The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

May 2010

  Northern California

  DANIEL

  Cello

  After one of their last rehearsals before one of their last concerts, Henry announced he was selling his records, and Brit started to cry, so Daniel thought it was an appropriate time to mention that his mother was dying. Pile it all on at once, he thought, and distribute the reaction.

  “Your mother?” Brit said through tears as Jana turned from her violin case and said, “Your records?”

  Daniel explained. His father, the one who’d been sickly for years now, had called Daniel on the phone, which is how Daniel first knew something was wrong. He couldn’t remember the last time he and his father had spoken on the phone—perhaps once when he called his mother to say he and Brit were moving in together and his father said, Oh hello, son, as though reminding himself of their roles. His mother had cancer, he said, and it was pancreatic cancer, but it didn’t matter now because it was everywhere, and they just named it for where it started, and that’s where they think it started, in her pancreas (did his father even know what a pancreas did?), but no matter, now it was just cancer, and the doctor said maybe three months. Three months? As though there was an expiration date, a predestined time to go missing.

  The news still felt unreal, but he knew it shouldn’t have been so shocking. He was five years from fifty, and in the minority among his peers. No one had parents anymore. Instead they were parents. He’d found out that morning, and hadn’t had a chance to tell anyone, not even Brit, especially when she looked so pretty and happy when she woke up. Who wanted to ruin something like that?

  Daniel’s father had ended the conversation with, “I hope you’ll be praying for your mother.”

  “I will,” Daniel said, which was the first time Daniel had ever committed to praying for someone or something.

  When Daniel shrugged and said nothing, Henry explained. He and Kimiko were thinking of having one more (my God, Daniel thought, Henry’s aging process was a stretched-out elastic band, he would never grow old, not like the rest of them), and they wanted to raise city children, so they were moving to San Francisco—“But what about the commute?” Jana asked, her voice rising—and despite the commute they thought it would be good to have the art and culture and diversity right there for Clara and Jack, and their small city was getting stuffier and whiter and richer by the startup, and anyway, there was a great deal on a place in Russian Hill, just off Van Ness, actually, wasn’t that funny. So they’d bought it. Already.

  “What does this have to do with your records?” Jana asked. She closed up her violin case and sat back down on her chair, her hands folded on her lap.

  Henry laughed. “Oh, see, the new place doesn’t have quite the space we’ve got here. So I can’t have a record room.”

  Brit had stopped crying. She still had her violin propped on her knee, and she looked from Daniel to Henry and back. It always made Daniel smile a little to see how, when she was sad, the corners of her mouth actually turned down, like a cartoon of a frowning face.

  “Why are you so upset?” Daniel asked across the stands.

  She opened her eyes wide. “Are you kidding?”

  “No, I mean about Henry.”

  “I’m not dying,” Henry said. He turned to Daniel. “No offense.”

  “None taken. I’m not dying either.”

  Brit placed her bow on the stand with a clatter. “It’s just, I don’t know. This seems like it’s real now. You’re leaving.”

  They all looked at Henry. He was leaving. After Henry had Clara, he’d been harried, and then after Jack he’d been downright crazy, and then after the kids got old enough to walk around on their own, there’d been something different. Or maybe there’d always been something different there, and Henry had finally relaxed enough to show it to everyone. He used to be obsessed, singularly wound by music. And it wasn’t his skill that faded, ever—he was still an incredible player—but something else about him faded, some way he was with them. The urgency was gone. When he played, it was hard to spot the prodigy in his eyes, the wildness that came along with diamond talent like his.

  Daniel thought for so many years that Henry had just been tired. But maybe what he’d gotten tired of was the quartet.

  “We’re just moving an hour down the highway,” Henry said, but his voice was smaller now. “It’s only a few more months I’m with you all, anyway. But we’re not there yet. Look, I’m just moving to the city. That’s it. So I need to offload some records and before I put them online I wanted to see if there were any you guys wanted.”

