Daniel awoke from a dream like pulling himself out of a hot bath, the hotel alarm buzzing B-flat, his least favorite note (the second finger on the G string always wavering; the note never round, nearly accidental). What had he been dreaming? Something pleasant, he felt sure, something that had made him happy. But now the dream had escaped like smoke, disappeared into the atmospheric recesses of his subconscious, and he had no hope of recovering it. The unease he’d become accustomed to slid mercilessly back in, and he submitted to waking fully.
The hotel room had a static dry heat about it; a light snow had begun to fall. Before moving from the bed, Daniel glanced at his cello case in the corner, strategically placed close enough to and far enough away from the radiator heat, and made a note to move it to the bathroom while he showered, to let the humidity loosen the seams of the wood panels.
And then, of course, there was his hand. Sopping wet now, wrapped up in a makeshift ice-and-washcloth contraption that had melted through the bedspread. It was his right hand, his bow-arm hand, which, if there was going to be a fucked-up hand, was the one he preferred. That pain he could get through. If there had been pain in his left hand, the notes just wouldn’t make. There would be no charging through that. He set about unwrapping to examine the damage.
Their dress rehearsal was in one hour, their concert in eight. Whatever subterranean feeling he’d had when he woke up, he was yanked out of it as though by a muscly tide.
Henry. Lindsay. Henry. Lindsay. Which person he’d injured should he think of first this morning?
Daniel pictured Lindsay in their apartment (was it now hers?), flipping through a design magazine at the small side table they used for eating, the window open, the sounds of an Upper West Side morning clanging through the room, sounds that, if heard discriminately or kindly, could resemble the leaf-crackling wholesomeness of an American autumn, but were really the unhinged dregs of a fleeting Manhattan October. No, she wouldn’t be up yet. It was Saturday, and Lindsay would be sleeping late. She would make pancakes at noon and take a walk to Fairway, buy blueberries, eat blueberries in the park and then maybe nap there, if the sun was still high enough. The day would have absolutely no point, and she wouldn’t care. She would think of one million things that day, and try to say as many of them aloud as she could, to whomever would listen. She would be as cheerful as the day was empty.
If it was possible to feel both contempt and nostalgia simultaneously for the same thing, that’s what Daniel felt. Perhaps it was that feeling of being underwater—of being angrily helpless and helplessly drawn—that he associated with being with Lindsay. The amount of time they had been together could still be reasonably counted in months, and while it felt like an inevitable amputation, their parting, it also did feel like an amputation—missed and longed for in a second-degree kind of way, but gone for good.
Are you really happy? He could not stop the habit of talking to her in his head, even though it had been so long since they’d actually spoken.
He thought of Lindsay often, though not in the way he knew she wished he thought of her. He pictured her compact, pink body in their too-small, dirt-ringed bathtub, her legs draped over the side, laughing fitfully at some inane thing he’d said or done, some face he’d made, some way he’d been that was so easy—too easy—and had delighted her. He recalled the cold closed lid of the toilet where he’d been sitting, and the shape his hands made, curved like two parentheses holding the joke he’d constructed, and her face, freckled and sly and dotted with beads of steam and sweat. Of course that hadn’t lasted, he thought, but how good it had felt to be tethered to someone’s spotlight like that.
Answer: She had been happy. But that didn’t mean she didn’t also need things from him to cobble together more happiness.
Daniel unwrapped the last of the washcloth, and while his hand was red and wrinkly from the ice, it didn’t appear to be swollen. There were two red cuts like winks on his knuckles, and those were sensitive. He clenched his hand and the winks opened like eyes. Like Lindsay’s palm-eye.
It was perfect, really, his injured hand for hers. On their last night together, Lindsay had ecstatically and drunkenly tried to saber a champagne bottle at a friend’s anniversary party (he’d reluctantly attended—in a resentful, perfunctory mood) and ended up with a jagged shard of a bottle of Veuve sticking straight through the webbed meat between her thumb and first finger, just left of the crooked eye tattoo on her palm. Her gin-loosened blood spurted briefly and then, when she held the hand above her heart as Daniel commanded, streamed down to her elbow and dripped onto her sandals and his slacks and the cab seat, all the way to Mount Sinai, where a pimply resident anesthetized her, extracted the shard, and stitched her up (four neat and dissolvable stitches, barely winks themselves) while she wordlessly looked on. It seemed not to hurt at all. Something about the way the halfhearted fluorescents lit their skin in the ER waiting room, or the way he’d crouched nervously next to the doctor, or the way she’d not cried once from pain or shock or the woozy speed of the cab ride home, or the way he’d held her by the waist like a stranger as they walked up the three flights of stairs to their apartment, or the way the apartment’s bottled-up air had felt like a crush of gravity when they swung the door open, or the way he’d watched her unwrap the already bloody dressing over the kitchen sink and rewrap it with cheap paper towels, never removing his own jacket, his arms crossed, waiting for her to look at him, willing her to ask him for help, to hold out her frozen, broken hand for his healthy, seamless one, even though he didn’t really want to help her, he just wanted her not to have done it in the first place—something about some part of it, or all of it, felt like one of those mosaics she was always tinkering with: cracked apart.
She didn’t ask him for help. She kept her back to him like an indignant child, her shoulder blades poking through the straps of her dress. She didn’t need saving.
Without turning around, she said, “You’re glad it wasn’t you, right?”
He didn’t uncross his arms from his chest. “Sure,” he said, and it was true.
“I saw you. You looked disgusted.”
It was disgusting, he wanted to say. He had been horrified on an existential level. He’d thought of his own hand, and how he might never recover if something punctured it like that. How everything he’d worked for and wanted would be over. How fucked up it was that everything he’d wanted could be ruined by something so simple. He’d watched the thin arc of blood literally jump out of her impaled hand, like something trying to escape.
“I ran to you, Lindz. I tried to help.”
At that, she turned around, half-moons of black makeup smeared beneath her eyes. The paper towels stuck out from the recycled medical tape at all angles. The makeshift bandage wouldn’t last the night. “Exactly,” she said. “But you should have tried to help me before it stabbed me.”
It stabbed me, he thought, ha. You stabbed yourself. It was her own bubbling, free-spirited whatever that had made her stab herself. But even her free spirit wasn’t free, at least not without injury.
They didn’t even have enough left to fight it out. They undressed—though Daniel felt like she hadn’t really undressed, not with her hand all taped up like that—and got into bed. He’d be lying if he said he didn’t think of it, of turning her over, pressing himself against and into her, and proving how good and useful they were for each other by how their bodies could still want each other even when—in dire circumstances, in a hospital, in blood—they couldn’t muster their dissipating love. They used to do it like their lives depended on it, like the lives of lovers everywhere depended on their sexual sustenance; they were participating in an important life force. Daniel hated to say that was what tied them together in the first place, but it was, and later he would come to realize that wasn’t so bad. There were worse things than having a body’s pull match your own, and there wasn’t so much different when you tried to describe love in less physical terms.
But the possibility of sex passed out of his mind and through the open window, lowered now to a sliver in the changing seasons. They both lay like injured prey in the dark. He felt connected to his wife (a word that so quickly reclaimed its foreignness) that night only in that he knew she, too, was jerked in and out of sleep—whenever he woke, she replied with a bodily sigh, and while he stared aimlessly out the window, she coughed and winced herself awake, clutching her hot wet hand against her stomach. He watched the silhouette of his cello in its case lose its hard outline when the sun rose. Later, he found bits of blood-damp paper towel stuck to the backs of his knees and inside his elbows.
