March 2003
Los Angeles
Jana found it annoying that Carl had chosen to have her mother’s funeral on the day after the invasion of Iraq. Of all the days. Not only did it represent a complete lack of a sophisticated understanding of the world and its goings-on—and it wasn’t that hard, just turn on a TV, for God’s sake—but it also meant getting around the city would be impossible. She was tasked with picking up the flowers in the morning (by Carl, Carl, she could not believe she was being ordered around by a man she’d never met before the previous night—a man who, for a time, thought her name was actually Janet), and it took an hour to get to the shop because of street closures. She felt guilty, complicit in something, as she drove past the angry young white people with signs that read Honk for Peace, and she didn’t honk, because it all seemed so self-important, so self-righteous, and she didn’t believe in it. Sure, let’s not invade Iraq. But no, my honking won’t stop it. And anyway, what was peace? And anyway, no one had ever made Jana feel part of something in this town, and she wasn’t about to help anyone else feel the benefits of community, not on this morning, on the morning of Catherine’s funeral.
Jana had a secret, though. She was going to adopt a baby, a girl from Ethiopia, a girl who had been born two months ago, on January 1, but whose destiny had been in the making for two agonizing years. After the home visit and the endless amounts of paperwork here and over there, and then a waiting period in which it seemed like the only kind of motherhood she’d experience would be the tenderness she felt for that paperwork she’d spent so much time with, Jana had finally been sent a referral, two pictures stapled to a dossier that listed stats Jana couldn’t have cared less about—height, weight, gassiness—but the pictures, the pictures Jana kept in a cardstock envelope in her purse.
In one photo, the baby girl was laid against a background of clouds made from cotton balls, wearing a full bear suit that was entirely too big for her, and Jana could only make out her small face, which was clearly on the edge of a crying fit: release me from this cage of a bear suit! Oh baby, she’d thought, I know how you feel. And in the second, the baby in normal baby clothes, belly down on a blanket, smiling, plump and with an optimistic tuft of black hair. She’d felt, as all the parents on the forums wrote, as though she knew the baby, this baby that did not come from her but was going to belong to her for eighteen years. Begrudgingly, she admitted it wasn’t possible, she didn’t know the baby, she just wanted to know her. But secretly, she thought her sense of kinship was special, unique: This baby and I are going to be found soon.
It was a secret from everyone, even the quartet, even Henry. Not that Henry would have had time to help her with it. Clara had just turned four and Kimiko had recently given birth to a boy they named Jack, and Kimiko was trying to play and record semiconsistently, leaving Henry to run around like a maniac, arriving at rehearsals with child spit-up on his shirts and sour bottles in his pockets and sometimes—many times—babies in strollers. The quartet had just accepted a position in residence at a fancy university an hour north of San Francisco, where they would teach and play and run a chamber music series. It was a posh position in a lucky location, and Henry’s need for a yard and more bedrooms for his offspring, as well as his much-voiced desire to move closer to his sister, had been a large part of the group decision. There was also the matter of the way New York had changed in the last two years: now every city event was charged, every trip in and out of the city harried, the guilt that tinged the pleasure Jana felt when she left the city, and the way staying was a political statement. Even the concerts in the city were laden with intention and meaning that Jana thought obscured the real, pure underbelly of music-making. It was time for the quartet to move on, for more than a few reasons.
So everyone was busy in the process of buying property or renting a place in California, of moving their things from New York back to the Bay Area, and in the middle of it, of course, Catherine died. There were conflicting reports about exactly how it’d happened. Catherine had been sickly for a few years now—no one who drank that much wouldn’t be—but she was still relatively young. She’d gone out drinking with friends one night and then left alone to try to find the LA River (the LA River? Jana had never purposely gone there and she’d grown up there). Catherine’s body had been found washed up under an overpass between Los Feliz and Atwater. It was an unseemly way to die, but not entirely surprising to Jana, or to Carl, apparently, who insisted on flowers and a late-morning funeral in a church Jana had never known her mother to attend.
So, the flowers. Carl had ordered enormous tacky explosions of arrangements that Jana had to carry back to the car one at a time, wires and basket twine poking her all the way. Their fragrance made her roll down the window on the drive back, which meant she not only had to pretend not to see the protesters once again but also pretend not to hear them: “Don’t attack Iraq! The world says no to war!”
The protesters peered into her window at the stoplight, and she tried to stare straight ahead. How foolish she must look, she thought, these flowers celebrating in her backseat as bombs dropped in the dusk on the other side of the world. The morning was bright and clear and calm, Los Angeles in March, like Los Angeles in most other months. The protesters wore linen shorts and didn’t sweat.
“Honk for peace!” one shouted into Jana’s window.
Slowly, she turned her head to look at the protester, a woman with gray hair tucked behind her ears, eclectic tortoiseshell glasses perched on her nose. When Jana looked at her, the woman grinned—grinned like a girl, one side of her smile yanked up higher than the other.
“Fuck this,” Jana said evenly.
The woman didn’t falter. “Exactly,” she said.