  Brit shook her head, but didn’t seem to be saying no to his question.

  “Right,” Jana said. “Okay. Let’s not talk about this now? Let’s get through the Octet performance first.”

  In a month, the quartet was going to merge for one night with the group that had just won the Esterhazy competition, the Seoul Quartet, a collection of young, ridiculously talented Koreans (as in barely-able-to-drink-in-America-young), all smooth-faced and shiny-haired, exceedingly nice, but pretty fierce players. The way the first violinist attacked the lower strings was somewhat alarming to Daniel. It had sounded like a cello. They were going to play the Mendelssohn Octet with the group as a sort of passing of the torch, though none of them—not Daniel, Jana, Brit, or Henry—thought they were through with the torch just yet. But it had been arranged by the Esterhazy organization, and the performance was at the War Memorial hall in San Francisco, a venue they always loved to play. And you almost never got the opportunity to play the Mendelssohn Octet.

  A month after that, the quartet would play its final concert with Henry on viola, at Carnegie. The upcoming octet performance allowed all of them to ignore that looming event.

  Daniel drove and Brit sat quietly in the passenger seat the whole way home. The car was a brand-new Toyota Corolla, with enough trunk space for his cello, and a soft, new-car-smelling interior. Sometimes when Daniel got in it, he felt estranged from himself. But they’d gone together to the dealership and bought the car themselves, half and half. You could purchase all the fixtures of an adult life, but Daniel wondered when you ever stopped feeling a little bit like an imposter, like a man watching yourself drive your new car around the city.

  Their home was an actual house, one they owned, or at least paid a mortgage on, a one-story midcentury typical of the area, with a patch of backyard that made up for what it lacked in square footage. Daniel sat down at the dinner table and waited for Brit to come to him. He listened to her busy herself, slamming the washing machine lid shut, restacking music in their office, swooshing open the sliding glass door and then ten minutes later swooshing it again, and finally she walked into the kitchen and sat across from him at the round table.

  “So,” she said.

  “So, we probably have to go to Houston,” he said. “To say goodbye.”

  She nodded. “After the Octet.”

  Brit had only grown lovelier, he thought. More elegant. Even when she was sad, the smile lines around her lips lingered. He’d even come to see her crooked eyetooth as elegant, and she no longer tried to hide it. Her face had opened up, her freckles were darker and solid now, and her blue eyes less constantly in awe, though they had the same depth, always asking a question. And she’d grown bigger somehow. Not bigger, actually, but more present in her body. This private Brit was an utter revelation. She breathed and walked and had thoughts and made love and moved around their home in specific and wholly unexpected ways. He’d spent the last two years taking it in, and now he felt like he could spend the next however-many years memorizing it. And then it’d probably change again. He couldn’t wait. He loved in a way he sometimes felt bad about, which was to say he loved her totally and completely, in the most adult, surefooted, at times ugly and at times whiplash-passionate way he had ever loved anyone ever, and he imagined Lindsay somewhere feeling cheated out of a real marriage.

  T
hen—this was how Daniel had changed—he thought, no. Lindsay’s married again, living in Brooklyn, and he saw her name pop up in his Facebook feed every once in a while, her installations featured at small gallery spaces in neighborhoods he’d never even heard of. She seems happy: I’m probably a small blip on the great big pencil drawing of her own zigzagging life.

  And then, as though stemming from his own private thoughts, Brit said, “Let’s get married.”

  He felt, and not for the first time in the last two years, grateful. Like something being gently pulled open instead of something constricting.

  “But not like other people,” he said, leaning over the table, touching his hands to hers, not exactly meaning not like other people, but not like the other people he’d been.

  “No,” she said. “Not like other people.”

  * * *

  —

  When Brit and Paul finally broke up (could you call it that after ten years—breaking up? Breaking apart seemed more appropriate; dismantling, even), she became unexpectedly morose. She had expected to feel sad, she said. Their relationship had, after all, been almost a third of her life so far. But the way it had happened had been a surprise, leaving neither of them time to prepare.

