The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  “Over here,” Jana said to him.

  “I know, I just . . .” Henry said, twisting to look at himself. “I can’t get comfortable.”

  “Maybe we’re good on this,” Brit said, setting her violin down across her lap. “We know it. We’re warm.”

  Jana acquiesced, and Daniel stood up and stretched. “I need some water,” he said.

  “I bet you do,” Jana said.

  “What happened?” Henry asked, checking his watch. They had half an hour until curtain.

  Jana’s eyes lit up. “You don’t know?”

  “I’ve been in that awful master class or asleep all day,” Henry said. He walked to the mini-fridge and found some ice for his elbow. He couldn’t ice his hand before a performance, but he could ice his elbow, and then right before they went on stage he would apply a heating pad. Which mostly worked.

  Jana and Daniel told him the story in tandem (Brit, meanwhile, ran off to put out a fire with Paul). There’d been a meltdown in the hot tub after he left, after the reading party wound down, which escalated at the same rate that people became more drunk. Colin had been the first to get in the hot tub, and within the first ten minutes he managed to break another glass bottle near enough to the water to make people nervous, but not, apparently, one of the students’ boyfriends, who, equally drunk, started an underwater breath-holding competition with him. Ryan, who was outside the tub, saw the two men disappear under the water and charged. Charged, Daniel said. And grabbed Colin by the hair. Everyone gasping and wet and angry. Would have been hot if it wasn’t so pathetic, Jana said. And then Jerome, out of nowhere—was he even at the reading party?—showed up in swim trunks, stood there like a referee, trying to figure out what happened, and who did what to whom, and how it could possibly be resolved. And then they were screaming, everyone screaming at everyone else, even the student whose boyfriend had been underwater with Colin, and Jerome, shivering in his swim trunks, and somehow it was Jerome and Ryan who ended up wrestling on the grass. No punching, though, said Daniel with a wink.

  “Who won?” Henry asked.

  “Everyone lost,” Jana said. “Obviously.”

  Henry felt depleted by the story. “That makes me so sad,” he said.

  Jana laughed. “Really? It’s so absurd. They’re just nuts, that group. We’ve always known it.”

  But it wasn’t true. Henry remembered a time when the Sequoia had first made waves, maybe six or seven years after the Van Ness had come to New York. They’d been at Curtis, and were a collection of beautiful, talented men. Part of their allure was that women and men alike loved to watch and listen to them. They packed the Met Museum atrium for free shows and drank with donors until dawn. Had Henry not had a small child at home, he might have been out there with them. And they played with energy. He remembered that. The energy, like a quartet that was young and had nothing to lose, everything to prove. They played like the music had just been discovered, because it had, by them. Maybe it was true, they’d always been a little nuts. But maybe that was what you needed—to be nuts in love with what you were doing, and the people you were doing it with.

  “Did I really change?” he asked.

  Daniel and Jana looked at him blankly. “Huh?”

  “After the babies.”

  “Well, you stopped making me want to hit you,” Daniel said.

  “No, really.”

  “You take this one,” Jana said to Daniel. “I tried.”

  “I think . . . you became a little more present in your life,” Daniel said.

  “So was I absent before?”

  The stage manager peeked her head in for the ten-minute warning, and Henry switched on his heating pad. But he didn’t let Daniel off the hook. “Like, what was I before, if not present?”

  “I don’t know, man,” Daniel said, sliding rosin up and down his bow. “I guess before . . . you were just playing around. I mean, you were so good at everything, anything you wanted to do you could do. It made sense that you played around. I guess I was kind of annoyed by it. Or jealous of it. Or something. But it meant that you could play whatever you wanted, whenever and however you wanted. And afterward, well, I guess you had to narrow your scope a little.”

  Daniel looked up and saw Henry’s expression. “Oh, God, sorry, didn’t mean to upset you. You’re good, right?”

  Henry nodded. “Just my arm.”