In the morning, she didn’t move from the bed while he packed. He slung the bag and his cello on his shoulders and stood in the archway of their bedroom, backing out in miniature steps, while they tried to out-look each other, to find reasons in each other’s faces to stay, to continue. What pained him most was that she looked at him from the mess of sheets not in any particularly unique way, but in an absolutely recognizable way. A way many women had looked at him before. The way Brit had looked at him from inside her dark car before she drove away from his apartment in San Francisco that night so many years ago (Daniel, you want the wrong thing). The way his mother had looked at him in Houston, full of God and pity, the friction of cicadas in the August night following as he’d driven out of town (Danny, you could be better). A look that was distraught because it was not entirely surprised. A look that said: I always knew you’d do this. And hadn’t he known, too? In that bedroom in Costa Rica, when he’d been the one tangled in the sheets, looking at Lindsay alight all over the room, hadn’t he told himself that he was marrying her because she would make him free and together they would be the freest married people ever, when really he was hoping freedom would mean he would have to give nothing? Hadn’t he known that she would want something from him anyway? And if he really was being honest, hadn’t he also known, in some seed-like way, that he wanted to give nothing because had nothing to give, nothing but his music, or the dogged pursuit of it anyway, that he was as full up of music as he’d ever be of anything, and that he would eventually end up here—staring at his life with Lindsay like it had been wrongly stitched onto him and wanting to run frantically from it, a man made strange to himself, a man made alone?
Which is why he couldn’t exactly say he regretted punching Henry. Who was Henry to have all the things one could want, that Daniel wanted—not one but two families, easy talent—and then go around crying about it? That attitude alone deserved a punch or two or three. But when his fist made contact and Henry’s smile skewed itself off his face, and the two of them were just bone to bone, there was an unexpected communion, Daniel’s rage meeting Henry’s crisis, both men the most angry at their misplaced selves.
Daniel thought he wanted the right thing: to be better.
He examined his cello, which he’d left in an open case next to the tub while he showered. Steam had coated the outside, and he pushed his fingers against the seams to seal them. His cello was finicky with dry heat, and the millimeter expansion of the wood exacerbated a wolf on certain notes, making a single F-natural sound like it was two reedy notes, one a true F and one the product of a small rent in the cello where a seam was pulling apart. He decided to practice here in the hotel room a little before leaving for morning rehearsal, just to solidify the jammy sound.
In Henry and Kimiko’s small apartment, they had to shove his cello next to the TV like a potted plant. Daniel had called his mother when he’d been staying at Henry’s a week. He told her he was getting a divorce, though he and Lindsay hadn’t actually spoken the word aloud. It was just easier to explain it to her this way.
“Oh, Daniel,” his mother said, no hint of surprise in her voice. “I’m so sorry.”
“Are you?”
“Of course I am,” she said. “I don’t want you to have to go through this.”
“But you think I have to, don’t you? You’ve always thought I had to.”
She said, “I always thought she wasn’t quite the girl you’d invented in your mind.”
“Why can’t people want each other in the exact same amount that other people want them?” he said, finally, in a small voice. He’d never spoken to his mother about these things.
She answered swiftly and calmly: “Because sometimes we need to suffer and break, and then be made whole again to be close to God.”
Daniel hung up the phone.
His parents were not coming to Canada to hear him play. His mother sent a good-luck card to him and had written beneath an embossed illustration of flowers that his father’s slipped disc was acting up again and she had to be around in case he fell. She enclosed a check for two hundred dollars. Daniel knew his father fell for reasons other than back pain, and he cashed the check without calling her to say thank you.
In the corner of his hotel room farthest from the radiator heat, Daniel took out his cello and arranged himself. He heard nothing from the wall he shared with Henry, not even the crank of the ancient shower. This would wake him up.
Daniel began with scales, as he always did, reliable and strong. When he was satisfied, he moved to the pizzicato portions of the Ravel, warming up his right hand, and then settled on the relentless triple stops in the Shostakovich. They were dissonant on purpose, but their dissonance had to be just so, or they would sound sloppy. Laziness in Shostakovich intonation was a classic mistake in these competitions—when you got tired, you thought you could hide in the noise. He started with the bottom notes and worked his way up, playing the three notes separately until they were the same exact pitch several times in a row, and then adding them up, perfecting the pivot of his bow.
In his mind he commenced a one-way imaginary conversation with Lindsay. Depressing Shostakovich? Ha. This had verve and spark and limitless energy. It was subversive and political and breathless. It was angry, not depressing, Lindsay. No one answered but his own cello.
He’d been playing the triple stops for ten minutes when Henry banged on the door for him to shut up, and when Daniel opened it, he recognized in Henry’s purpled eye, swollen nose, and sorry stench his own wayward bruise. In that tacit way, they apologized to each other, and forgave themselves.
Brit looked at them like they were disfigured, and when she asked what happened, Jana said, “Nothing,” at the same time Henry said, “I made Daniel hit me.”
Brit turned to Daniel. Daniel said, “It’s true.”
“But why?”
“Sometimes you have to be broken down in order to be made whole again, at least in God’s eyes,” Daniel said.
Brit sighed. They set up quietly and started their run-throughs. What Daniel had told Lindsay was true—they no longer filled rehearsals throwing ideas around, debating and arguing over interpretations of phrases and tenutos and sforzando articulations. Instead, decisions were made with a series of subverbal cues: Brit’s taking over the melody in the second movement and Jana’s passing it to Henry in the fourth denoted who was in charge of that phrase; a slip of a bow tip could indicate ambivalence about the dynamic choice; and countless other movements were missives—a slight lean forward or back, a persistent attack at the frog, a certain brightness of tone, and when necessary, a furrowed brow, a frown, and a pause in playing.
Which isn’t to say they didn’t speak. They did, of course. But it was no longer the meat of what they did. At some point it simply became irrelevant, extra.
Brit’s hair was still wet from her shower, and her hands were white with cold. She’d always looked so wide-open to Daniel, open in the face. She had a regular face, but it had a naked quality to it, a tendency to appear recently unmasked. Pale and clear and patrician, a surprise of dark, mannish eyebrows under her long light hair. Blue eyes, a direct nose, a small mouth, and an alto voice with little range that always came out calm and considerate, even when she was angry, even when she was sad. In the six years they’d known each other, she’d changed physically, become leaner in the jaw, creased around the mouth, more upright in her carriage, and less loose in the arms. But the exposed nature of her face remained the same—plump skin, a dash of freckles across her nose. She would still be beautiful when she was very old.
“You’re swelling up,” she said to Henry as they switched music from the Ravel to the Shostakovich.
He grimaced, and then grimaced at the pain of grimacing. “I’ll ice it.”
“Maybe makeup, too,” Brit said.
“He’s good at icing things,” Jana said. “I think he should see a doctor about the hand.”
“I don’t need to see a doctor,” Henry said. “It’ll be fine. It’s just stress.”
Another group noisily entered the hall, clattering down the aisle. Their time was running out. They had a luncheon to attend, and then a short afternoon free before the concert. Maybe he would ask Brit to take a walk with him. They hadn’t spent time alone in ages. Maybe years. Henry and Jana seemed so caught up in something, playing through netting, that he wanted suddenly just to have Brit around.
They cut short the Shostakovich run-through, not even touching the final two movements. They usually felt a healthy dose of nerves before a concert, but this was different, perhaps having to do with Henry’s purple eye or Daniel’s cut-up knuckles or Jana’s refusal to discuss it at all, and they were nervous in a new way. It passed between them like a cold current.
Jana stuck around to listen in on the other rehearsal, and Henry said he was going back to his room for more ice. Brit and Daniel walked out of the hall together and into the white morning. The dusting of snow had stopped, but the sky was still overcast. The vertiginous mountains towering behind the shops had the look of being both off in the distance and menacingly close, and something about their ghostly pallor and ragged outline, like a pencil drawing on the blank sky, added to Daniel’s nerves.
“We should ski,” Daniel said, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say.
“I’ll meet you at the top,” Brit said. She’d tied her blond hair in a braid down the side of her neck.
“No, I don’t ski.”
“Eh, me neither.”
“Too expensive,” Daniel said.
Had they truly not been alone in so long? In New York, it was difficult to be alone. Everyone was always running somewhere, trying to catch the subway or a bus, meeting someone on the next corner, running into a coffee shop or a bookstore or a bodega for a quick this or that before the next thing. It seemed to Daniel that they’d all simply matched the pace of the city, in both their personal lives and their career. The clip was fast, and because the city always gave you something to do, it was easy to fall in line. Keeping up was easier than trying to make space.
