by Sarah Laing
‘Where’s Bruno?’ He is jiggling something in his hand, looking happy and nervous.
‘He left.’
‘Why?’
‘Jet lag?’
‘Well, I’m glad. I don’t like the way he looks at you. Besides, I want you all to myself tonight.’ He opens his palm to an orange resin ring. He puts it on my ring finger, but it’s too loose. ‘It’s okay, I have another,’ he says. He reveals a milky jade one, a Chinatown cousin to pounamu. It’s smaller and fits snugly. He puts the orange resin one on his own finger. ‘Who says girls get to be the only one with the bling?’
We bite into our dumplings, and the soup spills down our chins, onto our shirts. We grab our napkins, dabbing ourselves, swallowing the rest of the pastry, the fish, the pork. The next time we are more prepared; dumplings pinched between chopsticks, we bend over our bowls. We puncture the wrappers with our teeth, sucking the juice out as quickly as we can, scalding our tongues. Then we chew on what remains, eyes lifted to give each other triumphant smiles.
Esther calls me a few weeks after Toby and I marry at City Hall. Her usurping niece Isabel is in town, performing with her chamber orchestra at BAM, and has given Esther two complimentary tickets. Would I would like to accompany her? Isabel wants to meet me; we can go backstage after the performance. I accept; I want to see for myself who stole my get-out-of-jail-free card. Maybe we swapped destinies the moment the cello broke.
The concert is in Brooklyn: Esther complains that she will have to go over the bridge, as if it’s an international trip. ‘I hardly ever leave Manhattan,’ she says, ‘unless I’m going to the airport.’
‘I’ll meet you at DeKalb,’ I say. ‘It’s only one stop from us.’
‘But where at DeKalb? That place is a rabbit warren. Every time I go there I think I might not make it out. How about we meet on the steps of the Academy?’
‘Okay,’ I say. I am growing fond of Esther, surprised that I might have a friendship with a seventy-eight-year-old woman.
The last time I went to BAM, there was a man sleeping between the pillars, cocooned in boxes and newspapers, wearing all of his clothes at once. An unwashed stink rose up around him and I wondered how he could sleep in the snow, but his snores were unmistakable. Tonight he’s still there, half-conscious, only he doesn’t have the cardboard box. Maybe it’s too warm for that now.
Esther is standing on the stone steps, wearing another one of her tailored coats, teal green. Her hair is fastened with a black pincer, her pumps are patent leather.
‘There you are, dear. I was worried that you would be late. It was quite a palaver leaving the house. Terence and Calypso couldn’t believe that I was going without them. Their howls were heartbreaking. I almost called the sitter.’
Esther doesn’t want to wait around in the foyer, and nor does she want a glass of wine. She buys a programme from a bow-tied attendant and we go into the stalls, standing on toes and pushing people’s knees back like swing doors until we’re right in the middle.
‘These are good seats.’
‘Yes, Isabel always ensures that I’m close enough to see her properly. I tell her I’m not here to listen to the music, I’m here to see her perform. She did buy me a pair of opera glasses but I’ve misplaced them.’ Esther folds her coat and straightens her pencil skirt before she settles down. Her shoes gleam like night puddles, catching the light from above.
I twist in my seat, taking in the crowd. They’re mainly middle-aged to elderly, as they are back home. The sight depresses me, making me feel as though the audience is moving towards extinction. But still, even though I haven’t been to a classical performance for years, I’m excited about the ritual, feeling nostalgic rather than frustrated. Maybe I should go more often.
‘Here they come,’ says Esther, sitting up, excited. ‘See, there she is, the dark one with the frizzy hair and the very full skirt, that’s Isabel. I don’t understand why they don’t wear matching costumes. They would look so much more unified.’
‘Is she African American?’
‘Her father was. Caused quite a scandal. I’ll wave, but she probably can’t see us, all those bright lights.’
The orchestra begins to warm up, a beautiful cacophony. Runs, phrases, chords escape. And then the conductor comes on to a shower of clapping, asking the oboeist for a concert A. All the squiggly threads are pulled into a straight line. The pianist appears, more clapping. She sits at the Steinway as shiny as Esther’s shoes. The conductor lifts his baton and they begin.
