The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  No one asked if anyone else was ready and they started the piece like they were joining a song that had already begun.

  * * *

  —

  Brit couldn’t help blushing. Paul, her new boyfriend, had said fuck in the hush of Patelson’s, and though they were on the upper level in the mostly empty choral section, she thought she could see the conductor of the Met at the counter below, preparing to buy a stack of scores, and he looked up sharply at the accusation. It was like cursing in church.

  “I wouldn’t say I fucked him,” Brit whispered.

  Paul shrugged. He’d used that word, though he didn’t seem at all angry, just curious. Brit had a fleeting wish for him to be angry when he said it, at the thought of her having sex with Daniel. But Paul was smiling, amused at the thought of her salacious history.

  It was June of 1997, the early evening still burning sunlight, and they were in the early stages of dating. She was showing him one of her favorite places in the city, this relic of a music shop in what was once a carriage house, an institution full of mothballs and creaky floors and rows of sheet music organized by sometimes bizarre logic in every crevice. When you exited out the back of Carnegie Hall, you were practically compelled into the store across the way, though no one who wasn’t a musician would have taken a second look passing by.

  Paul had bouncy hair for a man, strawberry blond, springing out of his scalp and lying in a smooth swoop across his head. He had clear skin and a quick laugh, and a face so evenly proportioned that it was sometimes forgettable. She’d had to meet him several times to register his face in her memory. He dressed well (that day, a thick navy polo shirt and well-cut slacks), had good table manners, worked in money but wasn’t governed by it. He adored her.

  “It was only a few months. Maybe six,” she said, flipping through some Handel.

  “Do you sing?”

  “Who, me?”

  He laughed and put his arms around her.

  “What about you?” she said.

  “Sing? Only scat.”

  “No, I mean who was your last girlfriend?”

  He let her go and ran his hands through his hair. It sprung back into shape perfectly. “A real one? The last real one would have been Sarah. About three years ago. For three years.”

  He went on about Sarah—she’d really loved volleyball and lacrosse and had been an athlete at a small college in New England and then an accounts girl in advertising, and she’d had lovely shoulders and yes, he’d loved her, but she’d been angling to get married from the get-go, and why get married if nothing was wrong, he wondered—but all Brit thought about was that he must have broken up with Sarah around the same time she and Daniel had stopped doing whatever it was they’d been doing, and how Paul had been nursing his wounded heart at the same time she’d been nursing hers all the way over in San Francisco, and she liked to think it was cosmic, that simultaneous heartbreak.

  Years later, she would tell him this, long after they’d moved in together and she assumed she wouldn’t have to feel foolish for having thought that they were linked by destiny and loss, but he’d made her feel foolish anyway. He said, “But I broke up with Sarah over Christmas, so there goes that fantasy.”

  “Show me more,” he said in Patelson’s. “What other sections do you like?”

  Brit led him on a sheepish tour of the space and its bound music: here’s where I bought my first partitas, here’s where I replaced the Stravinsky that Henry spilled tomato sauce all over, here is the best edition of the Shostakovich quartets, careful not to bend the corners. She’d never led anyone on a tour of anywhere special to her before. It seemed absurd that that was true, but it was. She fumbled through the story, trying to explain how important Hindemith was in her education to someone who didn’t really know what a viola was. How did people do this, construct narratives about themselves on the spot? Brit added it to her list of things to practice.

  But it was what she’d first fallen for in Paul, the story of his evolution, or at least the way he told it. There were certain secrets, even for him: an alcoholic father, a disappointing gap year, a brief affair with an older, married woman. Tame confessions, but intimacies still. It would take a while to recognize it, that what she’d loved most was the way he’d let her in, more so than what she found once she was there.

  And he didn’t poke a finger into the story about her parents. She told him, and he let it be, didn’t extrapolate it into a mythology. Didn’t even ask her to connect pieces together, though over the years she doled them out, connected them for him, and he seemed content.