Catherine hadn’t been all bad, but she had been bad at knowing anyone other than herself. Jana did contact her again after that call before the first Esterhazy concert, a few times, and even saw her once, when the quartet swung through LA on their first western tour circuit. Jana had felt so exhilarated then. They’d given master classes in Salt Lake and befriended students afterward, really excellent students; they’d been the centerpiece of a festival in Portland, playing outdoors to a quiet crowd in a ridiculously verdant summer; and they’d made a triumphant return to San Francisco, their old teachers hosting reading parties late into the night. And in LA, they’d played Royce Hall, and Catherine and Carl had stumbled in halfway through—Jana saw them out of the corner of her eye during a rest in the Beethoven opus 133—and afterward Jana had let them take her out to dinner.
But Catherine spoke only of herself, and asked Jana only one question: did she have a man in her life?
Daniel and Henry, Jana wanted to say, but didn’t. She and Laurent had just broken up and it had been altogether uneventful, though they’d stayed together for two even years. He delivered the news to her in a letter sent from Montreal, where he’d accepted a teaching job at McGill, his own quartet dismantled after they failed to place at the Esterhazy where the Van Ness had triumphed.
Dear Jana, he’d written, the formal salutation like he’d never spoken to her before. Montreal is: as I remembered it, steep and full of beautiful people and fresh mussels and a seediness that refuses the gentrification your Brooklyn seems to value. I find I’ve found myself here. And also, though not as an afterthought, it occurs to me in this cold northern autumn to tell you that I’ve met a woman, a Québécoise who doesn’t play music but teaches philosophy, which seems to me somehow related and yet excitingly apart. We are a more useful match, and you must know something like this anyway. It hasn’t become physically intimate between Michelle and me, and I hope you’ll send my extra violin via courier.
I find I’ve found myself here. Jana had rolled her eyes when she read that. So like Laurent, to put together a sentence that could make a gesture toward meaning and end up meaning absolutely nothing. Of course you were there. That’s where you were. And the way he strung those last two clauses together in one sentence, as if the fact he hadn’t physically cheated somehow earned him the favor of her sending his second violin via courier.
Laurent could never really stand that Jana was more successful than he was, and she could never really hide that she knew it. The imbalance didn’t bother her, but it was a fact, and it affected decisions, and she wasn’t going to apologize for it. They’d sealed the beginning of their relationship with the crack of Daniel’s punch to Henry’s face in that hotel room, but they couldn’t ever really reach that pitch again. When they broke up, Jana felt something like relief, at not having to constantly nurse an undercurrent of disappointment anymore.
So it was particularly annoying when, at the diner (Catherine couldn’t spring for something that didn’t have mirrors along the booths, that didn’t have booths, whose menus weren’t coated in plastic?), Catherine and Carl sat across from Jana, expectantly. Did she have a man?
“No,” she said. “No boyfriend. I’m so busy.”
Catherine’s face fell. Well, it had already fallen. She was sallow by then, she wasn’t getting any parts, not even for mothers. She didn’t look good. “Oh, dear. You’re just like . . .” Who was Jana like?
“You’re just like yourself, I guess,” Carl offered, digging into his breakfast-for-dinner waffles.
“You were always like yourself,” Catherine said. “Just doing your own thing. I like to think I made that environment for you, so you could be so independent.”
Everything Catherine said, even when it purported to be about Jana, was about herself. Jana wondered now if Catherine had ever had that moment that mothers describe, that flood of selflessness that comes in the seconds after you give birth. When your very self rushes out of you and love for this stranger being comes in to fill it, like water, every crevice. But then, so what if she had? For Catherine, even that feeling would’ve been a kind of self-love: look at what I created. And with that thought, her own self would come rushing back in.
It made Jana angry, as though she had been swindled into loving a person who only craved her love. She could not now un-love her mother. Even after the diner, where Catherine drank too many tiny airplane bottles of red wine, when they stood outside by the cars, and Carl wandered off to buy an already out-of-date USA Today, Jana had said, with traffic zooming down Ventura Boulevard, “I love you, Mom.”
“Oh, Carl loves me, too,” Catherine said dreamily, her fuzzy hair around her face, the lit-up street seeming to electrify her silhouette.
She grabbed Jana’s hand and held it for a brief second, like she was squeezing a rosary, and then let it drop. It happened so quickly Jana didn’t have time to respond. Her mother composed herself and tossed her keys to Carl, who was buried deep in a story about the new millennium, and instead the keys landed on the windshield with a smack that cut through the traffic noise and startled Jana out of the moment. Later that night, Catherine would call Jana, crying hysterically, to tell her the windshield was breaking, had slowly grown spider cracks, veins against the dark sky, the whole way home. She was afraid if she got in the car again to take it to the shop, the glass would come shattering down on her. She was crying so hard it was difficult to tell the difference between words and moans. Jana could hear Carl banging around in the background. Her mother howled.
“You don’t have to go in the car. You don’t have to go back in,” Jana said. “It’s okay. You can stay outside. You can.”
This fucking church, Jana thought.
