The Ensemble Page 7

  It wasn’t as though they didn’t speak. They did. It was impossible not to. But they no longer ate dinners alone, or walked each other to the BART station, and she hadn’t been to his place in Oakland since that night she’d walked away, though they’d seen each other every day at least once. Daniel could be friendly, sometimes overly so, and the friendlier he got, the more she withdrew. It reminded her too much of how they’d been, and also rattled false. When they rehearsed, however, he was irritated and distanced, and not just from her. He seemed frustrated, but she wasn’t sure at what, exactly. She’d had to ignore it. She’d devoted her energy to preparing for the competition. Seemingly, they all had. Though Jana had mentioned a few times that Brit and Daniel seemed odd, she’d taken her questioning no further. Brit spent her free time trying to forget what it was like to have his attention on her only, and sent small prayers into the universe that she wouldn’t have to see him give himself to anyone else, at least not too soon.

  Which was why when, after the shuttle to the lodge, in the middle of unpacking her bags in a musty room, she was shocked to open her door and see Daniel standing there.

  He looked like a small animal, hopeful and cheery but with a layer of desperation underneath. His hair stuck up at awkward angles. He didn’t like to fly, and the flight had been stuffy and uncomfortable.

  “Hey,” he said. “Are you hungry? They’re saying it might snow, maybe just flurries.”

  Brit was never going to say no to him. They wandered down the touristy main street in jackets ill-suited to a Canadian spring, especially one that carried the possibility of snow, and because it was dark or cold or very late, or because they tucked their chins into their chests and looked at the sidewalk, they ended up at the cheesiest, most touristy pub in the entire ski town, all wood and brass with rigid bench booths and overpriced, dull food. But neither of them suggested going anywhere else.

  “Bangers and mash?” Daniel said, pointing at the plastic menu.

  There was too much brimming at Brit’s lips, things she wanted to say. She looked at Daniel dumbly perusing the menu and felt it wasn’t the time or place, and also that the time and place were rapidly receding from her, that strange sense of vertigo you get when a wave you’ve let wash over your feet rushes back into the ocean.

  He seemed to be in a good mood and ordered the bangers and mash. He made jokes at Henry’s expense, jokes he and Brit had made privately, weeks ago, as if trying to conjure the same invisible, romantic mist that had hovered between them then. He looked her straight in the eye. Maybe it was the change of scenery, she thought, maybe it had changed something elemental inside him. This place, after all, was a little pricey, very unlike Daniel and his tight budget, and he’d gone along with that. Maybe it was the high stakes and the near possibility of winning that energized him. Maybe it was her. The place she’d worked to close off from him bloomed when he smiled at her.

  “If we get food poisoning during the performance, I’m blaming you,” she said, tucking the plastic menu between salt and pepper shakers shaped like moose.

  “If that happens, we’ll be dead by Jana’s hand before we have time to blame anyone,” he said.

  “You know, we poke at Jana so much for wanting this so badly, but I think the rest of us do just as much, don’t you? It’s like one of those things you didn’t even know you wanted until it’s so close.”

  “Nah,” Daniel said. “I wanted this. I just don’t want it in such a bossy way.”

  “Ha,” Brit said. “I might disagree with that, but all right.”

  “Do you?”

  “Do I what?”

  “Want it.”

  She paused. “Yes, of course I do.”

  They were so close to the thing they wanted—needed—for the next stage of their career, and if they got it, so many other things seemed possible. If they got it, what was to stop them from getting anything else?

  “Not just the competition, I mean,” he said.

  “Then what? What else is there to want?” Brit asked.

  “This. The quartet.”

  She stared at him. “Well, sure. That’s—that’s the whole point. Of all of this. That’s the reason . . . the reason why—”

  “—we’re here. Yeah, I know, but I mean, sometimes you just get caught up in some idea.”

  Daniel was interrupted by the waiter, who carefully placed a huge plate in front of him and a moderately sized plate in front of her. Steam rose into his face. After the waiter left, Daniel whispered, “Wait, what are bangers again?”

