The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  “Auntie?”

  Clara’s wet voice seeped through the door. Brit got up and helped Daniel up—“old man,” she said—and inside the bathroom they found Clara on her hands and knees on the big cerulean tiles.

  “I don’t feel good,” she said.

  Brit kneeled down by the girl and Daniel filled a small glass with tap water. He sat on the edge of the tub and handed the glass to Clara, who took small sips. Her eyes were damp, and she’d taken the straps of her bathing suit off her shoulders, like she was trying to be free of it.

  Brit rubbed her back. “Just breathe.”

  “Brit,” Daniel said quietly, and jerked his thumb behind him. “Check this out.”

  Behind Daniel, on the rim of the oval Jacuzzi tub, was a picture frame leaning against a tile mosaic of an exotic bird. In the frame was the quartet, an old publicity picture they’d used when they first came to Stanford, before the university paid to have new pictures taken. It was the one of them standing at the corner of Van Ness and McAllister, waiting for the light to change, still students at the conservatory. They’d been impossibly young.

  “Where on earth did they get that?” Brit asked.

  She left Clara and stepped into the empty bathtub for a closer look. In her hands, their youth was ludicrous. Here they were, forever preserved in black-and-white, eight by ten, their faces quietly waiting and unburdened by a hundred concerts a year, muscle spasms, colicky babies, the pressure of the Kennedy Center, jet lag from another hemisphere. She touched the image of her own face like she’d be able to feel it—her face then, softer and always expecting something, wanting something, open to see what she was sure was coming. In the picture, she was looking out over the street and Daniel was next to her, holding the curves of his cello and looking down and to the side, his head cocked, his gaze on the tips of her hair in the wind. Or something in that direction. It was difficult to tell what exactly they were looking at, even Henry and Jana behind them, who had much more determined expressions, fixed on the same spot just off camera. The people standing beside them blurred. Their instruments were shiny and unreal. The picture had caught them in a tutti tacet, a great Grand Pause. They all had been waiting for the light to change, but their expectant faces made her sad. Their lives then had been arranged around waiting or chasing, but waiting and chasing the wrong things—success, money, recognition, a relationship, a mother, a child. It had taken them years to figure out that what they’d been after was already circulating at that stoplight.

  It was like looking at another life, and Brit’s whole body was filled with the kind of desperate yearning she hadn’t felt in years and years. She crouched in the tub.

  “It’s like a time machine,” Daniel said. “Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t even know these people.”

  “What do you remember?”

  “About what?”

  “About that time?”

  Brit rubbed the edge of the frame. It was cheap. When was the last time anyone had asked her what she remembered, had wanted to know, even though they had also been there? “I remember being surprised at how disappointing things were.”

  “And now you just expect it?”

  “No,” Brit said. “Now I know whatever things I was sad about weren’t really disappointments.”

  Daniel shifted, put one leg in the tub. “And then good things happened. For us.”

  “Oh my God,” Brit said, a realization coming over her. She turned to Daniel and held the picture up. “We’re eternally taking a bath in here.”

  They looked at each other and smiled, recognized each other both then and now. This, she thought. This was what she meant to say: this picture, the way three words—take a bath—could bring reeling back an entire story, one that neither of them could really tell anymore, but one of the moments that they’d each grown around for years, that they carried inside their bodies, in their cells and molecules, what they were made of. The story spanned the distance between their past and their future, and suddenly, briefly, they were two versions of themselves. And if they were two versions of themselves, they were also all the versions in between, and their entire shared life unfolded before them. This kind of intimacy was hard to talk about or explain. This kind of clarity was hard to hold on to. But Brit and Daniel could be in it together for a few moments, in the tub. Time travelers.

  And here they were, in a fancy bathroom, Brit’s dirty feet muddying up a pristine tub, Daniel straddled on the edge in a too-small shirt, and the strange child on their periphery, prostrate on the floor. Here was a possible life, she thought, and for the first time she was unbothered by the thought, was instead comforted by it. Even the choices they hadn’t made were contained in that space. That could be enough.

