“My mother believes in destiny,” Daniel said. “She thinks I was her destiny. And that mine is music.”
“What, and you don’t?” Brit asked. “That seems like a fine thing to believe in.”
Daniel shrugged. “Sure, if you don’t want to have any responsibility for your life. Or control. Or ability to make things better.”
“Maybe that’s what your mother means, though, about you being her destiny. Don’t you think that’s why people have children?” Brit asked. “To make a better family than the one they grew up with?”
“No,” Daniel said, too quickly. “I guess that could be a reason, but it’s not the smart one. Especially when you don’t have money to pay for that family.”
Daniel was always talking about money, that was one thing. Money was never far from his mind, and he rarely paid for things, and he was always tired, working late at the bar he wouldn’t let any of them visit. He felt insecure about the quality of his cello and expressed this by always being the first to mention it.
“I don’t know,” Brit said. “We didn’t have much money, but we were happy.”
“Well,” Daniel said, “there’s a difference between your ‘not much money’ and my ‘not much money.’”
“Really?”
“‘Really?’ says the girl who got an inheritance to pay for this life here.”
Brit straightened her shoulders. He had a way of stinging that was quick and shallow. She would give all the money back from that small shack of a house if it meant having her parents around for just one more week, one more concert. She didn’t say that.
The effect of his nastiness registered across Daniel’s face. He leaned forward. “I just mean that we used food stamps and my brother and I slept in the living room in one of our places, and I had to ask for tuition remission for everything—everything—and this thing I’m doing, it’s like the least profitable thing ever, and none of you have to worry about that.”
“I worry about it,” she said. She did, but not in such a way that it influenced any decision she felt was imperative. And she worried about him, about the way his worry had made him hard at the edges, all that determination and self-doubt wrapped up in his obsession with money. “I worry that you would let something like money keep you from something like . . . having a family.”
“I’m not sure I want children regardless.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“But why? Why would it be any better? Why add more people to the world unless you absolutely have to?”
Brit stirred the pasta around her plate, making delicate, unappetizing designs. She had never thought of herself as one of those women who absolutely had to have children, could not identify with the girls from high school who so swiftly wrote in to the alumni magazine about their babies—The greatest Christmas gift I could ask for! or We are so in love with baby Isaac! (already? does love happen so fast, ever?)—and yet, even though she was a modern woman, she could not picture wanting to have a child outside of wanting to have a family. Being a mother seemed an entirely different enterprise from being part of a family, a real one. And that was what she wanted, she realized suddenly, over the middling pasta. A family again.
“I always thought I’d meet someone who I’d love so much that that love had to spill out into another being. Lots of other beings. I want to have a child as an expression of love, I guess,” Brit said. “I’m saying I want to absolutely have to.”
She was surprised to find herself embarrassed at her speech. She sensed Daniel across the table, also ceasing to eat, his wineglass empty, both of them on the verge of the next thing—leaving or staying. He made no indication he wanted her to stay. She tried not to show that she wanted him to want it.
“I agree, I suppose,” Daniel said. “That would be a nice feeling.”
“Do you think you’ll ever feel that?” Brit asked.
Daniel drummed his fingers on the table in time to Starker, who had just begun the prelude to the third Bach cello suite. “You know that part of the Symposium? Where Aristophanes talks about how humans were split in two by . . . by—”
“By Zeus,” Brit offered. She already knew the story, but she let him tell it anyway.
“Right, by Zeus. And that desire is the pursuit of wholeness.”
Brit remembered a bad translation from a college intro class, though she hadn’t thought of it in some time. “I like that.”
Daniel leaned forward. “But don’t you think that’s a little reductive? That someone can only be whole with someone else? What about everything that can make you whole without attaching yourself to something like a parasite? What about hard work and accomplishment and . . . like, inner harmony?”
“What’s inner harmony?” Brit asked. Daniel laughed, but she continued, “No, really. How can you harmonize with yourself?”
Daniel stopped laughing abruptly. He folded his hands on the table. “Well, I don’t know about you, but I contain many pitches. It’s about moving from polyphony to harmony. People are so much music. People don’t recognize that enough.”
“So you’re going to be alone forever because it’s too offensive to your dignity to attach yourself to someone else?”
“You’re not understanding,” Daniel said. He leaned back, revealing to Brit small bits of sauce where the front of his shirt had touched the plate. “It’s not someone else. It’s the whole concept of fitting in someone else’s . . . construction.”
Brit didn’t know how to say that it sounded nice to be contained in someone else’s construction without sounding stupid, young, naive. And anyway, even if she could have said it, he wouldn’t have come around to see it from her side. He was too busy with his hammer and pick, chiseling away at a perfect likeness, freeing his ideal self from stone.
She could feel her face go slack, her chest hollow out. It was what she saw happen to Daniel’s body when he sat down to play.
“Look,” he said. “I suppose it all comes down to biology, anyway. Maybe there’s a biological urge I’ll feel for children. Maybe not. What I’m saying is it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with love, not to me. And it definitely has to do with money, which, if you remember, I have none of.”
His obdurate nature often presented itself in a refusal to really answer a question—he was more afraid of being wrong than of being nothing. He did this in rehearsal often, making Jana red in the face by not completely agreeing or completely disagreeing with her interpretation of a passage. It amused Henry, but Brit often stepped in to defuse the situation, which usually meant persuading Daniel to let Jana have her way. Daniel would play the passage the way that seemed best, anyway, which was always whichever way Jana articulated it on stage, and their instantaneous response in performance was a skill they had cultivated.