Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (12 page)

He’s the man who wrote the letter,
she thinks.
The man who wants me to play for him.
For some reason she had expected him to be a great deal younger and not so fat. He looks a bit like Captain Kangaroo, this man, and he waves and calls her name and smiles. And the violinist wishes that the taxi were still waiting there to take her back to the station, that she didn’t need the money the fat man in the yellow house had offered her, that she’d had the good sense to stay in the city where she belongs.
You could still turn and walk away,
she reminds herself.
There’s nothing at all stopping you from just turning right around, and walking away, and never once looking back, and you could still forget about this whole ridiculous affair.

And maybe that’s true, and maybe it isn’t, but there’s more than a month’s rent on the line, and the way work’s been lately, a few students and catch-as-catch-can, she can’t afford to find out. She nods and waves back at the smiling man on the porch, the man who told her not to bring her own instrument because he’d prefer to hear her play a particular one that he’d just brought back from a trip to Europe.

“Come on inside. You must be freezing out there,” he calls from the porch, and the violinist tries not to think about the sea all around her or that shade of yellow, like a pool of melted butter, and goes to meet the man who sent her the lilac-scented letter.

The Collector makes a steaming-hot pot of Red Zinger, which the violinist takes without honey, and they each have a poppy-seed muffin, which he bought fresh that morning at a bakery in the village. They sit across from one another at his desk, surrounded by the display cases and the best of his ammonites, and she sips her tea and picks at the muffin and pretends to be interested while he explains the importance of recognizing sexual dimorphism when distinguishing one species of ammonite from another. The shells of females, he says, are often the larger, and so are called macroconchs by paleontologists. The males may have much smaller shells, called microconchs, and one must always be careful not to mistake the microconchs and macroconchs for two distinct species. He also talks about extinction rates, and the utility of ammonites as index fossils, and
Parapuzosia bradyi,
a giant among ammonites and the largest specimen in his collection, with a shell measuring only slightly under six feet in diameter, a Kraken of the warm Cretaceous seas.

“They’re all quite beautiful,” she says, and the violinist doesn’t tell him how much she hates the sea and everything that comes from the sea, or that the thought of all the fleshy, tentacled creatures that once lived stuffed inside those pretty spiral shells makes her skin crawl. She sips her Red Zinger and smiles and nods her head whenever it seems appropriate to do so, and when he asks if he can call her Ellen, she says yes, of course.

“You won’t think me too familiar?”

“Don’t be silly,” she replies, half charmed at his manners and wondering if he’s gay or just a lonely old man who’s grown a bit peculiar because he has nothing but his rocks and the yellow house for company. “That’s my name. My name is Ellen.”

“I wouldn’t want to make you uncomfortable or take liberties that are not mine to take,” the Collector says and clears away their china cups and saucers, the crumpled paper napkins and a few uneaten crumbs, and then he asks if she’s ready to see the violin.

“If you’re ready to show it to me,” she tells him.

“It’s just that I don’t want to rush you,” he says. “We could always talk some more, if you’d like.”

And so the violinist explains to him that she’s never felt comfortable with conversation, or with language in general, and that she’s always suspected she was much better suited to speaking through her music. “Sometimes, I think it speaks for me,” she tells him and apologizes, because she often apologizes when she’s actually done nothing wrong. The Collector grins and laughs softly and taps the side of his nose with his left index finger.

“The way I see it, language is language is language,” he says. “Words or music, bird songs or all the fancy, flashing colors made by chemoluminescent squids, what’s the difference? I’ll take conversation however I can wrangle it.” And then he unlocks one of the desk drawers with a tiny brass-colored key and takes out the case containing the Belgian violin.

“If words don’t come when you call them, then, by all means, please, talk to me with this,” and he flips up the latches on the side of the case and opens it so she can see the instrument cradled inside.

“Oh my,” she says, all her awkwardness and unease forgotten at the sight of the ammonite violin. “I’ve never seen anything like it. Never. It’s lovely. No, it’s much,
much
more than lovely.”

“Then you will play it for me?”

“May I touch it?” she asks, and he laughs again.

