The Ensemble Read online

  “So, what’s next is maybe a move,” Brit said. “I think we have to move.” She was answering a question no had asked out loud.

  Jana lay down on her bed. “New York?”

  Brit nodded. “No bathtubs there.”

  There was only one unsure element. Jana asked: “Do you think Henry will do that?”

  “You’d know better than I would,” Brit said. She knew Jana spent chaste nights with Henry, but she’d never asked her explicitly about it. Talking about boys wasn’t really something they did together. Though they were as ingrained in each other’s daily lives as significant others—even spilled over into that space—their conversations consisted of cues and crescendos and careers, not crushes. And Jana and Henry seemed more like siblings than anything else; Jana never moved or talked more freely than when she was around him, which is why this one-on-one Brit and Jana were having had been tinged with awkwardness before they started drinking. Brit realized they’d done something irritating, pairing off with Henry and Daniel as they had, girl to boy, girl to boy. Another reason to step away from Daniel, Brit thought. But toward what?

  And toward what for the quartet? They were now a quartet without a country, no flag of the conservatory or the competition to stand under. A life of hustling, of trying to get signed, of starving in New York and trying to make it in the classical world, which didn’t, at the moment, care that much for chamber musicians, at least not those who hadn’t won competitions, or even placed.

  “I think if we do it now,” Jana said, “he might. But that asshole might poach him.”

  “What asshole?”

  “Ferrari,” Jana said, and she got up, opened up her violin case, and snatched something stuck into the velvet lining. She held it out to Brit. It was a small girl with black hair and a few missing teeth, one of those school photos against a neon background. She smiled wildly at the camera, the way you do when you’re a kid.

  “Who’s this?” Brit asked.

  Jana shrugged and took it back from her. “I don’t know,” she said, and walked into the bathroom, where Brit saw her drop the picture in the toilet. She did not flush it.

  Jana came out to answer the knock on the door, which turned out to be Henry and Daniel, both of whom seemed fairly liquored up themselves. Henry was sweaty and Daniel swayed a bit. He was carrying something under a tin, as though from room service.

  “What are you guys doing here?” Brit asked.

  “We live here,” Henry said.

  “No you don’t,” Jana said.

  Daniel walked toward Brit, who sat up. Immediately the room swerved and the walls started a slow spin. She put a hand to her head.

  “I got you this,” he said, and lifted up the tin to reveal a multilayer vanilla cake that had fallen over, its ribbons of icing smeared all over the plate. “Oh, oops,” Daniel muttered, seeing the mess.

  She felt several things at once: First, she felt outrage. As though cake could make up for it, the dessert they’d never have. He probably thought he was being some kind of poet, doing this, but what he’d said, what he’d essentially said to her, was, I don’t want you, no matter what. The cake he spent his hard-earned money on was just for him, to make himself feel better, not for her to actually take anything from him, or for him to give anything of value. Second, she felt drunk. More drunk than she had planned on being, and certainly more drunk than she’d felt in a while. She felt like something was stuck in her lungs, and she was suddenly hot and nauseated, and wanted to both move urgently and never move again. And third, she felt touched, and a tenderness for Daniel, like a wound that had worked its way into the essential tissue in the center of her heart, one she couldn’t dig out if she tried the rest of her life. He was a person trying to be a great talent, flawed and self-hating, living in this perpetual state of suspended tragedy, though there was no real tragedy, and she felt sad for him, and saw also that this cake, this was what he could do.

  “Thank you,” Brit said, taking the plate into her hands. The only way to make a life with him in the quartet was to accept that she could not make a life with him privately. She saw now that if one thing was to continue, the other had to end. At that thought, a pang went through her chest, piercing her wish for his love. She would live above the pain. She would eat the cake.

  He smiled gratefully as she took it, and sat next to her as she ate, saying nothing. She wanted to know if he knew what she was doing, accepting his shortcomings, but not asking him was part of the deal. She put the fork and the plate down on the side table, and he inched closer to her. He smelled like rosin and beer. Their legs were touching, but the electricity of the connection was draining away. Here were his legs, and here were hers, simple parts of two bodies they’d come to know more intimately than anyone else’s, in more than one way.

  “I’m such a failure,” Daniel said in a whisper.

  It wasn’t exactly an apology. And what she said back to him wasn’t exactly the truth: “You could never be.”

  Some hours later, when they’d all drunk everything in both minibars and then some, when Brit leaned over the toilet and vomited onto the picture of the small girl, when whatever emotion had been lodged in her chest came up (along with vanilla cake), she finally cried. Jana knocked lightly on the door and pushed it open. She was holding a compress.

  “Henry made this for you,” Jana said, climbing into the empty bathtub next to Brit. They still wore their gowns, which were showing wear, Brit’s bunched up around her thighs, Jana’s wrinkly and sour with sweat. When Brit retched again, Jana reached over the rim of the tub and drew Brit’s hair into a low ponytail. She held it there, and Brit liked her cool hand and the compress resting on the back of her neck, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it. She just cried, and the tile edges around the toilet cut into her knees. Everything smelled like whiskey and rancid sugar.