There’s a young girl next to me, maybe six or seven, and she sniffs, coughs and arches her back, perhaps to pull her skirt out from her undies. She rummages inside a packet of sweets and pops one in her mouth. I’m irritated, wanting to tell her to shush, but then I remember my own seven-year-old self, sitting in the audience with my father.
‘Mama played for this orchestra,’ he told me, visibly excited, the ceiling of the Michael Fowler Centre triangling above us. ‘She was also a soloist.’ I’d been transfixed by the fierce cellist from England, tossing his leonine head, pushing so hard on his bow that the horse hairs broke. Dad had speculated that the cellist was fighting the conductor, trying to lead the orchestra, but I believed music was always this dramatic. It was then I’d decided to learn the cello.
Isabel, in the second row of cellists, is very serious as she attends to Mozart, and her movements are crisp and lithe. Although he isn’t my favourite composer, I enjoy his lightness of touch. When the concerto is finished, the clapping a monsoon, people stand up around me. The pianist is presented an enormous bouquet and holds the back of her hand to her nose, eyes streaming with tears. Isabel beams among the other cellists, moist and exhausted, bowing like a dancer.
‘Shall we go see Isabel?’ says Esther, standing, the seat crocodile-jawing behind her.
‘Okay,’ I say, feeling sick with nerves.
‘That girl sitting next to you was a disgrace. Parents should only bring their children when they can sit still for long enough.’
‘She was annoying.’ There’s something to be said for rigid etiquette. They didn’t return after the interval; perhaps her mother could only endure the disapproving glares for so long.
We make our way towards the stage door, meeting a guard twice our height and width. ‘My niece is in the orchestra. She told us to come backstage,’ Esther says.
‘Your name please?’
He walkie-talkies our details through, and then with a nod the door is opened.
Backstage is bright and hospital-like in comparison with the warm, dark spaces of the auditorium. We push our way through a gaggle of violinists, already debriefing. ‘Excuse me, where would I find Isabel Preston?’ Esther asks a skinny man with a large bumpy nose.
‘I think I saw her over there,’ he says, waving vaguely over in the corner.
This could have been me.
I feel sad, a surging sense of alienation. I could have been part of a community, but instead, I’m composing and playing alone. I channel through the viola players, looking for Lily. I can’t help it.
‘Aunt Esther,’ says Isabel, suddenly there, larger in real life, throwing her arms around the old woman. Esther kisses her cheek and allows herself to be engulfed.
‘And you must be Rebecca. Hi, I’m Isabel. Esther was telling me all about your wedding at City Hall. She said it was very moving.’
‘Yes, it was.’ I had found myself a 1940s suit in Screaming Mimi’s that looked almost like the one in Klara’s wedding photograph, and although we were one of a number of couples lining up for the morning’s wedding vows, ours seemed to be particularly tender. I cried. Toby cried. Wendy cried. Ivan didn’t show. Esther suggested we go to Katz’s Deli for our wedding breakfast; that’s where Klara and Owen had theirs. Wendy took lots of photos: we posted them online and I’m still fielding emails, finding international packages in our apartment entrance. I never realised how excited people would get over a marriage. Most of the gift-givers feel a little cheated.
‘Well, congratulations. You’re a lucky girl. I’m still single myself.’ Isabel pulls a sad face. Her skin is very smooth and elaborately made-up, her age hard to discern. Maybe she’s in her late thirties?
‘You’re too picky, dear. And you work too hard, that’s your problem.’
‘The problem is that the only people I meet are other musicians. And you don’t know how hard it is when you break up and you still have to perform together. Even if they’re on the other side of the orchestra, you can hear them honking away. I’ve taken up kung fu classes. That’s how I’m going to meet my man.’ She does a little flick with her arms and Esther jumps back.
‘Oh, my. You’ll scare them off even more.’
‘Aunt Esther tells me you have her old cello.’
‘I do, I do. I even brought it tonight. My other one is being adjusted. Another Heinrich Weiss, a later one, but I have to play my first or else it gets tetchy.’
‘Can I see?’
‘Sure, I put it away, but I can get it out for you.’ Isabel walks over to the corner, her full skirt swooshing behind her.
‘Isabel, dear, I don’t think that skirt is becoming. Would you like me to make you something more tailored?’
