The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  She had no partner with whom to lie in bed that month and the months after and discuss the pink chaos of the city, but if she had, if some man had lain next to her and asked what she felt and when she felt it and how it had changed and why, she would have said that in the beginning she was afraid to feel anything, because she didn’t want to co-opt anyone else’s authentic pain—she and Daniel on her roof under the clear sky, privately tamping down their doubled, tripled, quadrupled mourning (the inadequacy of human mourning was part of the horror)—and that after the vigil concert she felt useful (music solved the inadequacy with extra-human expression, if only temporarily), and so she let herself feel sad, which was in itself useful for her as a performer, and then after all of that, after the Carnegie debut and the tour and the way their lives became busy and full of concerts and engagements and teaching and interviews at the same time her life emptied out, like she was hanging upside down, lint drifting from her turned-out pockets, the city settled into an agitated, anxious resilience, and she didn’t want to be filled up with that, not now, especially not now, and she felt bad for that, for her desire to flee from unease, to switch randomly from a diseased understanding of the world to a major chord, but weren’t they old enough for that, to turn away, to move away, to have children, to have unadulterated successes, to be angry at the deafness of the world and then go deaf to it by hoping something good could happen, by making something good happen in all the shit and at least you are here, strange, faceless man in my bed, at least you are here to shrug with me, run your hand along my shoulder, call me by a name only you use, and say, well, at least in all these disasters big and small we have each other.

  * * *

  —

  Brit drove them to the airport and Jana switched over to the driver’s seat. Brit slung her bag over her shoulder and leaned in through the window to give Jana a kiss on the cheek, her hair whispering Jana’s face.

  “You were good,” Brit said.

  Jana tried to make her face as wide-open as Brit’s. “So are you. Thank you for being here.”

  Back at the house, Carl was still up, and Jana poured the two of them drinks under the low ceiling at the lit-up kitchen counter, the rest of the house dark and silent and holding the energy of everyone who’d once filled it, giving the space the confessional feeling of a bar after closing. Carl talked and Jana refilled the drinks, and replaced the ice when it melted, and Carl told stories about her mother that Jana wasn’t sure were entirely true, at least not true to the person Jana had known, but sure seemed true to Carl, who even teared up once or twice, now coated in the emptiness of his life post-funeral. There was a trip to Ojai, camping in Joshua Tree, a lost weekend in Tijuana (food poisoning, a likely story). He softened into himself. No, Jana softened to him. There was a lot of liquor to finish. There was the way he described Catherine describing Jana—ambitious and quick-tempered though given to brief sentimental crevasses—which was a Jana Catherine had once known, and Jana smiled at that version of herself, waved, called hello across the divide. Whatever Carl was mourning, he was also mourning himself, that much was clear. He had to tell himself a new story, but before he could do that, he had to tell all the stories from before.

  Some days later, on the way to the airport, Jana was surprised to find a diminished but dedicated group of protesters on the same corner she’d previously encountered them. The worldwide protests were over, weren’t they? But here they were, fervent in their small numbers. While stopped at the light—now in traffic, many others ignored their chants—Jana rolled down her window. One man cried, “Wooo!” as though at a rock concert. They bobbed their signs up and down. Maybe it wasn’t so self-important after all. Maybe if they gathered enough times, for long enough, loudly enough, the war would end. No, probably it wouldn’t. But it was nice to think so. Thinking so was all they were asking, Jana supposed.

  Jana leaned on her horn with one arm and hung the other out the window, her hand balled into a fist. She didn’t know what to say, what one said in these situations. She thought only of clichés—Fight the man! Power to the people!—sayings like that.

  A few of the protesters heard her honk and screeched, looking for the source. She waved her fist around until they saw her. The day was bright and clear, the same as it had always been. When they spotted her, their faces changed, rose up, like she’d given them a gift, and their cries were louder, their signs bobbed heartily. Jana smiled but shook her head. Nothing would change, but wasn’t it something, she thought, the things we could convince ourselves of, the things we told ourselves not until they were true, but until they were real.

  July 2007

  Northern California

  BRIT

  Violin II

  Brit couldn’t read and listen to music at the same time. She didn’t know how anyone could, really. And Paul liked listening to jazz, and he liked to read the newspaper on Sundays at the counter in their condo, and he liked to do both at the same time. This seemed to Brit like the worst version of each activity. She knew she was supposed to like jazz—her father, the trumpet, “My Funny Valentine,” Byrd—but she didn’t. It seemed to spring out of a different place from the music she’d internalized, and the looseness, the modulation of keys and blurry edges of intonation, all that, when she listened to it, made her aggressively distracted. She was always trying to put jazz music back together in her head. And Paul, proud of his seven-days-a-week subscription to The New York Times, always read the paper section by section the same way each Sunday, whereas she only picked up the Arts & Leisure section, after it was puffed out and picked through by him. She always turned the music off when she read it. It seemed to Brit the newspaper only gave you party talking points, hollow horror, and she wilted a little each time they were at a gathering and Paul pulled out a headline he’d stored away for conversation: “The way we’ve lost Fallujah, despite bolstering the Iraqi police force.” Bolstering?

