Gregory was a subtle leader, so subtle that Celine found herself not just listening to his first violin but watching him closely for any twitch of the mouth. When he looked back at her, just as when either of the Mikes caught her eye, it was with the unapologetic stare of collaborating musicians. There were musicians who never looked up from their hands or their instruments, but she’d seen quartets of straight men gaze at each other like they were making love.
They finished the Allegro and Prestissimo movements and stopped to talk about balance. “You have amazing acoustics,” Gregory said. “We could record right here.”
She looked around the room, at the high ceiling and bare walls, the bare floor, the couch and coffee table crammed into a corner, the empty and cavernous fireplace. “It comes from having no furniture,” she said.
Mike Langley raised his viola bow tentatively in the air, asking permission to speak. The Mikes would both have to get bolder, be willing to argue with Celine and Gregory. “Should we come up with a name?” he asked. “Before your Deutsche Grammophon person gets here? Would that help?” No, it wouldn’t, particularly, but Celine didn’t want to shoot him down.
“I’m sure Marlboro Quartet is already taken,” Mike Cho said.
Gregory laughed. “No one has dared for a very long time.”
“The May-December String Quartet,” Celine offered. “Because two of us are so damn old.”
The Mikes both looked horrified, and confused about whether they should protest. “She doesn’t mean that,” Gregory said. “She’s only forty. What she means is the two of you are so damn young.” How Gregory knew her exact age, she had no idea. She wondered if he’d been googling her. “The Happenstance Quartet,” he offered. “The House in the Middle of Nowhere Quartet. The Get Your Cross off My Lawn Quartet.”
Langley raised his bow again, but this time it was in triumph, and Celine was thrilled with his confidence. “The Cross-Purposes Quartet.” He didn’t need to spell out the various meanings. It was perfect, just like the quartet itself.
And when they played the Allegro again, lo and behold, it had a more solid shape, a stronger arc. They knew who they were.
That night, the Cross-Purposes Quartet drank mulled wine in the chairs they’d pulled in front of Celine’s fireplace. Gregory had gone knocking at half the front doors on the long, twisty road until he’d happened on an old man with a woodpile and a generous heart. The other three had watched, laughing, from the front porch as Gregory pushed an actual wheelbarrow back up the driveway.
Celine had left the room when Gregory opened the flue, afraid bats or mice would tumble out. She’d never had a fire in this house, but now that it was roaring along pleasantly, she imagined she might do it again sometime this winter. She might even invest in a real poker, rather than the barbecue fork Mike Cho was using to prod the logs.
“What if you moved it?” Mike Langley said, out of nowhere. “You could just transplant the whole thing one house down, in front of some other tree, and when they see it they’ll assume their minds are playing tricks.” He was joking, but she actually considered it for a second.
“I bet they’ve got an album full of photos with your house in the background,” Gregory said. “That’s something else—if the city does own that property, and you tear the shrine down, could these people sue? They’d have proof.”
“Oh, God. Take that back.” Celine found that she was looking at Gregory’s shoulder, his Adam’s apple, anywhere but his face. How strange, when it had been so comfortable to lock eyes during rehearsal. He wasn’t terribly handsome, but he didn’t need to be. He was a perfect example of what her grandmother had always said: After forty, you look how you deserve to. Here was Gregory, whose eyes were creased with laugh lines, whose arms were taut from music, whose habit of leaning forward into every conversation was a sort of invitation.
But Celine was absolutely not interested, and three years after the split from Lev she was fully and finally settled into her decision to be on her own. She had bought the house, and she had told her well-meaning friends that no, in fact, she did not want to be set up. It was a lot like naming the quartet. She’d decided who she was, and this was what allowed her to move forward.
The conversation had turned back to religion. “I’d call it half-assed Buddhism,” Mike Cho was saying. “Like, pretending to be Buddhist in front of our grandparents. There was a lot of shoe removal. That’s all I really registered: a lot of OCD shoe stuff.”
Celine said, “Don’t you think there’s a connection? I went through obsessive-compulsive phases as a child, and they always went together with my religious phases. Touch everything three times, kneel and cross your chest, you know? That’s what those women are doing out there. It’s compulsive ritual.”
“I imagine it has more to do with grief, Celine.” Gregory was smiling, but she still took it as a judgment.
“You see, I am a bad person.”
The night grew sillier and happier as the mulled wine turned to regular wine and then to coffee. Celine was persuaded to do her “cello blues” trick, with Gregory and Mike Langley trading verses (“Got a big white cross sitting on my lawn / Got a big white cross sitting on my lawn / Got the white trash blues / Lord I wish that cross was gone”) and Mike Cho giggling like a sugared-up little girl. It occurred to her only then that she’d been serving alcohol to an eighteen-year-old. She poured him more coffee.