  “I think that’s what happens when you love people more, or more people. In here gets bigger.” Daniel tapped his hand on his own bullish chest. “But out here has to get a little bit smaller,” he said, sweeping his hand around the room.

  Julia St. John knocked and entered. She wore long layers of jewel-toned raw silk like she was a gentler Stevie Nicks, and her black hair was straight down her back. She smiled, familiar lines deepening around her face. “I thought we’d walk out together. You won’t mind, sitting on stage during my introduction?”

  “Not at all,” Henry said.

  Once they found Brit, the five of them made their way to the stage and waited to be announced—the world premiere of Julia St. John’s latest quartet by one of the world’s premier ensembles—before walking on stage. The quartet took their seats, but the spotlight shifted to Julia at a podium stage right. Her hands gripped the edge, her rings clanking in the microphone.

  “I want to thank you all for coming to witness this,” she began. “Those of you who missed my pre-concert talk this afternoon won’t know that I’ve spent a lot of time getting to know the Van Ness, getting to know their rhythms both on stage and off stage, and I’m happy to report they’re one of the most complex and tightly knit groups I’ve ever had the pleasure of composing for. This particular piece came to me after watching a performance of theirs at Carnegie Hall, many years ago, before which they were merely people, hungry, frustrated, sad, cold, and whatever host of human emotions you can imagine. But it was so striking to me because once they were on stage, they were almost inhuman. They were powerful, in control, a unified, multitoned voice. But they were also doing the most intrinsic of human feats. They were communicating to the rear mezzanine something that was emotional and extra-verbal.”

  Henry remembered this performance. It was when they’d received a career grant, and no one but Brit knew Julia very well. It hadn’t been that many years ago, but it felt like a lifetime’s distance away. He winced to think about it.

  “What was remarkable in the performance, however,” Julia went on, “was that these four people, they contained everything. That’s what made them both human and inhuman. They encompassed everything from earth to sky, everything I could imagine. This piece, Sediment to Sky, speaks to some of that, some of what came from them, and also the principles that are important to me. It had long been a dream of mine to do something like this, to arrange my life around the people I love, to create a shared life with every one of them. I think probably many of you have considered this at one point or another, but thought it impossible. I think many of us strive for community and family, but often find it difficult to participate in because of, well, life gets in the way. But it is possible. It is possible to arrange your life around art, and to find, in that art, a kind of love that grows like corn, from way down here to way up here, that changes, goes away, comes back.”

  Henry’s mouth was dry. He had done just that, had grown up like a stalk of corn in the middle of this group, in the hot center of the quad they formed on blond-wood stages across the country, the world. He felt a wave of gratitude like a distant tsunami, a large, warm swell, unstoppable. It heated his elbow down to his wrist, the fragile muscle and tendon writhing between them. It pushed to the base of his throat, where he swallowed and remembered the way his first apartment in San Francisco had been so cold that it smelled cold, and how it was difficult to sleep without Jana there, complaining next to him. And he remembered the one time Brit showed up at his apartment in Manhattan while Kim
iko was over, so deeply upset that Daniel had gotten married, how Kimiko made her warm cider and let her cry and cry on the floor, from which she refused to get up. He remembered Daniel getting so angry at him for making him go rock climbing in the Australian bush, how Daniel had been so scared at the top about belaying down and so worried about his fingers and wrists (he had been right about that), and how Henry laughed until he cried, and apologizing only made Daniel angrier. When they came down from the mountain, Daniel made him buy all the beers, and Henry remembered Daniel’s face when, over the beers, Henry told him he and Kimiko were having another child. The look: breathless, sad, reverent.

  They were playing now, like they always had. It wasn’t easy. It never had been. It was something like a miracle, all this music, each note a discovery you’ve already made, but it was also maybe the most ordinary thing in the world, to assemble and compose and perform—night after night—a life.