  The newspaper and jazz were why they were late to the Allbrights’. “Tradition,” Paul said, snapping the paper in front of his face and leaning back into the stool.

  “Habit,” Brit said, tying her bathing suit straps behind her neck.

  “Whatever you want to call it,” Paul said. “It’s the Fourth of July. I can do what I want. No one’ll notice if we’re late to a pool party.”

  “It’s not a pool party,” Brit said.

  “Then why are you wearing a bathing suit?”

  “It’s not a pool party for us,” Brit said, pointing to her violin case by the door. The Allbrights were major donors to the music program at the university, and though they had an annual pool party in their enormous Sonoma home for faculty and staff, they always set up music stands and chairs and had their piano tuned and a stack of fresh scores under the cabana by the outdoor bar. Maisie Allbright usually wanted the quartet to play something slow and sad, and by the end of the evening, she’d stand right in front of them and cry and sip her daiquiri while her husband, Richard, disappeared into the house, into another bottle of Scotch, into bed. They were expected to perform, but then they were expected to watch the Allbrights’ performance, too. It was exhausting.

  Brit waited for Paul to finish his paper. She stood in the kitchen the entire time, watching him, listening to the music. He didn’t look up once, and she didn’t disturb him once. This was how they fought: by not fighting. Outright arguments weren’t Paul’s style, or Brit’s either, though over the years it had become hard to tell who’d led the charge. They grew into or around each other’s flaws, like knotty, ancient trees. He was easy, which is why it was so good with him for those early years. I’ve finally gotten what I deserve, Brit remembered thinking when he’d been the one to say he loved her first, when he’d been the one to chase her out the door when she was angry, when he’d been the one to say let’s move in, let’s merge bank accounts, let’s never vacation apart. She’d never been with someone who seemed so grateful for her, more grateful than sh
e was for him, and she thought that was the way it had to be, someone always carrying more of the gratitude. But then five years went by, and the quartet decided to take the job in California, and she’d waited for him at their Hell’s Kitchen apartment one Wednesday, prepared to say she was going, prepared to break up with him, like she’d told Jana in LA—that she’d understand if he didn’t want to go, since New York was his home, but it was the next logical step for the quartet, and she had to go for her career, and that she’d loved him anyhow. But the word California had barely escaped her mouth and he was already alit in the computer’s glare, looking up openings in finance in the Bay Area, real estate prices, weather probabilities. She never even had the chance to say that she was okay with their breaking up, and so it was like a scream that she never got to scream but couldn’t swallow, caught perpetually in her throat.

  How could you say no to a man who followed you like that? That kind of following was only familiar to Brit through the quartet.

  And then it was ten years. Ten years since they’d begun dating, and here they were, in their carpeted condo in the part of the small city that was better than the part the students lived in, but not as nice as the parts the dot-com guys lived in, the burnt summer filtering through plastic blinds and the air conditioner kicking in and jazz on the CD player, like some imitation of a life.

  It wasn’t that she didn’t love him, or that he wasn’t kind. She did, of course, and he was, absolutely, but after a while it got to seem like they’d reached a moment where it was really pleasant, like the highest form of pleasant it could be, and then they’d stayed there. And stayed. And now she was nearly forty, and it was about time she admitted that the life she was living was actually her life, not some precursor to her life, and that the reason she wasn’t living another, perhaps better, life was that she’d met someone decent with whom she’d had something very important in common: a desire to be in love.

  He looked up brightly when he finished the last section, like he was happy to have a news digest fresh in his mind. “Thanks for waiting, lovely,” he said, and walked over to her, kissed her on the forehead, and untied the tie behind her neck.

  He walked away into their bedroom, laughing, asking for five more minutes, he had to find his swim trunks. He said that phrase she hated, swim trunks. She retied her bathing suit.

  The drive to the Allbrights’ was all windy roads through the country. The day was hot, and she cranked up the A/C but he rolled down a window, and then they had a standoff. Finally, she said, “Think of my violin, Paul,” and he silently closed his window and turned the radio up.

  * * *

  —

  The Allbrights’ home showed its wealth with its total lack of coherence. The front of the house was all circular gravel driveway, molded shrubs, Italian pillars, and the back was sixties mod—a lap pool, a vintage cabana, a croquet course in new grass. And the inside, marble and parquet, heavy sliding doors and glass room dividers. They were so rich they could decorate however they wanted, whenever they wanted, change themes on a whim and never mind informing the rest of the house.

  Maisie took Brit’s hand and kissed her on the cheek, smelling like baby powder and vodka. Maisie had a truly painted-on face and gray-and-white hair swept up into a bun that had to be half fake, and wore a designer caftan and kitten heels.

  “You’re finally here, dear,” she said, leading her through the cold house and back into the hot day to the pool area.

  “She just wouldn’t stop listening to Chet Baker this morning,” Paul said, though Maisie didn’t appear to be listening.

