May 2010
Northern California
After one of their last rehearsals before one of their last concerts, Henry announced he was selling his records, and Brit started to cry, so Daniel thought it was an appropriate time to mention that his mother was dying. Pile it all on at once, he thought, and distribute the reaction.
“Your mother?” Brit said through tears as Jana turned from her violin case and said, “Your records?”
Daniel explained. His father, the one who’d been sickly for years now, had called Daniel on the phone, which is how Daniel first knew something was wrong. He couldn’t remember the last time he and his father had spoken on the phone—perhaps once when he called his mother to say he and Brit were moving in together and his father said, Oh hello, son, as though reminding himself of their roles. His mother had cancer, he said, and it was pancreatic cancer, but it didn’t matter now because it was everywhere, and they just named it for where it started, and that’s where they think it started, in her pancreas (did his father even know what a pancreas did?), but no matter, now it was just cancer, and the doctor said maybe three months. Three months? As though there was an expiration date, a predestined time to go missing.
The news still felt unreal, but he knew it shouldn’t have been so shocking. He was five years from fifty, and in the minority among his peers. No one had parents anymore. Instead they were parents. He’d found out that morning, and hadn’t had a chance to tell anyone, not even Brit, especially when she looked so pretty and happy when she woke up. Who wanted to ruin something like that?
Daniel’s father had ended the conversation with, “I hope you’ll be praying for your mother.”
“I will,” Daniel said, which was the first time Daniel had ever committed to praying for someone or something.
When Daniel shrugged and said nothing, Henry explained. He and Kimiko were thinking of having one more (my God, Daniel thought, Henry’s aging process was a stretched-out elastic band, he would never grow old, not like the rest of them), and they wanted to raise city children, so they were moving to San Francisco—“But what about the commute?” Jana asked, her voice rising—and despite the commute they thought it would be good to have the art and culture and diversity right there for Clara and Jack, and their small city was getting stuffier and whiter and richer by the startup, and anyway, there was a great deal on a place in Russian Hill, just off Van Ness, actually, wasn’t that funny. So they’d bought it. Already.
“What does this have to do with your records?” Jana asked. She closed up her violin case and sat back down on her chair, her hands folded on her lap.
Henry laughed. “Oh, see, the new place doesn’t have quite the space we’ve got here. So I can’t have a record room.”
Brit had stopped crying. She still had her violin propped on her knee, and she looked from Daniel to Henry and back. It always made Daniel smile a little to see how, when she was sad, the corners of her mouth actually turned down, like a cartoon of a frowning face.
“Why are you so upset?” Daniel asked across the stands.
She opened her eyes wide. “Are you kidding?”
“No, I mean about Henry.”
“I’m not dying,” Henry said. He turned to Daniel. “No offense.”
“None taken. I’m not dying either.”
Brit placed her bow on the stand with a clatter. “It’s just, I don’t know. This seems like it’s real now. You’re leaving.”
They all looked at Henry. He was leaving. After Henry had Clara, he’d been harried, and then after Jack he’d been downright crazy, and then after the kids got old enough to walk around on their own, there’d been something different. Or maybe there’d always been something different there, and Henry had finally relaxed enough to show it to everyone. He used to be obsessed, singularly wound by music. And it wasn’t his skill that faded, ever—he was still an incredible player—but something else about him faded, some way he was with them. The urgency was gone. When he played, it was hard to spot the prodigy in his eyes, the wildness that came along with diamond talent like his.
Daniel thought for so many years that Henry had just been tired. But maybe what he’d gotten tired of was the quartet.
“We’re just moving an hour down the highway,” Henry said, but his voice was smaller now. “It’s only a few more months I’m with you all, anyway. But we’re not there yet. Look, I’m just moving to the city. That’s it. So I need to offload some records and before I put them online I wanted to see if there were any you guys wanted.”
Brit shook her head, but didn’t seem to be saying no to his question.
“Right,” Jana said. “Okay. Let’s not talk about this now? Let’s get through the Octet performance first.”
In a month, the quartet was going to merge for one night with the group that had just won the Esterhazy competition, the Seoul Quartet, a collection of young, ridiculously talented Koreans (as in barely-able-to-drink-in-America-young), all smooth-faced and shiny-haired, exceedingly nice, but pretty fierce players. The way the first violinist attacked the lower strings was somewhat alarming to Daniel. It had sounded like a cello. They were going to play the Mendelssohn Octet with the group as a sort of passing of the torch, though none of them—not Daniel, Jana, Brit, or Henry—thought they were through with the torch just yet. But it had been arranged by the Esterhazy organization, and the performance was at the War Memorial hall in San Francisco, a venue they always loved to play. And you almost never got the opportunity to play the Mendelssohn Octet.
A month after that, the quartet would play its final concert with Henry on viola, at Carnegie. The upcoming octet performance allowed all of them to ignore that looming event.
Daniel drove and Brit sat quietly in the passenger seat the whole way home. The car was a brand-new Toyota Corolla, with enough trunk space for his cello, and a soft, new-car-smelling interior. Sometimes when Daniel got in it, he felt estranged from himself. But they’d gone together to the dealership and bought the car themselves, half and half. You could purchase all the fixtures of an adult life, but Daniel wondered when you ever stopped feeling a little bit like an imposter, like a man watching yourself drive your new car around the city.
Their home was an actual house, one they owned, or at least paid a mortgage on, a one-story midcentury typical of the area, with a patch of backyard that made up for what it lacked in square footage. Daniel sat down at the dinner table and waited for Brit to come to him. He listened to her busy herself, slamming the washing machine lid shut, restacking music in their office, swooshing open the sliding glass door and then ten minutes later swooshing it again, and finally she walked into the kitchen and sat across from him at the round table.
“So,” she said.
“So, we probably have to go to Houston,” he said. “To say goodbye.”
She nodded. “After the Octet.”
