While Kimiko watched Henry play on stage, her own fingertips burned. She, too, had studied the St. John piece inside and out. She knew the tricky transitions, the parts Henry had rewritten with Julia, the surprise penultimate key change. With her right hand, she held the arm of her daughter sitting next to her, who was preoccupied with Jana’s daughter, Daphne, who sat beside her. Kimiko’s left hand was laid on the armrest, and her curved fingers lightly tapped in time to the notes—her own fingerings, ones Henry’s large, slender hands found to be, as he said, “too spidery.” She was partial to left-hand position shifts. He was more into the dramatic extension. She forgot her daughter next to her and she forgot her son back in the cabin with Jana’s Rebecca, and continued to silently play the armrest. She played through the whole thing, perfectly, seamlessly, and her playing continued on even when her husband’s failed.
When they’d woken up that morning, mere minutes before the children, he’d turned on his side and said, with the lucidity of having been awake for hours, “Have I changed?”
She answered quickly, maybe too quickly: “No.”
Kimiko wanted to ask him the same thing: Have I changed? But she already knew the answer. Yes, she’d changed. She’d always been the one to do the changing. Henry was the one who always wanted things and then acquired them, with no amount of change necessary on his part. That quality of his—the easy satisfaction—was what she loved about him, even when it sometimes made her sad.
In fact, their union had seemed so easy for him that there’d been two years early on in which Kimiko became convinced that she was simply a partygoer in his life who had stuck. One who was appropriately charmed by him, a prettier, more talented version of the kind of gin-breathed admirers he schmoozed with at fund-raisers. He’d insisted she wasn’t, that he liked her precisely because she wasn’t like that.
“Babe,” he said, “no one would mistake you for someone who worshipped me.” He was right about that. It wasn’t in her DNA to fawn. But she also knew who she’d been in the privacy of those early lessons, in the practice rooms and the shitty apartments. She’d felt like that, like a girl under the spell of a boy. And when she cried that day in the park, when she told him she was pregnant, it wasn’t because she was scared. It was because she had not once considered not keeping it. Because what was happening to her body—with the baby but also with him, the way he’d invaded it—was turning her into an act of self-betrayal.
What the baby had done to her body had been cruel, and it had been cruel with Jack, too, and that was something no one ever says. It wasn’t the first time Kimiko had undergone pain in her body to get what she wanted, however. The pain and discomfort hadn’t been the thing. It was that something else was making decisions for her. As a musician, you were trained to listen to your body, and then to ignore it, trick it, or change it. Your arm hurts, you strengthen your sacrum and relax your shoulder blades. Your left hand aches, you loosen your wrist and jaw. Visualize the interval, and your hand makes the jump. A sforzando comes from your solar plexus, a forte from your throat. In her whole life, she had never not been able to defy her body except when it was pregnant. She suddenly did not belong to herself anymore.
And if she was being honest, she never really got over the unfairness of it.
But what loving him had done to her: it had been like someone drained her of her old blood and replaced it with new blood, the same liquid that coursed through Henry. So when they touched, it was finishing a line. That love, too, had been a kind of theft.
So, yes, she’d been the one to change. Not necessarily against her will, but not fully with it, either. She reached out to touch his face in bed.
“What makes you say that?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said, sighing into her hand. “It seems like everyone else has. Jana said she didn’t know if she could be a mother.”
Kimiko snorted. “A little late for that.”
“So maybe she didn’t change,” he said. “Maybe she just tried to.”
“When you have kids, I guess you sort of have to change. But it doesn’t mean you have to like it,” Kimiko said, turning on her back. She spoke to the ceiling. “You don’t have to walk around with a smile plastered on your face talking about how grateful you are for your children, the way some of these people do,” she said.
Some of the people attending this conference—the older students, the concertgoers, the rich hangers-on who had enough money and time to spend a week in the redwoods with them—their mixture of self-satisfaction and fandom was nauseating. Henry was always better at socializing, even with the ridiculous ones. People were so easily taken with him, and he collected facts about them like presents to give to Kimiko later. The man with the twenty-thousand-dollar hair transplant; the beautiful woman who lived half of the year in Montana, but the wrong half; the stagehand who reminded him of Brit and Daniel mixed together, who looked like a child that would never be, a girl who was airy and sullen, slight and magnetic. It was easy for him, and easy to hit his stride at parties, even with all the shrill laughter and the clumsy segues and the close air. Even with the physical pain he was sometimes—or more often than sometimes—in. Aside from the pain, he’d always been like that.
