Pickup Notes Page 3

  “Sorry, doll. Only Strings.” Arvin tucked my strings into a paper bag and creased the top shut. “What’s he doing?”

  “New direction for the quartet.”

  “Decent music for a decent price. That’s a good direction.” Arvin paused. “He hasn’t been in since December. Tell him to get back here before his E string snaps during a bridal march.”

  That happened once, but Harrison covered. He wasn’t like Paganini, the violin-stuntman who used to cut three strings and play an entire concert on the G alone. But I suspected Harrison practiced sometimes without touching the higher two, just in case.

  Now for the next stop. I let myself into Harrison’s apartment, serenaded by an awkward version of “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.” Harrison sat on a folding chair before the seven-foot windows while a boy played a violin shorter than a loaf of Italian bread, the acoustics augmented by hardwood floors and lack of clutter. Totally, totally cute.

  Silent as a cat, I removed my coat and boots, straightened my beige sweater, then slipped into the kitchen to turn on the tea kettle. I’d dressed up a notch because of the client meeting, but that didn’t mean anyone should look at me.

  A woman read a book on the couch, inadvertently coordinated to match the décor. Or maybe intentionally, since you couldn’t miss the color theme. Red, white, and black. I imagine the day after renting the place, Harrison must have taken a cab to Ikea, found a lamp he liked, and then dragged around one of those flat carts in search of things it matched. Gleaming black coffee table? Check. Even the tropical fish beneath the incomprehensible oil painting complemented the scheme. Maybe he recruited students that way too. “Ma’am, I was wondering if you’ve ever considered violin for your child. For starters, your ebony hair matches the couch.”

  Leaning forward at the end of the piece, Harrison corrected the boy’s bow hold while cheering him on. That was so much better! I can tell you practiced hard this week. Now here’s what I want you to work on for the next few days.…

  The boy clutched his eighth-size instrument with a strangle-hold, bouncing on his toes while standing eye-to-eye with Harrison.

  After he saw them off at the door, Harrison joined me in the kitchen. He pointed to the milk and sugar I was adding to the oversized mug of Earl Grey. “Is there any other torture you could inflict on that poor defenseless tea?”

  I rolled my eyes as I stirred. “You were good with the kid.”

  “So listen.” I might as well have remarked on the atomic weight of neon. “We’ll call it string fusion. My brother is investigating how we get permission from the copyright holders, and—”

  I waved him off. “Wait until Josh and Shreya get here. The whole thing’s a bust if they don’t agree.”

  Only momentarily troubled, Harrison steamrolled on. “They’ll like the idea. You’re the only one down on it. I’m thinking we’re—”

  “Oh, for goodness sake!” This must be how it felt to get trampled to death by guinea pigs. “Quit it!”

  By the time I finished my tea, Josh and Shreya arrived, and Harrison had the living room set up with two more music stands. As he retrieved Josh’s practice cello from the closet, Harrison blathered about rights and permissions, and I set my mug in the sink next to his breakfast dishes, hoping he wouldn’t give me a migraine. Was it too much to ask that a string quartet could play actual string quartets?

  When he once again called it a project, I turned back to the sink. Hot water. Bubbles. Lots of bubbles. Clean dishes. No one can argue with clean dishes. The world would stay sane if only I put everything where it belonged.

  After I set the last dish in the rack, I went out to find Harrison facing me with a haggard look. “Have you heard about the tragedy? A car with three violists plunged into the Hudson River!”

  Ah, that joke. “And the tragedy was that they could have fit two more?”

  His eyes brightened. “Rats, you heard it already?” He turned back to Shreya. “I can’t stop thinking about that song last night.”

  Taller than me by five inches, Shreya looked better on a bad day than I’d look after a makeover. With angular cheeks, nutty skin, and dark eyes, she had no need to buzz-cut her hair and dye what remained electric blue: she’d have attracted attention anyhow. She only ever said the hair was “to match my violin,” which for the record was light maple and not blue spruce. Harrison once called her the anti-Joey, since I dressed to disappear and performed with my frizzy brown hair in a bun.

