The Measure of the Moon

by Lisa Preston

  Gillian shook her head, steeped in the history she’d learned. “Paul says that, after Germany, Romania is the country that was hardest on Jewish people and Gypsies during World War II.”

  “Ooh, Paul says.” Kevin laughed, then shrugged off the wrath in her eyes.

  She’d never before been one of those women who used her husband’s words to bolster a point or let his words stand in for fact or a personal opinion. And now she’d done a Paul-says in a professional setting. “Well,” she muttered, trying not to sound like she was apologizing, “he knows a lot about World War II. I’ll use lots of sources and subject matter experts for—”

  Kevin flipped one hand in a dismissive wave. “Forget it. I know what you mean. I know what he means, too. For what it’s worth, it’s okay to say Jews and it’s not so much okay for you to call Roma Gypsies.”

  Was he bent on making her feel like an amateur or was she stuck behaving like one? Gillian opened her mouth to respond but cut herself off when Kevin talked again.

  “Look how this story can explode Roma myths: a guy who’s a bow maker from way back and is now making elite bows right here in Seattle. It’s pretty cool, him creating these new roots, not a typical Roma. You’re sure that’s what his heritage is? Roma?”

  She nodded, distracted by noticing a man across the coffee shop glancing at her. She’d seen him before and tried to think where.

  “You need corroboration,” Kevin said.

  “I know.”

  “Independent, but also …”

  “What?”

  “You must talk to the great-aunt,” Kevin said, chin down to his chest so that he looked at her with his eyes at the top of the sockets, peering through his eyebrows. The angle bathed his jaw in the light while his eyes were shadowed, accentuating his cheekbones. Dammit, he was handsome and young and strong-looking and interesting and exciting.

  Gillian looked, looked away. “There’s nothing great about her. She’s a bigot and a drunk.”

  “You have to talk to her. It’s part of the story. She adds something.” He tapped the black and white picture of the children in the woods. “She took this picture.”

  “Will you help me?” Gillian hesitated. It was hard to ask, but she wanted him to be more than a sounding board on this project.

  “I’ll help you in lots of ways,” he rasped, leaving nothing to be guessed. “In a New York minute.”

  “Are those really faster minutes?” Trying for something mundane didn’t make their chemistry any duller.

  “They are. They really are.” His cell rang and this time she placed the Stones tune, “Satisfaction.”

  “I can dig into this better as soon as my regular work slows down,” she said. Portraiture sessions were going to make her scream now that she had a taste of photojournalism. It would take an afternoon and evening away to do that wedding shoot, and then many more hours at home to sort, edit, and upload those photos so the family could access them.

  His eyes were in his lap, on his cell.

  “I’m going to pop in at the bow shop as soon as I can,” she said.

  “Right. Good idea. Back to work.” He lingered in the coffee shop and blew her a kiss as she walked away.

  The Sartineau Shop’s yellow lights made the darkness beyond the windows starker. Gillian felt like a moth drawn to the warm glow and counted it all as a good omen for how the interview would go. Setting aside her natural apprehension, she was grateful for the promise of no family interruptions here.

  Mario held a bow delicately between his thumb and fingertips.

  A young man in a dress shirt and tie accepted the elegant piece and said, “It seems like it would be good for sensitive hands. My teacher says I’ve got sensitive hands.”

  Mario nodded gravely and stifled a gulp. Gillian got it. The bow would be wasted on a student violinist.

  She glanced to the back of the shop then back at Mario and mouthed, Alex?

  He shook his head. She bit her lip. She could still get bow shop photos. The dusky light made a difference. She studied the bows and tools, thinking of craftsmanship and how long the Sartineau Shop had produced fine bows. The thick rubber mats on the floor at the work stations had wear marks from Mario and Alex’s heels. She’d looked up the hand tools, read about bow making and fancied that the ancient patina on the knives, burins, and planers bolstered the finished art. Perhaps the scent of rosin and varnish lingered for decades with a whisper of the birth. She wished the shop had a real wood floor instead of the linoleum of printed parquet. She eyed the canvas aprons hanging on hooks and the nicked safety goggles beside the power tools. And she knew the photographs she’d capture today.

