by Jane Lebak
The driver slammed his hand on the door. “I know I go through the tunnel!”
A yellow cab pulled up behind him. Awesome. Saying, “Hold on,” I pushed the button on my cell phone to dial Josh. Looking confused, he picked up.
“How would this guy get to Port Authority?”
Need directions? Ask a cabbie.
Josh said, “He’ll hang a right as soon as he gets out of the t-tunnel.”
I said, “Hang a right when you exit the tunnel.”
“That will be Www-west Street, which turns into the West Side Highway.”
I repeated that. Angry Man glared while Walt took his sweet government-issued time ambling over.
“Take a right at Hubert Street, then take that four blocks to Hudson. Take a left and stay on Hudson until it turns into 8th Avenue. Port Authority is at 42nd Street.”
Because I was repeating about four words after Josh, it slipped out automatically when he said, “And that’s the porn district.”
Angry Man recoiled. I glared at Josh, who was enjoying a great laugh at my expense. Thanks. Thanks so much.
As Angry Man’s cheeks purpled, Walt finally arrived.
Flushing to my eyebrows, I said, “Eight dollars, sir.”
Walt stood by, menacing in his ineffectiveness, as the SUV driver paid and left.
Josh pulled up, and reading his EZ Pass, the toll-booth raised the arm automatically.
He was laughing so hard he was crying. I muttered, “I’m going to kill you.”
“T-totally worth it.”
Walt said, “All set now?”
“Yeah.” I thought about my front seat conversation with Josh, how he said the shallow ones were ashamed of his stutter, so without thinking, I blurted, “Hey, Walt? This is my quartet’s cellist.”
“Nice to meet you,” Walt monotoned, then ambled away out of the cold.
Speaking of heat, my cheeks were a thousand degrees. “What was that crack about porn?”
A mischievous wink. “No one catches a bus at mmm-midnight. He wanted to pick up hookers.”
I blew on my hands.
He said, “But you would know about that, as much time as you spend with that Woody fellow.”
I grinned. “Of course I do! I’m a pro at standing out all night taking money from men in cars.”
Chuckling, Josh pulled off his leather gloves. As he handed them to me, he said, “Does it have to be cash, or can you barter too?”
“What?” My head filled with questions. “What about you?”
“I have a heater.” He extended them again. “Really. You need fingers to p-play the viola.”
“You need them for the cello too.” Why would he do that for me after what he’d said? “Thanks.”
“No p-problem.” He saluted. “See you tomorrow.”
As he pulled out, I murmured, “Thank you.”
Still warm from his body, his gloves felt supple on my hands. I remembered holding his hand eight years ago, remembered yanking my hand from his and sending him home. I put my face in my palms and wished I could go back in time and give myself a hard slap.
EIGHTEEN
We proceeded through my spreadsheets. Whenever Harrison and I butted heads, I’d reply with, “Blame the calendar.” He blamed me anyhow, but we moved along.
Until Harrison lost his mind. He decided his violin needed to go to the luthier for a tune-up. Literally a tune-up.
Violins and violas do need TLC at the luthier, where an expert can adjust the soundpost, check the bridge, and look for cracks. But Harrison must have confused “luthier” with “pediatrician” because he insisted that after exactly a year, it needed its 50,000 note service.
Harrison’s violin was out of warranty by about two centuries, true, but it wasn’t a seventeenth-century Italian that required such a precise degree of babying. Regardless, I sometimes imagined Harrison spoke to it: “You poor thing! Here, have some peg compound.” Josh joked that he tucked it in at night. To which Harrison only looked guilty.
In the end, with three against one, Harrison conceded: he’d take it in July, after we’d finished recording CDs, playing festivals, and serenading June brides. But for consolation, or maybe in a snit, he declared his intention to rehair the bow. For that I shut up because they guaranteed a 24-hour turnaround.
Besides, violin shops rock my world.