  “What are you thinking?” he asked, flipping a massive score of a Mozart Mass beneath his nose, sniffing the scent of new stock.

  “How easy this is,” she said, at the same time he said, “I mean for dinner,” and they laughed loudly enough that yes, the opera conductor did see them, and frowned.

  It was that easy, she marveled. Someone could unzip and open up, invite you to step inside, stay awhile.

  They kissed each other sloppily, moving seamlessly from choral music to opera, landing finally in contemporary Latin American chamber music, where it occurred to Brit that she wanted tapas. They held hands and walked back through the store, pushed open the door, which rang chimes that cracked through the solemn, library-like mood, and stepped out with him leading. Outside, where it was humid and noisy, she stopped short and looked around her waist. Her purse, in all the kissing and giggling, must have been set down. She patted her pockets and spun in a circle, checking the sidewalk, and when she looked up—Paul was both there and nowhere. She hadn’t yet begun to recognize his walk or his stature from the back, and any number of men let loose on Fifty-sixth Street could have been him, yet none of them were. She turned in a circle again, this time looking up. The exact color of his shirt was fading, and in the dark, lamp-lit street she wouldn’t have been able to discern navy from cerulean anyway. But where was he?

  Well, he’d recognize her absence soon enough and come back for her.

  She went back into Patelson’s and caught the door to quiet it before it clanked shut behind her. She padded to the back, where they’d lingered, and scanned the bins for her purse, fighting a fluttering in her chest. Should she have stayed outside and waited for Paul to come barreling back? Or should she have come back in, looking for her money and cards and ID?

  Brit was interrupted by the sight of Daniel, messy-haired with sweat rings under his arms, holding up her green leather purse in one hand and a stack of sheet music in his other. He wore his thick glasses, which were slipping down his too-large nose, warping his eyes in a way that made him look like he was a cartoon. He always wore a look like he was trying to catch up with his face. She took a step forward, looked behind her, and then back again at him. Yes, he was still there.

  “I’d recognize this mess anywhere,” he said, holding the purse out.

  She took it. “I didn’t see you in here before.”

  “I didn’t see you, either,” he said, and immediately Brit sensed he was lying, on account of how quickly he tossed off the comment, the tiny downturn of the left corner of his mouth. “Anyway, the planets,” he said.

  Brit looked up and saw only ceiling. “Huh?”

  He shook the music in his other hand. “I was just picking up Holst. An arrangement of The Planets. For us.”

  “Movie music?”

  “It’s not movie music.”

  “It’s not quartet music.”

  “Ah, but it could be. It’s an arrangement for four.”

  “Not a chance. Too much percussion. Any arrangement would sound shallow without timpani.”

  Daniel put a fist to his chest. “You underestimate my percussive qualities.”

  Brit shrugged. “You underestimate how many times I had to play that in youth orchestra. Anyway, some planets are missing.”

  “Pluto doesn’t
count,” Daniel said, and propped his stack of music on a shelf to root through it. He pulled out a book on the bottom and held it up. “I’m getting this, too. This can be Earth.”

  It was Tchaikovsky’s first quartet, which, to Brit’s mild surprise, they hadn’t played together yet. Like everyone who’s ever heard it, she was partial to the second movement, the Andante cantabile, which was often played apart from the other movements, sometimes as a melancholic encore. “I love that piece,” she said.

  “There’s an arrangement for cello and orchestra, too,” Daniel said. He shrugged. “But I’m just getting the quartet.”

  At times it was impossible for Brit to imagine having been enamored with Daniel, as when he stood in his rigidity by endlessly arguing some dry point during rehearsal, or when he shied away from any sentimental expression by making a joke or by literally shrinking back, turning sideways to a tough conversation. But instances like this brought it all back, moments in which he betrayed his underlying warmth: here was an unmitigated tenderness for something, even if it was just music.

  “So,” she said. “I should go. Thanks for picking this up.”