  Outside was a shock of children. Brit was always alarmed the way they seemed to throw themselves all over the place when they were near a pool or any body of water, like they just believed the water would magically buoy them.

  Henry’s daughter, Clara, ran up to Brit, dragging a pool noodle behind her in a damp path on the concrete, her long dark hair wet down her back.

  “Do you know how to cannonball?” she asked, and then fell into a fit of giggles, like the joke didn’t depend on Brit’s answer at all, and ran away.

  Kimiko and Henry waved from the outdoor bar, and Jana and her daughter, Daphne, were in the pool, in the middle of a lesson on floating. It was still strange to see Jana with Daphne, Jana as a mother, which was something Jana always seemed to be embarrassed about. Her transition into motherhood had not been as seamless as everyone hoped it would be, though it was as private a struggle as everyone expected. Daniel was playing croquet with some of their better graduate students (mathematics and engineering PhDs, always the best violinists, though arts majors were better cellists) in shorts and no shirt. Now that he’d reached what might be the early part of the middle of his life, he’d grown into his hooked nose and his long arms—Brit saw that nothing looked like a mistake on him anymore. His face had transitioned from boyish to sly, even down to his small mouth, which more frequently broke into a smile these days. She spotted patches of gray on his chest hair and when he looked up, she looked away.

  This was the kind of California that was sometimes so unbelievable that it was nearly unbearable, and there was nothing for Brit to do but relax into it. She sat on the edge of the pool with her legs in the water, tossing children toys and quietly cringing when they called her “auntie,” and accepted plastic cups of wine from Maisie, who wanted to know when she and Paul were going to get married, and to tell her about how she’d once sung with the San Francisco Opera, and what was her favorite opera. She heard Paul say to Henry, “And that’s one good thing to come out of all of this, the Iraqi police force.”

  “Do you have a favorite of these children?” Maisie asked, leaning into Brit. She was already a little drunk.

  “I like whoever’s not crying,” Brit said.

  Paul was over with little Jack, who really was too little for his age. He went to doctors and got shots of hormones—while his smallness was worrisome, it meant he could stay adorable. It was like he was refusing to grow up. He’d be the smallest in his kindergarten class. Could she say he was her favorite?

  “I had a favorite child,” Maisie said. “It was the middle one, Jordan. She was so quiet. You must have been a middle child.”

  “I was an only child,” Brit said.

  “Ah, same thing,” Maisie said.

  “Is Jordan still your favorite?”

  “Oh, Jordan’s long passed.”

  Brit wanted to ask of what causes, but the answer would only deepen the mystery, surely. When children died, it was always an unsolvable mystery.

  “What about you, dear? Where are your parents?”

  “Oh, they’re dead, too,” Brit said. She never liked to say passed. It was a silly word for what happened to people.

  “Yes,” Maisie said, and the two of them looked out over the indulgent pool glinting sunlight and the children who sloshed around in it, rising and falling with the subtle waves. That anyone stayed alive at all was a mystery not worth talking about.

  Brit found Daniel around the side of the house, going long for a football. She waved him over and said they might have to play soon if they were going to beat the fireworks and the drunkenness—“my own,” she said—and he agreed, dropping the football on the spot.

  “You should probably put a shirt on,” she said.

  “I think Maisie would prefer I didn’t,” he said.

  “I demand Tchaikovsky!” Maisie said when they’d set up, Daniel with a borrowed shirt (of course he couldn’t find his own) and Brit having to untie her bathing suit under her tank top so that her violin could fit squarely in its spot on her neck. The children screamed in the background. Paul lay on the grass near them, but had a ladies’ straw hat over his entire face. For all Brit knew, he could have been sleeping.

  “Daphne, I swear to God,” Jana said, hovering above her seat and angling her bow at her daughter, who had just bopped another child on the head
with a croquet stick. Brit already felt drunk.

  “E-flat minor?” Daniel said, more to them than to Maisie, but Maisie leaned in.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “You must do the Andante cantabile. It will break my heart.”

  “You sure you want your heart broken?” Daniel said, smiling. He was flirting.

  “By you, always,” Maisie said, floating backward, settling into a lawn chair.

  “Well,” Henry said. “The lady wants what the lady wants.”

  “The lady wants Daniel,” Jana muttered, and Brit coughed and handed out the music.

  The parts she provided were fresh and unmarked, nothing like their own tattered copies, whose markings were dated by the fade. The older Brit got, the less she wrote on the page, the less she even looked at the page. It was there mostly for show; they could play the piece, most pieces, with no music, no stands, nothing between them. But to do that here would be to show off, and so they unfolded the new music and clipped it to the stands with clothespins so it wouldn’t fly away in the breeze.

  This was useless, Brit thought as the cabana walls flapped like the snap of Paul’s newspaper in the morning and the children cried indiscriminately and Maisie Allbright held her hand to her heart. What was the point? Their sound would go nowhere outdoors, especially a piece as soft and tender as this. Brit’s bathing suit slipped a centimeter down her back.