  A concert poster on the wall featured someone named Janos, a famed soloist. She remembered the commissioned bow. Then she remembered the hidden concert tickets at home, unused. Shame rose within her core. Paul was just the sort of man who would hope his wife would attend a concert with him, but then not mention it when she preempted the date, saying she was busy before he even asked.

  Derailed, Gillian studied the customer who was inspecting a dark sword of a bow. He twisted his mouth, glanced at Gillian, and asked Mario, “Is this bow light or, you know, a pretty good weight?”

  “It is sixty-three grams,” Mario said.

  They talked more, of the heuristic quality, the lack of temperamentalness. Gillian wondered if they would soon name the bow and if the moniker would be masculine or feminine. The customer left after Mario carefully wrapped the bow for him and charged nine hundred dollars to the man’s Visa card.

  “It’s amazing to me what bows are worth,” Gillian said. She had a four-digit check in her purse. The Hellman award. To her, it was a lot of money. She wanted a connoisseur’s knowledge of fine things, instruments, wines, and woods—concerts even—though she refused to dwell on the fact that these were things Paul knew and would share with her.

  Mario smiled. “Great sticks cost five digits. Janos’s bow—it’s weeks from done—will cost a pile. A benefactor is buying it for him.” He pointed at the door, indicating the departed customer. “I made the bow he bought, but if he’d paid more, bought one of Alex’s, he’d have one that would triple in value.”

  “I’m impressed, but I don’t understand it,” Gillian told him. “Alex says no one remembers bow makers.”

  “His bows are worth more than mine,” Mario said, shaking his head.

  “He’s really good then?” she asked. “Must be his young start in the old world. Bow making is in his family.”

  Mario stared briefly and shook his head. “Alex is an old man. I’m young, relatively.”

  She shook her head with incomprehension. “Just your age difference affects the price of your bows?”

  “A dead bow maker’s bows go up in value much faster than a live artisan’s. Do the math. I’ll be around longer than Alex. It’ll be a while ’til my bows shoot up in value just because I’m dead and gone. Not so with Alex. He’s an old duffer, you know. He says no one remembers bow makers, but he’s wrong.”

  “Alex said you play better than him.” It had been a quick compliment as he talked about Mario’s father mentoring Alex.

  “At playing, I am. I wish I’d worked at it.” He fixed his gaze. “I wish I’d played for my father, and I really wish I’d been interested in bow making when he wanted to teach me.”

  Gillian gave a sympathetic face over his painful, unpayable debenture and blurted, “Having an opportunity doesn’t mean you have to take it.”

  He nodded, made a stabbing motion with his right hand. “You know, how on the gamba they stab and on the cello and violin, they pull?”

  Gillian shook her head. “Gamba?”

  “Viola da gamba,” Mario said.

  “I guess Alex and I don’t talk about musical instruments much, though we talked about bows a bit, how he learned bow making in Europe when he was young.”

  “He can tell some tales,” Mario said, friendliness falling away.

  Their moment vanishe
d as a middle-aged couple entered. They both looked up at the sound of jingling bells above the door, and he went to greet them. She waved her camera, and Mario nodded agreement to her taking pictures of his tools and inventory. While the shoppers browsed bows, Mario came to her at the work stations behind the customer counter.

  “So you only came here for Alex?” Mario teased, sniffing and wiping at his dry eyes. “You want an old Gypsy when I’m available?”

  “I need to talk to him,” Gillian said softly. “I was hoping to do it here. Have you ever met his sister?”

  Mario shook his head and talked of a special bow he was building, of their stock of wood, the ribbons of horsehair, and the tools she was photographing.

  When the bells jingled the shoppers’ exit, Gillian made her voice casual and said, “You were about to tell me something?”

  Mario pretended fixation on an old bow on the work counter. She saw most of the hair was frayed away.

