The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  Brit turned to look back through the sliding glass door, the inside of her place now lit up against the dark outside. The children were still playing in their fort, messing it up, tearing walls down, fixing them, getting lost. She’d helped build the form, but they’d inhabited it in a way she couldn’t understand.

  From somewhere inside the house she heard shouting, and when she slid open the door, she knew it was Paul. The two girls were standing outside the fort, looking down the hallway.

  “Where’s Jack?” Brit asked, and they pointed.

  They found him in Paul’s office, where Paul painstakingly put together his ships inside bottles. Paul stood in the center of the room and Jack cowered in the far corner. At Paul’s feet was a collection of broken glass and pieces of a ship that looked, when shattered, like it was made from cheap kitchen utensils. She felt an urge to laugh, looking at the small boy, afraid in a corner, and the grown man staring and shouting at his broken toy.

  “He broke it!” Paul shouted, answering a question that Brit hadn’t asked. “He fucking broke all those hours of work!”

  “Paul,” Brit said. “Stop it. It’s just a boat.”

  “Goddammit, it’s not a boat. Don’t call it a boat.”

  “Okay, well, you have about sixteen others over here.” Brit gestured toward the shelves where, in fact, Paul had a large collection of miniature boats—ships—inside absurdly shaped bottles, a wall begging to be broken.

  Paul looked up at her, looked up finally from the ruins at his feet, and narrowed his eyes, his mouth. Jack was frozen in his spot. “That’s not the point. The point is that Henry doesn’t teach his kids how to treat nice things.”

  Brit walked closer to Paul, hoping Jack and the children wouldn’t hear, trying not to notice that the boy was noticing every tiny breath and utterance between the two of them.

  “He’s only five. You’re scaring him. This is a hobby. Everyone will live,” Brit said quietly.

  “How would you feel if it was one of your violins? Why didn’t you let Clara play your violin earlier?” Paul asked. “You know, you can’t stand here and act so much nobler than me when you care about your hobby as much as I do. You all bank on being so collaborative and community-minded, et cetera, et cetera, but you’re really more selfish than any of the rest of us blessed to grace your lives.” He looked to the doorway, where Clara and Daphne were frozen. “Clara! Brit says you can play her violin. Go get it.”

  It’s a twenty-six-thousand-dollar violin gifted to me by the foundation in Moscow, she didn’t say. It’s my livelihood, she didn’t say. I don’t even own it, she didn’t say.

  What she did say, slowly, evenly, coldly: “That is art. This is a toy.”

  Paul walked out of the room and returned with her violin. “Let her play it, Brit,” he said.

  She looked from the violin in Paul’s smooth hands to Clara’s reddened face. Clara’s right hand held on to the doorway, afraid as she was to fully step inside, and her left hand clutched Daphne’s. Out of Clara’s mouth bubbled something so thick that it seemed at first, to Brit, like bile—except it wasn’t physical. Clara said, with relief in her voice, “I saw Brit kissing Uncle Daniel.”

  It had been absurd to expect a child, so new to the world of logic and reason, to keep a secret like that. It would have been absurd for Brit to be shocked by Clara’s admission. Paul had moved the girl into the center of their argument, a pawn, and Clara had very intelligently replaced herself with a different sort of pawn, knowledge she hadn’t entirely understood except that it had been private, and that was a concept she was only just beginning to know.

  Much later, Kimiko would say to Brit, “Who knows why she did that? She’s a strange girl.” But Brit knew. She recognized in Clara a powerful desire to please the people around her, to be liked without being the center of anyone’s attention, to share the burden and the spotlight, the glory and the blame. Clara saw the connections between people, and then became a connection. This was what would make Clara a good chamber musician.

  * * *

  —

  When the dinner had been eaten (pizza, takeout) and the baths lolled in (Brit administering, of course), the children slept in their fort. They asked, and Brit felt that she couldn’t say no after what they’d had to witness. She watched them crawl in with flashlights, their small bottoms disappearing into the dark entrance, and after some rustling in various chambers and a whimper that stopped just before she was about to intervene, she turned out the light and went to bed.

  Paul was already under the blanket, glasses on, book out, large glass of wine at the bedside table. Brit pulled off her jeans, tied her hair up, and climbed in on her side.

  She’d been here before, on the other side, as the listener to the thing that can’t be unsaid. A cheesy pub near Edmonton, a meatloaf poorly digested.

  Paul put his book down, something serious with a woman in a suit on the front, claiming she could get you a better life if you followed these seven steps of good business. “I’m supposed to say I’m sorry, I guess.”

  “You don’t have to say anything,” Brit said. “You said enough.”

  “So did you.”