But something about these mountains was slowing everything down. Even he and Brit walked more slowly than usual, ambling toward their hotel. The bottom of his cello thumped against the back of his thigh with every step, and he found it strangely pleasing. Brit was smiling, too, and she pulled a knit hat low over her head.
“So you’re not going to tell me what happened?” Brit asked.
“I was being a prick and then he was being a prick, so it just seemed like the thing to do.”
“Okay. Hopefully that’s out of your system now. So we can play tonight.”
“I hope so,” Daniel said, though he was not at all sure. The problem didn’t seem to be that something was in his system, but that something wasn’t. “I hope his hand is okay.”
“Yours, too,” Brit said.
“Well, yeah.”
“I don’t remember it being so nice here,” she said. “I think I was too terrified to see how nice it was.”
“It’s hard to imagine us then,” he said. “When I think back on that group that competed—us—it’s like . . . we were children.”
“Well, we were something like children,” Brit said. “Now we’re having children.”
“I was scared, too,” he said.
“We weren’t ready,” Brit said.
“I know.”
She cupped her hands over her mouth and breathed into them. She had poor circulation, always. Daniel remembered long ago waking in his bed at night because her chilly foot grazed his in sleep. On good nights, in better moods, he would clamp both his feet over hers until they warmed. Other nights, she was gone before morning.
All of that felt far away, though at the time it had felt very bad or good in an immediate and lasting manner. People just faded away, Daniel thought. Even Brit had, though he saw her nearly every day. You could learn someone’s circulation, you could wake them in the middle of the night to make their blood flow, and then you could just stop.
“It’s good we did it, though,” Brit said as they turned the corner to their absurd hotel. “Competed when we weren’t ready. You know?”
The walkway up to the lobby was long and steep. He stopped to take his cello off his back and roll it on its wheels the rest of the way. “Oh, you think? Why?”
“Because,” she said. She was looking at the mountains. “It’s like we paid our dues.”
She sounded like his mother. Sayings people clung to in order to make themselves feel better, good luck attributed to purposeful graciousness. But looking at Brit blowing into her hands, and at the postcard mountains behind the hotel, he wanted to be the same as her. Believing in good luck and grace would not only be easier (and anyway, being easy wasn’t such a bad thing), it would be freer, too. You could really make a mistake.
He rolled his cello behind him, and they started up the hill at an even slower pace.
“Do you want to go walk around after lunch? Maybe explore?” he asked.
“Oh, no, I don’t think so,” she said cheerily, as though he were asking her something totally pedestrian and unrelated to him, like Do you like broccoli? or Are you a Virgo? He experienced one of those moments of social clarity that cut so finely that Daniel knew that when he thought of it later, he’d say out loud to himself, No, no, as if trying to erase the memory. Here’s who Daniel thought he was to Brit: someone with a shared history, someone interesting and comfortable with whom Brit might like to go on a walk. Here’s who he really was to her: someone with whom a walk would be incidental and ultimately unenticing. There were two Daniels—at least two—and he nearly choked at how clearly he saw it.
When they reached the hotel entrance it occurred to him that for her, what he had asked was nothing—a friend, a cold walk, a casual question—while for him, it had been a gesture, an overture. An overture to what? He had no first movement in mind, no theme or motif. It seemed he should be able to go back, amend, erase. But there was no going back, only the electric pull of time yanking forward. He opened the heavy door to the hotel for her and she said, “Oh, thanks, Daniel,” and walked on through, away from him.
The luncheon was boring—speeches from the committee, a bland fish patty no one could identify, handshakes with people whose names they wouldn’t remember—and Henry didn’t even show. Jana looked tired, shaken almost, and Daniel suggested in a general way that she get some sleep before the concert. She nodded and clutched his hand in a very un-Jana-like way before walking off with Laurent from the Montreal group.
Brit wandered away, too, and he busied himself with looking at tourist maps in the lobby, but he couldn’t picture himself in any of the vistas. He couldn’t picture himself anywhere, really, not even standing in this lobby.
He sat in a plush chair by the stand of brochures. He’d never been bothered by being alone. His brother had grown and married and left the house by the time Daniel was twelve, and the only person he’d ever lived with after leaving home was Lindsay. That he preferred to be alone had always been a problem between them. They didn’t have enough rooms in the apartment. He wanted a space where he could go and not be bound by some invisible string to someone else in the vicinity. He couldn’t be available for her every whim. She couldn’t stand for him not to be. But how were you supposed to love someone if you didn’t know what it was like to be away from her? Or what it was like to be just you?
After a while, he made his way back upstairs, and thought he should check in on Henry, to formally apologize or let Henry apologize, or perhaps both. He knocked on Henry’s door, surprised at the quiet murmur of voices. Henry usually liked to practice in the afternoons, at least mess around a little with his own compositions. But the door pushed open at Daniel’s knock, and Daniel stepped in.
“Henry?” he called, and the voices quieted.
“Daniel?”
But the voice that called his name was not Henry’s. Instead, it was accented and laced with mousse and arrogance, and belonged to Fodorio, whom Daniel found sitting on the chair next to the desk, opposite Henry, who was standing, running a frantic hand through his hair. Fodorio: it took Daniel a moment to place him, how little he’d thought of the man in the past few years. He remembered him less as a former competition judge or a one-time coach of the quartet than he did as the guy who always appeared in the photo ads for symphonies, his Crest-whitened smile announcing a high-profile (and highly paid-for) guest appearance. But here he was, Fodorio, sitting in Henry’s hotel room, on the day of one of their Esterhazy concerts.
“Fodorio’s just visiting,” Henry said.
“Well, yes,” Daniel said. “I didn’t think he was living here.”
Henry smiled sheepishly under his bruise. He was so tall and lanky that his nervousness made him seem like a large bird from a different time, fluttering and trapped. “We were talking.”
Fodorio did not stand, but offered his hand. “Daniel. I remember you. The troubled cellist, of course, of course.”
Daniel took it. “I didn’t think you were on the jury this year.”
Fodorio waved his hand. “Oh, I’m not. But I still come, you know, just to get away and see what’s what. More fun to watch if you’re not jurying, if you ask me.”
The lines in Fodorio’s face were sun-deepened and definitely not present in the airbrushed photos he used for promotion. Gray stripes in the hair at his temples. Here, on this chilly afternoon, he wore a navy sport coat.
Daniel sat on the edge of the bed. “Well, what were you talking about?”
Fodorio leaned in, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped. “If you must know, you. You and Jana and that willowy second violinist.”
“Brit,” Daniel said.
“Yes, Brit. A silly name, but a solid player. Anyway, we were talking about options. Possibilities. The future.”
“For us?” Daniel asked.
Henry paced tiny steps next to the nightstand. “No, for me,” he said.
Daniel said nothing. It was happening. Here it was, the moment Daniel first knew of Henry’s intention to leave the group. It felt terrible, a panicky kind of terrible, the kind of terror you feel when something is happening to you and you cannot escape its happening. His brain scrambled for ways to get out of it, for ways to reverse it. He imagined walking backward, out the door, into the hallway, back through the lobby, and going on that walk, seeing that lake, taking in that vista, alone. This would not have happened had he chosen to be alone.
“Are you going to be sick? Do you need to lie down?” Fodorio asked.
“No,” Daniel snapped. “I’m just—I’m taking in this information. That you’re trying to take . . . our violist . . . away.”
“I’m not trying to take anything,” Fodorio said. “What do I have to gain? I’m advising him of his options is all. A talent like that shouldn’t waste away—well, not that the quartet is wasting away. But, you see, quartet playing for your entire lifetime, even for a short while, can warp your technique. You forget how to play solo, the careful nuance, the clarity, the bravado. You are never asked to use it. So it withers a little. A lot. I’ve seen it. And someone like your friend Henry here, his sound shouldn’t mute itself like that. And it will happen, sooner rather than later. One day, he’ll wake up, pick up his viola, and the sound will be three-quarters of what it was, no matter what bow arm he uses. Then, a year later, half as bright. Then a quarter. Then he’s disappeared. Not that there’s much of a market for viola soloists, but there’s something.”
Fodorio sat back, his point made, and recrossed his legs. His loafers were freshly shined and caught the mountain light peeking through the blinds.
