The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  And then Brit. Being with her didn’t feel like making room for anything because she’d always been there, as had Jana and Henry. There was no new space that needed to be carved out. But one night, early in their new, second relationship, they’d been having sex, and something shifted. It wasn’t the physical, necessarily, though that was important: she’d been underneath him, legs hooked around the back of his (when he moved, she did, and when she moved, he did, and the equality of that tandem alone was intoxicating), and he’d had his face buried in her damp neck, and the whole thing had been impossibly slow—like they were taking their time just to prove how exactly they were where they wanted to be—and, like the slowest, thickest rubber-band release in the history of rubber bands, they came at the same time. That wasn’t the first time it’d happened to Daniel, but with Brit it was the most annihilating. Yes, there was the physical, the two of them like insects cupped against each other, spinning a web between them, tossing the taut strands back and forth, back and forth, but there was also the way the physical caught them in the act of the unsayable. In that space—it lasted forever, it’s still going on—two things were true, at least two: First, that there was room, there was a whole bunch of room, for a child, or children, or whatever. It was strange and baffling how much room there suddenly was. And second, there was the knowledge that there would never be a child. And at the confluence of the two, knowing both things were true was enough. For the first time in his life, he wanted nothing other than what was, which included the want of a child, and its impossibility.

  Afterward, the room was filled with the pungent liquor-and-cake smell of excellent sex and a thin sheen of sated silence, coppery almost, as it hung in the air around them. They said nothing for a while and lay naked on top of the blankets. Brit’s head was tilted down and to the side like she was looking at something on her shoulder, and she was smiling, but mostly to herself. Daniel felt his face wide-open and floating, blimp-like. Could he say it? And what could he say? Let’s want to have a child together. They wouldn’t—they were slightly too old, and if they weren’t too old, they were no longer in need of it as they might have been when they were young, requiring some new, unctuous evidence sprung from their love. Brit had told him that in their first year together. She’d only ever wanted a family, and she had one, with him and with the quartet. If they never had children, if they never made the move to have children, it would be just fine, she said. This happiness is enough, she said. Too much, even.

  Instead of saying something, he reached his hand across the bed to rest his palm on the part of her stomach from her belly button to her pubic bone. He felt her muscles automatically shiver back, likely from the scratchy calluses on his fingertips, but then she relaxed, and her abdomen rose to fill his hand.

  “Your hand is so large,” she said. “The cello never had a chance.”

  He smiled. When she breathed and spoke, he felt it through the walls of her stomach and muscles and skin and then through the walls of his hand and muscles and skin.

  “What are you looking for in there?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” he said. All he could do was listen to her vibrations translated into his and then send a translation back. Everything else was a great mystery.

  * * *

  —

  The Octet took only half an hour to perform in full, an amount of time that seemed not at all equal to the amount of effort that went into preparing for it. The Seoul Quartet rehearsed with the Van Ness for four solid days at their studio space near the university, and it seemed to Daniel like two of those days were spent trying to match their frequencies, not of sound but of being. The Seoul group was made up of three men and a woman violist, and they were quiet in a young way, unsure of how to enter a conversation anyone in the Van Ness started, but also energetic, which is to say they were frenzied and determined in a way Daniel recognized but could no longer join up with.

  The Van Ness played all the first parts, and the Seoul played the second parts, but after the Octet opened the recital, the Van Ness would leave, and the Seoul would finish out their San Francisco debut with a Haydn quartet and a contemporary tonal Chinese piece Daniel had never played.

  The eight of them could play the parts. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that it was especially important that they play the parts in the same way, because there were so many parts. Otherwise it would sound like eight people gathered around, having separate conversations. It was why the Mendelssohn Octet was so tricky and so thrilling to play. If you did it wrong, it would sound like one big, messy mistake, but if you did it right, the depth of sound was unparalleled.

  The girl, Mary, was the only one who expressed worry, and she did it privately, backstage, twenty minutes before curtain, when Daniel ran into her in the hallway and she held up her hands, coated in a fresh sheen of sweat.

  “I can’t get them dry,” she said.

  Daniel rolled his eyes. “Oh yes you can,” he said, and took her hand and led her into his dressing room. He turned on the faucet so it was lukewarm. “Hold your hands under there for three minutes.”

  She looked at him like she’d tasted something bad, but did it anyway. She was very short but otherwise looked like Clara all grown up, black hair swept up on the top of her head and a naked, vulnerable face. She seemed, of all of them, the least assured of what they were doing. But she was a lovely violist, with a sound not all that different from Henry’s, if less biting. Her sound was more tenor in mood, maybe on account of how much bigger the instrument seemed in her hands than in Henry’s. Daniel saw that her career was to be a constant wobble back and forth between her talent and her insecurity.

  “Are you nervous?” Daniel asked, sitting on the couch, amused.

  “Aren’t you?” she asked.

  “Well, sure,” he said. “But not like that. And I wasn’t like that after winning the Esterhazy, that’s for sure.”