It was ostentatious, like the flowers, and even if Catherine had been a good friend to people, even if she had been the most famous drunk in the Valley, the pews wouldn’t have been filled. And so it felt pathetic to have Jana and Carl on display in the first row, a smattering of people awkwardly seated behind them. She didn’t know how to look like she was appropriately grieving. She’d worn black, the same concert blacks she used to wear in the pit or in chamber orchestra. Black dress pants and a black blouse, her hair tied neatly back, off her neck, makeup caked on her violin hickey.
There was one more request from Carl, whose belly poured over his belt like he did not care at all, who pushed it ahead of him wherever he went. A favor besides the flowers.
“Would you play some songs?” he’d asked. “Your mother would have loved that. She told everyone about her famous violinist daughter.”
Jana could count on one hand the number of times Catherine had come to see her play or even asked about her music. But funerals weren’t for the dead. They were for the living, and Carl was inhabiting this widower role as though at the end of it was some kind of prize. He spoke softly, in cadences that lilted toward sadness and then tumbled back toward gratitude. He held everyone’s hands in both of his hands. He sighed audibly and often. What was in it for him? Jana wondered. Certainly Catherine had no money. They weren’t even married. The house was a step up from the trailer, and the car, the one with the replaced windshield, was still cracked in other, less visible places. And now Carl would have to drink alone.
She decided it wouldn’t hurt anyone or anything to play part of a Bach partita. A Bach partita never hurt anyone.
Jana turned to survey the crowd and saw Brit in the back row, easy to spot with her blond hair pulled over one shoulder of her black dress. Brit had flown in that morning and driven straight to the church, and would have to fly back on the red-eye after the reception, because she had a slew of students to teach, before closing out her studio for the move. Brit took on more students than any of them, certainly more than Jana, who had one or two Juilliard students at any given time, students who didn’t really need her. It’d been nice of her to come, Jana thought. Surely Brit would cry before Jana did. Brit would cry so Jana wouldn’t have to. She waved her thin hand at Jana, and Jana waved back.
Carl spoke first, his voice wavering at exactly the right moments, sliding up the scale just enough for him to catch his cry in a handkerchief. Jana sighed.
“Catherine,” Carl said, as though calling out to her, looking up—actually looking up—at heaven, and then came a litany of lies, or what Jana considered to be lies. Catherine as a generous partner. Catherine as an endlessly curious woman. Catherine as an adventurer. Catherine as someone who took a chance on Carl, who welcomed him into her life, who took care of him. The woman Carl described was like a ghost, an outline of a person Jana thought she would like, a blank space that shot straight through her. She glanced around. Who were these people? What had her mother been to anyone else?
Then came a few women Jana didn’t know, some of them present the night she drowned. Jana felt her palms dampen as Carl took the podium again to introduce her performance.
“And now we’ll hear from Catherine’s only daughter, Jana, playing one of Catherine’s favorite pieces, Barber’s Adagio for Strings.”
Jana couldn’t help the grimace on her face. They had agreed on the Bach. Had Carl misunderstood? Did he not know the difference? Had Catherine actually told him about the Barber? Had she remembered? She stood and looked around, as though someone might rise from the pews to defend her. When she approached Carl, who had his smug hands folded across his belly, she whispered, “You mean the Bach?”
He smiled and shrugged. “I put it on the program,” he said, gesturing to the printer paper crumpled in his hand.
Jana sighed and took her violin out of its case, aware of dozens of eyes watching her, suddenly panicked at not looking distraught enough. But she couldn’t—she couldn’t be distraught while she played. She tapped the strings to make sure they were in tune and, with her chin clamped down on the chin rest, glanced at the audience. Were they an audience? Was that what you called attendees at a funeral?
She found herself looking for Billy, but he was nowhere, missing. She was now older than he’d been when she last saw him. He would be unrecognizable. He could have been any one of those men.
So she would play the Adagio for Strings. She couldn’t think of a good reason not to.
She thought of a good reason not to the moment she began: it was an ensemble piece, an intimate arrangement. It made no sense without the other parts. Alone, the chords weren’t thickened and textured, and though the first violins led the charge for most of the melody, the piece didn’t quite have the richness of tragedy that it did when the seconds came in, when the violas were purposefully dissonant, when the celli climbed up to thumb position. When she was younger, when she’d played it for Billy in her bedroom, what he’d done was that thing you did with children. You filled in the empty spaces they couldn’t. You did a little magical thinking with them. You taught them about it, about how to do it—how to see and hear things that weren’t there. That’s why she had felt completely normal playing this piece for Billy solo, when it really wasn’t a solo piece. She had been just a child.
Now Jana thought maybe everyone could hear it, the missing parts. Surely Brit could. She felt like an idiot, ashamed, holding the long whole notes, hearing the absence of the other parts.
She finished, and her cheeks were wet. She didn’t know why she was crying, or she couldn’t say.
Jana dutifully dragged all the flowers from the church to the afternoon reception, where she tucked herself into a corner of the coral-colored kitchen next to a bucket of white wine bottles, with Brit.
No one knew what to say, so they said that: “I don’t know what to say.” Which meant Jana had to reassure them, which was a perverse way for this whole thing to work, she thought.