“I can’t imagine how you’ll play it otherwise.”

Ellen gently lifts the violin from its case, the way that some people might lift a newborn child, or a Minoan vase, or a stoppered bottle of nitroglycerine, the way the Collector would lift a particularly fragile ammonite from its bed of excelsior. It’s heavier than any violin she’s held before, and she guesses that the unexpected weight must be from the fossil shells set into the instrument. She wonders how they will affect the sound, those five ancient stones, how they might warp and alter this violin’s voice.

“It’s never been played, except by the man who made it, and that hardly seems to count. You, my dear, will be the very first.”

And she almost asks him why
her,
because surely, for what he’s paying, he could have lured some other, more talented player out here to his little yellow house. Surely someone a bit more celebrated, more accomplished, someone who doesn’t have to take in students to make the rent, but would still be flattered and intrigued enough by the offer to come all the way to this squalid little village by the sea and play the fat man’s violin for him. But then she thinks it would be rude, and she almost apologizes for a question she hasn’t even asked.

As if he might have read her mind, and so maybe she should have apologized after all, the Collector shrugs his shoulders and dabs at the corners of his mouth with a white linen handkerchief he’s pulled from a shirt pocket. “The universe is a marvelously complex bit of craftsmanship,” he says. “And sometimes one must look very closely to even begin to understand how a given thing connects with another. Your late sister, for instance – ”

“My
sister?
” she asks and looks up, surprised and glancing away from the ammonite violin and into the friendly, smiling eyes of the Collector. All at once, there’s a cold knot deep in her belly and an unpleasant pricking sensation along her forearms and the back of her neck, goose bumps and histrionic ghost-story clichés, and now the violin feels unclean and dangerous, and she wants to return it to its case. “What do you know about my sister?”

The Collector blushes and peers down at his hands, folded there in front of him on the desk. He begins to speak and stammers, as if, possibly, he’s really no better with words than she.

“What do you know about my sister?” Ellen asks again. “How do you know about her?”

The Collector frowns and licks nervously at his chapped lips. “I’m sorry,” he says. “That was terribly tactless of me. I should not have brought it up.”

“
How
do you know about my sister?”

“It’s not exactly a secret, is it?” the Collector asks, letting his eyes drift by slow, calculated degrees from his hands and the desktop to her face. “I do read the newspapers. I don’t usually watch television, but I imagine it was there, as well. She was murdered – ”

“They don’t
know
that. No one knows that for sure. She is
missing,
” the violinist says, hissing the last word between clenched teeth.

“Well, then she’s been missing for quite some time,” the Collector replies, feeling the smallest bit braver now and beginning to suspect he hasn’t quite overplayed his hand.

“But they do not know that she’s been murdered. They don’t know that. No one ever found her body,” and then Ellen decides that she’s said far too much and stares down at the fat man’s violin. She can’t imagine how she ever thought it a lovely thing, only a moment or two before, this grotesque
parody
of a violin resting in her lap. It’s more like a gargoyle, she thinks, or a sideshow freak, or a sick, sick joke, and suddenly she wants very badly to wash her hands.

“Please forgive me,” the Collector says, sounding as sincere and contrite as any lonely man in a yellow house by the sea has ever sounded. “I am unaccustomed to company. I forget myself and say things I shouldn’t. Please, Ellen. Play it for me. You’ve come all this way, and I would so love to hear you play. It would be such a pity if I’ve gone and spoiled it all with a few inconsiderate words. I so admire your work.”

“No one
admires
my work,” she replies, wondering how long it would take the taxi to show up and carry her back over the muddy, murky river, past the rows of empty warehouses to the depot, and how long she’d have to wait for the next train to New York. “I still don’t even understand how you found me.”

And at this opportunity to redeem himself, the Collector’s face brightens, and he leans across the desk towards her. “Then I will tell you, if that will put your mind at ease. I saw you play at an art opening in Manhattan, you and your sister, a year or so back. At a gallery on Mercer Street. It was called…damn, it’s right on the tip of my tongue.”

“Eyecon,” Ellen says, almost whispering. “The name of the gallery is Eyecon.”

