The Last Coat of Varnish

The taxi dropped me on the corner by the old textile mill at eight in the morning, a full two hours before the rehearsal was supposed to start, and I stood there on the cobbled street with my cello case in one hand and looked up at all those tall windows and thought, well, here we go again, Jackson, you absolute show-off. I'm sixty-two years old, I've been retired from dentistry for four years now, and I have never once in my life walked into a room without wanting to be the best thing in it. It's a disease, honestly. My mother said so before she passed, and she said it with a smile, but she meant it.

I took up the cello at fifty-eight because I needed something new to win at, and because my doctor told me I needed a hobby that wasn't arguing with strangers on the internet about golf. I found a teacher, a woman named Nadia who is twenty-nine years old and could probably play circles around half the orchestras in Europe, and she has been patient with me in a way that I don't deserve, mostly because I pay her well and partly because she finds my competitive streak funny. She told me once, "Jackson, you practice as if you are trying to beat death itself." and I took it as a compliment, which maybe says everything about me.

Anyway, Gabriel Davis, the violin maker, had invited a handful of players to a dress rehearsal for his exhibition, some big showcase of instruments he'd been building and restoring for years, and I got asked because apparently his old friend Trish Thompson needed a second cellist and I was the only amateur in Lyon desperate enough to say yes on a Tuesday. I'd met Gabriel exactly once, at a dinner Nadia dragged me to, and he'd spent the whole evening telling me about the acoustics of his loft with the kind of love most men save for their first car. So when I found the big iron door unlocked, I let myself in early, thinking I'd get an hour of quiet practice in before anyone showed up and caught me warming up like the student I still am.

The place was exactly what he'd promised, a huge open floor with pale wooden benches covered in wood shavings, half-built violins hanging from racks like coats in a closet, and windows so tall they went almost to the ceiling, all of it looking down on the Rhône, which was running low and green in the morning light. I stood there a minute just breathing it in, and I'll admit I was already composing my little opening line for when people arrived, something modest that would make it clear I'd been playing for years and not just four.

Then I saw her.

There was a corner of the loft, over by the north wall, that had been set up like a little laboratory, a table with lamps clamped to it, trays of cotton swabs, little bottles with labels, and a big panel lying flat, some old painted thing with saints or angels on it, half of it cleaned to a warm gold and the other half still gray with grime. A woman sat at the table with her back half to me, working with a swab no bigger than an eyelash, and she did not look up. She was maybe forty, dark hair pulled back in a messy clip, sleeves rolled to the elbow, and she had the stillness of somebody doing surgery, which I suppose in a way she was.

I set my case down as quietly as I could, which was not very quietly, because those floors were stone and my cello case has brass corners that clank like a bucket falling down a well. She still didn't look up. She gave a small nod, the kind of nod you give a delivery man, and went back to her swab.

I'll be honest, that nod stung. Two hours early, hauling a cello, standing in a cathedral of a room, and I get the delivery man nod. My whole life I've gotten smiles, handshakes, the good chair at dinner, and here was this woman treating me like a package of screws. So I did what any mature adult does. I sat myself down at one of the benches, opened the case, rosined the bow with a little extra flourish, and started playing scales, slowly, beautifully, with the kind of tone that makes people look up.

She did not look up.

I ran through my scales, then through the slow movement of the piece we were supposed to play, and I put everything I had into it, and I mean everything, all four years of lessons and every morning I'd spent in my kitchen annoying the neighbors. The sound in that room was honestly something, all that stone and wood giving it back to me doubled, and I finished the phrase and let the last note hang in the air like I was in a concert hall.

The woman picked up a fresh swab and kept cleaning.

Well. Fine. I told myself she was a professional, deeply concentrated, probably half deaf from the lamps humming or whatever conservators get. I told myself it didn't matter, that I hadn't come to impress a stranger, that I was sixty-two years old and past all that, and then I spent another forty minutes playing everything I knew, including one piece I don't actually know very well, just on the off chance.

That's how Gabriel found me, flushed and slightly sweaty, sitting on a bench in an empty loft playing like my rent depended on it.

* * *

Gabriel came down the iron stairs from the apartment level at around ten, coffee mug in hand, and he was not what I expected from a master craftsman, being on the skinny side, thirty-five or so, with wire glasses and a habit of talking with his eyebrows. He shook my hand and said, "You're early, Mr. Harmon. Very early. The rehearsal is at ten thirty."

"Couldn't sleep," I said, which was true, "and I wanted to get a feel for the room."

"And how did you find the room?"

"Generous," I said, and he looked pleased as a father.

Then he walked me over to the corner with the lamps and the trays, and I realized I was about to be introduced to the woman who had ignored four years of my musical life in a single morning. "Tess," Gabriel said, "this is Jackson Harmon, our second cellist. Jackson, Tess Wertz. She's conserving the panel for the exhibition, a sixteenth-century altarpiece fragment, and she is doing it so well that the owner cried when he saw the test patch."

Tess sat back, pulled her reading glasses down off her face, and looked at me properly for the first time. She had sharp brown eyes and a small scar over one eyebrow, and she looked at me the way I look at an X-ray, calm and complete, top to bottom, no flinching. "Hello," she said. "I heard you earlier. The Bach is nearly there. Your third finger pulls flat on the A string when you're tired."

I opened my mouth and nothing came out for a second, which for me is a medical event. "You heard all that?"

"I hear everything in this room," she said, not unkindly, just as a fact, like reporting the weather. "The floor carries sound straight to my table. You've been playing for about four years, self-taught posture with corrections, and you want very badly to be liked." She put her glasses back up and returned to her swab. "It's a good sound, Mr. Harmon. You'll want to breathe more."

