The Ensemble

by Aja Gabel

  She looked out at her own arm like it was someone else’s arm and then back to him. At the same time he stepped toward her—to embrace her, he would later say, though even later he would tell himself that wasn’t what he was going to do—she pulled her arm back and moved toward him, and they crashed into each other in a way that made Daniel feel the hard, icy concrete under his stumbling feet and the incredible distance to the water.

  “Just this,” she said, and put her hand around his waist and drew him to the railing with her. She dangled her free hand in the abyss. He could see some of the magic of the night dropping out of her, falling down into he didn’t know what. Somewhere a boat moaned, or it was the bridge moaning in the wind, or it was a whale, or it was a man in a lighthouse he couldn’t see, and in any case it was a sound of warning. Daniel stood rigid and still under her arm, as if by not moving he could disappear this moment. Don’t pull me toward you, he thought at the same time he thought, Don’t let me go.

  And eventually, she did let go. They were worn down from the cold, which was why it was empty on the bridge at night. She walked away first, back toward the car, hands hidden in pockets, hair forgotten in the weather. He clutched the railing with his hand, too afraid to release it but also petrified in the position. The time in which she walked away was a physical space that he inhabited, more than the length of an arm dangling over a bridge railing at night and less than the length of a lifetime of communal orbit—and the farther she walked, the finer the point of her image became, shimmering and darkening, merging with the black view, not breaking apart, but the opposite, until she was as exact and impossible as this question: What do you love? And another: How? She walked away, but not really.

  * * *

  —

  If he thought about it too much, there was a whole lot to be angry about. For instance, his father, who never did stop drinking, and who had held Daniel at a yardstick’s distance his whole life. For instance, his brother, whom he’d barely known, who’d made a new family somewhere else and left him to fend for himself. For instance, cancer, dying in general, parents dying, parents, really. But standing in the hot swelter of the backyard of his childhood home at dusk, a record player in the middle of the damp grass, waiting for Brit to appear at the end of the aisle, Jana and Henry looking on, he knew two things. First, that he could blame no one else—for who could know a man who refused to know himself?—and second, that he’d long ago forgiven himself. It was easy, as it turned out. You didn’t have to ask for it.

  Also, he’d made a family, too.

  Brit did appear, with Jana at her side, and the women walked toward him. There weren’t the thoughts he’d expected to have, though they existed somewhere in him (she is beautiful, I am lucky, we are happy), and instead there were pre-thoughts. No name for it. The stuff that came before you started naming things. She was a gift. He was a gift. Nothing would do.

  When they reached him, Jana put Brit’s hands in his and winked, and took a seat next to Daphne and his mother. Henry stood between them, but whenever Daniel tried to look at him, the setting sun behind him blackened his face. He had to look away, and so there was only Henry’s voice.

  Love is inexact, Henry said. It is not a science. It is barely a noun. It means one thing to one person, and one thing to another. It means one thing to one person at one point and then something else at another point. It doesn’t make sense. We are gathered here today to not make sense. We are gathered here today to listen to the ineffable. I’m supposed to be explaining it, but I can’t explain it. I love you, it’s a mystery. Because it’s a mystery, we have to take care of it. Feed it. It can go missing, but we can’t tie it up. We can only tie it to someone else. Other people. Then the world is like this: full of the geometry of my rope tied to you, and to you, and yours tied to him, and to her, and hers to someone else. I love you, it’s a mystery. A moment of silence.

  In four months, they would all return to Houston for his mother’s funeral. She’d make it longer than anyone expected, and though her organs were shutting down one by one, what took her in the end was a spill in the bathroom, a fainting spell that shattered her bones; or maybe she’d died in the faint, and the shattering came after, Daniel could never remember. It didn’t seem that important. What did seem important was that at the funeral, sitting between Brit and his father, he caught himself praying—to what? But praying.