“We’re only talking,” Henry said.
Daniel couldn’t remember the last time he’d played like a soloist. Fodorio was right, and that was what was really making Daniel feel sick, the way he agreed with Fodorio. Solo playing was different. It involved hardly any listening, no matter what teachers or professionals said, it just didn’t. The musical sensitivity was to yourself, mostly. Were you being your best Brahms? Was this your most glissando-y Gershwin? But quartet playing was almost all listening, sensitivity to three other people. You could not play alone, at your own tempo, or with your own idea—you couldn’t even breathe alone. So, no, he had not played with bravura in some time. The realization pinned him square in the gut, as though a sign had been tacked on: Nothing to see here.
“We’re conversing,” Fodorio said.
“Okay,” Daniel said. He wasn’t going to beg Henry to stay. There were so many things he wanted to say to him, about how they hadn’t really even made it yet, and he should wait for that, to see what that feels like, how he owed it to them to stay—for what, he wasn’t sure, exactly, but it seemed that if Henry left he’d be breaking off a corner of the group and leaving them lopsided and limping, and when had they ever left him lopsided?
But perhaps Henry was leaving anyway, growing his own family. He was the only one of them with family here at the festival, after all. Henry had always been an outlier that way.
Daniel stood. Fodorio held up a hand and said, “Aren’t you going to ask me?”
“Ask you what?”
“Why I didn’t talk to you about this kind of career?”
Daniel swallowed. “No, I wasn’t going to ask you that.”
“So you know, it’s not to do really with talent. It’s the way you play. You and the other two, the women, you all play the way you’re supposed to, like chemicals mixing together—no, no, it’s good. It wasn’t so good four years ago, let me tell you, it was a bit chaotic, but you must go there, to the place of chaos, if you’re to find the balance. And back then, it wasn’t awful, either. You didn’t lose because you were awful. You lost because there was almost too much energy, energy you all didn’t know how to use yet. Anyhow, you three, you’re like that, but Henry here, he’s got a different type of spark.”
“I didn’t ask you,” Daniel said.
Henry took a step toward him. “Don’t tell anyone else, okay?”
“I won’t. I also won’t tell Fodorio about the tendonitis in your arm or your hand or whatever. He wouldn’t want to hear something like that.”
Daniel left the room, trying with effort to slam the door, but it would not slam. He charged down the hall looking at his feet and ran roughly into Jacqueline, Henry’s sister, at the end of the hall. She was the opposite of Henry, short and dark and serious. The stark difference between them always surprised Daniel, no matter how many times he’d been around her.
“Oh!” she said. “God, are you all right? Don’t tell me . . .”
He touched Jacqueline’s arm. “I’m sorry. No, everything’s fine. Your brother’s in his room planning some kind of escape, but whatever.”
Jacqueline laughed. “He always is. He’s the kid that goes into a room and looks for all the exits. He can’t feel comfortable unless there’s a way out. You know that.”
Do I? Daniel wondered. How much did he know intuitively about his quartet members without consciously stating it? He knew Henry was a flake about being on time and also goofy and warm and brilliant. But did he know what Henry needed? Were they giving it to him? Could they?
“Don’t worry so much,” Jacqueline said. “If there’s one thing I learned being related to Henry—hell, being related to anyone—it’s that you have to trust that they’re going to be there. That’s the only thing that motivates people like Henry. That’s where the binding-someone-to-you part comes in. Your faith that they’ll show up. Worrying doesn’t do shit.”
“What about punching him in the face? Have you tried that?”
She rolled her eyes and began walking past him. “Don’t worry,” she said again, like someone who was truly related to Henry.
In his room, Daniel worked his way through the Shostakovich by reading the score. Technically, the Ravel was the more difficult piece, but they’d performed that before, many times. It had been the first really difficult piece they’d mastered. But the Shostakovich was less organized, or less obviously logical. It took an exhausting amount of concentration to pull the phrases together, to make the fragments and jumps compose a whole. You could not miss a millisecond in the piece. It was helpful to look at the score, which Daniel always had at his feet during rehearsal. It was helpful to see it all laid out like that. Sometimes he read scores like people read books, before bed, over coffee, for a good story. But reading the Shostakovich quartet scores was, for Daniel, much like reading a Russian novel: when you finally understood one desperate line, you then had to be able to see it twofold—first, as part of the larger tragedy, and second, as stand-alone grace.
Once he’d played the whole piece in his head, all the parts, he closed the score and placed it on the desk. What did he know about staying or leaving? There were divorce papers to file, the paperwork a cruel punishment for having failed a government-aided promise. It all sounded like such a failure—divorce—and he’d never so frequently disappointed people as in these past several months. He was thirty-three, and so far, the most he’d ever felt about anything was about the absence of Lindsay, and what he felt was a light shining on the absence of himself. He felt more emotions about her departure than he ever did when he’d actually been with her, and that depressed him further. He could fall into passionate love with an outline of Lindsay, a Lindsay-shaped loss, more easily than he could with her.
And even now, slowly getting ready for this important concert, he was trying to methodically run through his loss, to balance the emotional budget. Trying to work it out with a pencil and paper, talking to Lindsay in his head, trying to make sense of things. Trying to put these little pieces of their relationship into a mathematical equation, even if the result was always zero. This because this.
But his decision to marry Lindsay had been in part because this hadn’t equaled this. They were so unlike each other that it was constantly kinetic, sparking. His relationship with the quartet was similar in principle, but different in practice. It was also kinetic, but in the process of making music, the friction was quieted. Of course, they could never match perfectly on a personal level. And of course Henry was thinking about leaving. Someone always would be.
Daniel ran into Henry and his family in the lobby. Henry looked less purple and swollen than before, and said nothing of Fodorio. Henry’s mother hugged Daniel hard, and he felt glad that someone’s family was here, at least. It made everything seem less high stakes, all that unmitigated love. Daniel saw that it wasn’t just an absence of money that kept him from having a fallback like the rest of them, but also an absence of family.
The girls had gone ahead, so they walked with Henry’s family to the hall, their instruments on their backs. Henry’s mother asked all sorts of questions, though not the ones she shouldn’t have (about Lindsay), and Henry’s father made good-natured jokes about Canadians and Henry’s eye. How had Henry ended up such a man-boy with a family like this? Daniel wondered. But then again, Henry, six years younger, was actually still a boy.
“Are you crying?” Henry asked as they broke off from his family.
“Shut up,” Daniel said.
“Well, I’m not. Hurts enough, though.”
“Don’t tell Jana that. She’ll think it was the reason if we don’t win.”
“Nah, I think it’s good,” Henry said. “It’ll fuel the fire, you know?”
Daniel didn’t know.
They had their own private dressing rooms, and Daniel practiced the tough spots in the Shostakovich, running through them seven, maybe eight times until they were perfect, until his fingers had memorized the positions once again, and playing it felt easy. He felt confident about the performance, at least the part in his hands.
But he was still sore from Brit’s refusal to go on a walk with him earlier in the day. He couldn’t let it go, and it hummed annoyingly in his mind as he rehearsed. Was she punishing him for choosing Lindsay? Did he regret choosing Lindsay?
He knew he didn’t regret losing Brit—they’d spent not even six months together, and all that time they hadn’t been together, not really—nor was he in love with her now. There were all sorts of reasons they weren’t right for each other, and she was no angel. She loved people too easily, for one. Daniel had always felt that when she touched him back then, he had to peel her hand off him, to remove himself from her gaze, if he wanted to get away. And she had a way of asking him too many penetrating questions—what had it been like growing up in Texas, why didn’t he believe in God, what time of night was he born—but not enough of herself: as in, she would never ask herself why she loved someone, or why she couldn’t simply decide not to feel bad if someone didn’t love her back. She didn’t think about things in ways that allowed her to make choices. She was always the victim. She also looked sort of bored when she wasn’t smiling, which was whenever she was playing or thinking, and you could tell she didn’t think about or practice what she said before it came out of her mouth, so sometimes it was difficult to understand her. And she over-pursed her lips when she made words with an oh sound, so as to hide the snaggletooth on her left side. That was annoying.
