Second Fiddle (19 page)

“Never. Again,” Giselle muttered. “Where the heck are we? What if these people are kidnappers or something?”

The women slid out of the backseat, and the little girl was still holding Vivi’s hand.

“They seem so nice, though,” I said, leaning close so the others wouldn’t hear. But then, Arvo had seemed nice, too. “Do you know where we are?”

“Don’t be silly, you two,” Vivian called over her shoulder as she followed the Montoyo family down the block. “Look, there’s the Madeleine.”

“And Miss Clavel?” Giselle said. “That’s perfect, because I really think we need a nun right now.”

I laughed, imagining the twelve little girls in two straight lines and their matching yellow hats trooping down the street to give us directions.

“Don’t be a dork, Giselle. The Madeleine.” Vivian pointed
down the street to a lit-up building that looked like a Greek temple. “It’s a church. If we go toward it, the Seine is just a few blocks farther. We can walk east along the river until we get to the bookshop.”

I relaxed, knowing the church would be on my map. Even if Vivian’s directions were a little off, we’d be able to figure out the way back to Shakespeare and Company.

We walked a block to a tiny restaurant with green awnings in front and no sign of any kind on the door or in the window. It was like a secret restaurant, but apparently well-known, because the dining room was crammed with men in work clothes and great-smelling food. People turned to look at us as we went in, and every person there was either black like Giselle or brown like the Montoyo family. I wondered if they were going to be annoyed about Vivian and me, the way enlisted men are annoyed when a bunch of pip-squeak lieutenants turn up at their favorite bar on a Friday night. The grandma waved us to a table, and I felt better because there were some families with little kids nearby.

Everyone seemed to know the Montoyos, and when the mom and dad kissed the women working in the kitchen and then put on aprons, I figured it was a family business. There didn’t seem to be a menu, just a long table with steaming-hot dishes. Grandma Montoyo showed us where to stash our instruments under the table. She handed us plates, and then she and Vivian had what sounded like an argument in
French. Afterward, Vivian smiled and said,
“Merci,”
and told us that it was the custom here for musicians to pay with a song.

“Okay.” I looked around the room; it was not the usual classical music crowd. Most of them seemed to be cabdrivers. “What shall we play for them?”

“No idea,” Giselle said. “We’ll think of something.”

The evening passed in a blur of food and music and dancing. I tried one of everything on the buffet since I didn’t recognize a single dish. Most of it was fabulous, especially the thing with shrimp and sausage and yellow rice, but there was a fish dish with a sauce so spicy, I thought the skin was going to peel off my tongue. There didn’t seem to be anything to drink but wine, and even though all three of us had finished the Just Say No class three weeks ago, we couldn’t think of a way to say no to grown-ups that was polite in English or Spanish or French. We ended up pretending to sip the wine and making a bunch of trips to the bathroom to drink water from the sink.

Just as we were finishing our meals, some of the men pushed tables to the side and set up four chairs in a half circle facing the dining room. Talk died down immediately, and several of the diners went to the buffet table and took guitars and drums and fiddles from underneath.

Grandma Montoyo sang first. It was very different from what she sang at the gallery. Her voice was deeper and rougher. It was almost as much a wail as a song, but I could
tell right away, even though I didn’t speak one word of Spanish, that it was a song about tragic love. It was as if the ghost of her true love was standing across the room, and she was begging him to come back to her, and the other people were calling out to her to not give up, but no matter how much she sang, he could never come home.

I cried. Not that I’d ever had a tragic love or even a not-tragic love. I hadn’t really looked for a true love. The quality of boy available in the eighth grade was not very inspiring, but for the first time I thought that someday it would be wonderful to be cherished so much that decades later he would still be singing about me.

After Grandma’s song, other people got up and sang. One man brought out an accordion. Another one danced what looked like flamenco to me, but it was mostly feet and very little arms. A fiddler played and sang with a man who played a djembe. A man in a steel-gray turban played an instrument that was like a guitar but had a long neck and a pear-shaped body, and after that the grandma danced some flamenco with her grandson. Just as I was getting sleepy, Grandma Montoyo waved Giselle and Vivian and me over to take our places in the circle. I’d forgotten about playing music to pay for our supper.