‘Oh no, Aunt Esther, you know we have completely different tastes. This skirt is practical.’ She flicks open the case, a shiny white one. She takes out the cello and hands it to me.
It’s the same heft, the same colour, and inside is the same hand-printed Heinrich Weiss label. I look around for a place to sit, and Isabel points to a bucket seat. She’s tightening the bow for me, applying a few strokes of rosin.
I feel highly self-conscious playing the instrument in a room full of experts, of people who made it to the end of their music degrees and successfully auditioned for orchestras. And yet, I have to hear what the instrument sounds like. I hover my fingers above the strings, testing their give. The distance is familiar. I place the heel of the bow on the D-string and pull.
The note leaps out full and strong. But different. This is not my cello. This is not the sound I remember.
‘Oh,’ I say.
‘You look surprised.’
‘I thought it might sound like mine.’
‘All string instruments have an individual voice. They’re like Cabbage Patch kids.’
‘But I didn’t expect it to be this individual.’
‘How many years since you played Klara’s? This wood has matured, and Aunt Esther said you came from New Zealand. Different climates can affect tone. It all depends on the humidity.’
‘It’s quite damp in Wellington.’
‘There you go. How much you play an instrument changes it as well. I played this all through high school and college, but before that Aunt Esther had neglected it for years. It just sat in her apartment gathering dust.’
‘I did play it occasionally,’ says Esther.
As I hand the cello back to Isabel I feel numb. The howling has abated. My grandmother’s cello, with its perfect tone, its load of secrets, has been gone for years. I’ve grown used to my new cello. In fact, I think I prefer it to Isabel’s. Maybe I’ve just been using the broken cello as an excuse. Something to explain my screw-ups, my failings. Maybe, even with my grandmother’s cello intact, I would have arrived at the same place that I stand now.
CHAPTER 26
Debut: New York, 2003, six months later
The concert is tonight, at Northsix in Williamsburg, and we’re doing the sound check. Okay, it’s a Tuesday night, and I’m the first of four acts, the background music before people start to pay attention. But I’ve invited some people and a few of them have already turned up: Wendy, Marcella (back from Pittsburgh, cautiously refriending Wendy) and Ivan. Esther can’t make it — she’s visiting Isabel in Los Angeles. In some ways I’m pleased; Esther’s the only one who knew Klara, who can tell how many liberties I’ve taken, how much I’ve had to invent. There are other people here too, people I don’t know, wearing skinny jeans and stripy T-shirts, their hair hanging in their eyes. Maybe one of them’s a journo or a music exec. But maybe not.
We’ve got a complicated technical set-up: Toby’s playing samples on his Mac, but I also have a foot controller so I can feed and loop as I go. Ryan’s playing drums. Wendy has agreed to mind the video projector; Toby’s made a beautiful short film to project above us as we play. It’s not what I expected. He didn’t use the photos I borrowed from Aunt Esther, nor the pictures from the Heinrich Weiss Luthier Museum. Instead there are bands of sea and bush, sideways skyscrapers and birds, weaving in and out of each other. The f-hole is a recurring motif, a scroll that sometimes darts out like a frog’s tongue, catching things. He tells me it’s what he hears in the music. Besides, it wouldn’t be art if he merely illustrated my lyrics.
Ryan’s moved in with Wendy, and we’ve moved out. Ryan doesn’t work — working is bourgeois — but he makes collages and uses his trust fund to pay for rent. I can’t really criticise him. Toby covers most of our expenses. I collect pocket money — two hundred dollars at wedding gigs, looking wistfully upon the white silk bride, the morning-suited groom. Not that I would have done it differently. I feel proud of our simple ceremony, its echo of my grandmother’s. I feel different now too. More sure. Less fluctuating.
The museum says they’ll buy Heinrich Weiss’s letters off my father, but he doesn’t want to let them go; he wants the museum to return Klara’s letters to him. Not that he can understand them; they’re in German and he never learned to speak the language. They’ve even made an offer on the broken cello, but Dad is a jealous archivist, unwilling to relinquish his relics. We’ve come to an agreement: I’ve done as much as I can to repay my debt, and he has to leave it at that. So he has. Reluctantly. Now I’m working on him to visit his aunt, because I think it’s outrageous that they’ve never met. He’s suggested next year, but I tell him he should come quicker: Esther isn’t young. Besides, there’s the Brooklyn Bridge to see, one of the world’s greatest feats of engineering. He’s as yet undecided.
