It’s during these drives that he first gets the idea to build his own studio, somewhere rural and away from the city, where he’ll make custom furniture of his own design, just like George Nakashima had in New Hope, Pennsylvania.
“Your counters and tables are beautiful, Liam,” Meena says, touching the back of his neck after he shares the idea with her. “But I can’t imagine the miracles you’ll work in a proper shop of your own, without some snotty corporate decorator peering over your shoulder.”
Liam adores the uncondescending interest that Meena shows in his carpentry, as though both their vocations are of equal cultural value. To his surprise, she views her own musicianship as a kind of hard labour, submitting herself to a grim practice regimen that trumps all else, including spending time with him. And as a result, Liam already hungers to spend every waking minute that he isn’t working in her company.
After six months, Meena’s New York engagement ends and she gives up her apartment in preparation for her return to Los Angeles. Because Liam still lives in a tiny room above an auto shop in Crown Heights, he can’t possibly host her while she’s in town, so he withdraws his entire savings to put down on a semi-detached house on the “up-and-coming” edge of Fort Greene. Thankfully, Meena appreciates the boldness of the gesture, and promises to divide her time between L.A. and New York.
Yet her obligations prevent her from visiting as often as planned, and half-time quickly turns into quarter-time. While Liam knows he’s possibly being insecure, he grows convinced that because she’s so accustomed to fine hotels and opulent concert halls, his house displeases her. So in his off time he strips the walls to their studs and performs a complete renovation, all in meticulously finished old-growth Douglas fir and redwood. The raw materials alone nearly double his debt, and though Meena marvels outwardly at the job, she still doesn’t visit as often as he’d hoped. And when she books a two-month engagement in Prague, Liam trips into a black and airless cavern, and dreams of Oxycontin for the first time in years.
A QUESTION
“DO YOU LOVE the forests more than you love me?”
His mother shifts in the lawn chair she’s pulled from the Westfalia to sit by the ocean, running a hand through her salt-tangled hair. They’ve finally made it to the Oregon coast for his tenth birthday, except the water here is black and freezing and the waves are squat and impossible to surf. Liam has spent the afternoon in a funk, crushing between two rocks the purple mussel shells that he finds on the beach. The cold hasn’t stopped Willow from skinny-dipping all morning, bobbing out there with an armada of bull kelp. He wishes she’d wear the bathing suit he prudishly bought for her with his own money at JC Penney, but she hasn’t even removed the tags.
His question hangs in the air unanswered as she slowly quarters an orange with her Opinel and then bites into a wedge. He’s asked this question before and knows it annoys her, but he repeats it anyway. He needs her answer more than he needs anything else, and perhaps because it’s his birthday, this time he gets one.
“You’re a good person, Liam. One of the best. But you’re just one person,” she says, sucking pulp from her teeth and spitting it into the sand. “Nature is greater than us all.”
THE VIOLA
DURING MEENA’S TWO-MONTH trip to Prague, Liam manages to beat back his cravings for Oxycodone by throwing himself into a series of complex contracts: huge gut-jobs for which he refuses to hire a helper. And when she finally returns, things are good for a while. That is, until she first brings the Stradivarius home.
“Officially,” Meena tells him excitedly that night over Korean takeout, “it’s known as ‘the Russian Viola’ because it was once the property of the Soviet state. But after glasnost, it fell into the hands of a woman named Tanya Petrov, an oil oligarch’s wife who’s since fled St. Petersburg and now fancies herself a patron of the arts. She heard me play in Prague, and has loaned it to me for the weekend while she’s in New York.”
“Wow, that’s great,” Liam says, stretching for enthusiasm. In truth, he hates all this talk of Europe and rich patrons loaning Meena irreplaceable items, favours for which she’ll be indebted forever.
After dinner, Meena lifts the viola from its military-grade Kevlar case and plays it for Liam as he does the dishes in his wood-shrouded kitchen that still smells faintly of varnish. His eyes well up at the instrument’s lush yet precise sound, though after she’s finished the piece, he claims to prefer the sturdy resonance of her regular viola.
