September 2007
The Redwoods
There were, as Henry saw it, two kinds of pain. Short pain and long pain. Short pain wasn’t just pain that lasted temporarily. It could be chronic or recurrent. It could be sharp or dull. What made short pain short was that it stopped your playing immediately, stopped you short in rehearsal. It’s the kind of pain where suddenly you feel shards of glass in your elbow, and you leave rehearsal early, pop four aspirin, go to your physical therapist or doctor for some stronger pills, and come back two days later. Maybe it comes back in six months, maybe it doesn’t. Short pain is like a cleaver coming down on your arm, cutting deeply, and while it’s scarring and hurts like hell, it’s fixable, it has the possibility of healing. Long pain, though, was the kind of pain that, while it could be acutely excruciating, specifically and precisely horrific, was deep inside the bones and tissue. Here, the cleaver has already come down with finality, you’ve been separated from yourself, and for the rest of your life, you are a person with reattached parts, threaded back on, a little lame, a little altered. Short pain was part of your body. Long pain was part of your life.
It was long pain that Henry was more accustomed to, though short pain was no stranger. The long pain was in the elbow and wrist of his bow arm. All his young life, playing had been easy. Playing had been the easiest thing he’d ever done. And when playing began to hurt, as it does for anyone who has played for years and years, he ignored it. Easy was the way he was used to living his life, and he would continue living that way by force of will if he had to. But when his sister was diagnosed with her heart problem, and his father, too, revealed his bad heart, Henry decided to no longer ignore the pain. When he described it to the doctor, he said that it felt like something heavy had fallen on his arm, rendering it both numb and blood-hot. He said he wanted either to ice the limb or to cut it off at the triceps. He said not playing was not an option. The doctor had looked at the X-rays, given him a brief physical test, and said, foolishly, “Can you cut back on playing?”
What the quartet knew: Henry had a particularly bad case of tendonitis in his elbow and wrist, and it was treatable if he maintained regular physical therapy and didn’t participate in marathon rehearsals.
What no one but Kimiko knew: the doctors had repeatedly warned him that if he didn’t cut back on playing, there would come a time very soon where there would be no playing at all. With every flare-up he was causing not only tissue damage but nerve damage, changing the very makeup between his skin and bone, grinding away bit by bit at whatever was left there to help his bow arm stay fluid or go spiccato at a moment’s notice. His tendonitis was also musculoskeletal, and the doctors asked him to think of it as opening and reopening lesions that connected his tissue to his bone through nerves. Continuing to play at the rate the quartet played was literally destroying his right arm.
What was the worst part: he could never predict the pain’s acute expression. While it always thrummed dully beneath the surface, flare-ups, as he’d experienced during the second Esterhazy and countless times since, were impossible to predict. He wished he had something like a migraine aura or some other kind of warning. Nausea, sickness, a bad mood, even.
And here it was happening at the Festival of the Redwoods, where they were teaching and performing at a chamber music festival in a grove of trees between the mythically wild Northern California ocean and the hot-gold hills of the vineyards. It was their second time at the festival, a favorite of theirs because of the location and the people and the generally relaxed attitude of all of it. They could bring their children and they slept in log cabins and rehearsals were often in the shade of a seven-hundred-year-old Sequoia, one that had been around before Haydn, before Vivaldi, before what they were doing was invented. But also here was the span of his right elbow to wrist, burning in such a way that he wanted to shake it, right before they were to go on stage for the world premiere—a soft premiere—of Julia St. John’s commissioned quartet.
“Are you okay?” Jana asked, touching his arm.
“Just a—just that thing again. Can you find my aspirin? It’s in the pocket of my case over there.”
He was suddenly hot in the outdoor amphitheater, though the wind blew a mostly pleasant chill and Brit pulled out her cardigan to play. Don’t think about it, he thought. Don’t think about it don’t think about it don’t think about it.
Thinking about it was what got you into trouble. Because if you thought about your elbow, then you thought about that permanent knot in your neck, your lower-back spasms in bed some mornings—and the way blood flowed through the body like magic, how the magic was flawed in your sister and your father, and how your body, too, was flawed, how bodies were simply physical machines and not magic at all.
