As If a Bird Flew By Me: A Novel

A Sound You Want to Fall Into

41 A SOUND YOU WANT TO FALL INTO Now the cello was purely hers. No teacher, all of her sheet music packed in an attic box. She had just her search for what the cello wanted, an exploration of what it could do if asked. She craved Bach, her worn and oversized copy of his six cello suites, her teacher’s finger notations on the page. But for now she lets the box rest in the attic for a little bit longer, so that she can dream through the dusty and luminous box, where like a notebook’s blank page, everything was possible. She just had to begin. And to trust her hands. She never loved the cello like this as a child—she knew hours of scales and impatience, the cat under her feet, and she knew sloppy indifference. She never improvised, but merely stuck to the printed notes in front of her. The cello was what other people had written. k Even at work, she thinks of her cello, locked in its velvet-lined case, the potential energy in the pegs, the strings taut, vibrato from past shimmerings still trapped in the wood’s atomic bonds. The cello has no label, no maker’s mark, but she was told by a refurbisher that it was German, over 100 years old, and the front and back had been overly planed inside, so now they were thin as a viola. That was why the cello was so loud. 42 Musicians describe instruments as sounding warm, and she finds this adjective murky. A timbre you want stumble into or lie down in? That reminds you of oncoming sleep? A welcoming door? Yes, her cello is all these things, but a little brighter, more insistent. She knows a played string instrument is a happy and healthy one. If live music in a hospital can speed healing and decrease pain, then that same music must surely maintain the instrument’s own health, vitality and personality. Like a Turkish rug salesman once said to her in Soho, “To hang a rug on the wall is to kill it.” And she once said at a party, “An unplayed cello is a cello that taunts you from its corner.” She knows what it’s capable of. Some of the instrument’s top edges just barely meet the ribs, and a crack near the tailpiece is always threatening to unglue. A wolf—a buzz that sounds only when a certain tone is played, the A in second position on the D string in hers—arrives each winter. Winter, too, has the strings rising (or is it, the fingerboard falling?) so it is harder to play just one string at a time and not brush the others with the bow. The bridge is a bit warped, as is its spare that recently resurfaced in a tin marked Cat Treats, mixed with shells and a vertebra of a fish she found on a beach in South Carolina. k She stretches out her fingers on her left hand, tendons and muscles taut, and her reach is abridged, fumbling. Fifteen years ago she practiced two hours a day, and what ease notes rolled from her hands then. Now, stiff and out of tune, she plays an almost unrecognizable scale, her ears flinching at the missed notes, her fingers’ memory clouded. k 43 In high school, she was friends with a prodigy––a violinist, composer, pianist. He practiced six hours a day, attended a special school that let him study around his music schedule. He had no special genius sheen to him so that a stranger could pick him out of the crowd. Only a pale and thin countenance, an awkward pause before speaking. It was difficult to make him laugh, and she and her friends wondered what would happen if he couldn’t play anymore since he knew nothing else. They were in the same youth orchestra, he the concertmaster year after year, undefeated, and dating his slightly older stand partner , she mid-section (therefore, rank) of cellists. She wanted external proof of his gifts, something she could turn over in her hands, that she could admire but never acquire, that explained the source of his talents. But all she had was his performance and the reportage from his daily life. Nothing else, not a scent on his breath, not a slight limp in his walk, nor an almost...