Horsehair on Heartstrings

Greta waited anxiously for the fiddler as she finished her music theory homework on supertonic and subdominant seventh chords. It was confusing stuff. She sat cross-legged in the window seat hunched over her score papers and notes, trying to make sense of the assignment. Hoping that speaking the concepts aloud might make them clearer, she read from her textbook. “In the Bach, note how the alto leaps to A on the second beat. The sole purpose of leaping at this point is to prepare the suspension." Scanning the facing page with a sour grimace, she continued, "keeping the E through the second beat would have produced an irregular leap into the dissonance.”

Still puzzled, she followed the E leaping to the A with her finger, but the notes did not speak to her. “Wait. What?” she blurted with impatience. “Why would it be an irregular leap into the dissonance if the E stayed?” It might help if she could hear it, she thought, to feel the emotion of the harmonic change. But playing the keyboard sometimes triggered her dissociative amnesia, a baneful affliction since childhood, so she tried to imagine how the notes might sound instead.

She much preferred playing music intuitively, by ear.

Looking up at the clock, she noted the fiddler was eleven minutes late. Would he come? She had only met him yesterday, but she had been so impressed with his fiddling at the Live Oak Park Fair, she hung around after his set. Leaning against a gnarly trunk, Pete's coffee cup in hand, she had watched him through several ballads as the shoppers strolled amid the craft booths and wisps of black-bellied plovers spun out overhead toward the bay. She swooned over his masterful fiddle chops and sinewy arms with their quick muscles leaping like minnows as he bowed. There was something about him.

It had been so long since she had let anyone get close, though. Now she was beginning to regret inviting him over.

Greta closed her textbook with an exasperated sigh and sat agitated in the oblique reddish light of the stained-glass window. The old-fangled ding-dong of the doorbell startled her and hung in the air like a prompt in a child's game. For a moment she considered pretending she wasn't home.

Hot at the back of her neck, she willed herself to rise from her cushion and move toward the stairwell. Through the open window of her Berkeley flat, the September breeze lapped at her with the spicy scents of chestnuts and wood stain. She floated down the stairs to let him in, this fiddler she had found at the fair.

When she opened the door, there he stood on the terracotta porch tiles in worn-out sneakers and baggy corduroy trousers. The frayed waistband caught on his hip bones, just keeping them up. A clean white T-shirt rippled over his torso, the moist cotton clinging in neat eagle’s feet beneath fiddle-toned shoulders. Smooth like a boy’s, the musician's face seemed more familiar to Greta than it should. His soft periwinkle eyes sparkled at her through a fern grove of long lashes. Dark blond hair spread like a hand over his forehead.

There he stood in the sun like a farm boy coming to bring her fresh milk.

“I’m glad you came,” she managed to say behind her tight smile. “Come in.”

He laughed nervously and shuffled over the threshold into the Victorian stairwell, tripping on a muddied shoelace. “Well, you said you had a song you wanted to show me,” he said as if he had no choice but to come and listen to it.

The fair vagabond leaned forward and skipped two steps, lithely following Greta up the varnished pine stairs that needed sweeping, and emerged into her cool hallway. There he fixed his timorous eyes on hers as if he had suddenly lost his way. Clyde, the cat, sidled over. The fiddler sank down to stroke his white back all the way down his tail the way he liked it. Then the dogs came clamoring in from the kitchen to make sure the new guest smelled all right.

Greta led him into the dining room by the window that overlooked her landlord’s shed as she swatted the dogs away from him. She could smell the skunky, naughty scent of the landlord's marijuana plants through the open window. The dogs sniffed and licked the wiry young man who seemed to smell just right. What was that smell? Yes, he smelled like Greta's beloved grandfather who had been a corn and soybean farmer in Iowa: Oldspice and perseverance.

The fiddler looked at her, eye-level, with a bold innocence. They studied each other’s faces with quizzical impatience. Each looked so much like the other they could almost be twins, Greta thought, from Sweden or Norway. Near the same height, wide-set eyes, high cheekbones, and hair— shades of a wild rabbit. They each waited for the other to speak, trying to understand why they had come together this afternoon.

He looked to be in his twenties, like her, but there was something almost childlike about him. His face betrayed a rare vulnerability, she thought, yet shone forth mildly defiant, hinting of a long-harbored betrayal as if something had hurt him deeply long ago. Such a glorious and tragic sadness rested in his face.

“So, show me this song,” he said, trying to appear casual, resting his fiddle case beside him as he sat down at the round table, running his calloused fingers over the embroidered tablecloth. Greta’s golden retriever, Tulip, sat beside him and leaned against his muscular thigh. Open-mouthed, she smiled and panted at the stranger.

“I’ll play you our rough mix,” Greta said, summoning her nerve. “We just laid down drums yesterday, but we still need to track finals.” She rose quickly before she could reconsider and went to fetch the basket of cassettes on the counter. The fiddler ducked and teased her rescue hound, Stewbone, with playful lunges.