On our way to the Upper West Side, the sidewalks gleamed with melting snow piles, and the edges of the street had a gritty gloss from repeated salt application. It had rained, and I scented dirt on the air. Most cars were filthy, but sometimes I spotted one shiny, washed by an optimist.
In other words, springtime in New York.
Harrison shook his head. “You’re just making sure I don’t leave the violin.”
I chuckled. “You’ll never prove it.”
While we walked, Harrison lobbed a few viola jokes in my direction. He bought a soft pretzel from a cart and offered me half. I thought about Shreya’s family selling hot dogs to give her a good start in America. I thought about my sister, hanging around Grandma’s apartment asking how many rent payments I’d miss before I surrendered. Thought about how I’d invited my parents to the festival and my father said he’d check with my mother. And how the same world could be so different for different people: the pretzel-sellers, the pretzel-buyers, and the recipients of someone else’s pretzel-charity.
At one of a dozen row-houses, Harrison and I climbed a nondescript stairway to a second-story entrance where an apron-clad guy ushered us into a fantasy world.
A violin shop hits you with a scent you can’t name but which is without imitation. The odor of animal glue, the spice of resin, the sawdusty smell of wood shavings: it’s a dream. The sharpness of varnish contrasted with the staleness of sunlight filtering through closed windows. As a child I’d pressed my cheeks into the viola and smelled time, but this was the odor of joy.
I slowed my steps to gaze into the cases, the dozen violins and two violas upright in stands so you could admire the sunlight as it played with the woodgrain flaring across the back in a giant V. Oh, for one of these sweethearts, for a five-figure loan... Yeah, not happening. But someday. Maybe.
Beyond the showroom was a workshop, violins hanging from the ceiling in various stages of building, repair, and disrepair. A mini crock-pot of vanish simmered near the back wall, alongside a metal case holding gouges, thumbplanes, and a dial gauge. With these we manufacture love.
The luthier himself was bent over a violin mid-autopsy. He had the belly off, and exposed to the world was the violin’s heart.
Nothing. The empty space is what makes the music. A mute violin is solid wood.
The maestro removed his glasses with their jeweler’s eyepiece. He shook Harrison’s hand and then discussed Harrison’s violin as if it were a child, noting its temperament and general health. I sat on one of the stools.
Harrison presented his bow for rehairing. “She won’t let me leave the violin.”
Damn straight. I glanced at the disemboweled instrument, the manufacturer’s name fully visible on a bass bar that normally you could only see in the right light at the right angle. Violins sounded glorious; pieces of wood did not.
With a wink at me, the luthier assured Harrison his instrument would thrive until at least July. Then he turned to me. “Are you okay with temptation?”
My heart skipped. “Tempt away!”
In the showroom he leaned on one of the viola showcases, dangling a key. “Well...?”
Harrison got a look at my face and laughed out loud. A moment later, I was cradling fifty thousand dollars.
The luthier looked expectant. “What do you think?”
Its dark red-brown finish felt like a foretaste of its lowest registers. I tucked it under my chin and plucked the strings, then adjusted the D’s fine-tuner a shade. “What do we have here?”
“This is a hundred-fifty-year-old Frenchman,” said the luthier. “Survived two world wars and just underwent a neck reset.”
I drew the bow across the strings, and the sound vibrated right through me. I did a three-octave C scale and then brought it all the way back down.
I wanted to say, “Impressive,” and act cool while handing back the instrument, but instead I yielded to temptation and launched into the Fantasia Chromatica, letting the melody climb through the strings and then sequencing the motive back down, down, down again to the low C.
“You’re extremely good,” said the luthier. “I played with it a bit just to make sure it talked, but I needed a master to make sure it would sing. Please, go on.”
“She’s amazing,” I whispered.
“Ah,” said the luthier. “It’s a she? I couldn’t tell.”
Harrison said, “How do you sex a viola?”
The luthier said, “Violists know.”
I did a repeat of the Kodály-Bach, and then abruptly, mid-sequence, I hit two wrong notes in a row. I knew they were wrong, but they felt right, right enough that I longed to continue.
