The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  “Yeah, kind of like punching buttons or something.”

  “God, don’t tell anyone we’re saying this.”

  Daniel gestured at the molded ceilings. “God has ears in here, I think.”

  They sat in the empty hall for a while, not saying anything, listening for they didn’t know what. They didn’t know it then, but in two years’ time, they would play their final performance with Henry on that stage, and afterward, Daniel would cry on Henry’s shoulder for the second time in his life.

  They weren’t allowed to exit out the back, out the artists’ door, so they exited the way they came in and walked around the back to get to Patelson’s. The wind had picked up, and a too-warm breeze blew Brit’s hair all around her face and into Daniel’s face, and Daniel reached behind her and gathered it into a ponytail.

  “No hairband,” she said.

  “No apology necessary,” he said.

  Patelson’s was before them, but it looked as though a great diminuendo had slackened it. The outside of the building looked tarnished and sun-bleached and the inside was lit up like a doctor’s office, fluorescent and unnatural. From outside they could clearly see that inside the selections of bound music had been picked through, and what was left was being lazily perused by uninterested people, wandering ants in a maze. Neon posters obscured the view through one large window, advertising the final liquidation sale. Daniel felt deeply sad, with a hollowed-out space in his belly. He was suddenly starving.

  “Let’s not go in,” he said.

  “Oh, but we have to,” Brit said. “Maybe there are some gems left.”

  She started across the street holding his hand, but he stood firm. “Don’t you want to remember it as it was? This, this is like a Tower Records closing-out sale.”

  She had one foot in the street and one foot back on the curb with him. “Don’t be so tied up about it. You can still remember it like it was. This is . . . inconsequential.”

  Daniel doubted that, but he followed her across the street anyway, and into the shop, and straight to the chamber music section, which was nearly empty and war-torn; the place smelled sharply of mothballs in a way that made Daniel sneeze, and he buried his nose in her perfumed neck while she looked through the lesser publications of student arrangements of Mozart quartets. Brit pieced through all that was left.

  In the end, they found nothing in the store, recognized no one. Their visit to the shop would not have been memorable if not for the saturated memories of the past they carried around like vintage photographs in their minds.

  What made their visit memorable was later—after dinner at a no-name Italian place and an exhausted walk back to the hotel, and the too-long conversation in the hallway of the hotel, and the exact moment when Daniel asked her to come back to his room—when he, for perhaps the first time in his life, turned in the direction he was emotionally compelled, did not resist it or manipulate it or try to compel himself elsewhere.

  In the way that parting from Lindsay had felt inevitable, something set in motion from the moment they’d met, this, too, felt inevitable to Daniel, and that lack of surprise didn’t, as he’d feared, take away from the excitement. Instead it added an innate quality, a sure comfort, like a layer of small, plush pillows always on their periphery. What did surprise him was that, when he touched her, when they were together, the anxiety of time wasted dissipated. Their bodies were at once familiar and unfamiliar to each other, and it was thrilling to touch her, because when he touched her, he was touching two people, the Brit with the cold feet and the unsure crawl across his sheets from nearly twenty years earlier, and the Brit now, rounded and comfortable and, yes, still with poor circulation—and also all the Brits in between, and even all the Daniels in between, a whole uproar of the people they’d been or tried to be. Being with her, next to her, inside her, it was like having the power to never be erased or lost or missing, though that had happened in life, erasure, and would continue to happen. But with her, no part of his past or her past went unknown.

  It was embarrassingly easy. He wondered if everyone had to wait until their forties to get it right, for the windfall.

  What she said to him before he fell asleep: “Here we are again.”

  In the morning, in the cab on the way back to the airport, Brit leaned over the cello between them and told him what he’d said in his sleep the night before.

  “You said, ‘Don’t go, there’s something I wanted to tell you about the cake,’” Brit said. “So what do you want to tell me about the cake?”

  When Daniel thought of cake, he thought of the moldings in Carnegie Hall, how they curled and flounced like frosting, how the light on the stage was like confection batter, how the seats were the consistency of sugar and flour and water. Brit’s hair was like vanilla. He’d bought her a piece of cake to apologize for what he’d said after the first Esterhazy competition. He could go on. He was still very hungry.

  Daniel didn’t remember what he had been dreaming, but he could finish the dream anyway: “I wanted to tell you we still have time to eat it.”

  * * *

  —

  Everything happened so fast. Daniel’s father fixed up Skype for their house, and for the first time Daniel looked at his parents through a computer screen. They sat like they were posing for a painting, and Daniel could see them staring at their own tiny image at the bottom of the screen instead of looking at the camera. His mother sat in a wheelchair in sweatpants—had he ever seen his mother in sweatpants?—and his father dressed for the occasion, and held a drink in his hand. Daniel heard the ice melt and shift throughout the conversation. His mother assured him she was feeling fine, if nauseated by the smell of eggs and dairy products, but that it was much like being pregnant, and that his brother’s wife was coming in a week to help out with the housework, so he shouldn’t worry. Brit joined halfway through and they mirrored his parents’ postures, hands on knees or folded across the lap, upright and nervous-seeming. Brit told them that she was sorry they couldn’t make it to Houston until after the Octet performance, but that the very next day they’d get on a plane and that they’d like to get married, perhaps in his parents’ backyard, a small ceremony, mostly family, really (though what family? But Daniel insisted they say it this way so his mother didn’t invite the entire zip code), no big deal, and would it be too hot by then? It would be too hot by then, of course, but they would do it anyway. Daniel’s mother said, putting her palms together under her chin, “I’m so happy to be able to attend this wedding.”

