August 1998
New York City
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?”
“Why do you care? Let’s talk about this time.”
Henry couldn’t think of a reason why it mattered, but he wanted to know. This bothered him. “I care.”
“No one you know. A visiting cellist from Germany. He’s married, has kids of his own. He wasn’t even a very good player. Bad intonation. It was stupid.”
“Oh, okay,” he said. “This isn’t stupid, right?”
She stopped walking and abruptly turned to him. Her voice was small: “It’s not fair,” she said. At first he thought the wetness pooled around her eyes was sweat—God, it was hot, fuck this city, he hated it—but then he saw it was coming out of her eyes, and kept coming. Her face was trembling, every part of it at once, messily, inelegantly. He’d never seen her cry before. It made him want to cry, too, and he never felt that way, and now he felt it rising in his chest and throat.
He cared. He cared about what had happened to her before he’d met her, about the babies she hadn’t had. He cared what happened to her in this park, if she tripped, if she cried. He loved her, if that’s what love was. They’d never been on an actual date. It was strange to sit in a coffee shop with her, to walk with her, without their instruments. But he loved her. Maybe because she was growing inside her a small pebble of a zygote half containing his DNA, maybe because she was the one for him, forever and ever. There was no telling. The choice to love her and to raise a child with her wasn’t rational or sense-making, and in that way it was like the only other choice he’d ever made in his life. It was the beautiful, musical choice.
He put his arms around her, pulled her into him. She wasn’t small. He wouldn’t describe her that way, not now.
“No, this isn’t stupid,” she said, crying a country-sized stain into his T-shirt, and that was how he knew she loved him, too.
One way to say it was: when they moved to New York, Jana and Henry cut back on overnights because she lived on the East Side and he lived on the West Side, and she hated the crosstown buses and also walking across the park alone, especially with her violin, and there were so many people in their lives—so many people in New York City—that time alone became sacred and rare.
Another way to say it was: they were older, had grown up and out of it, no longer needed the physical rampancy and secret comfort of each other’s bodies in bed after a blood-flushing concert or a brutal, prickly rehearsal.
Another way to say it was: the practice had marched right up to the edge of being inappropriate, and enough was enough. They’d never had sex, not even close. There’d been nothing sexually charged about their relationship. Nothing really romantic either, unless you counted that feeling of mutual recognition when someone wraps her body around yours and you both go unconscious.
And one more way to say it was: the context changed. They were no longer scrappy and trying to make it in San Francisco. Now they were “emerging,” as the Juilliard intern who wrote their bios liked to put it, though Henry wondered how long you could be “emerging” until you were simply just standing in a doorway of an empty room, emerged, yet unnoticed. At Juilliard, they were treated as professionals, serious adults with serious endeavors, and their habit of co-sleeping suddenly seemed a childish leftover from a past and lesser life.
They had taken a little while to figure this out. The last time Jana had come over to Henry’s, it was a night in early December, right as the season was beginning to slip into winter. The two of them, having grown up in the wet but generous winters of California, usually felt giddy and quaint huddled under layers of thin blankets. Still charming was the way the streetlamps flooded bronze light through the windows even with all the lights off, casting an anemic pallor on their cold cheeks. Still eccentric was the incessant honking and yelping, the churn of lives always in progress just outside the apartment walls. But that night they’d fought, a fight that, in their nightclothes in bed in the middle of a city night, felt like a point from which they would not turn back.
That evening they’d gone, with Brit and Daniel, to a performance of the Guarneri Quartet at Carnegie Hall. They’d had to go, really—their dean regularly invited them to concerts so they could meet other groups and become familiar faces to programming officers at the various venues. Afterward, there was a party in a small, narrow cocktail bar across the street. Daniel and Jana had charged forward into the crowd, always the determined, well-spoken face of the quartet, neither from that tony world but both able to talk to moneyed patrons with a studied fluency. Henry often ran out of things to talk about with these people after they were done marveling at his youth. He noticed Brit spending an inordinately long time at the bar deciding what to drink, and when she finally had a glass of red wine in her hand, she remained staring at the rows of liquor bottles, her back to the crowd. Henry walked up beside her.
