The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  “You’ve worked hard,” Henry told Kimiko that night as she began to cry. “In every area of your life. If you change the way you spend your time, no one will think you’re a failure. Least of all me.”

  She cried harder. Henry had seen Kimiko cry only three times before—once when she told him she was pregnant with Clara, and each time she gave birth (an angry cry, not tears of joy).

  What the quartet wouldn’t believe at first, he knew, was that Kimiko hadn’t asked him to leave. It was entirely his idea. Because when he saw her cry in bed that night—at the unfairness of being a parent and having a career and loving a man who also was a parent and had a career—he thought of his life as a piece of music, sonata form, one that progressed through movements, in which the motif became clearer and clearer through repetition and variation, until the third movement, the menuet, when the theme distilled down to a simple, sing-able song. The song was Kimiko. He wanted to be with her more than he wanted to be in a quartet, and he wanted to be with her in a life that didn’t end in her crying in bed at night. It was where they’d arrived.

  The plan was that Henry would finish out the 2009–2010 season, and then stay home and take on especially promising private students from the surrounding area who needed more than their public high schools could offer. After that, he’d take the steady teaching position at the conservatory where Kimiko sometimes filled in. Kimiko’s last record was only five years old, and she still had connections. It wouldn’t take her long to put together a few engagements, to start to remake a career that had been swiftly dismantled like one of Jack’s Lego structures.

  He truly hadn’t meant to tell them on the ferry, but, as with most snafus lately, it could be blamed on the children.

  The ferry had just pulled away from the dock, and the quartet stood on the deck, posing against the gray sky in their concert blacks, which they’d been asked to wear. Henry could feel Jana shivering against him in her long-sleeved dress. She stood tall and erect regardless. Daniel looked a bit green. The ferry churned against the waves.

  “Are you done?” Daniel asked the photographer. “This is not ideal.”

  “A few more,” the photographer said, crouching on the dirty, wet floor to get God knows what angle. He wore a big sweater and dark jeans and he looked warm.

  Kimiko and Jack were inside, shielded against the cold, and Jack was plastered against the window, waving at them. Clara stood behind the photographer, though, never wanting to miss out.

  “Daddy looks too tall,” she said. “You’re taller than everyone!” she called over the wind.

  Henry cringed. Brit laughed a little and turned to Daniel, kissed him on the cheek. Clara’s outburst to Paul about the kiss she’d seen at Maisie Allbright’s hadn’t explicitly been the cause of Brit and Paul’s breakup, but it had been the final flick up of the carpet they’d been living under. And really Brit and Daniel’s kiss in the first place had been the real culprit, if you didn’t blame Brit and Paul’s spectacular failure to end their relationship years before. In any case, Brit and Daniel coming together had breathed new air into the quartet, a release of tension that had churned through their union since they’d first begun playing together. It hadn’t been ostentatious or dramatic, them getting together, but natural and seamless, and its solidity was one of the reasons Henry felt all right about leaving the quartet.

  “When Daddy leaves, you’ll find someone more your height,” Clara said, crossing her arms and peering into the photographer’s viewfinder to check out the photos so far.

  Silence like a steel door closing, and only the smacking of the waves against the hull of the ferry.

  “When’s Daddy leaving?” Jana finally asked.

  Clara looked up, concerned at Jana’s tone. She shrugged. “In time to help me to audition for show choir next year.”

  Henry’s voice caught in his cold throat. “I was going to say something tomorrow,” he said, though what was tomorrow, he didn’t know.

  Brit pulled on a fleece jacket and looked down at her feet, her shoulders slumped. Jana asked the photographer for a cigarette. Daniel leaned over the boat and stared at the white water below. “I am seriously going to throw up,” he said.

  “Oh, don’t,” Jana said, annoyed. “Jesus, great timing, Henry. As usual.”

  “Hey, I have excellent timing,” Henry said, trying to make a joke.

  “Maybe grab your instruments?” the photographer asked, oblivious to the conversation that was slowly dismantling his subjects.

  “In this?” Jana waved her cigarette-clad hand around. “You want our instruments to get destroyed by the weather?”

  “Just for four minutes,” the photographer said.

  “So you’re quitting?” Brit asked in a small voice. With one hand she was rubbing Daniel’s back.

  “Leaving, yeah,” Henry said. “It’s time.”

  “‘It’s time’? What in the fuck does that mean?” Daniel asked.

  “Hey,” Henry said, gesturing toward Clara. “Language.”

  Jana struggled to light the cigarette, but couldn’t get a good direction or shield against the wind. “It means,” she said, with the cigarette dangling from her lips, “that he’s gone as far as he could with us.”

  “That’s not what it means,” Henry said. “It means it’s time for me to be with my kids and Kimiko has things she needs to do. This was fun—”

  “Fun?” Brit asked. “It was fun?”

  “More than fun. It’s been my life.”

  “God, like we’re dead already,” Jana said.

  “I’ll help you find a replacement,” Henry said. “I have a few ideas. I want to finish out the season. So you’ll have until next summer to prepare.”