“What would you like to hear?” Vivian asked.

“You delight us,” she said. “Play something from your home.”

Vivian and I went for our violins, but Giselle stood right
up in the middle of the circle and sang “Amazing Grace.” Her voice was incredible—kind of low for a girl but powerful! She sang all five verses by heart. How could we have been friends all this time, and I never knew she could sing? I guess I knew she went to church, but I never thought about her singing in her church choir. When she got to the end of the last verse, she went straight back to the first and raised her hand for everyone to join her. I was shocked to see the entire room stand up. People sang out that verse, and they linked arms and swayed back and forth the way you see Germans do at soccer games. I didn’t even think these people spoke English. Plenty of patriotic things have happened in my life—the army kind of makes a point of it—but I don’t think I’ve ever felt so proud of my country as I did in that tiny Paris restaurant full of cabdrivers.

Vivian got her violin out and played “Simple Gifts,” which is pretty even though it’s a beginner’s tune. Next she played a hoedown that got all the little kids up and dancing. I couldn’t think what to do that would top that, but since the kids were all out on the floor, I decided to do some of my brothers’ favorites. I knelt down so that the little ones could see my fingers, and I played “Pop Goes the Weasel,” which always gets kids giggling when you pop the E string. There was a boy who was only about two, but he really wanted to touch my violin, so I invited him close and put my fiddle on his shoulder. I knelt right behind him and held up the fingerboard. I guided his hand with the bow, and we played
“Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” together. We got the best applause of the night.

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard people clap, but before, it had always been an audience of parents. These people had no connection to me except the music, and I hadn’t even played anything fancy, but there was something in that response that I wanted in my life. It was like the moment when you know you’ve found a friend.

The toddler scampered off to his mama, and I got up off the floor just as Vivi was saying, “Oh my gosh, it’s eleven-thirty! We’ve got to leave right now if we’re going to walk all the way back to the bookstore by midnight.”

Giselle nodded, and I headed for the table where we’d left our violin cases.

“Bravo!” Mrs. Montoyo said. “You must come visit us again!” She touched her cheek to mine—not a kiss exactly, but so warm and friendly. “May we give you a ride home?”

“Why are you so kind?” I said. “We only just met a few hours ago, but you fed us dinner and now this.”

“You love our music,” Mrs. Montoyo said. “That is not nothing to us. And you made something beautiful for our children. Girls such as you do not walk through this door every day. Now tell us where to take you,” she said as I packed up my violin. “You are students, yes?”

“Oh, right,” I said. I’d forgotten hours ago that we were pretending to be grown-ups. She had been so kind; I hated to lie.

“We’re music students from Berlin,” I said. “We came to Paris for a music contest at the Sorbonne. I wish we lived close enough to come back, but the truth is we are moving back to the States in a few weeks. My dad is retiring from the army; I don’t think I’ll ever be in Paris again.”

I looked around the café, drinking in the details. Of all the places I’d been on this crazy trip, this little restaurant, with its clutter of tables and faded wallpaper, was the place I wanted to remember most.

“Ah, the army,” Mrs. Montoyo said. “You are American Gypsies then.”

“Exactly.” I laughed. I hadn’t thought of it that way before.

“Good for you to have your music.” She gave my hand a squeeze. “It is a thing …” She searched for a word in a language I’d know. “A thing large … but light to carry.”

I gave her hand a squeeze back, thinking of Arvo carrying his boy choir songs into the Soviet army and all the way to East Germany.

“It’s good for making friends,” I said.

“Come, come,” Mr. Montoyo interrupted us. “Here is your ride. Our friend will take you home.”

The musician with the gray turban gave us all a very serious smile and said, “
Salaam
, young ladies. It is my custom to offer a special rate for fellow musicians.”

“Let me guess,” Giselle said. “A song?”

“If you please.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Vivi said, chewing at the corner of her lip. “I can’t sing.”

“Vivi,” I said with a smile, “if you can breathe, you can sing.”

Five minutes later, we were climbing into a taxi that smelled like pipe tobacco and cinnamon sticks. The driver put our instruments in the trunk, and we hugged all the Montoyos goodbye.