“Are you as bored—”
She jumped in her seat, tipping her glass and sending drops of red wine onto the front of his suit. “Oh, Henry,” she said, dabbing at his jacket with a bar napkin. “I’m sorry. This looks expensive. Was it expensive?”
It was bespoke, but Henry hadn’t paid for it. His mother had, a gift upon learning they had landed the Juilliard residency.
“It’s nothing,” Henry said.
Brit frowned. “It’s sort of your fault, anyway.”
Henry sat next to her and ordered a gin and tonic; the compact, buttoned-up bartender peered at him suspiciously but didn’t card him. Brit had been in a mood lately. Really, she’d been in a mood for at least three years. Though neither Brit nor Daniel had ever explicitly spoken of it, Henry and Jana knew there’d been something early on, a romantic scuffle, a fast fizzle, and a subterranean burn as it faded away. The topic hadn’t much come up during Henry and Jana’s overnights, either. What was there to discuss? It had been years since whatever had once been between Daniel and Brit appeared to settle into a semi-comfortable stasis, a slightly charged status quo, with Daniel’s rotation of forgettable girls (unremarkable two- or three-month relationships) and Brit’s steady, low-grade longing for him (dignified in the shadows when she was waiting, and girlishly undulating when he turned his attention to her in the intermissions). Though lately something felt like it was shifting with Brit and Daniel, probably not unrelated to Brit’s new boyfriend, Paul.
“I was going to say you seem quiet tonight, but not with a mouth like that,” Henry said.
“Why do people always say that to me? ‘You seem quiet.’ What should I say back? ‘Yes, that’s because I don’t want to talk’?”
“Okay, well,” Henry said, standing.
“No, no.” Brit put her hand on his arm. “Sit down. I’d rather talk to you than anyone else here.”
“Oh, wow, thanks.”
“I don’t mean that. I just mean”—she gestured across the bar, toward where Jana and Daniel held captive a collection of miniature elderly ladies in chunky necklaces—“them.”
Henry could tell, even from this distance, that Daniel’s suit, the only one he had, fit even worse than the last time he’d worn it. The cuffs now revealed his wrists. Were Daniel’s irregularly long arms growing longer? Was that possible? Henry saw the seams were gray from years of pulling. When was Daniel’s birthday? Perhaps Henry could get him a custom suit of his own. No, he’d be resentful. Daniel kept taking off his glasses and putting them back on and taking them off. He hated wearing his glasses—he had once told Henry something about how they represented an evolutionary weakness—but he seemed to be squinting more and more these days, at things other than just sheet music. Jana, seen from afar, was all strange planes and angles. She was the sort of woman who was not exactly pretty but striking, not slender but skinny, someone who could look alarmingly different with the slight jut of a chin, a nose that could be pointed and regal in profile and unfortunately knobbed head-on, large eyes that were anime when tired but toothsome with the right smile. She was mutable even down to her dark hair, which could make her look boyish when it was tied back or halting when it lay across her shoulders. It was just like Jana to deny anyone a firm hold on her.
Brit, though, Brit always looked the same: freckles, plump skin, smile lines, pale and blond, sincere and kind, and Henry realized, sitting there, that he was grateful for her dispositional consistency.
“This is their natural habitat,” Henry said. “They can be easily adored.”
Once he said it, he saw it was mean, but Brit smiled a little. “Or they can become people who are easily adored. At these things I always feel like, when I’m talking to someone, I have to apologize for how . . . just . . . boring I am. I play the violin. What more can I say? Look, listen to Jana, you can hear her from here. That pitch is unnatural.”
Jana threw her head back and laughed, a shrill laugh that Henry knew contained seething just beneath the surface. She could communicate with this crowd, but she didn’t like it.
“It’s not too bad,” Henry said. “At least we have them to do it for us.”
“They’re not doing it for us,” Brit said.
“Whoa, settle,” Henry said. “Do you have something you want to tell Uncle Henry? What about this new Paul fellow?”