He swallowed three aspirin—okay, four—and walked a bit down the path, asked the host to stall, tell a few jokes. He stamped his feet under some trees and visualized the pain dissipating. That’s what one doctor had said to do in emergencies. Imagine it gathering together, getting all its things, and floating out of your body from a single point. Now he heard the wind, now he heard the applause. He walked back, picked up his viola, and nodded to Jana and Brit and Daniel. They went on.
The acoustics in the outdoor amphitheater were shit, and the afternoon performance wasn’t open to the public, which is why they were calling this a soft premiere. The official premiere would be the following night, at the festival’s penultimate concert, indoors, and open to the general public. But in this audience were people who mattered, professional peers, including the all-male, all-drama Sequoia Quartet, who were also teaching at the festival. Henry spotted them—well, half of them—sitting in the front row. Only two of the members of that quartet were even talking to each other, something they tried to hide from the students, which, of course, just revealed it more clearly to everyone. There was something about a few nasty interviews, someone sleeping with someone else (though Henry wasn’t sure who or why that was wrong), and a theft of some kind.
The piece, Sediment to Sky for Four, was beautiful, deceivingly plain, a meditation on land. Julia St. John was a self-proclaimed naturalist, living on zero-carbon shared land (not a commune, she’d corrected someone at a talk Henry had attended once) in Mendocino County. Nothing made Henry and Kimiko squirm more than imagining communal farm living, but Julia’s lifestyle didn’t keep her from being recently named one of the most important living composers by The New York Times. She’d been Brit’s friend first (Brit had been the one to spend some time with her on the commune-not-a-commune), but when Julia began sitting in on rehearsals, she was a natural fit with the group. She was wry and serious, generous without forgoing expectations. Even Daniel, with his high standards and squirrely patience, loved her.
She worked on Sediment to Sky quickly, and they’d gone through two rounds of back-to-the-drawing-board with her. Henry had loved participating in the process of composing, or advising to the composition, more than he’d expected, more than he’d remembered. Back in the salad days of conservatory, before children and New York, when he’d done everything to its maximum, when there’d been time and praise and women, he’d dabbled in composing. He aced composition class and started, though never finished, an opera.
The St. John collaboration came at a good time: the quartet had tired of the same old program (Haydn, Beethoven, something not too alienating from the early twentieth century), and Henry could feel everyone getting antsy and bored. They were geniuses, Beethoven and Haydn, but it was as though the quartet had agreed to read the same forty-five books over and over and over again for the rest of their lives. Henry thought (but didn’t say) he was the most bored of them all, and at night he lay awake, dead tired from the day but unable to sleep, thinking about how people lived long lives, how everyone must die disappointed that they’ve arranged their lives so nothing ever changes too much.
The quartet sat down in the amphitheater to play, and Henry winced at the expectation of pain. It was less severe than he’d been prepared for, but he knew it would only become more intense the longer they played. The piece was told in three long movements, each movement attacca to the next, which is what made it exhausting in particular, but what made it exhausting in general were the emotional requirements. It put no instrument to waste, especially not the so-often-ignored viola, and took the players through the full emotional range. Henry steeled his arm, his body, his unsure heart.
The performance went well—trees were conjured, soil was wafted—but Julia still had some notes for them afterward. Don’t take the second movement so fast, she told Jana, and could Daniel come out more always, she wanted a strong foundation throughout, and Henry, was everything okay? He was making faces during the performance.
“Oh, it’s this,” he said, holding up his right hand. “Just sometimes it’s bad.”
Julia looked worried. Jana put her hand on Julia’s. “He’ll be fine,” she said. “We’ve been playing a lot here, those reading parties. We won’t do it again until the performance.”
“But the master class,” Henry said. “Tomorrow we have a master class.”
“Well, you’re not taking the class. You don’t have to play,” Jana said.
Henry liked to demonstrate. He still remembered Fodorio sitting in with them during the master class before their final conservatory concert, how he’d taught them about energy and verve and engagement simply by playing with them instead of talking at them. Henry liked to do that when he taught. It made the students hungry.
He begged off the post-concert meal and took the long way back to his cabin, where Kimiko was reading while Jack napped and Clara did her homework on the porch. They’d taken her out of school to come to the festival, but Kimiko made sure to sit with her every afternoon and do the take-home assignments, shockingly difficult for an eight-year-old. But Clara was nothing if not precocious, which surely came from Kimiko.