They were also very alike, and back then Daniel thought their kindred nature would have a canceling effect, that one would X out the other. They were easily excited by each other’s thoughts. Those few months they spent together, they often sat on the couch tangled in each other, the conversation between them like a car accelerating, gaining speed, shifting up and up, cruising. Daniel had never before been so excited simply to talk with someone. Sure, her long pale legs poked out of her dress and tucked under his, and they both knew they would end up in bed after the conversation burned out, but first there would be animated arguing about Heitor Villa-Lobos and South American folk music and the state of contemporary composers, especially the pretentious contemporary composers they knew, or whether Henry was ever going to grow up or compose something or conduct something, or if Jana really liked any of them—and how did Jana get that bright sound anyway, was it the action on her strings, was it her old-school Russian teachers, was it just the way she’d always played? Conversation had never been more thrilling or exhausting, and he’d never felt more exposed. As if he were talking to an original version of himself, a version who could see the layers of fakery and armor he put on to get through the day, the week, the part of life where he was trying to be something. Brit had been substance; she had been solid. She had been too much.
The point was that the old Brit and the old Daniel would have jumped at the opportunity to waste an afternoon taking a walk together in a ski village. He supposed those people were gone now, and he couldn’t afford to regret it.
He played over the solo he had in the fourth movement, a haunting melody that spanned all four strings, required perfect intonation, little vibrato, and precise agility. Everybody was exposed in the Shostakovich, and he wanted to get this right. He had the music in front of him, but he closed his eyes while he played and pictured the score. Rests on all the parts but his, the long slurs across the staff, simple black notes, spaced a civilized distance from each other, and then Henry joining in, harmonics, and Jana taking over the melody. To see it was to play it.
But when he reached for the F on his D-string, the wolf bowled out instead, and the shock of it set his hand off, and the next four notes were painfully out of tune. He opened his eyes. He stopped playing. He’d sounded terrible. He’d made a mistake.
Once they were sitting under the warm lights of the stage, the welcome applause fizzling out, Daniel had completely forgotten how they’d gotten up there. He couldn’t remember it. What he could remember—even as they began to play the first few phrases of the Mozart—was arriving in the wings early and finding only Jana there, waiting in her narrow dress, looking at the dark stage, their four empty chairs arranged just so. In the shadows, he saw that Jana’s face had changed in the past couple of years. She looked grown now, the planes on her face purposeful and womanly, her brown eyes slim and focused. He was sure his own face looked older.
“Did you ever think we’d be here?” Daniel asked, palming the neck of his cello in his suddenly sweaty hand.
Jana looked at him. “We were here four years ago.”
“No, I mean. You know, here here. Like about to do this.”
“We haven’t done it yet. And after that rehearsal today, I’m not sure we’re going to.” Jana crossed her arms and looked at the floor, marked with white tape that meant nothing to either of them, yet she didn’t turn away. “But to answer your question, yeah. I did think I’d be here.”
Daniel smiled. “Me too.”
For a moment, they both looked out at the auditorium, mostly filled. Neither was looking for family.
“I guess your parents aren’t here?” Jana asked.
Daniel laughed a small laugh. “No.”
“I sometimes forget about your family,” Jana said.
Daniel said nothing, but he thought, Me too. Where would they be about now? His mother in the bedroom, reading the Bible among many cheap decorative pillows, his father parked in front of the television, unshowered, vodka in hand.
“It’s not fair,” Jana said. Her voice was small, unusual. “That we had to escape those . . . the past, our families.”
“No, it’s not fair,” Daniel said. “At least Brit’s past escaped her. She always acts like the victim of her situation, but in a way, she’s kind of lucky.”
The houselights dimmed and he swung around to call for Brit and Henry, but there they already were, not five feet behind him, Brit’s white face like a ghost in the dark, stricken. He hadn’t known she was so close, that she could overhear him. He moved toward her as if to say something, but nothing came. I didn’t mean, I don’t think, I can’t say, I’m sorry, I love you. Though those sentiments were true, they would have sounded like lies, because here was a despicable, rigid, naked, malformed version of Daniel they could finally both see. But before he could say anything, the lights brightened, the applause started, and they were ushered on stage.
The Mozart began, unkind to matters of human strife.
The three others started the piece, Daniel tacet for the first few phrases, and it was comfortable, classic Mozart, if richer and fuller than his early quartets: Henry’s playful eighths under Jana’s high melody, and the familiar hints of “Eine Kleine Nachtmusik” sneaking in every now and then. It was a perfect piece to start a performance. Oh, the audience seemed to say, this is something we understand. It was joyful, though Daniel’s heart churned under it all. He could not bring himself to look at Brit, not even when they shared the same inside line, broken and dissonant.
Someone had once told him that playing Mozart and Haydn quartets was like all your organs coming together in your middle—your solar plexus turning up into a smile. There was no smile at the center of the piece right now.
In the space between the Mozart and the Ravel, where they shuffled their music and let their arms go slack (take this time to rest your muscles, he always told his students, breaks don’t come very often), he looked over at Henry, whose swollen eye made it look like he was winking, and maybe he was winking. He looked at Jana, whose stony face belied an undercurrent of worry. The Mozart had not gone off seamlessly enough to ensure the rest of the performance. In fact, it had felt like something apart from them, like seeing a long-departed ex-lover, how you recognized the great big swath of love you once felt, though you were no longer compelled by that love.
They began to play the Ravel, the opening of the first movement requiring a light, liquid touch, the phrase starting as if joining in on an already-begun elemental melody. Here, they were ramping it up. The piece was beautiful but also tragic, building to angry, aggressive moments and then backing down again to the Monet-like theme. Even in the second movement, when everyone was pizzicato, it was a symphony, each attacking their instrument, but in time and in song.
But did they play it that way? Daniel had no way of knowing; his brain was still back in the wings, frantically searching for a way to erase that look from Brit’s face.
The final movement of the Ravel, Vif et agité, short and exciting, ended on an optimistic F-major chord, but it was a different kind of F major from what they’d need to begin the Shostakovich. They waited a respectful amount of time to let the air clear between pieces. Daniel could see Jana sweating, the sheen around her hairline. He was sweating, too. He tried to catch her eye, but she was staring at the first page of the Shostakovich, and he knew she was trying to hear it in her head before she led the opening. He needed to catch her eye. If they didn’t connect—if someone didn’t connect—this whole thing would fall apart.
And then she looked up, but not at him. Instead, through him. He looked at Henry, who was staring back, and Daniel remembered with a start that he was the one who began the piece, with a lone version of the somber melody. He began, and Henry entered midway through his phrase, his version a smidge quicker. And when Brit entered, and then Jana, completing the round, each tempo was subsequently different, an attempt to correct that only amounted to disjointed time. But everyone kept playing. There was no other choice. Daniel heard it: they were each playing as though playing alone, together. They hadn’t played like this in years.
Panic swelled in Daniel’s chest, his hands growing damp, and when he heard the sounds—a primal moan followed by a woman’s scream—he thought it was simply the aural manifestation of his insides.
But it wasn’t. A few other high-pitched shouts sounded from the audience, and Jana abruptly stopped playing. The rest of them wound down like a toy turning off. Jana shielded her eyes from the stage lights and peered out over the audience. The stage manager stepped out of the wings and held up a hand to Daniel, pressing a finger to his earpiece. “Wait,” he said. “We’re figuring out what’s happening.” And on his cue, the houselights brightened. Daniel saw, in the very back left side of the theater, a group of people standing up, bending over something, someone.
Jana sat back down. “Are we supposed to just sit here?” she whispered.
“No one’s looking at us,” Brit said.
“Well,” Jana said. “I guess we get to start that over, but not play it like a piece of shit this time.”
She stared at Daniel, and Daniel looked down at his feet, his scuffed black shoes that used to be shiny, felt his tux jacket pull on his back as he slouched. It had been his fault that they’d started the Shostakovich badly (slowly, lazily), but it wasn’t entirely his fault that they hadn’t found a way to fix it. None of their whole selves had been there. They’d all left parts of themselves somewhere off stage tending to preoccupations, worries, betrayals. The brazen Shostakovich revealed what the Mozart and the Ravel had kindly hidden: they’d been not at all the cohesive group they’d found so easily these past years.
