“Plus,” she said, “you’ll be lonely.”
So they left behind the years they’d put in, and veered off in search of a quartet. They’d met Brit and Daniel almost immediately, both of whom had wasted their own time at regular colleges—Indiana University and Rice. So their start as a group was late. That was undeniable. For Henry, time wasn’t such a big deal. He was young. But for Jana, the official commitment to the quartet was the beginning of the churning worry inside her that she would run out of time before she was ever successful, that she needed to ascend faster and more fiercely than normal, at Henry-like speeds.
That was what was on her mind the morning of their last rehearsal in San Francisco before the competition, instead of the sixteenths in Beethoven’s “Serioso,” which did need some attention, and suddenly she was anxious. She had the score in her lap and they were waiting for Henry to tune. He’d left his viola beneath a slightly open window in his apartment that morning, and the cold had contracted the strings and wood. He and Jana both had perfect pitch, so tuning could take forever to satisfy their testy ears. Daniel made no secret that he found this annoying and refused to sit for it, instead pacing the back of the stage. Jana knew he was just infuriated he didn’t have perfect pitch.
They were due to fly to Canada that afternoon, with the first round of performances the next night. Four of the sixteen groups would be cut then, with three more rounds to go. Just focus on round one, Jana told herself. They would play the Beethoven, which had gone more than decently at the conservatory recital a week earlier, but in the time since had started to feel brittle.
Now they were testing the sound on stage, as if it was going to matter. They’d already played on this stage during their recital, and Esterhazy was going to be on a different stage, thousands of miles away. And besides all that, if Jana had learned anything from relentless performing, it was that chamber music was made up of a hundred minute responses to even more minute changes in both the environment and each other’s bodies. Sometimes she was momentarily embarrassed at how well she knew Brit’s thin left hand or the elfin knobs of Daniel’s knees, perhaps better than she knew either of them.
In any case, Henry’s scroll was propped on his knee, and his ear was turned close to the wood, and Jana was still worrying about their age. She and Brit were both twenty-four. Henry was newly twenty (an ambitious, antsy prodigy), and Daniel somewhere near thirty—he didn’t like to discuss his age. The groups winning the Esterhazy competition were getting younger each year, some still in conservatory. Nineteen-year-olds. And there they’d been, toiling away at a master’s certificate in chamber music, as if it mattered to anyone but their teachers, whom they were too old to have any longer.
But she’d needed to study more, and they’d needed to find Brit and Daniel. Still, Jana often thought of how it would have been so much easier if they’d all found each other earlier, if they’d all gone to conservatory together the first time around. What Jana really wanted wasn’t to have studied more, but to have grown more as a whole group. To grow faster, now. Or to somehow turn back time to five years ago and start growing together then. If they’d solidified their connection earlier, they might be more comfortable now with these big performances. This biggest performance.
“What’s wrong with you?” Jana said.
Brit looked up, her eyes alarmingly wide. She’d been reticent all morning, making barely any noise but for her own private tuning. Her face was colorless except for a suddenly noticeable splash of freckles across her pale cheeks, her long hair tied back in a bun. Jana was annoyed. They couldn’t afford to be lackluster.
Brit snapped back, “What’s wrong with you?”
“Tuned!” Henry announced, running a hand through his long hair. He beckoned to Daniel. “Tuned! Sorry, guys, forgot it was going to be cold this morning. It’s all good.”
“Could you please get a haircut before the concert?” Jana said to Henry.
“Why don’t you ask me five more times?” he said. “Call my mother and tell her to remind me?”
Daniel took his place again, stabbed his endpin into the rockstop. Jana cleared her throat. They agreed to run through only the openings of every movement of all three pieces. Jana had always been a firm believer that you have one good performance of any given piece in you a day, a superstition handed down by her first teacher, the Russian. Their conservatory coach had decried this idea, saying that if you don’t have more than one good performance in you a day, you shouldn’t be a professional. He’d have made them rehearse everything all the way through until their fingers were raw, then tell them to go zone out for three hours before coming back to the hall. But Jana liked the mysterious quality of keeping a full run-through of a piece until they were really on stage. It was like keeping a bride from her groom until she walked down the aisle—the groom knew what she looked like, but the deprivation made her appearance more sacred.
Not that any wedding was as important as the concerts they would play at Esterhazy.
Anyway, it was two days until their first appearance at the competition, but Jana felt that it was too close to risk a full rehearsal.
Her hunch about a lackluster attitude proved true in their run-through. She felt so stuffed with that idea that she tried not to speak at all while they were rehearsing. Brit was clearly in a mood, and Daniel was just an okay foundation, not his usual vocal self. Henry tried to smile at her across the stands, but she scowled back. They ran a couple of known rough spots, which were smoothed out, if devoid of the life they were capable of applying.
At the end, when there was nothing else to run through, Jana couldn’t help it, the words came out of her mouth like a sneeze: “Bad rehearsal.”
“Not really a rehearsal,” Brit said.
“Well,” Jana said. “We could use one.”
“Bad rehearsal, good performance, isn’t that what they say?” Henry said.
The four of them looked at each other in a swath of silence. What they’d just done in rehearsal hadn’t made any sense, and no superstition was going to make Jana feel good about it.
The silence curled away like fog, and they dispersed from the chairs. As Jana put her violin in its velvet case, she heard Daniel clicking his case snaps shut and walking off stage, and Henry saying something quietly to Brit, trying to make her laugh a little. Jana didn’t turn from her violin. There was nothing to say. The space had the unnamable yet pervasive feeling of a holiday spent alone.
As she slung her case over her shoulder, she felt Henry’s presence behind her, and turned to find him smiling, joyful. “It’s going to be fine,” he said, holding out his arm. She slid hers through the crook and they walked into the wings, through the cold backstage, and out onto 19th Avenue. Outside, the fog had lifted, and a warm May afternoon alighted. The warmth was fleeting, though. It always was in San Francisco.