Kimiko put down her book when she saw his face. “Did it not go well?”
“It was fine,” he said, opening the freezer door and sticking his hand in between two bags of ice.
Kimiko put her arms around him from behind. He closed his eyes in the cold air.
“I’m sorry. Should I call in some Vicodin to the pharmacy in town?”
“I can’t play with Vicodin,” Henry said, annoyed she would suggest that. She knew how foggy it made him. Maybe he could play Mozart with a Vicodin, sure, but not Beethoven and definitely not the St. John.
“No need to snap.”
He turned to face her and put his cold hands on her hot arms. Sometimes she was a marvel. Once this young girl he’d thought he was lucky to sleep with, someone who never wanted him to meet any of her friends, who didn’t really have friends, who was too good a player for friends. She’d been a student who was intimidating in every way to him, the teacher. And now here she was his wife, his wife for many years, the person with whom he—Henry, who honestly never stopped feeling like a child himself—raised children, strange humans with their own interests and ideas. Sometimes he looked at her and saw years, and in the years he saw what religious people must see: the uncontainable presence of something impossible and divine.
But other times, like now, for instance, he saw himself from her position. How his possible self—on his own, in less pain, happier than he’d been recently—must look like a flickering, disappearing image to her. He saw himself before he’d acquired all these things and people and responsibilities, which isn’t to say he didn’t love the things and people and responsibilities—they were also life—but he understood he had slowly exchanged that possible self for this way of living. Kimiko’s gaze always reminded Henry that he would not be both people at once, would not have both lives.
“What do you want?” he asked. “For me to go on stage tomorrow night half asleep? For them to write about the violist that doped his way through Julia’s premiere?”
Kimiko stepped back, went to the day bed under the window where she’d been reading, and sat down. “I want you to feel better.”
“I’ll feel better if I get a new arm,” Henry said, resigned. He sat down next to her. The old springs bounced them two, three times.
“If you left quartet-playing—”
He cut her off. “Not now.”
“If you stepped back—listen, what I’m saying is if you retired and just took soloist gigs, taught every other semester, you could control your schedule, you could have off time when you wanted off time. When your arm wanted off time.”
She was right. All those things would lessen the incessant shredding of the inside of his right arm and give him some time. That was the thing that was disappearing. Time. He lay back on the bed, shoved himself against the wall beneath the window where redwood-filtered light blasted through. It was gorgeous here. They were blindingly lucky. Kimiko lay down next to him, tucked her knees at the back of his.
“I don’t want to do that,” Henry said.
“So what do you want?”
Henry closed his eyes. He wanted Vicodin, to go to sleep, for Jack to keep napping. He wanted to go back to the moment where his arm first hurt and un-hurt it, turn a different corner, get up from rehearsal, where Jana was probably shouting at him, and Daniel was taking the solo too fast, and Brit wasn’t loud enough. He wanted to go back, as far back as was required, and reconstitute his bone, restring the strings of muscle coating that bone, build thicker and more sinewy the fine tendons twitching those strings. Now he wanted to sleep, he wanted to drink.
“I don’t know,” Henry said to Kimiko, and meant it. He had no idea.
When he woke, it was dark, early dark, and he was alone. There was the sound of the children outside with other children, and through the window he saw Kimiko with a glass of wine and Jack shouting at the flies. Henry walked outside and the screen door slammed behind him like a memory of the countryside he’d never had. His arm ached dully now, like low-grade electricity was running through his thin ulna. It felt comfortable, that pain. Long pain.
He stood next to Kimiko and watched the children play. Clara ran after Jack, all limbs. She threw her arms about when she ran, kicked her legs so that they nearly slapped her bottom. The forest floor crunched beneath her feet, and her outline kept disappearing in the transition to night.
“I’m afraid she’s going to fall,” Kimiko said.
“So she falls,” Henry said. “You gotta let ’em fall.”
“Not her,” Kimiko said, watching intently.
Henry understood what she meant was Clara’s arms and hands, how good she’d become at the violin, scary good. Not prodigy good, but good enough to pay a teacher in the city $150 per lesson twice a week, good enough to start thinking about auditioning for the SF Youth, good enough that both he and Kimiko felt wary about it. Don’t break your arm, they wished. Break your arm, they wished.