  Some months after the party at Maisie Allbright’s home, they were all eating dinner in Henry and Kimiko’s backyard, the last outdoor meal of the season before November brought in the Bay Area rains. Paul had kept his promise and hadn’t spoken to Daniel since Clara told him about the kiss. Daniel knew of Paul’s vow, but it hadn’t haunted or disturbed him. The kiss had seemed completely natural, the physical move back to each other, coming with no urgent need to do anything else. He knew where Brit was, and that she wasn’t going far from him. They had time. And the fact that neither he nor Brit took precautions to make sure Clara didn’t tell anyone must have meant that, on some level, they wanted to be outed. It was stranger to Daniel that Paul had stayed with Brit after he found out about the kiss, though the relationship was clearly in shambles after the summer ended. And even stranger than that was the impetus for Paul’s eventual departure. At the dinner in Henry and Kimiko’s backyard, Daniel bit into some undercooked corn on the cob and chipped his left incisor. Brit reached across the table and picked up the part of Daniel’s tooth that had broken off, and jokingly held it up to his mouth. It must have been that, Daniel thought, her fingers in Daniel’s mouth, that reminded Paul that, for the quartet, intimacy was so much more than physical touch. More than a hand in a mouth, more than laughter in the flickering light of a mosquito-repelling candle, more even than the calluses that made their fingers match. Paul stood up from the table, checked his pocket for his wallet, and walked away. Brit said that when she got home, he’d packed up almost all of his things. It was very civilized and undramatic, and it drove her crazy. She said she followed Paul around and insisted it was nothing, which made Daniel grimace when she said it, and so she stopped saying anything about the breakup at all.

  But in the midst of her sadness, Daniel had come to her condo with a copy of the new music they had to learn for the next faculty recital and found her in bed, in pajamas, in the middle of the afternoon, face puffed up from crying, silent and nearly unrecognizable. He didn’t jostle her out of bed, but joined her. He sat on top of the comforter and kept his shoes on. He unfolded the music and made like he was marking bowings and dynamics, but instead he wrote on the corner of the staffs funny little notes for her to find later, like Don’t be such a pansy here b/c Henry will drown you out and You left the burner on at home and Jana farted.

  When he was done, he placed it on her nightstand and waited. It occurred to him that he might have been waiting years for her.

  Eventually she turned over. “I don’t know why I’m so upset,” she said.

  “Because this isn’t the first time your life has just disappeared?” He made an explosion motion with his hands.

  He was a friend to her. He told her that Paul was nice, but that dating him must have been like dating the guy in the war movie who you know is going to be killed early on. He was a symbol of a man, a partner, he’d outlasted his fate. Brit nodded. Daniel watched as Brit moved through the familiar stages, like someone evolving through forms, slouching out of bed, slouching to rehearsal, given to spontaneous fits of crying while driving; and then an unsightly, prolonged state of self-hatred (I’m too old to feel like this, she said); and then settling into a black-and-white version of herself, until ultimately arriving, some months later, at a childlike delight at the blankness of her life. She was suddenly infused with energy, spinning from the inside, kinetic in a way Daniel hadn’t remembered seeing her since their early days in San Francisco.

  So in April, when Patelson’s announced it was closing, the quartet exchanged wan looks, and Daniel booked plane tickets to New York for himself and Brit. He’d made arrangements to look at a cello that a patron of Juilliard was considering loaning to him, but the two-day trip was organized around a final visit to the sheet-music shop.