  The photographer ducked in: “Hey, so grab the violins?”

  “It’s not all violins,” Daniel snapped.

  They retrieved their instruments and walked back out to the deck. “Look,” Henry said, desperate for the moment to dissolve. “You all knew this was going to happen eventually. Someone was always bound to leave. It happens. Groups evolve. You might even be better with someone new.”

  “Great, but don’t look at each other, perhaps?” the photographer suggested.

  They all looked at the photographer, no one smiling. Clara gave them a thumbs-up. “I just don’t understand,” Brit said. “Why now?”

  “Because . . . it feels like the right time. Like things will be okay with you guys if I leave. And it’s so hard to do this with children. Kimiko and I are going crazy. I don’t want to drag my children around the world and not actually spend time with them.”

  “I do it,” Jana said. “Take Daphne, I mean.”

  “But that’s because you have to,” Henry said, too quickly.

  Jana’s face became dusky.

  “And you have a tutor and Rebecca travels with us, and it’s only one child. That’s what I meant,” Henry said. “It’s just different.”

  No one said anything. The camera snapped away.

  “You’ve wanted to leave forever,” Daniel said, practically hissing his words. “You’ve always thought you were better than us. How about that time I found you taking a meeting with Fodorio in Calgary? I never pushed you on that, never told Jana, because I thought it was about some personal crisis you were having about—about having a baby—but you’ve always been like this. One foot out the door.”

  Henry slowly turned to face Daniel, gripping his viola at the neck. Only Daniel could make him this enraged. Daniel knew how to cut a person in half with words, and he wasn’t afraid to do it. He was cruel and articulate, and everyone always forgave him. Hell, Brit forgave him everything enough to be with him.

  “You know that’s not true,” he said. “You’re just being mean. It’s how you are. Way to go, Daniel. Way to go all lowest common denominator on us.”

  “I know what that means,” C
lara said.

  “I think we’re about finished here,” the photographer said.

  “Thank God. Interminable,” Jana said. “All of this.”

  “Quite terminable, actually,” Daniel said.

  “You know, Daniel,” Henry said, pointing at him with his bow, “what do you have to be so pissed about? Everything worked out for you. You always thought I had it so much easier than you, but look—look at her—she’s with you, you of all people, after everything. Maybe you’re mad because you’ll no longer have me around to blame for everything bad that happens in your life.”

  Daniel opened his mouth to respond, but stood speechless for a moment. Brit opened her eyes wide at Henry. “Stop,” she said. “Please.”

  “Me stop?” Henry said. “Me? See, everyone just lets you get away with this chip on your shoulder. But, like, you don’t just get to walk around with a chip on your shoulder forever.”

  Henry was brandishing his bow at Daniel to punctuate his sentences. The ferry was rocking against the chop, and several times he had to reach out to the railing to steady himself. People around them started to stare. Daniel’s face reddened as Henry continued to talk, to excoriate him, airing a list of grievances fifteen years long. They were fighting like they were kids again, when they’d been first starting out. They hadn’t really fought since that night Daniel hit Henry right before Esterhazy. Henry always reasoned he had children and a wife to fight with, so it wasn’t worth picking it up with Daniel. And Daniel had seemed to relax a little after the divorce, and then really after he and Brit got together, finally having freed himself from bad decisions made in haste. But here, it was as though they’d time-traveled back to a San Francisco of their youth, when they’d been eager and ambitious and hotheaded and tied to nothing and nothing could embarrass them.

  Daniel had his cello in his right hand, the endpin digging into the wet floor of the ferry, and his bow in his left hand, and maybe it was a years-old grudge about being punched that made Henry tap Daniel’s bow with his own, or maybe it was an accident, but the tap made Daniel reflexively lift his own bow at Henry, and there they were, in a performance but the wrong one, fighting like fencers with their bows pointed at each other. The bows were too expensive to hit each other with, they both knew that, though in the stance they silently dared each other.

  “Stop it,” Brit said, more seriously now.

  “I’ll stop,” Henry said. “I’ll stop when he stops.”

  “Stop?” Daniel said. “You’re quitting. Quitting is what it’s called.”

  At the same moment Daniel moved his bow an inch closer to Henry’s face, the boat rolled, causing Henry to move his bow an inch closer, maybe more, definitely enough to loosen Daniel’s grip on the frog, and the bow went flying into and with the wind, out over the bay like a bird wing fluttering, until it dropped quietly into the frothy water. Alcatraz loomed closer than Henry thought.

  Daniel’s mouth hung open as they watched the tender, slight bow be swallowed by the froth, and disappear under the churn of the ferry’s movement. This time, the silence was whole. No one said anything for the remainder of the ride.

  When the ferry docked at Alcatraz, Kimiko, who saw it all in Henry’s face, said, “So I guess that didn’t go very well?”

  He looked at Kimiko and it occurred to him that if she simply took his place in the group, everything would be fine, or everything would be closer to fine than it was now.

