The Ensemble Read online

  So now Daniel was taking her to dinner at a place they could not afford—Daniel could not afford—in Tribeca. Lindsay seemed pleased, and though Daniel wanted to remember what he had done to her to make her so mad, he mostly didn’t want to bring it up. She slipped between emotions so easily, a pretty little eel. Sometimes he just watched it happen, bewildered.

  “This place has zucchini foam,” Lindsay said, pointing to the stiff menu in her hand. She laughed. “We should order that.”

  After they ordered, she leaned down over the table, her shirt falling off one shoulder. No bra. She barely ever wore underwear. When they’d first fooled around, she scooted out of her jeans and he was utterly shocked to find she wasn’t wearing anything beneath them. He had a flash of the first time he and Brit had gone to bed together, how he’d made fun of the sweetness of her blue cotton underwear with worn-away white music notes on the rear, and she’d been completely unembarrassed. He liked that she wasn’t embarrassed. It made him embarrassed, suddenly a witness to this whole private life someone had of choosing which underwear to buy, and when to wear it, and whether or not to take it off.

  “I replied to a call for a muralist in this neighborhood,” Lindsay said. “Inside a loft somewhere. They want their wife’s name splashed across the original brick interior. Isn’t that nice?”

  “You do murals?” Daniel said.

  She shrugged and her shirt fell further down her shoulder. “I can. I’ve done them before.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Yeah, that’s nice, I guess. It would be weird to have your own name on a wall in your apartment, though, don’t you think? Like, it’s your apartment already.”

  “Mmm . . . I don’t know. It could be done right.”

  “Are you going to take the job?”

  “I haven’t been offered it yet. Were you listening?”

  “Okay, well, if you’re offered it, would you take it?”

  “Duh. I need the money. We need the money.”

  There was a sweltering silence where neither said anything about the $28 price tag that came with the zucchini foam appetizer. He didn’t say it seemed like they should pay less if they were just getting the foam of something. Lately she’d become more impatient about his inability to pay for a lifestyle upgrade, though he’d never been unclear about that. If Daniel didn’t have the quartet, he had nothing, and even with the quartet, he had only a little. Their marriage wasn’t doing his wallet any favors.

  She went on about a project she was thinking of proposing, an idea for an installation in a corner park in the Village, a motorized swing that was lit up all night long and traced the pattern of constellations across a mirror buried in the dirt below. So people could ride it and look below their feet and see the disappearing patterns of stars. It would be expensive and she’d never make it, Daniel knew. But he liked to listen to her talk about it, to her ideas. Lindsay was, if nothing else (and there was a lot else, if he was being fair), endlessly sweet. Sweetly optimistic. Optimistically generous. Everything he wasn’t.

  And she was smart, too. Though lately that intelligence seemed submerged in her turbulent moods, intermittently visible like a dinghy in a stormy sea.

  “What are you working on?” she asked. “How’s the Shostakovich going? I love that piece.”

  The quartet was readying the Shostakovich Quartet no. 3 for the Esterhazy competition in a couple of months. They would also play the Ravel and a late Mozart Köchel, but the Shostakovich was the one they’d never performed before.

  Their food came. Daniel had rehearsal in the morning. “Oh, it’s better. It’s good. It’s depressing, you know, to work on that piece sometimes.”

  “Since when do you play anything not depressing?” Lindsay asked. She immediately had green foam on the corners of her mouth. He felt irritation bubbling in his throat.

  “We play lots of things that aren’t depressing,” he said. “The act of making music is not depressing.”

  She rolled her eyes. “You don’t have to be such a doctor about it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Clinical. You’re always so clinical. Like I’m asking you to look something up in the dictionary and tell me about it. I could do that.”

  “It’s just what I think.”

  She slapped her fork down on the plate and it clattered loudly. “But what you think isn’t fact, Daniel. Also, how about what you feel?”

  “I feel like when I play music it’s generally not depressing.”

  He knew he was goading her. All he had to do was yield just a little, admit the gray area, that something was unknown to him, and she would soften. But now she was swinging.

  Lindsay said, “That’s probably why you guys don’t ever win at Esterhazy.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Art has to be sort of hopeless sometimes, I think, to be good. That’s what I think.”

  “We’ve only competed once. And we knew we weren’t going to win anything that time.”

  “So what, now you think you deserve it? You don’t win by deserving it.”

  “The greatest players are the most joyful,” he said, though as it was coming out of his mouth, he knew it wasn’t true. He thought of Brit, kind and melancholy.

  “Okay, Daniel, whatever.”

  “You know for that installation, people won’t be able to see the traces of light in the mirror under the dirt. Not under the dirt. Even if it wears away from people’s feet. Mirrors don’t work that way.”

  Lindsay held up her left palm, where she had a blurry image of an eye tattooed across her life line. She’d told him she didn’t remember getting it, that when she was nineteen she’d gone to a party with Jell-O shots and she loved Jell-O so much and when she woke up, her palm was bleeding, and a few days later she realized she could blink the eye by contracting her hand. She never ate Jell-O again. Lately she’d been holding her eye-palm up to him as a way of indicating she saw something he couldn’t.