Brit softened and told him about Paul, how she could tell he cleaned his apartment before she came over, how she’d found a scribbled list of things from his day he wanted to make sure to tell her on his bedside table, how whenever she asked him a question he always asked her one back.
“Sounds like a good one,” Henry said when she finished. “So why are you so angry right now?”
“I’m not angry,” she said.
“Is it because you’re angry at yourself for spending so much time pining for that guy? That guy in the bad suit over there?”
Brit went silent, though she leaned her head into his shoulder, drank her wine at the side of her mouth. From behind, from Jana’s point of view, it must have looked like something else, at least fleetingly, because after the brief moments during which Henry felt tenderness for Brit’s blond head beneath his but before he could say anything more, Jana was there, behind him, her hand in his hair. His hair!
“You both need haircuts,” Jana said, and Brit withdrew.
Jana was scratching his scalp with her fingernails, sending white shivers down his neck, and the way the response was both automatic and charged irritated him. Now he linked the touch to Kimiko’s touch: a different woman, a different context, a different impulse. The point where the wires crossed was buzzing electric, and it stayed lit inside him all night. Later that night, in bed, after Jana scooted toward him, cold under the quilt, he said, “Don’t do that again, to my hair.”
Jana paused. A siren wailed by. “I was just saying you need a haircut. I mean, seriously, you do. There’s a public face we have to maintain.”
“People could get the wrong idea,” he said.
“What, with Brit nuzzling you in a bar? Sure.”
They volleyed back and forth a few times, their barbs getting hollower as they got meaner. This kind of meanness was meant for people having sex, people who could later expunge the meanness in the half-tender, half-violent act of merging.
“Aren’t you sleeping with anyone?” he said. “You know I’m sleeping with Kimiko, right?”
Of course she knew. Henry knew she knew. He also knew Jana had no intention of having a sexual relationship with him, and that his accusation was low and undermined years of tangled but necessary friendship—and that once he’d made it, the nights together were over. The dark room momentarily choked on itself. He actually coughed.
Jana rolled over, her back to him. “You’re right. I don’t think I should spend the night here anymore.” And with that, she made it his idea and her decision.
She fell asleep fast and easy—when Jana made a decision, she did not unmake it—and Henry lay awake most of the night. It was the right thing to do, for both of them, so why did it feel bad? There was life, right out there, sirens and clanking bottles and the crazy bellowing man in the building across the way. It couldn’t be more different from their life in San Francisco, all sky and studiousness and sea splash. Couldn’t she also see things were changing—had, in fact, already changed?
The next morning, he awoke to Jana fully dressed (she’d smartly brought a change of clothes, black leggings and a black tunic, now cold and almost Slavic at this angle) and tiptoeing around his chilly room. What she looked like wasn’t slippery at all, he saw now. Her face was serious, the aquiline nose and the whittled jawline, but really, it was the face of a girl trying out expressions and postures, its origin withheld from him now. He watched her gathering her things but also lightly grazing his things with her fingertips, his clothes and his dresser and his records stacked on the floor, feeling for what he couldn’t say, feeling the varnish on his viola, the tips of the metal music stand in the corner, the molding around the doorway—Henry watched her know with her hands the stuff of his life, and then thought to himself, This stuff isn’t my life, my life’s out there, and he realized that his context had changed, but Jana’s hadn’t.
So it was very unexpected when on the evening after he and Kimiko had walked in the park for hours, and he’d watched her dry-heave by the closed-down ice rink and thought, stupidly, My child is causing this, Jana called him and said she was coming over. Before he could ask whether “coming over” meant “staying the night,” she’d hung up.
Henry felt panicked. Jana knew he and Kimiko had been spending more time together. It wasn’t a secret. But he’d have to tell her about the baby, and he’d have to tell her now. Fathers of unborn children didn’t share beds with other women, even if they were just friends.
