Second Fiddle (12 page)

“Does your sister have a choir? Does she have a good voice?”

“Last time I heard her sing, she still had a little-girl
voice-all chirp like a bird. She will grow into a strong voice if she practices.”

“Practice makes your voice louder?” I said. “I thought some people were just naturally loud.” I was totally thinking of Giselle.

Arvo laughed. “Being bigger helps, but a strong voice takes practice. How about you? Are you in a choir now?”

“Oh no, I can’t sing!”

“Not sing? Bah! If you can breathe, you can sing.”

“No, really, I’m not a singer. I’m a composer.”

What on earth made me say that?

“A composer?” Arvo looked at me as if I’d just claimed I was a movie star. “Tell me what you write. Sing it.”

“It doesn’t have words. It’s classical music. It’s just the kind I know the best. I’ve got a lot to learn.” Usually when adults asked about my music, they were done being interested when I told them it was classical music.

“I would love to hear something you have written. Will you play it at your competition tomorrow?”

“No, we’re playing something traditional, Pachelbel’s Canon, but the piece I wrote is a canon, too.”

“Show me.”

“Seriously?”

“Please.”

I got off the backpack I’d been sitting on and took out my music notebook and the book light I used to read at night. I flipped through the first dozen pages to the opening
measure of “Canon for Three Friends.” We both scooted so we were sitting side by side with our backs against the wall.

“This is the part I play. The first violin for Vivian starts here.” I flipped ahead a half dozen pages. “This is Giselle’s cello part.”

“Ah, cello,” Arvo said, “the man’s voice.” He looked over Giselle’s part, fiddling with the book light so that it fell on the page. “Tempo?”

I tapped my hand on my knee for moderato speed. Arvo listened for two measures and then he started to sing the cello part—just dum, dum, dah, dee, dum—but it sounded exactly like it had in my head when I wrote it. I had been nervous when I wrote the cello part, because I couldn’t play the cello to check if my notes were correct. I closed my eyes to drink in the sound.

“Let’s hear it together,” Arvo said. “You sing the violin part.”

“I can’t sing.”

“Everyone can sing. If you can breathe—”

“—you can sing. Right. Okay, I’ll try.”

“What is your starting note?”

I closed my eyes, because I had the violin part memorized. I hummed my opening note, and Arvo hummed his. The notes fit together perfectly. I knew they would, but knowing it and hearing it are not the same thing. Arvo tapped his foot to the same tempo I’d just given him and we began. At first I was thinking, I hope he likes it. I hope he says it’s
good—I got distracted, and I was out of tune. But then I concentrated on my music, not just singing the right note, but singing the note with the right feeling. By the time we were all the way to the end, I didn’t need him to tell me anything. I knew.

woke up the next morning as the train slowed down on the outskirts of Paris. Vivian yawned and stretched in the window seat beside me, and Giselle got up mumbling something about a bathroom and a toothbrush. We got off at the Gare du Nord. Early-morning sun angled through the gray metal grid on the arched windows up by the ceiling. The lollipop-shaped lights were still lit on either side of the green columns that went the length of the station.

We headed toward the clock. I thought we’d have to wait for Arvo to get off the train, but he was there ahead of us, crutches tucked out of sight behind him, and a cap pulled low over his eyes. He didn’t look up as we came, so we stood nearby but pretended we were not together. I looked around for the spy guy, but there were hundreds of people in the station even though it was early in the morning.

“We need to find the Métro, right?” I said.

“Yeah,” Vivian said. “I looked at the map last night. We should take this red train to the Latin Quarter and get off at
Odéon and take the green line to Cluny, and then we are only three blocks from the Sorbonne.”

“Can you walk that far?” I whispered. Arvo gave an almost imperceptible nod.

“I think we need bathrooms first,” Vivian said. “To put on our recital clothes. I don’t even know if there will be changing rooms at the university.”

“Meet you at the Métro station,” I whispered, and Arvo headed slowly in the direction of the subway.

Giselle and I trooped after Vivian down a flight of stairs to the bathroom and changed into the black skirts and white blouses we always wore for competitions. We put up our hair. Mom thought the outfits made us look like real professionals. I thought they made us look like penguins. We clip-clopped back up the stairs in our dress shoes and headed for the university.

Two Métro rides later, we were walking through the Latin Quarter. The streets were narrow but not crowded so early on a Saturday morning. Except for some construction workers and one well-dressed groggy couple who seemed to be heading home from a Friday-night party, we were alone. We came to the iron gate and then the carved wooden front doors of the Sorbonne. We followed signs for the music competition to a lobby full of people with name tags. We fell into line behind a quartet of older girls and a mixed trio about our age. The registration table was staffed by a girl who looked like she was in high school and an older woman
who was deep in conversation with two other music teachers. We were safe, probably.

“Just sign Herr Müller’s name where they show you,” Vivi whispered to Arvo.

He signed the paper without looking up and inviting conversation. We got our program with the order of competition and followed the general tide of musicians down the hall and up two flights of stairs into an ancient lecture hall. Fancy plasterwork ringed the ceiling like frosting flowers around the edge of a wedding cake. The wooden floor was buffed to a honey-colored glow. The long wooden tables were pushed to the side and were so old, they probably had graffiti on them that said “Napoleon rocks!” Violin cases and sheets of music and backpacks and satchels were strewn about, and chairs were pulled up in groups as duos, trios, and quartets tuned and practiced their pieces.

