“Yeah,” I said. “I played outside a lot today, and I learned that it’s easier to make your music heard over the sound of water in a fountain than the sound of people talking. And I learned we sound best when there is a doorway behind us. I think the sound bounces out to people better.”
“Sí,” the artist said enthusiastically. “Reflection is everything in art. Do you agree?”
She leaned a little closer and said, “Make sure you eat something before you play, or these vultures won’t leave anything for you.” The man in the violet shirt walked up, and she reached out both her hands to him. “Here you are!” she said. “I’ve met your musician—she is quite charming.”
“This is not the musician,” he said.
“No?”
“I have engaged the services of the Montoyo family—flamenco artists magnifiques! Unfortunately, not punctual. I deeply regret this.”
“Oh,” Isabella said. “But silence is not good for my paintings. What do you and your friends play?” She turned to me.
“This is ridiculous,” the gallery owner said with a dismissive wave of his hand. “They are unproven. I have no references. Where are they from?”
“What do you play?” the artist asked again.
I straightened my shoulders and looked the gallery owner in the eye like Giselle would. “Monsieur,” I said, copying the way Vivian would pronounce it, “we are music students.” I decided that telling part of the truth was best. “You haven’t heard of us because we are from Berlin. Our mentor is Herr Müller of the Berlin Philharmonic. We can’t play an entire evening of classics, but we can play seven songs in popular classical repertoire. That’s about a half hour of music. That would take care of your silence problem, right?” I turned to Isabella. “And a half hour is long enough for your other musicians to show up, or you could call someone else.”
The gallery owner frowned, but I could tell he was thinking about it.
“We would charge only three hundred francs,” I said firmly. “That’s a fair price for all three of us, and we could be ready in two minutes. What do you think?”
Isabella smiled. She looked expectantly at the gallery owner.
“Agreed,” he said, still frowning. He reached out and shook my hand.
Wow! I’d gotten us our first paying gig! I started grinning like an idiot. “Super! This is going to be so fun!” Then I remembered I was supposed to be a grown-up, so I added, “Miss Johnson will require a chair to play the cello, but Miss Armstrong and I will stand.”
“Very well,” the gallery owner said, and left.
I turned to Isabella and said, “Thank you so much. You don’t even know what it means to us to have a job tonight!”
She gave my arm a squeeze. “We artists must stick together,” she said.
I gave her a little hug because I knew exactly what she meant. I was never going to walk past a street musician again without leaving a whole dollar. I skipped over to the snack table.
“Guess what, guys? We have a paying gig!” I grabbed a handful of the cheese pastry things and told Giselle and Vivi all the details. I totally talked with my mouth full.
“Oh my gosh!” Vivi said. “Three hundred francs? That’s enough to get us home.” She gave me a hopping-up-and-down hug.
Giselle hugged us both and lifted us an inch off the ground. “Jody, you’re my hero!” she said.
“Come on!” I gulped down one more pastry and brushed off my hands. “I want to play better than we ever have so Isabella will sell lots of paintings.”
We went to an alcove on one side of the gallery, where the owner had cleared some space and set up a chair. It was a different feeling to play indoors, for money, in front of people who probably knew a thing or two about classical music. I let go of all the things I was worried about: the money and Arvo and getting home. I put my whole heart into our playing. People didn’t stop to listen in the gallery, which was just like the street. But I didn’t mind. They weren’t supposed to be my audience; they were supposed to be buying paintings. When I saw the gallery owner put a sold sign on one of Isabella’s dolls, I felt as proud as a mom.
We were into our fifth song when a family of six walked in. There was a mom and dad, two kids, an uncle, and a grandma. They had a guitar and a violin with them, so I guessed they were the Montoyo family.
The gallery owner hustled over. “Where have you been?” he demanded in a quiet growl.
The man with the guitar shrugged and smiled. “We have been arriving.”
“We did not engage a babysitter for your children,” the gallery owner went on, still sounding angry.