  She shrugged. “Sometimes you’ve just got to make a noise. Even if it fails.”

  Josh said, “Well, you s- s-” He blinked, then gathered himself. “—saved our bacon.”

  “Maybe our hummus,” Harrison shot back. Shreya was vegetarian.

  Josh laughed.

  Although last night both guys wore “the musician’s uniform” (tuxedos) today they could have auditioned for Clash of the Closets, Harrison arrayed in his LL Bean and Josh in beat-up denim with his New York Yankees cap pulled low over his eyes. Josh was over six feet, Harrison a bit under, but they weighed the same, giving Josh that “starving musician” aura. Without the cap, Josh had black hair that curled whenever it got too long, whereas Harrison trimmed his brown hair every couple of weeks.

  I looked around to find Shreya studying me. She asked, “Are you okay?”

  I looked at the floor. She’d done something fantastic last night, and I should be grateful. “You were marvelous. Where did you learn to do that?”

  She shrugged. “Practice.”

  I forced a smile. “I practice too. I couldn’t have pulled a guitar riff out of my pocket.”

  “It’s not that impressive. Improvisation is just another skill to practice.” She shrugged. “I used to screw around doing exactly that. It’s doable. You ever try?”

  I was about to answer when Harrison said, “Okay, guys, let’s get started. Mozart’s not getting any younger.”

  “Now that would be a trick,” said Shreya, and I laughed.

  Josh looked up. “Oh, good. I was afrrr-raid you’d forgotten how to do that.”

  I stuck my tongue out at him. He grinned.

  Already tuned from the lesson, Harrison gave us an A, and we tuned to him.

  Shreya said, “Can we go over the first movement of the Dissonance Quartet?”

  Harrison said, “I’d like to see you do ‘Hotel California.’”

  I said, “And I’d like to win the lottery. Let’s do real music first. We could tinker with the fusion all day, but right now, Mozart is paying the bills.”

  He shrugged as he got out the score. Sure, because it was a big favor to let our quartet play quartets.

  Harrison raised his bow, and he started with the motive, followed by Shreya. I followed before they were completely done, and as I worked through the phrase, Josh joined. We split off into four branches, the sounds coming up when I knew they would and sometimes surprising me with how we overlaid one another, enhanced one another, contrasted. Harrison’s line, Josh’s, Shreya’s, mine—a dialogue, a community, a tug-of-war.

  This kind of conversation was a comfort: scripted, controlled. No need to listen behind the words to figure out what people were really saying. You knew what you were saying was good enough, because Mozart or Haydn said it was good enough, and you could trust them. No second-guessing, no judgment. A classical quartet was the perfect friendship between instruments.

  As if driving a car, I had four checkpoints: the music stand, Harrison and his cues, Shreya on my one side, and Josh on the other. Shreya moved even while seated, but now that I’d seen her dancing I wished I could free her from that chair. On my other side Josh’s fingers changed the tone of such an impressive instrument with so little pressure. I loved the fluid motion of his hand during a vibrato, the way he smiled while coaxing that instrument to emote. And there I was at the center, concentrating so hard to nail the tough parts while staying in the rhythm of the piece as well as my own personal rhythm: upbow, downbow, check the music, watch Harrison, watch Sh
reya, watch Josh, watch the music again.

  Then the movement ended, and I trembled because it had been here and it was over. I returned to myself again, but I couldn’t remember the intervening time. These moments—these too-few moments with a viola and a bow and a universe of sound—these were reasons I could stand in a toll-booth, could shiver through nights in an attic apartment, could face down my bank balance every month.

  If you took that away, I’d die. It was all I had.

  Me and a musical phrase, an instrument singing with three other instruments in its mellow tenor while the cello gave the bass and two violins worked as alto and soprano. Four instruments, one song, one quartet playing in a key that unlocked my soul.

  It felt smooth. It felt natural. And in other ways, it felt like a back-alley fight with the composer.