The instrument kept humming against my throat, reminding me of nothing so much as my grandfather’s viola fighting to recreate his songs.
I passed it back before I dropped it, my voice quavering. “Thank you.”
That wasn’t what I wanted to say. I wanted to say, What the hell was that? and then, And why does it make me so sad? But Harrison was mid-eyeroll talking about wrong notes in the low register, and the luthier locked it up again, thanking me for proving his “patient” had recovered. I struggled to remember the notes, but they wouldn’t return.
Back in the workshop, the luthier ran Harrison’s credit card, and I thought about a neck reset on a French viola and the disemboweling of that violin on the bench. These were the things you did for an instrument you loved.
If someone loved me enough to open my insides, what would they find? If my mother vivisected me on a table and slit me right down the sternum, while Josh set my heart off to one side and Harrison removed all the icky bits with hands double-gloved in latex, what then? They’d check the name stamped on my spine. It would probably be my grandfather’s. Then they could open my brain and pass their judgment: “She tried.” And after they’d emptied me out like an abandoned apartment, they could reseal the seams and try to figure out if there was still a song in that hollow space.
“Are you okay?”
I started. “What?”
Harrison’s brows wore an inverted V. “Let’s go.”
I said nothing out among the traffic and the half-conversations of pedestrians with cell phones.
Harrison finally spoke. “If I’d realized the festival would upset you this much, I never would have tried to score an invite.”
I wrinkled my nose. “Is this Non-Sequitur Theater? What are you talking about?”
He shook his head. “You’re not yourself. You— Is this because—”
“It’s not because of anything because nothing’s different.” I was never a great liar, but then again, Harrison was never a great lie-detector. “Have we heard from the nasty attorney?”
Harrison turned his head. “I haven’t. No.”
I frowned. “Isn’t it odd they’d just drop it?”
“It’s not about the lawsuit.” As if I were a misbehaving puppy, he raised his voice. “The day after we got accepted for the festival, you marched in with the spreadsheet of doom, and you haven’t geared down since. Josh said he’d tell you himself, but I thought he meant you’d be excited, not that you’d turn into a werewolf.”
I hear werewolves lock their jaws and don’t open until the prey dies. So too Harrison.
I said, “I’m not upset.”
The light changed. We crossed, Harrison keeping pace with me.
He frowned. “You’re lying to me. I may not be Einstein, but I can tell you’re lying. Is this because I kissed you?”
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t wish you hadn’t done that, but no.”
He bit his lip. “That’s too many negatives. Rephrase, please?”
I shrugged. “I haven’t thought about it since.”
Proving he was lousy at picking up lies, Harrison only said, “Oh. Okay.”
Let him be the disappointed one. For once.
He recovered fast enough. “Is it your klepto family? Did you change the locks and get renter’s insurance?”
“No to the locks. Yes to the insurance. The agent even made me take pictures.” I just felt tired of being wary. “Are you about to bill me a hundred dollars an hour for psychotherapy?”
Harrison muttered, “I figured since you were here, I’d at least take a stab at what’s eating you.”
“You are! You’ve sucked the fun out of the whole thing!”
Harrison said, “Thing? It’s a career! It was never supposed to be fun!”
“Don’t give me that—you sold it to me as something fun.”
Harrison muttered, “Playing three-hour concerts for late brides is fun?”
“Yes. Being assaulted by a drunk bride was fun. Getting an irate call from a rabid attorney was even more fun. But what you’re doing,” I said, “is a musical frontal assault, and I want no part of your quest for perfection.”
Harrison stopped. “You’re leaving?”
I looked him in the face. He had the decency to pretend to be shocked. “Are you driving me out?”
“How can you even ask that?” He stepped closer. “No one notices quartets at a function unless there’s a disaster. But they pay attention to a CD, and on a recording, the same errors get repeated for all eternity.”
“Aren’t those the same thoughts that made Peter leave?”
Harrison folded his arms. “So let me ask you again: are you leaving?”