  Brit leaned forward on her knees, the porcelain smashing her bones, and pulled herself up the side of the tub, to where Daniel was sitting. He was giving off warmth, his lips slightly parted, eyes still, watching her. She took her time positioning her mouth so that it matched with his, and then lightly pushed her lips against his, opened his mouth with hers, gave him her tongue, and he took it, and they passed electricity back and forth. She cupped his chin with her hands. She could feel from somewhere in the pit of her stomach an insistent urge to pull him closer to her, to finish the chemical exchange of warmth, and the recognition of its possibility expressed itself in a small whimper in her throat. This was what it was like to kiss Daniel after thirteen years, like kissing someone entirely new, a stranger who happened to be so familiar as to be cut from your own body.

  And then the child vomited. A thin, pink puddle beneath her and stringing from her lips, growing larger on the expensive floor.

  Brit wanted to laugh, but instead she placed the frame on the bottom of the tub and hurried to Clara, guided her to the toilet, where she retched again. Brit looked over her shoulder at Daniel, but he was already up and in the linen closet by the door, pulling out towels and spray bottles. Together, they cleaned up the floor and Clara, and Brit repositioned Clara’s bathing suit straps and kissed her on the cheek. She smelled sour.

  “You’re okay,” she said.

  Clara nodded. “Okay,” she said, believing her.

  Outside, it had become night. The thwang of a soccer ball rang against the wall of the house and Daniel winced, but then they heard the first whinny of a rising firework, which, after half a second, they saw evidence of through the windows along the top of the wall. Brit pointed up at the billowing sparks.

  “See? You didn’t miss it.”

  * * *

  —

  Back outside, the night reasserted itself. It had grown chilly and Maisie and Richard passed out blankets, which people pulled around themselves with their necks craned upward. Everyone was mostly silent in the round boom of the fireworks, except Clara, whom Brit heard say to her father in a clear, high voice, after placing her hand firmly in his, “I was sick, but now I’m not.” And then Clara leaned into her mother, whispered something into her ear. Kimiko looked at Brit, and Brit shrugged back at her. Let the girl tell, she thought, if that’s what she was doing.

  Brit found Paul and crouched on the grass with him. He smelled like summer: sunscreen and exhaustion with an undercurrent of something ending. He put his arm around her and she gathered into his hot shoulders. The pool hadn’t gone still yet and the fireworks reflected sloppily on its surface. Next to her, Jana had Daphne on her lap, who slept upright through the whole noise of the display, her black hair across Jana’s lips. That’s what it should be, Brit thought, Andante cantabile should be something to put children to sleep to, like the Mozart tape she’d listened to as a child. Maybe that’s why people were so moved when they heard it. It reminded them of their own childhoods, how easy it used to be to drift off, how even the most serious thoughts only dipped into the minor key, how every melody ended in reassurance. How hard it was to drift off peacefully as an adult.
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br />   Brit tried to fit the irregular booms into the Tchaikovsky that was running through her head, but the fireworks wouldn’t fit the singing, and after a while she gave up trying, and gave in to listening to the sound that was right in front of her.

  * * *

  —

  Later, after the arrangement to babysit Clara, Jack, and Daphne for an overnight was made, Paul blamed Brit, but Brit blamed Paul, and both were very sure they had not officially offered during the barbeque. Brit was very sure it had been Paul, in a moment of magnanimity that went along with whatever semi-tedious conversation topic he’d become newly obsessed with, vaccinations or school vouchers or attachment parenting. Likely he’d been lecturing Kimiko about it, whatever it was, and Brit had tried to placate Kimiko, who cared not at all about any of those things, by agreeing to whatever babysitting offer Paul had made. But there they were, three kids between the ages of five and eight, dropped off at their condo in the late afternoon, to be picked up the next morning. Kimiko and Henry were taking a night away in Monterey, and Jana, hearing this news, quickly jumped on, scheduling something for her and Finn in Tahoe, and as the children tumbled through their doorway, Brit wondered why she and Paul never went away on the weekends anymore. They used to do things like that, but the sheer number of years they’d been together made any weekend away the same as a weekend at home. They were the same wherever they were, which is why, Brit supposed, people stayed together for this long. For that sense of orderly sameness, familiarity, the reassurance that you were an immovable, consistent being.