Despite the hilarity she was angry with herself, all night, for having let on how superior she felt to those two women. And perhaps, after all, she was only so disgusted with the women because she saw her younger self in them, in their pointless adding and adjusting. She remembered a period—she must have been ten—when every time she was alone in a room and sneezed or belched, she had to say “excuse me” to God one hundred times. If she lost count, she had to start over. One day when she was supposed to be practicing Bach, she sneezed but felt that she didn’t have time to stop playing, so she kept going, whispering “excuse me” on the first and third beats of every measure. And if she hated the child she had been, the one who had tried to control a frightening world through the details, then wasn’t it also natural that she should want to shake these adults by the shoulders, these grown women acting the same way?
She showed everyone where the towels were, and the linen closet, and the extra soaps, and she demonstrated the bathroom tap that had been hooked up backward, so that the hot water was to the right and cold to the left. She spent five minutes trying to get the window closed all the way in Mike Langley’s room, even though he said he didn’t care, and then she found herself opening and closing all the drawers in that room’s tall old dresser, to make sure there was nothing inside. Gregory patted her shoulder and said, “How’s that OCD coming?”
Mike Cho was hungover in the morning, slumped at the table with his forehead on a bag of frozen peas. Celine made him a grilled cheese sandwich and forced him to drink glass after glass of water. Julie was due at the house at noon.
She agreed to go for a run with Langley—and really, it was also an excuse to check what damage had been done to the cross by the early-morning thunderstorm—and Gregory promised he’d do his best to detoxify Cho in their absence. As Celine and Langley stretched together on the porch, she realized she hadn’t run since Marlboro, when the combination of damp, cold air and lingering cigarette smoke had made each deep intake of breath at once vital and strangled, as if she were running with the flu.
The shrine looked approximately the same, except the stuffed figures were slumped farther over and the rain had left the flowers and the cross itself bright and glistening. It looked a little less like a grave and more like an Easter display. It had occurred to her, half-asleep during the storm, that the cross might be struck by lightning—that God, offended by the tackiness of the display, might vaporize the whole thing and let the poor girl rest tastefully in peace, let Celine have her lawn back, let the women
move on with their grief. It was strange, the way her brain clung to the notion of God, twenty-five years after she’d last prayed or made sure to touch the Communion cup equally with both hands. Much like the way she still found herself budgeting money for hypothetical vacations when there was no one to vacation with, and when she’d never liked traveling with Lev in the first place.
She managed to keep pace with Langley, despite his alarmingly long legs. “So tell me about Vitrello,” he said, meaning Gregory. “What’s his deal?”
In the several steps it took her to catch enough breath to speak, Celine considered how she was meant to answer. “He likes you guys,” she said. “I think he’s committed to this.”
Langley was laughing beside her. “That was my subtle way of asking if he’s queer. I was trying to figure it out all summer. Sometimes I swear he’s flirting. But wasn’t he married once? Clue me in.”
“He wasn’t married,” she said. “But he’s straight. Sorry.”
Langley, she realized, was barely jogging, just sort of loping along, the way you might pretend to run with a small child. “You know for sure?” he asked, and when he turned to hear her answer, she knew she’d already given it: Her cheeks were burning, and her hand had fluttered to her forehead. “Really,” he said, and kept jogging with his head turned, as if she might tell him the whole story.
She didn’t, of course, and she was horrified at herself for blushing, but at least the adrenaline carried her all the way to the end of the road.
By the time Julie showed up, Mike Cho had emptied his stomach several times and was weak but functional. Celine worried, as they started tuning, that he would fall asleep on his viola’s chin rest. Langley, in contrast, never stopped moving his feet or rocking his body back and forth, and seemed in danger of chewing his own lips off. And then there was Gregory, staring her down.
Julie had shown up in a black pantsuit and heels, nearly falling when she tripped on the gravel drive. She was reclining barefoot now on the couch in the corner, drinking tea and waiting for the music.
Gregory started them far too slow, Mike Langley seemed to be playing a different piece than everyone else entirely, and Mike Cho was nearly catatonic. Celine herself was still bothered, really, by her own reaction to Langley’s questions. She’d acted like an idiotic child, one who didn’t understand that what happened at Marlboro did not translate into the real world. Well, maybe the music did—though what was this mess they were presenting to Julie, then?—but not the sex. It was like Vegas, in that regard. As it should be.
They were making a disaster of it, although really the first movement of Bartók’s fourth quartet was dissonant enough to hide the rough edges to less trained ears, and Julie was more a businesswoman than a musician. They muddled their way through three awkward movements and arrived at the Allegreto Pizzicato: three minutes of entirely plucked strings, which when done well sounded playful and crisp and strangely elfin, and when done badly sounded like arguing birds. Langley’s manic energy and Cho’s nauseated languor didn’t bode well, and when they all leaned over to put their bows on the floor, Cho stayed down a full five seconds.
Gregory and Celine started too loudly, but it gave Langley something to follow and it seemed to snap Cho awake. It was like leading students rather than colleagues, but it worked. And then the accented notes that require those insane Bartók pizzicati—where the player plucks the string so hard it slaps back against the fingerboard—somehow electrified the room, so that by the end of the movement they were back together, back in some caffeinated and blessed rehearsal space in Vermont, and Julie was sitting up on the couch.