Jana arrived at his door, sweaty, just after sunset. She’d jogged to his place, though the heat index must have made it an unhealthy endeavor. Henry had never known her not to run. She was the type who couldn’t sleep without it, who made sure their hotels had gyms and treadmills when they were on the road. She wore blue dolphin shorts and a tank top that was soaked through. He let her in, and she kicked her shoes off by the window unit and stood there, pulling the fabric from her stomach to let the cool air in.
“I have to stay the night” was the first thing she said. “I can’t go back out in that.”
Henry gestured to the window and 102nd Street below, heavy with heat and quiet but for a few sedans. “You’re the fool that chose to run in this.”
“Actually, the best time to run—when everyone’s gone to the Hamptons,” she said. Sweat trickled down the back of her leg. She looked up at him and grinned. “You’re the one with the facial hair. What?”
“What, what?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know, you’re acting strange. Did you get a prize or something?”
Henry laughed. “No, I was just . . . standing here. Trying to think of what to eat.”
“Good thing I’m an expert at eating.”
Jana rifled through his fridge with a familiarity that bent Henry’s heart a little. She was his sister. She found some lettuce and bacon and tortillas, and made them something close to a BLT. While she cooked the bacon, they both sat on the floor by the window unit to stay cool. They ate on the floor, too, with an old ottoman as their table. Jana’s sweat had dried and she had started to smell like girl sweat, like two-day-old perfume.
“Doesn’t the heat warp your records?” Jana asked, pointing toward the milk crates of records against the wall.
“Oh, I put all the nice ones in storage in Queens,” he said. It was one of the first things he’d done when he moved to New York. He’d paid to ship his records out here, before he realized how insane it looked to have them lining all the walls of his small apartment. But he couldn’t let go of them. He’d been collecting since he was a child: the rare recording of the Hoffmeister viola concerto, every major recording of the Bach suites, even obscure limited pressings of contemporary Chinese composers he’d once wanted to emulate. Getting rid of his records would be like saying all those years spent gathering them were over. And they weren’t over—he was still in the midst of them.
“Well, that seems impractical,” Jana said. “You should just sell them.”
“I can’t sell them. Why would I sell them?”
“Because if they’re in storage, you’re obviously not listening to them.”
“But I could. If I wanted to. Jesus, Jana.”
She raised an armpit, a bit of bacon hanging out of her mouth, and sniffed. “Are you offended?” She looked genuinely worried.
“No, no.”
“What’s wrong with you? Are you worried about Esterhazy?”
For a moment Henry didn’t recognize the word. He hadn’t thought about the upcoming competition all day. He’d thought about traveling, and leaving Kimiko, but he hadn’t actually thought about what they were rehearsing for Esterhazy—a Shostakovich, a Mozart, and the Ravel they knew so well. It would be their second time at the competition, having made the smallest of splashes—like a hand slapping a pond, really—their first time, earning no prizes, but falling apart in the first round to the point of crashing the entire performance. It had taken them some months to recover from that, but by winter they’d gained management and the residency at Juilliard. This year was the year they were supposed to be in the Esterhazy game, for real. The board had changed the competition a bit—not only did they move it from May to October, but they pre-scored and seeded competitors, so that any incidences of extreme stage fright or freak accidents wouldn’t be weighted as heavily.
“Oh, I basically forgot about that,” he said.
“Mm.”
Behind Jana’s head, if Henry squinted and focused, he could see a wedge of the Hudson.
“Are you seeing anyone?” he asked.
She pointed to her mouth and chewed. “Who has time?”
“Well, Brit and Daniel,” he said.
“Yeah, but, they’re more, you know, into that kind of thing than us,” Jana said, and laughed. “I guess that guy from the St. Vincent asked me out, but . . . I don’t know.”
“The violist?”
A few weeks before, they’d played in a classical showcase and met the St. Vincent String Quartet. The two quartets shared a management company as well as career aspirations. The St. Vincents were from Montreal, all men, pretty and tall and sandy-haired, with varying shades of French accents. From far away, they looked more like attractive actors pretending to be in a quartet than actual musicians. Henry had found them difficult to tell apart. Of the eight groups they’d be competing against at Esterhazy, the St. Vincent was the best, though not better than them, at least by Jana’s estimation.