I’ve spent a lot of time at the museum over the past months, getting to know the curator, a gay Malaysian-Chinese Canadian living in Tribeca. He has meticulously recreated Heinrich’s first workshop in a neighbouring apartment, digitally reproducing the wallpaper based on shreds found in Heinrich’s old closet.
Klara isn’t the focus of this museum, but there is a display about her. Below a photograph of her performing at Juillard is an essay on her early years, about how she was integral in rekindling Heinrich’s luthier career. Her letters can be seen on application, and even though I’m family, I had to put a request to the board. I struggled to read the originals with my high school German, but there was a translation, typed and laminated. Still, they only reveal her musical life; it’s from her letters to Aunt Esther that I learn more. Esther has lent me the balance: they’re all in English, veering from banal to insightful, revealing someone more ordinary, more housewifely, than I might have imagined. They often contain sketches of the view from her window, a posy of flowers. I didn’t know that Klara could draw. Sometimes she sounds lonely, regretful about her decision to move to New Zealand. She complains about the mono-cultural grocery stores, the empty streets, the lack of like-minded people to talk to. Other times she’s rhapsodic about the birds, hilariously describing the first lumpy vest she knitted my father, excited about the discovery of canned sour cherries at the Dixon Street Deli. Although Klara often asks about Esther’s health, she doesn’t ask about Ruby. It’s hard to reconcile the two different Klaras, but I have incorporated lines from both sets of letters in my songs.
A couple of times the museum curator’s taken me out for lunch, once to a Nyonya restaurant, his mother’s cultural heritage, another time to a minimalist white tapas bar. Theoretically we’re discussing Heinrich and Klara, but we get sidetracked by our own life stories. He tells me about his jock boyfriend, his move from Toronto to London to New York. I tell him about my recent marriage that almost got derailed, my botc
hed classical career and my reinvention as composer/wannabe pop star. We’re both émigrés, that’s what binds us. That, and our obsession with dredging the past. The curator says he’ll come to the gig tonight, but he prefers jazz. He’s attending out of professional interest: how have I curated Klara’s life?
I don’t have the full measure of Klara, although I think I am getting closer. I’ve mashed punk with snatches of her favourite sonatas — a scrap of Shostakovich here, a tuft of Debussy there. And then there’s my salvaged sounds, the ones I’ve gathered on street corners and laundromats, on subways and in doctors’ waiting rooms. They’re the ones that Toby has layered up on his computer. When he gets home from work, after we’ve had dinner, we sit down at his laptop and splice. I didn’t pick Toby for a musical collaborator, but he has an ear for what’s on, what’s off, and he can override my technophobia, stop me from hurling my foot controller across the room. He’s even got my backing vocals on file, so I can sing along with myself. Although we could have laid down drum tracks too, I’m glad Ryan’s playing live with me. We’re like the White Stripes. Not that Ryan is much of a Meg: he’s too laid back, leaving the beat till the last available second, until you almost think he’s going to miss it, but then he doesn’t and it makes you hungry for more.
I wonder how Wendy and Ryan will get on living together. I was surprised he moved in so quickly, but then he’s eccentric and easy-going, so maybe they’ll be fine. They wouldn’t hand over Iggy the fish, or his new companion Bowie, so Toby entrusted Ryan with their care. Nor would they let Toby install a webcam. Instead they post weekly pictures on Wendy’s blog. Look, the water is clean. Yes, he’s playing with Bowie. The fish are attaining cult status. Wendy also posts pictures of broken lampshades or fur coats she’s found, using Ryan as her new cross-dressing model. Wendy tells me that summer is a great time to go clothes scavenging; people are always throwing them off after a night’s dancing. I like to check out the comments. Wendy’s audience thinks she’s an eco-warrior, the ultimate recycler, not the cheapskate I picked her for. If she complains online about her fused bones, she gets a hundred sympathy notes. And people buy her stuff; she’s got a knack for transforming trash into treasure. It’s all about context. Ryan has done wonders for her; she’s bleached her hair blonde again and got some colour back in her cheeks. I like her more now we don’t live together.