  It would bring him back to this wedding, this moment where with applause growing up around them like time, he kissed Brit, she kissed him, and then they embraced, and her hair filled his mouth, filled it up and for a second he couldn’t breathe. It was like kissing the space between the moment you thought something and the moment you opened your mouth to say it aloud. But then, just as quickly, he left that feeling, released it, and re-joined the clamor, the singing, the music.

  CODA

  Perpetual Motion

  —Composer unknown

  December 1992

  San Francisco

  We were afraid. It was like getting naked in front of someone, playing together for the first time. Though, of course, we’d already been naked in front of each other in a way. We’d all heard each other play at conservatory events or sitting in with the chamber orchestra or with another group. But not like this. Of us, Henry was the best player, a prodigy of sorts, it was rumored, but Jana the most forceful. Brit was an unknown quantity and we eyed her sideways. Daniel was charming, at least, if a little aloof. We let ourselves tune up. We noted Jana’s and Henry’s perfect pitch. We felt ashamed, those of us who weren’t born with that, but then assured ourselves we were born with something else, a spitfire spirit that allowed us to ascend even without a scientific blessing. We had stacks of music: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Arriaga, Saint-Saëns, Schubert, Ravel, Shostakovich, Dvořák, Strauss, Sibelius, Schoenberg, Ives, and on and on.

  What should we play?

  Which was a different question from “What would we play?”

  Henry said he thought it would be funny if we could play this piece from Suzuki, Perpetual Motion, a piece his beginner students liked to use to practice playing fast. We were alarmed to hear that he had students, as he seemed to be still a teenager.

  We should play it as fast as we can, Daniel suggested. He had funny glasses he wore when he played that we got used to, over time.

  It turned out we all remembered that piece. Duh-duh-duh-duh-da-da-dum-dum, Henry sang. Yep, we all said. That’s the one.

  We decided Jana should count us in, and Jana agreed on that, too. Three, four, she counted. Three, four? some of us thought. This piece is in 6/8! This piece is in 3/8! we didn’t say. Instead, we all played our different Perpetual Motions, four separate pieces. We played on, and it wasn’t until sometime in the middle that we recognized that we were all playing different music from memory, but we continued playing after that, and tried to make it work, tried to make the pieces fit together, and in a weird way that no one would ever want to hear—but we did, at least at the time—it did fit together. Some of us made stuff up if our piece ended too early. Some of us skipped over the parts we couldn’t remember. Some of us were just playing whatever came to mind.

  After, we cracked up, which was like breaking the tension after you’ve seen someone naked, but you really liked it.

  That was awful, we said.

  That was impressive, we said.

  That was magic, we said.

  We found one another nervous and lacking, but we found one another beautiful. We didn’t say it then, but we found each other half blown apart. We found each other ugly in just the right way, though it wouldn’t be right for a long time. We found each other to have good instruments around which we could organize. We found each other to have good hands that were more than just parts of bodies, and good arms and shoulders, and strong spines and stable cores, and supple necks and warm chins. We laid a pervasive claim on one another. On our hearts. Some of
us more than others, some of us in different ways. We weren’t yet full people, but we were required to pretend to be. We thought that together we could pretend to be until we were. We thought it might not work, but knew there was no way of really knowing. We set about infiltrating spirits. We set about aligning schedules. We set about getting better, but first we had to get known. We wanted to learn everything, but knew it might take an entire lifetime. We couldn’t tell which way it would go, which we took to mean it was like falling in love, which we didn’t always take to be a good thing. We found it was easier that way, to think it was like falling in love, though we didn’t always stick to it. We found it was easier to obsess about recitals and bowings and the future. We found Henry to be irresponsible and Jana to be mean and Daniel to be foolish and Brit, we called to her, and sometimes she was there, and sometimes she wasn’t. We found it to be more complicated than that, the people you were stuck with. We did the sticking. We found that to also be a part of the music, the sticking. We found it to be, if not pleasurable, alive. We found each other to be amenable and willing and calling, and then insistent and hungry and answering. We found each other.