“This is a family,” the guitar man said mildly. “If you do not allow children to sing and dance with their parents, then my mother must perform for you alone.” The man smiled kindly enough, but everyone else took a step closer to the grandma, even the little girl in the blue polka-dot dress. It was pretty clear nobody was going to mess with this family.
“Very well, you will play in five minutes,” the gallery owner said. He walked away just as we came to the end of our piece.
“I’m sorry,” I said to the guitar man. “I think he’s grouchy with everybody.”
“So long as the tiger pays me, he can growl all he likes,” the guitar man said. “Please finish your set.”
We ended with Pachelbel’s Canon and played it better than we ever had before. If I’d known then that it was the last note we’d ever play together, I think I would have cried, but that night I was happy to pretend that this would be my future, playing concert halls and galleries all over Europe with my string trio—my best friends.
The Montoyo family came out and took the stage. They’d left their jackets and cases in the back room. The men wore white shirts with no tie, and the women wore red flowers in their hair and long full skirts. The gallery owner motioned for us to come to the back room. We followed him in, and he handed me three one-hundred-franc notes. I’d never held a bill with a hundred of any country’s money before. I tucked them in my pocket and felt like a millionaire.
“Oh my gosh!” Giselle whispered as we went out. “We did it! We actually did it! I’m going to take all my vacations with you guys now. This is so much better than any Mom-and-Dad trip I’ve ever taken.”
“Yes!” Vivi said. “We are rock stars!” She threw her head back and made a few twirls across the floor.
“Vivi, stop! You’re going to break something.” I grabbed her violin case before it knocked over the table with the art brochures. “Come on, let’s find Isabella and tell her thanks.”
I started across the room to find her, and the Montoyo family began to play. At first it was just the four adults clapping in rhythm. The grandmother and mom did a slower rhythm, and then the men did a fancier rhythm, one with claps and the other beating time on the tall wooden box he was sitting on. Then the mom switched to clapping double time, and the dad started to play guitar. After a while the mom joined in on violin. I was mesmerized. The tune was faster and more elaborate than anything I’d ever tried to play. I got so caught up in watching her fingering and bow work, I forgot all about Isabella.
The songs never quite ended but shifted from one to the next. After a few songs the uncle stood up and sang a solo. Then the boy got up and danced. At first I thought it was kind of mean to make a boy dance in front of strangers. My brothers loved it when I gave them twirls in the kitchen when we were listening to the radio, but they’d die if they thought anyone was watching. This boy looked like he was nine or ten. He was taller than Tyler and stick-skinny. He held his body very stiff and straight and drummed his heels on the wooden floor in time to the song. He never moved very far. The whole dance could have fit on your average coffee table, and he never smiled. Still, I could tell by the lift of his head and the way he was concentrating that he loved to dance like I loved to play. Watching him made me want to get out my violin and practice, practice, practice.
Giselle was into the music, too. She was tapping on her cello case
in time to the clapping, and after a while she started to improvise her own rhythms. Vivian had danced the Spanish Coffee role in The Nutcracker last year, so she was doing a bit of her dance part with the little girl, who was only three or four. They twirled their skirts and took turns with the little girl’s red and black silk fan. She taught Vivi how to move her hands for flamenco dance. Before we knew it, Isabella was shaking hands with people going out the door, and the caterers were putting away the empty trays.
“You girls are aficionados?” the grandmother said while the others were packing up their instruments. “You should come with us and hear what real flamenco music sounds like.”
“Really?” I said. “Where?”
“Let’s go!” Giselle said. “We don’t have to be home until midnight.”
“Bibi! Bibi!” The little girl tugged at Vivi’s hand and looked up at her grandma, all big brown eyes.
The grandma smiled. “Did you make a friend?”
“Then we should feed them a better meal than this,” the dad said, coming back with his guitar in hand. “This way, please.”