  “If only you’d put your hair up like I said . . .” Jana said, and Brit cried harder. “Oh, don’t cry. Don’t cry. You’ll feel better soon.”

  Through the crack Jana left in the door, Brit saw Daniel and Henry open the curtains. They had found the classical music radio station and started blasting the Elgar cello concerto. Daniel was conducting at the window, playing Barenboim’s part (Brit was sure it was the Jacqueline du Pré version—she managed to whisper, “It’s du Pré,” to Jana), waving his hands at the black window, over the imagined city, the city of their very first failure. He was trying to show Henry something with his conducting—No, here is where the phrase begins, no, here. Her stomach roiled. She was the kind of ill where you regretted everything, where you made imaginary deals with anyone, any god, to feel differently. Du Pré was climbing the E-minor scale to the climax, sixteenth notes all the way up to sixth position on the A string, playing tenuto, slower and louder the higher she went, perhaps the most dramatic notated cadenza Brit had ever heard, and she saw Daniel conducting largamente, like a man, with authority, passion, despite his ridiculous eyeglasses, even though no one was following him. This was what he cared about, and he cared about it deeply. “No, here, here,” he said to Henry. “Just wait for it.”

  But they knew she was in the bathroom, sick, and Daniel dialed up the knob on the radio, looked at his reflection in the dark window, conducting the absent cellist. Henry tried to correct him—his downbeat was a little wonky—but Daniel went on, already too far into his own fake concerto. He was trying to be great, at the expense of anything else.

  Brit looked at Jana, droopy in the bathtub, her dark hair coming out of its bun. Jana was hard but loving and almost weepy herself, Brit noticed.

  “They’re . . . sometimes disappointing,” Jana said. “But who else?”

  “Don’t take a bath,” Brit managed to say, croaking it, an ugly sound, and immediately after she said it—Jana laughing but noting the arch of Brit’s back and anticipating her purge, changing her body just so to feel the strain of Brit’s spine
under her hand, and Daniel and Henry in their own separate concerts, one stone and one liquid, one earthly and one slipped through fingers, one breathless and one like breath, and du Pré hitting the highest E possible, gasping, there was no more string left, no more fingerboard—Brit leaned forward on her hands and knees and threw it all up, her primal sound like the beginning of something awful and essential, everything she had.

  PART 2

  “Prussian” String Quartet no. 21 in D Major, K. 575

  —Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

  String Quartet in F Major

  —Maurice Ravel

  String Quartet no. 3 in F Major, op. 73

  —Dmitri Shostakovich

  August 1998

  New York City

  HENRY

  Viola

  When Kimiko told Henry she was pregnant, she did it loudly in a generic coffee shop in the Fifties they had never been to before and would never go to again, and followed the news with the information that she’d had two previous abortions, and what did he want to do about it?

  Henry looked around the café, panicked. They were close enough to Juilliard that they could have seen colleagues, but Henry saw none. It was one thing to sleep with your student, and another entirely for her to be pregnant. He wasn’t sure how his colleagues would classify the situation, her having confessed pregnancy and abortion to him in the same breath. It couldn’t be good.

  Kimiko fiddled with the straw in her iced coffee. Coffee? Henry thought. It seemed the decision had already been made. She looked calm, placid, but she always did, even when she was tasked with playing the infamously exhausting Britten Violin Concerto, which she’d just performed with the symphony. She never made anything look as difficult as it was. He liked that about her. Wait: Had she been pregnant when she performed it? How did these things work? When was that? He tried to spy her belly beneath her flowy dress, but he couldn’t. The air-conditioning in the coffee shop suddenly produced goose bumps on his arm. His beard itched all over. Why did he have a beard in August? I’m an idiot, he thought.

  “What do you want to do?” Henry finally asked. “How long have you known?”

  Kimiko shrugged. “I was feeling sick during the Britten rehearsals, but I thought it was just, you know, nerves. I haven’t been to the doctor yet. Maybe just a month?”

  She didn’t answer the first question. She flicked water drops from the straw onto the table, where they hovered like tears before popping. She was Henry’s student, yes, but she wasn’t so much younger than him, and she wasn’t really his student. Part of the quartet’s responsibilities as Juilliard’s Quartet-in-Residence was to take on a few advanced undergraduates, and Kimiko was his best, the best he’d ever have, he thought. They mostly just spent lessons knocking around their favorite sonatas and concertos, and then after the lessons: dinner, bars, dancing, excellent sex. Not exactly against the rules, but certainly not encouraged.

  “You’ve had—two abortions?” Henry said in a whisper.

  She frowned at him. “Well, don’t act like it’s the worst thing in the world.”

  “I’m sorry. I just . . . I don’t know what to say, Kim,” he said. “What do you want me to say?”

  She shrugged.

