The Ensemble Read online

  If she called now, there would be no way Catherine could make it from Los Angeles, but Jana would at least have told her. Would not have to feel guilt about that.

  She dialed the number the way she’d finished the food, robotically, without knowing where the muscle movement was originating from.

  A man answered, of course.

  “Ray?” Jana said.

  “Who?”

  “Who is this?”

  “Who is this?”

  “This is Jana. Is this Ray?”

  “This is Carl. Are you calling for Ray?”

  “For Catherine. Is she home?”

  Jana heard a hand muffle the speaker, but he still yelled loud enough for Jana to pull the phone from her ear. “Katie! Janet’s on the phone for you!”

  Jana held her breath until her mother’s voice came on the phone, a whole half-octave higher than she normally spoke.

  “Janet?”

  “It’s Jana.”

  “Jana! Carl, it’s Jana, not Janet. Oh, honey, so glad you called. I couldn’t find your number, and Carl said he was going to look you up, but I didn’t know if you lived in San Francisco or some other town, and maybe you aren’t even listed, so we couldn’t find you.”

  “That’s okay. Hey, I’m just calling to say I’m competing in a big thing this week.” Jana heard her own voice quaver. She closed her eyes. This was a bad idea.

  “That’s great, honey. Can I read about it? Will it be televised? Or on the radio?”

  Her mother didn’t understand how any of it worked. It was some kind of miracle that Jana had ended up a classical violinist: a chance meeting with Dmitri at the LA Phil on a school trip, hundreds of hours wearing a stupid paper hat at In-N-Out Burger to pay for the violin, and a nearly crazed desire to enmesh herself in something foreign to her mother.

  “No. It’s not that big a deal,” Jana said.

  “If it’s no big deal, then why’d you call me? Sure it’s a big deal. Did I tell you that I got a callback for this PacBell commercial? My agent thinks I’ll get it.”

  Jana resisted the urge to say, No, when would you have told me that, we haven’t spoken in two years. Instead, she said, “That’s great. Who’s Carl?”

  “Carl lives with me now.”

  “What happened to Ray?”

  “Ray?” Catherine laughed. “Oh, baby girl, that was ages ago. I can’t believe you remember that.”

  Tears sprang meanly to Jana’s eyes. She wasn’t surprised at any of it, and her lack of surprise was what saddened her. She blinked.

  “I’ll send you a program. I have to go, Catherine.”

  “Yes, send me a program. I’ll send you a copy of the commercial. If I get it.”

  “You’ll get it,” Jana said.

  “Thanks. You too, honey.”

  She hung up without saying goodbye, and continued to stand at her sink, looking out the window for she didn’t know how long. What did Catherine think Jana was going to get? She made a promise not to reach out to her again, and felt glad in her stubbornness.

  She could have said, I fucked a famous violinist so we’d win a major competition, and her mother would have understood. With that thought, it wasn’t shame or sadness that overcame Jana but anger that she had let herself be like her mother for a moment—let herself believe, foolishly, in the invisible, in the dreamy possibility of magic instead of the actual pursuit of greatness.

  At some point, the sunlight in the square of window began to dip, and that was how Jana knew it was time to dress, pack, and rush to catch her—their—flight to Esterhazy.

  BRIT

  Violin II

  After they ended their last rehearsal before leaving for Canada, Daniel walked off the cold stage without saying goodbye. Brit turned just in time to see his cello case on his back bouncing behind him as he disappeared into the unlighted hall. Henry, always aware of the subtle changes in other people’s emotions and totally unable to talk explicitly about them, walked over to her and made a joke, something about the difference between Irish fiddlers and violists. Brit didn’t exactly hear it, and laughed only to make him feel like he had indeed made her feel better. Being that attuned to each other’s inner emotional lives was the sometimes unfortunate side effect of playing music together.