  “Sausage,” Brit said. “What did you think it was?” Sometimes, the things Daniel didn’t know—things that couldn’t be learned by books or in school—astonished her. He seemed, on the one hand, so worldly, with a soft spot for Greek mythology and philosophy, an encyclopedic knowledge of music history and theory, but on the other, so inexperienced, so shut off from the rest of the world. From things like food. Eating, to Daniel, was probably just an act of survival.

  He shrugged. “I guess I didn’t think about what it was.”

  She laughed. “Okay. Well, try it.”

  They ate slowly, leisurely, as though they were old lovers on a date, enjoying the novelty of it again. Neither looked at a watch or a clock. This wasn’t one of Daniel’s moments of feigned fondness. This was the real thing. As he neared the end of his meal, Brit felt bolstered by the dark restaurant and his easy laugh, and she leaned over toward him.

  “What I was saying before,” Brit said. “About wanting it. I think you must know.”

  “Must know what?” he said, scraping his plate of potatoes.

  “That I want this, at the expense of this—” She waved her hand in the space between them. “The quartet is more important. Otherwise . . .” She trailed off and placed her hand on his. “I do miss you.”

  He coughed and a little bit of potato spat out onto the table. He didn’t see it, but she did. “Miss me? We spend all our time together.”

  She withdrew her hand from his, which had remained steely beneath her touch. He continued to chew, staring at her, and she felt herself go red, and wished she’d said nothing at all. She’d almost been there—over this—hours and days spent diminishing a thing that never even was, and here she’d walked backward. Of course he wasn’t thinking about that. He wasn’t ever thinking about anything other than how to be better.

  And they should have left it there. He should have. Made nothing more of it, let it be an aberrant bubble in the otherwise seamless interpersonal weave of their strange little family. But, bound by stubbornness, by a drive to get it right, Brit assumed, he went on.

  “I want you to know, if we weren’t in the quartet—even if we weren’t in the quartet”—he stuttered like a bird was caught in his throat—“I wouldn’t be with you.”

  She felt a weight move through her, like a stone slowly sinking in her chest, stomach, hips, moving cruelly through the viscosity. She felt so heavy and full with this weight that it actually seemed like she might get stuck to the tacky floor of this nowhere pub and some official would have to peel her off, teach her to stand again, teach her about gravity, that nonsensical logic of bodies. It was the force of Daniel saying that thing—that thing one says that one cannot take back, after which nothing is the same. Here their story would take a sharp turn and change forever, she understood. He had swerved, and she had no choice but to swerve with him.

  “I mean,” he said. “I mean that you can’t use the quartet as an excuse. We can’t. That’ll poison the whole thing. We just have to look at this, you know, objectively.”

  She nodded but she wasn’t listening. How many times could she be made a fool of? This would be the last, she swore. She made a big deal of her meatloaf—she never knew she could make up so many things to say about meatloaf—and then said she was too full for dessert, but all the while, she felt the viscous parts of her being pushed out
through her feet—she was leaving herself, she was all stone now. In the end, he did complain about the bill, and they split it precisely. She begged off to sleep, blaming jet lag. In the old rooms in the old hotel, everyone waited for a late snow that did not, in fact, arrive—though if it had, Brit doubted she would have felt it. She felt now completely outside herself, which is the most lonely you can feel, as it is impossible to name, impossible to point to, except that you can point to yourself, lying there on the bed, say: Look at her, who is she?

  * * *

  —

  In this way, the concert happened without any of them being there at all, really. If the “Serioso” was also about love, Brit tried to remember the vast swath of her life when she didn’t love Daniel, but while they were playing, it was impossible. His boyish face contorted uncontrollably, erotically. She wondered if he felt that way about her, too, watching her play, if anyone did. And she decided no, that wasn’t quite the way she played. Brit liked nuance, liked to be the supporting voice, the harmonic line you didn’t know you heard. But Daniel, as cellist, was a presence to be noticed. And like a grunting tennis pro, he couldn’t manage his face when he was really inside of the music, he wore his effort there, and so it went practically unconscious, and he slipped into some liminal area where desire met work. He squirmed in his seat, propped his right foot on its ball, twisted his nose so that his glasses would stay up, and that mouth. She’d never loved someone’s mouth before, hadn’t even really thought about the mouths of men, but here was Daniel’s, bow shaped or snarled by turns—how could it not be erotic? This was his submission, his participation in a disorderly beauty.