We followed him out of the gallery and down a block to one of those tiny cars we’d seen zipping all over Paris. The uncle got in front and the little girl dragged Vivian into the backseat with the mom and grandma. I guessed that Giselle and I would follow in a different car, but then the dad popped open the trunk and the boy hopped in like this was a daily occurrence. I looked at Giselle and shrugged and followed the boy into the trunk, holding my violin in my lap. Meanwhile, the dad tied his guitar case to the rack on the roof and did the same with the cello.
“Lord help us!” Giselle muttered as she climbed in, gathering up her long legs and wedging herself between me and the side of the trunk. “We are all going to die in a wreck!”
I tried not to think about what my dad might say about all this—safety was very big with him. “We’ll be fine,” I said. “He’s driving around his own family. I’m sure he’ll be very careful.”
car sputtered twice. When it started up, it belched out as much diesel smoke as an entire convoy of Humvees. We lurched into traffic so fast, I would have popped out of the trunk completely if I hadn’t been wedged in too tight for breathing. Since we were directly above the tailpipe, breathing probably wasn’t a good idea. I glanced at the boy. He was calmly taking in the sights and not looking at me. He must have been shy. Giselle gritted her teeth. She had the edge of the trunk in a death grip. I tried to keep track of the streets so we could find our way back to the bookstore, but street signs were not well lit. And they were not on every street corner. And I realized that there was no comfortable position to sit on a tire iron. And I was beginning to think we were being taken to dinner in Spain.
But then we swerved onto a less busy street that was packed with taxis in every parking space on both sides. We putted along slowly. When a taxi driver got into his cab, the dad leaned out the driver’s window and shouted something to him. The cabby waved his arm in a way that made me wonder if it was the French way to flip someone off, but then the uncle laughed and waved his arm in exactly the same way, right in front of his family, so maybe I was wrong about that. I resolved to do nothing at all with my arms until I figured out how not to flip someone off in French. Maybe they were just waving hello in Spanish. Hard to tell. The cabby left his parking space, and we took it. The boy jumped out of the trunk as soon as we stopped. My legs were kind of tingly from sitting on the tire iron, so I was way less graceful getting out of the car.
“Never. Again,” Giselle muttered. “Where the heck are we? What if these people are kidnappers or something?”
The women slid out of the backseat, and the little girl was still holding Vivi’s hand.
“They seem so nice, though,” I said, leaning close so the others wouldn’t hear. But then, Arvo had seemed nice, too. “Do you know where we are?”
“Don’t be silly, you two,” Vivian called over her shoulder as she followed the Montoyo family down the block. “Look, there’s the Madeleine.”
“And Miss Clavel?” Giselle said. “That’s perfect, because I really think we need a nun right now.”
I laughed, imagining the twelve little girls in two straight lines and their matching yellow hats trooping down the street to give us directions.
“Don’t be a dork, Giselle. The Madeleine.” Vivian pointed down the street to a lit-up building that looked like a Greek temple. “It’s a church. If we go toward it, the Seine is just a few blocks farther. We can walk east along the river until we get to the bookshop.”
I relaxed, knowing the church would be on my map. Even if Vivian’s directions were a little off, we’d be able to figure out the way back to Shakespeare and Company.
We walked a block to a tiny restaurant with green awnings in front and no sign of any kind on the door or in the window. It was like a secret restaurant, but apparently well-known, because the dining room was crammed with men in work clothes and great-smelling food. People turned to look at us as we went in, and every person there was either black like Giselle or brown like the Montoyo family. I wondered if they were going to be annoyed about Vivian and me, the way enlisted men are annoyed when a bunch of pip-squeak lieutenants turn up at their favorite bar on a Friday night. The grandma waved us to a table, and I felt better because there were some families with little kids nearby.