In the bed there was a quiet, inflated moment between them. Had she said she was ungrateful for their children? Or had she said she was unhappy about it? Had Henry been frightened by that statement? Or had he agreed, so effortlessly that his own assent was what frightened him? Before either of them could open their mouths to say something, there was the sound of their children, Jack and Clara, the beginnings of a fight. It was better not to say more, Kimiko thought, not on a performance day.
“I’ll go start breakfast,” she said, throwing off the covers. “You stay.”
After the master class and before the performance, when the forest turned blue in the falling light, Kimiko left Jack with a friend, and a napping Clara with a napping Henry, to take a walk. Alone. In moments like this, moments that had to be so carefully and precisely orchestrated so she could have her space, she wished that they had brought a nanny the way Jana had. The idea made Kimiko blush, and she hated that it made her feel bad. But for what purpose would they have a nanny? She wasn’t working here herself, she wasn’t playing or teaching, and there was no reason she couldn’t take care of the kids.
At the entrance to an unfamiliar trailhead, she paused to read the map, and felt a firm hand on her shoulder. Jana, dressed for a champagne brunch but carrying a walking stick, smiled at her.
“Thank God,” Kimiko said. “I wanted to be alone but not, like, alone alone.”
Jana gestured to her sundress and gladiator sandals. “As you can see, I also lied about needing to get out of the house. I said I was going on a hike, but I could really just use a Bloody Mary.”
The two of them ambled slowly down the path into the woods. Might as well attempt it, they decided. Kimiko was delighted that she’d run into Jana. Though things had been somewhat icy between them early on, they’d spent so much time together at this point that she was more like a sister-in-law than her husband’s work friend. And when the quartet’s manager had referred to Jana as Henry’s “work wife” some years ago, Kimiko didn’t even blink. She’d once been jealous of Jana—they’d been too alike in personality for that not to happen. But now, something else had emerged between them, a quiet understanding that allowed them to be completely stripped with each other. A kind of nakedness that she was never able to achieve with Brit or Daniel, both special tidal pools of emotions that remained obscure to Kimiko.
As they walked, she and Jana spoke about what they missed about New York (namely, how everyone wasn’t completely obsessed with hiking there), and about the St. John piece, and about the upcoming string of international tour dates, and about Clara’s lessons.
“Does she know how good she is yet?” Jana asked.
“No,” Kimiko said, understanding. There was a turning point in young players who were good the way Clara was good. When they realized they had that leverage, a talent that earned respect from adults and could shoot them out of the world of regular children, they became haughty, demanding, and impossible. They’d all seen it happen to students, and Kimiko woke up every day hoping that Clara could somehow skip over it.
“Maybe she’ll be like Henry,” Jana said. “I don’t think he was ever really like that.”
“That’s because his family never treated him like he was a god. But because of this—this world we’re in, that’s not going to happen. Everyone’s looking for Henry’s talent in her, expecting it.”
“She’s a good kid,” Jana said. “Hell, I was probably insufferable between the ages of twelve and seventeen. And look at me. I turned out just fine.”
Kimiko laughed, but she thought that if Clara turned out like Jana—queenly and willful and determined—it wouldn’t be the worst thing.
Jana stopped at a clearing and swatted at a sweat bee hovering around her. She turned back to face Kimiko. “I’m sorry, we don’t have to talk about the kids. I hate it when people think that’s all they can talk to me about. Like, you didn’t ask me where Daphne was. That’s everyone’s opener when I’m without her: where’s Daphne? As though I couldn’t possibly have a desire to do things without a child strapped to me.”
Kimiko dusted off a rock and sat down on it. It would be minutes before the sweat bees came for her, but she didn’t care. “I was thinking today about just that. I started to say it to Henry, but . . .”
“About what?”
“About how . . . I love my children, but that’s not the same as not being able to imagine life without them. Can I imagine life without them? Yes, absolutely.”
Kimiko would have never said that to anyone else out loud, maybe not even Henry. You weren’t supposed to think that, let alone say it, as a mother. There were mothers here who would call Child Protective Services if they heard her say it. But with Jana, she was fine. Jana sat down across from Kimiko, planted her butt on the dirt.