Brit had only grown lovelier, he thought. More elegant. Even when she was sad, the smile lines around her lips lingered. He’d even come to see her crooked eyetooth as elegant, and she no longer tried to hide it. Her face had opened up, her freckles were darker and solid now, and her blue eyes less constantly in awe, though they had the same depth, always asking a question. And she’d grown bigger somehow. Not bigger, actually, but more present in her body. This private Brit was an utter revelation. She breathed and walked and had thoughts and made love and moved around their home in specific and wholly unexpected ways. He’d spent the last two years taking it in, and now he felt like he could spend the next however-many years memorizing it. And then it’d probably change again. He couldn’t wait. He loved in a way he sometimes felt bad about, which was to say he loved her totally and completely, in the most adult, surefooted, at times ugly and at times whiplash-passionate way he had ever loved anyone ever, and he imagined Lindsay somewhere feeling cheated out of a real marriage.
Then—this was how Daniel had changed—he thought, no. Lindsay’s married again, living in Brooklyn, and he saw her name pop up in his Facebook feed every once in a while, her installations featured at small gallery spaces in neighborhoods he’d never even heard of. She seems happy: I’m probably a small blip on the great big pencil drawing of her own zigzagging life.
And then, as though stemming from his own private thoughts, Brit said, “Let’s get married.”
He felt, and not for the first time in the last two years, grateful. Like something being gently pulled open instead of something constricting.
“But not like other people,” he said, leaning over the table, touching his hands to hers, not exactly meaning not like other people, but not like the other people he’d been.
“No,” she said. “Not like other people.”
When Brit and Paul finally broke up (could you call it that after ten years—breaking up? Breaking apart seemed more appropriate; dismantling, even), she became unexpectedly morose. She had expected to feel sad, she said. Their relationship had, after all, been almost a third of her life so far. But the way it had happened had been a surprise, leaving neither of them time to prepare.
Some months after the party at Maisie Allbright’s home, they were all eating dinner in Henry and Kimiko’s backyard, the last outdoor meal of the season before November brought in the Bay Area rains. Paul had kept his promise and hadn’t spoken to Daniel since Clara told him about the kiss. Daniel knew of Paul’s vow, but it hadn’t haunted or disturbed him. The kiss had seemed completely natural, the physical move back to each other, coming with no urgent need to do anything else. He knew where Brit was, and that she wasn’t going far from him. They had time. And the fact that neither he nor Brit took precautions to make sure Clara didn’t tell anyone must have meant that, on some level, they wanted to be outed. It was stranger to Daniel that Paul had stayed with Brit after he found out about the kiss, though the relationship was clearly in shambles after the summer ended. And even stranger than that was the impetus for Paul’s eventual departure. At the dinner in Henry and Kimiko’s backyard, Daniel bit into some undercooked corn on the cob and chipped his left incisor. Brit reached across the table and picked up the part of Daniel’s tooth that had broken off, and jokingly held it up to his mouth. It must have been that, Daniel thought, her fingers in Daniel’s mouth, that reminded Paul that, for the quartet, intimacy was so much more than physical touch. More than a hand in a mouth, more than laughter in the flickering light of a mosquito-repelling candle, more even than the calluses that made their fingers match. Paul stood up from the table, checked his pocket for his wallet, and walked away. Brit said that when she got home, he’d packed up almost all of his things. It was very civilized and undramatic, and it drove her crazy. She said she followed Paul around and insisted it was nothing, which made Daniel grimace when she said it, and so she stopped saying anything about the breakup at all.
But in the midst of her sadness, Daniel had come to her condo with a copy of the new music they had to learn for the next faculty recital and found her in bed, in pajamas, in the middle of the afternoon, face puffed up from crying, silent and nearly unrecognizable. He didn’t jostle her out of bed, but joined her. He sat on top of the comforter and kept his shoes on. He unfolded the music and made like he was marking bowings and dynamics, but instead he wrote on the corner of the staffs funny little notes for her to find later, like Don’t be such a pansy here b/c Henry will drown you out and You left the burner on at home and Jana farted.
When he was done, he placed it on her nightstand and waited. It occurred to him that he might have been waiting years for her.
Eventually she turned over. “I don’t know why I’m so upset,” she said.
“Because this isn’t the first time your life has just disappeared?” He made an explosion motion with his hands.
He was a friend to her. He told her that Paul was nice, but that dating him must have been like dating the guy in the war movie who you know is going to be killed early on. He was a symbol of a man, a partner, he’d outlasted his fate. Brit nodded. Daniel watched as Brit moved through the familiar stages, like someone evolving through forms, slouching out of bed, slouching to rehearsal, given to spontaneous fits of crying while driving; and then an unsightly, prolonged state of self-hatred (I’m too old to feel like this, she said); and then settling into a black-and-white version of herself, until ultimately arriving, some months later, at a childlike delight at the blankness of her life. She was suddenly infused with energy, spinning from the inside, kinetic in a way Daniel hadn’t remembered seeing her since their early days in San Francisco.
So in April, when Patelson’s announced it was closing, the quartet exchanged wan looks, and Daniel booked plane tickets to New York for himself and Brit. He’d made arrangements to look at a cello that a patron of Juilliard was considering loaning to him, but the two-day trip was organized around a final visit to the sheet-music shop.
On the plane, Brit looked out the window the whole time, reaching her hand over to his to point things out as they traveled—the desert, the mountains, the impossible snow. As they approached JFK, Daniel’s nervousness intensified, a feeling in the base of his abdomen that spread like an ink stain. The way the afternoon light changed so quickly to early evening light across her face when they were in the air made him feel—there was no other word for it—devastated. The closeness with which they sat, the way she didn’t look at him before reaching her hand out to him, the small wrinkles that stretched from her eyes to her pale hairline, all of it. It had all been here this whole time. They’d been sitting next to each other this whole time. What had he been doing with that time?
With Lindsay, he thought he’d solved a problem: he’d found a way to be with someone who wanted and needed nothing from him. But when that failed, he’d given up entirely on the idea of being with anyone. And in order not to wind up in a situation like that again, he peppered his life with women in the shallowest of ways. Younger women, unserious women, women who couldn’t possibly want what he’d been doing with the quartet.
But Daniel couldn’t even see that he got from the quartet whatever other people got from their partners. Consistency, obligation, nonverbal understanding and misunderstanding—a deformed, ugly-pretty kind of love, knowledge that what was there wouldn’t change, for better or worse.
