The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  He begged off the post-concert meal and took the long way back to his cabin, where Kimiko was reading while Jack napped and Clara did her homework on the porch. They’d taken her out of school to come to the festival, but Kimiko made sure to sit with her every afternoon and do the take-home assignments, shockingly difficult for an eight-year-old. But Clara was nothing if not precocious, which surely came from Kimiko.

  Kimiko put down her book when she saw his face. “Did it not go well?”

  “It was fine,” he said, opening the freezer door and sticking his hand in between two bags of ice.

  Kimiko put her arms around him from behind. He closed his eyes in the cold air.

  “I’m sorry. Should I call in some Vicodin to the pharmacy in town?”

  “I can’t play with Vicodin,” Henry said, annoyed she would suggest that. She knew how foggy it made him. Maybe he could play Mozart with a Vicodin, sure, but not Beethoven and definitely not the St. John.

  “No need to snap.”

  He turned to face her and put his cold hands on her hot arms. Sometimes she was a marvel. Once this young girl he’d thought he was lucky to sleep with, someone who never wanted him to meet any of her friends, who didn’t really have friends, who was too good a player for friends. She’d been a student who was intimidating in every way to him, the teacher. And now here she was his wife, his wife for many years, the person with whom he—Henry, who honestly never stopped feeling like a child himself—raised children, strange humans with their own interests and ideas. Sometimes he looked at her and saw years, and in the years he saw what religious people must see: the uncontainable presence of something impossible and divine.

  But other times, like now, for instance, he saw himself from her position. How his possible self—on his own, in less pain, happier than he’d been recently—must look like a flickering, disappearing image to her. He saw himself before he’d acquired all these things and people and responsibilities, which isn’t to say he didn’t love the things and people and responsibilities—they were also life—but he understood he had slowly exchanged that possible self for this way of living. Kimiko’s gaze always reminded Henry that he would not be both people at once, would not have both lives.

  “What do you want?” he asked. “For me to go on stage tomorrow night half asleep? For them to write about the violist that doped his way through Julia’s premiere?”

  Kimiko stepped back, went to the day bed under the window where she’d been reading, and sat down. “I want you to feel better.”

  “I’ll feel better if I get a new arm,” Henry said, resigned. He sat down next to her. The old springs bounced them two, three times.

  “If you left quartet-playing—”

  He cut her off. “Not now.”

  “If you stepped back—listen, what I’m saying is if you retired and just took soloist gigs, taught every other semester, you could control your schedule, you could have off time when you wanted off time. When your arm wanted off time.”

  She was right. All those things would lessen the incessant shredding of the inside of his right arm and give him some time. That was the thing that was disappearing. Time. He lay back on the bed, shoved himself against the wall beneath the window where redwood-filtered light blasted through. It was gorgeous here. They were blindingly lucky. Kimiko lay down next to him, tucked her knees at the back of his.

  “I don’t want to do that,” Henry said.

  “So what do you want?”

  Henry closed his eyes. He wanted Vicodin, to go to sleep, for Jack to keep napping. He wanted to go back to the moment where his arm first hurt and un-hurt it, turn a different corner, get up from rehearsal, where Jana was probably shouting at him, and Daniel was taking the solo too fast, and Brit wasn’t loud enough. He wanted to go back, as far back as was required, and reconstitute his bone, restring the strings of muscle coating that bone, build thicker and more sinewy the fine tendons twitching those strings. Now he wanted to sleep, he wanted to drink.

  “I don’t know,” Henry said to Kimiko, and meant it. He had no idea.

  * * *

  —

  When he woke, it was dark, early dark, and he was alone. There was the sound of the children outside with other children, and through the window he saw Kimiko with a glass of wine and Jack shouting at the flies. Henry walked outside and the screen door slammed behind him like a memory of the countryside he’d never had. His arm ached dully now, like low-grade electricity was running through his thin ulna. It felt comfortable, that pain. Long pain.

  He stood next to Kimiko and watched the children play. Clara ran after Jack, all limbs. She threw her arms about when she ran, kicked her legs so that they nearly slapped her bottom. The forest floor crunched beneath her feet, and her outline kept disappearing in the transition to night.

