, too. And Jana couldn’t say the 131 made any more sense than it had before, had any more of a cohesive narrative, but their playing of it lost some of its clunky self-awareness, some of its awkward loneliness, and in that strange way a total national disaster became part of their musical story. When they finished playing, no one applauded, which was the only time in their entire career that had ever happened; since then, to Jana, applause after the 131 felt obscene.