Brit stepped in to save her sometimes, pretending to know Catherine, using the bits of information Jana remembered telling her over the years. She was a delightful actress, a woman who loved to laugh, a woman who loved love. Jana couldn’t see through Brit’s narrative, though she stared hard at her lips when she talked. Was Brit lying? Or just stringing together what good parts she did know? That was, after all, the way Brit seemed to see the world, as a bunch of good parts connected by gaps where the really bad parts were.
“I was supposed to play a partita,” Jana said as Brit refilled her Sauvignon Blanc.
“Which one?”
“Three.”
Brit frowned. “Hm. Not the most funeral-appropriate music.”
“Yeah, but it would have at least sounded normal as a solo piece. What the hell was that, springing the Barber on me?”
Brit filled her own glass now. “You didn’t have to play it. No one would have known the difference.”
“Oh, but Catherine in heaven would have known the difference,” Jana said, pointing a finger up at the ceiling. Maybe she was a little drunk already.
Brit didn’t smile, took a drink.
“Well, no. Probably she wouldn’t have known the difference, either,” Jana said. “I would have known the difference.”
“Sorry I was kind of late,” Brit said.
“Oh, God, thank you for coming,” Jana said, a little too loudly. “I’m sorry—yes, thank you. You’re here. Jesus, if you weren’t here, what would I be doing right now?”
“I was just held up because of the protests by the freeway. I would have been more on time if not for that.”
“You should have seen me trying to get these flowers.” Jana gestured toward the arrangement crowding her hair. “I practically had to sign petitions to get through stoplights in Glendale.”
“It was a beautiful rendition,” Brit said. “Of the Barber.”
“Even without the rest of the music?” Jana asked.
“Nah,” Brit said. “I heard it.”
Jana shook her head to disagree with Brit, and the vase of flowers by her head began to fall in slow motion. First petals brushing her forehead, and then the weight of the vase against her hair, and then the briefest brush of thorns against her lips, and then a clump of dirt and pollen on her shoulders. Brit’s hands reached out to try to catch the vase, but too late, it had already crashed onto the coral kitchen tile, breaking into six or seven large, pretty shards at their feet.
Jana brushed the hair out of her face and with it came a few stems and a single orchid bud, hard and unopened. She held the bud up to the light, and she and Brit looked at it for a while before starting to giggle. They were soon laughing so hard that they had to bend over, their faces over the vase shards, spilling a little wine on their shoes and the floor. Time slogged on into early evening, past the time when finger foods were appropriate, and then they were the only ones left besides Carl, and they were still giggling in the corner, darker and drunker now than when they’d begun.
Jana was barely sad when Laurent didn’t return, and she did send his violin via courier to Montreal with a note: I’m glad Montreal is: as you’d remembered it. Good luck with yourself.
She’d been alone since. Her aloneness felt like both a result of her stubborn persistence (something she was doing to herself) and a burden to bear (something everyone else was doing to her). After a certain amount of time, it began to seem like no one could understand her as well as she understood herself, and the longer that was true, the more deeply it was true. Though the longing was there—sure, it would be nice to have someone else cook her breakfast every once in a while, or kill the cockroach, or help carry the groceries up the stairs, or occupy the sometimes frustrating and useless expanse of sheets—the aloneness had carved a canyon so deep and wide, it swallowed and dissipated any romantic possibility. At a certain point, it became easier to go to bed early with a book or a movie and a potent sleeping pill, maybe a glass of wine if she had gone running that night, and sleep in the mild unhappiness that would one day just feel so regular it could be confused for happiness.
The quartet filled her life, anyway: the traveling and recording sessions and negotiated engagements, the EPs and the teaching, the way New York zigzagged your life around so it was possible to become distracted from the general emptiness of it, especially after 9/11.
And then there was the physical pain to deal with. A knot in the base of her spine had been tended to by doctors and spinal specialists and acupuncturists and chiropractors and massage therapists. She used a ridiculous buffer pad behind her when she rehearsed and sweat through the pain during performances. She’d had all kinds of MRIs and scans, and no, there was nothing tumorous there (and for a brief moment she’d been disappointed—the path would have at least been clearer, choices made for her), just a nagging disc out of place. The doctor said she’d been sitting upright and twisting her core around for thousands of hours more than the average person, and that this was bound to happen.
They all had some version of their bodies bearing the weight of their work. Brit’s violin hickey was continuously infected, and she slathered lotions and creams on it to quell the burn. Daniel had recurrent shoulder problems and his own personal massage therapist, Erica, whom Jana suspected he’d slept with. And Henry had tendonitis in his right elbow and wrist, to a degree he hadn’t explicitly said, but the ravages of which Jana had begun to notice in the bow pressure of his fortes, which were a little louder and stiffer these days.
Jana’s lower-back problem felt like a little patch of suffering come to colonize her tissue and fuse with her bones. She knew she wouldn’t die from it. But it felt like death, giving in to the pain. Which is when she began to look into adopting. Which she wouldn’t say was the opposite of death, but all the doctors and the meds got her thinking about the pills her own mother took—and also just about her mother, and what it was like to be a mother, and how could you do that in so much pain, or on so many pills.
Jana couldn’t imagine it.
