Second Fiddle (17 page)

It’s not that I liked William all that much, but it wasn’t fair that I did all the cat work and she got all the cat love.

“So where are you from?” Annalies said.

The question stopped me; it always did. It’s such a simple thing, and people ask it all the time, but when you grow up in the army, it’s the hardest question in the world to answer. Should I say where I was born? Where my parents were from? The place I happened to live at the moment? I looked at the girls. Besides music, this was the one thing we shared. They both just shrugged. Say anything. Home doesn’t matter. That’s what they were thinking.

“We’re from out of town,” I said.

“And what are your plans?”

“Well, we need to earn some money, so we are going to play music on the street,” I said.

“Okay. What kind do you play?”

“Classical mostly,” Giselle said.

“That’s a tough sell. Do you know any sacred music?”

“A few pieces.”

“So go play in front of Notre Dame. It’s packed with tourists, and when you see a group of Americans, play ‘Amazing Grace.’ You and your little angel faces, you’ll make a thousand francs in two minutes.”

“Really?”

“Oh yeah, Americans are ridiculously sentimental. Listen, don’t stay in one spot more than an hour. Steer clear of the police. And if you can, try to play something a little bit hip—something your audience would recognize.”

“Are you a musician?” I said.

Annalies smiled. “Ja. As far as Mr. Whitman is concerned, I’m a poet, but actually, it’s all lyrics for my band.”

“Hey! What kind of music do you play?”

The two-note wail of a French police siren drowned out her answer. I got to the window in time to see the taillights of three teeny police cars zip down the street toward the Sorbonne.

“Oh, what now?” Annalies said, exasperated. “If only Mr. Whitman believed in television as much as he believes in books, I’d have a clue about what’s going on in the world.”

“Is something bad happening?” Vivi said.

For a second I thought, It’s Arvo! The police found him! But that was crazy. The police didn’t even know that he stole from us. Nobody knew he was here.

“Down that way”—Annalies pointed south—“there are a lot of drug dealers, so I wouldn’t hang out over there. Not
after dark. But it could be terrorists, you never know. Everybody under the sun comes to Paris, and some of them are not nice at all.”

“Dad did say something about Paris and terrorists a couple weeks ago,” Giselle said. “Or maybe it was arms dealers.”

“Things are kind of crazy these days,” Vivian said. “The Soviet Union has always been so huge and strong and everything they did looked so permanent. Mom thinks that a year from now there won’t even be a Soviet Union. Isn’t that weird? Just Russia and a bunch of tiny countries no one has ever heard of.”

“Well, I’m pretty sure that a year from now I’ll still be grounded if I don’t show up at the train station tomorrow,” I said. “It’s getting late. Let’s go.”

“Start with Notre Dame,” Annalies said. “And you’ll need to eat, too.”

“I’m starving,” Giselle said. “I bet we walked twenty miles today.”

“You three look clean and tidy,” Annalies said. “You could get away with the art gallery game. Plus with your instruments you’ll automatically look serious.”

“The art gallery game?”

I looked from Annalies to Giselle and Vivian, wondering if this was one of those things that would be obvious if you had a family that actually went to art galleries.

Annalies shook her head and smiled. “Babies. You really are new at this, aren’t you?”

Giselle gave her the look for her baby remark, but fortunately, she wasn’t paying attention.

“Every Saturday night there are gallery openings,” Annalies went on. “It’s where they start showing a new artist’s work. There’s a party with music and reviewers and all the artist’s friends, but the main thing is there’s food. Little snacks and wine usually. The snacks are tiny, but they have about a thousand calories each, so you only have to eat a few of them. Just don’t hang over the platters and gobble them, or you’ll get thrown out for sure.”

“Thrown out?” Vivi said.

“Well, yeah, if they think you’re vagrants, they’ll throw you out, so don’t act like you’re starving. Look at the art first. Comment to some stranger about the sense of movement in the sculpture or the hopeful use of the color green in a painting.”

“Okay,” I said, feeling the urge to take notes. “Can any color be hopeful or just green?”

Annalies laughed. She was pretty, even with all the black eyeliner and the spiked-up hair. I bet she was only nineteen or twenty. “If the gallery owner is around, make sure you say something about the quality of the light. Gallery owners have a fanatical relationship with lightbulbs.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Let’s get going.”

“The gallery listings are in the newspaper,” Annalies said, and then she disappeared down the hall. I grabbed my violin and my pocket map of Paris, and we headed out the door.

Dame was a short walk from the bookstore, but the square in front of the church could have been another planet, it was so different from the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter. It was a football field in pavement. Enormous buses idled their smelly engines in a ring around the square. Groups of tourists clustered around guides or meandered on their own. It was hard to decide on a good place to play. We tried setting up in the middle, but nobody could hear us. I couldn’t even hear us.

We moved to the church steps off to the left of the main door so Giselle had a place to sit and play. Vivi and I stood beside her, and the stone front of the church helped our sound go out to the square. Like before, almost everybody strolled right past us without looking—except for the kids. Kids always looked. The good thing about not having music stands was that we got to watch the people watching us. I could tell the musicians right away, because they stopped and thought about whether we were playing well. And they
always gave a coin, but almost never more than one. Vivian kept a whispered tally of our profits after every single donation. I don’t know how she kept track. No way could I add up change in the middle of a sonata.