  “That’s kind of the point, dummy,” she said.

  “And also,” he said, “the mirror would break after the first person jumped off. Bad luck.”

  They ate the rest of the meal in a protracted silence that seemed to deepen with each bite.

  Finally, after the waiter cleared their plates, Lindsay said, “Oh, I forgot to say that your mother called today. She told me to tell you she’s praying for us.”

  * * *

  —

  Daniel had been a late starter, ten years old when he first took a cello lesson, but he still couldn’t remember why he’d started. His mother told the story that he’d seen an orchestra on a PBS show she and his father were watching and had said, as though struck by a divine idea, “I want to do that.” This seemed unlikely to Daniel, not only because he’d never been inspired by an orchestra playing, but also because he didn’t recall his parents ever watching TV together. Sure, separately: his mother watching daytime soaps once his father had gone to the construction site, his father watching Westerns at night until he fell into a liquored sleep in the recliner chair. Daniel’s bedroom was between the living room and his parents’ bedroom, and the mumbled, distorted sounds of the television joined up with muted noises of his mother turning and turning in bed, the closest his parents ever were at night.

  It was around the same time, when he started playing cello, that his mother found Jesus. He knew this because he clearly remembered his mother telling him one night as she put him to bed that Jesus had come to her in a vision and that he’d let her know they wouldn’t have to worry about money anymore, and that she hoped one day Daniel would also accept Jesus into his heart. He had gone to his cello lesson the next day and told his teacher, excitedly, that Jesus was waiting to be accepted by Daniel’s heart.

  “You could work on accepting these études into your heart,” his teacher said, with a stern look and a slight frown.

 
Daniel felt embarrassed that he’d been so excited about Jesus, especially as his teacher’s only scholarship student, already at a disadvantage. And now Jesus. It was the last time he let himself be excited by something he couldn’t see or hear or touch.

  After her vision, his mother was distinctly different. Everything good that happened seemed to be extra good for her, because it was evidence of God. She made Daniel attend church with her on Sundays until he joined an orchestra that rehearsed at the same time. His parents continued to fight about money, as his mother poured what Daniel’s father called his “sweat-cured money” into the church collection plate. But Daniel’s mother seemed less bothered by the fighting, calm in her conviction.

  She said of Daniel’s cello playing, “What a gift God has given you,” and he thought it strange she didn’t say what a gift Daniel was to her.

  Once at dinner (hamburger meat mixed into box macaroni and cheese), he asked why Jesus hadn’t come to help them pay his private lesson bill on time, and his mother reached over and held her hand out as if to slap him, but instead slapped her hand down on the plastic table, shuddering the glasses and sending the silverware skittering across the surface.

  “That’s an act of grace right there,” his father had said.

  Daniel didn’t like thinking of his talent as being given to him. He worked hard and studiously, even when the other orchestra players found out that his tuition had been waived. His father begrudgingly worked off the lesson payments they couldn’t make, with handiwork around his teacher’s home. His father didn’t like things that reminded him of his status in life, and trading his meager construction skills for his younger son’s lessons in something sissy like the cello was doubly embarrassing.

  Daniel’s older brother, Peter, was out of the house by the time Jesus entered it, and Peter quickly surpassed their father, becoming a managing contractor in Dallas with his own rational, law-abiding, middle-class family. They were the normal kind of churchgoers, not rabid like his mother. At least when Peter came home, his father had someone to talk to.

  As an adult, Daniel understood his mother’s conversion to evangelical Christianity as simply the only thing big enough and mysterious enough to fill the vacuum left by the absolute failure of her marriage and life. But as a child, he’d been deeply unsettled by it, how his mother could go from being unexcitable one day to being thoroughly and eternally pleased by things, and pleased by her pleased-ness. She became more zealous in her faith as she aged. He supposed that as her children grew up, the hole got bigger, and her faith expanded to fill it. Undeterred by worry for her, Daniel moved out of their house when he went to Rice University, to a vermin-infested apartment near campus. Though his school was only a twenty-minute drive from his parents’ house, it felt like a whole universe away. He’d chosen Rice so he could keep studying with his teacher, who was kind of famous in classical music circles. The school’s music department was renowned, and he fit in, and his days were finally filled only with music.

  When Daniel went home for Sunday dinners, his mother made the best pot roast and meatloaf and pasta salad. His father tended to his drinking, named it a hobby when Peter gave him a beer-brewing kit for Christmas. He developed a back problem and a kidney problem and a prostate problem. He was yellowing and his mother was thriving.