He sighed. “I’m gonna go check on the Sierra House.”
She kissed his arm. “Don’t stay out late,” she said. “You need rest.”
Henry walked toward the Sierra House, the common building where the students (mostly very good amateur adults from the area) and the faculty (always the Sequoia Quartet) gathered for reading parties and drinking, where they made the hot tub too hot and raided the kitchen for cheese. He had stumbled away from the concert and slept the afternoon away and felt he should make an appearance so people didn’t think he was sulking.
He heard the Sierra House before he saw it: the Rimsky-Korsakov Sextet. A slight piece, Henry thought, not indicative of what the composer was capable of, or what the form could sound like. It sounded lazy when it was played, halfway toward dying. For a moment he stood outside and watched the inside scene lit up through the window. The Sequoia Quartet was playing with two more advanced students, and Henry saw it wasn’t only the piece that was lazy, but the playing. Ryan, the first violinist, the handsome drunk from Alaska, was flailing all over the place. Colin, the second violinist, looked on lovingly at Sam, the violist, whom Henry actually liked. He was the most rational of the four, though he wasn’t entirely sane. He was older than the rest of them and clearly bothered by it, puffing his chest during master class and sidling up to Henry partly because (and Henry knew this) of Henry’s talent and status. The cellist, Jerome, was the worst of them all. He’d been the one who gave the nasty interview, the most recent one, where he’d subtly outed Colin and Sam, who were both married to other men (who were pointedly absent here in the redwoods), making an affair that was already public knowledge officially public and in print. It was semi-surprising that the quartet had ended up even coming to the festival, especially after the interview.
The worst part—what made the Sequoia truly insufferable—was that they were almost transcendently good. Almost, but not quite, the most frustrating level of talent, and Henry disliked listening to them. It was like listening to the warbling of a chord that was the tiniest of intervals away from being in tune.
Around the players, other students watched, clutching sweaty longnecks, Brit talked to Daniel at the kitchen table (something was amiss there, though it wasn’t yet clear what), a golden retriever slept at Ryan’s feet, and Jana sat cross-legged on the carpet, one hand on the golden and the other on her child asleep on the floor, head on Jana’s lap. Jana looked tired and bored. Henry nearly turned around—surely no one had seen him yet. He felt how Jana looked. Tired and bored. Also in pain, but mostly tired from fighting the pain, and bored from the sameness of it all.
But just as he was about to turn around, Jana saw through the quartet and the windowpane and caught his eye. It was a small movement she made with her eyes, a widening and a brightening, but he knew she’d seen him, and he went in.
Henry stood in the back of the kitchen, away from Brit and Daniel, who were leaned over the table talking quietly and seriously. He saw Jana remove herself from beneath Daphne and place Daphne’s head gently on the floor next to the golden’s ass.
Jana opened the fridge. “Endless supply of beer,” she said. The fridge was full of beer, bottles of all kinds, microbrewery upon microbrewery. A man could gain ten pounds in ale alone at this festival.
She took out two bottles and handed one to Henry.
“This isn’t good,” Henry said.
“The beer? Did it go bad?”
“No, this.” He nodded at the group, still blindly groping their way through the Rimsky-Korsakov.
“Oh,” Jana said. “Eh, they’re not so bad.”
He looked at her. “Really? You think they’re not so bad?”
“Well, they sure put Daphne to sleep. Thank God. That child refuses to nap anymore, and today’s Rebecca’s night off. I think she went into Santa Rosa for a drink with friends. I told her she wouldn’t have to come back till morning.”
Rebecca was the nanny Jana hired to go on tour with them or to festivals like this, times when a prolonged absence wasn’t quite appropriate (and anyway, who would Jana leave Daphne with?), and also Rebecca could tutor Daphne.
“Sometimes I think we should have a Rebecca,” Henry said.
“Oh, a Rebecca is good. A Rebecca is the only way. I can’t believe that both you and Kim go everywhere together with the kids. I mean, don’t you wish we could go to Warsaw kid-free next month? Listen to me. Party in Warsaw without the kids. How did we become these people?”
“I do wish that,” Henry said. “But it’s nicer if Kim gets to come with the kids and travel and be with me instead of stay home alone with them.”
“Sure,” Jana said. “Must be nice, to have help. Finn’s okay, but he’s got his own thing right now, and, I mean, we can’t even manage to live together. Rebecca is my Kimiko.”
