His question hangs in the air unanswered as she slowly quarters an orange with her Opinel and then bites into a wedge. He’s asked this question before and knows it annoys her, but he repeats it anyway. He needs her answer more than he needs anything else, and perhaps because it’s his birthday, this time he gets one.
“You’re a good person, Liam. One of the best. But you’re just one person,” she says, sucking pulp from her teeth and spitting it into the sand. “Nature is greater than us all.”
THE VIOLA
DURING MEENA’S TWO-MONTH trip to Prague, Liam manages to beat back his cravings for Oxycodone by throwing himself into a series of complex contracts: huge gut-jobs for which he refuses to hire a helper. And when she finally returns, things are good for a while. That is, until she first brings the Stradivarius home.
“Officially,” Meena tells him excitedly that night over Korean takeout, “it’s known as ‘the Russian Viola’ because it was once the property of the Soviet state. But after glasnost, it fell into the hands of a woman named Tanya Petrov, an oil oligarch’s wife who’s since fled St. Petersburg and now fancies herself a patron of the arts. She heard me play in Prague, and has loaned it to me for the weekend while she’s in New York.”
“Wow, that’s great,” Liam says, stretching for enthusiasm. In truth, he hates all this talk of Europe and rich patrons loaning Meena irreplaceable items, favours for which she’ll be indebted forever.
After dinner, Meena lifts the viola from its military-grade Kevlar case and plays it for Liam as he does the dishes in his wood-shrouded kitchen that still smells faintly of varnish. His eyes well up at the instrument’s lush yet precise sound, though after she’s finished the piece, he claims to prefer the sturdy resonance of her regular viola.
Later, while Meena showers, Liam takes up the Stradivarius in his rough, splinter-ridden hands. Though his first instinct is to criticize it, he can’t resist admiring its magnificent workmanship. Some species of spruce on top, what looks like willow for the internal blocking and lining, then rigid old-growth maple for the back, ribs, and neck. Everywhere the grain, joinery, and finish are impeccable. Covertly, he snaps some reference photographs with his phone while memorizing the object’s every texture and nuance. When Meena emerges towelling her hair, he expresses his unease at having such a priceless object in their home. “This thing’s worth more than everything we’ve ever owned or will own in our entire lives,” he says.
“Oh, it’s insured,” she says nonchalantly.
Still, he has trouble sleeping, especially given the wretched souls that patrol his up-and-coming neighbourhood—people sunk to a hopeless impoverishment he seldom witnessed in Canada. Much to his relief, Meena returns the viola before flying back to L.A. that Monday for a concert. Yet the next weekend she appears with the case in tow, and after that comes a semi-permanent loan. As Liam feared, with Meena now associated with the Russian viola’s mystique, there’s a flood of new bookings, including solos and lucrative guest gigs overseas with prestigious quartets. When Tanya Petrov invites Meena to perform at a party she’s hosting at the Waldorf Astoria, Liam claims he doesn’t have a suit and spends the evening at home, running some oak cabinet fronts that have warped through his planer.
After what feels like just a few weeks at home, Meena leaves again for a one-month European tour. To keep himself from asking the neighbourhood crackheads to score him some oxys, Liam reads up on the viola’s construction. He hurls himself into the research—he hasn’t read this much since cramming for his carpentry ticket—and unearths obscure theories about how Stradivari achieved his iconic resonance. It’s believed that he first treated the wood with mineral solutions—sodium, potassium silicate, borax—and then coated it with a lacquer of vernice bianca, egg white, honey, and acacia sap. Whenever Liam’s questions linger unanswered, he phones experts on the subject, fusty professors at universities in Vienna or Florence, who sigh at his intricately technical queries but answer them nonetheless. Liam learns that while some assert that Stradivari used only reclaimed wood salvaged from ancient cathedrals, perhaps even from crosses themselves, tree-ring dating has proven these theories false. “So they could be made from modern wood, you’re saying?” Liam asks, and the professor replies: “Oh yes, of course.”
Liam orders the clearest slabs of the required wood from online dealers and builds a steaming rig in his basement. Like Stradivari, he constructs his instrument by way of an inner form, rather than the copyists like Vuillaume, who used outer forms to approximate the shape. Even after Meena returns, Liam remains immersed in the project, forbidding her to go down to the basement, where he plays his music loud to cover the whir of his band saw as he cuts the instrument’s curves. For finer scrollwork he breaks out the hand tools—carving gouges, knives, scrapers, and tiny finger planes that he inherited from his great-uncle, who’d made chess pieces in his later years. Liam knows that if the viola is out even a tenth of a millimetre, the sound will be off, and though Meena may claim to love it, she’ll secretly sense its imperfections—an outcome too crushing to contemplate.
In all his years of woodworking, Liam has never before made something so alive, with the shape of a human form and the timbre of a human voice. And after he finishes sanding the joins and is applying the last coat of precisely concocted varnish with a sable fur brush, he’s struck by the realization that perhaps his mother had been right: maybe trees do have souls. Which makes wood a kind of flesh. And perhaps instruments of wooden construction sound so pleasing to our ears for this reason: the choral shimmer of a guitar; the heartbeat thump of drums; the mournful wail of violins—we love them because they sound like us.
At the end of nearly three months of toil and frustration, the viola is ready. And when Meena is in New York over her thirty-second-birthday weekend, they have dinner at an expensive restaurant Liam once renovated in Red Hook. After they’ve returned home and made love for what will be the final time, he goes down to the basement then returns to the bedroom with the viola.
“What’s this?” she says, setting her wine down on the nightstand.
Proudly, he lays the instrument in her hands. “It’s a gift.”
“It’s exquisite,” she says. She sits studying the instrument with tentative fascination, feeling its smooth neck, testing the action of the strings with the thick pads of her fingers. “Where’d you get it?”
“I made it,” he says, trying but failing to swallow the sour paste that has inexplicably begun to seep into his mouth. “For you.”
Suddenly she lays the viola down on the quilt, as if it’s grown hot and painful to hold. “Oh, Liam,” she says, covering her mouth with her hand, her unfocused eyes casting around the bedroom. Then she rises to stand beside the bed. “I can’t accept this,” she says, shaking her head. “It’s too much.”
“You need to play it first,” he says, feeling a kind of cold desperation grip him—something he hasn’t felt since those days detoxing in Willow’s van. “I did hours of research. It’s the exact replica of a Strad.”