The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  At the entrance to an unfamiliar trailhead, she paused to read the map, and felt a firm hand on her shoulder. Jana, dressed for a champagne brunch but carrying a walking stick, smiled at her.

  “Thank God,” Kimiko said. “I wanted to be alone but not, like, alone alone.”

  Jana gestured to her sundress and gladiator sandals. “As you can see, I also lied about needing to get out of the house. I said I was going on a hike, but I could really just use a Bloody Mary.”

  The two of them ambled slowly down the path into the woods. Might as well attempt it, they decided. Kimiko was delighted that she’d run into Jana. Though things had been somewhat icy between them early on, they’d spent so much time together at this point that she was more like a sister-in-law than her husband’s work friend. And when the quartet’s manager had referred to Jana as Henry’s “work wife” some years ago, Kimiko didn’t even blink. She’d once been jealous of Jana—they’d been too alike in personality for that not to happen. But now, something else had emerged between them, a quiet understanding that allowed them to be completely stripped with each other. A kind of nakedness that she was never able to achieve with Brit or Daniel, both special tidal pools of emotions that remained obscure to Kimiko.

  As they walked, she and Jana spoke about what they missed about New York (namely, how everyone wasn’t completely obsessed with hiking there), and about the St. John piece, and about the upcoming string of international tour dates, and about Clara’s lessons.

  “Does she know how good she is yet?” Jana asked.

  “No,” Kimiko said, understanding. There was a turning point in young players who were good the way Clara was good. When they realized they had that leverage, a talent that earned respect from adults and could shoot them out of the world of regular children, they became haughty, demanding, and impossible. They’d all seen it happen to students, and Kimiko woke up every day hoping that Clara could somehow skip over it.

  “Maybe she’ll be like Henry,” Jana said. “I don’t think he was ever really like that.”

  “That’s because his family never treated him like he was a god. But because of this—this world we’re in, that’s not going to happen. Everyone’s looking for Henry’s talent in her, expecting it.”

  “She’s a good kid,” Jana said. “Hell, I was probably insufferable between the ages of twelve and seventeen. And look at me. I turned out just fine.”

  Kimiko laughed, but she thought that if Clara turned out like Jana—queenly and willful and determined—it wouldn’t be the worst thing.

  Jana stopped at a clearing and swatted at a sweat bee hovering around her. She turned back to face Kimiko. “I’m sorry, we don’t have to talk about the kids. I hate it when people think that’s all they can talk to me about. Like, you didn’t ask me where Daphne was. That’s everyone’s opener when I’m without her: where’s Daphne? As though I couldn’t possibly have a desire to do things without a child strapped to me.”

  Kimiko dusted off a rock and sat down on it. It would be minutes before the sweat bees came for her, but she didn’t care. “I was thinking today about just that. I started to say it to Henry, but . . .”

  “About what?”

  “About how . . . I love my children, but that’s not the same as not being able to imagine life without them. Can I imagine life without them? Yes, absolutely.”

  Kimiko would have never said that to anyone else out loud, maybe not even Henry. You weren’t supposed to think that, let alone say it, as a mother. There were mothers here who would call Child Protective Services if they heard her say it. But with Jana, she was fine. Jana sat down across from Kimiko, planted her butt on the dirt.

  “What would that life look like?” Jana asked.

  “Oh,” Kimiko said, looking away. She had to look away to see it. “I’d be playing a lot, recording, traveling for my own gigs, doing a lot back in Asia, seeing my family in Japan more. And Henry would be doing the same thing he’s doing, traveling with you all, but because we’d be apart, the time that we’d spend together would be . . . more exciting. Special. Like the kind of marriage Daniel thought he was going to get with Lindsay. One we made up on our own.”

  When she imagined it, she felt her heart lift in her chest like a balloon, and then jerk against the wall of her sternum. But the weightlessness, just for a minute, that had felt nice.

  She looked back at Jana, who seemed caught in her own imagination, a stricken look on her face. “Do you remember Fodorio?”