Until he began to suspect that Henry wanted to leave, wanted to break the rules of family that he’d tacitly been living by. You could leave. You could choose one family over another. And it occurred to Daniel then that he did not have a second family—he had made nothing else. This was it. And the familiarity of Brit sitting next to him on the plane registered as a shock in that it was both part of his DNA and as tenuous and fragile as a hanging bow hair. It could all disappear, once they landed, in a year, in six. While the kiss in the Allbrights’ bathroom had made him feel like they had all the time in the world (they knew each other in a way that required no discussion), the plane ride and her open, quivering excitement at being free from something made him feel an urgent need to make her his family, to bind her to him emotionally in the way they were already bound in music. The devastating part was that she’d been there all along, and he hadn’t done it, in all those years. That was the time, and he’d wasted it.
That night, in his separate room in the hotel in Midtown, he barely slept. The need to have her was overwhelming, but the how was crazy-making. What if she didn’t feel the same? What if she didn’t want him? What if he said the wrong thing? The surety of his feelings was matched by the anxiety of, for the first time, not knowing hers.
In the morning they looked at the cello, a nervous indemnity professional hovering around Daniel while he tested it and playfully spun it on its endpin. It had a chocolaty middle register that he liked, not so buoyant and bright but settled-in and even a little scratchy. The lower register was bold and the upper register brilliant, and the varnish regal and the overall sound like breaking through a paper wall, barely separated from the inside of the instrument and the outside. In the end, it was the variety of tone that won him over, and the ferocity of its announcement. He gratefully agreed to take it, and the donor wept, hugging him and Brit at the same time.
They dropped the cello at the hotel and walked the long way to Carnegie Hall. They took a detour up Second Avenue, the East River reflecting an impossible spring sun between the buildings.
“This is the New York you can only experience after you move away,” Brit said.
Where Second approached the Queensboro, they veered left and snaked back down past the spires of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, the antiqued primness of Fifth Avenue that had once seduced Daniel now washed out, stuck in time, and arrived in a roundabout way at the hall. They talked their way into the performance space by counting the number of times they’d performed there and name-dropping the event services manager and the box office manager and the managing director, and an elderly ticket taker opened the door to the mezzanine, let them through, and then winked and held a finger to her lips, closing the door behind them.
“She wants us to be quiet?” Brit whispered. “There’s no one here.”
“Why can’t we go down on stage?” Daniel said.
“What would we do on stage? What are we doing up here?”
Daniel sat in one of the red velvet chairs. The stage was all lit up in buttery lights, and in the center was a lone piano with its lid propped up and a leather seat askew. The poster outside had advertised a young Chinese pianist whom he’d never heard of, and the recital was sold out. The whole place held the atmosphere of a rehearsal having just been abandoned.
“We’d play that piano,” Daniel said.
“I don’t trust pianists,” Brit said, sitting down next to him. “The quality is somewhat predetermined. I feel like after a certain point, you just can’t tell how good they are.”
“Yeah, kind of like punching buttons or something.”
“God, don’t tell anyone we’re saying this.”
Daniel gestured at the molded ceilings. “God has ears in here, I think.”
They sat in the empty hall for a while, not saying anything, listening for they didn’t know what. They didn’t know it then, but in two years’ time, they would play their final performance with Henry on that stage, and afterward, Daniel would cry on Henry’s shoulder for the second time in his life.
They weren’t allowed to exit out the back, out the artists’ door, so they exited the way they came in and walked around the back to get to Patelson’s. The wind had picked up, and a too-warm breeze blew Brit’s hair all around her face and into Daniel’s face, and Daniel reached behind her and gathered it into a ponytail.
“No hairband,” she said.
“No apology necessary,” he said.
Patelson’s was before them, but it looked as though a great diminuendo had slackened it. The outside of the building looked tarnished and sun-bleached and the inside was lit up like a doctor’s office, fluorescent and unnatural. From outside they could clearly see that inside the selections of bound music had been picked through, and what was left was being lazily perused by uninterested people, wandering ants in a maze. Neon posters obscured the view through one large window, advertising the final liquidation sale. Daniel felt deeply sad, with a hollowed-out space in his belly. He was suddenly starving.
“Let’s not go in,” he said.
“Oh, but we have to,” Brit said. “Maybe there are some gems left.”
She started across the street holding his hand, but he stood firm. “Don’t you want to remember it as it was? This, this is like a Tower Records closing-out sale.”
She had one foot in the street and one foot back on the curb with him. “Don’t be so tied up about it. You can still remember it like it was. This is . . . inconsequential.”
Daniel doubted that, but he followed her across the street anyway, and into the shop, and straight to the chamber music section, which was nearly empty and war-torn; the place smelled sharply of mothballs in a way that made Daniel sneeze, and he buried his nose in her perfumed neck while she looked through the lesser publications of student arrangements of Mozart quartets. Brit pieced through all that was left.
In the end, they found nothing in the store, recognized no one. Their visit to the shop would not have been memorable if not for the saturated memories of the past they carried around like vintage photographs in their minds.
What made their visit memorable was later—after dinner at a no-name Italian place and an exhausted walk back to the hotel, and the too-long conversation in the hallway of the hotel, and the exact moment when Daniel asked her to come back to his room—when he, for perhaps the first time in his life, turned in the direction he was emotionally compelled, did not resist it or manipulate it or try to compel himself elsewhere.
In the way that parting from Lindsay had felt inevitable, something set in motion from the moment they’d met, this, too, felt inevitable to Daniel, and that lack of surprise didn’t, as he’d feared, take away from the excitement. Instead it added an innate quality, a sure comfort, like a layer of small, plush pillows always on their periphery. What did surprise him was that, when he touched her, when they were together, the anxiety of time wasted dissipated. Their bodies were at once familiar and unfamiliar to each other, and it was thrilling to touch her, because when he touched her, he was touching two people, the Brit with the cold feet and the unsure crawl across his sheets from nearly twenty years earlier, and the Brit now, rounded and comfortable and, yes, still with poor circulation—and also all the Brits in between, and even all the Daniels in between, a whole uproar of the people they’d been or tried to be. Being with her, next to her, inside her, it was like having the power to never be erased or lost or missing, though that had happened in life, erasure, and would continue to happen. But with her, no part of his past or her past went unknown.