  Daniel went around telling people they were getting married in Houston at his parents’ house because it would mean so much to his mother, because that seemed the appropriate thing to say, but he wasn’t so sure who exactly it was for. Walking around and waiting for someone to die, it was like being asked to live every moment as if it was your last. It was impossible. It was like being asked to never drift off, or lose focus, or forget what everything meant all the time. It was like trying to play everything fortissimo. Sometimes Daniel thought they were getting married at his parents’ house so that they could say they’d been living like that, so that when they did lose themselves in meaningless preparations—flowers, dress, script—they could know it was all to perpetuate a timbre of love that they had failed to produce consistently in all the time before.

  What wasn’t meaningless was music, specifically what music would play during the ceremony. Daniel had played so many wedding gigs in his teenage years, all of them bad, that it seemed cruel to ask anyone, stranger or not, to do that for them. And how meaningful could Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” be at this point? Or Pachelbel’s Canon? Or, God forbid, the triumphant “Wedding March” as recessional, like you’d finished a marathon or been coronated or won a prize?

  Henry solved the music problem in the way Henry solved every problem, as though it wasn’t a problem at all.

  One bright Saturday in May, before the su
mmer fog settled in, Daniel helped Henry move some furniture into the new place in Russian Hill, an antique couch and two unyielding dressers up two steep flights of stairs. The apartment was long and narrow and sunny, with a zigzagging hallway off which several rooms perched, one for each of the children, even the one not yet conceived, a small studio for music, and a living room with a bay window that didn’t overlook the bay but rather the streetcar as it clanked by every hour.

  “I didn’t know this neighborhood even existed when we lived here,” Daniel said, wiping sweat off his face with the bottom of his T-shirt.

  Henry handed him a folded-up starched handkerchief. “I know. Now we’re basically priced out. This city changed fast.”

  The apartment was still mostly empty, though they’d moved in mattresses and toys and some music. Enough to get Henry and Kimiko started. Half their lives was still up north, but after the weekend was over, they’d be here for good. Daniel found a couple of beers in the fridge and brought them out to the living room, where neither of them chose to sit on the ornate couch, instead leaning against the wall under the open bay window.

  “Jana would have actually killed us if we injured ourselves moving this couch,” Daniel said. They were only a few weeks from the Octet performance, which meant they were only a few weeks from the wedding, after which it felt like his mother would just give up and die, which was something he didn’t say to anyone.

  Henry smiled. “She sure would have.”

  “You’re going to miss her giving you a hard time, aren’t you?”

  “You guys are talking about me like I’m already gone. I’m still here. I’ll still be here,” Henry said, beginning to peel the label off his bottle. “I’m sure she’ll never stop giving me a hard time, no matter where I am.”

  “We still have to find someone to replace you.”

  Henry laughed. “Well, true replacement is not actually possible. But there’s that girl Lauren, who just started teaching at the conservatory. A woman, I suppose, not a girl. But she’d probably be ready for a group soon.”

  Daniel shrugged. “Get her to agree to never have a family, and she’s in.”

  Henry frowned, even though Daniel grinned at his half joke. “That’s not entirely fair.”

  The streetcar rolled by, ringing its bells, and a seagull took off, squawking, and for a moment it was like Daniel had transported back to 1992, and he’d just moved to the city and was living in his first apartment by Fisherman’s Wharf before he moved to the East Bay. For a moment he was that twenty-eight-year-old again, broken car, shitty cello, never satisfied, everything about him compact and tough. He had so wanted to prove his mother wrong. He had wanted to show her you could make a life outside her definition, that you could make all her wishy-washy spirituality stuff into an exact science.

  “Is that why you never had kids?” Henry said. “Because of us?”

  “Because of me, I think.”

  “But now?”

  Daniel laughed. “Now? I don’t even know, now. I like what I have. I have more than I deserve.”

  “It’s sort of terrible, though, isn’t it?”

  “What?”

  “When you get everything you wanted.”

  Daniel didn’t say anything. But this, he thought, was the difference between him and Henry. His younger self would have been angered by Henry’s sentiment, how it spoke to Henry’s lucky life, how Henry had never known Daniel’s constant striving. Daniel didn’t think it was terrible to get everything you wanted. He thought it was terrible not to know what to want.

  They finished their beers. Kimiko would be back from the park with the children soon, and they had a bedframe to put together before Daniel drove the hour back home, where Brit was waiting, where they’d make a salad and eat it on their patio in the suburban quiet.

  “We were thinking you could marry us,” Daniel said to Henry.

  Henry held up his left hand. “I’m already spoken for.”

  “You sure are,” Daniel said.

