Pickup Notes

by Jane Lebak

  I couldn’t make a determination on first glance, so while we walked to Panera, I did the one thing I knew would make engaged couples talk. “How are you doing on the wedding-planning?”

  And instead of getting a list of gripes about the dress, the ring, the attendants, and her father who didn’t want to wear tails on his tuxedo, I got a glare at the ground. “I hate it. I hate every minute of this stupid wedding thing.”

  I said, “Um—”

  Harrison said, “Are you sure you want to be talking to us?”

  Oh, great, jettison our next paycheck. The groom said, “Chrissy’s mother is making it difficult.”

  “Difficult?” The bride tossed her head. “I don’t even know where to begin—everything is, ‘Oh, that’s not how Aurelia did it!’ Because for the rest of eternity, Aurelia’s wedding is the pinnacle of how weddings should have been, because of course Mom went out and planned her entire wedding and Aurelia did everything Mom wanted.”

  I said, “Aurelia’s your sister?”

  “Yes, and if she crashed her car into a bridge abutment, it would be the loveliest wreck you’ve ever seen, and I should have one just like it.”

  The groom snorted. I could already predict that if we signed this client, it would be the mother on the phone, demanding to hear us rehearse and asking for our exact shade of concert blacks. Our first Momzilla.

  The bride fumbled in her wallet for a fabric swatch, a glossy magenta that careened toward the brink of violet. “My mother wants this color for bridesmaid dresses, and she wants the tablecloths to match, but the caterers won’t match it because, get this, they don’t want fifty tablecloths that make people go blind.” I think there were tears in her eyes. “And in the middle of everything we had an infestation of fucking spiders in my apartment—like, a thousand of them, these stupid little white spiders crawling all over everything. And I’d be squashing them while my mom is on the phone telling me to call back the caterer and demand fuchsia table cloths. I thought this was supposed to be my wedding.”

  I whispered, “Oh my God.” I could just imagine if I ever got married. “Why don’t you elope?”

  Harrison said, “You don’t get presents if you elope.”

  I nearly swung the laptop case right at his skull because you can’t call a client greedy and expect her to stay, but the bride chuckled. “Yeah, pretty much. And everyone expects a big wedding. Like Aurelia’s. So we’ll go through with it.” She closed her eyes. “Although if I see even one more spider, I’m going to run away and never come back.”

  At Panera’s crowded counter we placed our orders, thankfully on the quartet’s dime rather than my own. Harrison offered to carry my lunch while I staked out a table.

  I opened the laptop and checked my email. One of the messages had a semi-familiar name, and the subject line “Hotel California.”

  The room tilted. Already? Word had gotten out already?

  When I opened the email, though, it was a message from last night’s videographer. “Great job! This was so awesome you have to have it, but don’t spread it around because I’m risking my neck getting it to you.”

  Very funny. Although—and here I sneaked a glance at the couple we were courting—maybe some mothers-of-the-bride did own a guillotine.

  Regardless, I opened the video to find three minutes of footage, starting with a drunken bride bellowing at Harrison. I hit pause.

  Harrison was still at the counter, so I fished out my headphones. Then, holding my breath, I clicked play. This was going to hurt; the only question was how bad.

  I expected humiliation, so I surprised myself by laughing. Harrison was totally flummoxed when the bride charged in and interrupted Beethoven. Typical Harrison. He shouldn’t have tried to reason with her. If he’d talked crazy back, maybe she’d have behaved.

  The camera didn’t have a good angle on me or Josh, but Shreya was right beside Harrison for the eruption of Mount Bride. When the bride went for my instrument, Shreya’s expression changed completely, from startled to angry to—determined?

  Now that was odd. And pretty cool.

  Scratch that: she was more than determined. By the time she stood, she was no longer Shreya. The first go-around seemed tentative. Then the wig came off and she cut loose, and her focus transformed to joy. I wasn’t imagining things last night: she did dance. She loved every second of it. To be that good—wow.