“What would that life look like?” Jana asked.
“Oh,” Kimiko said, looking away. She had to look away to see it. “I’d be playing a lot, recording, traveling for my own gigs, doing a lot back in Asia, seeing my family in Japan more. And Henry would be doing the same thing he’s doing, traveling with you all, but because we’d be apart, the time that we’d spend together would be . . . more exciting. Special. Like the kind of marriage Daniel thought he was going to get with Lindsay. One we made up on our own.”
When she imagined it, she felt her heart lift in her chest like a balloon, and then jerk against the wall of her sternum. But the weightlessness, just for a minute, that had felt nice.
She looked back at Jana, who seemed caught in her own imagination, a stricken look on her face. “Do you remember Fodorio?”
“Yes,” Kimiko said. “The guy who wouldn’t leave Henry alone for a while. Yeah. Sort of . . . unappealing.”
Jana’s mouth turned down. “He wasn’t that unappealing.”
Kimiko grinned. “Uh, okay.”
“Well, I slept with him.”
“Why?” Kimiko said, more distastefully than she meant to.
“I felt so bad about it for so long because, ostensibly, I slept with him so we could win Esterhazy the first time,” Jana said. “He was a judge and I actually said that in bed to him—what an idiot. But then we didn’t win.”
“So, no harm, no foul,” Kimiko said.
“Exactly,” Jana said. “There was no harm, just me pretending to be rich in a fancy hotel one night, him thinking I was unique or something. And when I think about it now, I don’t feel bad. I don’t feel bad at all. I feel nostalgic. But I’m nostalgic for that way of thinking. Not for the actual life. I’m just saying, it’s okay to long for a different life. It doesn’t mean you actually want it.”
It was still hot, but evening was coming in now. The blue shadows of the trees got long. Jana was absently picking bark off a tree trunk next to her, touching it with the uncurious fingers of an animal. The action reminded Kimiko of Henry—how he’d been when they met, lean and unaware of his height and stature. She was filled suddenly with jealousy. Of Jana. At first it had to do with a flash of Jana in bed with Fodorio, a man who, at the time, was much older than her, richer, more powerful. The way something like that must have felt for Jana, a flame catching oxygen inside her and burning upward, a perfect, wild cylinder. She remembered carnality like that. She’d once given not more than half a thought about a decision to sleep with a man—to whom she gave her body, and why, and how.
But in the second wave, it was jealousy that Jana, as a mother now, had resisted (Jana always resisted) that steady weight that Kimiko carried behind her. A leash tied to a sack filled with one or two or three lives unlived, or at least the possibility of them, all bound together by the promise of agility. It had to do with time. Time looked different when you were young, and whatever foolishness you engaged in was undiluted—there was always the possibility that the next promised moment would carry you somewhere else, always the possibility of more flames, more beats, more life. Time, when you were older, was something different, irregular, Kimiko thought.
Jana was still a successful musician. Jana could, if she wanted, go out tonight and have terrible, wonderful sex with a man who meant nothing.
Kimiko told her that. Jana looked at her thoughtfully. Jana said, “But you can do all that, too, if you want.”
It was really beginning to get dark now, and Clara would surely be waking from her nap. Jack would need to be fetched from her friend’s. How far out were they, anyway? She hadn’t been keeping track. She’d just been following Jana.
“Hey,” Kimiko said. “I did something like that once. I slept with my teacher at Juilliard.”
“What a whore,” Jana said, smiling at her.
“Best mistake I ever made,” Kimiko said.
They turned around instead of finishing the loop, as they had no idea how far the loop would take them, neither of them having really studied the map at the trailhead. They walked back and didn’t speak of music or of children. They barely spoke at all. Kimiko felt like she could hear the woods getting darker, the way an absence of light makes the other senses, like sound, amplified—twigs breaking underfoot, the quick rustle of birds escaping, her own labored breathing.
When the trailhead was in sight, up a short but steep hill, Kimiko stopped and said, “I just—it was never as equal as we said it would be. I mean, there’s no way it could be. And you should see the way the other wives look at me here. Like I’m another long-suffering whatever like them. I hate that. But then I think they’re kind of right. That I am.”
“A long-suffering wife?” Jana laughed. “You? Never.”