It was embarrassingly easy. He wondered if everyone had to wait until their forties to get it right, for the windfall.
What she said to him before he fell asleep: “Here we are again.”
In the morning, in the cab on the way back to the airport, Brit leaned over the cello between them and told him what he’d said in his sleep the night before.
“You said, ‘Don’t go, there’s something I wanted to tell you about the cake,’” Brit said. “So what do you want to tell me about the cake?”
When Daniel thought of cake, he thought of the moldings in Carnegie Hall, how they curled and flounced like frosting, how the light on the stage was like confection batter, how the seats were the consistency of sugar and flour and water. Brit’s hair was like vanilla. He’d bought her a piece of cake to apologize for what he’d said after the first Esterhazy competition. He could go on. He was still very hungry.
Daniel didn’t remember what he had been dreaming, but he could finish the dream anyway: “I wanted to tell you we still have time to eat it.”
Everything happened so fast. Daniel’s father fixed up Skype for their house, and for the first time Daniel looked at his parents through a computer screen. They sat like they were posing for a painting, and Daniel could see them staring at their own tiny image at the bottom of the screen instead of looking at the camera. His mother sat in a wheelchair in sweatpants—had he ever seen his mother in sweatpants?—and his father dressed for the occasion, and held a drink in his hand. Daniel heard the ice melt and shift throughout the conversation. His mother assured him she was feeling fine, if nauseated by the smell of eggs and dairy products, but that it was much like being pregnant, and that his brother’s wife was coming in a week to help out with the housework, so he shouldn’t worry. Brit joined halfway through and they mirrored his parents’ postures, hands on knees or folded across the lap, upright and nervous-seeming. Brit told them that she was sorry they couldn’t make it to Houston until after the Octet performance, but that the very next day they’d get on a plane and that they’d like to get married, perhaps in his parents’ backyard, a small ceremony, mostly family, really (though what family? But Daniel insisted they say it this way so his mother didn’t invite the entire zip code), no big deal, and would it be too hot by then? It would be too hot by then, of course, but they would do it anyway. Daniel’s mother said, putting her palms together under her chin, “I’m so happy to be able to attend this wedding.”
Daniel went around telling people they were getting married in Houston at his parents’ house because it would mean so much to his mother, because that seemed the appropriate thing to say, but he wasn’t so sure who exactly it was for. Walking around and waiting for someone to die, it was like being asked to live every moment as if it was your last. It was impossible. It was like being asked to never drift off, or lose focus, or forget what everything meant all the time. It was like trying to play everything fortissimo. Sometimes Daniel thought they were getting married at his parents’ house so that they could say they’d been living like that, so that when they did lose themselves in meaningless preparations—flowers, dress, script—they could know it was all to perpetuate a timbre of love that they had failed to produce consistently in all the time before.
What wasn’t meaningless was music, specifically what music would play during the ceremony. Daniel had played so many wedding gigs in his teenage years, all of them bad, that it seemed cruel to ask anyone, stranger or not, to do that for them. And how meaningful could Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus” be at this point? Or Pachelbel’s Canon? Or, God forbid, the triumphant “Wedding March” as recessional, like you’d finished a marathon or been coronated or won a prize?
Henry solved the music problem in the way Henry solved every problem, as though it wasn’t a problem at all.
One bright Saturday in May, before the summer fog settled in, Daniel helped Henry move some furniture into the new place in Russian Hill, an antique couch and two unyielding dressers up two steep flights of stairs. The apartment was long and narrow and sunny, with a zigzagging hallway off which several rooms perched, one for each of the children, even the one not yet conceived, a small studio for music, and a living room with a bay window that didn’t overlook the bay but rather the streetcar as it clanked by every hour.
“I didn’t know this neighborhood even existed when we lived here,” Daniel said, wiping sweat off his face with the bottom of his T-shirt.
Henry handed him a folded-up starched handkerchief. “I know. Now we’re basically priced out. This city changed fast.”
The apartment was still mostly empty, though they’d moved in mattresses and toys and some music. Enough to get Henry and Kimiko started. Half their lives was still up north, but after the weekend was over, they’d be here for good. Daniel found a couple of beers in the fridge and brought them out to the living room, where neither of them chose to sit on the ornate couch, instead leaning against the wall under the open bay window.
“Jana would have actually killed us if we injured ourselves moving this couch,” Daniel said. They were only a few weeks from the Octet performance, which meant they were only a few weeks from the wedding, after which it felt like his mother would just give up and die, which was something he didn’t say to anyone.
Henry smiled. “She sure would have.”
“You’re going to miss her giving you a hard time, aren’t you?”
“You guys are talking about me like I’m already gone. I’m still here. I’ll still be here,” Henry said, beginning to peel the label off his bottle. “I’m sure she’ll never stop giving me a hard time, no matter where I am.”
“We still have to find someone to replace you.”
Henry laughed. “Well, true replacement is not actually possible. But there’s that girl Lauren, who just started teaching at the conservatory. A woman, I suppose, not a girl. But she’d probably be ready for a group soon.”
Daniel shrugged. “Get her to agree to never have a family, and she’s in.”
Henry frowned, even though Daniel grinned at his half joke. “That’s not entirely fair.”
The streetcar rolled by, ringing its bells, and a seagull took off, squawking, and for a moment it was like Daniel had transported back to 1992, and he’d just moved to the city and was living in his first apartment by Fisherman’s Wharf before he moved to the East Bay. For a moment he was that twenty-eight-year-old again, broken car, shitty cello, never satisfied, everything about him compact and tough. He had so wanted to prove his mother wrong. He had wanted to show her you could make a life outside her definition, that you could make all her wishy-washy spirituality stuff into an exact science.
“Is that why you never had kids?” Henry said. “Because of us?”
“Because of me, I think.”
“But now?”
Daniel laughed. “Now? I don’t even know, now. I like what I have. I have more than I deserve.”
