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 Brit 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.
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,” Brit 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.
“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.