  “Thanks,” Henry said, walking backward. “Call if there’s a problem!”

  Kimiko waved from the car. “But only a really big problem,” Kimiko shouted through the open window.

  Paul had set up the living room as a play area, but when Brit saw what he’d done, she wondered if he’d ever seen kids play before. He’d moved the couches back against the walls, and the carpet was a shocked white where the furniture had been. The glass coffee table had been turned upside down and pushed against another wall. He’d moved everything to the perimeter, like the children were animals who needed open space.

  Immediately they all sat down on the couches, now much farther apart from each other than was comfortable.

  “What should we do?” Brit asked them.

  “Do you have a pool?” Jack asked.

  Clara nudged him. “No, dummy. You know that already.”

  “We could go to a pool,” Paul said, standing up.

  “No,” Brit said. “No, let’s stay here. We can do something without a pool.”

  The children stared at her blankly. Brit was less afraid of the children than she’d been when they were all babies, delicate and always upset. The way babies cried instantly—whenever something was remotely uncomfortable—made her heartbroken, too heartbroken. And not because she didn’t want them to be hurt (though she didn’t), but because she empathized. Babies didn’t know social norms, the way people constantly negotiated emotions, pushed them down, ignored them, shoved them into blacked-out corners, and crying babies reminded Brit that adults were all ignoring some deep, undulating pain, nearly every hour of every day. Babies seemed like the real people, and adults like the mediated versions, whittled away by the world. It was depressing, anxiety-producing to be around them. But children, especially ones this age, who had recently learned how people act and were excited to act similarly, this she could recognize and deal with.

  Coming up with an activity for all of them to do at once was nearly impossible, however. She suggested charades (Jack and Daphne too young) and coloring (Clara too old) and tag (too boring for all of them). Not only did their ages present a unification problem, but so did their personalities. Jack, the youngest, was sweet but—and Brit would never, ever say this out loud—kind of dumb. Uninterested might be a better way to describe a five-year-old, she decided. Nothing she ever came up with seemed to stimulate a response, so she always resorted to hugging him. He’d be the cuddly child. Maybe he’d develop some kind of interest in the world later. Daphne was exactly the opposite of how Brit imagined Jana as a little girl: happy by default, eager to please, quick to laugh, quick to cry, a collection of emotions simmering just beneath her new skin. And Clara was a classic oldest child, and acted not only as Henry and Kimiko’s oldest child, but also as the oldest child of the whole lot of them, her parents included. She often adopted an exasperated tone with her father, whom she adored, and an incredulous tone with her mother, whom she worshipped, and then acted as caretaker and leader of Daphne and Jack. She was precocious and observant and—it went mostly unremarked on, so as to not apply pressure—an extremely good violinist.

  “Can I play?” Clara asked, gesturing to Brit’s office, where she stored her violin and sheet music.

  “Mmm, maybe later,” Brit said. “Why don’t we do something we can all do together?”

  “Mom keeps trying to get Jack to play the piano, but he doesn’t want to,” Clara said.

  “Piano’s boring,” Jack said, smiling.

  “I like piano,” Daphne said. “My mom puts piano on when we clean. Shoe-man.”

  “Schumann,” Clara corrected her.

  Brit looked at Paul and Paul looked back and they saw, together, the day’s hours elongate like a dry, horizonless desert before them. Brit raised her eyebrows. Did he have anything to offer?

  “What about a fort?” Paul said. “I moved all the furniture, so you might as well make something here.”