Trembling, she slipped the cassette into the boombox on the butcher block island beside the jars of loose change and chewed pens. She pushed down hard on the gray plastic lever as it sank mechanically beneath her fingers. A drop of sweat went cold on her ribs. She watched the spool of the thin brown tape feed itself over to the opposite side, preparing to release her song to the world.

The two strangers listened to Frank’s electric guitar tuning up. Then, Greta's own amplified breath rose and fell into the hot microphone, blowing and hissing like a giant goddess. The drummer said something about “Canadian bacon,” or a “Canadian vacation.” It was unclear which. Then, a shuffling of score papers. Frank muttered, “ready? We’re rolling.” Greta winced as she heard her garish chuckle, amplified and awkward.

Dropping his head, the fiddler listened as the song began. Greta watched to see his reaction. Her heart limped heavy with dread. She felt ill. Softly at first, her voice spread out around them, building into a fierce cadence over the beds of drums, thunderous bass, and anguished wales of the cello.

Her voice rang fearlessly. She could hardly believe it was her own. The 6/8 time-signature made the song rock and swoop like a boat. Greta held on—a bit seasick. The two young musicians looked into each other’s faces as the song came on like a tempest.

As she remembered to breathe, the sickness lifted and she began to relax. Next to this oddly familiar man, her muddied colors began to wash clean. The notes brightened and blew through the room like a summer storm. The bass vibrated inside her bones.

It was good, she decided with relief. Notes leaped and collided. Oceans of sound ebbed into dissonance, aching to resolve.

A luxurious tingle overtook her and she could feel the music whipping over her skin like raindrops. As her cheeks flushed, her body hummed along with the lilt. She imagined that she could smell the fiddler's body sending out a sort of musky pollen of its own. His closed eyes shivered beneath their delicate lids. Tulip lay her heavy blond head on his lap and sighed with trust.

Resting his hand on Tulip's back, he stroked her matted fur and swayed gently with the 6/8 rhythm. His sunburnt cheekbones lifted as if he were about to smile. After a long while, the song came to an end with the soaring high harmonies that she had layered over three of her other parts: a symphony of Greta just for the fiddler. After the last trails of electric guitar died out, the two sat in silence for a moment, taking in the song.

“Do you want a glass of merlot?” she asked.

He looked surprised and mildly timid. “That would be heaven,” he said. His swollen pupils glistened. “Wow, your voice. And the chord progression— it’s unusual. You wrote this?”

Greta looked at her flip-flops and smiled with bashful delight. “Yes, but my producer, Frank, arranged it,” she said pouring the thick, dark liquid into a stemmed glass. “He changed the time signature. It was just a 4/4 melody over some random guitar chords until he re-worked it.” She handed him the wide-mouthed goblet and poured one for herself. They both hovered their faces over the fragrant yawning bowls like cats about to drink.

“It’s wonderful,” he said at last.

“The merlot?” she asked. He looked up and they laughed together, tasting the leathery quench of grapes on their tongues.

"The song," he said, his eyes honest. "But the merlot, too."

As their lips stained deeper shades of maroon, they listened to the rest of the rough mixes. Their tongues loosened with effortless conversation; words and ideas tumbled out like only happens with kindred childhood friends after years apart. For Greta, it was a spell steeped in the brine of waiting. Waiting for years, a lifetime maybe, for this easy grace. His face pulled her into a warm lagoon and let her play there in their secret hideout. It felt good to find this place, to be there with him.

When they ventured out the screen door to the deck, the dogs jumped at the fiddler’s legs and tried to sniff him. He tousled their furry heads and massaged their slobbery jowls. He offered her a clove cigarette and they smoked like rebellious teenagers, throwing back their heads, sucking in the gingerbread smoke, spilling it out their mouths into the dimming evening. The dogs thumped up and down the stairs panting, bringing them sticks and chasing each other down in the overgrown grass, their tongues lolling out from their wet black gums.

Like curious children, Greta and the fiddler listened again to the rough tracks through the open window as if in a sort of sonic dream. The sky darkened and a couple of fireflies sent their fleeting signals over the potted ficus plants. Between songs, they could hear the early evening crickets. What were they listening for, Greta wondered, under this California sky? Through his ears, she heard the songs anew. It seemed that she had written them for him, expecting to meet him.

Let’s go down into the grass,” he said. They brought the bottle of wine down into the long rectangle swath of green dotted with the feathery halos of dandelion puffs.

They both understood the magic that had taken hold. Was the wine some kind of love potion, or was it real, Greta wondered? Unable to keep their warm, buzzing bodies from moving closer together, their hands touched. Like a suspended chord wanting to resolve, she let herself fall. She felt shy, but not unsure of herself. She had never felt so sure of anything.