Later, while Meena showers, Liam takes up the Stradivarius in his rough, splinter-ridden hands. Though his first instinct is to criticize it, he can’t resist admiring its magnificent workmanship. Some species of spruce on top, what looks like willow for the internal blocking and lining, then rigid old-growth maple for the back, ribs, and neck. Everywhere the grain, joinery, and finish are impeccable. Covertly, he snaps some reference photographs with his phone while memorizing the object’s every texture and nuance. When Meena emerges towelling her hair, he expresses his unease at having such a priceless object in their home. “This thing’s worth more than everything we’ve ever owned or will own in our entire lives,” he says.
“Oh, it’s insured,” she says nonchalantly.
Still, he has trouble sleeping, especially given the wretched souls that patrol his up-and-coming neighbourhood—people sunk to a hopeless impoverishment he seldom witnessed in Canada. Much to his relief, Meena returns the viola before flying back to L.A. that Monday for a concert. Yet the next weekend she appears with the case in tow, and after that comes a semi-permanent loan. As Liam feared, with Meena now associated with the Russian viola’s mystique, there’s a flood of new bookings, including solos and lucrative guest gigs overseas with prestigious quartets. When Tanya Petrov invites Meena to perform at a party she’s hosting at the Waldorf Astoria, Liam claims he doesn’t have a suit and spends the evening at home, running some oak cabinet fronts that have warped through his planer.
After what feels like just a few weeks at home, Meena leaves again for a one-month European tour. To keep himself from asking the neighbourhood crackheads to score him some oxys, Liam reads up on the viola’s construction. He hurls himself into the research—he hasn’t read this much since cramming for his carpentry ticket—and unearths obscure theories about how Stradivari achieved his iconic resonance. It’s believed that he first treated the wood with mineral solutions—sodium, potassium silicate, borax—and then coated it with a lacquer of vernice bianca, egg white, honey, and acacia sap. Whenever Liam’s questions linger unanswered, he phones experts on the subject, fusty professors at universities in Vienna or Florence, who sigh at his intricately technical queries but answer them nonetheless. Liam learns that while some assert that Stradivari used only reclaimed wood salvaged from ancient cathedrals, perhaps even from crosses themselves, tree-ring dating has proven these theories false. “So they could be made from modern wood, you’re saying?” Liam asks, and the professor replies: “Oh yes, of course.”
Liam orders the clearest slabs of the required wood from online dealers and builds a steaming rig in his basement. Like Stradivari, he constructs his instrument by way of an inner form, rather than the copyists like Vuillaume, who used outer forms to approximate the shape. Even after Meena returns, Liam remains immersed in the project, forbidding her to go down to the basement, where he plays his music loud to cover the whir of his band saw as he cuts the instrument’s curves. For finer scrollwork he breaks out the hand tools—carving gouges, knives, scrapers, and tiny finger planes that he inherited from his great-uncle, who’d made chess pieces in his later years. Liam knows that if the viola is out even a tenth of a millimetre, the sound will be off, and though Meena may claim to love it, she’ll secretly sense its imperfections—an outcome too crushing to contemplate.
In all his years of woodworking, Liam has never before made something so alive, with the shape of a human form and the timbre of a human voice. And after he finishes sanding the joins and is applying the last coa
t of precisely concocted varnish with a sable fur brush, he’s struck by the realization that perhaps his mother had been right: maybe trees do have souls. Which makes wood a kind of flesh. And perhaps instruments of wooden construction sound so pleasing to our ears for this reason: the choral shimmer of a guitar; the heartbeat thump of drums; the mournful wail of violins—we love them because they sound like us.
At the end of nearly three months of toil and frustration, the viola is ready. And when Meena is in New York over her thirty-second-birthday weekend, they have dinner at an expensive restaurant Liam once renovated in Red Hook. After they’ve returned home and made love for what will be the final time, he goes down to the basement then returns to the bedroom with the viola.