Annalies was right about the power of “Amazing Grace” and a smile. We made a mint with that one every time. One group of old ladies in floral skirts and pink Nikes actually stopped and sang along in two-part harmony. It was kind of sweet. Giselle kept her eye on the time, and after an hour we stopped, even though we were making good money. I would have argued for staying longer, but I was starving and the sweet smell of a crepe cart was driving me crazy.

We were packing up when I saw two black sedans park behind the tour buses. Four men in black suits got out of each car. They didn’t have the spy guy turtleneck on, but they had the spy guy look, and one of them had a radio. They spread out around the square and started talking to groups of people. I nudged Giselle and Vivian and pointed them out.

“What should we do?” Vivian whispered.

“Take cover,” I said.

There was a group of tourists coming out of the church. Most of them were very tall. We grabbed our instruments and followed them, working our way to the middle of the group. We went with them to their tour bus at the edge of the square. It shielded us from the agents’ view as we ran along the street to the Pont d’Arcole. I led the way across the Seine
to the Right Bank and headed us north toward the gallery where there was an exhibition of a Spanish painter’s work.

Just over the bridge was a big open square with a palace at one end that was straight out of Disneyland, only bigger. There were fountains on either side of the square and a carousel in the middle. Between the fountain and the front door of the Hôtel de Ville were a bunch of TV broadcast vans, a cluster of French policemen, and two men in American army uniforms. It was getting dark, and the TV crews were setting up lights. It looked like a press event—except for the black-suit guys with radios in their ears who were watching over the crowd in front of the camera. Maybe it was going to be a political speech. I was starving, so we kept to the edge of the square and avoided the crowds to move faster. Half a dozen police cars passed us going south toward the Latin Quarter. Maybe Annalies was right about the drug dealers down that way.

We headed north, away from the city hall. The streetlights came on and merchants were locking up the fancy shops. There was one just for handbags and another with all perfume and no makeup. Down the side streets I saw flower vendors closing up for the night and smelled a falafel stand.

“How much farther?” Giselle said, pulling her cello along more slowly now that we were passing a bakery. It’s just no fair—whenever you’re hungry, it’s the good kind of cake in the bakery window.

“Almost there,” I said.

Vivian looked up from counting change in her hand. “We made over a hundred and seven francs back there. We only need three hundred more.”

“Just a couple more blocks,” I said as cheerfully as I could, but I was totally thinking about breaking the window and making off with an entire cake—the chocolate one with raspberries on top. I got out my last piece of candy and sucked on it to make it last. We walked past the Picasso Museum and arrived at the gallery just as a bunch of ladies in suits and pointy shoes got out of a cab.

There were twinkly lights around the window and a sign with the artist’s name: Isabella de la Torre. There was a fair crowd inside. We took a minute to check each other’s hair. Vivian lent me more of her pink lipstick. We walked in, lured by the smell of something warm and spicy in the back room. I resolved to look at twenty paintings at least before devouring the food. The paintings were around the edge, and in the middle of the room was a cluster of pedestals. Each one had a porcelain doll on it in an elaborate vintage dress and tiny leather shoes. But in place of the china head was a skull of a small, fierce-looking animal. The artist had painted each skull with an elaborate design like a tattoo. I got a shiver looking at them.

“Wow,” Vivian said. “I bet if the boys knew there were skulls in art, lots more of them would sign up for it at school.”

Behind us, a slender woman in a sparkly black dress
laughed. “Let’s not tell them then,” she said in a Spanish-sounding accent. “So there will be more room for us girls in the art class.”

I moved over so she could look with us. “It’s creepy but cool, too. I keep expecting to see something in those eye sockets. It’s hard to look away.”

“If this was your work, would you put something in the eyes?” the woman in black asked.

“Could you stick a mirror down there, so you could see a little bit of yourself? That would be really neat.”

The woman nodded and was about to say something when a man in a black suit and violet shirt and tie swooped over, saying, “Isabella, dear, someone for you to meet.” And they walked away.

“Oh my gosh,” I said. “I think that was the artist. I can’t believe I told her how to make her art.”

“She asked,” Giselle said. “Don’t worry about it.”

“Let’s eat,” Vivi said.

“You two eat first,” I said. “I’ll catch up, so we don’t look like we’re crowding the table.”

The girls headed for the trays of food at the back of the gallery. I’d expected everyone there to be like Giselle’s and Vivian’s parents, but I saw all kinds of people. Some wore fancy clothes, but others were dressed even more plainly than me. There was a young man in shabby shoes making sketches in a notebook. Another man had brought a little boy and girl with him, and he was having a very earnest
conversation in French with them over by the skull-headed dolls. I immediately felt sorry for the dolls that lived at their house. I was sure they’d be decapitated by morning. I started working my way toward the refreshments when an enormous painting caught my eye. At first glance it looked like warm splashes of yellow, red, and orangy brown, with thin curving black lines. When I looked closer, I could see the outline of a girl twirling and splashing in water. The girl was not solid-looking, but wispy and light like she was a dancing flame. It was amazing. I couldn’t stop looking at it.