Especially not with her back twisted up and a relentless travel schedule and a tiny apartment in Brooklyn. But a calm had come over her professional life, or a tamped-down anxiety, now that the quartet had reached a point where they no longer had to hustle for gigs, and they had a manager and a publicist who reviewed paperwork and provided arrangements, a rehearsal space they never worried about paying for, priceless instruments on loan, wealthy patrons, the stamps of Juilliard and Esterhazy, years of experience that had slowly matured into confidence.
Though there may not have been a clear reason to have a child—no husband, no family to speak of—there was no longer any reason not to.
Henry made it work. Why couldn’t she? As she spent weeks and months sifting through information and scrolling through potential adoptees and reading adoption narratives, a new version of herself began to emerge: a Jana who went to bed tired not from a pill but from exhaustion at having carried a child all over the city, who bought small clothes for the small human, who decided what the child would wear until the child began to decide for herself, who marveled at that child’s transition into sentience, who grew a little thicker around the middle (not that she couldn’t use it) eating cupcakes with the child (or maybe the child would like salt, she didn’t know yet), who met other adults who did not play music but held jobs in offices, but who knew Jana the way you know someone who has suffered like you have—even a Jana who grew angry with the child, maybe most days became angry, at least at first, but then at least the anger was directed at someone else, someone of her but not her, not her lithe, spackled, alone self.
She kept her plan a secret because it felt natural to keep it a secret. She told no one in case it failed. If she tended to it privately, it would remain sacred. This was, she imagined, what it might be like to actually be pregnant.
Jana considered writing Laurent: I find I’ve found myself a mother. She didn’t, of course. But it was true. She’d found a mother: herself.
Brit was the one who suggested a drive, before she had to get to Burbank for the red-eye, and Jana tossed her the car keys. The rental was a blindingly white Dodge Neon, the interior smelling of fresh Crayolas, and Jana rolled down the window and leaned her head out in the wind once they were on the 101. No one touched the radio. The wind was noise enough.
“Where should I go?” Brit asked.
Jana shrugged.
“Take me somewhere cool,” Brit said. “Some part of LA that doesn’t seem like LA.”
Jana remembered a dusty hike up Griffith Park with one of Catherine’s more outdoorsy boyfriends. She’d been small and she’d fallen, scraping her knees, and Catherine had picked her up and carried her, roughly at first, and then gently. She pointed out the Hollywood sign in the distance, through haze and smog even back then.
Jana directed Brit east and Brit wordlessly drove. The road wound around the park and then through it. Technically, you weren’t allowed on the trails after sunset, but Jana didn’t think they’d be caught. Everything felt safe and new tonight. They parked at the base of the trail and got out of the car. Brit grabbed Jana’s wrist when they saw a coyote eye them through the trees.
“Late for coyotes,” Jana said, and started up the steep incline.
They followed the trail around a grassless mountain that had no view until it did, suddenly, opening up, revealing the whole canyon below.
“What’s at the top?” Brit asked.
Jana said, “Um, the sky?”
The hike was tiring, and by the time they made it to the fenced landing—which required them to practically claw at the ground with their hands—they were both breathing hard and sweating, and a layer of dust coated their funeral clothes. They were limp with fatigue. Maybe they’d gone too fast.
They stood at the top and looked out. For a good while they couldn’t see anything.
“I can’t see anything,” Brit said.
Jana knew what she was looking for, though, and said, “Wait.”
The lights of the many clusters of office buildings burned below them. Which crop of lights was downtown? Jana had no idea. One looked like the other. A gray haze settled just above the buildings, and above that a few stars were visible. Otherwise, nothing.
“Carl’s eulogy was stupid,” Jana said. “Delusional.”
“Yeah?” Brit said.
“Yeah. Will we be delusional when we’re old?”
Brit scoffed. “We’re kind of old already.”
“Older, then.”
Brit sat down in the dirt and Jana followed. “That’s one way of looking at it. But maybe also there’s a way of looking at it like, that’s the gift your mom gave Carl.”
“What, a descent into narcissism?”
“Self-love, let’s call it. Maybe he felt important because he got to take care of her. Everyone needs someone who allows them a way to love themselves.”
“Oh yeah? Is that what Paul allows you to do?”
“We’re breaking up.”
Jana laughed, but Brit didn’t. Brit rubbed her knees with her hands like she was shaping them. “Oh? For real?”
“I think so,” Brit said. “The fat lady sang. The conductor put his baton down. The fermata over the rest faded out. Epic rest.”
Jana considered Paul, a blond man with wide shoulders, a man in a suit, a man not quick to laugh, but quick to smile—a man whom, despite the years they’d all orbited Brit, she couldn’t say she really knew. He looked like he was related to Brit. He receded into the background.
“I want to show you something,” Jana said, and got up, dusted off her legs. She led Brit back down the mountain, and at the halfway point, turned down a small, nearly invisible trail through bramble and scrub grass. In the dark, it was impossible not to get your legs scratched up. Brit put her hands on Jana’s shoulders at one point, and Jana felt with her foot for the next hold so as not to bring them both down. The bottom of this trail opened up into a field circled by a concrete walkway, and Jana paused so their eyes could adjust to the new dark.