  It cut off before the bride started singing (thank goodness) so I dragged the video back to Shreya’s first riff, her bow mid-retake. I studied the layout, the ferocity in her eyes, the duo of black- and white-clad women at the center of a banquet hall, one spinning magic from the memory of a song. For the first time I thought maybe Harrison was right, that we could spin money out of magic.

  The bridal couple returned, and I shut the laptop.

  As they settled down, the bride across from me and the groom diagonal, the groom said, “So...what do you play?”

  At my side, Harrison handed them our song list. They scanned it like a menu in Russian. Awesome. We were about to lose a client.

  The bride’s cell phone went off, and she fished it out, laying her purse alongside her tray between her and her groom. And as she rolled her eyes saying, “Yeah, Mom, I’m meeting the musicians now…” I noticed movement near the strap. A tiny white spider.

  No, two spiders. Crawling out of her purse. And getting near her food.

  She snapped shut the cell phone, and before she could put it back in her bag, I leaned forward. “Okay, so you saw the song list and it made no sense, right? Well, it’s not supposed to.”

  She looked me in the eyes, and I stayed forward so she didn’t look down to see two spiders, start screaming, and then forever associate our quartet with arachnids. “Quartets perform a special kind of classical music called chamber music.” Come on, think, Joey. Think. Keep talking. “It was written by composers like Mozart and Beethoven for in-home performances among friends, each instrument taking a solo part. In some ways, it sounds like a conversation.”

  The bride smiled. “That’s pretty cool. You can make the instruments sound like friends talking to each other?”

  “Absolutely! And it’s the different combinations that make things so exciting!” I didn’t look away from her eyes. “The first violin and the cello, or the viola and two violins, or all four of us playing in unison. Think of all the ways you can churn things up because different combinations highlight different features. The mix-and-match game is a quartet at its best.”

  She hesitated. “What about when you’re at your worst?”

  I snickered. “We sound like you and your mom.”

  She laughed out loud, and I relaxed a bit. Okay, so this was a timid bride after all. “There are four of us—you know, the quartet part. Um—” The stupid spiders were up on her tray now. “So your basic chamber unit is the string trio: a violin, a viola, and a cello.” I had no idea what the groom was doing, but she was still looking me right in the face. Please don’t look down. Please don’t look down. “From there, you can go ahead and enhance it with something to take the difficult parts: an oboe quartet is an oboe, a violin, a viola, and a cello. With a flute quartet, you add a flute.” I smiled at her. “Would you care to guess the special instrument in a string quartet?”

  She giggled. “Another violin?”

  I pointed right at her. “Bingo!” Take that, Momzilla. Your daughter is going to be a great bride, even if the tablecloths don’t match. “That’s why there’s a first violin and a second violin. The first violin is the leader, giving the cues but also getting the most difficult parts. Usually it’s playing highest, so you hear it best.”

  The bride frowned. “But you said it’s like a group of friends.”

  I’d almost forgotten Harrison was there until he said, “We are friends, but a quartet needs someone in charge.”

  The bride reached for her bag to put back her phone, so I stretched across the table and took the song list from the groom, cutting her off. “A
lot of our songs are modern, as well, just arranged for a quartet.” I pointed to “The Entertainer” and “Eleanor Rigby.”

  I couldn’t keep leaning over the table forever, and those spiders were dangerously close to her sandwich.

  Our fearless leader then said, “You know, we need space for the computer,” and so help me, he dropped a napkin onto the tray, right over the pair of spiders. He cleared her drink and sandwich off the tray, then lifted it (spiders and all) and took my tray and set it on top of the other, like a spider sandwich. I stood her purse upright, hoping that would deter any remaining explorers, and as he left, I said, “Thank you.”

  He tossed over his shoulder, “That’s what fearless leaders are for.”

  I glanced at the groom, who was smirking. Great. He’d seen the things too. But at least she hadn’t.

  I set the computer further forward, but I couldn’t think of what to do with it. The bride dropped her phone back in her purse, then took a bite of her sandwich. After she swallowed, she said, “Okay, I figured this was all stiff-stuff, because Aurelia had a quartet. But you make it sound almost fun.”