  So this was the way she’d be close to him. It was as good as any, possibly better, Brit thought. What civilian, what regular other woman could have this intimacy with him, could know his body this way? She’d take it.

  But another realization came over her, nearly in conjunction with the lovely one that preceded it: there would always be this distance. And here was the main theme of the “Serioso,” bursting out of their instruments in unison, an incredible and brave composition, but Brit had never felt more far away from it. This was it, all she would have of him, of any of them, just this collection of mechanics, a finely timed—well, finely enough—working together. The physical truth of it was shattering, him over there and her over here, and no matter how hard she tried, Beethoven would not join them together.

  Daniel was thinking of mechanics, too, though not in the same way. He was thinking that he’d chosen a career that should have been conquerable because the mechanics of it could be learned. And he’d learned so much, was so much older than the rest of them, and wanted it so bad, had nothing to fall back on—yet here he was, still sweating and struggling through the “Serioso.” No one worked as hard as him. But he saw now that was because they didn’t have to. Jana’s high, clear playing was curated to perfection, Brit played evenly and subtly, and Henry hadn’t made a single misstep, not even in rehearsal, in the entire time Daniel had known him. He became angry in such a way that—not for the first time in his life—he saw no way out of it.

  During the third movement, Henry watched Daniel fully settling into his anger, an anger that seemed greater than their unison minuet. Henry saw everything, but he did not react. Perhaps that was the real mistake that night, Henry not trying to do something to show Daniel that it was okay, because that was the moment where everything began to unravel. But what was there to do to temper Daniel’s anger? It ran as an undercurrent to the relentlessness and speed of this third movement, jumping note to note, cutting the edges more sharply, speeding up what was already a too-fast tempo set by Jana. But Henry didn’t do anything to stop it. He didn’t feel it was vital.

  Jana would later take the blame for starting the fourth movement a tad too fast, but she would also blame Brit for failing to take her cue to slow down in the rubato, and Henry for taking the speed as a chance to make a wild, embarrassing show of his supporting voice, and Daniel, whose sixteenths simply couldn’t keep up, whose fast sections came off messy, student-like. Why had she started it so terribly, though? The whole piece had been slowly building to this breakdown, in fact, and because she was leader, it was ultimately her fault.

  She had been, of all things, nervous. She was never nervous. It wasn’t part of her nature to be nervous. Confidence led her in all things, ever since she was a little girl, but she’d felt a sense she’d done something wrong hanging over her since before they took the stage. From the wings where she waited to go on, she caught sight of Fodorio in the third row, where the judges sat. He was dressed in all black, and his hair was in his eyes. She lifted her hand and held it up to catch his attention. When he looked at her, she began to smile, but his face did not change. Probably to an outsider it would have looked that way. It was that what registered in his face was recognizable only to her, and caused her shame. She wasn’t ashamed to have slept with him—that she would have done anyway—or even to have threatened or blackmailed him, or whatever one called it. She was ashamed to have asked for help, to have admitted to being in the position of needing help. And the way he looked at her had acknowledged only that: Oh, there you are, that person who needs help.

  When the quartet took the stage for the first round of performances—the round they would not make it past—all of them, each member, felt apart not just from one another, but from themselves.

  * * *

  —

  Word that they would not progress to the next round of performances, during which they would have played the much kinder Haydn, wouldn’t come until the morning, but no one needed a phone call to know it. They walked off stage to tepid applause and said nothing to each other. The only sounds in the greenroom were the clicking of the locks on their cases and the shuffling of music stuffed into pocket sleeves. The boys wordlessly took a car back to the lodge, but Jana and Brit walked. The night seemed cruelly cold now, much colder than May in San Francisco.

