Honorarium

Vasek was not familiar with the famous poet's work, but he had been asked if he would be willing, for a small honorarium, to play a brief selection at the open and close of the memorial service.

Yes, he said, partly because he hoped that by doing it, he might make himself available to other such requests, and also because it was the department head who asked him, directly, after a private lesson one foggy Tuesday in mid-September. Ezra, his instructor, laughed and clapped him on the back after she departed.

"You're a natural politician," Ezra said, and Vasek could only shake his head in cold wonder at the remark, which was at once a compliment and an insult.

Vasek met his friend Martine for coffee downtown. They sat under the heating lamps at the grocery store cafeteria, watching as workers dragged and stacked the metal patio furniture, then drew tarps over the tables and locked them. Across the courtyard, the lights of the library were soft and gold, and from where they sat, Vasek and Martine could see children running back and forth, their little heads floating by the window. It was cooler than it had any reason to be in September, and Martine shivered despite the heating lamps. She had gotten soaked in the rain earlier in the day and had failed to sufficiently dry herself. Her hair was still damp and her clothing had a cold, clear smell.

The cafeteria was loud but muted, as if all the noise somehow canceled itself out, leaving only the impression of volume. Occasionally, someone dragged a table or a chair across the stone tiles, and there was a screeching, crying sound that Vasek felt in his body, discord like a jolt to the nerves. Martine's coffee was exceptionally dark and thick, and he kept looking at it while she sipped. It deposited a creamy foam on her upper lip, which she licked away.

"If the weather's going to be shit, I wish it would make up its mind about the kind of shit it's going to be," she said. "It's getting out of hand."

"It's bad for the strings," he said.

"What an exceptionally normal response."

"It can't be good for the clay either," he said. "Or, I guess, maybe not. Maybe you guys have sophisticated HVAC over there. I know we do for our practice rooms."

"No," she said. "Actually, it's pretty low-tech in our neck of the woods. But we do keep some humidifiers plugged in."

"Yeah. It's different though. You take violins through the world. The clay just stays."

"That much is true," she said with a shrug. "But it's not the clay I'm worried about. I just get so anxious this time of the year. How do you dress, you know? For a blizzard? For constant rain? For thunderstorms? Tornados? Hurricanes?"

"Hurricanes? In Iowa. That I would pay to see."

"No, you wouldn't. You would flee, or you should, anyway."

Martine laughed, but Vasek stared down into the dark surface of his coffee. His fingers were warmer than they had been when moving through the fog, which now sat like a solid thing in the center of town. It was true that there were no hurricanes in Iowa, but the odds of one trekking this far inland from the Gulf seemed like something that might be goaded into reality just by virtue of its impossibility. It always seemed somehow to him that things that were unlikely to occur had the greatest chance of happening, but he also knew that he felt that way because he had seen too many movies and read too many books. He considered himself part of a narrative, and it was difficult not to believe that his circumstances, no matter how unremarkable, were somehow extraordinary.

"I'm doing a memorial service," he said.

"Oh? Who died?"

"I don't know them. Some poet. They died. Recently."

"We all gotta die sometime, I guess."

"Yeah, well, I was asked to play at the service. Two things, short. Barely...