  “Yes,” Kimiko said. “The guy who wouldn’t leave Henry alone for a while. Yeah. Sort of . . . unappealing.”

  Jana’s mouth turned down. “He wasn’t that unappealing.”

  Kimiko grinned. “Uh, okay.”

  “Well, I slept with him.”

  “Why?” Kimiko said, more distastefully than she meant to.

  “I felt so bad about it for so long because, ostensibly, I slept with him so we could win Esterhazy the first time,” Jana said. “He was a judge and I actually said that in bed to him—what an idiot. But then we didn’t win.”

  “So, no harm, no foul,” Kimiko said.

  “Exactly,” Jana said. “There was no harm, just me pretending to be rich in a fancy hotel one night, him thinking I was unique or something. And when I think about it now, I don’t feel bad. I don’t feel bad at all. I feel nostalgic. But I’m nostalgic for that way of thinking. Not for the actual life. I’m just saying, it’s okay to long for a different life. It doesn’t mean you actually want it.”

  It was still hot, but evening was coming in now. The blue shadows of the trees got long. Jana was absently picking bark off a tree trunk next to her, touching it with the uncurious fingers of an animal. The action reminded Kimiko of Henry—how he’d been when they met, lean and unaware of his height and stature. She was filled suddenly with jealousy. Of Jana. At first it had to do with a flash of Jana in bed with Fodorio, a man who, at the time, was much older than her, richer, more powerful. The way something like that must have felt for Jana, a flame catching oxygen inside her and burning upward, a perfect, wild cylinder. She remembered carnality like that. She’d once given not more than half a thought about a decision to sleep with a man—to whom she gave her body, and why, and how.

  But in the second wave, it was jealousy that Jana, as a mother now, had resisted (Jana always resisted) that steady weight that Kimiko carried behind her. A leash tied to a sack filled with one or two or three lives unlived, or at least the possibility of them, all bound together by the promise of agility. It had to do with time. Time looked different when you were young, and whatever foolishness you engaged in was undiluted—there was always the possibility that the next promised moment would carry you somewhere else, always the possibility of more flames, more beats, more life. Time, when you were older, was something different, irregular, Kimiko thought.

  Jana was still a successful musician. Jana could, if she wanted, go out tonight and have terrible, wonderful sex with a man who meant nothing.

  Kimiko told her that. Jana looked at her thoughtfully. Jana said, “But you can do all that, too, if you want.”

  It was really beginning to get dark now, and Clara would surely be waking from her nap. Jack would need to be fetched from her friend’s. How far out were they, anyway? She hadn’t been keeping track. She’d just been following Jana.

  “Hey,” Kimiko said. “I did something like that once. I slept with my teacher at Juilliard.”

  “What a whore,” Jana said, smiling at her.

  “Best mistake I ever made,” Kimiko said.

  They turned around instead of finishing the loop, as they had no idea how far the loop would take them, neither of them having really studied the map at the trailhead. They walked back and didn’t speak of music or of children. They barely spoke at all. Kimiko felt like she could hear the woods getting darker, the way an absence of light makes the other sense
s, like sound, amplified—twigs breaking underfoot, the quick rustle of birds escaping, her own labored breathing.

  When the trailhead was in sight, up a short but steep hill, Kimiko stopped and said, “I just—it was never as equal as we said it would be. I mean, there’s no way it could be. And you should see the way the other wives look at me here. Like I’m another long-suffering whatever like them. I hate that. But then I think they’re kind of right. That I am.”

  “A long-suffering wife?” Jana laughed. “You? Never.”

  “Not like that, but. I don’t know. No one looks at me like . . .”

  “Like you’re as good as Henry? Join the club.”

  “But I am as good as he is,” Kimiko said, very serious now. Henry’s face from years ago came clearly now to her. It had been delicate and impossibly soft and almost feminine—Jack would look like that, she thought—and his voice boyish and everything about him dirty golden. His hair, his eyes, his skin, the way he thought, what he said. He’d moved with a fluidity that made him lighter than everybody else and impossible to disappoint, but his sound remained thick and expensive and authentic. She’d fallen in love with a man for the first and only time in her life—because he’d been as she wanted to be.