“What is this?” Brit asked. “We might get murdered here.”
“It’s the old LA Zoo,” Jana said. “It closed in the sixties.”
“God, it looks like everyone just ran away from it one afternoon,” Brit said.
They spoke quietly, though there were no animals to wake. In a circle around the field were stone pens, weather-buffed former habitats for animals—ghosts of monkeys, tigers, emus—small enclosures whose bars had been removed so you could walk back into the shadowy recesses. They entered one, and the icy cold coming off stone hit their skin immediately. Brit grabbed Jana’s hand and held it as they walked farther, turning a corner into a cave, the place where the trainers must have entered the enclosure, curving steps leading back to a barred-off doorway. The stone walls were covered in graffiti, and beer cans crunched under their feet.
“It’s the place that feels the oldest to me in LA,” Jana said, her voice tinny and sharp in the habitat. “Nothing really feels that old here, and yeah, you’re right. There’s something about this that feels preserved, like everyone just up and fled all of a sudden.”
“What do you think happened?”
“The animals died? Don’t know. Someplace better came along, probably.”
Jana liked the old zoo because no one came here. No one talked about it as a place to visit, no tourists mobbed it. It was too far east for most people to care, and tucked inside this huge park with lots of other hiking trails. But it was a living ruin of the place where she was from, its grounds a little bit decrepit, always dirtied from high school students or vagrants passing through. It was a ghost of itself, one whose walls hadn’t yet crumbled.
She led Brit farther up the path, to the line of cages, ten or so, which curved around the hill. The cages were human-sized, and the bars were made of thick iron. Jana opened one cage and walked in. Brit stayed outside.
“Monkeys,” Brit said, threading her fingers through the bars. “No, birds. No, I don’t know.”
The ground beneath Jana’s feet was thick in leaves and dirt. There was a back exit to the cage, but that lock was sealed shut. She traced her fingers over it anyway.
“So,” Brit said. “I really didn’t think the Adagio was so bad.”
“Please. It was like a sixth-grade recital up there.” Jana turned back to Brit, slung her arms through the bars next to her.
“It was like the missing parts were—”
“Missing,” Jana said.
“Right.”
“I’m going to tell you something now,” Jana said.
“Okay,” Brit said, taking her hands out of the bars and coming around to step inside the cage with Jana. “It’s weird there’s nowhere to sit in here.”
“I’m having a baby,” Jana said, and then held her breath, waiting for a response. She’d never said that sentence before, not even to the social workers and agency staff she’d met with.
“Oh,” Brit said, touching her own stomach. She was still whispering. She was looking at a spot in between the two of them, as though Jana had conjured something. “Oh.”
“I’m getting one, I mean. I’m adopting. A girl from Ethiopia,” Jana said.
“What’s her name?” Brit asked.
“I don’t know yet.”
“Not Catherine?”
“God, no.” Jana laughed. “That would have made Catherine feel so old.”
She laughed again just thinking of it, the mixture of horror and confusion Catherine would have expressed upon hearing this news, and in the middle of her laugh, Brit lunged at her, arms open, and embraced her. Brit hugged her partly as though she was the one who needed the hug, with that kind of super-conscious physical force. Brit’s face was buried in Jana’s neck, her arms wrapped tightly around Jana’s back. It was a raw force of warmth, this embrace. Brit had a slight floral scent and her hair was soft and in Jana’s hands no matter where she placed them. Jana could feel Brit’s chest expanding and contracting against her own as she breathed. It occurred to Jana perhaps for the first time why men loved Brit—why people loved Brit: she was able, in a way that most people weren’t, to give and receive goodwill. In Jana’s whole life, she could not recall ever having been hugged like this. This one was all-encompassing compassion. Brit was an equal planet to Jana, and the two of them were temporarily merging, gravities combining. Jana accepted the kindness.
“I’m so happy for you,” Brit said into Jana’s hair.
When the cage latch creaked in the wind, Brit’s grip loosened, and they pulled away from each other. They looked around for animals, ghost or real.
Jana could tell Brit really did feel happy for her. The baby wasn’t even with Jana yet, and Brit already felt the happiness of the thing that was to come, the very idea of it. She believed in invisible things, in possibility. In that way, she was like Catherine.
It was strange in the dark to feel so seen. Jana could barely see Brit, but she could feel her there, breathing hot into the space in the cage, her own body still warm from the embrace. In that absence of actual vision, Jana allowed herself to accept something most people spend their days running from. She stood in the knowledge that there were people who saw the parts of her that she did not want to see herself—the anxiety buffering the nastiness, the desperate quality to her ambition, the tarnished sheen of her past—and that one of those people was standing right in front of her, seeing her be seen. It felt awful, like her skin had been peeled away and whatever was beneath was burning against the cold air. But it also felt like family.
Jana reached through the dark to take Brit’s jaw gently in her right hand. She tilted it a soft twenty degrees and brought Brit’s lips to meet her own. Whoever said women’s lips were pillowy was wrong, thought Jana. Here they were two parts of a hot, slick organ, an open cage for a sound that took seconds to form, build, and travel through the body, cousin to the tongue, translating something that was untranslatable and lawless.