  Acknowledgments

  This novel would not exist in your hands without the enthusiasm and wise counsel of Andrea Morrison at Writers House. I am deeply thankful for her support and wizardry. An equally boundless gratitude to Laura Perciasepe at Riverhead, whose passion for this book has made it better, sentence by sentence, than I could have imagined. I don’t like to wonder what my life would look like without these two women.

  So much is owed to the fellowships, residencies, and academic programs that have supported my writing over the years, including Wesleyan University and the Winchester Fellowship, everyone at the University of Virginia, the creative writing department at the University of Houston, Inprint Houston and its Alexander Prize and Barthelme Prize, the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, the Oregon Literary Fellowship, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, Pam Houston’s Writing By Writers and the Mill House Residency, and the incredible magic of the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. I am so very grateful to the National Endowment for the Arts for employing me and teaching me that art is also life.

  Nothing happens without teachers. Much gratitude to those who guided me, on and off the page: Alexander Chee, Christopher Tilghman, Deborah Eisenberg, Antonya Nelson, Alexander Parsons, J. Kastely, Mat Johnson, Chitra Divakaruni, Sydney Blair, Jeb Livingood, Tom Drury, and Anne Greene.

  Writing itself is a solitary act, but gathering the courage and spark to sit down and do it is a community effort. I am lucky to have found a community of artists, including those saint-status friends who read drafts of this novel, and anyone who ever let me talk about these characters over wine for too long: Michelle Mariano, Jessica Wilbanks, Jacob Reimer, Nathan Graham, David Engelberg, Remi Spector, John Voekel, Kirsten Dahl, Patrick McGinty, Adam Peterson, Austin Tremblay, Danny Wallace, Ashley Wurzbacher, Dickson Lam, Thea Lim, Rebecca Wadlinger, Jesse Donaldson, Matt Sailor, Meagan Morrow, Keya Mitra, Claire Anderson, Erin Mushalla, Hannah Walsh, Katie Bellas, Joshua Rivkin, Erin Beeghly, Katie McBride, Kate Axelrod, Rebecca Calavan, Heather Ryder, Darcie Burrell, Claire Wyckoff, Maggie Shipstead, and Celeste Ng.

  I am grateful to champions behind the scenes, including the inimitable Jynne Dilling Martin, as well as Becky Saletan, Geoffrey Kloske, and Geri Thoma.

  Thank you to my family, especially Mom and Dad for putting a violin in my hands before I could speak full sentences, for driving me from rehearsal to rehearsal, even when I traded up to the more awkwardly sized cello, and for never letting me think that an artist’s life was anything but achievable and meaningful.

  Thank you to my music family, without whom my world is silent: Cassidy English, Stefon Shelton, Ivy Zenobi, Brent Kuhn, Elia Van Lith, Linda Ghidossi-DeLuca, and Cory Antipa, and the music program at the Santa Rosa Symphony.

  When I was a teenager, I played in a chamber music seminar led by the St. Lawrence String Quartet, which is where the idea for this novel first took hold. Their mastery, authenticity, and passion taught me that four serious musicians could make something bigger and bolder than themselves. I am grateful they exist and let me witness that mystery.

  I’m also so thankful to every underfunded classical and chamber music series (and their student rush prices) in Santa Rosa, California, San Francisco, New York City, Washington, D.C., Houston, and Portland, Oregon.

  It is a fact that I would be a lesser woman and writer without the countless e-mails from and fierce friendship of Myung Joh Wesner, Sierra Bellows, and Erin Saldin. The fortitude, lyric, and grace of these three women have propped me up over the years. This is for them.

  About the Author

  Aja Gabel’s writing has appeared in BOMB, The Kenyon Review, Glimmer Train, and elsewhere. A former cellist, she earned her B.A. at Wesleyan University, her MFA at the University of Virginia and has a Ph.D. in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Houston. Aja has been the recipient of fellowships from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Literary Arts Oregon, and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, where she was a fellow in fiction. She currently lives in Los Angeles.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  * * *

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.

  Sign up now.