  Brit blamed her parents. They’d been amateur musicians themselves, her mother a cellist and her father a trumpeter. They had other jobs, careers, even, but they always made time to play in the shitty community orchestra where Brit grew up in Washington. They hadn’t been great players, but they were decent, and what’s more, they loved it. When it became clear early on that Brit would be a good violinist at the very least, they encouraged her to pursue it, set her up with too-expensive lessons, shuttled her from orchestra rehearsal to orchestra rehearsal. After they both died, Brit thought maybe she’d quit. It wasn’t too late to use her B.A. in English (she’d double-majored in music). She knew someone from college in New York hiring consultants—he wore heavy, fancy overcoats and said she’d be a “valuable advocate for the brand.” But at her mother’s funeral, a small affair with no one left to plan it but Brit, her mother’s friends hugged her too tightly and said how proud her mother had been of her musical career. Brit couldn’t tell them the truth, that without her parents pushing her along, she didn’t know how far she’d make it.

  But it wasn’t just the music Brit blamed her parents for. It was this fairy-tale idea she had about love. After her father died, her mother was not with another man—never even mentioned another man—and some months before her quiet death it seemed to Brit that her mother had resigned herself to the idea that life without her father wasn’t really a life after all. Brit’s friends who were the children of divorce bemoaned their inability to commit, their fear of failure, but Brit couldn’t conceive of love as anything but pure, lifelong, transformative, irrational, outside of any orderly system. And now, she supposed, ultimately disappointing. She had become melancholy without noticing, until one day she realized she couldn’t remember the last time she’d been happy, the last time she’d been unworried about finding love or sinking into a despair that seemed like a churning storm always at bay.

  Every man she’d loved—and there hadn’t been that many—she’d loved blindly. Leif, in college, who whisked in and out of their relationship with such grace and speed she barely noticed it, who left her after her father’s diagnosis, literally walking backward out of her dorm room, shrugging in apology. Julian, in her senior year, the year her father died, had been a snake, leather-jacketed and sulky, curling around her grief and then, when life demanded she come out of it, had slithered away. Jon, the line cook, who said he was philosophical evidence that it was possible to love two women at once (Brit, the second and lesser love; Brit, sad enough and worn-out enough by her sadness to settle for that silver tier). There had been men she’d loved who’d never even considered loving her, who never touched her, who listened intently as she talked about her dead father, before asking if she wanted cereal for dinner, if she knew how to iron (how did one not know how to iron?), and did she want to hear about their own tragic love lives.

  And when her mother died, she resigned herself to occupying the two ends of a wild oscillation she’d inherited from her parents’ lives and then their deaths: the raw, hungry desire to experience an inexplicable love, and the melancholic knowledge that she might never get to.

  No wonder Daniel thought her brand of living and loving dangerous, risky. It was full of awful turns and gaping holes. Even Brit didn’t want to say her history belonged to her. Daniel liked to say there was order to the suffering. He needed order because if there was order to the world, he could master it. He could ascend. He studied scores obsessively, with highlighters and different-colored pencils, marking patterns and changes in voice, looking for the logical order in the music. If he could have charted love onto a graph, he would have. Grief is
evolutionarily determined, he would say. Falling in love is chemical, he would say. Staying in love is a choice, he would say. Love is expensive, he would say.

  Their competing philosophies had seemed quaint until the other night, over the pasta, when it became clear to Brit that Daniel’s wasn’t a philosophy, but a survival tactic. He’d worked so hard his entire life, honed the obsessive studying and observing and concluding, because there was no one and no money to buoy him. How difficult for him to be next to Henry, Brit thought, rich and prodigious and shiny-haired Henry. But how difficult for Brit, too, to see Daniel’s own richness—in his hard work, his intelligence, his desire—and to be held away from it.

  So Brit felt the pain of Daniel’s absence doubly, first as an experience of rejection, and second as loneliness inside that rejection. There was no one to share the pain with, not Jana and Henry, who didn’t particularly deal in or ever dwell on romantic failures, and certainly not Daniel. She could not make sense of the fact that she could have feelings for someone—even love Daniel, had she said that aloud? Was it true?—and he could not feel the same way for her. Where was the order in that?