“I don’t want to, but…” I hunched my shoulders. “It’s not only on CDs that musicians repeat the same mistakes forever.”
He sounded bitter. “I’m well aware of my mistakes.”
Wow, was the great Harrison Archer admitting to a slight imperfection?
He stared at the ground. “Then what do you want from me?”
“What I want—” He’d tripped me up by asking for a list of demands I hadn’t prepared, and yet he looked almost frightened. What did he think I was going to ask for? I ended up speaking staccato, “—is for us to function as a group. For you to be pleased with us, for Shreya to be comfortable, for me to sit in back and play a lot of wrong notes, and for Josh—”
I stopped.
“So just normal stuff.” Harrison sounded relieved. “But you don’t play a lot of wrong notes. Only when it counts. Ow!” (That was because I’d just given him a shot to the arm.) He rubbed his elbow. “I want not to sound like a bunch of amateurs.”
“Do we?”
He didn’t reply.
“Have we sucked for two years and you forgot to mention it?”
We stopped at the next corner. “Normally we sound amazing. But we should sound better.”
Not good enough: a familiar feeling. “There’s a limit.”
He looked at me sidelong. “I’m not convinced we’re there yet. I don’t want to give up when there may be something holding us back.”
I went cold. He meant me. Of course he meant me.
Because Harrison wanted a “real” album cover this time, not something rigged up with the free copy of Photoshop Josh found in a cereal box, we spent one morning at a photography studio.
Laden with bags as if fleeing the country, the Boroughs String Quartet gathered in a lobby enough like my father’s that I wanted to hide. Josh arrived last, hat low over his eyes, lugging a cello and a suit bag. He immediately texted someone.
My cell phone buzzed: “I am never talking again.”
“Oh, that sounds bad.” I showed the phone to Harrison and Shreya. “Or looks bad.”
Josh nodded.
“What happened?”
He pointed to my cell phone.
“Oh, right. You’re never talking again.”
Harrison rubbed his chin. “That might make things di
fficult.”
As Josh sat on the couch, I said, “It’s not even that cold.”
Harrison took a seat across the room. “Cold makes people never speak again?”
“Yeah, it’s called frigid mutism.” I rolled my eyes “That’s why Eskimos have twenty-seven words for snow.”
Shreya raised a finger. “They don’t. That’s totally an urban legend.”
I stared at her. “Is not!”
“Is so. Check it out on Snopes.”
Harrison pulled out his phone. “Snopes, huh?”
While he played with his tech-toy, Shreya turned to Josh. “Is it a stuttering thing?”
How could she just say that? But Josh didn’t mind. I mean, more than he minded the stuttering thing in general. Staring at the floor, he nodded.
She said, “Don’t let the assholes get you down.”
He pointed to himself.
“Don’t let you get you down either.”
He wouldn’t look at me. Why would he? He said he knew what to expect, and I shouldn’t ask him for more than he wanted to give. So I didn’t do what I really wanted, which was to sit by his side.
Without looking up from his phone, Harrison said, “The offer stands to buy that EchoChamber thing.”
Josh grimaced.
Harrison added, “But if you’re not talking, you can’t say no.”
Josh flipped him the bird, but although I tensed for a fight, Harrison only laughed. “You communicated that just fine!”
“Not to change the subject,” I said to change the subject, “but is that attorney ready to have us hanged, drawn, and quartered?”
Everyone got still, and then Harrison said, “A quarter of a quartet is one person, so if she quartered us—”
Ah, intentional stupidity. “You know what I mean.”
Just then the photographer banged open the door. A squat middle-aged woman with a round face, she had a chin-length bob that reminded me of a mushroom cap and thick glasses with pink wire rims. “Let’s get started.”
What the waiting room was in terms of stale, the studio made up for in expansive. Imagine if a dragon swallowed a lighting store before the heroic knight sliced him open. Although the ceilings had fluorescent lighting, she’d stockpiled a thousand other lamps on tripods, peppered among backdrops and carts with props. It relieved me to spot at least one camera among the chaos.