  Henry made them leave the coffee shop and walk to Central Park. It was sticky hot outside, a Friday afternoon, and the city was emptied out. Crossing the street, he took her hand. Suddenly she had a fragile sheen, and he felt a quiver down to his core looking at her, like when he watched a doctor draw blood from his arm, the body’s biological mechanisms laid suddenly, brazenly naked. No magic—just animal. He had to fight the urge to screw his eyes shut and breathe. His hand was clammy. Or maybe hers was.

  “I’m twenty-two,” she said when they walked north into the park. He hoped the trees would be a respite from the heat.

  “I know,” he said.

  “Do you? Because don’t forget you’re already way into it, your career. I’m barely there.”

  “You just played the Britten with the symphony.”

  “You know what I mean. Not everyone’s like you. Not everyone’s a prodigy.”

  Henry hated that word, ever since the San Francisco Chronicle had done a lifestyle piece on him when he was fourteen, pimply and floppy-haired, premiering a commissioned work with the Napa Symphony. He’d been taken out of school, homeschooled by his mother—his mother, she’d probably be over the moon at this baby news—sent to Curtis years younger than everyone else, and never learned to drink, never had a girlfriend, not a proper one, really. He blamed, well, being a prodigy. Though could you, at twenty-four, still be called that? Was he now just a mal-socialized musician, a dysfunctional adult with rare faculties? Kimiko wasn’t his girlfriend, even. They had sex and read music together (sometimes had sex in the soundproof practice rooms, but who didn’t?), and that was about it. They ate, they fucked, they played, all whenever the need arose. They did none of the things Daniel and Lindsay did, like romantic trips and public fights, or Brit and her new boyfriend, like movies and museums and date nights in. Those things wouldn’t have occurred to Henry. He became bored simply by conjuring the idea.

  But did he love her? In the year they’d known each other, he’d never considered it. He loved her playing. He loved her thin, strong wrist and fluid bow arm, the striated muscles over her shoulder blades that pulsed when she performed in her strapless concert dress, how she played elegantly and brightly, a born soloist, but was, in person, fiercely opinionated, unsentimental, almost cold, yet in an endearing way. Now that he thought about it, she was very much like Jana. Henry could not imagine Jana and Kimiko hanging out together, though, just the two of them. He so rarely brought Kimiko around the quartet, and she so rarely wanted to come around. He and Kimiko had never, up until this point, formally discussed their relationship.

  Henry swallowed. “How would it work?”

  “Presumably I would gestate for nine months and then fucking push it out,” Kimiko said, crossing her arms under her breasts.

  They wandered under the shade of some trees, but it wasn’t any cooler. It was so humid that Kimiko’s long, loose dress was getting stuck to the inside of her thighs. Her family was in Japan. He’d never met them. She had been educated upstate, had no accent, flew quietly back to their Tokyo suburb once a year.

  “It’s just not like we have family around here who could help out,” Henry said.

  “Right.”

  “Or any money. Though I could get some money.”

  “Right.”

  “And after Esterhazy, we might move around a lot. A lot-lot.”

  “Right. I’m not an idiot. If you stay with the quartet, you’ll be traveling.”

  “If I stay?”

  “Everybody knows, Henry,” she said. “Everybody knows you’re out of their league.”

  Henry chose to ignore the comment. Kimiko needled him about his role in the quartet, but he chalked it up to her lack of chamber music experience. She’d been born a soloist, trained as a soloist, performed as a soloist. Chamber music was for her, like it was for many successful musicians, what she did in her spare time. It wasn’t, according to her, what people with talent like Henry’s did. “But I do do it,” Henry would tell her. Four rational people conversing, Kimiko had derisively said to him, quoting Goethe’s definition of a quartet: “four rational people conversing among themselves.” Henry had found that offensive. He’d talked to Jana about it afterward. It made what they did sound so boring, as if there was anything rational about it, or conversational. Even Mozart, even Haydn wasn’t teatime, parlor-room conversation. It was what he thought was most misunderstood about chamber music—that it was a kind of sense-making. For Henry, sense-making was perhaps the opposite of the point. He had fun in the chaos of four people; the chaos was what made it feel like art, like beauty.

  Besides, his whole life, his talent had been leading the way,
making the obvious, logical decisions for him. Choosing to stay in the quartet was not the obvious, logical decision. But for him, obvious and logical had nothing to do with real music-making.

  “People move around with babies,” he said. “Maybe we could trade lessons for nannying or something.”

  He hated the word nanny in his mouth, which was already parched. He talked it out some more, and minutes later he realized she had stopped responding. They were still walking, sweating. He understood her silence. No matter how much he talked it out, strategized, rationalized, there was no getting around it: they both could not have the careers they’d planned for and also have this baby. Someone would have to sacrifice the vision, settle for a lesser version of success. Ride out the other’s version. It was pointless to negotiate. There was no use talking about it. He thought, fleetingly, of the card from that Fodorio character, the lurking promise of a solo career. He’d eaten the card for Jana, but the promise remained.

  “When did you . . . terminate the other pregnancies?” he said, eventually.

  She rolled her eyes. “You can say ‘abortion,’ Henry.”

  “When?”

  “Once when I was sixteen, and once a couple years ago.”

  “Someone I know?”