“Yeah. Laurent.”
“I can’t believe that’s actually his name.”
“I know, I know.”
“You should go out with him,” Henry said.
Jana frowned. “What’s wrong with you? You think I should date someone we’re going to compete against in two months?”
“Who cares?”
She put her sandwich down on her paper plate. “You need to get ahold of yourself.”
“Kimiko’s pregnant.”
He said it because he couldn’t not say it. He’d spent the whole afternoon saying it in his head, making it feel real. And now that it was real, not letting Jana hear him say it felt like lying. Especially Jana, someone to whom he never lied.
Jana’s sandwich sat on the plate on top of the ottoman like something from a different life, like an idea from a finished phase of their friendship they’d yet to mourn. The lettuce seemed to wilt immediately. Her mouth hung open, revealing a couple cavities filled with metal, and Henry could see her—see her in real time—scramble to think of a way out of this information.
“We’re going to keep it,” he continued, and Jana’s grimace deepened. He regretted saying that part.
Her hair was falling out of her ponytail in the back, wisps here and there. He wanted to put his arms around her, and would have, in that other life, that sandwich life.
“Okay,” she said. “All right. She’s practically a child herself, but all right.”
Henry didn’t say anything.
Jana asked a series of questions and then answered them herself. She said: “I mean, if you want to be a father at twenty-four, go right ahead. When’s she due? We’ll have to make sure we’re not traveling then. She’s going to live here? Here? You should probably get a dinner table. You should probably get a different apartment, actually. One with, you know, walls. Dividing the space. Won’t you need some more income? I guess it’s not like your parents won’t help you out. Also, you won’t have time for video games. You don’t have time now, as it is, but somehow you always make time.”
He patiently listened to her list, the halfhearted insults tumbling out of her mouth. Henry didn’t think Jana was a mean person; he thought she was a good person, with a meanness problem. And he thought, in general, she had good reason to be mean. She’d worked very hard. She’d had no help. She wasn’t tolerant of failure. Of anyone’s failure. But couldn’t she see he wasn’t failing her?
Jana stood and began to pace. The wicking fabric of her shorts rubbing together was the only sound in the apartment.
It occurred to him: he loved her, too.
In a different way from how he loved Kimiko. But love, nonetheless. They’d had no choice, if he thought about it. They’d been together so long, so intimately, that they had to love each other. Like family—which neither Jana nor Brit had. Nor Daniel, come to think of it. Henry was the one with a family. And now another one growing. He had an embarrassing abundance of family.
Henry did understand how they had become responsible for each other’s well-being, each other’s livelihood. When you were on your own, in whatever career, whatever you did affected only your own job. But with the quartet, they had to share a goal, distribute the dream between them, and trust that each of them had an appropriate sense of commitment. The commitment had a way of bleeding into their lives off stage, as well. There were so many ways to betray each other.
Jana stood with her hands on her hips in front of the window. The sun was all the way down now, but it still cast pale on the sky from below the horizon. Looking at her silhouette, Henry imagined how her upper body moved as one whole unit when she led the group. Like a baton, that firmness at her center the very source of energy for all of them.
Then she turned and faced an old program he’d tacked onto the wall next to the window. It wasn’t framed or anything, but he’d felt weird throwing it away, so he put it there, where it curled up at the edges in the humidity. It was the program from their graduation recital, which he’d been handed just before they walked on stage. There was a photo of the four of them printed in black-and-white on the insert—they’d had it taken professionally, but until that graduation recital hadn’t seen it out in the world. The photo, their first portrait as a group, had been taken on a cold day in February, and they’d been frustrated and restless. They were actually waiting for the light to change on Van Ness and McAllister so they could span the crosswalk, Beatles style, and Daniel was holding his cello by the curves, trying to shield it from other pedestrians. City Hall and the Ballet loomed in the background. In the photo, none of them was smiling, but they’d liked that shot the best. Something about the quiet waiting, the way they looked like they’d ended up crammed together on this sidewalk accidentally but were all of a piece, made them choose that picture over the posed one, where they were actually crossing the intersection, smiling awkwardly and looking at odds with their bodies. After the light changed, Daniel had rushed from the sidewalk, and when the rest of them failed to fall in line, he screamed “Fuck!” and a small child holding her mother’s hand cowered. But before the light turned, they looked like they’d made a kind of peace with the restlessness, or had finally caught up with the anticipation.