“Not like that, but. I don’t know. No one looks at me like . . .”
“Like you’re as good as Henry? Join the club.”
“But I am as good as he is,” Kimiko said, very serious now. Henry’s face from years ago came clearly now to her. It had been delicate and impossibly soft and almost feminine—Jack would look like that, she thought—and his voice boyish and everything about him dirty golden. His hair, his eyes, his skin, the way he thought, what he said. He’d moved with a fluidity that made him lighter than everybody else and impossible to disappoint, but his sound remained thick and expensive and authentic. She’d fallen in love with a man for the first and only time in her life—because he’d been as she wanted to be.
“I know you are,” Jana said, matching her tone. “You always were as good as him. Look. It’s one thing to be a professional musician. It’s another thing to be someone who loves one. Unfortunately, you’re both.”
Kimiko turned back toward the hill. “I guess we should go home.”
“But here’s good news, though,” Jana said.
“What’s that?” Kimiko asked.
“So is Henry.”
At the evening’s concert, as Julia St. John gave her preamble, the quartet sitting dumbly behind her, a realization came over Kimiko: how difficult it must have been for Jana to tell her she could do whatever she wanted. Because Kimiko could do whatever she wanted—but only if Henry left the quartet, and left Jana. She looked at Jana, sitting just left of Julia during the talk, looking down at her lap, her violin propped on her thigh. Kimiko could remember Jana’s face when they first met as clearly as she could remember Henry’s. Whereas Henry’s face was a wide smile and young skin, Jana’s was sharp and handsome. And as she aged, her face had softened. Sure, she was tired and the lines in her face betrayed that exhaustion, but now there was also a quality of—what was it?—ease.
Kimiko sat in their reserved seats with Clara and Daphne. From this angle, above and to the side, Clara looked like Henry, too. Both her children did. They bore her dark hair, round face, and almond eyes, but everything else—the jut of their chin, their dimples, the sly defiance in a simple look—was all Henry. Daphne was fidgeting in her seat, still a bit too young to sit quietly at a concert, and Clara was helping her straighten out her dress.
“No, like this,” Clara whispered, patting Daphne’s skirt so it was both smooth and fluffed. “That’s how you look grown up.”
Kimiko took Clara’s hand to shush her. Julia was still talking. Henry’s look, his gaze fixed somewhere between his feet and the bottom of his music stand, became more absent. “It is possible to arrange your life around art,” Julia was saying, and Kimiko’s entire body was flooded with the kind of urgent sadness that can only precede change. Her heartbeat quickened and her skin grew cold and limp. Clara removed her hand from Kimiko’s grip.
When they played, something was off. It took her several pages of music to figure it out, but then she did, when Henry leaned down to turn a page to the right, and the bottom of the paper dragged on the edge of the music stand. She heard it, a microsecond of a skip in his note. He’d been late with the entrance after the page turn. But it wasn’t that he’d turned the page too fast and disrupted the line, as is often the case with those kinds of missteps. It was that he’d turned it too slowly, as though playing on his own, not at all keyed into the time in which the rest of them were playing.
And when he stopped playing—that’s what it was, a full stop where a note should have been—Kimiko felt his gaze move around the group and land, finally, on her. It happened in the space of a quarter note, but Kimiko felt the entirety of that space, three-dimensionally, so much so that she felt she could almost get up from her seat and walk around inside the moment. She’d never heard him make a mistake during a performance, even during a bad spell with his arm, and she always thought she’d be overcome by anxiety if it happened, if she had to watch him make a public mistake like that. But this wasn’t anxiety. What sped the motor in her chest was something moving, not something sinking.
The urgency was this: she had changed, she’d felt unfairly put upon, and she had accepted it. But she was changing again. She no longer felt burdened. What had stopped her feeling this way? When Henry’s own body began to really fail him. When the absence of ease sharpened him. When he needed her, when he accepted that he needed something. That had finally—physically—proven to her that he was as bound as she was, that they’d both stolen from each other.
Kimiko felt a hot wish growing inside her. The children fidgeted next to her, but she remained steely and intent, unfettered by the time and its slog. When the quartet finished, they stood as one for the applause, but Kimiko saw Henry look over to her, and Clara, and Daphne, and that was the part that would always get away from her, what he looked like then. Like a moment already disappearing into the next, and the next.