Chapter 20 – Ben
Ben
Winter comes to the hill town the way it comes to old people, in the joints first. Aldo feels it before the sky shows anything.
He'll stop mid-sentence with the loupe still in his eye and flex his right hand open and shut, open and shut, and say the word for rain, and be right, always right, and I learn to read the weather off an eighty-year-old man's knuckles the way I used to read a room.
I have been here through the olives coming in.
I have been here through the killing of the pig two doors down, which is a thing the whole lane does together and which I was not invited to until I had washed enough brushes to be a person and not a wallet.
I stood in the cold with the others and I held what I was told to hold.
Nobody thanked me. That was the point, I think.
You don't thank the weather for showing up.
The cello sits on the bench between us most days like a third person in the room.
Aldo will not let me touch it with anything but a rag and my own breath for the first six weeks.
I clamp the offcuts he gives me to practice on, cheap student bellies split down the seam, and I ruin four of them learning the pressure, the exact moment the wood tells you it's about to go, and he watches me ruin them and says nothing, and on the fifth one my hands finally listen and the seam draws closed clean and he grunts once and takes it away without a word.
That grunt did more to me than any deal I ever closed.
The paint comes off slow. It comes off the way he said it would, a millimeter of cobalt at a time, under a solvent he mixes himself in a jar with no label, and there are nights I sit with a swab the size of a match head and clear a patch of old varnish no bigger than a fingernail and that is the whole night's work, that fingernail of amber surfacing up out of the blue like something drowned coming back.
Tara painted a garden on it. That's the thing I made myself learn early, in week two, when enough of the top layer was gone to see the drawing underneath.
She painted a garden. Little fence, little flowers, the kind of thing you'd doodle on a napkin, dragged across two hundred years of somebody's genius because the surface was there and she was bored and nobody in that house would ever tell her no.
I don't hate her for it anymore. Hating her is easy and I have given up easy things. I hate the man who watched her set her paints down on the closed lid and said nothing, because he was that man, and he had a name, and it was mine. For Tara, I feel nothing and she'd hate that more anyway.
Aldo asks about Emily exactly once. It's late, the good light long gone, both of us working by the ugly bright lamp he saves for detail. He doesn't look up.
"The woman. She plays this."
"She played it. Before."
"Before you break it."
"Before I let it break. Yes."
He works a while. The rag goes back and forth. "She stops playing after."
"She got a second cello. A lesser one. She still plays.
" I don't tell him how I know that, that Connor told me, that Connor sends me two lines a week that are ninety percent company and one sentence at the end that is her, always at the end, always after the numbers, the way you'd hide the real thing behind the boring thing.
She's playing again. She looks well. She looks like herself, Ben, more than I've seen in years.
I read that last one on the stairs outside the shop and had to sit down on the cold stone until my chest stopped doing what it was doing.
"Good," Aldo says. "A cello that is not played is furniture. This one." He taps the bench beside it, not the instrument, never the instrument. "This one was screaming for eight years in a nice house. Now it screams here, where somebody hears it. Better."
I think about that for a long time. Screaming in a nice house where nobody hears. He doesn't know he's said the whole of it. He's talking about wood.
Spring is nearly on us before the varnish is whole again.
He does the last of it himself, the ground and the color coats, and I am not allowed near that part, I only mix and clean and hand him what he grunts for, and that's correct too, some things you don't get to do just because you showed up for the ugly middle.
On the last morning he strings it. He does it slow, tuning by an ear that shouldn't work anymore and does, and then he holds it out to me, not to keep, to hold, and he says, "Play. "
"I don't play."
"I know you don't play." He pushes it at me until I take it. "Draw the bow. One time. You want to give this to a woman, you should hear once what you are giving her, so you don't hand it over like a watch."
So I sit with a two-hundred-year-old cello between my knees like a man holding something that might wake up, and I draw the bow across the low string the way I've watched Emily do it ten thousand times from a doorway I never once walked through, and the sound that comes out is enormous and warm and completely beyond me, a sound with a grain in it, a sound like a room deciding to answer, and it goes on after my arm has stopped, it hangs there in the shop and it comes back off the plaster, and none of it gets swallowed, not one note, and I understand for the first time in my life what I stood in the doorway of for eight years and called a hobby.
I don't cry in front of the old man. I wait until the truck to the airport, and then I do, badly, with my forehead against the cold window and the case belted into the seat beside me like a passenger, and the driver has the decency to be Italian about it and turn up the radio and let me alone.
I don't call ahead. That's the one thing I'm sure of.
A call is a warning and a warning is a thing you give someone so they can arrange their face, and I am done making Emily arrange her face for me.
I land. I don't go to a hotel and I don't go to the office and I don't buy anything, which for me is its own kind of fasting.
I take the case and I take a car to a street I've only ever seen in Connor's one sentence a week, and I stand across from a plain brick building eleven stories tall with a door that has no doorman who knows anybody's dog, and I look up at it and try to guess which window is hers by the light.
The old me would already be inside. The old me would have called the broker, bought the building, had the super let me up.
I stand on the sidewalk in a coat that smells like turpentine and I hold the only thing I have made with my own hands in twenty years.
Then I cross before I can talk myself out of it.
She's allowed to say no. I want to be standing there when she does.