  Today after the first take, we backtracked to hammer on one section where Shreya always sped up because her line was difficult, and I did the same because my line was just as tough; by the end of that passage, we’d all be playing double-time. Through all this, Josh got stuck alternating two notes, and Harrison wasn’t playing at all.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice,” Harrison muttered as he got out his metronome, “if we could all just learn our stuff and let it fly?”

  Shreya said, “And people wonder why the Beatles broke up.”

  Harrison laughed. “We’re fine. We’re like family.”

  Quartets had to be closer than family. Whenever we prepared for a performance, we had to live in each other’s heads to adjust to the unexpected. And that was thrilling too, when Harrison cued us with the slightest of motions and I could read his mind for what he wanted.

  An hour later (really? an hour?) I felt breathless as we completed a run-through of the fourth movement. Intoxicated by the ending, I just wanted to start over again, to make a fleeting sound permanent.

  Instead Harrison set his golden-brown violin upright in his lap. “That was awesome! Now, let’s talk fusion.”

  Fighting disappointment, I reached for the flannel cloth in my case. As I wiped down my viola, taking care for the distressed parts, Harrison reviewed all the points he’d emailed over the past twelve hours. That a thousand string quartets in Manhattan compete for the same hundred weddings every weekend. That for most customers, one string quartet sounded just like the next. That people would remember the really cool wedding where the musicians didn’t play the same old stuff.

  As proof, Harrison said, “Remember the Creighton wedding?”

  Josh burst out laughing, and I flinched.

  Shreya said, “Um, no?”

  I shook my head. “You should get down on your knees every night and thank God you weren’t with us yet.”

  Josh flashed a smile that made his whole face brighter. “The D- D- deejay didn’t show up, so guess who they asked to play the rrr-reception?”

  Shreya shrugged. “Big deal.”

  Harrison snorted. “I’m not heartless. I only charged them double.”

  I said, “And afterward, we modified our contract to include overtime.”

  “Hell yeah,” Harrison said. “But back then we had barely three hours of music we considered performance-worthy.”

  Shreya’s eyes flared. “And you had to play a four-hour reception?”

  Josh turned serious. “We p-p-panicked.”

  I said, “Harrison made the decision to recycle.”

  She said, “And—?”

  “No one noticed!” Harrison laughed out loud. “They kept eating their trout almondine, and we got our check.”

  “But even if your premise is right,” I said, “that doesn’t mean your conclusion is.”

  Harrison held out a hand to stop me. “You want proof the product is good? Let’s hear Shreya do that again.”

  She played it through, much smoother than last night, and I closed my eyes to savor her power.

  Harrison turned to me. “How could we let that go?”

  The tension spread from my gut to my shoulders. “But how many riffs would convert to violin? And wouldn’t any sober bride who wanted ‘Hotel California’ book a cover band?”

  Harrison beamed. “We’ll make rock music more legit.”

  Josh said, “Other gr-groups do this. I looked it up on—” He blocked, then blinked. We waited out the stutter until he shifted words. “I Googled it.”

  Harrison leaned forward, his violin cradled in the crook of his elbow. “I Googled it too. What you find is other quartets doing arrangements of wedding-esque songs like ‘Fields Of Gold.’ We’ll fuse harder rock with Mozart or Haydn quartets.”

  Shreya said, “The Trans-Siberian Orchestra does it better.”

  Harrison ran his fingers over the violin’s F-holes. “They’ve taken classical music and worked high distortion electric guitars into the melody line. I want to replace the first violin line of a standard quartet with a recognizable rock riff. Mozartian rock!”

  You had to hand it to Harrison. He could sling around the word Mozartian as smoothly as I could the word pizza.

  I forced a laugh. “Okay, so we blend ‘Hotel California’ with Dissonance, and the exact location of Mozart’s grave lights up the world’s seismographs when he rolls over. Then what? We sell brides a half-baked version of ‘Hotel California’?”

  He pointed toward Shreya’s violin. “I refuse to call that half-baked. That’s deep-fried musical gold. She handles that guitar riff and suddenly it’s violinistic!”

  Yeah, that’s a word too.

  Harrison went on, “People recognize those songs, and that’s why we’d do it. How many brides have we interviewed who feel totally outclassed by chamber musicians?”

