“I don’t know,” Daniel said. “That whole narrative of love and children, it all just seems a little too much magical thinking to me.”
Starker was climbing up the fingerboard, heading toward the breakthrough arpeggio that required a difficult thumb position. The preludes to the suites always had these passages, ecstatic arpeggios that fully expressed the major chord, and then backed away into a modulated scale, before ending in dignified triple stops or broken chords. But before the ending, those ecstatic arpeggios threatened to dissolve into chaos. They were Brit’s favorite parts.
And just behind her sadness, this thought pulsed: She wanted Daniel, not only in a way he didn’t want her, but in a way he didn’t want to want anyone. And she wanted him to be different, to want to have a kind of love that trembles over the lid of a shared life, to have a hierarchy of wants of which money was not an essential part. The arpeggios died away. Starker was back to the descending scales, working his way toward the end of the first movement.
“I like him for the Bach suites,” Daniel said, switching topics. “Because he’s no-nonsense. Starker. No frills. Not a romantic player, like Yo-Yo Ma. Not a messy one like Casals. Not a furious one like Du Pre—she always seems kind of angry. Starker is more simple. Good. Clear. I think that’s what Bach intended. Not all this interpretive bullshit. What do you think?”
Daniel’s cello stood in its hard plastic case against the wall by his bed. She knew he allowed his mother to believe playing the cello was the path God had chosen for him. She knew his father didn’t care much for classical music. She knew his cello was cheap, and borrowed at that. She knew he would have to rent his tux for the performance, and that Jana and Henry would assume he owned it. She knew he would work a few more doubles at the bar this month to afford that rental. He grinned at her from his side of the table, no idea.
Go away, Brit said to her sadness. She knew how it could come.
“What do I think?” she repeated. “I think I prefer Du Pre.”
“Ah,” he said. “Of course you do.”
Brit saw then that Daniel’s articulation of their difference was his excuse not to fall in love. He was collecting evidence, always. She was ignoring it, always. She sighed. Really, she thought, they ought to have been able to predict this. She saw with sudden clarity the way he saw her. A pretty-enough girl across the table, the table in Counterpoint II or the fake dinner table here, now. A welcome distraction from the true goal of musical success—financial success. A girl who was not like him, not because her parents had died, but because of the money she had from their death.
“I should be going,” Brit said when Starker completed the suite. “And I think—I wanted to say—we should stop this.”
His face clouded for the briefest moment, then cleared. “Oh yeah?”
“Yes. It’s too much, you know? With the competition coming up—”
“No, you’re right. It’s too risky to mess with that.”
“Too dangerous.”
“Right, right.”
She stared at her dirty plate next to his, the napkins and knives on the table and the bits of pasta sauce everywhere. She knew he wouldn’t properly clean up after this meal, and with their final rehearsal and then the concert, the dishes would crust in the sink for a week, at least. He was messy, this was a thing she knew about him—dust bunnies collected on her clothes when she was there, were carried back to her apartment—and as she stood up from the dinner’s wreckage, she said goodbye to that knowledge.
There was no danger to Daniel’s life, no risk. And none in hers, either, but his lack was because he cut his life carefully around it. It was better that way, she supposed. Perhaps they had to save all that danger up for the stage. Perhaps it was dangerous enough just to be a person, alone.
He put his hand on her back and took it away. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll walk you out.”
There was an ease to letting go, she thought, especially if you never had anything to begin with. They walked down the close stairs of his shabby apartment building, smelling like their meal, the athletic fragrance of black pepper and pancetta, a smell that would for years bring reeling back a feeling of gut-sinking disappointment for Brit. The light was out in the lobby, as always. In the dark, before he pushed the heavy door open, she began to quietly cry. He didn’t notice until they were standing in the plain light of the streetlamp.
“Hey, Brit,” he said, but didn’t reach out, his hands stuffed in his pants pockets.
“I’m fine,” she said. Her chest was about to explode, her insides pounding like they were being impressed with a thousand tiny divots made by the back of a cello neck. She put her hand to her breastbone. There were no holes, no depressions: only herself.
They were useless together. She just had to leave, get in her car, drive home across the bridge—why did she always have to come to his place in Oakland, anyway, and he never to hers?—go to sleep, wake, rehearse, do it again and again, and play the concert of her life at Esterhazy. Just get through that. Everything could be the same, and then after, if they won the competition, if they played well, it might even be better.
She was being stupid, she thought. She shouldn’t even be thinking about children. She could barely afford her apartment, and she was young and in a secret relationship—not a relationship—with the cellist in her quartet. And yet—disappointment, possibility snuffed out, never even lit. She pictured fingers snapping out a small flame over and over, and the hiccupping sound beat in her eardrums. It seemed like a microcosm of her entire life, the snapping, the snuffing, the resultant darkness.
She’d take a trip to New York this summer, Brit decided, see a friend who played with the Met. After the win at Esterhazy. Spend her money that Daniel so resented. Catch a few recitals at Carnegie Hall and lose herself in Patelson’s music shop across the street for a few hours each afternoon, fill an extra roller bag with music, and come back to San Francisco like nothing had ever happened. She always liked visiting that musty music store after the storied concert hall; it reminded her that what she was participating in was an arc, bigger than she was, older than she’d ever be. Yes, she decided, on the short walk to her car, Daniel cautiously following behind her, I’ll do that.
When she got in her car, there he was, still Daniel, standing half in the shadow of the streetlamp, hands buried in his puffy coat, shorter than he seemed close up. Brit saw the slightly hooked nose she noticed only in profile, the scruff on his chin like a mistake, his small dark eyes, the inscrutable mouth that twisted up when he was turned on, charmed, or being clever. But always most distinctive was his irregular wingspan, disproportionate to his height, which allowed him unlimited and unfair range down the neck of his cello: broad shoulders, arms that drooped out of his sleeves, almost in apology, never actually in apology.