“It’s sort of terrible, though, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“When you get everything you wanted.”
Daniel didn’t say anything. But this, he thought, was the difference between him and Henry. His younger self would have been angered by Henry’s sentiment, how it spoke to Henry’s lucky life, how Henry had never known Daniel’s constant striving. Daniel didn’t think it was terrible to get everything you wanted. He thought it was terrible not to know what to want.
They finished their beers. Kimiko would be back from the park with the children soon, and they had a bedframe to put together before Daniel drove the hour back home, where Brit was waiting, where they’d make a salad and eat it on their patio in the suburban quiet.
“We were thinking you could marry us,” Daniel said to Henry.
Henry held up his left hand. “I’m already spoken for.”
“You sure are,” Daniel said.
The door opened and Daniel heard Kimiko wrangling children. The sound of keys dropping to the floor, little feet stomping, a cry from Jack that still sounded like a girl’s cry.
“Goddammit!” Kimiko said. “Did you have to put the dresser directly in front of the door?”
Henry popped up and began digging through a box behind the couch that they’d simply placed in the middle of the room on a diagonal. “Aha!” He held out a record to Daniel. “I saved this for you. I thought it could be played at the ceremony.”
Daniel took it from his hands. An original pressing of a live performance (they were all live then, weren’t they?) of the Budapest String Quartet performing the Tchaikovsky no. 1. It must have been from the early part of the twentieth century. Daniel hadn’t known any of their recordings other than the Beethoven cycle. The record’s outline had worn through the sleeve, and the whitened circle of it surrounded the picture on the front, a sepia-colored photograph of the four men in quartet formation but without the stands, leaning forward, looking at the first violinist as he said something about the sheet of music he held out in the middle of them. The music unknown, the conversation mysterious. Why a shot of them conversing and not playing? It didn’t look posed at all, but entirely natural, so natural and normal that for a second Daniel couldn’t tell them apart. Which one was Sasha Schneider, the only one he knew anything about? Or was it Mischa? And which incarnation was this? How many times had they turned inside out, let someone go, taken in someone new? Which Budapest was the one he’d loved, or had he loved all of their incarnations?
“The Andante, of course,” Henry said. “I don’t know if your parents have a record player or not.”
When Kimiko came dragging the children into the living room, a grocery bag hanging off one wrist and Jack sobbing off the other, she found her husband and Daniel in a static embrace except for the small quakes of Daniel’s chest, Daniel pressing his hand into Henry’s back through an old record, his eyes screwed shut and dripping tears like a broken faucet.
Daniel had spent so much of his life not wanting children—or not wanting to want children—that it had obscured some of his own childhood memories. He thought his mother’s version of his cello origin story was false, or as much willed into existence as her first vision of Jesus, but regardless, most of what he did remember from childhood was playing. In fact, he didn’t remember not knowing how to play. As a child he had enjoyed the way it was like a game, getting all your limbs to work around and on the cello, the way you had to hold it up with your body and then draw from it with effort. He liked the feeling of the C string resonating in his abdomen. He liked carrying the cello on his back in the soft nylon case, how it was bigger than him and how that must have made him look special on the bus, rich with something.
And then one day he was bigger than the cello, and that was even better. He had a growth spurt at around fourteen, and found one day while practicing that he was louder than he had been before. He knew this because his older brother, Peter, pounded on the wall from the living room and told him to shut it, they were trying to watch Green Acres, the cloying theme song of which gave Daniel chills well into his thirties. At his next lesson, after he demonstrated the ease with which he drew his bow firmly across the strings and produced a sound so thick you could practically see it vibrate in the air, his teacher said to him in his thick Russian accent, “You are now seeing what a man can do on a cello. It is different from what a boy can do,” and then he had Daniel hold his arms out so he could measure his growing wingspan.
After that, he began to notice how the instrument was shaping his body. He began to notice his body in general, as it slithered through an awkward phase of puberty and left him raw and overlarge on the other side. By the time he left for college, he had turned inward—the insides of his knees tipped toward each other and callused, the space beneath his ribs hardened and hollowed, his long arms got stronger and splayed, and his shoulders rounded, looking in toward the cello, even when there wasn’t one there. He had to embrace the cello to play it, and he liked that. He didn’t embrace anything else in his life like that. He carried his physical markings with pride, his body a map of his achievement.
And noticing that, the way his body shaped itself around the playing posture, was when Daniel remembered thinking he was a man and not a child, and why he held childhood in disregard for most of his life. Childhood was the vague wet-clay phase of life before the part where it was possible to achieve something great. But had he ever become great? Had he ever achieved what had been promised? Even in the peaks of the quartet’s great professional success, he didn’t feel the kind of tight elation he’d imagined he would. After they won the Esterhazy and before accepting the job in California, he fell into a regular kind of depression, one that felt heavier in the mornings when he counted the hours until he could reasonably go back to bed, one that made him wish the day was over and that he was unconscious, one that felt like a gentle nihilism, nonthreatening, not anything. He slept with many women then, masseuses and professors and bartenders and students, but loved none of them, and they didn’t love him, either.
One afternoon at home in California, walking from the shower to his closet, he caught sight of his naked body in an alarmingly large bathroom mirror he had yet to get used to. There he was, old now. Older than he’d ever thought he’d be, at least. His muscles lay on top of his bones like they were tired, and around his waist, two small pockets of useless flesh. The indent in the center of his chest from the back of his cello was dark, and his shoulders reached over his chest toward each other like closed helmets, his spine the top curve of a dramatic S. He looked like something beyond a man, something that had been there for a while and gone unnoticed, had spent years sitting stonelike and waiting. He stood up straighter and turned to the side. He tried to open up his shoulders. He’d been looking inward his whole life. No wonder there wasn’t room for anything else.