That realization was frightening for everyone in the group. For everyone but Henry. Henry felt it with a wave of relief so thorough he had a moment of nausea. He was free.
The stage manager came back on, crouched in between Brit and Daniel, one hand on each of their arms, and delivered the news. There’d been a heart attack, he’d heard, or something like it, and all involved parties had exited the theater and gone on to the hospital. No, they didn’t know if the victim (was he a victim if he wasn’t dead? what did one call someone who merely suffered from a heart attack but lived?) was okay. And yes, they should begin the Shostakovich over, and the part of the piece they’d played before the incident would not be judged as part of the competition.
Henry considered saying, “But I don’t want to.” But he didn’t say it, because though he might not have wanted to play or continue playing, he could play, and he could do it quite well, swollen eye and all. He felt his brain inside his skull like a body of water in which deep sediment had come loose, and this thought—I don’t want to—breaking the liquid surface with a satisfying if mostly soundless pop.
Daniel’s thoughts were more frightening. Someone could be dying, he thought. Someone was probably dying. Everyone was just organs and blood pumping along, and no one was free of that. No one was free. His panic morphed once more, this time into the idea that he had, indeed, walked through life disappointing people.
Before they began again—and how grateful they were to be given the second chance, and how terrible the reason—Daniel forced himself to look at Brit, straight in the eyes. Perhaps that was why they’d all been so sloppy. The inside voices couldn’t even look at each other.
She looked back at him, tilted her head, and as the houselights dimmed and the stage lights blinded, she mouthed something. He couldn’t quite see it, but Jana cleared her throat, and he began, and six and a half bars in—he would always remember this, six and a half bars—he realized what she had been mouthing: Love you. Not as a confession. Not as an insult. Not as a proclamation. But as a fact: I love you, even when you are your worst self, even if it’s you who takes this competition win away from us. I love you because we all love each other because we have to. It’s in some contract somewhere that no one ever saw or signed. A lived contract. I love you because if I don’t, there’s nothing, empty chairs, a dead man, fluttering paper music.
Henry hadn’t remembered signing on to a contract, though. When had he made the choice? He could recall the choice to have the baby, to commit to Kimiko; standing in Central Park in August—sweating down his back, the way nothing moved the tree leaves, the heavy heat just sitting on top of them, suspending everything in resigned, observant stillness—he’d felt the switch flip, if he hadn’t already switched it himself: I choose this.
But now the Shostakovich was already under way, Daniel having begun it with all of them this time. Henry played because that’s what they did. They played. They did it because they were good at it. Henry was especially good at it. But what if he was especially good at other things, too, things like being a partner to Kimiko, or a soloist, as she’d been prodding him to be, or a father? What if he was better at being a father than he was at playing the viola, or what if he was just as good? What if he was worse?
Here were these people, one of whom had punched him squarely in the face the night before. How were these terrible, beautiful people worth excluding entire sectors of living? Why were they—once unchosen, regular people, colliding in regular ways with other regular people—now linked to each other inextricably, tied by old binds, each breath wound around the breath of three others, like a monster, like a miracle?
Jana knew it was worth it. She played the Shostakovich knowing for sure it was worth it. But she’d been shaken this trip, not just by Henry’s strange behavior and Daniel’s emotional malaise, but by the handsome player from the St. Vincent, Laurent. He’d shown an interest, Henry was right, and if Henry was going to blow up his life with love, why couldn’t she? Being with Laurent could be willed, the way she’d willed this quartet into being, the way she’d willed them to Esterhazy a second time. It worried her, though, in a small way. She had never let in the external world before, not in the way Henry was doing, and she didn’t know if there was room in her career for it. During the Shostakovich, this time around, at least, there was absolutely no room for anyone else.
Brit was also letting go of people. It was what they had to do to play. With her look, she’d released Daniel, but she had really meant to release herself. It had been years—years—that she told herself she was over him, and she was over him in all the ways it was possible to be over this man who sat next to her every day and played music. There was, she realized in that first Shostakovich movement, a piece of him that had grown into her, and likely the other way around, and that was how she knew they were doing well, professionally. It was how she knew he’d been hurt earlier in the afternoon, when she declined the walk, and how she knew exactly the moment he understood the words she’d been mouthing and that he was grateful, and sorry, and also unchanged. It was an admission—love you—she was done denying, and also done indulging.
With Brit’s look, Daniel was released from who he had momentarily been, which, as the first movement (which Shostakovich had retitled from “Allegretto” to “Blithe ignorance of the future cataclysm” to avoid accusations of formalism) unfurled, made him consider who he had been, but he couldn’t access it anymore, and that was because who he had been was dark and closed and hard. He should be open—a familiar feeling, as music had always made him feel that way, bigger and fuller. It was because there was a story—one Daniel found so comforting—in the scores, where he was able to see it all at once, to see what he heard. Stories always filled you up.
This was the story of the Shostakovich quartet, as Daniel saw it in the black conversation on the score in his mind: The first movement, Jana trying to convince the audience of a placid pastoral theme, and the supporting notes martial, marching always forward, and as the martial themes start to overtake the pastoral melody, Jana fights back, and at the end, in an accelerating coda, Jana wins, two soft notes plucked in time to two harmonic eighths. But then, in the second movement (“Rumblings of unrest and anticipation,” definitely not “Moderato con moto”), Henry’s plodding three notes repeat, relentless—Henry looking a little relentless himself, his face strained, his work showing for once, but his sound clear and exacting—and Jana’s extended solo, different now, not lining up with Henry’s three-note cycle, the notes manipulated so as to appear in a different time signature completely, and the melody not pastoral at all, but wild. Angry. Daniel saw the competing time signatures on the page. Shostakovich was a beast whose work was difficult for many listeners because his quartets could not be fit into a mold. They, too, wanted to be free.
Daniel lost sight of the score, which coincided with a realization of what Brit had always been trying to convince him of—that it wasn’t just music that made you bigger. People did. People gave you stories. People made you expand.
And at the start of the fourth movement, Henry found his reason, too. Because these were the groaning sounds of one kind of family, the whoosh of blood, the gulp of muscles, the hiccup of veins. What else was there to do but make them?
Daniel had no score, but a story. Here were those triple stops, played together but apart, and Daniel’s haunting solo, the solo a lament, the fourth movement mourning into the fifth movement, and the fifth—which Shostakovich retitled “Why? And for what?”—furious for a time until the very end, where that same pastoral theme that had begun it all was played once more, this time greatly diminished, barely audible, slower, uncomplicated—all that desperation giving way to, well, giving up. What was the original title, the Italian one? Daniel could not remember. The movement wound down and down until Brit guided Daniel and Henry to a series of slurred whole notes, one after another, so many and so long and so low that it was as if they were merely tapping into a seismic chord that made the earth vibrate at an otherwise unheard frequency, and at last Jana plucked her final two notes—Okay, I’m giving up hope, you can, too—and the notes didn’t end, but died.
The result was unquantifiable. There was the way they felt during—lost, unreal, having dreamt the same dream in front of hundreds of people—and the way they felt after—depleted, used, but by each other—and the way everyone else felt after—elated, celebratory, brimming. It was hard to tell where their feelings ended and others’ began, not after the hour or so they’d spent on stage, tapping into each other, deliberately eliminating the boundaries between their bodies and their brains, making porous their expressions.
That performance exhaustion was why, as soon as they stepped off stage and the stage manager walked up to Henry with a fragile urgency and stood so close to him their noses practically touched—and told Henry it was his sister who had collapsed in the audience, who had been taken to the hospital, who had halted the performance, and it was her wife who had cried out, and that his sister was now in the hospital down the mountain, in some kind of condition no one knew, but his whole family was there (had missed the performance), and there was a car waiting for him, and his presence was requested immediately—Henry’s reaction was flat, unreadable. There was no expression left.
The group stood around Henry, shoulder to shoulder, breathing the same hot breath for a few seconds before anyone said anything.
