Her words came slowly because she was afraid, but the slowness lent them a sense of confidence. Tempo was always a strength of hers. She said: “If you don’t help us, I will tell everyone that you said you’d help us win if I slept with you.”
There was a pause, some counting of beats, a breath.
“Okay,” he said, his hands on her back, patting her like she was a pet. “Okay. All right.”
After he fell asleep again, this time noisily and deeply, she dressed silently and picked up the picture of Gisella from the carpet beneath the bed, where it had slipped, and tucked it into her purse before clicking the door shut behind her.
It was predawn in San Francisco, the hour when the city felt most like a small ocean town, morning sea birds swirling in the purple sky. But it was cold, and Jana walked briskly, regretting the choice not to wear tights. She found a lonely cab idling on the corner and hopped in.
At the door to Henry’s building in the Haight, she leaned on his buzzer until he moaned into the speaker. She hummed back the exact pitch of the buzzer (D-flat) and he let her in.
Jana climbed the three floors two stairs at a time and nudged open the already ajar door. Henry’s apartment, paid for by his rich parents in Napa—who were also kind, generous, witty people—was chilly. Beneath her feet crunched blank music sheets Henry had tossed to the floor, scribbled with phrases of a piece he was writing. Lined along the walls were crates and crates of classical music records, the only belongings besides his viola that he really carried around, city to city. He was attached to them in a way that made Jana feel tenderly toward him, like watching a child be protective of his toys. But at the same time his attachment also frustrated her. The records cluttered his life—he never unpacked or organized them, and he was forever searching for the right one when he needed it. It was just another way his life was needlessly wild.
She stepped out of her shoes and into Henry’s bed, into the familiar comma made by his long body, and found the spot warmed, perfumed, raw. There’d been someone else here.
“Who?” she asked, elbowing him.
“Off-duty ballerina,” he said into the pillow. “You?”
“No one,” she said. “That stage guy and I went out to a gay club downtown.”
He tightened his arm around her. “You spent a bunch of time with Ferrari tonight. How was that?”
“Just like you’d think it was.”
“He give you his card, too?”
Jana lifted her head from the pillow and turned it toward him. “He gave you his card?’”
Henry didn’t open his eyes but reached his arm across her to paw at the nightstand, where he produced a folded-up card with Fodorio’s name on it. Jana sat up in the bed and unfolded it. On the back, Fodorio had scribbled: For your John Lennon moment.
“Your John Lennon moment?” Jana said.
“What?”
“What he wrote on the back. For when you want to leave the band.”
“No one’s leaving the band,” Henry mumbled.
“Then why did he give this to you?”
Henry opened his eyes and propped himself up. “Because he’s an egomaniac who wants to feel like he’s helping me do something I don’t even know I need yet?”
Jana rubbed the folds in the business card between her fingers. “Then why did you keep it?”
Henry looked at her like he felt sorry for her, but not in a pitying way. Tenderly, his face matching her meek timbre. At that, she would have let it go, dropped the card to the dirty floor and fallen asleep. But then he took the card from her hand and tore it into tiny squares. He popped the squares into his mouth, chewed quietly, and washed them down with a glass of water from the nightstand.
“Sleep now?” he said.
“Okay.”
Together, they fell into a platonic slumber, as they’d done many nights before: a mess of tacos, sweat, rosin. They were friends, Henry like the brother Jana had always wanted. They were kindred in their prideful loneliness, the stubborn fermata held blankly in their centers that could just go on forever. They pushed their fermatas against each other, and were something close to satisfied. Is there anything better? Fodorio had asked her of his life, and she hadn’t answered. She wasn’t sure. She wasn’t so far away from the failures and disappointments scattered on the floor of his life, but at least she had this, someone else’s fermata. Jana dreamt of nothing. As for Henry, he slept with a dashed-off smile across his face, and she never could tell.
BRIT
Violin II
There was something nagging Brit, loping behind her more general sadness, and it was that she couldn’t remember having actually chosen to want to be with Daniel. And this was what made her current situation more painful and aggravating—her life felt like an old, warped record, her pain circling back around and skipping on her lack of intention. She was sad, and she was angry with herself for being sad. She didn’t like wanting what she hadn’t intended to want as much as she didn’t like being denied what she hadn’t really wanted in the first place. She thought there was enough to be sad about without adding on the unfulfilled wishes at the edge of your life. For instance, a slightly wider left hand, a better violin. For instance, your parents to be alive again.
Brit couldn’t deny she had been attracted to Daniel when they first met, and she knew he had also been drawn to her. Sitting on opposite sides of the table that first day in Counterpoint II, they’d noticed each other noticing each other. He hummed with nervous energy, quick to raise his hand to answer a question, possessing a spastic agility that betrayed his insecurity. A boyish face with large, nervous eyes and a nose not to be missed. And she caught him staring—at her face, her breasts, her mouth (her crooked eyetooth, even?)—when she offered answers to the professor’s questions about the tonic pattern in Don Giovanni. She whispered to Jana, “I think that cellist is staring at me,” and Jana rolled her eyes and said, “Not everyone is staring at you, Brit,” but she tucked a strand of Brit’s hair behind her ear when she said it so it wasn’t entirely mean.
But he had been staring at her. Nearly two years later, after they’d formed the quartet and just before the difficult conversation in which they all decided the quartet would be what they’d pursue together, she asked him about it, in bed, in that postcoital moment where one feels free to say anything because nothing could be more embarrassing or intimate than what has just transpired.
“Yes,” Daniel said. “I was watching you all the time then. I always thought you were pretty. You must know that you’re pretty.”
Brit hadn’t known. Some girls grew up that way, knowing they were pretty, using it. Brit felt she hadn’t been pretty until very recently, and the change made her uncomfortable; she was unused to men looking at her, seeing something she could barely see herself. In the mirror she looked how she’d always looked: pale skin, nearly blue-vein translucent; a puckered, downturned mouth (that tooth); oddly spaced features (nose too narrow, eyes large and far apart—like a cow, she’d once overheard a girl cruelly say); long hair, a dull shade of blond, boring, exasperated with itself.