  She turned back to the sink and looked at Daniel in the mirror. “So you weren’t afraid?”

  Daniel looked back at her in the mirror. “Oh, I’m afraid. I’m afraid, still.”

  Mary stood at the faucet and looked back at Daniel in a half-hopeful way he found endearing. He’d never done this water trick before. He had no idea if it would work. He was old enough to be her father. He tried to remember what he’d been afraid of at her age, but the list was overwhelming. It was easier to list what he wasn’t afraid of back then: his cello, spiders, girls he’d just met (but not girls who knew him, or knew him enough to know he’d flee eventually).

  “Afraid isn’t the same as being nervous,” he said. “I’m not nervous I’m going to play the wrong notes out there. If you got this far, you shouldn’t be, either.”

  “So what’s afraid?” She had the smallest lips, like a new bow.

  Daniel stood and turned the water off. “Afraid is everything else.”

  “I was listening to that pre-concert lecture,” she said. “And someone asked why chamber music.”

  “And that made you nervous?”

  Mary shrugged. “I don’t know if I have an answer. It’s not something I remember choosing. I just do it.”

  Mary dried her hands on a towel and held them up in front of her face, turning them around like they were sculptures crafted apart from her. Even her hands were young, Daniel thought. Especially her hands.

  “It worked,” she said.

  Daniel nodded and patted her on the back. “You’ll be full of all my tricks sometime when you’re old.”

  She straightened her gown, a satin magenta thing that Daniel knew she wouldn’t wear again after seeing pictures of herself on stage, the fuss of the dress a blaring distraction from the playing. “You know Mendelssohn wrote this when he was fifteen? So in a way, I’m old already.” And then she turned and walked out of his dressing room.

  * * *

  —

  The thing abou
t the Mendelssohn Octet was counterpoint. While playing, Daniel realized the quartet had never coached this piece, so they hadn’t developed a way to talk about its organizational intelligence, but it was entirely contrapuntal. Mendelssohn was showing off, a whiz kid, look at how I can weave together not four but eight independent voices, how they all can be harmonic relatives but still adhere to separate rhythmic shapes. Chords were easy, but counterpoint added texture, that thing you didn’t know you were hearing. There was Jana, furiously sawing away, eating that other violinist alive, really (poor guy), but then there were the second violins, doing their own sawing, at half a dynamic lower, and a triad apart from each other even, throwing sixteenths around but just so, to fit in the spaces between the first violins’ notes so what was produced was a whole new line, made up of four voices switching allegiances and tandem partners at a dizzying pace, a guise of unpredictability glimmering out of the sure underbelly. The chords were sweet and rich, too, and Daniel admitted to loving them, milking them, as there was something almost Schubert-like about how youthful and pure they were. But it was the counterpoint, which begged reaction, that drove the piece, at once calling attention to each tiny action and allowing those actions to add up to something larger.

  The movements were short, though full, and they made it to the Scherzo, which, if Mendelssohn wasn’t showing off in the Allegro, he certainly was here. The movement charged forward relentlessly, nearly choking the violinists with runs that were passed through each instrument like a waterfall, the rhythms changing to give the illusion of a tempo that continuously sped up. Henry and Mary were pairing well, their disparate sounds complementing each other, until Daniel saw Mary whip one of her pages over and—nothing. There was a page missing, there must have been, Daniel reasoned, as they weren’t done with the piece, but there was the black back of her stand and a barely audible gasp from her mouth.

  She continued to play.

  Which is what any good musician did, relied on memory, allowed the hours and years of practice to take over the muscles, addressed the sound instead of the page, the line instead of the stand. But then a funny thing happened: she took off. She just took off. She sat right next to Daniel and he saw her inch forward on her seat and dig in. It was as if she was hearing it for the first time, discovering something new and energetic about the final movement, and she began to play fast, faster than the tempo marking, and then faster. It was an accomplishment, Daniel would later admit, for the second viola part to be able to drive the other seven players into a new tempo, but she did it, short and small-lipped as she was. So that even when she rested for a bar or two and Jana attempted to recover tempo, the new speed was already established, the quality of being awake already implanted, and she couldn’t.

  Daniel held his breath and played faster. When he was able to, he let his left hand drop and shook it out. He saw sweat roll down Jana’s temple, a grimace break across her face, and Henry, on the other side of Mary, easily keeping up and seeming calm about and even impressed by the firestorm next to him; and then Brit, who was also not breathing, was also smiling a little, amused at the way everything was falling apart. Was it falling apart? There would be a breaking point, Daniel felt sure. They couldn’t keep it up for much longer.

  But then it ended. It ended where it was supposed to, where it always had, at the end of the page, but they reached it so much sooner than Daniel expected, or was used to. Suddenly there were the final four flourishes, where they all met back up, their bows thrown in the air all together, like drawing with bone tips some invisible map.

  * * *

  —

  Daniel was explaining the reason they had to rig up extension cords for the record player in the backyard. His mother didn’t understand why they couldn’t just use the boom box that didn’t need all those unsightly wires.

