Chapter 19 – Ben
Ben
The town has no name I can hold in my mouth, and the road up to it climbs in a way that feels less like driving than like being reeled in, switchback after switchback through olive terraces gone silver in the afternoon, and I have my window down and the cello in its case belted into the back seat like a passenger, because I would not let the airline touch it and I will not let a trunk touch it either.
It has been ruined once already on my watch. I am not going to add to the ledger.
I ask three people where the old man lives.
The first pretends not to understand me.
The second understands me perfectly and pretends the man is dead.
The third, a woman hanging washing between two shutters, looks at me for a long moment—the sunglasses, the rental, the whole expensive foreignness of me—and then points with two fingers up a lane too narrow for the car, and says a word I take to mean end. The house at the end.
So I walk. I carry the case the last of the way over stones worn smooth by five hundred years of feet, and I sweat through a shirt I don't know how to have cleaned anymore, and the lane funnels down to a green door under a stone lintel with a hand-lettered sign so faded I have to lean in to read it, and I can't read it anyway because it's in a dialect that isn't even the Italian I've been butchering on the phone for a week.
I knock. Nothing. I knock again, and a voice comes from somewhere behind the door, irritated, and I push it open into the smell.
That's the thing that stops me. The smell.
Spirit and wood shavings and something resinous and animal underneath, hide glue maybe, and it hits me the way a smell can, sideways, and for no reason I can name I think of Emily's music room, of standing in its doorway in a life I've apparently thrown away, and I have to set the case down on the nearest surface just to have the use of my hands back.
The man is small and bent and older than the town.
That's my first read of him, and my reads are never wrong—except that they've been wrong about everything lately, so I hold it loosely.
He's got a loupe screwed into one eye and a scroll of some half-finished instrument clamped in front of him, and he does not look up.
"Chiuso," he says. Closed.
"I tried to call your son some weeks ago.
About a repair." I hear my own voice doing the thing it does in a negotiation, the warmth, the certainty, the assumption of a yes I haven't earned yet, and I hear how it lands in this room, which is to say it doesn't land at all, it just falls to the floor with the shavings.
"They said you were the only one. Everyone said. The only one who'd even look at it."
He unscrews the loupe. He turns, finally, and his eyes are wet and pale and very sharp, and they go past me to the case, and something in his face changes before he's even seen what's inside.
"Show me."
I open it. I've opened it a dozen times on this trip, in hotel rooms, in the car, unable to stop myself, the way you press a bruise, and every time it does the same thing to me.
The cobalt. The gold. The violent smears of it dragged across a belly that took multiple men in this exact profession years to earn the right to build, fixative sunk into the grain, into the varnish that light itself is the enemy of, and I have learned enough now, from eighteen months of phone calls, to see it the way he must see it—not as damage but as desecration.
He makes a sound. It isn't a word. It's the sound you'd make if someone showed you a wound on an animal.
He crosses the room faster than a man his age should move, and he bends over it, and he does not touch it, he holds his old spotted hands above it the way you'd hold them over a fire, and he says something low and fast and furious that I don't need translated.
Then he rounds on me, and the pale eyes are not wet now, they're bright and hard.
"Chi?" he says. "Who does this. Who takes—" and he switches into English, which is better than he let on, of course it is, everyone in this story has been better at everything than they let on— "who takes a Grancino and paints it like a—like a fence.
Like a garden fence. This is not yours. A man who owned this would die before this happens. "
And there it is. In one sentence, from a stranger, in a room that smells like my wife's music: a man who owned this would die before this happens.
I owned it. I chased it across a continent for a year because I loved someone enough to listen once, and then I let it get carried out of every room in my own house and shoved into a corner, and I called the woman who mourned it petty, and I stood over her while she knelt on the floor and I asked her when she'd gotten so cold.
"It was my wife's," I say. My voice doesn't do the warm thing now.
It's got nothing under it but the true thing, small and plain, the register I'm still learning.
"I gave it to her. And I—" I make myself say it, because I have spent a season not saying the true things and I know now what that costs.
"I failed to protect it. That's on me. Not on her. On me."
He studies me. The fury banks down into something else, something appraising, and I have the disorienting sense of being read the way I read other people, all my life, fast and clean, and I don't like it, and I make myself stand there and take it.
"Can it be fixed?" I ask.
He turns back to the cello. He's quiet a long time. He picks up a rag, breathes on a corner of the lower bout, wipes, holds it to the window light, mutters. When he straightens his back cracks like the old wood itself.
"Maybe," he says. "Maybe. The paint is one thing.
The paint I can lift, slow, with the right—it is the fixative I do not like.
It goes into the varnish and the varnish is the voice, you understand?
Not the wood. People think the wood. It is the varnish, it is the ground under it, this is what took the old ones their whole lives.
If the fixative has killed the varnish then I give you back a beautiful corpse that does not sing.
" He shrugs, a whole philosophy in it. "I will not know until I am inside it. Weeks. Many weeks."
"Weeks."
"Weeks."