And then Brit. Being with her didn’t feel like making room for anything because she’d always been there, as had Jana and Henry. There was no new space that needed to be carved out. But one night, early in their new, second relationship, they’d been having sex, and something shifted. It wasn’t the physical, necessarily, though that was important: she’d been underneath him, legs hooked around the back of his (when he moved, she did, and when she moved, he did, and the equality of that tandem alone was intoxicating), and he’d had his face buried in her damp neck, and the whole thing had been impossibly slow—like they were taking their time just to prove how exactly they were where they wanted to be—and, like the slowest, thickest rubber-band release in the history of rubber bands, they came at the same time. That wasn’t the first time it’d happened to Daniel, but with Brit it was the most annihilating. Yes, there was the physical, the two of them like insects cupped against each other, spinning a web between them, tossing the taut strands back and forth, back and forth, but there was also the way the physical caught them in the act of the unsayable. In that space—it lasted forever, it’s still going on—two things were true, at least two: First, that there was room, there was a whole bunch of room, for a child, or children, or whatever. It was strange and baffling how much room there suddenly was. And second, there was the knowledge that there would never be a child. And at the confluence of the two, knowing both things were true was enough. For the first time in his life, he wanted nothing other than what was, which included the want of a child, and its impossibility.
Afterward, the room was filled with the pungent liquor-and-cake smell of excellent sex and a thin sheen of sated silence, coppery almost, as it hung in the air around them. They said nothing for a while and lay naked on top of the blankets. Brit’s head was tilted down and to the side like she was looking at something on her shoulder, and she was smiling, but mostly to herself. Daniel felt his face wide-open and floating, blimp-like. Could he say it? And what could he say? Let’s want to have a child together. They wouldn’t—they were slightly too old, and if they weren’t too old, they were no longer in need of it as they might have been when they were young, requiring some new, unctuous evidence sprung from their love. Brit had told him that in their first year together. She’d only ever wanted a family, and she had one, with him and with the quartet. If they never had children, if they never made the move to have children, it would be just fine, she said. This happiness is enough, she said. Too much, even.
Instead of saying something, he reached his hand across the bed to rest his palm on the part of her stomach from her belly button to her pubic bone. He felt her muscles automatically shiver back, likely from the scratchy calluses on his fingertips, but then she relaxed, and her abdomen rose to fill his hand.
“Your hand is so large,” she said. “The cello never had a chance.”
He smiled. When she breathed and spoke, he felt it through the walls of her stomach and muscles and skin and then through the walls of his hand and muscles and skin.
“What are you looking for in there?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. All he could do was listen to her vibrations translated into his and then send a translation back. Everything else was a great mystery.
The Octet took only half an hour to perform in full, an amount of time that seemed not at all equal to the amount of effort that went into preparing for it. The Seoul Quartet rehearsed with the Van Ness for four solid days at their studio space near the university, and it seemed to Daniel like two of those days were spent trying to match their frequencies, not of sound but of being. The Seoul group was made up of three men and a woman violist, and they were quiet in a young way, unsure of how to enter a conversation anyone in the Van Ness started, but also energetic, which is to say they were frenzied and determined in a way Daniel recognized but could no longer join up with.
The Van Ness played all the first parts, and the Seoul played the second parts, but after the Octet opened the recital, the Van Ness would leave, and the Seoul would finish out their San Francisco debut with a Haydn quartet and a contemporary tonal Chinese piece Daniel had never played.
The eight of them could play the parts. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that it was especially important that they play the parts in the same way, because there were so many parts. Otherwise it would sound like eight people gathered around, having separate conversations. It was why the Mendelssohn Octet was so tricky and so thrilling to play. If you did it wrong, it would sound like one big, messy mistake, but if you did it right, the depth of sound was unparalleled.
The girl, Mary, was the only one who expressed worry, and she did it privately, backstage, twenty minutes before curtain, when Daniel ran into her in the hallway and she held up her hands, coated in a fresh sheen of sweat.
“I can’t get them dry,” she said.
Daniel rolled his eyes. “Oh yes you can,” he said, and took her hand and led her into his dressing room. He turned on the faucet so it was lukewarm. “Hold your hands under there for three minutes.”
She looked at him like she’d tasted something bad, but did it anyway. She was very short but otherwise looked like Clara all grown up, black hair swept up on the top of her head and a naked, vulnerable face. She seemed, of all of them, the least assured of what they were doing. But she was a lovely violist, with a sound not all that different from Henry’s, if less biting. Her sound was more tenor in mood, maybe on account of how much bigger the instrument seemed in her hands than in Henry’s. Daniel saw that her career was to be a constant wobble back and forth between her talent and her insecurity.
“Are you nervous?” Daniel asked, sitting on the couch, amused.
“Aren’t you?” she asked.
“Well, sure,” he said. “But not like that. And I wasn’t like that after winning the Esterhazy, that’s for sure.”
She turned back to the sink and looked at Daniel in the mirror. “So you weren’t afraid?”
Daniel looked back at her in the mirror. “Oh, I’m afraid. I’m afraid, still.”
Mary stood at the faucet and looked back at Daniel in a half-hopeful way he found endearing. He’d never done this water trick before. He had no idea if it would work. He was old enough to be her father. He tried to remember what he’d been afraid of at her age, but the list was overwhelming. It was easier to list what he wasn’t afraid of back then: his cello, spiders, girls he’d just met (but not girls who knew him, or knew him enough to know he’d flee eventually).
“Afraid isn’t the same as being nervous,” he said. “I’m not nervous I’m going to play the wrong notes out there. If you got this far, you shouldn’t be, either.”
“So what’s afraid?” She had the smallest lips, like a new bow.
Daniel stood and turned the water off. “Afraid is everything else.”
“I was listening to that pre-concert lecture,” she said. “And someone asked why chamber music.”
“And that made you nervous?”
Mary shrugged. “I don’t know if I have an answer. It’s not something I remember choosing. I just do it.”
Mary dried her hands on a towel and held them up in front of her face, turning them around like they were sculptures crafted apart from her. Even her hands were young, Daniel thought. Especially her hands.
“It worked,” she said.
Daniel nodded and patted her on the back. “You’ll be full of all my tricks sometime when you’re old.”
She straightened her gown, a satin magenta thing that Daniel knew she wouldn’t wear again after seeing pictures of herself on stage, the fuss of the dress a blaring distraction from the playing. “You know Mendelssohn wrote this when he was fifteen? So in a way, I’m old already.” And then she turned and walked out of his dressing room.