“I’ll go with him,” Daniel said, and proceeded to give out instructions. Brit would call Kimiko and Jana would call their manager to talk about next steps. Jana took Henry’s viola out of his hands and packed it up for him, and it was only as Daniel and Henry walked out the back way, down an empty delivery hall to a town car waiting outside, that Henry said, “Wait. What? What happened to Jackie?”
Daniel didn’t know, but he said, “Something with her heart.”
The car was the same kind that had driven them there from the airport, and what had felt cramped then now felt too big and empty, the air steel-cold. Henry’s face fell into an impatient frown.
“It’ll be okay,” Daniel said, reaching his hand out to the space around Henry’s knee, though not quite touching it.
“I didn’t even know,” Henry said. “Someone should have told me. We should have stopped playing.”
“I don’t know,” Daniel said. “Maybe. We did stop, I mean. But then we started again.”
Daniel’s words, pointing out the obvious, hung in the air long enough that he thought perhaps Henry was going to lash out at him for saying, once again, nothing. For having nothing to say. For committing to nothing. But he saw, in the flash of streetlights as they approached the bigger town at the bottom of the mountain, that Henry’s face barely registered him. Henry’s face, and his mind and body, were in another place entirely, one Daniel couldn’t have gone to if he tried his hardest.
At the hospital, Daniel waited outside the room where Jacqueline was while Henry went in. The blinds in the window to the room were partially open, though, and he glanced through. Henry’s parents and Jacqueline’s wife stood around the bed, and he saw Jacqueline, with a gray pallor to her skin but her eyes open, and she smiled when Henry broke the circle. He saw the side of Jacqueline’s wife’s face—what was her name again?—puffy and tear-streaked. Her name was Anne.
Daniel sat on a bench next to a vending machine that buzzed with a bored but terrified hum. His dress pants were wrinkled, and his sweat-stained undershirt was starting to smell. He should call Brit or Jana, but he wanted to have something to tell them first. His fingers tingled with post-performance rawness. This was a strange way to come down. Usually after a performance, people handed them drinks and small plates of food and complimented them—and Daniel usually drank one drink more than the amount he should, and ended up strewn across the foot of a made hotel bed, drooling on the comforter until early morning. Here, there was no one, an empty hotel room waiting for him, a private family moment happening on the other side of a wall. He was on the verge of divorce, and had accidentally hurt Brit before the performance, and how was the performance, anyway? It was hard to tell out of context. He counted the flickers of the fluorescents, but found no regularity to them.
He should call someone, he thought again, but he didn’t. And here’s why: He was, in some small corner of his tired, crooked body, satisfied that something terrible had befallen Henry. Henry, to whom nothing terrible had happened in his entire life, who was given—without asking—talent, love, family, purpose, ease. And Daniel understood, ultimately, that this would not alter Henry’s life—that he would continue to receive blessings from whatever Henry reservoir of Henry goodness existed—but here, now, he was in pain, a real kind of pain, not a pain Daniel knew (Daniel, whose family hadn’t suffered from physical illness, but from a kind of illness that came with communicating across separate planets), but it was a tangible pain nonetheless. He would be temporarily broken, and when Daniel thought about it, he imagined that he and Henry might recognize each other in a new way.
After some time, Henry’s father, gray-haired, his face pocked with smile lines, came out of the room, put his arm around Daniel, and explained that Jacqueline had fainted, possibly due to undiagnosed cardiomyopathy, they weren’t sure yet, symptoms brought on by the altitude and drink. It was an issue with her heart muscles, a long-latent disease now affecting the way those muscles constricted. She should be fine with medication and a slight lifestyle change.
“No more heavy foods for her,” he said, chuckling a little, actually chuckling. “Gonna be hard as a chef.”
“I’m so glad,” Daniel said. “I’m glad she’s going to be all right.”
“Me too, son,” Henry’s father said. “You should go now. We’ll be fine. Go celebrate. That was one hell of a concert.”
“Was it? It’s hard to tell.”
“Oh, no, I think you know,” his father said, and winked. A world where fathers winked. Henry’s father hadn’t even heard the whole concert, and he was saying this. Daniel felt a crushing in his own chest, like two icebergs meeting. He wanted to hug Henry’s father.
Before Daniel could make a decision about the hug, Henry and Anne came out into the hallway, animated, and Henry’s father walked back into the hospital room.
“She’s okay,” Anne said, and repeated all the information Henry’s father had just reported. Anne, whom Daniel had met only once before, hugged him. She was small, built like a child, and her whole wiry frame clutched on to him. When she let go, she said, “Thank you for coming with Henry. He can be kind of unreliable in getting places, as you probably know.”
Anne left to go grab coffee from the cafeteria, and through the window to the hospital room, Daniel saw Henry’s parents embrace over Jacqueline’s bed.
“Go back and tell the girls, and I’ll be at rehearsal tomorrow morning,” Henry said. Daniel had never heard Henry speak with such calm conviction before. “I’m going to . . . stay.”
He’d tripped over that word: stay. Daniel looked at him, trying to decipher this new version of Henry.
Henry went on. “Listen, Fodorio made an offer, and it was really good. Like really good. But I . . . turned it down. For now. I’ve gotta deal with”—he gestured to his right elbow. “I think it’s tendonitis, which should be fine, right?”
“Should be fine,” Daniel said, having no idea. It depended on how much scar tissue there was, how long he’d been ignoring it, how badly he wanted what Fodorio had to offer.
“But I’m gonna stay here tonight. You go.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes,” Henry said, touching his eye. “If you don’t leave, I’m going to punch you in the face.”
The icebergs were melting into each other. Daniel’s whole body felt cold, then hot. He knew that if he spoke, he would cry. Something was changing.
Once back at the hotel, Daniel found the post-concert reception winding down, and he found Jana at the bar, chatting with a festival organizer. He told her about Jacqueline’s condition, how Henry was staying the night there, and that everyone was all right. Jana seemed tired, but relaxed for the first time in a very long time. Daniel asked if it was the wine. No, it was the performance, she said.
“We played really, really well,” she said, touching his arm. How rarely they touched, the two of them. And then, because she knew why he was there, she said, without him asking, “Brit went up to her room, but she wanted you to come find her once you were back.”
Daniel stood outside Brit’s door for a full minute before knocking, imagining that he was trying to think of what to say, though he wasn’t. Nothing was coming. The space in his head where he would have been planning out his words wasn’t exactly empty, but wasn’t full of anything he could name, either. He knocked.
Brit opened the door looking sleepy and invited him in. She was still wearing her concert blacks, and she had a half-empty glass of wine on the nightstand. Her room was a mirror image of his, the bathroom on the opposite side, and she had a king-sized bed instead of his two queens. She poured Daniel a glass and he told her about the hospital, and Henry, and Jacqueline.
“Cardiomyopathy, something where your heart muscle is too small to pump blood,” he said, settling in on the reading chair opposite her bed.
“Actually, it’s where your heart muscle is too big,” she said absently. “Still, same difference.”
He was regularly surprised by the things she knew. He supposed it was because she read so much. “Why would your heart muscle being too big make it not work?” he asked.
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I just remember the doctor trying to explain something to me about it when my mom died. Basically, the blood that isn’t pumped backs up into your whole system, your lungs and stuff. You drown in it. That isn’t what happened to my mom. Well, not exactly. But similar.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Daniel said, feeling useless, like a stuffed animal on the chair.
“It’s okay,” she said.
“No,” he said. “I’m sorry. About before.”
“It’s fine, you know,” Brit said. “I know what you meant.”
“I don’t even think I mean that.”
“Whichever. It’s fine. I should have told you that before we started playing.”
Daniel said, “I almost punched someone else today.”
“Oh yeah? Who?”
“Fodorio,” he said. He drank some more, closed his eyes hard, screwed them shut.
“Are you okay?” Brit asked. “Is it Lindsay?”
“No, Fodorio, I said.”
“No, I mean, maybe this thing with Lindsay’s got you overtired or something.”
He sighed. “There’s nothing with Lindsay.”
She drank the last of her wine. She tapped her fingers idly on her wet, empty wineglass and he wanted to flee. He fought the urge.