Gabriel made a small strangled noise into his coffee, and I stood there recalculating my entire morning. She'd heard me the whole time. She'd heard me and said nothing and just cleaned her saints, and now she'd handed me back my own pride like a coat check girl. And the worst part, the part that sat in my chest like a stone, was that she was right about every word of it.

Before I could find something dignified to say, there was a grinding, honking racket from the far side of the workshop, and we all turned to watch a fax machine, an actual fax machine, sitting on a filing cabinet like a relic from a museum, begin to chatter and spit out paper. Gabriel went pale in a way I found very interesting.

"Nobody uses that line," he said, walking fast. "Nobody has that number."

The machine kept going. Page after page, it hummed and fed and clunked, and Gabriel snatched the first sheet, read it, went a shade of red I have only otherwise seen in patients who forgot to mention their heart condition, and folded it so fast it tore. Tess had turned in her chair, swab in hand, and there was a slow, delighted smile spreading across her face, the first expression I'd seen on her all morning that wasn't concentration.

"Gabriel," she said, sweet as anything, "is that the letter to Marco? Because you've been rewriting that thing for three weeks and I was starting to think it didn't exist."

"It is not," Gabriel said, holding the torn paper against his chest like a hand of cards. "It is nothing. The machine misdialed. Faxes misdial."

"Faxes don't misdial," Tess said. "They get told numbers."

The machine cheerfully produced a third page. Gabriel lunged, tripped over a bucket of varnish, saved the bucket and lost the page, and the sheet skated across the stone floor, spinning, and stopped against my shoe. I should have handed it over unread. Any decent man would have. I looked down at it, because I am not always a decent man, and the first line in Gabriel's careful handwriting said, My dear Marco, I have started this letter eleven times and every time I get as far as your hands and lose the thread.

Tess was laughing now, really laughing, leaning back in her chair with her eyes shut, and Gabriel stood in the middle of his beautiful loft with shavings on his sleeves and a bucket of varnish rocking gently at his feet, saying, "Well, that's ruined, the secrecy, completely ruined," in the tone of a man reading his own eulogy.

I picked up the page and held it out to him, handle first, like it was a knife. "Eleven times," I said. "Respect."

"Thank you," Gabriel muttered, snatching it. "If either of you repeats a single word of this to Trish, I will restring your instruments with wire."

* * *

By ten-thirty the loft had filled up the way Gabriel must have dreamed it, because there were chairs in a loose arc near the tall windows, music stands with fresh printouts, and a carafe of coffee that nobody was allowed to touch for fear of staining anything. Trish Thompson arrived ten minutes late with her cello in a soft case and her reading in a hardback, and she took one look at the room and said, "Gabriel, if you've put me next to the radiator again I'm playing an octave lower out of spite."

"You are beside the window, Trish, the good window, the Rhône window," Gabriel said, fluttering around her like someone who needed this morning to go on his permanent record, and Trish gave me a once-over that was longer and less friendly than Tess's, then stuck out her hand.

"Trish. You're the dentist, right? Gabriel talks about you like you're a golden retriever he's training."

"Jackson," I said, shaking it. "And I'm better than I was at eight this morning, which was the low point."

"That wouldn't take much," she said, and she meant it as a joke but I got the feeling Trish's jokes came with a diagnostic function, the way my old professor's did, and I decided right there to be careful around her.

We tuned. I will say one thing for my four years of stubbornness, which is that my ear is finally honest with me, and I tuned to Trish's A without needing the machine, and when she nodded at me across the stands I felt it like a grade on a report card. Gabriel had arranged us so that the two cellos flanked a viola player named Céline, who was twenty-six and doing her master's, and a second violin that Trish had borrowed from the conservatory. Tess worked at her table in the corner with her back half turned to us, and I caught myself checking, every thirty seconds or so, whether her shoulders said she was listening.

The first piece was a Vivaldi concerto for two cellos, because Gabriel has a sense of humor about his exhibition, and it went fine for eight bars, and then my string broke.

Not a fraying, not a warning buzz, a full snap, right in the middle of my entrance, and the loose end whipped around and stung the back of my hand while the whole room stopped, and I sat there holding half a concerto in my lap like I was holding my own tongue. Somewhere in my head a voice said, well, there it is, the story of your retirement, told in one A string.

But before I could even stand up, Tess was there.

She came around the table with her glasses pushed up on her head, said, "May I?" with her hand already out, and I handed her the cello because I didn't know what else to do with a woman who moved like that. She sat down on my chair, settled the instrument against her like she'd been holding one all her life, and went into her kit, which is a big canvas roll, the kind dentists know, and came out with a pair of fine pliers and a new string in a paper sleeve.

"Where did you learn that?" I asked.

"Restoration," she said, winding the peg with her thumb and feeding the string through with a neatness that made my hands look like ham hocks. "You spend twenty years putting tension into old wood and taking it out again, you stop fearing a string. Hold this end for me a moment." I held it. She pulled the slack, seated the ball end, wound it up clean, brought it to pitch by ear, and hummed against the note to check it, and the whole repair took less time than I spend numbing a single gum. Then she looked up at me from my own chair and said, "Your bridge is a hair forward, by the way. Gabriel can true it at the break. There."

"You could have told me at eight," I said, "instead of letting me play on a bridge that's off."

"Yes," she said, handing the cello back, "but then you wouldn't have asked me to look." She went back to her table, and Gabriel coughed into his fist, and Trish said, "Well. Can we play, or does anyone else need surgery?"

We played. And here is where I have to be honest with