The thing about the Mendelssohn Octet was counterpoint. While playing, Daniel realized the quartet had never coached this piece, so they hadn’t developed a way to talk about its organizational intelligence, but it was entirely contrapuntal. Mendelssohn was showing off, a whiz kid, look at how I can weave together not four but eight independent voices, how they all can be harmonic relatives but still adhere to separate rhythmic shapes. Chords were easy, but counterpoint added texture, that thing you didn’t know you were hearing. There was Jana, furiously sawing away, eating that other violinist alive, really (poor guy), but then there were the second violins, doing their own sawing, at half a dynamic lower, and a triad apart from each other even, throwing sixteenths around but just so, to fit in the spaces between the first violins’ notes so what was produced was a whole new line, made up of four voices switching allegiances and tandem partners at a dizzying pace, a guise of unpredictability glimmering out of the sure underbelly. The chords were sweet and rich, too, and Daniel admitted to loving them, milking them, as there was something almost Schubert-like about how youthful and pure they were. But it was the counterpoint, which begged reaction, that drove the piece, at once calling attention to each tiny action and allowing those actions to add up to something larger.
The movements were short, though full, and they made it to the Scherzo, which, if Mendelssohn wasn’t showing off in the Allegro, he certainly was here. The movement charged forward relentlessly, nearly choking the violinists with runs that were passed through each instrument like a waterfall, the rhythms changing to give the illusion of a tempo that continuously sped up. Henry and Mary were pairing well, their disparate sounds complementing each other, until Daniel saw Mary whip one of her pages over and—nothing. There was a page missing, there must have been, Daniel reasoned, as they weren’t done with the piece, but there was the black back of her stand and a barely audible gasp from her mouth.
She continued to play.
Which is what any good musician did, relied on memory, allowed the hours and years of practice to take over the muscles, addressed the sound instead of the page, the line instead of the stand. But then a funny thing happened: she took off. She just took off. She sat right next to Daniel and he saw her inch forward on her seat and dig in. It was as if she was hearing it for the first time, discovering something new and energetic about the final movement, and she began to play fast, faster than the tempo marking, and then faster. It was an accomplishment, Daniel would later admit, for the second viola part to be able to drive the other seven players into a new tempo, but she did it, short and small-lipped as she was. So that even when she rested for a bar or two and Jana attempted to recover tempo, the new speed was already established, the quality of being awake already implanted, and she couldn’t.
Daniel held his breath and played faster. When he was able to, he let his left hand drop and shook it out. He saw sweat roll down Jana’s temple, a grimace break across her face, and Henry, on the other side of Mary, easily keeping up and seeming calm about and even impressed by the firestorm next to him; and then Brit, who was also not breathing, was also smiling a little, amused at the way everything was falling apart. Was it falling apart? There would be a breaking point, Daniel felt sure. They couldn’t keep it up for much longer.
But then it ended. It ended where it was supposed to, where it always had, at the end of the page, but they reached it so much sooner than Daniel expected, or was used to. Suddenly there were the final four flourishes, where they all met back up, their bows thrown in the air all together, like drawing with bone tips some invisible map.
Daniel was explaining the reason they had to rig up extension cords for the record player in the backyard. His mother didn’t understand why they couldn’t just use the boom box that didn’t need all those unsightly wires.
“It’s a record, Mom,” he said. “It needs to sound like a record.”
She was in bed, thinner already, in her bedroom, which had signs of his father’s presence—a pile of boxer shorts on the floor, a cracked leather belt hung over a door handle, a swipe of construction dirt on the molding around the doorway, his father’s fingerprint in the dried muck. Perhaps they had revived a part of their love for each other now that she was dying. Daniel felt a tinge of softness for his father. He’d be the one really alone at the end of this. Brit was outside, he could hear her in the backyard with Jana and his father trying to tack lights onto the trees, but they were losing sun, and Jana’s voice was getting reedy and frustrated. It was hot, too. They’d arrived two nights prior and stepped off the plane into the soup of early Houston summer. “Like walking through a warm bath,” Brit said.
There really wasn’t much to do except the lights and the chairs and the music, but everything felt difficult in the heat and in the face of his mother’s sagging skin and sudden bouts of nausea. She carried a pink kidney-shaped bucket around with her when she moved about, which was rarely. His father refused to call in hospice care just yet. She bruised easily. She was cold to the touch, even in this heat. But she was happy, his father said. Who knew what organs were on the verge of failing her?
“What’s so special about a record?” Daniel’s mother asked. “I thought the point was for you not to have to carry records and tapes and CDs around anymore?”
“Okay,” Daniel said, and fetched the record player from the living room and brought it up to her room.
He took his time setting it up on her dresser, as it was old and it would be just what they needed to have the needle break. He pulled the Budapest Quartet record out of the sleeve and placed it on the turntable.
“This,” he said, “will change your life.”
“Never too late,” his mother said.
He placed the needle at the start of the second movement. “See? Hear that? That’s the noise of—of the sound before the sound. The sound of people about to do something. All that white stuff. And see? It doesn’t go away, not even when they’re playing. You can hear the space around them.”
“Oh, Danny,” she said like she was proud of him, like she was knowing him for the first time, like it was him and not the Budapest coming out of the record player. The second movement began, gentle and sad.
“You can hear the slight attack in the bow change, the bow moving across the string, their breathing cues. You can hear how the breath is shared, how they breathe together. People in a room. They don’t make stuff like this anymore, Mom.”
The Budapest played devotedly through the sweet movement.
After it was over, his mother coughed lightly, but Daniel could tell she’d been saving it up. “It’s so . . . imprecise,” his mother said, but it wasn’t an insult.
“Yes,” Daniel said. “That’s it.”
He said he would stay with her until she fell asleep. She would sleep for only an hour or two. That was the most she got these days. Daniel let the record play out, all the way to the end, and then he flipped it over to the other side, and she fell asleep to the sound of Beethoven. He stayed and she stayed asleep, even as the record finished playing, and there was only that white sound spinning and spinning.