“What’s this?” she says, setting her wine down on the nightstand.
Proudly, he lays the instrument in her hands. “It’s a gift.”
“It’s exquisite,” she says. She sits studying the instrument with tentative fascination, feeling its smooth neck, testing the action of the strings with the thick pads of her fingers. “Where’d you get it?”
“I made it,” he says, trying but failing to swallow the sour paste that has inexplicably begun to seep into his mouth. “For you.”
Suddenly she lays the viola down on the quilt, as if it’s grown hot and painful to hold. “Oh, Liam,” she says, covering her mouth with her hand, her unfocused eyes casting around the bedroom. Then she rises to stand beside the bed. “I can’t accept this,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s too much.”
“You need to play it first,” he says, feeling a kind of cold desperation grip him—something he hasn’t felt since those days detoxing in Willow’s van. “I did hours of research. It’s the exact replica of a Strad.”
Without another word Meena darts into the ensuite, latching the pocket door behind her. He goes and stands with his forehead against it, listening to her sob quietly inside.
“I don’t understand,” he says, forcing a laugh. “You just need to play it. It sounds just as good as the real one, I swear. Better even. I did tests.”
“I’m sure it sounds wonderful, Liam,” she says through the door, and for a moment he recalls hanging it, performing the many fine adjustments that ensured the door slid freely without scraping against the frame—which means he could take it down in a hurry if it comes to that.
“I just can’t believe that this is what you’ve been doing down there all this time,” Meena goes on. “I thought you’d finally made that studio you always wanted—like George Nakashima—and you were making furniture. I thought you were doing something you cared about, Liam—for yourself. Not just for other people.”
“Why would I want to build anything for myself?” he says, his diaphragm tightening like a reef knot. “I already have everything I need.”
“I’m so sorry, Liam,” she says, before expelling a sad sigh. “I’m so sorry that you don’t understand what I mean.”
“But I did build the viola for myself,” he says, his eyes burning with tears, and even to his ears his tone is embarrassing in its childishness. “I built it so you won’t have to do whatever Tanya Petrov says anymore. And you won’t need to travel so much. You can play shows in New York and be around more.”
“I travel and perform because I want to,” she says with audible exhaustion. “Not because someone tells me to. And definitely not because I want to escape you.”
“Well that’s not how it fucking feels,” he barks as he punches the thin door, punctuating his last word with the blow, leaving a three-knuckle indentation in the wooden panel.
Looking back, Meena’s reaction to the viola is exactly what the deepest, least rooted part of him had expected all along. Over the ensuing years, her refusal to accept it will come to embody all the mysteries he’d never grasp about her, all the things she wanted from him that he could never hope to offer. And while building the viola is surely the most satisfying thing he’s ever done, it also taught him that Meena would never be with him, not completely. And just like Willow, she’d always be ready to abandon him for something she loved more.
Liam backs away from the door, retrieves the viola, and carries it outside. In his driveway, he gets an orange extension cord and ties the instrument by its perfect maple neck to his van’s trailer hitch, leaving enough slack that the body of the viola rests on the ground. Then he puts his van in gear and drives around Brooklyn all night with his windows down, until he can no longer hear the sound of woody scraping behind him.
The next morning, Meena wakes early and packs up the belongings she keeps at his place and calls a cab to the airport. That day, Liam works for fourteen hours straight. He does the same the following day. And the day after that. Three months later, his house sheds half its value in the housing crash and he defaults on his mortgage payments. After the foreclosure, he moves into his contractor’s van full time, parking at a state campground at Montauk, where he sleeps as wintry ocean gales lash the van’s thin steel walls.
Luckily, the bank allows him to keep his tools and his van, so instead of getting high, Liam takes out his first ad in The New Yorker and accepts as many carpentry contracts as can possibly be crammed into a calendar. After that, alongside guys like Alvarez, he renovates vacation homes seven days a week, fifty-two weeks a year.