“Cinquième arrondissement, s’il vous plaît,”
Vivi said confidently as we settled in the backseat fumbling for nonexistent seat belts. Our cabdriver didn’t have a request, so we sang every verse we could remember of “This Land Is Your Land,” which only got us a dozen blocks. We made up new verses from our trip: “From the Latin Quarter to the Luxembourg Gardens,” and everything else we could make fit the tune—Australian schoolgirls and black turtleneck spy guys. It was lots of fun.

We drove through a roundabout that had one of those tall skinny steeples with Egyptian writing on it, but no church of any kind was attached. The traffic got heavier as we came close to the river. When we finally got to the bridge, we could see a film crew shooting a movie and a very bored-looking policeman waving traffic over to a different bridge. We poked along with the rest of the traffic and finally crossed the river on a bridge I hadn’t seen before. I was trying to concentrate on where we were, just in case, but the driver
had turned on what must have been the news in Arabic, and I was yawning and rubbing my eyes by the time we stopped at the little fountain in front of Shakespeare and Company.

The front door was closed and the lights were off.

“No!” Vivian said. “What time is it? How can it be midnight already?”

I looked at the clock in the cab. It was 12:15. “Oh man, fifteen minutes!”

“Someone is awake,” our cabdriver said. He pointed to the third window down from the door; a glow of lamplight came from inside. “There.”

We piled out of the cab and peeked in the downstairs window. There was a lamp on a little table, and a sofa with a pillow and blanket on it, but I didn’t see anyone in the room. The window was open an inch.

“Is this the poetry section?” I said. “Because I am not climbing in here if it is.”

A voice came from inside. “Do you really hate poetry that much?” The Einstein guy stood up from a rocking chair in the corner.

“You have no idea!” Giselle said.

“Well, as luck would have it, this is the philosophy section.”

“Thank heavens,” Vivian said. “Can you please unlock the door,
please?
We were only a tiny bit late.”

“No, I’m sorry, Annalies keeps the keys, and she is very particular.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” Giselle said. “All of our stuff is in there.”

“You look plenty spry to me,” the Einstein guy said. He slid up the window and held out his hand.

The driver got out of the cab laughing and set our instruments on the sidewalk. “Crazy Americans,” he said, and drove away.

“Come on, Vivi.” I made a step with my hands. “I’ll give you a boost.”

She stepped up on my hand. After Vivian got in, we handed her our violins and the cello, and Giselle gave me a boost. Then she put her hands on the windowsill and jumped up high enough to haul herself in headfirst and land in a heap on the threadbare carpet. A cascade of thick and dusty philosophy books followed her to the floor.

“There now.” The Einstein guy viewed the destruction of the philosophy room with some satisfaction. “Tell me that wasn’t fun.” He gave Giselle a hand up and then started picking up the books. “Wittgenstein hasn’t had this much fun in decades, I guarantee,” he said, brandishing a book with that name on it. “Nor Hegel. Now tiptoe upstairs, little ducklings, and don’t worry about the troll from the poetry section. He met an untimely end earlier today.”

“What happened?” I said. I picked up books from the floor and set them back on the shelf.

“George found out about the charming invitation you were offered this afternoon,” he said, and then, noticing the
looks we gave each other, he added, “George may look absentminded, but he knows about everything that happens in his shop.”

“Everything?”

“Everything.” He slid the window shut and placed the bar across to lock it. “There are only a few rules here. Make your bed in the morning. Read a book every day. And most importantly, writers deserve to be respected and cared for. When George heard what our resident poet had said to you, he hunted up a hardcover copy of Lolita, beat him over the head with it, and threw him out of the store.”

“Wow!” Giselle said.

“You’ve got to be kidding! Mr. Whitman did that?” Vivian said. “He doesn’t look sturdy enough to hit anyone.”

“Doubt his sanity if you like—we all do. But don’t doubt his strength or his faithfulness to his convictions.” The Einstein guy straightened up the last of the spilled philosophy books and brushed the dust from his rumpled plaid shirt. “George is a remarkable man with a keen instinct for the best and the worst in human nature. Stay here just a little while, and he’ll change you.”