Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

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.