What happened wasn’t sexual, but Jana knew it would be impossible to tell anyone else about the experience without misrepresenting it that way, and so she vowed right after to never say anything. It was, however, about intimacy. She’d wanted to be as close as possible to the person who saw her—in the moment when this feral, empty part of her past met this specific, warm part of her present. She’d wanted to merge. But what she discovered was both disappointing and comforting: the kiss was nothing as intimate as the years they’d already spent together, the furious making and unmaking of music, the knowledge of each other’s nonverbal, preverbal, extraverbal selves. She should have known better than to connect their lips; their callused hands were closer to the truth.
When Jana pulled away—it wasn’t exactly pulling away as much as coming to the end—Brit’s lips were shiny in the dark. Neither of them apologized.
They left the cage together and walked back up the hill, back toward where they’d come from. They walked silently, though Jana was sure Brit had more questions about the adoption, and the reasons for its secrecy. But she didn’t ask, and Jana was grateful.
“I see it!” Jana said, stopping, pointing, finally not whispering. “Do you see it?”
Brit stood on her tiptoes, and the tilt of the earth almost sent her flying. Jana held her hand until she righted herself. Jana pointed through the muck and the smog that had cleared for a minute, and across the canyon, up at the edge of the horizon, was the blurred-out Hollywood sign.
“Oooh,” Brit said. “There’s the other LA.”
“If we had our violins, we could play that song at the beginning of the Paramount Pictures—”
“—with the clouds and the stars—”
“—and the mountain.”
“We’d need a drum kit.”
“And some other things.”
“I think we could do it. We should learn it back home. Henry’s kids would like it.”
“Let’s go to it. The sign.”
Jana smiled in the dark. “Sure.”
But no one moved.
There was another kind of pain, too, one more difficult to name.
Laurent’s letter had arrived in late August of 2001, as the quartet was preparing for the start of the concert season in which they would tour nationally, a tour that would start with their debut at Carnegie Hall and take them around the perimeter of the country, hitting all the major classical music cities. Their debut at Carnegie was scheduled for a Thursday in late September. Jana took Laurent’s final departure as a sign that things were clearing out for the start of the new phase of the quartet’s career. She was truly free now to focus on their tour program, the centerpiece of which was ambitious. The musically complex, physically exhausting, emotionally wrought, somewhat inaccessible, and absolutely relentless Beethoven opus 131. Perhaps the most well-known of the late Beethoven quartets—those written when his deafness had begun to close in on him and drive him mad—the 131 was infamously difficult. Seven movements played straight through attacca, with no break, it was nearly forty minutes long, demanding of both the players and the audience. But if they were going to debut at Carnegie Hall, they’d reasoned, they might as well do it in a big way.
She’d been mired in the score that morning—Daniel had purchased one for each of them so he wouldn’t be burdened with being the only one to have a score this time—the morning of September 11, having gotten in the habit of waking early and, before doing anything like showering or eating or even changing, listening to the most recent recording of her private practice or the quartet’s rehearsal while reading along with the music. She was sitting at her desk with her headphones in (thanks to the complaints of her neighbors, another terrible thing about being a musician in New York), reading through the last few pages, trying to figure out how they could move from the frenzied sawing of the final minor burst to the understated C-sharp major of the ending in a way that sounded less like an accidental arrival at a major key and more like purposeful consternation. She’d been sitting there in her pajamas, thinking this through, backtracking and listening, marking up the score with better fingerings for the transitions, when the sounds of Daniel’s pounding on the door broke through.
They’d all moved to Brooklyn for more space and cheaper rents in the past year (except for Brit, who stayed with Paul in Manhattan), but Daniel actually lived in Jana’s neighborhood, two blocks south. He couldn’t get through on the phone to anyone, and he’d run over to her apartment. She didn’t have a TV, so he took her by the arm, so tightly he left a pale yellow bruise, up to her rooftop, where they watched the plumes of black smoke across the water and the towers fall, one by one. Jana couldn’t remember them saying anything to each other. For a while afterward, she tried to construct a narrative out of it, what she thought and when she thought it, and when the thoughts changed. But eventually she gave up, and the memory of watching it happen was like a wide gray space in her brain. Then she thought of it as something akin to attending a massive funeral of someone you didn’t really know: at a certain point, it was all just faceless pain, making your own experience of it unimportant.
Rehearsals after that ceased for a few days, as they couldn’t even get to their rehearsal space, let alone focus on the music. For Jana—and she would never tell anyone this—she would always connect the Beethoven 131 with that helpless feeling of watching the towers burn and smoke and collapse, the inability to make sense of the transition from the minor to the major, the way the story resisted her in the chaos. She grew to hate the way the 131 ended in a major motif that felt suddenly out of place, outdated, a pathetic imitation of optimism, now rendered truly stupid after all that had come before.
It was Brit who suggested a dry run of the 131 in public a week before the Carnegie debut. She’d heard about a vigil at a cathedral in Brooklyn Heights that would welcome a performance from them. Jana thought they might spoil whatever magic they’d have at Carnegie with a free concert for a bunch of people in mourning, but she couldn’t figure out a way to say that without sounding cold and heartless. It was arranged. They would play the entire piece as people walked up to a makeshift shrine and lit candles or placed prayer cards.
