Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

“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?”