  “This is bad,” he said. “It pulls too hard on one side and stresses the bow.” He snipped the remaining hairs with scissors, just a few inches from the mortise. “Should have been done long ago,” he muttered.

  She watched him work, photographed his hands.

  “Want to know a secret?” he asked her.

  “I would love to know a secret.”

  He hesitated, then picked up another bow, swallowing and pausing so long she decided he’d changed his mind about what he would say.

  “You can wash bow hair. Instead of re-hairing. It can be washed clean. Unless it’s too far gone.” Mario showed her an abused bow, the hair brittle with carelessness, a hard glob of rosin stuck in the middle of the remaining frayed hairs. “And never leave an uncleaned bow in the heat. Well, never leave any bow in great cold or heat, but one that’s choked with rosin? The rosin warms up and turns into a mess like this. This can’t be fixed with a bow hair comb-over.” Mario forced a grin that fell when he saw her dark look. He turned away.

  Gillian leaned around his shoulder to make him look at her. “What stories has Alex told you?”

  “Me? Nothing, really. It was my old man he told stories to.”

  She tried to picture a younger Alex Istok, getting in with Mario’s father, an established bow maker. Alex told her about him, a fine bow maker whose son did not want to learn the business, a man who was happy to have a worker who came from eastern Europe with experience at bows, about Mr. Norbert Sartineau dying not long after Mario at last came home to learn.

  “What stories?” she asked again.

  “My father told me …” Mario shook his head and seemed to change his mind. His voice changed from the low tone of sharing a secret to conversational and casual. “Did you know I learned bow making from Alex?”

  She nodded.

  “I wish to hell I’d learned from my father, wish I’d wanted it when I was younger. Isn’t that the way? We don’t want what we have, what’s right in front of us. My father was a master craftsman and he wanted so badly to teach me, and I wanted no part of it. For forever. I was stupid and stubborn and went away for twenty-five years. And by the time I came back, he was feeble and he’d put all his effort into Alex, taught him everything. Alex worked his ass off at it, absorbed everything my dad told him, day and night, worked, worked, worked. And I kind of hate him for it. And before he died, my father told me—” He stopped himself.

  A cool dread descended as Gillian asked in a whisper what Mario’s dead father had said about Alex Istok.

  Mario gave her a solemn appraisal. “His first bows were nothing.”

  Heaviness settled in her gut. “What are you saying?”

  “Alex’s first bows were terrible. Worse than amateur. The bow you would make if some tools and a stick blank and a hank of hair were thrown at you. Alex knew nothing—nothing—about making a bow.”

  Gillian closed her eyes, sick. Alexandru Istok had lied to her about bow making in the Old World. She wondered what else Alex had lied about.

  CHAPTER 16

  It happened again. The baby cried or cooed in the night, and the sound nearly wrung Gillian insane.

  After Paul biked off to work, there was a knock at the door while Gillian was packing cameras, batteries, light deflectors, and more to shoot for hours. She answered in a rush and had to ask the middle-aged woman to repeat herself.

  “I’m with Super Kids Day Care and I’m here for a background check on Liz Cohen. She’s applied for a position with us.”

  “Liz Cohen applied for …” Gillian’s echo faltered and she rubbed her forearms. The prickle on her skin was electric and uncomfortable. There was something off about Liz using Paul’s surname. When Gillian and Paul married, neither had mentioned the possibility of Gillian changing her last name. She had never considered that Liz and Paul might share a name. Well, why would they? Liz was an adult when her mother married Paul’s father; why would they share anything? Did this woman from the day care think Liz was Paul’s wife?

  Gillian felt herself slipping as though in an unstoppable, finger-straightening fall from a cliff.

  “Super Kids,” the woman said, pointing one hand down the street. “We’re just two blocks away. It’s a great environment. Ms. Cohen popped in, and she was fantastic. Even for an irregular employee, however, we check residence and references. In her case, two stops in one.”

  Irregular employee. Under the table, Gillian thought. Liz is establishing a life here, up there in our studio with her child.