  “I know you are,” Jana said, matching her tone. “You always were as good as him. Look. It’s one thing to be a professional musician. It’s another thing to be someone who loves one. Unfortunately, you’re both.”

  Kimiko turned back toward the hill. “I guess we should go home.”

  “But here’s good news, though,” Jana said.

  “What’s that?” Kimiko asked.

  “So is Henry.”

  * * *

  —

  At the evening’s concert, as Julia St. John gave her preamble, the quartet sitting dumbly behind her, a realization came over Kimiko: how difficult it must have been for Jana to tell her she could do whatever she wanted. Because Kimiko could do whatever she wanted—but only if Henry left the quartet, and left Jana. She looked at Jana, sitting just left of Julia during the talk, looking down at her lap, her violin propped on her thigh. Kimiko could remember Jana’s face when they first met as clearly as she could remember Henry’s. Whereas Henry’s face was a wide smile and young skin, Jana’s was sharp and handsome. And as she aged, her face had softened. Sure, she was tired and the lines in her face betrayed that exhaustion, but now there was also a quality of—what was it?—ease.

  Kimiko sat in their reserved seats with Clara and Daphne. From this angle, above and to the side, Clara looked like Henry, too. Both her children did. They bore her dark hair, round face, and almond eyes, but everything else—the jut of their chin, their dimples, the sly defiance in a simple look—was all Henry. Daphne was fidgeting in her seat, still a bit too young to sit quietly at a concert, and Clara was helping her straighten out her dress.

  “No, like this,” Clara whispered, patting Daphne’s skirt so it was both smooth and fluffed. “That’s how you look grown up.”

  Kimiko took Clara’s hand to shush her. Julia was still talking. Henry’s look, his gaze fixed somewhere between his feet and the bottom of his music stand, became more absent. “It is possible to arrange your life around art,” Julia was saying, and Kimiko’s entire body was flooded with the kind of urgent sadness that can only precede change. Her heartbeat quickened and her skin grew cold and limp. Clara removed her hand from Kimiko’s grip.

  When they played, something was off. It took her several pages of music to figure it out, but then she did, when Henry leaned down to turn a page to the right, and the bottom of the paper dragged on the edge of the music stand. She heard it, a microsecond of a skip in his note. He’d been late with the entrance after the page turn. But it wasn’t that he’d turned the page too fast and disrupted the line, as is often the case with those kinds of missteps. It was that he’d turned it too slowly, as though playing on his own, not at all keyed into the time in which the rest of them were playing.

  And when he stopped playing—that’s what it was, a full stop where a note should have been—Kimiko felt his gaze move around the group and land, finally, on her. It happened in the space of a quarter note, but Kimiko felt the entirety of that space, three-dimensionally, so much so that she felt she could almost get up from her seat and walk around inside the moment. She’d never heard him make a mistake during a performance, even during a bad spell with his arm, and she always thought she’d be overcome by anxiety if it happened, if she had to watch him make a public mistake like that. But this wasn’t anxiety. What sped the motor in her chest was something moving, not something sinking.

  The urgency was this: she had changed, she’d felt unfairly put upon, and she had accepted it. But she was changing again. She no longer felt burdened. What had stopped her feeling this way? When Henry’s own body began to really fail him. When the absence of ease sharpened him. When he needed her, when he accepted that he needed something. That had finally—physically—proven to her that he was as bound as she was, that they’d both stolen from each other.

  Kimiko felt a hot wish growing inside her. The children fidgeted next to her, but she remained steely and intent, unfettered by the time and its slog. When the quartet finished, they stood as one for the applause, but Kimiko saw Henry look over to her, and Clara, and Daphne, and that was the part that would always get away from her, what he looked like then. Like a moment already disappearing into the next, and the next.