Everyone seemed to know the Montoyos, and when the mom and dad kissed the women working in the kitchen and then put on aprons, I figured it was a family business. There didn’t seem to be a menu, just a long table with steaming-hot dishes. Grandma Montoyo showed us where to stash our instruments under the table. She handed us plates, and then she and Vivian had what sounded like an argument in French. Afterward, Vivian smiled and said, “Merci,” and told us that it was the custom here for musicians to pay with a song.
“Okay.” I looked around the room; it was not the usual classical music crowd. Most of them seemed to be cabdrivers. “What shall we play for them?”
“No idea,” Giselle said. “We’ll think of something.”
The evening passed in a blur of food and music and dancing. I tried one of everything on the buffet since I didn’t recognize a single dish. Most of it was fabulous, especially the thing with shrimp and sausage and yellow rice, but there was a fish dish with a sauce so spicy, I thought the skin was going to peel off my tongue. There didn’t seem to be anything to drink but wine, and even though all three of us had finished the Just Say No class three weeks ago, we couldn’t think of a way to say no to grown-ups that was polite in English or Spanish or French. We ended up pretending to sip the wine and making a bunch of trips to the bathroom to drink water from the sink.
Just as we were finishing our meals, some of the men pushed tables to the side and set up four chairs in a half circle facing the dining room. Talk died down immediately, and several of the diners went to the buffet table and took guitars and drums and fiddles from underneath.
Grandma Montoyo sang first. It was very different from what she sang at the gallery. Her voice was deeper and rougher. It was almost as much a wail as a song, but I could tell right away, even though I didn’t speak one word of Spanish, that it was a song about tragic love. It was as if the ghost of her true love was standing across the room, and she was begging him to come back to her, and the other people were calling out to her to not give up, but no matter how much she sang, he could never come home.
I cried. Not that I’d ever had a tragic love or even a not-tragic love. I hadn’t really looked for a true love. The quality of boy available in the eighth grade was not very inspiring, but for the first time I thought that someday it would be wonderful to be cherished so much that decades later he would still be singing about me.
After Grandma’s song, other people got up and sang. One man brought out an accordion. Another one danced what looked like flamenco to me, but it was mostly feet and very little arms. A fiddler played and sang with a man who played a djembe. A man in a steel-gray tu
rban played an instrument that was like a guitar but had a long neck and a pear-shaped body, and after that the grandma danced some flamenco with her grandson. Just as I was getting sleepy, Grandma Montoyo waved Giselle and Vivian and me over to take our places in the circle. I’d forgotten about playing music to pay for our supper.
“What would you like to hear?” Vivian asked.
“You delight us,” she said. “Play something from your home.”
Vivian and I went for our violins, but Giselle stood right up in the middle of the circle and sang “Amazing Grace.” Her voice was incredible—kind of low for a girl but powerful! She sang all five verses by heart. How could we have been friends all this time, and I never knew she could sing? I guess I knew she went to church, but I never thought about her singing in her church choir. When she got to the end of the last verse, she went straight back to the first and raised her hand for everyone to join her. I was shocked to see the entire room stand up. People sang out that verse, and they linked arms and swayed back and forth the way you see Germans do at soccer games. I didn’t even think these people spoke English. Plenty of patriotic things have happened in my life—the army kind of makes a point of it—but I don’t think I’ve ever felt so proud of my country as I did in that tiny Paris restaurant full of cabdrivers.
Vivian got her violin out and played “Simple Gifts,” which is pretty even though it’s a beginner’s tune. Next she played a hoedown that got all the little kids up and dancing. I couldn’t think what to do that would top that, but since the kids were all out on the floor, I decided to do some of my brothers’ favorites. I knelt down so that the little ones could see my fingers, and I played “Pop Goes the Weasel,” which always gets kids giggling when you pop the E string. There was a boy who was only about two, but he really wanted to touch my violin, so I invited him close and put my fiddle on his shoulder. I knelt right behind him and held up the fingerboard. I guided his hand with the bow, and we played “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” together. We got the best applause of the night.
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