When she was much younger, Celine would have taken all those fours to mean something: four instruments playing the fourth movement of the fourth quartet. One more four would have been better: four to the fourth power. The four points of the cross, then. Maybe that would count. But then, she wondered what she meant by count. Because who was doing the counting?
Julie loved it—had loved it from the beginning, in fact—and was anxious to talk about recording schedules and the Marlboro tour that fall and publicity and a website. Gregory, for some reason, was more anxious to talk about the cross, and he told Julie the story. “There’s really no good answer,” he said. “I was sitting up half the night thinking about it.”
Celine was strangely flattered by this validation of her own obsession.
“You should get a lawyer,” Langley said. He had turned his chair around to sit in it backward, like a twelve-year-old punk. He couldn’t stop grinning at Julie.
“No! No, I can’t have you involved in a lawsuit!” Julie had found the whole thing funny, up till now. “And not about this!”
Mike Cho excused himself then to lie down upstairs, and Celine followed with a glass of water. She put a garbage can next to his bed and closed the curtains against the sunlight. When she came back, Julie was offering her own solution. “You leave a note,” she said, “where you offer to build something more permanent. You say you’ve noticed the rain damage, and you’d like to buy them a marble slab. Or a fountain, or something. One of those saints made of poured cement.”
“Or a real garden!” Langley said. “Which would conveniently hide the marble slab.”
It was a good solution, befitting Julie’s polish and young professionalism. Those were qualities Celine knew she herself lacked. Or rather, she’d always lacked polish, but now, blushing at the sight of the first violinist, measuring the distance between their bodies, she had lost her last ounce of professionalism.
Julie left that evening, and the boys stayed three more days. Celine made sure to delay the Mikes until Gregory was ready to go, then said good-bye to all of them at once, standing on the porch without a coat and hugging herself against the cold. She kissed them all on the cheek, and maybe she did feel a little like Snow White, sending her dwarfs off into the mines. Only they were carrying curvy black cases instead of pickaxes. They’d see each other in November for the Marlboro tour, and then they’d start recording. “Take a flower on your way out!” she called. “As a souvenir!” The Mikes started toward Langley’s car, but Gregory lingered behind, was even turning back to the porch, and so Celine went inside and quickly shut the door behind her.
She took Julie’s advice, and the next day she wrote a note on her nice stationery, sealed it in a Ziploc, and stuck it to the cross with duct tape. She phrased it nicely, offering several different options for “a more permanent memorial.”
Weeks passed, and she thought the women might not come back at all, but then there they were one morning, exactly a month after their last visit. It must have been the anniversary; the accident must have happened on July 10. So she could expect them again on November 10, and every tenth thereafter. She ran for her binoculars and watched from the guest room where Gregory had slept. She realized, kneeling on the bed for a better view, that she hadn’t changed the sheets, hadn’t even straightened the covers. It had been a long month, one of those months that last two years. It had been wet and cold and horrible, and Lev, she read in the Times, had gotten remarried. The bed felt strangely warm, as if Gregory had only just rolled out to grab some breakfast.
The women took a box from their trunk, then spent a long time walking around the cross before they finally peeled the Ziploc off and opened it. Celine couldn’t see their faces as they read, but when they finished they stepped closer for a better view of her house. They stood staring up at the windows, hands above their eyes to block the sun. She didn’t move, but she put the binoculars down. She actually did want them to know she was home, in case they felt like ringing her doorbell to discuss the offer.
There was something about their body language that she didn’t like, something about the way they both stood with their weight to one side, one hip jutting out, that felt angry and unpleasant—as if she’d done exactly the wrong thing. The older woman said something, and they both laughed. Celine could tell even from
up here that it was a bitter laugh, a sixth-graders-on-the-playground, sarcastic sort of laugh. The older one took the note and ripped it into pieces, and walked to Celine’s car. She lifted the windshield wiper and stuck the shreds underneath it, like some perverse flier.
The women took little plastic pumpkins out of their box and spent the next half hour sticking them around the cross.
Celine decided she’d e-mail the rest of the quartet in the morning: “What do I do now? Does this give me the right to be mean?”
Over the past month, both Mikes had become more and more comfortable, at least via e-mail, with expressing their opinions. Mike Cho had been brave enough to shoot down Gregory’s Haydn idea before Celine could veto it herself. Julie, meanwhile, was nagging them all to come into the city and have photos taken. Celine knew it was important, that Julie couldn’t start any publicity without it, but she kept putting it off. She was busy, truly, and she was getting ready for Vienna, and there were student recitals. But mostly she didn’t want to pose in a little row, staring seriously at her cello, turning red from her proximity to Gregory. She was like one of those apocryphal native people, worried the camera would steal her soul. Or at least, in this case, expose it.
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