  Gillian answered the woman’s bland questions, feeling oddly out, the butt of a joke. Then she slipped into the garage, listening at the base of the stairs for cries, straining, needing to hear the baby. Failing. She went into the backyard with Rima and considered how the studio had only two windows, one to the yard and one to the street. Liz could look only forward or back, there was no other choice.

  If she saw Liz in the window, she’d wonder if the woman was avoiding her.

  Gillian crept up the exterior stairs, turned the knob to the studio’s main door. Then she ran away, calling apologies over her shoulder.

  She shot a corporate gig, a financial company’s annual luncheon party, finishing formal portraits of several new appointees then dozens of candids, all on autopilot, consumed by sparking conflict in the back of her mind. In her sweater pocket, she found a love note from Paul. There was a point of diminishing returns, but she didn’t know where.

  Done, she started to call him but decided to surprise him at his office. She weaved through the University complex, then the maze of hallways lined with posters of Delta, Atlas, and Saturn V rockets, past his colleagues, past the man she’d seen looking at her when she and Kevin shared time in public.

  Had the man mentioned to Paul that he’d seen her with Kevin? Was she imagining his extra looks, the sidelong glances, and swallowed sighs?

  Did Paul always rub his jaw this much, hesitating to speak? Of course not. Paul was direct, kind. And honest always. He thanked her for dropping in, smiled, and kissed her warmly.

  “I can’t stay,” she told him. Without thinking, without knowing what words were coming out of her mouth, she said, “I want to ask you something, but I don’t want you to ask me why I’m asking.”

  Paul nodded agreement and waited expectantly.

  Again, words came from some unknown corner of her mind. “Do you have even one old picture of Liz?” She’d never considered the thought.

  He shook his head. She cocked hers. He shrugged and said, “I don’t have any old pictures. Of her or her mother. My dad wasn’t a picture taker, nothing like you.”

  “How do you even know that that’s actually your stepsister?”

  He gaped. “Gillian.”

  Should she tell him now that she’d be working late with Kevin, talking about layout and storming for ideas?

  In the parking lot, she called Alex at the Sartineau Shop and asked if she could come to his house to talk sometime soon. She thought of how he had stepped outside when his sister thrashed on the floor and wondere
d how much he’d seen of her ripping up the photo of the children. Surely he’d seen how revolted Gillian was by the old alcoholic, and surely he felt the same way.

  She managed to say, “I need to talk to Agnes for this story.”

  There was a very long pause. She repeated herself, and then heard, “I do not wish you to write of what the men did to her. You see, there must be a limit.”

  How do reporters do it? Gillian wondered aloud to her computer screen. She had dozens of photos to sort through and upload but wanted to do editing on her Istok piece. More, she wanted to plan it. The trepidation she felt from Alex’s last comment was worse than daunting. Raking her hands through her hair, Gillian flipped her fingers free at the base of her scalp before she made a mass of tangles, wondering where Paul was, then forcing herself back to task. Where would Tilda send this piece? Would it go national? International? It had the potential. She had to get it right.

  Unravel the possibilities, the ideas. Make a to-do list.

  She didn’t want to spend too much time considering what final shots she needed. The larger problem was what questions to ask and how. Really, she decided, she needed to go over the details with Kevin. He could give her a better handle on how to produce a spread like what she was trying to envision. No wonder so many photo essay pieces were done by two people instead of one person doing both photos and writing. Kevin, I need you, she thought. Don’t bail on me, on this project. He hadn’t texted today, hadn’t called, not a single email.

  The jangle of the house phone gave her such a start she gasped.

  Please don’t let the caller be Alex Istok, canceling.

  But it was Becky, incoherent with sobs.

  “Becky-Bird?” Gillian told herself to calm down, not let the squeal of terror on the end of the line scare her. From the sound of the cries, she was ready to swear someone was trying to kill her sister. Reaching for her cell phone, ready to call police while she stayed on the other line, she begged, then demanded Becky tell her what was wrong. But it was too hard to understand her sister on the phone. Gillian said she’d be there in ten minutes, she’d take the car.