“But this isn’t exactly a meditative piece,” Jana said, leaning over to Brit before they were about to begin playing.
“It’s just music,” Brit said. “They just want music so it’s not quiet when people are crying.”
Which seemed to Jana like the worst reason in the world to play music. But as they played, with no one really listening, or not just listening but listening and paying tribute, or listening and weeping, or listening and praying, or listening and thinking, or listening and trying not to think, Jana saw that yes, it was just music, and that was perhaps its best attribute. It was art as part of the landscape, movable, livable art, and what these people needed was that, an apparatus of art to hold them up for a while.
And for the quartet as well. It took some of the pressure off, with no one really focusing on their performance but simply experiencing it. So they experienced it, too. And Jana couldn’t say the 131 made any more sense than it had before, had any more of a cohesive narrative, but their playing of it lost some of its clunky self-awareness, some of its awkward loneliness, and in that strange way a total national disaster became part of their musical story. When they finished playing, no one applauded, which was the only time in their entire career that had ever happened; since then, to Jana, applause after the 131 felt obscene.
She had no partner with whom to lie in bed that month and the months after and discuss the pink chaos of the city, but if she had, if some man had lain next to her and asked what she felt and when she felt it and how it had changed and why, she would have said that in the beginning she was afraid to feel anything, because she didn’t want to co-opt anyone else’s authentic pain—she and Daniel on her roof under the clear sky, privately tamping down their doubled, tripled, quadrupled mourning (the inadequacy of human mourning was part of the horror)—and that after the vigil concert she felt useful (music solved the inadequacy with extra-human expression, if only temporarily), and so she let herself feel sad, which was in itself useful for her as a performer, and then after all of that, after the Carnegie debut and the tour and the way their lives became busy and full of concerts and engagements and teaching and interviews at the same time her life emptied out, like she was hanging upside down, lint drifting from her turned-out pockets, the city settled into an agitated, anxious resilience, and she didn’t want to be filled up with that, not now, especially not now, and she felt bad for that, for her desire to flee from unease, to switch randomly from a diseased understanding of the world to a major chord, but weren’t they old enough for that, to turn away, to move away, to have children, to have unadulterated successes, to be angry at the deafness of the world and then go deaf to it by hoping something good could happen, by making something good happen in all the shit and at least you are here, strange, faceless man in my bed, at least you are here to shrug with me, run your hand along my shoulder, call me by a name only you use, and say, well, at least in all these disasters big and small we have each other.
Brit drove them to the airport and Jana switched over to the driver’s seat. Brit slung her bag over her shoulder and leaned in through the window to give Jana a kiss on the cheek, her hair whispering Jana’s face.
“You were good,” Brit said.
Jana tried to make her face as wide-open as Brit’s. “So are you. Thank you for being here.”
Back at the house, Carl was still up, and Jana poured the two of them drinks under the low ceiling at the lit-up kitchen counter, the rest of the house dark and silent and holding the energy of everyone who’d once filled it, giving the space the confessional feeling of a bar after closing. Carl talked and Jana refilled the drinks, and replaced the ice when it melted, and Carl told stories about her mother that Jana wasn’t sure were entirely true, at least not true to the person Jana had known, but sure seemed true to Carl, who even teared up once or twice, now coated in the emptiness of his life post-funeral. There was a trip to Ojai, camping in Joshua Tree, a lost weekend in Tijuana (food poisoning, a likely story). He softened into himself. No, Jana softened to him. There was a lot of liquor to finish. There was the way he described Catherine describing Jana—ambitious and quick-tempered though given to brief sentimental crevasses—which was a Jana Catherine had once known, and Jana smiled at that version of herself, waved, called hello across the divide. Whatever Carl was mourning, he was also mourning himself, that much was clear. He had to tell himself a new story, but before he could do that, he had to tell all the stories from before.
Some days later, on the way to the airport, Jana was surprised to find a diminished but dedicated group of protesters on the same corner she’d previously encountered them. The worldwide protests were over, weren’t they? But here they were, fervent in their small numbers. While stopped at the light—now in traffic, many others ignored their chants—Jana rolled down her window. One man cried, “Wooo!” as though at a rock concert. They bobbed their signs up and down. Maybe it wasn’t so self-important after all. Maybe if they gathered enough times, for long enough, loudly enough, the war would end. No, probably it wouldn’t. But it was nice to think so. Thinking so was all they were asking, Jana supposed.
Jana leaned on her horn with one arm and hung the other out the window, her hand balled into a fist. She didn’t know what to say, what one said in these situations. She thought only of clichés—Fight the man! Power to the people!—sayings like that.
A few of the protesters heard her honk and screeched, looking for the source. She waved her fist around until they saw her. The day was bright and clear, the same as it had always been. When they spotted her, their faces changed, rose up, like she’d given them a gift, and their cries were louder, their signs bobbed heartily. Jana smiled but shook her head. Nothing would change, but wasn’t it something, she thought, the things we could convince ourselves of, the things we told ourselves not until they were true, but until they were real.