“That’s what I mean,” Brit said. “It’s all right to feel bad about it, even if you wanted it.”
“Wanted what?”
“You tell me,” Brit said. She sprung upright. “Actually, I have to call Paul before it’s too late. Do you mind? Real quick. Don’t go.”
She perched on the far end of her bed and dialed Paul. Daniel listened to her end of the conversation without pretending he wasn’t. She said nothing of note, nothing he would remember later, nothing that made his heart skip a beat, nothing that made him think of Lindsay or try not to think of Lindsay. Except at the end of the call, Paul must have said goodbye without saying “I love you,” and Brit said it quickly: “I love you,” with a miniature question mark at the end, a half-step higher in pitch that communicated something that made Daniel want to go sit next to her, hold her like he’d hold a cello, smell the rosin in her hair.
He stayed where he was, though.
He couldn’t hear if Paul had hung up before he heard her say it, or if he’d said it back and then hung up, but in any case Daniel waited a beat after Brit put the phone down to clear his throat. She looked at him as though she’d forgotten he was there.
“Dating you,” she said, setting her jaw and mouth in hard, mathematical lines. “Dating you was like being in a desert, being really thirsty, like about-to-die thirsty, and seeing this oasis, a big, wide lake, and running toward it at top speed, and then when you get there, there’s just nothing. Nothing there. It’s just a mirage.”
He leaned forward on his chair and clasped his hands together. “Oh,” he said. And then, “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, you said that,” she said.
“So.”
“All I’m saying is that Lindsay seems a little like that, too. Like, not all the way there. So maybe it’s just hard to have a relationship—a marriage—when both people are so similar like that.”
Daniel knew she was wrong, at least about Lindsay. Lindsay had been there. Oppressively there. There in every moment, sucking it dry, asking each one to be the most important moment of all the moments. Daniel had been the one not there, unsure of where there was, undesirous of the longitude of moments that made up there. He’d thought her there-ness would make him exist. Maybe it had, but maybe too late.
“Or maybe it’s hard to have a marriage when you’re also married to three other people,” Daniel said.
“Or maybe she’s just tired of running toward you. Or you to her.”
Brit moved around the room, taking her earrings off and placing them in a bowl on the credenza, removing her heels while standing, one leg bent behind her at a time, pulling her blond hair up into a high ponytail. He watched her, and she didn’t look at him once. She was a flamingo, a strange animal, partially see-through, partially solid, a new creature, uncategorized. She went into the bathroom, and she came out in sweats and a large Indiana University T-shirt, her face scrubbed clean of makeup. Her face was at once familiar and entirely out of his reach. The same freckles and open eyes, a vision from a part of his life that was quickly receding, or had already gone.
“Well,” Daniel said, standing. “I guess you’re going to bed. I should, too.”
“No, stay,” she said, and something inside Daniel leapt at her use of that word, again tonight, here as though she wasn’t saying, Daniel, stay, but the euphoric impossible: Stay, this feeling. “Tell me about Fodorio,” she said, clearly believing him to be making a joke.
She lay on the bed on top of the covers, two big pillows behind her. He sat back down on his chair.
“Well,” he said. “He looked older and so shiny at the same time. Like an old shark. Well, actually, I’ve never seen a shark in person. Is that weird? Anyway, he was doing some wooing, trying to convince Henry that it would be best for him to leave the group. But Henry wasn’t falling for it. I don’t think.”
“You don’t think? You don’t know for sure?”
“It’s not important. What’s important is that he said we played alike.”
“Who?”
“You and me. And Jana. Us. That we play . . . together.”
“Well, of course we play together.”
“No, that we’re of the same—that we come from the same source. Or something. That we . . .”
But he couldn’t finish. The words wouldn’t do it. He would continue to talk around it. In any case, he knew she knew what he meant.
“He said it wasn’t that we were terrible last time,” Daniel said. “It was just that we hadn’t reigned it in yet. I guess we were too young.”
“Do you think Henry’s going to leave when the baby’s born?” she asked.
He shifted in his chair. “I think . . . I hope he’ll have a hard time leaving if we win this thing.”
“I hope he doesn’t leave.”
“Me too.”
“Do you like Paul?”
Daniel shrugged. “He’s all right, I suppose. I don’t really know him.”
“You do,” she said. “You know him. That’s him, what you know.”
“Do you like Paul?”
“I love Paul.”
“Oh,” Daniel said.
“Come here,” Brit said, and then made a face. “Not like that or anything, but lie on the bed with me. This bed is so big.”
Daniel took his jacket off and threw it over the chair, and loosened his tie. His armpits were still damp through his undershirt.
He lay on the bed, but there may as well have been an entire bed between them, it was so big. His movements didn’t jostle her at all. They talked without looking at each other.
“Would it help if you told me all the terrible things about Lindsay?” she asked.
“No,” he said.
“I didn’t think so. What about all the wonderful things?”
“No, not that, either. That’s sort of not the point.”
“What is the point?”
“I’m glad Jackie’s okay,” Daniel said.
“Yeah,” she said. “Me too.”
“I’m glad she’s alive.”
Brit’s eyes were closed. “You know, just because my parents died doesn’t mean that anything escaped me. Or that I escaped anything.”
Daniel was starting to think that nothing escaped anything. He didn’t say it, but she knew. They lay there for a while, silent in the heater hum of the room.
Daniel said, “So Lindsay has this tattoo of an eye on her palm.”
“I know,” Brit said, her voice wandering.
“With eyelashes and everything. But then she stabbed her hand with a piece of glass—on accident—and now it’s healing, and I think the eye is going to be all fucked up. Elongated.” He held up his own hand to show her where Lindsay’s stitches were, and where the eye was. Brit nodded wearily. “Or it’ll look closed or something. About that, she doesn’t even care, though.”
“Hm.” Brit hummed. She was falling asleep.
“She just doesn’t care,” Daniel said again.
Brit said nothing, her breath steadied.
“It’s both things. Wonderful and terrible,” Daniel said. “Both things at once.”
Daniel didn’t move from the bed, though he didn’t fall asleep. Inch by inch he scooted closer to Brit until there was a cello-sized distance between them. She slept with her lips slightly parted and her clean hands folded over her stomach. He resisted the impulse to lift one of her hands and match it with his. He turned on his side and clasped his hands under his cheek, pulled his knees up. Then he did something he hadn’t done but to music, perhaps ever: he surrendered. Even though she never saw him do it, he gave in, completely, to her presence. In half an hour, he could feel the heat radiating off her skin, like an ecosystem unto itself. After an hour, he felt sure if he touched her, she would give him first-degree burns. Her body was churning out heat, even from her faraway feet. He didn’t touch her; she no longer needed him to warm her. He lay there trying to catch some of what she gave off. He figured she must have moved out of a REM cycle when she rolled onto her side, toward him, crushing the invisible cello between them in the interim of her private dreams. She closed and opened her mouth a little wider—there was her one crooked tooth on the left side, he could feel it with his tongue just by looking—and she rubbed her feet together. He stayed there, waiting for her eyes to flutter open, and when they didn’t, when they refused in their tireless unconscious satisfaction, he got up and turned the heavy knob and walked out of the room, clicking the door shut behind him, leaving the imprint of his heavy body on the bedspread next to her. Though later this would be the night that was remembered for having pivoted their careers, for the performance that would begin every bio from here on out—“Winner of the 1998 Esterhazy String Quartet Competition”—a night remembered not for anybody’s black eye, or scuffed-up knees, or thermal skin, or punctured hand, or wounded pride, or even ragged heart, but rather for their raw, ringing renditions of Mozart, Ravel, and Shostakovich, it seemed one and the same to Daniel—the cycle through the classic, the romantic, and the tragic, or the movement from joy to hope to despair—which is why when he thought of this night, he always thought of Brit’s sleeping body next to his awake one, always went back there, felt her heat, and wished with each recall that he’d chosen not to leave but to stay, to remain in that moment, to honor it as it constellated all their shared moments that came before it: that he’d waited, that he’d believed that from that single moment something remarkable could happen.