  Then he felt his arm crumble from the very inside, from the genesis of tissue and bone. A slow, hot release like a casual spill of lava from a faraway volcano spout. Jana would tell him later, with tears in her eyes, that it felt sudden—three-quarters of the way into the piece, how his arm skidded over two notes, the low F-sharp to a D on the C string—but he felt it from the beginning, something different, a wave he wasn’t going to be able to ride. What he didn’t tell Jana then was that he didn’t even try to ride it. He’d felt it generating from the third bar in, and once he’d completely given in, the pain lessened. He was surprised at that. Part of the torture had been the resistance. Then there were pages of music during which a very astute listener could likely hear that he lagged a millisecond behind everyone else. He was no longer anticipating, but following. When they arrived at that three-quarters spot Jana remembered, the jump and skid over an easy interval, he was no longer lagging, but not at all playing. He’d never once—not once—made a mistake during a performance, and here it was. An absence as glaring as the wrong note. In his periphery, he sensed a few faces turn and shift in the awkwardness, and six beats later he found his place. But here was the thing: when panic rose in everyone else, he felt relaxed. All the strain of the months and years leading up to this physical breakdown had been the tough part. This was the good part. He was not only playing these notes, this music. Julia’s phrase lingered in his ear, and he nearly smiled through the slow disaster. They contained everything. So, too, did this performance, and every performance. He was not only playing now, but playing everything before now, that miracle of a concert at Esterhazy, the way they’d sung at Carnegie Hall the first time. Time rolled out through his arm in hot waves. And though he was still playing, he looked around (no longer bound by time, anyway). Jana, wide-eyed and angular, only her parted lips betraying the glass-like fragility he loved in her. Brit, round-faced, still freckled, more freckled after all these years, not looking at him, giving him his space, which he appreciated. And Daniel, glancing at him with no expression at first and then the subtlest of understanding, continuing to play his own rock-solid part, even leading a little extra, picking up whatever Henry had left behind. Henry looked for his other family, sitting in the third row stage left, and while he couldn’t see her directly, he felt Kimiko knowing, clutching her armrest. He could hardly wait to be done, to go to her and show her his arm, to ice it, to watch her hug their children, to hug them himself. And later, to watch her play, practice, perform. It would be her turn now. It seemed impossible, for this piece, a small, short piece, to contain all that, for him to see everything, to know and relax into the knowing. He’d never been here before, but now that he’d arrived, he couldn’t imagine going back.

  KIMIKO

  Violin

  While Kimiko watched Henry play on stage, her own fingertips burned. She, too, had studied the St. John piece inside and out. She knew the tricky transitions, the parts Henry had rewritten with Julia, the surprise penultimate key change. With her right hand, she held the arm of her daughter sitting next to her, who was preoccupied with Jana’s daughter, Daphne, who sat beside her. Kimiko’s left hand was laid on the armrest, and her curved fingers lightly tapped in time to the notes—her own fingerings, ones Henry’s large, slender hands found to be, as he said, “too spidery.” She was partial to left-hand position shifts. He was more into the dramatic extension. She forgot her daughter next to her and she forgot her son back in the cabin with Jana’s Rebecca, and continued to silently play the armrest. She played through the whole thing, perfectly, seamlessly, and her playing continued on even when her husband’s failed.

  * * *

  —

  When they’d woken up that morning, mere minutes before the children, he’d turned on his side and said, with the lucidity of having been awake for hours, “Have I changed?”

  She answered quickly, maybe too quickly: “No.”

  Kimiko wanted to ask him the same thing: Have I changed? But she already knew the answer. Yes, she’d changed. She’d always been the one to do the changing. Henry was the one who always wanted things and then acquired them, with no amount of change necessary on his part. That quality of his—the easy satisfaction—was what she loved about him, even when it sometimes made her sad.

  In fact, their union had seemed so easy for him that there’d been two years early on in which Kimiko became convinced that she was simply a partygoer in his life who had stuck. One who was appropriately charmed by him, a prettier, more talented version of the kind of gin-breathed admirers he schmoozed with at fund-raisers. He’d insisted she wasn’t, that he liked her precisely because she wasn’t like that.