  What they didn’t say to each other: what next?

  In the large hallways of the lodge, Brit followed Jana back to her room, and when Jana unlocked the door and turned to find Brit behind her, she said the first thing she’d said to anyone since the performance: “Why are you still here?”

  “Let’s just have one drink,” Brit said. “Come on, you know you don’t want to be alone.”

  “No, you don’t,” Jana said, but held the door open behind her anyway.

  Brit thought for sure Jana would have a solution of some kind. That’s who she was. Solution girl. She always had a plan, and the plan always had multiple steps. This kind of failure wasn’t in the plan, but Jana was quick and determined. Brit wanted a drink, yes, and she also wanted to hear about Jana’s plan for their future.

  Brit opened the minibar and took out one of the tiny whiskeys. For Jana, she poured a small vodka over ice, a drink she’d seen her order at the bar they went to after rehearsals. When she handed it to Jana, Jana looked surprised that she knew her drink. But of course they all knew these small details. It was impossible not to after the hours of work and attention they’d extracted from each other. Brit sat on the floor, and Jana on her bed, legs crossed. No one opened the curtains or touched a remote or anything. They stared at the floor. Brit didn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry” was either incorrect or not enough.

  “Why are you looking at me like that?” Jana asked.

  “I’m not,” Brit said. “I mean, I’m looking at you, but not like anything.”

  “You guys always expect me to fix things.”

  “No we don’t,” Brit said. “Well, maybe Henry does.”

  “I tried to fix that tempo.”

  Brit wasn’t going to touch this line of thinking. It was useless and unproductive to go over what exactly had gone wrong, at least so soon afterward. In any case, they had all been there. They all knew.

  “At least our parents weren’t here to see it,” Bri
t said, and they both laughed. That was the sort of thing Jana would laugh at, something slightly morbid.

  “Thank the Lord,” Jana said, clasping her hands together in prayer.

  “I want to get so drunk I forget it happened,” Brit said.

  “But then you’ll have to remember all over again,” Jana said. “It’s the remembering that kills you, not the knowing.”

  “We came all the way out here. To do that.”

  Jana leaned down and clinked her glass against Brit’s whiskey bottle, which was empty. “Time for another.”

  They talked and worked through the minibar in the way Brit had imagined real college students did it, the kind of college kids who weren’t practicing four to five hours a day, who weren’t protecting their hands and fingers from minor injuries or cuts, who weren’t banking on a clear head to get them through the next day’s rehearsal, who weren’t choosing friends based on their ability to play, and losing them for similar reasons. She liked to watch Jana unwind, as it usually seemed like all of her was closely rotating a center pole in her body. As she drank more, that pole became elastic, and so did her laughter, her speech. Her face, cold when she was concentrating, became beautifully angular when she was animated; her full lips and sharp jawline, like a painting of a person from a different time. Brit lay down on the floor and stared at the ceiling.

  “Don’t take a bath,” Jana said, and they cracked up.

  It was an inside joke. They’d been coached once by Jacob Liedel, the aging emeritus director of the conservatory, who sat with his saggy skin and liver spots in a chair inexplicably on the other side of the room, and shouted at them the whole time. He barely let them get through a phrase before waving his hands, interrupting them, correcting them. Brit admired his old-school edge, but she knew Jana found it upsetting, and the louder he yelled, the more strained her bow arm became, until Jacob finally yelled, “Don’t take a bath!” and Jana stopped playing and said, “What?” Jacob repeated: “Don’t take a bath there. With that phrase.” None of them asked him what he meant, but he said it two, three more times during the coaching session; afterward, at dinner, the four of them sitting in a tired silence, Henry said, “What’s taking a bath mean?” and Jana and Brit laughed so hard they cried into their cheese fries and slid under the booth. Now and again they still said it to each other, with no consistency of context. To Daniel about his excessive foot tapping to count time: Don’t take a bath. To Jana, when she was obsessing over the tuning of her E string: Don’t take a bath.