The Cello Maker's Apprentice

The town I live in has four hundred people and one stop sign, and both of them have been there longer than me. I moved up here twelve years ago with my wife, Marion, because the wood was good and the winters were quiet, and I figured quiet was what a violin maker needed. For eight of those years it was. Then Marion got sick, and the winters stopped being quiet in the way I wanted and started being quiet in the way that grinds at you. She has been gone three years now. I still say good morning to her picture in the hallway, which my doctor would probably have thoughts on, but the doctor lives two hours away and the picture does not.

I make cellos, mostly. Violins when someone asks, and the occasional viola when someone insists, but a cello is where my hands are happiest. There is something about the size of the thing, the way the body has to hold so much air, that makes you honest. You cannot fake a cello. The wood knows. I work in a shop behind my house, a converted barn with a wood stove and a window that looks out on a stand of aspens, and most days the only voice I hear is my own, asking the spruce to bend and being surprised when it does.

That is why Delia knocked on my door in the first week of October, and why I almost did not answer it.

She had been here once before, two years back, buying a cello off the wall for her firm's executive retreat, some corporate gift thing where a wine distributor gives a client a handmade instrument and both of them feel cultured for a season. I remember she paid in full that day, cash, no haggling, and I remember thinking she was younger than the money suggested. She was twenty-four then. She is twenty-six now, and she has not gotten less sure of herself, which I noticed the moment she stepped into my shop and said hello like she had never left.

"Gabriel. Your road is still a nightmare and I still drove it anyway." She was holding a bottle of wine by the neck, the way you carry a small dog. "I brought a bribe."

"It's nine in the morning," I said.

"It's nine in the morning where you are. Where I'm from it's nearly ten, which is practically civilized." She set the bottle on my workbench next to a half-carved scroll and looked around the shop the way she had the first time, slowly, like she was reading it. "I want to commission something. A real one, this time. Not off your wall."

I should explain that people do not just show up here. My clients come by referral, usually a cellist with a broken instrument or a conservatory kid with a hopeful parent, and they usually call first. Delia did not call. Delia drove three hours on a road that washes out every spring because she felt like it, and when I asked her why she just shrugged and said she liked knowing where things came from.

We sat down at my drafting table and she told me what she wanted. She wanted a cello built for her, not for a gift, not for a retreat, for her. She had been taking lessons since the last time we met, she said, badly at first and then less badly, and she wanted an instrument that would grow with her. She wanted maple from somewhere she could point to on a map. She wanted the varnish a color she described as the inside of a wine bottle, and when I told her that was actually a very old formula she looked pleased with herself, like she had planned it.

"It'll take eight months," I told her. "Maybe ten."

"I'll be here," she said, and I did not ask what she meant by that, which turned out to be a mistake, or not a mistake, depending on how you count.

* * *

She came back the second week of November, ostensibly to see the wood I had selected. I use the word ostensibly because by then it was obvious she came for other reasons, and I was doing my best not to notice them, which is a sentence I have thought about more than once since.

The wood was beautiful. I had found a two-piece back of Balkan maple with a flame that ran through it like water, narrow and even, and when I laid it on the bench for her she put both hands flat on it without asking. I almost said something about the oils on skin. I did not say it, because she was looking at the grain with an expression I recognized from my own mirror, the one you make when a material is better than you hoped.

"So this is what I'll be playing in eight months," she said.

"That's what it'll become. Assuming I don't ruin it."

"You won't. You have that face." She tapped the maple with one fingernail, listening to it the way I listen to it. "Woodworkers have a face when they're being honest about material. It's the same face violinists have. You can't fake it."

I am not a man who talks easily. Marion used to say I rationed my words like sugar during a war, and she was right, and since she died the rationing had gotten worse. But Delia did not seem to need me to fill the silence. She filled it herself, comfortably, telling me about her work, the distributor she worked for, a client who had tried to expense a case of Barolo and how she had handled it. She was twenty-six and she was a marketing director and she carried herself like someone who had never once waited to be invited into a room.

I noticed her clothes, which I am slightly ashamed to say now. She was dressed the way people dress when they want you to think they did not try. Soft jeans, boots with a low heel, a flannel shirt with the sleeves pushed up, and underneath it a thin sweater the shade of dark brewed tea. Nothing about it was remarkable. Everything about it was deliberate. The flannel was open and the sweater sat close against her and when she leaned over the bench to look at the wood I caught the shape of her collarbone and looked away the way a properly raised man would, which I was, mostly.

"Are you hungry?" she asked, out of nowhere.

"Not especially."

"Good. I'm not either. But that wine isn't going to drink itself and my mother raised me to never waste a bribe."

So that is how I ended up sitting on my own workbench stool at eleven in the morning, drinking a bottle of Pinot Noir with a client, which every business handbook in the world would tell you is a bad idea. She found two glasses on the shelf over the sink, the ones Marion bought at a flea market in a year I no longer remember exactly, and she poured without ceremony, and the wine was genuinely good, which surprised me, because I had assumed she bought it for the label.

We talked about craft. That is the part I keep coming back to, in the weeks since. I told her about how you can tell when the wood is ready to be carved, how it changes under the blade, how the sound post is called the soul of the instrument and nobody knows why it works the way it works, it just does. She asked real questions. Not polite ones. She wanted to know what it felt like to tap a plate of spruce and hear the note inside it, and I tried to explain, and she listened with her whole face, and I realized halfway through my answer that I had talked longer than I had talked to anyone in months.

"Here's what I keep thinking about," she said, turning her glass slowly. "Everything you do is about touch. You touch this wood a thousand times before it's a cello. You know it with your hands. That's, I don't know. Intimate. Most people never touch anything that carefully."

"Most things don't reward it."

"No, I think most things do. I think most people just rush." She set the glass down and looked at my hands, which were resting on the bench next to a gouge and a bar of hide glue, and then, slowly, deliberately, she put her hand on top of mine. Her fingers were cool from the glass. "Sorry. I've been wanting to do that since the bottle opened. You were talking about the spruce and your hands moved and I just. Wanted to."