Henry laughed a little. “Do not ever tell Kimiko that.”
“Oh, God no. She would murder me. Like separate my head from my body with a steel-core Jargar C string.”
“Nah, those cost too much to murder you with. She’d use a D’Addario.”
Jana didn’t even laugh. Her lips hovered over the rim of the bottle. “I can’t do it,” she said. Her voice was low and wobbly. She looked at him with wide, serious eyes.
“Do what?”
“Daphne.”
The Rimsky-Korsakov was over, finally, and sheet music was being shuffled around for the next group. The Brahms viola quintet, someone suggested, and Daniel was being pulled away from Brit to join in. The Sequoias were kicked out of their seats.
“You can’t . . . what Daphne?” Henry whispered.
Jana looked at him, bumped the fridge. Some bottles shook nervously. “I don’t mean I don’t love her. Or that I wouldn’t do it all over again. Well. I mean, there’s no point in talking about that. But I guess I thought I would change. I would change like you did, just make a little hole in my life so she could fill it. But there’s no hole! Where’s she supposed to go?”
“I changed?”
“Yeah, but in this really steady way. You know, after Daniel punched you in Canada. Before that, you were insane about the baby coming. I thought you’d never stop waffling. But then you just . . . one day you were buying baby-sized shirts in the airports and buying a tricycle in London—remember that tricycle? Oh, it was adorable. But you were still you, you know? Just without all the crazy.”
“Crazy?”
“Hen, stop acting like I’m saying something mean here, or something you didn’t already know. And anyway, we’re not talking about you, we’re talking about me. What if I can’t do this? What if—what if I’m my mother?”
Henry laughed. He put his arm around her, and his arm stung a little. He winced into his bottle. “You’re not your mother. You’re way more successful.”
Jana leaned her head on him. “Kids don’t want successful moms. They want moms who want to be moms.”
Henry couldn’t think of anything to say. She was right. Kids wanted who they wanted, and if you weren’t that, you risked being part of the greatest disappointment of their lives. Having children was an adapt-or-die situation. That’s why people did it together. It was less lonely when you whittled away a part of yourself with the person who knew you pre-whittled. He could not fathom having sex with Kimiko in a practice room. Had they really done that?
“I’m sorry, kid,” he said.
The Brahms started. It was a beautiful piece, one with heart and substance. Daniel got to show off here, and he was good at showing off. While Jana had struggled with a stiffened sound and Brit constantly switched violins to adjust to her changing left hand (and Henry’s goddamn arm was falling off), Daniel’s playing had actually consistently gotten better with age, more refined, more sure, more present. He was unstoppable now. Henry wanted to be playing the Brahms with them, but he also wanted to be in bed with Kimiko, to catch lizards with Jack, and to help Jack set them free.
“Watch out,” said Colin of the Sequoias, who nudged Jana a bit to get in the fridge.
“Hey,” Jana said.
“No, sorry, didn’t mean to hit you with the door.” Colin leaned in, his breath hot and malty. “I mean, watch out. Your wives and husbands could be watching.”
Jana shook her head and made an exasperated sound that caused her to spit. “Jesus! Not everyone is fucking everyone else in their quartet. Well, maybe Daniel. I don’t know.”
“I didn’t say you were sleeping together,” Colin said. “You don’t have to be sleeping with someone in your quartet to make your spouse jealous. Hell, I hate Jerome more than I’ve hated anyone I’ve been in a relationship with. Jerome. Fuck Jerome.”
“Is Jerome leaving?” Jana leaned in, always one for gossip.
Colin wavered, belched, then whispered, “We’re all leaving.”
Jana gasped. “What do you mean? You’re going to the Shanghai residency? I’m so jealous.”
Henry imagined he could see the drink inside Colin, sloshing around his stomach, gumming up his tongue. His eyelids were half closed. How had he even been playing a moment ago?