  Paul gave a speech—it felt like a speech. Brit could tell he’d thought about it and rehearsed it, probably when she was ordering pizza and feeding her friends’ kids and bathing them and reading them stories. He was delivering a speech about how he would get over it, but. But Daniel couldn’t come over anymore, and he didn’t want to ever speak to him again. But how about she not kiss other men. But she can’t continue to demean everything he does, whether it’s manage rich people’s money or build model ships (ships), and anyway, she took rich people’s money and did something her whole life that most people would think was elite, snobby, trivial. He hadn’t really meant she was selfish, but. But maybe what they did trained them to be selfish. But they all couldn’t walk around expecting everyone else to understand that there was this relationship in their lives that was superior to every other relationship, and they had to understand that other people valued other things, and well, but. He seemed less upset about the kiss than about the fact that Clara knew, which meant Henry and Kimiko knew, which embarrassed him, that it was public that someone else had co-opted his nice thing, his boat, his girlfriend.

  While he spoke, Brit heard only the word selfish. It had rang in her ears like a reedy note from a cheap clarinet all through dinner and bathtime. She wasn’t mad, at least not anymore. She had been mad when she had to explain to Clara why what she’d said had made Paul disappear for the rest of the night. She’d seethed silently when the girl cried a little. But his accusation—that she was selfish—lodged between her ribs like shrapnel. No one had ever called her that before, though she’d thought it about many people, including, from time to time, Daniel. And Jana. And Henry, too. All of them devoted to their playing, to the career they thought they should have, to the talent they couldn’t help having. But it hadn’t seemed so damaging, to think them selfish. Because what they were devoted to, essentially, was her. Each other. Music.

  So Paul was right. She was selfish. She had been trained that way, and she had survived because of it. She had spent so many years trying not to be alone, finding the opposite of loneliness in what the quartet did in rehearsal and on stage, and in the end, she’d made that sovereign in her life. First was the music, which was servant to nothing. Second was everything else, servant to her music.

  “It’s okay,” Brit said, interrupting Paul. She smiled, turned on her side toward him, grabbed his hand under the blanket. All the years sweetly diffusing in front of her. “I’m not sorry, either.”

  PART 4

  Sediment to Sky for Four

  —Julia St. John

  “American” String Quartet in F Major, op. 96, no. 12

  —Antonín Dvořák

  Octet in E-flat Major, op. 20

  �
�Felix Mendelssohn

  September 2007

  The Redwoods

  HENRY

  Viola

  There were, as Henry saw it, two kinds of pain. Short pain and long pain. Short pain wasn’t just pain that lasted temporarily. It could be chronic or recurrent. It could be sharp or dull. What made short pain short was that it stopped your playing immediately, stopped you short in rehearsal. It’s the kind of pain where suddenly you feel shards of glass in your elbow, and you leave rehearsal early, pop four aspirin, go to your physical therapist or doctor for some stronger pills, and come back two days later. Maybe it comes back in six months, maybe it doesn’t. Short pain is like a cleaver coming down on your arm, cutting deeply, and while it’s scarring and hurts like hell, it’s fixable, it has the possibility of healing. Long pain, though, was the kind of pain that, while it could be acutely excruciating, specifically and precisely horrific, was deep inside the bones and tissue. Here, the cleaver has already come down with finality, you’ve been separated from yourself, and for the rest of your life, you are a person with reattached parts, threaded back on, a little lame, a little altered. Short pain was part of your body. Long pain was part of your life.

  It was long pain that Henry was more accustomed to, though short pain was no stranger. The long pain was in the elbow and wrist of his bow arm. All his young life, playing had been easy. Playing had been the easiest thing he’d ever done. And when playing began to hurt, as it does for anyone who has played for years and years, he ignored it. Easy was the way he was used to living his life, and he would continue living that way by force of will if he had to. But when his sister was diagnosed with her heart problem, and his father, too, revealed his bad heart, Henry decided to no longer ignore the pain. When he described it to the doctor, he said that it felt like something heavy had fallen on his arm, rendering it both numb and blood-hot. He said he wanted either to ice the limb or to cut it off at the triceps. He said not playing was not an option. The doctor had looked at the X-rays, given him a brief physical test, and said, foolishly, “Can you cut back on playing?”

  What the quartet knew: Henry had a particularly bad case of tendonitis in his elbow and wrist, and it was treatable if he maintained regular physical therapy and didn’t participate in marathon rehearsals.

  What no one but Kimiko knew: the doctors had repeatedly warned him that if he didn’t cut back on playing, there would come a time very soon where there would be no playing at all. With every flare-up he was causing not only tissue damage but nerve damage, changing the very makeup between his skin and bone, grinding away bit by bit at whatever was left there to help his bow arm stay fluid or go spiccato at a moment’s notice. His tendonitis was also musculoskeletal, and the doctors asked him to think of it as opening and reopening lesions that connected his tissue to his bone through nerves. Continuing to play at the rate the quartet played was literally destroying his right arm.

  What was the worst part: he could never predict the pain’s acute expression. While it always thrummed dully beneath the surface, flare-ups, as he’d experienced during the second Esterhazy and countless times since, were impossible to predict. He wished he had something like a migraine aura or some other kind of warning. Nausea, sickness, a bad mood, even.