In 1994, it cost three dollars to cross the Golden Gate Bridge going south, so Daniel and Brit parked on the south side and walked north. They’d slept together (clumsily and silently) exactly once, hovered over each other in various states of undress a handful of times, and sat next to each other separated only by black metal music stands and a thick fog of heat for days and days and days. But now it was night, and there was fog, real fog, rolling chaotically down the hills on the north side and across the bridge. There’d been a dim sum dinner (paid for separately) and rail whiskey drinks (paid for separately at first and then generously by her) and aimless, dangerous driving (sloppily navigated by her, excitedly driven by him) and now this, a walk across the Golden Gate Bridge, something neither of them had ever done before, something so obvious and predictable that they’d never felt it was necessary to actually do. Neither of them made the decision to go. It seemed inevitable as a destination.
The cold was biting and their jackets were underperforming. The wind whipped Brit’s long hair around her face, and as they walked, Daniel resisted reaching up to pull strands back so he could see her face, and then he stopped resisting. Each time he pulled her hair back, there she was, smiling. They stopped somewhere they assumed was the middle, but there was no way to know. They couldn’t see the water below them or the pedestrians around them or the stars above them. Daniel thought he could hear the wind snap the cords of the bridge and looked up, but he saw nothing moving, only the burnt-red cables disappearing into black.
“Are you afraid it’s going to fall?” Brit asked.
“No,” Daniel said quickly, realizing too late she was teasing. Daniel couldn’t see her face and he wanted to.
Brit held her arm over the railing. The chewed sleeve of her jacket shivered in the wind and Daniel’s fingertips tingled in response. She held her arm farther.
“Okay,” he said. “Don’t.”
“There’s Alcatraz.” She pointed, leaning out. She put one foot on the railing and then the other.
“Really, don’t.”
“You’re not even trying to look. Find Angel Island.”
He looked instead toward the lanes and the cars heading one way or the other.
She didn’t move her arm, but she stepped back onto the concrete. “Why did you take me here if you’re afraid of heights?”
“I didn’t take you here,” he said, but he said it quietly and his tone was the kind of cold that made people close up, a flower in reverse.
She looked out at her own arm like it was someone else’s arm and then back to him. At the same time he stepped toward her—to embrace her, he would later say, though even later he would tell himself that wasn’t what he was going to do—she pulled her arm back and moved toward him, and they crashed into each other in a way that made Daniel feel the hard, icy concrete under his stumbling feet and the incredible distance to the water.
“Just this,” she said, and put her hand around his waist and drew him to the railing with her. She dangled her free hand in the abyss. He could see some of the magic of the night dropping out of her, falling down into he didn’t know what. Somewhere a boat moaned, or it was the bridge moaning in the wind, or it was a whale, or it was a man in a lighthouse he couldn’t see, and in any case it was a sound of warning. Daniel stood rigid and still under her arm, as if by not moving he could disappear this moment. Don’t pull me toward you, he thought at the same time he thought, Don’t let me go.
And eventually, she did let go. They were worn down from the cold, which was why it was empty on the bridge at night. She walked away first, back toward the car, hands hidden in pockets, hair forgotten in the weather. He clutched the railing with his hand, too afraid to release it but also petrified in the position. The time in which she walked away was a physical space that he inhabited, more than the length of an arm dangling over a bridge railing at night and less than the length of a lifetime of communal orbit—and the farther she walked, the finer the point of her image became, shimmering and darkening, merging with the black view, not breaking apart, but the opposite, until she was as exact and impossible as this question: What do you love? And another: How? She walked away, but not really.
If he thought about it too much, there was a whole lot to be angry about. For instance, his father, who never did stop drinking, and who had held Daniel at a yardstick’s distance his whole life. For instance, his brother, whom he’d barely known, who’d made a new family somewhere else and left him to fend for himself. For instance, cancer, dying in general, parents dying, parents, really. But standing in the hot swelter of the backyard of his childhood home at dusk, a record player in the middle of the damp grass, waiting for Brit to appear at the end of the aisle, Jana and Henry looking on, he knew two things. First, that he could blame no one else—for who could know a man who refused to know himself?—and second, that he’d long ago forgiven himself. It was easy, as it turned out. You didn’t have to ask for it.
Also, he’d made a family, too.
Brit did appear, with Jana at her side, and the women walked toward him. There weren’t the thoughts he’d expected to have, though they existed somewhere in him (she is beautiful, I am lucky, we are happy), and instead there were pre-thoughts. No name for it. The stuff that came before you started naming things. She was a gift. He was a gift. Nothing would do.
When they reached him, Jana put Brit’s hands in his and winked, and took a seat next to Daphne and his mother. Henry stood between them, but whenever Daniel tried to look at him, the setting sun behind him blackened his face. He had to look away, and so there was only Henry’s voice.
Love is inexact, Henry said. It is not a science. It is barely a noun. It means one thing to one person, and one thing to another. It means one thing to one person at one point and then something else at another point. It doesn’t make sense. We are gathered here today to not make sense. We are gathered here today to listen to the ineffable. I’m supposed to be explaining it, but I can’t explain it. I love you, it’s a mystery. Because it’s a mystery, we have to take care of it. Feed it. It can go missing, but we can’t tie it up. We can only tie it to someone else. Other people. Then the world is like this: full of the geometry of my rope tied to you, and to you, and yours tied to him, and to her, and hers to someone else. I love you, it’s a mystery. A moment of silence.
In four months, they would all return to Houston for his mother’s funeral. She’d make it longer than anyone expected, and though her organs were shutting down one by one, what took her in the end was a spill in the bathroom, a fainting spell that shattered her bones; or maybe she’d died in the faint, and the shattering came after, Daniel could never remember. It didn’t seem that important. What did seem important was that at the funeral, sitting between Brit and his father, he caught himself praying—to what? But praying.
It would bring him back to this wedding, this moment where with applause growing up around them like time, he kissed Brit, she kissed him, and then they embraced, and her hair filled his mouth, filled it up and for a second he couldn’t breathe. It was like kissing the space between the moment you thought something and the moment you opened your mouth to say it aloud. But then, just as quickly, he left that feeling, released it, and re-joined the clamor, the singing, the music.