  Now they looked like a funeral. Kimiko and the children went to walk around the grounds while the quartet was led to a makeshift backstage area that was really an old officers’ quarters adjacent to the cell house. There was supposedly a nice view of the lighthouse, but you had to go outside to see it, of course. They were left in the room with their instruments, and Henry felt bone-chilled and wet from the ride, as well as simultaneously sheepish and angry. Now he had to apologize, when it ought to have been Daniel apologizing. Daniel always made it like this.

  “Feels like detention in here,” Brit said, opening up her case.

  “You have your spare bow in your case, right?” Jana asked Daniel.

  He nodded. “Always do.”

  “Look, I’ll buy you a new bow,” Henry said.

  Daniel sighed. “Don’t buy me anything, please.”

  They were to open with Dvořák’s “American” String Quartet, which had been on the program of their graduation recital all those years ago. It was a relatively unchallenging piece. The main themes in each of the movements were Dvořák’s interpretations of classic American sounds, and its buoyancy made it sound almost pop-like to contemporary audiences. Even though some critics thought it was easy listening, the piece was still one of Henry’s favorites. The melodies were crowd-pleasing, and the second movement was heart-wrenching. The whole thing was fun—fun, that word Brit had hated when he’d said it. But it was true, when they played this piece it was fun, joyful, fleetingly happy, and that was the quartet at its best. For him.

  They tuned up morosely but didn’t run through any parts of the “American.” The stage was set up in the old cell house, which had been lit like a living room with lamps around an ornate rug. The audience was sparse and made up mostly of former students and older patrons, and every one of them had witnessed the outburst on the ferry, how Henry had sent Daniel’s bow sailing into the bay. They sat down to modest claps and, after Jana adjusted her dress and Daniel pinned his endpin into the rug, they began to play.

  The piece began like light glittering on water, and for a while it was Jana’s show. She played more like a Russian now, Henry thought, aggressive and confident and . . . loud. He liked it, though. It sounded grown up. And he loved this jaunty theme from the first movement, striking a balance between happy and serious, like an opening to a Western. Then, of course, toward the end of the movement, Daniel had a brief, European solo, so milked and liquid that it felt elegiac, only a few measures, really, climbing the fingerboard, but he played it so beautifully that Henry felt suddenly moved. Daniel was a good player; he’d been lucky to play with him.

  As the sad second movement started, Henry realized that the way they played now, compared to the way they played during their graduation concert, was different and better. They’d arrived somewhere. Playing was no longer cathartic, that strange mixture of pain and pleasure one became used to in one’s twenties and thirties. It was no longer a means to an end, a way to go from stifled to expressed, from caught to free, from panicked to all right. Instead, playing was like lifting a sheet to reveal the secret, beautiful gears and pulleys at play beneath the work of living—that was it, like letting everyone in on a secret, instead of working their own way out of one. It was a different kind of relief.

  When had that happened? When had they begun to play like that? Henry didn’t know, and as the second movement gave way to the third, he saw definitively that things would be fine in the quartet without him. And in a backward way, it made him happy that Daniel had gotten so upset; he should have expected nothing less. They finished out the third and fourth movements and Henry was pleased that none of the strife and fighting from the previous hour had sneaked into their playing. They were steady and tight. When it was over, he heard Clara whooping in the audience like she was a grown-up at a concert, and his heart surged a little bit.

  At the reception afterward, Clara explained to Daniel and Henry the history of the prison as she’d learned it. “It’s a place where really bad prisoners were kept, so it’s like an extra-bad prison for extra-bad people. And children lived here, too, children of the people who worked here. But they had to go to school on a boat that took them to the Van Ness Street Pier, like your guys’ name. And also, there was a rule of silence. Prisoners couldn’t talk except at meals.”

  She paused in her breathless report and they listened to the clinking of glasses and laughter echoing off the bars of the cellblock. Henry had given up trying to figure out the point of
this strange venue except that it was uncharted territory, a gimmick that a rich San Franciscan had gotten the rights to. The playing had also been echo-y, despite the rug and the lamps, and the overall vibe depressing, locked in, riding against the expansive piece.

  “Yes, silence would be quite a punishment,” Henry said.

  “Getting back on that ferry is going to be punishment,” Daniel said. “It started raining outside.”

  Clara ran off to join Jack and some other children in a game of hide-and-seek, which, in a prison, seemed like asking for trouble, but Henry ignored it. He turned to Daniel and said, “So you want to break my bow?”

  “I don’t want to do anything,” Daniel said. “I don’t want you to leave.”

  “But I need to,” Henry said.

  “So I guess it doesn’t matter what I want,” Daniel said, not as though he was mad but as though he had given up being mad.

  Henry crossed his arms over his chest and looked up. There were fluorescent lights above them, unlit, but for a second Henry mistook them for skylights. The era when he was ruled by the collective sum of Daniel’s and Jana’s and Brit’s desires was soon to be over, so he said, “No, it doesn’t make a difference.”