The Ensemble Read online

  And just behind her sadness, this thought pulsed: She wanted Daniel, not only in a way he didn’t want her, but in a way he didn’t want to want anyone. And she wanted him to be different, to want to have a kind of love that trembles over the lid of a shared life, to have a hierarchy of wants of which money was not an essential part. The arpeggios died away. Starker was back to the descending scales, working his way toward the end of the first movement.

  “I like him for the Bach suites,” Daniel said, switching topics. “Because he’s no-nonsense. Starker. No frills. Not a romantic player, like Yo-Yo Ma. Not a messy one like Casals. Not a furious one like Du Pre—she always seems kind of angry. Starker is more simple. Good. Clear. I think that’s what Bach intended. Not all this interpretive bullshit. What do you think?”

  Daniel’s cello stood in its hard plastic case against the wall by his bed. She knew he allowed his mother to believe playing the cello was the path God had chosen for him. She knew his father didn’t care much for classical music. She knew his cello was cheap, and borrowed at that. She knew he would have to rent his tux for the performance, and that Jana and Henry would assume he owned it. She knew he would work a few more doubles at the bar this month to afford that rental. He grinned at her from his side of the table, no idea.

  Go away, Brit said to her sadness. She knew how it could come.

  “What do I think?” she repeated. “I think I prefer Du Pre.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Of course you do.”

  Brit saw then that Daniel’s articulation of their difference was his excuse not to fall in love. He was collecting evidence, always. She was ignoring it, always. She sighed. Really, she thought, they ought to have been able to predict this. She saw with sudden clarity the way he saw her. A pretty-enough girl across the table, the table in Counterpoint II or the fake dinner table here, now. A welcome distraction from the true goal of musical success—financial success. A girl who was not like him, not because her parents had died, but because of the money she had from their death.

  “I should be going,” Brit said when Starker completed the suite. “And I think—I wanted to say—we should stop this.”

  His face clouded for the briefest moment, then cleared. “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes. It’s too much, you know? With the competition coming up—”

  “No, you’re right. It’s too risky to mess with that.”

  “Too dangerous.”

  “Right, right.”

  She stared at her dirty plate next to his, the napkins and knives on the table and the bits of pasta sauce everywhere. She knew he wouldn’t properly clean up after this meal, and with their final rehearsal and then the concert, the dishes would crust in the sink for a week, at least. He was messy, this was a thing she knew about him—dust bunnies collected on her clothes when she was there, were carried back to her apartment—and as she stood up from the dinner’s wreckage, she said goodbye to that knowledge.

  There was no danger to Daniel’s life, no risk. And none in hers, either, but his lack was because he cut his life carefully around it. It was better that way, she supposed. Perhaps they had to save all that danger up for the stage. Perhaps it was dangerous enough just to be a person, alone.

  He put his hand on her back and took it away. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll walk you out.”

  There was an ease to letting go, she thought, especially if you never had anything to begin with. They walked down the close stairs of his shabby apartment building, smelling like their meal, the athletic fragrance of black pepper and pancetta, a smell that would for years bring reeling back a feeling of gut-sinking disappointment for Brit. The light was out in the lobby, as always. In the dark, before he pushed the heavy door open, she began to quietly cry. He didn’t notice until they were standing in the plain light of the streetlamp.

  “Hey, Brit,” he said, but didn’t reach out, his hands stuffed in his pants pockets.

  “I’m fine,” she said. Her chest was about to explode, her insides pounding like they were being impressed with a thousand tiny divots made by the back of a cello neck. She put her hand to her breastbone. There were no holes, no depressions: only herself.

  They were useless together. She just had to leave, get in her car, drive home across the bridge—why did she always have to come to his place in Oakland, anyway, and he never to hers?—go to sleep, wake, rehearse, do it again and again, and play the concert of her life at Esterhazy. Just get through that. Everything could be the same, and then after, if they won the competition, if they played well, it might even be better.

  She was being stupid, she thought. She shouldn’t even be thinking about children. She could barely afford her apartment, and she was young and in a secret relationship—not a relationship—with the cellist in her quartet. And yet—disappointment, possibility snuffed out, never even lit. She pictured fingers snapping out a small flame over and over, and the hiccupping sound beat in her eardrums. It seemed like a microcosm of her entire life, the snapping, the snuffing, the resultant darkness.

  She’d take a trip to New York this summer, Brit decided, see a friend who played with the Met. After the win at Esterhazy. Spend her money that Daniel so resented. Catch a few recitals at Carnegie Hall and lose herself in Patelson’s music shop across the street for a few hours each afternoon, fill an extra roller bag with music, and come back to San Francisco like nothing had ever happened. She always liked visiting that musty music store after the storied concert hall; it reminded her that what she was participating in was an arc, bigger than she was, older than she’d ever be. Yes, she decided, on the short walk to her car, Daniel cautiously following behind her, I’ll do that.