I searched the room for an empty spot where we could have a little privacy to settle our nerves. A comfortably anonymous hum of voices in French, German, and Italian floated in the room, but then, a little louder than everyone else, I heard an unmistakably American voice. It was a flat, unmusical, middle-of-the-country voice. I turned around, and there was Mrs. Jorgenson and her string trio from Minneapolis, the trio that beat us in Frankfurt last year.

The kids were named Karl, Lazlo, and Megan, or maybe it was Maggie. There was no mistaking them; they were as pale as three puddles of milk. They looked like triplets with
stick-straight pale hair and broad shoulders. I’d heard that they were farm kids from dairy towns in Minnesota and their parents had sent them to the music boarding school in Minneapolis. Vivi had carried on last year about how stuck-up they were because they didn’t talk to her, but I could tell they were just shy. The girl smiled when she saw me, and I gave her a little wave.

Mrs. Jorgenson swooped over, all long black clothes and long black hair and dangly jewelry.

“Here you are,” she said, extending her hand palm down to show her magenta fingernails. I couldn’t make up my mind if she wanted me to shake her hand or not. Giselle glanced up from tuning her cello.

“The expatriates,” Mrs. Jorgenson said with a very lip-sticky smile. “We will have to be at our best to prevail today.”

I hated being called an expatriate, like patriotism was bad or hopelessly old-fashioned. Plus I hated when I couldn’t tell if what someone said was a compliment or a dig.

“How kind of you to say so,” Giselle said. She stood up as she said it and shook Mrs. Jorgenson’s hand. Giselle was taller than her, and she stood up good and straight to make a thing of it.

“Good luck,” I said, trying to match Giselle’s posture if I couldn’t manage her height.

The boy from the Minnesota trio who was standing nearest me, the cute one with the square glasses, said, “Thanks, you too.” He pulled a handful of Smarties out of his suit
pocket and held them out to me. I smiled and shook my head. He was wearing a hand-me-down shirt and tie, I could tell, and he acted like an international music competition was nothing to get worked up about. It made me think we could be friends if we lived in the same country.

“And where is Herr Müller?” Mrs. Jorgenson said, still smiling.

The three of us froze. I turned to Arvo, trying to think of how I could possibly explain. He was gone. I glanced all around the room, but Arvo had vanished.

“He must have stepped outside for a moment,” I said.

“He hasn’t been feeling well lately,” Vivi added.

“So I heard,” Mrs. Jorgenson said. “I’ll find him afterward.
Bonne chance.
” She turned back to her own trio.

Whew!

“I guess he decided to duck out of the room,” Giselle said.

“We don’t need him now that he signed us in,” I said. “But weird that he just disappeared without saying anything.”

I was disappointed. Now that I knew he loved music, I’d been hoping that he’d hear us play.

“Let’s run through the beginning and then the last eight measures,” Vivi said. We took our places and were just setting the tempo when the first measures of Pachelbel’s Canon came floating across the room from the Minnesota trio’s corner. All three of us stopped dead.

“They stole our song,” Giselle said. We stared at them for an entire sixteen measures.

“We’ll just have to play it better,” Vivian said. We listened to the rest of the opening section. They sounded good—tone, rhythm, everything.

“We play right after them,” I whispered. “Even if we play better, we’ll sound like copycats.”

“What can we do?” Vivian said with a shrug. “Play last year’s piece?”

Last year’s piece was good, but we’d lost to the Minnesota trio with it. We’d worked so hard to get to Paris. I wanted our song to be perfect. I wanted it to be ours.

“Wait.” I took out my music notebook and flipped to my composition. “We can play this.” I tore out the cello part, put it on Giselle’s stand, and set the first violin part on Vivi’s. “It’s not hard. It’s a canon, and it’s about us.”

“You wrote this?” Giselle said.

“Yeah.”

“Jody, this is amazing. Is this what you’ve been doing all year on the train?”

“Yeah. Look, we’re last. That means we’ve got more than an hour to practice. We can do this! The main theme is only twelve measures long, and it repeats a bunch of times. The bowing is not tricky at all. What do you think?”

Vivian was already going through her part, singing the melody line quietly, and Giselle was running her notes on the fingerboard without bowing.

“Oh yeah,” Vivian said. “This is good.” She read through to the end of the page. “This rocks!”

“Let me at it!” Giselle said, picking up her bow.

An hour and a half later we took the stage in the fanciest auditorium I’d ever seen in my life. It said
SALLE CARDINAL RICHELIEU
on the door, and it was breathtaking. The panel of three judges sat at a table directly in front of the stage, and an audience of a few dozen parents looked on. We were more nervous than we’d ever been. Giselle stood in front of us as Vivi and I took our places.

“Messieurs et mesdames,”
she said in her most polite command voice. “The Berlin American trio will have a change of program this morning. We will play the debut performance of ‘Canon for Three Friends.’ ”

The judges looked at each other over the tops of their glasses.

“It’s a composition by Jody Field.” She flapped her hand at me to get me to stand. I looked from one judge to the next, wondering if we were even allowed to change our program in the middle of the competition.

The three of them looked very stern, but then one of them said, “Very well,” in a British accent, and the old one said,
“Merci, mademoiselle,”
and gestured for me to sit down, and the one on the end actually smiled at me.