  I paused.

  A certain kind of bride seldom signed the contract. Nervous, she’d show up at lunch with her mother or the groom’s mother. She’d scan our song sheet with a vague incomprehension, then pass it to her equally-baffled companion. Classical pieces have titles like String Quartet Number 8 in E Minor, opus 59/2 rather than “Bridge Over Troubled Water.” Those brides, if they booked us at all, wanted us for the ceremony and never the reception.

  “Think accessibility,” said Harrison.

  “Oh...” For the first time, his plan made sense from a marketing perspective. He wanted an entry to classical music for people who think it’s what you hear at Carnegie Hall if you earn seven figures. Or what you were supposed to have for your wedding. You don’t have to enjoy it—you just have to do it.

  That was us: the dental-floss of the musical world.

  On the other hand: “We can’t afford to lose the clients we’ve already got. Won’t this hurt our musical credibility?”

  Harrison sighed. “The way it hurt Bond’s?”

  “Bond is locked into techno-dance classical.”

  Harrison’s face sagged in mock sorrow. “And sobbing every time they cash a tremendous royalty check, do you think?”

  Josh said, “You don’t ne-ne-need the money.”

  Harrison looked stung. “I want us to succeed.”

  Josh raised his eyebrows. “Then it’s not about the money.”

  Shreya said, “It’s a way to get our name out there.”

  And what would they add after saying our name? “Think about the time commitment to come up with enough of these.”

  Harrison waved a hand, as if he could write a check and order thirty-six-hour days. “Not a big deal. The rock tunes are simplistic. Josh can arrange the music and manage the transitions into the real pieces.” He looked back at me, which helped because for a moment I wasn’t sure he remembered I existed at all. “You know, some of Mozart’s stuff was considered lowbrow in its time.”

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” I walked toward the windows, frowning. “You’re not listening. If we fail—if this ends up sounding like crap—there’s no room for error! We could lose everything.”

  “No, not everything.” Shreya laid a hand on my shoulder as she passed me en route to her violin case. “We might make ourselves s
ound like idiots, but even that might help us stand out.”

  I looked to Josh, but I wasn’t getting any backup from him.

  The last holdout, I walked to the couch to set my viola in its case, then zipped it shut. I shifted my weight and stared at the area rug with its swirling black and muted red.

  “I need to think about this.” I bit my lip. “I’m not convinced.”

  FOUR

  Five minutes to noon, my laptop bag and beige sweater and I accompanied Harrison to a hotel lobby. Our fearless leader had us meet clients in hotels instead of coffee shop lobbies on the grounds that we’d have an easier time finding one another, but I bet he thought he looked better in the artificial living-room décor.

  Clients believed we met to assess their needs and hand off our sampler CD. In reality, Harrison wanted to sell, sell, sell. I’d have rather said bye-bye-bye, but I accompanied him because, although terrific at smooth-talking a signature out of a nervous couple, Harrison didn’t always remember our limits and would cheerfully offer the moon on four strings.

  He and I looked good together, both a plus and a tragedy. While Harrison belonged on the front of a college recruitment brochure, I owned exactly two outfits suitable for meeting clients. I tamed my hair with a hair clip, applied make-up as if performing, and carried the laptop case. Harrison did the talking while I stood a pace behind looking professional.

  I spotted our quarry first: their uncertain scan of the lobby, as if the normal humans were worried the musical humans might be performing right there, just because. I nudged Harrison, and he approached them, wielding an old-money handshake bestowed only by breeding.

  I sized up the bride because different brides required different tactics. Confident brides wanted relaxed musicians. Timid brides required hand-holding. And on the other extreme, you got the Bridezillas, the ones for whom every detail had to be perfect. With them, you had to sound uptight so they knew you had your act together. I hated those brides’ picky demands, although I didn’t hate cashing their checks. Last year Shreya had spoken with one of these, then came back with her verdict: if Christ had turned water into wine at this woman’s wedding, she’d have been totally put out that it was a Shiraz and not a Merlot.