Page 18 of Requiem

Brett 6

The stage lights are too bright. The concert hall is too warm. I can’t seem to get comfortable in my chair, or in my skin, for that matter. Despite what I had hoped, there’s nothing that feels right, or good, or comforting about my return to the Walton Quartet tour.

I’d thought, stupidly, that throwing myself into my music would make me feel a little better. I was very, very wrong. At this moment, it’s all I can do to keep myself from bolting off the stage and running back to the only place on this earth where I’m guaranteed some comfort …Maggie’s arms. But that isn’t an option at this moment.

I strong-armed my way through the light and bright Mozart Quartet. I pushed through the hypnotic Philip Glass Quartet. Right now, as we reset our music, retune our instruments and take an inventory of eye contact between one another, I am finally in the homestretch of this godawful night. It won’t be long now before I can flee the oppressive applause and concerned glances of my colleagues for the sanctuary of my soulless hotel room and its minibar. But, standing squarely between me and that blissful numbness, is Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.

If only we’d chosen something different to end the program … but then, how could we have known six weeks ago that I would suffer such a devastating loss? As soon as I got into town for rehearsal this afternoon, Joe sensed this could be a problem. He immediately offered to drop the piece, knowing that it would be difficult for me. But I’d insisted it would be fine – that I would be fine. If that wasn’t the most idiotic fucking display of pride, I don’t know what is.

Now, as Joe begins to play the first violin part, he enters on a note so soft and subtle that it seems to materialize out of the ether. I can’t help myself, I commit the cardinal sin of chamber music performance: I close my eyes. Playing in a setting this intimate, with no conductor to direct the ensemble, requires the keenest attention to body language and facial expressions. But if I can’t see my colleagues, then I can’t see the worry or the sympathy that they’ve been telegraphing to me silently all night. If I can’t see Joe, or Neville, or Philip, I can lose myself in Brett.

I play underneath, listening as Joe spins the lamenting melody that will possess the next ten minutes of my life. The rest of us – second violin, viola and cello, slip in beneath him. We provide a slow-moving blanket of music to catch the sound of the first violin’s tears. Not that this is some self-indulgent funeral dirge. This music is raw, unbound emotion … grief at its harshest and cruelest.

It’s pining for something forever lost, wishing you could retrieve all that time you wasted, because you now realize that there will never be another hour. Or minute. Or second. There will never be another heartbeat.

As our individual parts melt into one another, we become mourners standing around a gravesite, bound only by our collective agony. Aside from that single thread that tethers us to one another, we are each lost in our own internal suffering; bereft and desolate.

When it’s my turn to echo the melody begun by the first violin, I find relief in allowing my viola to shoulder the wordless tune for me. Under my bow, I feel it growing and spreading and building. And then I pull back, allowing the cello to take on the burden of this lament.

Then, little by little, the tension starts to coil and our individual parts weave together into a single intense sound. Our unified agony turns in on itself until we are lost in a frenzy of ragged desperation. This is the sound of a fist, raised and shaking its ire towards the heavens, crying out at the injustice of it.

And then there is silence. It is the silence of the dead. It hangs for one very long moment before transforming itself into the softer, lower chords of acceptance for that which we cannot change. When the original melody returns again, it’s no longer haunting … it’s haunted. The jagged edges of sorrow and despair have been rubbed smooth by grudging acceptance. And then Joe is there again, the first violin in its final moments, with the same rhythm but different notes– a lower, tempered play on the opening measures.

As the Adagio comes to its conclusion, the sound stretches thinner and thinner until there’s nothing left to hold it together anymore. Just air. And then shadow. And then darkness.

The flame is snuffed. The casket is lowered. And now there is nothing left to prove that this moment ever even existed. That is, except for my broken heart.

****

“Join us for drinks?” Joe asks as we head back to the dressing rooms to get packed up. “We’re meeting some of the Detroit Phil guys.”

Absofuckinglutely not.

“No, thanks, Joe. I appreciate the invite, but I’m pretty wiped.”

He nods his understanding. “Do you …do you want me to tell you if your brother’s name comes up?”

“No,” I shake my head and then stop. “Yes, actually. No … Oh, fuck, I don’t know, Joe. You decide. If it seems like something I should know then please, do. But if it’s just the same bullshit he’s always up to …then I’d just as soon not. Okay?”

I can see in his expression that he realizes just how wrung-out I am. “Did you tell him you were going to be in town?”

“Oh, trust me, I don’t have to. I have no doubt that he knows. And if he wants to find me, he will.”

We arrive at Joe’s dressing room door and he puts a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “You’re not your brother, Brett. You don’t answer to him anymore. You never did – you just didn’t know that before. But you do now.”

“Well, maybe somebody should tell him that,” I mutter as I turn my back and keep walking.

I find my way out through the backstage door and into the chilly Detroit night. It’s cold enough that I can see my breath, but I’m still feeling warm and flush from sitting under those stage lights. Suddenly my jacket feels as if it’s choking me and I stop to peel it off, breathing a sigh of relief when I’m finally free of my leather albatross.

I’m just about to start walking again when I spot him not twenty feet in front of me. It turns out that Jeremy on a bench in Detroit looks very different than Jeremy at my mother’s kitchen table. I was certain he’d show up somewhere, I just wasn’t certain when or where.

“Bro!” he grins happily as he gets to his feet.

He holds out his arms to embrace me, but I just stand there, staring at him blankly. Finally, he drops them to his side.

“What? Aren’t you happy to see me? I can’t believe you didn’t mention that your tour was bringing you here to Detroit! I had to read it in the paper.”

“When should I have told you? Before you demanded your inheritance, or after you threatened Mom?” I reply icily, shifting away from him.