  “I’m afraid she’s going to fall,” Kimiko said.

  “So she falls,” Henry said. “You gotta let ’em fall.”

  “Not her,” Kimiko said, watching intently.

  Henry understood what she meant was Clara’s arms and hands, how good she’d become at the violin, scary good. Not prodigy good, but good enough to pay a teacher in the city $150 per lesson twice a week, good enough to start thinking about auditioning for the SF Youth, good enough that both he and Kimiko felt wary about it. Don’t break your arm, they wished. Break your arm, they wished.

  He sighed. “I’m gonna go check on the Sierra House.”

  She kissed his arm. “Don’t stay out late,” she said. “You need rest.”

  Henry walked toward the Sierra House, the common building where the students (mostly very good amateur adults from the area) and the faculty (always the Sequoia Quartet) gathered for reading parties and drinking, where they made the hot tub too hot and raided the kitchen for cheese. He had stumbled away from the concert and slept the afternoon away and felt he should make an appearance so people didn’t think he was sulking.

  He heard the Sierra House before he saw it: the Rimsky-Korsakov Sextet. A slight piece, Henry thought, not indicative of what the composer was capable of, or what the form could sound like. It sounded lazy when it was played, halfway toward dying. For a moment he stood outside and watched the inside scene lit up through the window. The Sequoia Quartet was playing with two more advanced students, and Henry saw it wasn’t only the piece that was lazy, but the playing. Ryan, the first violinist, the handsome drunk from Alaska, was flailing all over the place. Colin, the second violinist, looked on lovingly at Sam, the violist, whom Henry actually liked. He was the most rational of the four, though he wasn’t entirely sane. He was older than the rest of them and clearly bothered by it, puffing his chest during master class and sidling up to Henry partly because (and Henry knew this) of Henry’s talent and status. The cellist, Jerome, was the worst of them all. He’d been the one who gave the nasty interview, the most recent one, where he’d subtly outed Colin and Sam, who were both married to other men (who were pointedly absent here in the redwoods), making an affair that was already public knowledge officially public and in print. It was semi-surprising that the quartet had ended up even coming to the festival, especially after the interview.

  The worst part—what made the Sequoia truly insufferable—was that they were almost transcendently good. Almost, but not quite, the most frustrating level of talent, and Henry disliked listening to them. It was like listening to the warbling of a chord that was the tiniest of intervals away from being in tune.

  Around the players, other students watched, clutching sweaty longnecks, Brit talked to Daniel at the kitchen table (something was amiss there, though it wasn’t yet clear what), a golden retriever slept at Ryan’s feet, and Jana sat cross-legged on the carpet, one hand on the golden and the other on her child asleep on the floor, head on Jana’s lap. Jana looked tired and bored. Henry nearly turned around—surely no one had seen him yet. He felt how Jana looked. Tired and bored.
Also in pain, but mostly tired from fighting the pain, and bored from the sameness of it all.

  But just as he was about to turn around, Jana saw through the quartet and the windowpane and caught his eye. It was a small movement she made with her eyes, a widening and a brightening, but he knew she’d seen him, and he went in.

  Henry stood in the back of the kitchen, away from Brit and Daniel, who were leaned over the table talking quietly and seriously. He saw Jana remove herself from beneath Daphne and place Daphne’s head gently on the floor next to the golden’s ass.

  Jana opened the fridge. “Endless supply of beer,” she said. The fridge was full of beer, bottles of all kinds, microbrewery upon microbrewery. A man could gain ten pounds in ale alone at this festival.

  She took out two bottles and handed one to Henry.

  “This isn’t good,” Henry said.

  “The beer? Did it go bad?”

  “No, this.” He nodded at the group, still blindly groping their way through the Rimsky-Korsakov.

  “Oh,” Jana said. “Eh, they’re not so bad.”

  He looked at her. “Really? You think they’re not so bad?”