  Harrison returned in time to say, “We can go one better than Aurelia. For a fee, we can work your special songs in with our repertoire.”

  I glared at him. He flashed me the adorable smile that meant he knew I wanted to club him to death with a panini.

  The bride looked puzzled. “You could play ‘Lady’ by Styx?”

  Harrison said, “Not just play it, but weave the main line into one of these quartets.”

  I cut off Harrison by saying, “We can’t guarantee any specific song at this point.”

  He leaned forward. “She’s too modest. Since this is our specialty, I’ll tell you that of course we can.”

  Oh, for crying out loud. There was being friendly to a timid bride, and there was insanity. “We’d have to look over the music first to make sure we could arrange an adaptation that would do justice to the wedding you’re planning.”

  The bride’s phone rang again. “You mean the wedding my mom’s planning,” and she took the call, so I opened the laptop and found a thirty second clip of “Lady.” As I suspected, helicopter crashes sounded more violinistic.

  The bride said, “Mom wants to know if you can play the ‘Ave Maria.’”

  I snickered. “If you ever meet a wedding quartet that can’t play the ‘Ave Maria,’ it’s because they’re living under a bridge with their hats out for spare change. I can play it in my sleep.”

  She said into the phone, “Yeah, Mom, they can do it. No, you can’t talk to them. They’re really busy,” and then hung up on her.

  Our henpecked bride was already looking bolder. “Okay, so let’s let’s back up. You can take ‘Lady’ and weave it into something done by Mozart? Not just play it, because I have to be honest: those versions sound lame.”

  “I think it will sound lame anyhow,” said the groom. “Sweetie,” and he turned to the bride, “if we’re going to have someone play ‘Lady,’ why not a cover band with electric guitars? Or a DJ?”

  She glared at the table. “Aurelia didn’t have a DJ.”

  The groom laughed, and that was the sound of an unsigned contract. “Honey, go one way or the other. Either get a string quartet to play whatever it is they play, or tell your mother to jump in the river and have what you want. You know I’ll support you.”

  My heart pounded. “Why not have both? For the rest of the evening, you could have a full complement of Haydn, Beethoven, and Mozart, but your first dance can be to ‘Lady.’ Aurelia won’t know what hit her.”

  The bride looked at her groom. “You know, you’re right. Why is my mother dictating everything all of a sudden? We can get a DJ and just have what we want. She’s going to complain anyhow, so she might as well complain about things we enjoyed.”

  I exclaimed, “But—”

  The bride picked up her purse and looked at me. “I’m sorry. We shouldn’t have wasted your time, but you were really helpful.”

  Harrison said urgently, “You know, if you listen to our CD—”

  “Before you go,” I said loudly, interrupting Harrison’s interruption, “watch this.”

  I had left the video open in my web browser, poised right after the drunken bride backed off. I clicked to start and handed over the laptop.

  Despite the volume of all Manhattan at lunch, the speakers did their job. As Shreya’s riff skirted the edges of my hearing, the bride’s pupils widened. At the point when Shreya began dancing, the groom’s mouth opened.

  Harrison murmured in my ear, “What the hell?”

  The groom said, “She’s astonishing.”

  I beamed. “That’s Shreya Ramachandran, our second violinist.”

  The groom’s head shot up. “Second violinist? But you said—”

  I jerked my thumb toward Harrison. “He’s the first.” Folding my arms, I probably looked confident. Or something. “You can hear we don’t sound ridiculous. Why would we promise what we couldn’t deliver?”

  Well, for the money. But with their wedding a year away, surely we could cobble together something.

  The bride looked up from the screen. “Why’d she take off the wig?”

  “Working the crowd.” I had no idea why Shreya pulled off the wig. Who knew what Shreya ever thought?

  When the video ended, I pulled back the laptop so the bride couldn’t hit replay and see we’d pulled this out of a top-hat like a magician’s rabbit. She looked up, taken aback, but I only clicked the laptop shut. In the marketing books they said keep ’em wanting more. Now it was a necessity.