“No, I mean we’re, what’s the word, disbanding. The band’s breaking up. It’s not worth it anymore. Fucking Ryan’s on the brink of divorce, and hell, so am I. Who knows, anyway, but really, God, nothing’s worse than being forced to sit day in and day out with someone who loves you but not in that way, you know? Sam’s a blowhard, it feels good to finally say that. Don’t you hate it? The way that person disgusts you, and you have to sit with them on planes, check in to the hotel, warm up, watch them sweat like a sick pig under the lights? The whole time complaining about how good we’re not. But, like, he could afford to lose a few, right? And Jerome. Do not fucking get me started on Jerome. Years you spend with someone, they know all your fucking secrets, they’ve cried in bus stations with you, picked you up from bars in fucking Mumbai, and then a reporter flirts with them and poof! Everything you’ve built, the people you once were, gone. Just like that. Playing together, it’s a farce now.”
The first movement of the Brahms finished, and Henry was so inside Colin’s recitative that he was startled by the sudden silence. The movement was already over? How had it gone by so fast, such a tough, lively movement? It was his favorite and he had missed it.
Jana was smirking, her trouble with Daphne gone. “Good God, get out, man. Sounds like a soap opera.”
“It’s worse than a soap opera. It’s a soap quartet,” Colin said, and then immediately dropped his bottle on the floor, where it shattered and spewed beer on their ankles. “Oh, sorry,” he said. “My hand’s been hurting today.”
“I’ve gotta go,” Henry said, backing away. “I mean, the children.”
“Oh, the children!” Colin said, shouting now. The playing had stopped. “Don’t forget the children!”
At the next morning’s master class, Henry sat dumbly with his impotent hand while everyone looked at him with glassy, hungover eyes. He accidentally yelled at the cellist in the first group. It was frustrating; he wanted to show the cellist something, to show her the difference between a left-hand sforzando and a right-hand sforzando, and because he couldn’t waste the playing on teaching, the only way he could demonstrate was to sing it and mime it, and she didn’t get it. The cellist nearly cried. Henry thought she probably burst into tears the moment her group walked off stage. The director of the festival came up to Henry afterward, asked if he needed anything. Vicodin, Henry didn’t say. “Maybe some sleep before the premiere,” he did say, and the director cleared Henry’s teaching schedule for the rest of the day. He slept fitfully, and only really gave in to sleep when Clara crawled in bed with him.
“Are you mad?” she’d asked.
“Mad at what? No, I’m not mad.”
“You’re acting mad. You kicked at the dirt outside before you came in.”
“It’s just dirt. It’s for kicking,” he said. “Shhh. Go to sleep. I’m not mad.”
“Okay, but the dirt didn’t do anything, Daddy. Don’t be mean to it. It’s just sitting there.”
“It doesn’t have feelings,” Henry said into his pillow. “It’s dirt.”
“Everything has feelings,” she said, and he didn’t respond because maybe she was right, and they slept.
The suit jacket wasn’t fitting right. The quartet was warming up in the greenroom, and Henry kept flexing his shoulders and the jacket kept pulling at the seams. He looked in the vanity mirror. Had he gained weight?
“Over here,” Jana said to him.
“I know, I just . . .” Henry said, twisting to look at himself. “I can’t get comfortable.”
“Maybe we’re good on this,” Brit said, setting her violin down across her lap. “We know it. We’re warm.”
Jana acquiesced, and Daniel stood up and stretched. “I need some water,” he said.
“I bet you do,” Jana said.
“What happened?” Henry asked, checking his watch. They had half an hour until curtain.
Jana’s eyes lit up. “You don’t know?”
“I’ve been in that awful master class or asleep all day,” Henry said. He walked to the mini-fridge and found some ice for his elbow. He couldn’t ice his hand before a performance, but he could ice his elbow, and then right before they went on stage he would apply a heating pad. Which mostly worked.
Jana and Daniel told him the story in tandem (Brit, meanwhile, ran off to put out a fire with Paul). There’d been a meltdown in the hot tub after he left, after the reading party wound down, which escalated at the same rate that people became more drunk. Colin had been the first to get in the hot tub, and within the first ten minutes he managed to break another glass bottle near enough to the water to make people nervous, but not, apparently, one of the students’ boyfriends, who, equally drunk, started an underwater breath-holding competition with him. Ryan, who was outside the tub, saw the two men disappear under the water and charged. Charged, Daniel said. And grabbed Colin by the hair. Everyone gasping and wet and angry. Would have been hot if it wasn’t so pathetic, Jana said. And then Jerome, out of nowhere—was he even at the reading party?—showed up in swim trunks, stood there like a referee, trying to figure out what happened, and who did what to whom, and how it could possibly be resolved. And then they were screaming, everyone screaming at everyone else, even the student whose boyfriend had been underwater with Colin, and Jerome, shivering in his swim trunks, and somehow it was Jerome and Ryan who ended up wrestling on the grass. No punching, though, said Daniel with a wink.