  “Well, they sure put Daphne to sleep. Thank God. That child refuses to nap anymore, and today’s Rebecca’s night off. I think she went into Santa Rosa for a drink with friends. I told her she wouldn’t have to come back till morning.”

  Rebecca was the nanny Jana hired to go on tour with them or to festivals like this, times when a prolonged absence wasn’t quite appropriate (and anyway, who would Jana leave Daphne with?), and also Rebecca could tutor Daphne.

  “Sometimes I think we should have a Rebecca,” Henry said.

  “Oh, a Rebecca is good. A Rebecca is the only way. I can’t believe that both you and Kim go everywhere together with the kids. I mean, don’t you wish we could go to Warsaw kid-free next month? Listen to me. Party in Warsaw without the kids. How did we become these people?”

  “I do wish that,” Henry said. “But it’s nicer if Kim gets to come with the kids and travel and be with me instead of stay home alone with them.”

  “Sure,” Jana said. “Must be nice, to have help. Finn’s okay, but he’s got his own thing right now, and, I mean, we can’t even manage to live together. Rebecca is my Kimiko.”

  Henry laughed a little. “Do not ever tell Kimiko that.”

  “Oh, God no. She would murder me. Like separate my head from my body with a steel-core Jargar C string.”

  “Nah, those cost too much to murder you with. She’d use a D’Addario.”

  Jana didn’t even laugh. Her lips hovered over the rim of the bottle. “I can’t do it,” she said. Her voice was low and wobbly. She looked at him with wide, serious eyes.

  “Do what?”

  “Daphne.”

  The Rimsky-Korsakov was over, finally, and sheet music was being shuffled around for the next group. The Brahms viola quintet, someone suggested, and Daniel was being pulled away from Brit to join in. The Sequoias were kicked out of their seats.

  “You can’t . . . what Daphne?” Henry whispered.

  Jana looked at him, bumped the fridge. Some bottles shook nervously. “I don’t mean I don’t love her. Or that I wouldn’t do it all over again. Well. I mean, there’s no point in talking about that. But I guess I thought I would change. I would change like you did, just make a little hole in my life so she could fill it. But there’s no hole! Where’s she supposed to go?”

  “I changed?”

  “Yeah, but in this really steady way. You know, after Daniel punched you in Canada. Before that, you were insane about the baby coming. I thought you’d never stop waffling. But then you just . . . one day you were buying baby-sized shirts in the airports and buying a tricycle in London—remember that tricycle? Oh, it was adorable. But you were still you, you know? Just without all the crazy.”

  “Crazy?”

  “Hen, stop acting like I’m saying something mean here, or something you didn’t already know. And anyway, we’re not talking about you, we’re talking about me. What if I can’t do this? What if—what if I’m my mother?”

  Henry laughed. He put his arm around her, and his arm stung a little. He winced into his bottle. “You’re not your mother. You’re way more successful.”

  Jana leaned her head on him. “Kids don’t want successful moms. They want moms who want to be moms.”

  Henry couldn’t think of anything to say. She was right. Kids wanted who they wanted, and if you weren’t that, you risked being part of the greatest disappointment of their lives. Having children was an adapt-or-die situation. That’s why people did it together. It was less lonely when you whittled away a part of yourself with the person who knew you pre-whittled. He could not fathom having sex with Kimiko in a practice room. Had they really done that?

  “I’m sorry, kid,” he said.

  The Brahms started. It was a beautiful piece, one with heart and substance. Daniel got to show off here, and he was good at showing off. While Jana had struggled with a stiffened sound and Brit constantly switched violins to adjust to her changing left hand (and Henry’s goddamn arm was falling off), Daniel’s playing had actually consistently gotten better with age, more refined, more sure, more present. He was unstoppable now. Henry wanted to be playing the Brahms with them, but he also wanted to be in bed with Kimiko, to catch lizards with Jack, and to help Jack set them free.

  “Watch out,” said Colin of the Sequoias, who nudged Jana a bit to get in the fridge.

  “Hey,” Jana said.

  “No, sorry, didn’t mean to hit you with the door.” Colin leaned in, his breath hot and malty. “I mean, watch out. Your wives and husbands could be watching.”