  “Babe,” he said, “no one would mistake you for someone who worshipped me.” He was right about that. It wasn’t in her DNA to fawn. But she also knew who she’d been in the privacy of those early lessons, in the practice rooms and the shitty apartments. She’d felt like that, like a girl under the spell of a boy. And when she cried that day in the park, when she told him she was pregnant, it wasn’t because she was scared. It was because she had not once considered not keeping it. Because what was happening to her body—with the baby but also with him, the way he’d invaded it—was turning her into an act of self-betrayal.

  What the baby had done to her body had been cruel, and it had been cruel with Jack, too, and that was something no one ever says. It wasn’t the first time Kimiko had undergone pain in her body to get what she wanted, however. The pain and discomfort hadn’t been the thing. It was that something else was making decisions for her. As a musician, you were trained to listen to your body, and then to ignore it, trick it, or change it. Your arm hurts, you strengthen your sacrum and relax your shoulder blades. Your left hand aches, you loosen your wrist and jaw. Visualize the interval, and your hand makes the jump. A sforzando comes from your solar plexus, a forte from your throat. In her whole life, she had never not been able to defy her body except when it was pregnant. She suddenly did not belong to herself anymore.

  And if she was being honest, she never really got over the unfairness of it.

  But what loving him had done to her: it had been like someone drained her of her old blood and replaced it with new blood, the same liquid that coursed through Henry. So when they touched, it was finishing a line. That love, too, had been a kind of theft.

  So, yes, she’d been the one to change. Not necessarily against her will, but not fully with it, either. She reached out to touch his face in bed.

  “What makes you say that?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said, sighing into her hand. “It seems like everyone else has. Jana said she didn’t know if she could be a mother.”

  Kimiko snorted. “A little late for that.”

  “So maybe she didn’t change,” he said. “Maybe she just tried to.”

  “When you have kids, I guess you sort of have to change. But it doesn’t mean you have to like it,” Kimiko said, turning on her back. She spoke to the ceiling. “You don’t have to walk around with a smile pla
stered on your face talking about how grateful you are for your children, the way some of these people do,” she said.

  Some of the people attending this conference—the older students, the concertgoers, the rich hangers-on who had enough money and time to spend a week in the redwoods with them—their mixture of self-satisfaction and fandom was nauseating. Henry was always better at socializing, even with the ridiculous ones. People were so easily taken with him, and he collected facts about them like presents to give to Kimiko later. The man with the twenty-thousand-dollar hair transplant; the beautiful woman who lived half of the year in Montana, but the wrong half; the stagehand who reminded him of Brit and Daniel mixed together, who looked like a child that would never be, a girl who was airy and sullen, slight and magnetic. It was easy for him, and easy to hit his stride at parties, even with all the shrill laughter and the clumsy segues and the close air. Even with the physical pain he was sometimes—or more often than sometimes—in. Aside from the pain, he’d always been like that.

  In the bed there was a quiet, inflated moment between them. Had she said she was ungrateful for their children? Or had she said she was unhappy about it? Had Henry been frightened by that statement? Or had he agreed, so effortlessly that his own assent was what frightened him? Before either of them could open their mouths to say something, there was the sound of their children, Jack and Clara, the beginnings of a fight. It was better not to say more, Kimiko thought, not on a performance day.

  “I’ll go start breakfast,” she said, throwing off the covers. “You stay.”

  * * *

  —

  After the master class and before the performance, when the forest turned blue in the falling light, Kimiko left Jack with a friend, and a napping Clara with a napping Henry, to take a walk. Alone. In moments like this, moments that had to be so carefully and precisely orchestrated so she could have her space, she wished that they had brought a nanny the way Jana had. The idea made Kimiko blush, and she hated that it made her feel bad. But for what purpose would they have a nanny? She wasn’t working here herself, she wasn’t playing or teaching, and there was no reason she couldn’t take care of the kids.