“Who won?” Henry asked.
“Everyone lost,” Jana said. “Obviously.”
Henry felt depleted by the story. “That makes me so sad,” he said.
Jana laughed. “Really? It’s so absurd. They’re just nuts, that group. We’ve always known it.”
But it wasn’t true. Henry remembered a time when the Sequoia had first made waves, maybe six or seven years after the Van Ness had come to New York. They’d been at Curtis, and were a collection of beautiful, talented men. Part of their allure was that women and men alike loved to watch and listen to them. They packed the Met Museum atrium for free shows and drank with donors until dawn. Had Henry not had a small child at home, he might have been out there with them. And they played with energy. He remembered that. The energy, like a quartet that was young and had nothing to lose, everything to prove. They played like the music had just been discovered, because it had, by them. Maybe it was true, they’d always been a little nuts. But maybe that was what you needed—to be nuts in love with what you were doing, and the people you were doing it with.
“Did I really change?” he asked.
Daniel and Jana looked at him blankly. “Huh?”
“After the babies.”
“Well, you stopped making me want to hit you,” Daniel said.
“No, really.”
“You take this one,” Jana said to Daniel. “I tried.”
“I think . . . you became a little more present in your life,” Daniel said.
“So was I absent before?”
The stage manager peeked her head in for the ten-minute warning, and Henry switched on his heating pad. But he didn’t let Daniel off the hook. “Like, what was I before, if not present?”
“I don’t know, man,” Daniel said, sliding rosin up and down his bow. “I guess before . . . you were just playing around. I mean, you were so good at everything, anything you wanted to do you could do. It made sense that you played around. I guess I was kind of annoyed by it. Or jealous of it. Or something. But it meant that you could play whatever you wanted, whenever and however you wanted. And afterward, well, I guess you had to narrow your scope a little.”
Daniel looked up and saw Henry’s expression. “Oh, God, sorry, didn’t mean to upset you. You’re good, right?”
Henry nodded. “Just my arm.”
“I think that’s what happens when you love people more, or more people. In here gets bigger.” Daniel tapped his hand on his own bullish chest. “But out here has to get a little bit smaller,” he said, sweeping his hand around the room.
Julia St. John knocked and entered. She wore long layers of jewel-toned raw silk like she was a gentler Stevie Nicks, and her black hair was straight down her back. She smiled, familiar lines deepening around her face. “I thought we’d walk out together. You won’t mind, sitting on stage during my introduction?”
“Not at all,” Henry said.
Once they found Brit, the five of them made their way to the stage and waited to be announced—the world premiere of Julia St. John’s latest quartet by one of the world’s premier ensembles—before walking on stage. The quartet took their seats, but the spotlight shifted to Julia at a podium stage right. Her hands gripped the edge, her rings clanking in the microphone.
“I want to thank you all for coming to witness this,” she began. “Those of you who missed my pre-concert talk this afternoon won’t know that I’ve spent a lot of time getting to know the Van Ness, getting to know their rhythms both on stage and off stage, and I’m happy to report they’re one of the most complex and tightly knit groups I’ve ever had the pleasure of composing for. This particular piece came to me after watching a performance of theirs at Carnegie Hall, many years ago, before which they were merely people, hungry, frustrated, sad, cold, and whatever host of human emotions you can imagine. But it was so striking to me because once they were on stage, they were almost inhuman. They were powerful, in control, a unified, multitoned voice. But they were also doing the most intrinsic of human feats. They were communicating to the rear mezzanine something that was emotional and extra-verbal.”
Henry remembered this performance. It was when they’d received a career grant, and no one but Brit knew Julia very well. It hadn’t been that many years ago, but it felt like a lifetime’s distance away. He winced to think about it.