  And here it was happening at the Festival of the Redwoods, where they were teaching and performing at a chamber music festival in a grove of trees between the mythically wild Northern California ocean and the hot-gold hills of the vineyards. It was their second time at the festival, a favorite of theirs because of the location and the people and the generally relaxed attitude of all of it. They could bring their children and they slept in log cabins and rehearsals were often in the shade of a seven-hundred-year-old Sequoia, one that had been around before Haydn, before Vivaldi, before what they were doing was invented. But also here was the span of his right elbow to wrist, burning in such a way that he wanted to shake it, right before they were to go on stage for the world premiere—a soft premiere—of Julia St. John’s commissioned quartet.

  “Are you okay?” Jana asked, touching his arm.

  “Just a—just that thing again. Can you find my aspirin? It’s in the pocket of my case over there.”

  He was suddenly hot in the outdoor amphitheater, though the wind blew a mostly pleasant chill and Brit pulled out her cardigan to play. Don’t think about it, he thought. Don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it.

  Thinking about it was what got you into trouble. Because if you thought about your elbow, then you thought about that permanent knot in your neck, your lower-back spasms in bed some mornings—and the way blood flowed through the body like magic, how the magic was flawed in your sister and your father, and how your body, too, was flawed, how bodies were simply physical machines and not magic at all.

  He swallowed three aspirin—okay, four—and walked a bit down the path, asked the host to stall, tell a few jokes. He stamped his feet under some trees and visualized the pain dissipating. That’s what one doctor had said to do in emergencies. Imagine it gathering together, getting all its things, and floating out of your body from a single point. Now he heard the wind, now he heard the applause. He walked back, picked up his viola, and nodded to Jana and Brit and Daniel. They went on.

  The acoustics in the outdoor amphitheater were shit, and the afternoon performance wasn’t open to the public, which is why they were calling this a soft premiere. The official premiere would be the following night, at the festival’s penultimate concert, indoors, and open to the general public. But in this audience were people who mattered, professional peers, including the all-male, all-drama Sequoia Quartet, who were also teaching at the festival. Henry spotted them—well, half of them—sitting in the front row. Only two of the members of that quartet were even talking to each other, something they tried to hide from the students, which, of course, just revealed it more clearly to everyone. There was something about a few nasty interviews, someone sleeping with someone else (though Henry wasn’t sure who or why that was wrong), and a theft of some kind.

  The piece, Sediment to Sky for Four, was beautiful, deceivingly plain, a meditation on land. Julia St. John was a self-proclaimed naturalist, living on zero-carbon shared land (not a commune, she’d corrected someone at a talk Henry had attended once) in Mendocino County. Nothing made Henry and Kimiko squirm more than imagining communal farm living, but Julia’s lifestyle didn’t keep her from being recently named one of the most important living composers by The New York Times. She’d been Brit’s friend first (Brit had been the one to spend some time with her on the commune-not-a-commune), but when Julia began sitting in on rehearsals, she was a natural fit with the group. She was wry and serious, generous without forgoing expectations. Even Daniel, with his high standards and squirrely patience, loved her.

  She worked on Sediment to Sky quickly, and they’d gone through two rounds of back-to-the-drawing-board with her. Henry had loved participating in the process of composing, or advising to the composition, more than he’d expected, more than he’d remembered. Back in the salad days of conservatory, before children and New York, when he’d done everything to its maximum, when there’d been time and praise and women, he’d dabbled in composing. He aced composition class and started, though never finished, an opera.

  The St. John collaboration came at a good time: the quartet had tired of the same old program (Haydn, Beethoven, something not too alienating from the early twentieth century), and Henry could feel everyone getting antsy and bored. They were geniuses, Beethoven and Haydn, but it was as though the quartet had agreed to read the same forty-five books over and over and over again for the rest of their lives. Henry thought (but didn’t say) he was the most bored of them all, and at night he lay awake, dead tired from the day but unable to sleep, thinking about how people lived long lives, how everyone must die disappointed that they’ve arranged their lives so nothing ever changes too much.

  The
quartet sat down in the amphitheater to play, and Henry winced at the expectation of pain. It was less severe than he’d been prepared for, but he knew it would only become more intense the longer they played. The piece was told in three long movements, each movement attacca to the next, which is what made it exhausting in particular, but what made it exhausting in general were the emotional requirements. It put no instrument to waste, especially not the so-often-ignored viola, and took the players through the full emotional range. Henry steeled his arm, his body, his unsure heart.

  The performance went well—trees were conjured, soil was wafted—but Julia still had some notes for them afterward. Don’t take the second movement so fast, she told Jana, and could Daniel come out more always, she wanted a strong foundation throughout, and Henry, was everything okay? He was making faces during the performance.

  “Oh, it’s this,” he said, holding up his right hand. “Just sometimes it’s bad.”

  Julia looked worried. Jana put her hand on Julia’s. “He’ll be fine,” she said. “We’ve been playing a lot here, those reading parties. We won’t do it again until the performance.”

  “But the master class,” Henry said. “Tomorrow we have a master class.”

  “Well, you’re not taking the class. You don’t have to play,” Jana said.

  Henry liked to demonstrate. He still remembered Fodorio sitting in with them during the master class before their final conservatory concert, how he’d taught them about energy and verve and engagement simply by playing with them instead of talking at them. Henry liked to do that when he taught. It made the students hungry.