  “It’s a record, Mom,” he said. “It needs to sound like a record.”

  She was in bed, thinner already, in her bedroom, which had signs of his father’s presence—a pile of boxer shorts on the floor, a cracked leather belt hung over a door handle, a swipe of construction dirt on the molding around the doorway, his father’s fingerprint in the dried muck. Perhaps they had revived a part of their love for each other now that she was dying. Daniel felt a tinge of softness for his father. He’d be the one really alone at the end of this. Brit was outside, he could hear her in the backyard with Jana and his father trying to tack lights onto the trees, but they were losing sun, and Jana’s voice was getting reedy and frustrated. It was hot, too. They’d arrived two nights prior and stepped off the plane into the soup of early Houston summer. “Like walking through a warm bath,” Brit said.

  There really wasn’t much to do except the lights and the chairs and the music, but everything felt difficult in the heat and in the face of his mother’s sagging skin and sudden bouts of nausea. She carried a pink kidney-shaped bucket around with her when she moved about, which was rarely. His father refused to call in hospice care just yet. She bruised easily. She was cold to the touch, even in this heat. But she was happy, his father said. Who knew what organs were on the verge of failing her?

  “What’s so special about a record?” Daniel’s mother asked. “I thought the point was for you not to have to carry records and tapes and CDs around anymore?”

  “Okay,” Daniel said, and fetched the record player from the living room and brought it up to her room.

  He took his time setting it up on her dresser, as it was old and it would be just what they needed to have the needle break. He pulled the Budapest Quartet record out of the sleeve and placed it on the turntable.

  “This,” he said, “will change your life.”

  “Never too late,” his mother said.

  He placed the needle at the start of the second movement. “See? Hear that? That’s the noise of—of the sound before the sound. The sound of people about to do something. All that white stuff. And see? It doesn’t go away, not even when they’re playing. You can hear the space around them.”

  “Oh, Danny,” she said like she was proud of him, like she was knowing him for the first time, like it was him and not the Budapest coming out of the record player. The second movement began, gentle and sad.

  “You can hear the slight attack in the bow change, the bow moving across the string, their breathing cues. You can hear how the breath is shared, how they breathe together. People in a room. They don’t make stuff like this anymore, Mom.”

  The Budapest played devotedly through the sweet movement.

  After it was over, his mother coughed lightly, but Daniel could tell she’d been saving it up. “It’s so . . . imprecise,” his mother said, but it wasn’t an insult.

  “Yes,” Daniel said. “That’s it.”

  He said he would stay with her until she fell asleep. She would sleep for only an hour or two. That was the most she got these days. Daniel let the record play out, all the way to the end, and then he flipped it over to the other side, and she fell asleep to the sound of Beethoven. He stayed and she stayed asleep, even as the record finished playing, and there was only that white sound spinning and spinning.

  * * *

  —

  In 1994, it cost three dollars to cross the Golden Gate Bridge going south, so Daniel and Brit parked on the south side and walked north. They’d slept together (clumsily and silently) exactly once, hovered over each other in various states of undress a handful of times, and sat next to each other separated only by black metal music stands and a thick fog of heat for days and days and days. But now it was night, and there was fog, real fog, rolling chaotically down the hills on the north side and across the bridge. There’d been a dim sum dinner (paid for separately) and rail whiskey drinks (paid for separately at first and then generously by her) and aimless, dangerous driving (sloppily navigated by her, excitedly driven by him) and now this, a walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, something neither of them had ever done before, s
omething so obvious and predictable that they’d never felt it was necessary to actually do. Neither of them made the decision to go. It seemed inevitable as a destination.

  The cold was biting and their jackets were underperforming. The wind whipped Brit’s long hair around her face, and as they walked, Daniel resisted reaching up to pull strands back so he could see her face, and then he stopped resisting. Each time he pulled her hair back, there she was, smiling. They stopped somewhere they assumed was the middle, but there was no way to know. They couldn’t see the water below them or the pedestrians around them or the stars above them. Daniel thought he could hear the wind snap the cords of the bridge and looked up, but he saw nothing moving, only the burnt-red cables disappearing into black.

  “Are you afraid it’s going to fall?” Brit asked.

  “No,” Daniel said quickly, realizing too late she was teasing. Daniel couldn’t see her face and he wanted to.

  Brit held her arm over the railing. The chewed sleeve of her jacket shivered in the wind and Daniel’s fingertips tingled in response. She held her arm farther.

  “Okay,” he said. “Don’t.”

  “There’s Alcatraz.” She pointed, leaning out. She put one foot on the railing and then the other.

  “Really, don’t.”

  “You’re not even trying to look. Find Angel Island.”

  He looked instead toward the lanes and the cars heading one way or the other.

  She didn’t move her arm, but she stepped back onto the concrete. “Why did you take me here if you’re afraid of heights?”

  “I didn’t take you here,” he said, but he said it quietly and his tone was the kind of cold that made people close up, a flower in reverse.