Those who claim that rage is counter-productive need only consider all the wondrous things that Liam Greenwood has built in his thirty-four years of life to understand that the opposite can also be true: that rage is perhaps the most productive fuel there is.
GAPS
HE DOESN’T REMEMBER how he made it to his van. But it’s dark now, and the night-triggered driveway lights have popped on. He can see his own body’s drag marks snaking through the frosty sludge of decaying leaf mulch all the way back to the house, which is now just a series of distant glass cubes, glowing expensively in the distance.
He pounds loudly on the van’s side panel to get Alvarez’s attention, but there’s no response. Jaw clenched, shoulders shaking and nearing collapse, Liam hauls himself up into the driver’s seat, drawing up his legs manually before cramming them beneath the wheel. Despite the clawing cold, it feels good to be upright, to have the seatback against him.
“Alvarez, you in here?” Liam says, scanning the cargo area of his van by swivelling the rear-view mirror around in a circle. “Alvarez?” Nothing.
Liam rests a moment, watching the white bouquet of his breath assemble before him then float up to cling to the windshield. When some sensation returns to his hands, he rifles through the glove box but can’t find his extra phone. Alvarez must have been so pissed after Liam kicked him off the site that he called his cousin for a ride, then offered him the phone for gas money. But instead of anger, all Liam feels for Alvarez is pity. He’d been a good employee, and Liam hopes he finds peace, perhaps in an online casino, or perhaps elsewhere among all the world’s shattered people.
His molars chattering, Liam digs his keys out from the pocket of his Carhartts and gets the van started. There’s over a half tank of gas left so he lets it run, and soon the heaters blow hot. It doesn’t take long for the piss that had frozen stiff in his pants during his crawl to melt into the seat. It looks like he’ll have to drive the van to the hospital himself. When he’s ready, he’ll press the gas pedal with the baseball bat that he keeps around in case thieves come for his tools while he sleeps. And if that’s too difficult, he’ll just let the van creep along in idle to the main road, which could take a while, but better late than never.
You grew up in a van, all your life you’ve gone to work in one, and now here you are dying in one, too, he mutters to himself and then laughs until he coughs, which conjures a quick stab in the small of his back that nearly makes him black out. Willow’s gone now, he thinks after the pain recedes. Then why does he feel—even after years of her absence—that she could pull up beside his van in her Westfalia right now and he wouldn’t question it for a moment?
Lung cancer took her. Bong h
its, menthol cigarettes, and organic gardening—that was Willow. Had Liam visited her when she was sick? He had. He went to Vancouver and cared for her and eased her discomfort. At least he’d done that.
Though in truth, there are few mistakes that Liam has avoided in his life, few decisions he doesn’t regret. And as a result, there are so many gaps in what he permits himself to think about, so many things he’s left in his own personal rear-view mirror—just like Willow had taught him.
He ought to get driving, but he’s not ready yet. He reaches down and kneads each of his thighs with the palms of his hands and feels nothing. His body has served him so faithfully until this day. It has wrenched and torn and built. It has lifted and pushed and pulled. It has pounded a million nails and driven a million screws. It has shed itself of a thousand pounds of toxins and cut a million pieces of wood to exact lengths. It has risen for him on a thousand dark mornings and endured enormous discomfort in order to survive. All to fail him now.
He sits warming himself and gathering his strength. It’s been so long since he’s sat idle like this without the numbing distraction of work, and the longer he sits, the harder it will be to keep his mind from filling in certain gaps that he’s left in the story. Each passing minute inches him closer to the chasm of what he’s been running from, the memories that he’s so vigilantly trained himself to avoid, and just as he’s about to tumble over the edge and let her into his thoughts—his daughter who he’s never met—Liam closes his fist and strikes the van’s rear-view mirror, breaking it off, leaving only a circular crust of adhesive on the windshield. The ferocity of his movement causes a vise to clamp down on his lower back, which cranks tighter and tighter with every short, gasping breath that he takes. He feels his eyelids flutter.
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