  On the plane, Brit looked out the window the whole time, reaching her hand over to his to point things out as they traveled—the desert, the mountains, the impossible snow. As they approached JFK, Daniel’s nervousness intensified, a feeling in the base of his abdomen that spread like an ink stain. The way the afternoon light changed so quickly to early evening light across her face when they were in the air made him feel—there was no other word for it—devastated. The closeness with which they sat, the way she didn’t look at him before reaching her hand out to him, the small wrinkles that stretched from her eyes to her pale hairline, all of it. It had all been here this whole time. They’d been sitting next to each other this whole time. What had he been doing with that time?

  With Lindsay, he thought he’d solved a problem: he’d found a way to be with someone who wanted and needed nothing from him. But when that failed, he’d given up entirely on the idea of being with anyone. And in order not to wind up in a situation like that again, he peppered his life with women in the shallowest of ways. Younger women, unserious women, women who couldn’t possibly want what he’d been doing with the quartet.

  But Daniel couldn’t even see that he got from the quartet whatever other people got from their partners. Consistency, obligation, nonverbal understanding and misunderstanding—a deformed, ugly-pretty kind of love, knowledge that what was there wouldn’t change, for better or worse.

  Until he began to suspect that Henry wanted to leave, wanted to break the rules of family that he’d tacitly been living by. You could leave. You could choose one family over another. And it occurred to Daniel then that he did not have a second family—he had made nothing else. This was it. And the familiarity of Brit sitting next to him on the plane registered as a shock in that it was both part of his DNA and as tenuous and fragile as a hanging bow hair. It could all disappear, once they landed, in a year, in six. While the kiss in the Allbrights’ bathroom had made him feel like they had all the time in the world (they knew each other in a way that required no discussion), the plane ride and her open, quivering excitement at being free from something made him feel an urgent need to make her his family, to bind her to him emotionally in the way they were already bound in music. The devastating part was that she’d been there all along, and he hadn’t done it, in all those years. That was the time, and he’d wasted it.

  That night, in his separate room in the hotel in Midtown, he barely slept. The need to have her was overwhelming, but the how was crazy-making. What if she didn’t feel the same? What if she didn’t want him? What if he said the wrong thing? The surety of his feelings was matched by the anxiety of, for the first time, not knowing hers.

  In the morning they looked at the cello, a nervous indemnity professional hovering around Daniel while he tested it and playfully spun it on its endpin. It had a chocolaty middle register that he liked, not so buoyant and bright but settled-in and even a little scratchy. The lower register was bol
d and the upper register brilliant, and the varnish regal and the overall sound like breaking through a paper wall, barely separated from the inside of the instrument and the outside. In the end, it was the variety of tone that won him over, and the ferocity of its announcement. He gratefully agreed to take it, and the donor wept, hugging him and Brit at the same time.

  They dropped the cello at the hotel and walked the long way to Carnegie Hall. They took a detour up Second Avenue, the East River reflecting an impossible spring sun between the buildings.

  “This is the New York you can only experience after you move away,” Brit said.

  Where Second approached the Queensboro, they veered left and snaked back down past the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the antiqued primness of Fifth Avenue that had once seduced Daniel now washed out, stuck in time, and arrived in a roundabout way at the hall. They talked their way into the performance space by counting the number of times they’d performed there and name-dropping the event services manager and the box office manager and the managing director, and an elderly ticket taker opened the door to the mezzanine, let them through, and then winked and held a finger to her lips, closing the door behind them.

  “She wants us to be quiet?” Brit whispered. “There’s no one here.”

  “Why can’t we go down on stage?” Daniel said.

  “What would we do on stage? What are we doing up here?”

  Daniel sat in one of the red velvet chairs. The stage was all lit up in buttery lights, and in the center was a lone piano with its lid propped up and a leather seat askew. The poster outside had advertised a young Chinese pianist whom he’d never heard of, and the recital was sold out. The whole place held the atmosphere of a rehearsal having just been abandoned.

  “We’d play that piano,” Daniel said.

  “I don’t trust pianists,” Brit said, sitting down next to him. “The quality is somewhat predetermined. I feel like after a certain point, you just can’t tell how good they are.”