  Jana shook her head and made an exasperated sound that caused her to spit. “Jesus! Not everyone is fucking everyone else in their quartet. Well, maybe Daniel. I don’t know.”

  “I didn’t say you were sleeping together,” Colin said. “You don’t have to be sleeping with someone in your quartet to make your spouse jealous. Hell, I hate Jerome more than I’ve hated anyone I’ve been in a relationship with. Jerome. Fuck Jerome.”

  “Is Jerome leaving?” Jana leaned in, always one for gossip.

  Colin wavered, belched, then whispered, “We’re all leaving.”

  Jana gasped. “What do you mean? You’re going to the Shanghai residency? I’m so jealous.”

  Henry imagined he could see the drink inside Colin, sloshing around his stomach, gumming up his tongue. His eyelids were half closed. How had he even been playing a moment ago?

  “No, I mean we’re, what’s the word, disbanding. The band’s breaking up. It’s not worth it anymore. Fucking Ryan’s on the brink of divorce, and hell, so am I. Who knows, anyway, but really, God, nothing’s worse than being forced to sit day in and day out with someone who loves you but not in that way, you know? Sam’s a blowhard, it feels good to finally say that. Don’t you hate it? The way that person disgusts you, and you have to sit with them on planes, check in to the hotel, warm up, watch them sweat like a sick pig under the lights? The whole time complaining about how good we’re not. But, like, he could afford to lose a few, right? And Jerome. Do not fucking get me started on Jerome. Years you spend with someone, they know all your fucking secrets, they’ve cried in bus stations with you, picked you up from bars in fucking Mumbai, and then a reporter flirts with them and poof! Everything you’ve built, the people you once were, gone. Just like that. Playing together, it’s a farce now.”

  The first movement of the Brahms finished, and Henry was so inside Colin’s recitative that he was startled by the sudden silence. The movement was already over? How had it gone by so fast, such a tough, lively movement? It was his favorite and he had missed it.

  Jana was smirking, her trouble with Daphne gone. “Good God, get out, man. Sounds like a soap opera.”

  “It’s worse than a soap op
era. It’s a soap quartet,” Colin said, and then immediately dropped his bottle on the floor, where it shattered and spewed beer on their ankles. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “My hand’s been hurting today.”

  “I’ve gotta go,” Henry said, backing away. “I mean, the children.”

  “Oh, the children!” Colin said, shouting now. The playing had stopped. “Don’t forget the children!”

  At the next morning’s master class, Henry sat dumbly with his impotent hand while everyone looked at him with glassy, hungover eyes. He accidentally yelled at the cellist in the first group. It was frustrating; he wanted to show the cellist something, to show her the difference between a left-hand sforzando and a right-hand sforzando, and because he couldn’t waste the playing on teaching, the only way he could demonstrate was to sing it and mime it, and she didn’t get it. The cellist nearly cried. Henry thought she probably burst into tears the moment her group walked off stage. The director of the festival came up to Henry afterward, asked if he needed anything. Vicodin, Henry didn’t say. “Maybe some sleep before the premiere,” he did say, and the director cleared Henry’s teaching schedule for the rest of the day. He slept fitfully, and only really gave in to sleep when Clara crawled in bed with him.

  “Are you mad?” she’d asked.

  “Mad at what? No, I’m not mad.”

  “You’re acting mad. You kicked at the dirt outside before you came in.”

  “It’s just dirt. It’s for kicking,” he said. “Shhh. Go to sleep. I’m not mad.”

  “Okay, but the dirt didn’t do anything, Daddy. Don’t be mean to it. It’s just sitting there.”

  “It doesn’t have feelings,” Henry said into his pillow. “It’s dirt.”

  “Everything has feelings,” she said, and he didn’t respond because maybe she was right, and they slept.

  * * *

  —

  The suit jacket wasn’t fitting right. The quartet was warming up in the greenroom, and Henry kept flexing his shoulders and the jacket kept pulling at the seams. He looked in the vanity mirror. Had he gained weight?