  When she got in her car, there he was, still Daniel, standing half in the shadow of the streetlamp, hands buried in his puffy coat, shorter than he seemed close up. Brit saw the slightly hooked nose she noticed only in profile, the scruff on his chin like a mistake, his small dark eyes, the inscrutable mouth that twisted up when he was turned on, charmed, or being clever. But always most distinctive was his irregular wingspan, disproportionate to his height, which allowed him unlimited and unfair range down the neck of his cello: broad shoulders, arms that drooped out of his sleeves, almost in apology, never actually in apology.

  Tonight his face looked like a flat beach, a blank cake, unfinished.

  But Brit felt an old warmth at the sight of him. She had become the one looking now, always looking at him, watching for a sign, a smirk, a wink, a slight lean toward her when she felt sad, or waiting for a half-measure breath on her neck before he kissed her, some physical representation of the way he could give himself to her. But he never changed. I was watching you watch me, she should have said back. Would it have made a difference? And now, still, watching you not see me.

  She drove away. She didn’t remember the warmth in the morning exactly, just the feeling that something had slipped through her hands. The lurking voice: you don’t want Daniel, you just want someone. The answer: no one wants you, not even Daniel. She woke up and practiced in the early gray morning until that feeling, too, slipped away.

  JANA

  Violin I

  She feared they were already too old. That they’d wasted too much time getting here, to the start of their career, and that now it was too late. It had taken Jana a while to figure out, and to accept, that her path wasn’t toward a solo career, but rather this webbed, collaborative endeavor. It had taken all of them a while, she supposed. And it almost hadn’t happened.

  Jana and Henry met at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where they’d both been excellent soloists. Jana was drawn to Henry’s raw talent, and playing in a quartet with him was the closest she could get to the force of it. He’d been a bright, boundless light on campus, younger than everyone else, taller than everyone else, a better musician than everyone else, and eager to play anywhere and everywhere. He played with the confidence only prodigies had. She�
��d once witnessed him sight-read Stravinsky on violin while nearly blind drunk, and play it more flawlessly and beautifully than she ever could on a first go. The idea of failure had never gotten near him. He lived in a world without it. Jana loved that about him.

  She’d met prodigies before, but she’d never met anyone like Henry. He always said yes. Did he want to play one more? Did he really like ensemble work? Did he want to go out after? Did he want to write music? Did he want to conduct? Did he want to try this new viola, this new restaurant, this new drink? Jana didn’t know what it was that made someone so fearless. He was enthusiastically up for anything.

  Once, after they’d finished a night of playing with two other first-year players (neither as good as them) and began packing up, Henry asked Jana about her life before. He assumed their lives in music had been similar.

  “I used to be really jealous of my sister, Jackie,” he said. “She didn’t play anything, ever. She didn’t even want to. The only thing I hated was all the stuff I missed out on because of practicing and lessons twice a week, like, I don’t know, intramurals? I would have been good at soccer, I think. Jackie got to do all that. Who did you study with in California?”

  Jana said the name of the Russian violinist who’d taken pity on her when Catherine had arrived drunk to pick her up from lessons. He’d given her a deep discount on lesson fees, and even still she did office filing for him after school to pay the rest. A few times she had to go down to only two lessons a month, when it was all they could afford.

  “When I was really little,” Henry said, “my mom wouldn’t come to my recitals. Because it would make her so nervous she would sometimes throw up. For real.”

  Jana smiled and said nothing.

  He went on. “But now she doesn’t care that much. She’s seen me play so many times. She doesn’t come to my performances, but not because she’s nervous. Because she already knows how I play.”

  Jana couldn’t think of something similar to say. She struggled in the silence where she was supposed to respond. She finally said, “My mother’s never seen me play.”

  Henry’s face changed, lost some of its brightness.

  “She doesn’t really like classical music,” Jana said. “But also, she kind of only likes herself. And vodka. And I don’t know my father. So in a way, I guess it’s good. I had no one to impress in the audience but strangers. And myself.”

  Henry put his viola case down. He studied her with a worried look. “Well, I heard you,” he said. “Back in first year. You were good.” And he hugged her, his long arms around her stiff body. One thing she knew for sure about Henry was that his talent was only matched by his tenderness. He hugged with his whole body, as though he wasn’t afraid she wouldn’t hug back. He hugged without needing someone to hug him back. She did hug him back, eventually.

  So nothing bad had ever happened to him. That was it. That was what made someone unafraid.

  Henry’s peculiar absence of fear made him very popular with women, though Jana never thought of him sexually, romantically. She had no interest in being one of the girls (always older and less talented) he fell into bed with. What she wanted, instead, was for her playing to be associated with his playing, for his playing to scorch her and change her and better her. And while Henry’s popularity at conservatory was far and wide, it hadn’t translated into real friendship for him. There were the girls and there were the players, and no one offered themselves up to him in the middle ground. No one except Jana.

  While they both let the conservatory push them toward solo or orchestral careers, they privately built a friendship upon hours of playing chamber music together. The other players who rotated in and out of their groups saw it as an extracurricular activity, and always abandoned them for more promising paths. But Jana and Henry stayed a consistent pair. She knew a solo career was what you were supposed to want and what Henry had been primed for his entire life, but she also knew that both of them had always been more engaged and more creatively determined—and simply had more fun—playing in string quartets.