  “I’ll see you,” he said, turning back to his stack as she turned back toward the exit. There was no way for her to know if he watched her walk out, but she sensed that he did, or imagined it, which was very similar.

  Once outside—it was definitely hot now, though the sun had already gone away, but it was summer in the city—she ran straight into Paul’s chest and looked up, and there he was, all strawberry-colored and -flavored and grinning down at her.

  “You lost me,” he said.

  He took her palm in his again and started off, but she turned one last time to peer through the glass into the store that seemed like a whole other world on the inside, quiet and cool and organized and lit up, stuffed with all manner of secrets. She searched for Daniel, but found him nowhere, and recognized that even if she did spot him, even if she waved at him with her other hand, he could not have seen her in the dark.

  * * *

  —

  Maisie was, of course, crying. She stood saturated in the late sun, sweating in her cover-up and crying, with Clara at her feet, the child’s face buried in a ball of pink-and-white cotton candy. What was it about the Andante cantabile that moved middle-aged women to tears? There was something in it similar to the second movement of the Dvořák “American” String Quartet from their graduation concert in San Francisco, a lilting folk-song quality that had shades of the serious and the melancholy. The tune was almost elementary, as it repeatedly came back and back, lightly ornamented with restrained, classical turns, simple in composition—led entirely by Jana with the rest of the group in supporting roles. Brit was also moved by the piece, but not so much by the sound as by watching everyone make the sounds. Because the piece was so simple (though not really, nothing was really simple), there was a certain ease they could take with it, and Brit liked to watch Jana’s lids half close as she softened into a milky sound, or Henry’s full-body dip when he was given the melody for half a line, or Daniel’s mouth shake a little when he got to do the rich, round vibrato as bass line. She led the syncopated support beneath Jana and above Daniel, along with Henry. She was good at it, and in a piece like this, she got to do some watching. There was an art, also, to watching.

  After they were done, Maisie had her arms draped around Henry’s neck. Henry was still aggravatingly in his early thirties and fresh-skinned, though tired under the eyes. Clara stomped around them, sugar-spun and trilling nonsense.

  “I need to piss,” Daniel announced, setting his cello back in its case. “Pee, I mean. I need to pee.”

  “Me too!” Clara said, whipping her cotton-candy stick in the air. “Pisssssss.”

  “I’ll take her,” Brit said to Henry, whose face was now firmly in Maisie’s hands.

  The three of them, Daniel, Clara, and Brit, walked into the house, where the air-conditioning chilled the pool water on their skin, making them shiver. Clara grabbed Brit’s hand. “I feel sick,” she said.

  Brit took the cotton candy from Clara’s other hand. “Let’s find you some water, too, then. And I’ll take this.”

  The bathroom was down a strangely twisted hallway (money bought curved walls) and was nearly obscured by the brightness through the glass panels that lined the very tops of the walls. It was a hallmark of rich people’s homes, Brit had noticed, to add features that made it seem like you were being looked in on, that fostered the notion that you were someone worth watching, being on display.

  “Can you let Daniel go first?” Brit asked.

  Daniel flashed a smile. “I’ll be quick, Clar.”

  Clara sat down in the hallway and nodded. Brit joined her. The floor was cool.

  “Too much cotton candy,” Brit said. “But you’ll feel better soon.”

  Clara said nothing and they listened to Daniel urinate through the door. She saw Clara grin a little, looking down at her lap. She would be devastating one day. Her pink bathing suit was already too small, her brown legs stretching out the frayed edges. Clara had seemed to grow exponentially that year, a new girl each time Brit saw her. She’d be tall and lanky like Henry, all limbs, made fun of until she was in her twenties, and then envied. Her face was all Kimiko, though, easily tanned in the summer, cherry-wood brown eyes, precise features, no mask with which to filter anything. She had long hair, hair too long for a girl her age, Brit’s mother would have thought, and Brit ran her hands through the tangles in it now. Brit wanted to tell her something like It’ll be okay, but then she’d have to explain what wouldn’t be okay, and she wasn’t sure she could do that. Eight was too young to think things wouldn’t be okay.