  I put steel into my voice. “And that’s the kind of violinistic rock theme we fold into a traditional Mozartian quartet.”

  Dear God, Harrison had infected me. I’d said both violinistic and Mozartian.

  The groom said, “Okay, I’m convinced.”

  The bride bit her lip. “I still don’t know. I mean, my mother—”

  Harrison picked up her fabric swatch. “You know, you were talking about the details. Let’s blow your mom out of the water. For a small fee, our second violinist will dye her hair to match.”

  Yeah. That bride couldn’t get her signature on the paper fast enough.

  Harrison was ebullient. “I can’t believe you did that!”

  Me, not so much. “And I can’t believe you did that.” We walked toward the subway, my brain terribly conscious of a three hundred dollar check in my wallet. “You’re out of control!”

  He snickered. “How is that any different from changing our song list?”

  My voice edged toward outraged. “How is selling Shreya’s body different from playing Henley instead of Haydn?”

  “She dyes her hair blue. Why would she care?”

  I handed him my phone. “Want to find out right now?”

  I wouldn’t cash that check before Harrison consulted her, that was for sure.

  When he didn’t take it, I muttered, “I notice you didn’t offer to dye your own hair.”

  “And I notice you suddenly became the biggest champion of string fusion.”

  “Don’t you even—?” My voice broke, and I stopped to face him. Pedestrians parted around us like a stream around a boulder. “Without clients we aren’t a string quartet. I’ll go along with you, but we have to do it right. We can’t count on Shreya to pull us out of the fire whenever things get hot.”

  Of course, Harrison didn’t look at all contrite. “You need to trust me that this will work.”

  “I don’t need to trust you.” I folded my arms. “I need the quartet to survive.”

  FIVE

  The Saturday after our first stay at the Hotel California, we were booked for a dignified evening wedding.

  Per usual, Josh decided to drive rather than entertain the whole subway system by lugging a cello while wearing a tuxedo. Also per usual, he offered me a ride.

  I knew what to expect. I accepted anyhow.

  It wasn’t that he sweet-talked me into it. He
could have sweet-talked me into anything if he wanted to, but he never tried. No, he just went with the straight-forward, hesitant, “You want a lll-lift?” and then a soft, almost shy, “I’ll p-p-p-pick you up at five-thirty,” and I said yes.

  Like a gourmet wine-taster, after seventeen years I’d learned to identify and even predict Josh’s three different stutters: blocks (when the sound wouldn’t form), repetitions (s-s-s-sandwich), or prolongations, when he’d drag out a syllable (sss-sandwich). Back when we used to talk on the phone for hours, I’d find myself thinking in his stuttering rhythm, and I’d have to remind myself not to do it out loud. I didn’t know how he’d react, if he’d think I was making fun of him. He’d certainly be justified.

  The sound itself was pretty cool, especially when he was relaxed, almost soothing in the way you could take your time and really listen. What unnerved me were the things they call stuttering “secondaries,” the way someone who stutters does things he subconsciously associates with speaking fluently. When Josh blinked rapidly or twitched his head to the side, those things that made people stare until I wanted to melt into the floor—those were secondaries. He avoided eye contact, but I’d learned it wasn’t that he didn’t want to look at me: that was just something most stutterers do.

  For the most part, it wasn’t a big deal. He said what he needed to say, hesitant and never quite looking at you. He sang without a problem. Reciting in tandem with someone else, he was fluent. Sometimes he and Harrison, going over a difficult section, could say the notes for each part in time to each other, and Josh never stuttered. Although anxiety itself didn’t cause stuttering, when relaxed, he stuttered less.

  And when he drove, he swore fluently.

  At exactly five-thirty he pulled up outside my house in a scuffed black Jetta with the logo missing. A perfect gentleman, he even opened the door. He looked good: tall, trim, well-tailored, and with that sudden look-away that made him seem coy. He waited for me to buckle in before turning on the engine, and he offered me the choice of radio stations.