  One night during their last year, while they were playing late in a stuffy practice room, she brought it up. “What if we formed a quartet, like a real one?” she asked.

  Henry needed some convincing. How could they find one person they liked, let alone two, and where would they find them? Why couldn’t they just go on as they were, and keep playing together like this when they had time? Jana had prepared for these questions, and produced the application for the chamber music certificate at the San Francisco conservatory. It would be only two years, three at most, and they’d meet people there who wanted the same thing, she was sure of it.

  “Otherwise it won’t go on like this,” she said. “I know what will happen. You’ll be traveling or living abroad and you’ll be famous and busy forever. And you’ll forget about me.”

  That was when he’d decided. Jana saw it. She’d so rarely been vulnerable like that with him, with anyone. But it was the truth: she was afraid his career would eclipse their connection. And he hadn’t ever had anyone outside of his family who valued his companionship over his potential career.

  “Plus,” she said, “you’ll be lonely.”

  So they left behind the years they’d put in, and veered off in search of a quartet. They’d met Brit and Daniel almost immediately, both of whom had wasted their own time at regular colleges—Indiana University and Rice. So their start as a group was late. That was undeniable. For Henry, time wasn’t such a big deal. He was young. But for Jana, the official commitment to the quartet was the beginning of the churning worry inside her that she would run out of time before she was ever successful, that she needed to ascend faster and more fiercely than normal, at Henry-like speeds.

  That was what was on her mind the morning of their last rehearsal in San Francisco before the competition, instead of the sixteenths in Beethoven’s “Serioso,” which did need some attention, and suddenly she was anxious. She had the score in her lap and they were waiting for Henry to tune. He’d left his viola beneath a slightly open window in his apartment that morning, and the cold had contracted the strings and wood. He and Jana both had perfect pitch, so tuning could take forever to satisfy their testy ears. Daniel made no secret that he found this annoying and refused to sit for it, instead pacing the back of the stage. Jana knew he was just infuriated he didn’t have perfect pitch.

  They were due to fly to Canada that afternoon, with the first round of performances the next night. Four of the sixteen groups would be cut then, with three more rounds to go. Just focus on round one, Jana told herself. They would play the Beethoven, which had gone more than decently at the conservatory recital a week earlier, but in the time since had started to feel brittle.

  Now they were testing the sound on stage, as if it was going to matter. They’d already played on this stage during their recital, and Esterhazy was going to be on a different stage, thousands of miles away. And besides all that, if Jana had learned anything from relentless performing, it was that chamber music was made up of a hundred minute responses to even more minute changes in both the environment and each other’s bodies. Sometimes she was momentarily embarrassed at how well she knew Brit’s thin left hand or the elfin knobs of Daniel’s knees, perhaps better than she knew either of them.

  In any case, Henry’s scroll was propped on his knee, and his ear was turned close to the wood, and Jana was still worrying about their age. She and Brit were both twenty-four. Henry was newly twenty (an ambitious, antsy prodigy), and Daniel somewhere near thirty—he didn’t like to discuss his age. The groups winning the Esterhazy competition were getting younger each year, some still in conservatory. Nineteen-year-olds. And there they’d been, toiling away at a master’s certificate in chamber music, as if it mattered to anyone but their teachers, whom they were too old to have any longer.

  But she’d needed to study more, and they’d needed to find Brit and Danie
l. Still, Jana often thought of how it would have been so much easier if they’d all found each other earlier, if they’d all gone to conservatory together the first time around. What Jana really wanted wasn’t to have studied more, but to have grown more as a whole group. To grow faster, now. Or to somehow turn back time to five years ago and start growing together then. If they’d solidified their connection earlier, they might be more comfortable now with these big performances. This biggest performance.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Jana said.

  Brit looked up, her eyes alarmingly wide. She’d been reticent all morning, making barely any noise but for her own private tuning. Her face was colorless except for a suddenly noticeable splash of freckles across her pale cheeks, her long hair tied back in a bun. Jana was annoyed. They couldn’t afford to be lackluster.

  Brit snapped back, “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Tuned!” Henry announced, running a hand through his long hair. He beckoned to Daniel. “Tuned! Sorry, guys, forgot it was going to be cold this morning. It’s all good.”

  “Could you please get a haircut before the concert?” Jana said to Henry.

  “Why don’t you ask me five more times?” he said. “Call my mother and tell her to remind me?”

  Daniel took his place again, stabbed his endpin into the rockstop. Jana cleared her throat. They agreed to run through only the openings of every movement of all three pieces. Jana had always been a firm believer that you have one good performance of any given piece in you a day, a superstition handed down by her first teacher, the Russian. Their conservatory coach had decried this idea, saying that if you don’t have more than one good performance in you a day, you shouldn’t be a professional. He’d have made them rehearse everything all the way through until their fingers were raw, then tell them to go zone out for three hours before coming back to the hall. But Jana liked the mysterious quality of keeping a full run-through of a piece until they were really on stage. It was like keeping a bride from her groom until she walked down the aisle—the groom knew what she looked like, but the deprivation made her appearance more sacred.