  Back at her apartment after the rehearsal, she cleaned. She cleaned her violin, her rugs, her shower tiles. She wanted to go to the competition with a spotless apartment. She watched with satisfaction as the patchy mold disappeared and the coffee rings on the counter flaked off. She thought of Jana as she did this, feeling physically productive, tangibly accomplished. This was something Jana could relate to and Brit felt a sudden urge to call her, to get something to eat with her, to talk not about boys or the competition but just music, how Jana got to be so good, what had made her want to play in the first place. But Jana was closer to Henry, and closed off to Brit in general, to people in general. It made sense, Brit reasoned. People could disappoint you, fail you in lots of ways. She wished for the entire duration of cleaning the bathroom that she could be more like Jana, whose hopes rested safely in career aspirations that were ambitious but possible, and not at all emotionally risky. Then again, Jana seemed perpetually afraid the rest of them would disappoint her at any moment, and Daniel afraid he would disappoint himself.

  She finished cleaning much earlier than anticipated, and sat on her lone couch in the living room that was also her bedroom, and felt—there was no other word for it—sorrow.

  She remained in that state for another hour, like a minnow caught in a suddenly vicious eddy, until it was time to go to the airport.

  * * *

  —

  Though it was becoming harder and harder to recall, Brit’s childhood had been happy. She’d grown up on an island off the coast of northern Washington—to get there, you had to take a ferry from an Indian reservation outside Bellingham, the last real town before Canada—a nine-mile patch of land on the tip of the sound before it spilled into Vancouver, a place where evergreens lined the roads and the shore was audible from all the houses, breaking through the dense, wet forests that towered over them. There was an elementary school and a middle school on the island, where her parents taught, the classrooms mostly full of kids from the tribe that had originally inhabited the island, and most of those kids didn’t make it over to the high school on the mainland with Brit.

  Before high school, she hardly ever boarded the ferry except to attend her parents’ concerts in Bellingham, or for an occasional trip to Seattle, instead preferring to follow or tear trails through the woods and up to the island’s peaks. She would perch on a rock on the highest peak with lunch or a book and take in her private panorama: the silky water that seemed to effervesce with sunlight, the rest of the San Juan Islands peeking out like ancient mossy creatures surfacing, the long tip of her island petering off into rocks and beach and glinting fish. Summers, Brit saw orcas and dolphins chase each other in the far distance, squinted her way toward Canada, spied the richer residents’ catamarans, the tourist dive boats, the whale-watching ferries. In the winter, when no tourists came, she and her father collected rain gear and made forts under tree cover, spending one night, maybe two if it wasn’t so rainy, catching and releasing frogs, playing cards, tramping through familiar territory now sodden and sinking, like a whole new island. There were the gusts through the trees and the kissing of the water on docks and the always light rain on the roof and the bald eagles’ long, zipping calls and even the slow slurps of the neon slugs in the early morning.

  The whole island was encased in the quietude of its habitat.

  That is why, Brit supposed, her parents chose that place to live, so their house could be filled with music instead. Brit’s mother played the cello decently enough, though she never progressed past the sonatas of being a music minor at Reed. Brit had a violin in her hand before she had a name for it, and knew how to play it before she knew how to write, and her earliest memories were of playing duets with her mother, her mother’s childlike delight at having a stringed partner once again. But Brit’s father was a better trumpeter than her mother was a cellist, loud and bright, too good for the community orchestra. Every other year the conductor pulled him out to play or replay a trumpet concerto (there weren’t that many), and the tacky smell of a brass mouthpiece always brought to Brit’s mind her father at her bedside, lips on her forehead, pressing play on the Mozart for Kids cassette she liked to fall asleep to. Their old house, a small woodstove in the center responsible for heating it in the winter, brimmed with music. Though it was just the three of them, in their music the house contained the sounds of a much larger family, a philharmonic of children and holidays and schemes.

