“I don’t know that,” she said. What she meant was, Tell me more about how I’m pretty.
They were lying on their backs in bed, the sheets yanked up above their chests, staring at the ceiling, their fingertips touching down near their bare, damp thighs. Daniel had been exactly as she’d wanted him to be—kind but primal, and relentless in his pursuit of her satisfaction. She’d been fine, she assumed. She’d been lost, in a good way. She was cold.
But he didn’t tell her more about how she was pretty. Why didn’t men do that? Was it because she wasn’t really, except if they were having sex with her? Or was it because they truly believed she knew she was pretty and didn’t need convincing? Or was it because they believed by virtue of their having sex with her, she would come to understand her physical beauty? What Daniel did instead was swing his thigh over hers and bring his rough hand to her belly, which he began to rub. He said, “This is fun.”
“But we shouldn’t rush things,” she said, an answer to a question he hadn’t asked.
“No, casual is best,” he said as he worked his hand across her torso. Then he paused. “Do you think there’s something wrong with me, that women don’t want to date me?”
“Perhaps it’s that you don’t want to date them?” she said, smiling.
Daniel was an unlikely playboy. He was awkwardly large and small at the same time, shorter than average and a little stocky, disproportionate, with a curiously handsome face. There was something solid and undeniable about his body, everything tightly packed in there. Something glinting and playful about the way he carried himself, light and dangerous as a tumbleweed, apt to cut and suddenly whisk away. But he always had girls around, even if they never stayed long enough to matter, and Brit suspected his catch-and-release pattern would continue long after he let her go.
“Would we be good together?” she asked, and paused to consider the question, but she couldn’t conjure up an image of the two of them, walking on a day-lit city street, holding hands, or trekking up a mountain somewhere, throwing backward glances at each other, teeth shining in the alpine air. She wanted to see it, to hear a soundtrack—maybe something like water running over a plate of glass, violins, sixteenths at the tip of the bow at the edge of the string near the bridge—but she couldn’t. It wouldn’t form, it wouldn’t hold.
“No.” He resumed his pawing. “We’d be . . . just awful together.”
“You’re right,” she said, arching her back and winding a leg through his. “I agree with you completely.”
Brit half believed they wouldn’t work together. She’d often thought this, when he stubbornly scrutinized sheet music from behind the Coke-bottle glasses, or when he infuriatingly answered a question by analyzing in detail each side before settling on a studied waffle, or when he obsessed about the correct position on anything, everything—the history, value, and diversity of grace notes; the exact amount of wear an ebony frog could take before it needed to be replaced; the salty sting of the air in San Francisco, where they rehearsed, versus the air in (more affordable) Oakland, where he lived, and its effect on the wood of his cello. His compulsive precision made him an exceptional lover and a disastrous mate, an outstanding musician and an exhausting friend. Nothing unquantifiable could be perfect enough for him, and it was starting to become clear to Brit that unquantifiable things were the only things that had value to her.
That was why that moment in bed after they’d had sex for the first time, I was watching you all the time then, she knew she’d remember what he said for a long time. She had been right, after all. There had been a mutual recognition two years ago, of something mathematical but mysterious between them, seen simultaneously, something totally invisible and unexpected, but natural. Like the molecules of the air had been dyed and made bright, electric, tangible. It gave her faith in so many things—her beauty, her instincts, possibility itself. Most of all, the thrilling freedom of being truly unable to predict your life.
Which is how, she supposed, what happened happened. They continued to sleep together and told no one, especially not Jana or Henry. It was terrible fun. They played music, silly duets they hadn’t played since their Suzuki days and contemporary duets they found in the sheet music warehouse. They got drunk and found videos of famous performers and criticized their technique, rewinding and fast-forwarding, frame by frame. They stayed up late, clawing at each other between periods of dozing, with the frenzy of the first blush of infatuation, a blatant desire to know every single part of the other’s body, to exhaust that knowledge. They fell asleep on Daniel’s cheap futon, head to foot, legs tangled in each other’s arms, listening to Pablo Casals records, and woke only to the existential fuzz of a needle with nothing to play. They came to rehearsal sleepy, puffy with secrets.
At night, she found the divots in his breastbone made by the point on the back of his cello neck, and the light bruises that appeared and disappeared on the insides of his knees, depending on how long their rehearsals lasted. He ran his fingers through her hair, asked her never to change it. On nights after they rehearsed, he carefully avoided the rust-colored welt on the left hollow of her neck, even with his breath.
It could only go on so long.
Two days before their graduation recital, after a particularly rough rehearsal, they’d made up similar excuses of exhaustion, and Brit offered to drive Daniel home. There, she made him a late dinner—he couldn’t cook, and he so rarely went out to eat, always just scraping by—and they ate at his bachelor-sized table with a Janos Starker record spinning in the background. She argued for Heifetz instead, and he responded by repositioning the needle at the beginning of the record, insisting she listen again, for what exactly he didn’t say. She lit a candle she found in his dirty bathroom, and laid out cloth napkins, which were actually the soft towels she used to wipe rosin from her violin. When he wiped carbonara off his mouth, the napkin left a chalky white glint on his chin. She smiled and said nothing.
Unlike Jana and Henry, Daniel and Brit had both gone to academic colleges for their undergraduate degrees, and Brit felt an outsider kinship because of this. But Brit’s connection to him went further, in that they both felt like they were missing families. He talked about his mother. Daniel was the second child from a generally loveless family in Houston, one whose struggles with money did nothing to bind them together, and whose peculiar, artistic younger son only furthered their cosmic expansion away from each other. His father worked on a construction crew that jumped from site to site, and his mother cleaned their small home in the affordable suburbs, occasionally cleaned other people’s homes, and prayed. They quietly tolerated each other, made ends meet, cared that Daniel was successful, and cared much less that he was a musician. What he did, he did alone.
Brit was an actual orphan, though she didn’t describe herself that way. Her father died of a regular kind of cancer when she was in college, and her mother just simply gave out—there was no other way to put it—a year into Brit’s time in San Francisco. She had no siblings, either, no one to go home to. Brit was drawn to the story of Daniel’s family, how he had one and was still a kind of orphan. He didn’t seem sad about it, but matter-of-fact. They could share the same hurt, but in different ways. They bore the same wound, in different shapes. She learned to crave that dynamic between the two of them. She could be the fabric flapping in the wind; he could be the flagpole.