“Yes, yes, that’s it. Thank you. I thought it was such a very silly name for a gallery, but then I’ve never cared for puns and wordplay. It was at a reception for a French painter, Albert Perrault, and I confess I found him quite completely hideous, and his paintings were dreadful, but I loved listening to the two of you play. I called the gallery, and they were nice enough to tell me how I could contact you.”

“I didn’t like his paintings, either. That was the last time we played together, my sister and I,” Ellen says, and she presses a thumb to the ammonite shell that forms the violin’s scroll.

“I didn’t know that. I’m sorry, Ellen. I wasn’t trying to dredge up bad memories.”

“It’s not a
bad
memory,” she says, wishing it were all that simple and that were exactly the truth, and then she reaches for the violin’s bow, which is still lying in the case lined with silk dyed the color of ripe pomegranates.

“I’m sorry,” the Collector says again, certain now that he hasn’t frightened her away, that everything is going precisely as planned. “Please, I only want to hear you play again.”

“I’ll need to tune it,” Ellen tells him, because she’s come this far, and she needs the money, and there’s nothing the fat man has said that doesn’t add up.

“Naturally,” he replies. “I’ll go to the kitchen and make us another pot of tea, and you can call me whenever you’re ready.”

“I’ll need a tuning fork,” she says, because she hasn’t seen any sign of a piano in the yellow house. “Or if you have a metronome that has a tuner, that would work.”

The Collector promptly produces a steel tuning fork from another of the drawers, and slides it across the desk to the violinist. She thanks him, and when he’s left the room and she’s alone with the ammonite violin and all the tall cases filled with fossils and the amber wash of incandescent bulbs, she glances at a window and sees that it’s already dark outside
. I will play for him,
she thinks.
I’ll play on his violin, and drink his tea, and smile, and then he’ll pay me for my time and trouble. I’ll go back to the city, and tomorrow or the next day, I’ll be glad that I didn’t chicken out. Tomorrow or the next day, it’ll all seem silly, that I was afraid of a sad old man who lives in an ugly yellow house and collects rocks.

“I will,” she says out loud. “That’s exactly how it will go,” and then Ellen begins to tune the ammonite violin.

And after he brings her a rickety old music stand, something that looks like it has survived half a century of high-school marching bands, he sits behind his desk, sipping a fresh cup of tea, and she sits in the overlapping pools of light from the display cases. He asked for Paganini; specifically, he asked for Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 3 in E. She would have preferred something contemporary – Górecki, maybe, or Philip Glass, a little something she knows from memory – but he had the sheet music for Paganini, and it’s his violin, and he’s the one who’s writing the check.

“Now?” she asks, and he nods his head.

“Yes, please,” he replies and raises his tea cup as if to toast her.

So Ellen lifts the violin, supporting it with her left shoulder, bracing it firmly with her chin, and studies the sheet music a moment or two more before she begins.
Introduzione, allegro marziale,
and she wonders if he expects to hear all three movements, start to finish, or if he’ll stop her when he’s heard enough. She takes a deep breath and begins to play.

From his seat at the desk, the Collector closes his eyes as the lilting voice of the ammonite violin fills the room. He closes his eyes tightly and remembers another winter night, almost an entire year come and gone since then, but it might only have been yesterday, so clear are his memories. His collection of suffocations may indeed be more commonplace, as he has been led to conclude, but it is also the less frequently indulged of his two passions. He could never name the date and place of each and every ammonite acquisition, but in his brain the Collector carries a faultless accounting of all the suffocations. There have been sixteen, sixteen in twenty-one years, and now it has been almost one year to the night since the most recent. Perhaps, he thinks, he should have waited for the anniversary, but when the package arrived from Belgium, his enthusiasm and impatience got the better of him. When he wrote the violinist his lilac-scented note, he wrote “at your earliest possible convenience” and underlined “earliest” twice.

And here she is, and Paganini flows from out the ammonite violin just as it flowed from his car stereo that freezing night, one year ago, and his heart is beating so fast, so hard, racing itself and all his bright and breathless memories.