  And then Brit’s musical ability surpassed her mother’s, and then her father’s, and it wouldn’t be entirely wrong to say that something tectonic shifted in her life when she started to board the ferry not just for high school but to go into Bellingham for lessons, and then Seattle to study with the symphony’s concertmaster. Brit’s parents were never anything less than happy that she’d shown remarkable talent and precision in the violin, gladly forking over their teachers’ salaries for lessons and a better instrument and summer music camps, even when Brit no longer played with them. She didn’t have the time. The last ferry to the island was at ten p.m. on weekdays, and sometimes she wouldn’t make it back from the city in time and would instead crash with a friend and wearily take herself to school the next morning. When she did make it back to the house on the island, it was always dark: the dark of the trees velvety against the dark of the sky, the dark of the house around the smoldering remnants in the woodstove, something shivering up through her in the sudden immersion into the island’s constant sonic ecosystem. In the mornings, when the ferry groaned into the dock at the mainland reservation, the sounds of cars and wheezing bus brakes and the nearby playgrounds filtered back into her as though filling empty spaces in her bloodstream.

  Which is why, Brit supposed, she went as far away for college as she did. Indiana’s music program was highly regarded, and she didn’t want to miss out on a regular college experience by committing to a conservatory. And for a while, she was a regular girl with a singular talent, awkward and acting out in Bloomington. When she was there she missed the island and when she was home for the breaks she missed Indiana, and things felt balanced.

  But then her father, never a smoker, got lung cancer, and it ate him up inside in the space of six months, and he was dead just before she graduated. She felt like a piece of her broke off then and drifted out to sea, though she wouldn’t understand it that way for years, and she stagnated in Bloomington for a while, waiting tables and teaching little kids violin, and that was why she took the spot in the program in San Francisco, to be closer to her mother, who, in spirit at least, whittled away almost as fast as her father.

  Now Brit would say that in those two years between her father’s death and her mother’s death she walked around lopsided, but she wouldn’t truly feel it until her mother passed away in her sleep. The phone call delivering the news stole all the breath out of B
rit like a cold wind, so that she actually dropped to the kitchen floor, gasping, the receiver clanking down with her. Ever since, Brit felt like she couldn’t get that air back, not all of it anyway. And in a way, this new grief balanced out the other grief that had already broken off a part of her, and she became resigned to their muting implications. She was lesser. On the island, after her mother’s funeral, she packed up the house and the instruments and made a fire in the woodstove and lay dimly on a cot on the floor, the primitive quiet of the place seeping into the emptiness where sleep should have come, the idyll of a gibbous moon (you noticed the phases of the moon only on islands) passing briefly through the window and just as quickly vacated.

  Once back in San Francisco, she met Jana, who invited her to read quartet music one afternoon with her friends, Henry and Daniel. There was something stark in Jana that drew Brit magnetically, and made her say yes. Something tender in Henry. Something challenging in Daniel. Something wild to chase when they practiced. And what did they find in her? What was she to them? In the ensemble: proficient, subordinate, pianississimo, the smallest sound you could make, the only kind of sound that recalls its very absence.

  * * *

  —

  On the plane to Canada, the seat between Brit and Daniel was occupied by the cello, his the only instrument requiring its own ticket. His black plastic case was beat up, and the remnants of a few torn-off stickers scratched Brit’s arm when he leaned over to buckle his seatbelt. She was thankful for the object between them. They didn’t look at each other the entire long flight to the mountain town, though she’d listened in as he joked with Jana at the newsstand in the airport. They’d riffed for a little bit on an inside joke Brit hadn’t understood, and she nearly burst into tears standing behind them. It had been a rough week or so without Daniel’s companionship, but that he’d maintained his connections with Jana and Henry stung.