  The door opened and Daniel heard Kimiko wrangling children. The sound of keys dropping to the floor, little feet stomping, a cry from Jack that still sounded like a girl’s cry.

  “Goddammit!” Kimiko said. “Did you have to put the dresser directly in front of the door?”

  Henry popped up and began digging through a box behind the couch that they’d simply placed in the middle of the room on a diagonal. “Aha!” He held out a record to Daniel. “I saved this for you. I thought it could be played at the ceremony.”

  Daniel took it from his hands. An original pressing of a live performance (they were all live then, weren’t they?) of the Budapest String Quartet performing the Tchaikovsky no. 1. It must have been from the early part of the twentieth century. Daniel hadn’t known any of their recordings other than the Beethoven cycle. The record’s outline had worn through the sleeve, and the whitened circle of it surrounded the picture on the front, a sepia-colored photograph of the four men in quartet formation but without the stands, leaning forward, looking at the first violinist as he said something about the sheet of music he held out in the middle of them. The music unknown, the conversation mysterious. Why a shot of them conversing and not playing? It didn’t look posed at all, but entirely natural, so natural and normal that for a second Daniel couldn’t tell them apart. Which one was Sasha Schneider, the only one he knew anything about? Or was it Mischa? And which incarnation was this? How many times had they turned inside out, let someone go, taken in someone new? Which Budapest was the one he’d loved, or had he loved all of their incarnations?

  “The Andante, of course,” Henry said. “I don’t know if your parents have a record player or not.”

  When Kimiko came dragging the children into the living room, a grocery bag hanging off one wrist and Jack sobbing off the other, she found her husband and Daniel in a static embrace except for the small quakes of Daniel’s chest, Daniel pressing his hand into Henry’s back through an old record, his eyes screwed shut and dripping tears like a broken faucet.

  * * *

  —

  Daniel had spent so much of his life not wanting children—or not wanting to want children—that it had obscured some of his own childhood memories. He thought his mother’s version of his cello origin story was false, or as much willed into existence as her first vision of Jesus, but regardless, most of what he did remember from childhood was playing. In fact, he didn’t remember not knowing how to play. As a child he had enjoyed the way it was like a game, getting all your limbs to work around and on the cello, the way you had to hold it up with your body and then draw from it with effort. He liked the feeling of the C string resonating in his abdomen. He liked carrying the cello on his back in the soft nylon case, how it was bigger than him and how that must have made him look special on the bus, rich with something.

  And then one day he was bigger than the cello, and that was even better. He had a growth spurt at around fourteen, and found one day while practicing that he was louder than he had been before. He knew this because his older brother, Peter, pounded on the wall from the living room and told him to shut it, they were trying to watch Green Acres, the cloying theme song of which gave Daniel chills well into his thirties. At his next lesson, after he demonstrated the ease with which he drew his bow firmly across the strings and produced a sound so thick you could practically see it vibrate in the air, his teacher said to him in his thick Russian accent, “You are now seeing what a man can do on a cello. It is different from what a boy can do,” and then he had Daniel hold his arms out so he could measure his growing wingspan.

  After that, he began to notice how the instrument was shaping his body. He began to notice his body in general, as it slithered through an awkward phase of puberty and left him raw and overlarge on the other side. By the time he left for college, he had turned inward—the insides of his knees tipped toward each other and callused, t
he space beneath his ribs hardened and hollowed, his long arms got stronger and splayed, and his shoulders rounded, looking in toward the cello, even when there wasn’t one there. He had to embrace the cello to play it, and he liked that. He didn’t embrace anything else in his life like that. He carried his physical markings with pride, his body a map of his achievement.

  And noticing that, the way his body shaped itself around the playing posture, was when Daniel remembered thinking he was a man and not a child, and why he held childhood in disregard for most of his life. Childhood was the vague wet-clay phase of life before the part where it was possible to achieve something great. But had he ever become great? Had he ever achieved what had been promised? Even in the peaks of the quartet’s great professional success, he didn’t feel the kind of tight elation he’d imagined he would. After they won the Esterhazy and before accepting the job in California, he fell into a regular kind of depression, one that felt heavier in the mornings when he counted the hours until he could reasonably go back to bed, one that made him wish the day was over and that he was unconscious, one that felt like a gentle nihilism, nonthreatening, not anything. He slept with many women then, masseuses and professors and bartenders and students, but loved none of them, and they didn’t love him, either.

  One afternoon at home in California, walking from the shower to his closet, he caught sight of his naked body in an alarmingly large bathroom mirror he had yet to get used to. There he was, old now. Older than he’d ever thought he’d be, at least. His muscles lay on top of his bones like they were tired, and around his waist, two small pockets of useless flesh. The indent in the center of his chest from the back of his cello was dark, and his shoulders reached over his chest toward each other like closed helmets, his spine the top curve of a dramatic S. He looked like something beyond a man, something that had been there for a while and gone unnoticed, had spent years sitting stonelike and waiting. He stood up straighter and turned to the side. He tried to open up his shoulders. He’d been looking inward his whole life. No wonder there wasn’t room for anything else.