The night of the graduation wasn’t just the first time Henry had seen that picture in print, but the first time he’d seen them as a group presented so formally. It felt official. He had felt a part of something, which, though no one would feel sorry for him, hadn’t come easily in his life. When you were a prodigy, the defining principle was that you were singular, standout, alone. Here, he was not alone.
He watched Jana study the program and the photo on his apartment wall, in which he—barely twenty then—towered over everyone else, his cheekbones sharp and his hair looking less messy than it was in black-and-white.
“I think you need to cut your hair and shave your beard,” she said, finally.
He put his hand to his chin, felt the rough fuzz there. “Yeah, all right.”
They walked to the bathroom, humorously small, and plugged in his clipper. The mirror was splattered with toothpaste, the sink a well for his beard trimmings. Jana reached down and splashed her face with water from the faucet.
“Okay,” she said when she popped back up.
“Okay,” he said.
She started with his hair, sliding pieces between two fingers and trimming a little at a time. She worked around the sides and then methodically across the top. She shaved his face meticulously, seriously, knitting her eyebrows when it came to his upper lip, tilting her head at an unnatural angle to get under his chin. It seemed to take forever, certainly longer than he’d ever taken to shave himself. He’d had a beard since they moved to New York. At first he’d grown it because it was cold, but then it got warm, and then he was afraid to shave it off, as though he’d have a blank space where his beard was. Which he would now, he guessed.
Jana took it all off. She didn’t cut him once. He looked younger when it was all gone—he actually looked his age. There was his mouth. There were his lips. He couldn’t stop staring at himself. Jana didn’t look in the mirror once, but she looked at him directly, and over time, her gaze changed from jilted to kind, and then content, or something close.
She did stay the night one last time. They went to bed early, and she wore one of his big T-shirts from Curtis, identical to a shirt she also had, in her own apartment across town.
“It’ll make you leave us,” Jana said.
She didn’t seem to require an answer. It wasn’t a question. Who knew where this ended? Not him. What he heard in Jana’s statement was not an accusation or a confrontation, but a confession: she saw this as the beginning of the quartet’s falling apart.
She turned on her side, away from him, and put her hands neatly under her head. He mirrored her. The streets below were eerily city-quiet, a spatter of pedestrian laughter or old brakes floating up to his window every so often, the desperate shudder of the window unit turning off and on. They slept with only a sheet on top of them, and Henry felt the pillowcase against his shorn cheek for the first time in he didn’t know how long. It felt like there was nothing between him and anything else. Jana suddenly seemed like a strange island in his bed, long-limbed and lanky and warm, emanating heat. How had he not seen her like this before? He curled himself around her anyway, and didn’t move, not at all.
When she left the next morning, early and silently, he went back to bed to sleep for a few more hours. Just as he was about to fall asleep, however, the phone rang in the kitchen. On instinct he rolled over and reached for a pillow to cover his ears, but then he remembered he was now an expectant father, and that expectant fathers answered all phone calls out of fear. He tripped his way to the phone, but when he picked it up and said hello, it wasn’t Kimiko calling, or even Jana, to tell him she’d made it home, or Daniel asking to borrow rosin again, or Brit seeing if he wanted to get lunch.
“You haven’t called, and you’ve been in New York all this time!” said the man on the other end, his voice thick with a familiar accent.
“Hello?” Henry said again.
“I’ve been waiting. To make something of you. Let’s meet. Tonight? Something’s come up that you’d be perfect for.”
“I’m sorry, who is this?”
“Don’t be ridiculous. It’s me,” said the man, as though Henry was foolish to question his identity. “It’s your old friend, Fodorio.”