“What was remarkable in the performance, however,” Julia went on, “was that these four people, they contained everything. That’s what made them both human and inhuman. They encompassed everything from earth to sky, everything I could imagine. This piece, Sediment to Sky, speaks to some of that, some of what came from them, and also the principles that are important to me. It had long been a dream of mine to do something like this, to arrange my life around the people I love, to create a shared life with every one of them. I think probably many of you have considered this at one point or another, but thought it impossible. I think many of us strive for community and family, but often find it difficult to participate in because of, well, life gets in the way. But it is possible. It is possible to arrange your life around art, and to find, in that art, a kind of love that grows like corn, from way down here to way up here, that changes, goes away, comes back.”
Henry’s mouth was dry. He had done just that, had grown up like a stalk of corn in the middle of this group, in the hot center of the quad they formed on blond-wood stages across the country, the world. He felt a wave of gratitude like a distant tsunami, a large, warm swell, unstoppable. It heated his elbow down to his wrist, the fragile muscle and tendon writhing between them. It pushed to the base of his throat, where he swallowed and remembered the way his first apartment in San Francisco had been so cold that it smelled cold, and how it was difficult to sleep without Jana there, complaining next to him. And he remembered the one time Brit showed up at his apartment in Manhattan while Kimiko was over, so deeply upset that Daniel had gotten married, how Kimiko made her warm cider and let her cry and cry on the floor, from which she refused to get up. He remembered Daniel getting so angry at him for making him go rock climbing in the Australian bush, how Daniel had been so scared at the top about belaying down and so worried about his fingers and wrists (he had been right about that), and how Henry laughed until he cried, and apologizing only made Daniel angrier. When they came down from the mountain, Daniel made him buy all the beers, and Henry remembered Daniel’s face when, over the beers, Henry told him he and Kimiko were having another child. The look: breathless, sad, reverent.
They were playing now, like they always had. It wasn’t easy. It never had been. It was something like a miracle, all this music, each note a discovery you’ve already made, but it was also maybe the most ordinary thing in the world, to assemble and compose and perform—night after night—a life.
Then he felt his arm crumble from the very inside, from the genesis of tissue and bone. A slow, hot release like a casual spill of lava from a faraway volcano spout. Jana would tell him later, with tears in her eyes, that it felt sudden—three-quarters of the way into the piece, how his arm skidded over two notes, the low F-sharp to a D on the C string—but he felt it from the beginning, something different, a wave he wasn’t going to be able to ride. What he didn’t tell Jana then was that he didn’t even try to ride it. He’d felt it generating from the third bar in, and once he’d completely given in, the pain lessened. He was surprised at that. Part of the torture had been the resistance. Then there were pages of music during which a very astute listener could likely hear that he lagged a millisecond behind everyone else. He was no longer anticipating, but following. When they arrived at that three-quarters spot Jana remembered, the jump and skid over an easy interval, he was no longer lagging, but not at all playing. He’d never once—not once—made a mistake during a performance, and here it was. An absence as glaring as the wrong note. In his periphery, he sensed a few faces turn and shift in the awkwardness, and six beats later he found his place. But here was the thing: when panic rose in everyone else, he felt relaxed. All the strain of the months and years leading up to this physical breakdown had been the tough part. This was the good part. He was not only playing these notes, this music. Julia’s phrase lingered in his ear, and he nearly smiled through the slow disaster. They contained everything. So, too, did this performance, and every performance. He was not only playing now, but playing everything before now, that miracle of a concert at Esterhazy, the way they’d sung at Carnegie Hall the first time. Time rolled out through his arm in hot waves. And though he was still playing, he looked around (no longer bound by time, anyway). Jana, wide-eyed and angular, only her parted lips betraying the glass-like fragility he loved in her. Brit, round-faced, still freckled, more freckled after all these years, not looking at him, giving him his space, which he appreciated. And Daniel, glancing at him with no expression at first and then the subtlest of understanding, continuing to play his own rock-solid part, even leading a little extra, picking up whatever Henry had left behind. Henry looked for his other family, sitting in the third row stage left, and while he couldn’t see her directly, he felt Kimiko knowing, clutching her armrest. He could hardly wait to be done, to go to her and show her his arm, to ice it, to watch her hug their children, to hug them himself. And later, to watch her play, practice, perform. It would be her turn now. It seemed impossible, for this piece, a small, short piece, to contain all that, for him to see everything, to know and relax into the knowing. He’d never been here before, but now that he’d arrived, he couldn’t imagine going back.