  They all seemed to get excited about that in the physical way children get excited. They squirmed off the couch, tossed their belongings (not exactly) in corners, and began tearing cushions off the chairs. Brit went to the closet to get blankets and empty boxes for propping things on and was suddenly struck by a long-latent memory: building a blanket fort with her father one Christmas Eve, a maze that led across the dining room and living room to the Christmas tree, a dark, dusty world that smelled like trees, the way everything on that island smelled like trees. Brit paused in the hallway, her arms full of blankets, and tried to remember something specific—anything—she and her father had said or done that night, but all she could conjure were the red lights breaking through the makeshift roof as she and her father crawled on their hands and knees toward the smell of pine needles and ribbon.

  When she walked back into the living room, she found that the children had essentially torn it apart. Paul stood over them like a shell-shocked soldier. The furniture had been moved (how long had she been standing in the hallway?), and the picture frames taken from the mantel to mark some kind of path, which Jack kicked into place. Daphne was dragging plants to one side, for what? An entry? An exit? A garden? Clara stood on the table giving directions. Brit loved how different it all looked, and how quickly it had transformed. Paul looked at her angrily.

  “Just go work in your office,” she said to him. “I’ll do this. You can do dinner.”

  She knew that Paul, Paul who harbored an aversion to anything messy, literally or otherwise, hadn’t pictured a fort like this. But Brit wondered what other way there was to create a fort than to tear apart everything for materials and then rebuild. Paul tapped her back in thanks and disappeared toward the bedroom. Brit dove in.

  The fort became more and more complicated, and Brit had to go digging in the garage for tent poles and stability balls. Jack devised booby traps (maybe he was interested in something, after all), which Daphne got trapped in, and Clara, the architect, designed the path through the fort with rooms and anterooms and various exits and ceiling heights and furniture. Brit’s living room was transformed not just into a fort, but into an entire world, and not one of her making. She did what Clara said to do, but she rarely understood it until it was finished, and even then, the results all seemed to follow some obscure-to-her kid logic, the layout and organization patched together from pieces of adult living they’d observed or half observed. In the end,
what was produced was something so messy and chaotic and full that looking at it—and the kids existing in and throughout it—made Brit’s throat tighten. This was what it was like to be a kid, out of the baby world of suffering, and into the world made imperfect by your own hands.

  “What’s wrong?” Clara asked, seeing her face. “Do you need a kiss?”

  Brit was startled by Clara’s question, and Clara was clearly startled at Brit’s response. Brit put a hand on Clara’s head and kissed her cheek, her own face clammy.

  Brit stepped through the sliding glass door to her meager backyard, where the sun had almost set and the mosquitoes were starting to emerge. She gulped some air and thought not of the transformed living room, but the transformed afternoon in the other house, the Fourth of July, only two weeks ago, when Clara must have seen her kissing Daniel (how many people in this quartet would Brit kiss?) and decided it was normal. Perhaps she’d even told Kimiko, who might have told Henry, though he’d said nothing. Brit and Daniel had also said nothing afterward, the kiss like a bubble that had grown in the bathroom and popped once they left. She didn’t think about it after she left the bathroom, went back to Paul, drove home with him, went to bed, got up, read the paper, did everything all over again, and then over again. She didn’t think about the kiss because she understood it to be an attempt to bridge the bizarre spread of time that had been made visible to both her and Daniel that day. The kiss was honest and complete. There was nothing else to say about it.

  But that didn’t mean that it didn’t seep into her life somehow, a fact she’d shoved down as far as it could go these past couple of weeks. When she next kissed Paul, she felt different, as though participating in something new and separate from her, and it was a little bit exciting. It surprised her, that the kiss with Daniel was the one that felt familiar, like flipping the switch on in a part of her that had been turned off for years. But what exactly was it that was turned off? That question was what Brit thought about instead of the kiss itself, what she lay awake thinking about next to Paul’s complacent, unconscious body.