  August 2009

  San Francisco, CA

  HENRY

  Viola

  There was never a good time to tell someone you were leaving them, Henry knew, but perhaps trapped on a boat was the worst place. Especially this ferry, which felt particularly old and plastic on this chilly, windy summer day, full of their children and other people’s children, interminably making its way to Alcatraz on an unreasonably choppy bay. They were to play at the inaugural event of a new music festival that an old Symphony patron was trying to get off the ground on Alcatraz, but why anyone would want to go to this depressing island to listen to classical music was beyond Henry. But they’d said yes—rather, Jana had said yes to their manager, on everyone’s behalf—and they showed up at the terrible tourist trap of Fisherman’s Wharf, as requested, to board the ferry and ride all together to the island with a photographer who was invasively taking pictures for promotional materials. Henry, displeased at this obligation, insisted on taking Kimiko and his children in order to make it somewhat of a family day. He’d been wanting more of those lately.

  Kimiko had wanted Henry with the family more, too. Her solo career had been consistent until Jack, but even then, not as buzzed about as it had once been. While she could still command a high performance fee, she wasn’t as young or new as she’d been when she first appeared on the scene in New York, and the classical music industry, like most industries, loved a young, new thing.

  Kimiko’s desire for a different kind of life had first become clear to her after the concert at the Festival of the Redwoods—Henry’s last summer there—but it was two years before she told him she wanted it.

  She waited until after Henry returned home from a particularly grueling three-week stint in England and Holland, involving a residency with relentless teaching expectations. They’d put the kids to bed, and then gone to bed themselves, and Henry had been so grateful to be home again, simply because it was a place where he wasn’t expected to play at a moment’s notice. His arm hurt. She’d long ago stopped asking him how the pain affected his concerts; there was nothing to say in the aftermath of a performance mistake.

  “You’re tired,” Kimiko said to him as he reached to turn out the lamp.

  “Yes,” he said. “Pretty obvious.”

  “But I’m not.”

  “You’re not?”

  “Well, I’m exhausted. I mean, I’ll be tired for the rest of my life. But you seem tired in a different way.”

 
“What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “In the redwoods,” she said. “Two summers ago. The St. John. You haven’t been the same since then.”

  “I screwed up one time, two years ago, and you’re still on about it,” he said, defending himself, but only halfheartedly. “I don’t know. Maybe you’re right.”

  He knew she was right. She was tired, and he was tired, but in different ways, and his sometimes showed through his playing. They’d waded through the past few years as though they were something they had to get through, to survive—this period of baseline exhaustion, where they barely looked at one another, him tending to one child while she tended to the other. He knew Kimiko bore the brunt of it, though. Henry’s tour schedule was full each season, and involved jumping from one country to another. It had seemed impossible, for years really, that all the schedules—his, Kimiko’s, the quartet’s, now Clara’s and Jack’s, too—could match up and allow for breathing room, a space where they could be a family. Henry saw that he and Kimiko had simply given up on the idea of it: time.

  She talked for nearly an hour. She talked about how she’d been thinking how she wanted something different but denying it for almost two years, and she said she was sorry she didn’t tell him sooner. She said it took time to hear the truth of it. She talked about how grateful she was to have had the chance to be the children’s mother, but how she also didn’t want to resent anybody or anything for a life that had almost been lived. She told him that she felt trapped—if she gave up staying at home, she’d be failing the kids, and if she didn’t, if she gave up on recording and touring as much as Henry, she’d be failing a possible self. She said that she hadn’t really changed, that she still wanted what she wanted when she’d entered Juilliard. A career, a life of music on stage, in practice rooms, with orchestras. She didn’t want to play with a quartet, either, and certainly not the Van Ness. She wanted her own story. The idea of her existence had gotten bigger with Henry and the children, but what drove her never faded. She said she’d loved the years and how they’d arranged them, taking the kids to Brussels or Barcelona when Henry’s schedule took him there. But she wanted to go there differently, she said, not only as a mother. She wanted to go as a musician, too.