And the thing in me that built a company out of a laptop on a friend's floor, the thing that closes eleven figures across a twelve-hour time difference, opens its mouth before I can stop it, because it only knows one language and the language is faster.
"What if I paid more," I say. "Whatever your rate is. Triple it. I need it done—there's a person, I need it done as fast as?—"
He laughs. It's not a kind laugh. It's the laugh Connor gave me at the dinner, the one a man gives when he's remembering something he'd rather not, and I feel the shame of it go into me clean, the way the true ones do, they don't tear, they slide.
"You think I go faster for money." He says it flat, not even a question.
"You think the glue dries faster. The varnish, it says, ah, he has tripled the rate, I will cure in a week instead of three.
" He turns his back on me, done, and picks the loupe back up.
"Go home. Come back in the spring. Maybe I have your corpse ready, maybe I have your instrument.
I do not know which yet and you cannot buy which. "
I stand there in the shavings. The old me would have pushed.
The old me was always pushing; pushing was the whole of what I was, the refusal to let anything slip, the certainty that a closed door is only a door you haven't offered enough to open.
And I look at this small furious ancient man bent over the ruin of the one gift I ever gave that cost me more than money, and I understand that there is nothing in my accounts he wants, and that this is the first true thing anyone's said no to me in years, and that some part of me—the part the itch lives in, the part that's been gnawing since long before I found the calendar—is grateful for it.
For a no I can't buy my way through. For a wall I can only climb the slow way, hand over hand, the way I climbed the first one, back when I had nothing to offer but the work.
"Three weeks," I hear myself say. "I'll come back in three weeks."
He doesn't look up. "Come back whenever you like. It will not be ready."
"Then I'll wait however long it?—"
"You will not wait in a hotel and drive up here to breathe on my neck.
" Now he does look up, and there's something almost sly in the wet pale eyes.
"You want it fast. There is no fast. But there is—" he searches for it, waves a hand at the crowded bench, the clamps, the half-finished scrolls, the disorder of a lifetime, "—there is sooner, if there are two hands instead of one.
My eyes are good. My back is not. I have no boy anymore, the last one went to Milan to make guitars for tourists.
" He says guitars for tourists the way another man would say drown kittens.
"You want this done. Then you stay. You clamp what I tell you to clamp.
You hold what I say hold. You wash the brushes and you do not touch the instrument until I say, and you learn what it takes, with your hands, so that the next time God gives you something like this you do not hand it to a woman who paints fences.
" He picks the loupe back up. "Or you go home and you wait for spring. Those are the doors. Pick one."
It's insane. That's my first thought, clean and immediate—I have a company, I have Connor holding it with both hands and a merger still settling and a marketing floor I gutted, I cannot vanish into a hill town with no name to hand tools to a man who won't even give me a timeline.
It's the most inefficient thing anyone has ever proposed to me.
It has no term sheet. It has no end date I can hold in ink.
And then, under that, comes the other thing, quieter, arriving from very far down, walking up toward the light the way the true things do now.
Penance.
Nobody would call it that but me. But I know what it is.
I spent eight years believing that showing up meant being present in the body and absent everywhere it mattered, holding a tablet the way other men hold a wife, letting a woman I loved run the whole invisible hull of my life while I stood on deck taking credit for the wind.
I never once held anything for her. I never clamped what she asked me to clamp or washed a single brush.
The one time I set down my fork all night it was to defend the woman who did this, and here is the ruin of it in a case, and here is a stubborn old man offering me the one thing I have never in my life been any good at.
To stay. To do slow work with my hands for someone else's sake, on someone else's timeline, with no way to make it go faster, no way to buy out of the waiting, no way to be anywhere but exactly here, present, holding.
If I can't do this, I have no business standing in front of Emily and asking her to believe I've changed. This is the asking. Before the asking.
I take out my phone. I call Connor. It's the middle of the night in his time zone and he answers on the second ring anyway, because that's what staying looks like, I'm learning it late but I'm learning it.
"You find your old man?" he says, thick with sleep.
"I found him." I'm watching the luthier, who has already forgotten I exist, bent back over his bench in the amber light with the ruin of my marriage held between his hands with more care than I ever showed it. "Con. I need you to have the company for a while longer than we said."
A pause. "How much longer."
"I don't know." And the not-knowing doesn't panic me the way it would have a month ago. "There's no term sheet on this one."
I can hear him grinning. I can hear it right down the line, eleven time zones, the first honest grin.
"Roll up your sleeves, then," Connor says. "About time somebody taught you to hold still."
I hang up. I take off my jacket, the good one, and I look for somewhere to hang it and there is nowhere, so I fold it over the case—no, not the case, never the case—over the back of a chair, and I push up my sleeves, and I turn to the old man in the room that smells like her music, and I ask him the only question left that matters.
"Where do you want me to start?"
He doesn't look up. He just points, two fingers, at a rack of brushes crusted with the work of forty years, sitting in a basin of turpentine gone brown.
"There," he says. "You wash. And you think, while you wash, about the woman."
So I do.