  What Daniel wouldn’t admit was that he wanted to prove his mother wrong. He wanted to see her recognize a crack in her faith, that it wasn’t a salve for life’s problems. He wanted to show her that you could rise above your situation without the help of Jesus. He wanted to show her that it wasn’t miracles that made people amazing, but hard work. He thought maybe he stayed in Houston so long after graduation, working in the music department and continuing to take lessons, because, in addition to being unable to abandon his parents as Peter had done, he was waiting for a way to prove his mother wrong. His mother held fast, and Daniel’s life continued to be neither particularly blessed nor unblessed. He was a good player, his teacher repeatedly told him he had promise (promise, like a curse: You’re good but you could be great), and the best years of his twenties slipped right through his fingers. He spent year after year filing music for the school during the day, taking lessons at night, playing gigs on weekends, and feeling increasingly insecure about his ascending age—until finally, in a fit that twisted one defiance into another, he decided to go somewhere else, try something else. He was too old to cut it as a solo artist, had spent too much time obsessively honing skill and not enough honing flair. But he could still try to make it as a chamber musician.

  Before he left for San Francisco, he took his parents out to dinner at a sushi restaurant in Rice Village he knew they wouldn’t like.

  “Ma,” he said, using a name for her he hadn’t used since high school. “I don’t think I’m ever going to become a Christian.”

  His father raised his eyebrows and stopped chewing, ordered a sake.

  His mother, unfazed, used the diminutive: “Danny, I wish you would. You would be so much happier.”

  “I’m happy,” he said. “And anyway, happy’s not the whole point.”

  Her smile was placid. “All right, honey.”

  “What’s the point, then?” his father asked, suddenly interested.

  “Free is the point.”

  His parents stared at him blankly. “What do you want to be free from?” his mother asked.

  Daniel couldn’t say. He could say, actually: Free from you. Free from a belief system that says, paradoxically, that you can do anything you pray for and also have a predetermined destiny. Free from this sweltering non-city city and mid-level expectations and the dingy plywood walls built by their economic mistakes.

  “Success is also the point,” Daniel said. “You get one with the other.”

  He wasn’t sure which came first, and no one asked.

  “Perhaps you do,” she said. “But you’re not really experiencing life if you’re doing that. You’re not in the marrow of it.”

  He had never heard his mother say “marrow” before. Where had she learned to talk this way? Church, he guessed.

  “Sure I am,” he said.

  But as they ate and talked of other things, he began to feel sick in the pit of his stomach. The eel, he thought, but later that night, lying in his dismantled bedroom among boxes of records and sheet music, he let the feeling that his mother was right sneak through a fissure in his defiant constitution. He thought of all the good things that had happened to him—his talent that he slowly perfected, his girlfriends whom he had learned to love to varying degrees, his decent looks and crystalline health record—but as he considered them, he cast himself simply as an excellent witness, a bemused journalist taking notes on his life, jotting everything down, trying to make it add up.

  So when his mother said she prayed for him, which she did at the end of every phone conversation, he experienced a surge of anger. She thought she was freer than him, and so did he.

  * * *

  —

  Daniel and Lindsay walked home from dinner, all the way uptown, holding hands and sweating in the dark heat (At least we’re saving cab money, Daniel thought). Their hands were exactly the same amount of hot. It was like holding the inside of someone’s hand, the blood and veins, where all the happiness and sorrow journeyed around. He was a little drunk, she a little more drunk. Tomorrow he’d sleep off his hangover and spend all day practicing, he decided.

  They walked straight up Ninth Avenue for what seemed like forever. They were miles from home.

  “Didn’t you think New York would be different than it actually is?” he asked when they crossed into Midtown from Chelsea, the streets suddenly vacant and unlit.

  “Hmm,” Lindsay said. “I don’t know. What do you mean? It’s pretty great.”

  “I don’t know, just maybe that it would be more . . . exciting. Or something. To live here. But you move here, and then you’re ju
st here. It’s just where you live.”

  Lindsay squeezed his hand. “I think you’re just in a slump,” she said.

  Lindsay was six years younger than him, unburdened yet by squandered time. If he was being honest, it had become clear to him that they wouldn’t be together forever. Did she know that? He took it as a bad sign that he couldn’t tell.

  “What, I’m taking a bath?” Daniel said.

  “Excuse me?” Lindsay said.

  “Never mind.”

  “I think your slump is why we’ve been fighting. Why you said that thing last night,” she said.

  Now was his chance. “What? What thing did I say?”

  “You know—about Brit.”

  “What did I say about Brit?”

  “Are you on drugs?”

  “I think you think that I think about Brit way more than I do.”

  “Well, you spend a good chunk of time with her.”

  “Well, I have to,” he said, but he didn’t like how it sounded. He did have to, but he also wanted to. On some molecular level, the group was just drawn to each other.

  “Still. What you said, unnecessary.”

  “What was it? Lindsay?”

  She let his hand go. Her youth was sometimes painful, not in a way where Daniel judged her for being young, but in a way that inspired a vital wish in him. To be as young to the core as Lindsay was. Her mercurial nature hummed with endless possibility. It was easy to mistake for confidence. She was nothing like him.

  “You said that Brit never made you talk anything out, not like me. You used to like arguing things with me. You used to get off on that.”

  “No, I think I said that what I liked about the quartet nowadays is that we don’t have to talk most things out. We kind of just play it out.”

  Lindsay shook her head, her light brown hair falling all over her bare shoulder. “No. You said Brit.”