  “I want to make it to fireworks,” Clara said.

  Brit made a small braid in the back of Clara’s hair. “You will. It’s almost dark.”

  Daniel opened the door, grinning. “All done. All yours.”

  “I can go alone,” Clara said. “But don’t leave, okay?”

  Of course she could go alone, Brit thought. What eight-year-old couldn’t go to the bathroom alone? She had been foolish to assume the opposite. What you knew about children could be yanked out of you in two seconds, she thought.

  “We’ll be here,” Brit said.

  Daniel sat across from her. “Do you think anyone has ever sat in this hallway before? Do you think people sit on floors in this house?”

  “I think people probably sit on floors after five o’clock every day,” Brit said, making a drinking motion with her hand.

  “Good point,” Daniel said. He tugged at his borrowed shirt, which was too small in the arms. Daniel’s wide chest and long arms, of course. Brit took them in, remembering with clarity the absurd span of his body.

  “What?” he said. “It’s Henry’s shirt.”

  Brit looked at the way his dark hair had faded to gray at his temples and the suggestion of gray in his patchy beard. Daniel was solidly into his forties, a decade she was staring in the face. “When did you get old?”

  “Easy. December, 2004. December twenty-third, to be exact. We got old, you mean.”

  Brit laughed. “What happened then?”

  “Remember, we played in that Christmas concert for the department? And Kimiko brought Clara and Jack, and Jack was sick, and Jana had just started dating Finn, and Daphne was two and a disaster. We played something . . . some contemporary Nutcracker arrangement blah-blah, and it was basically us playing through screaming children, and afterward Henry and Jana wanted to go do that gift exchange at Henry’s place—”

  “—but we made up that lie,” Brit said, remembering. “What did we say?”

  “That we had bad shrimp. Which was so not true. We didn’t even have shrimp, and we all ate dinner together.”

  “Right. But they didn’t notice because they couldn’t notice anything but babies then.”


  “And then you and I went to that movie with the robots and that kid actor—”

  “—oh, what was that movie? I can’t remember.”

  “See? We’re old.”

  “We fell asleep in the theater, anyway. So I blame the movie.”

  “I blame how old we were. We are.”

  “I thank God all the time that you’ll always be older,” Brit said. He smiled at her, and the light changed from orange to gray. The sun had set.

  “At least we’re not Paul-old. His newest hobby is building those ships in bottles. Like we’re retired.”

  “Ugh, hobbies,” Daniel said, practically spitting it. “I hope I never have a hobby. The very idea of it is offensive. Commit to something or don’t do it.”

  “I’m sure your girlfriends say that about you all the time,” Brit said.

  Daniel shrugged. “So dating is my hobby.”

  They didn’t say anything for a while. Brit pursed her lips into a smile and stared at the fading wall behind Daniel’s head. When you wanted to talk to people about the past, it was never exactly the way you imagined it, Brit thought. She wanted to say something about the ocean-sized expanse of hours and years between them, how they’d once been fragile people who threw themselves at each other, and how now they were real people, more of the body than those twenty-somethings always on the verge of a breakdown. You aged, and even though you used your arms and hands and fingers and spine as tools to play music, your skin still sagged and your hair lost pigment, your bones ached and you were stiff in places that used to be pliable. They were just people whose physical parts were slowly failing them. They’d become adults in this strange thing they did, in the years they’d attached themselves to each other, the half a lifetime they’d orbited the quartet. They went through life as a unit, banking on the consistency of emotional expression, all the while given to the same normal tragedies and impulses and failures and passions as everybody else. Marriage, children, death, and other, more vague departures. It seemed to Brit that what they’d done was sew onto each other those moments like patches: If you go down, I go, too.