The third violin

At bar forty one, the fluorescent tube above the second violins began to buzz. I was holding a G that was supposed to grow out of silence, and I could hear the tube through all four strings.

Dario stopped me with two fingers in the air.

“Again from thirty eight. Leave room before the high note.”

I nodded as if leaving room had never occurred to me. Rosin flakes showed white on my new black trousers. I brushed at them with the back of my hand, missed most of them, and raised my bow.

I had practiced the solo in Night Ferry for four months. Our community orchestra had played the piece once before, when its composer still lived in town, and I had spent that concert counting rests in the second violins while a guest soloist played the part I wanted. When Dario announced that a member could audition for it this time, I began getting up forty minutes early. My downstairs neighbor began leaving notes.

I played the phrase again. This time I waited, took the high note cleanly, and let it go before my bow ran out.

“Thank you, Bea,” Dario said. He looked at the folding chair beside me. “Mara?”

Mara had joined the orchestra three weeks earlier. She was twenty four, perhaps twenty five, and still wore a grocery store polo under her concert black. She tucked her hair behind one ear, stepped past my chair, and opened a score that looked as if it had come off the printer that morning.

I wanted her first note to squeak. I am capable of wanting worse things, but that was all I asked for then.

It did not squeak. She found the quiet opening at once. Her bow stayed close to the string, and when the melody climbed she did not hurry to prove she could reach the top. By the time she got to bar forty one, I had folded my hands around my violin so I would stop testing the tackiness of my own rosin.

Dario let the last note die. A chair creaked near the basses.

“Mara will play the solo,” he said. “Bea, I’d like you on third violin. First stand.”

There were only three third violins. The part had been written to add a pulse beneath the larger violin sections. In most of the piece it consisted of rests, paired eighth notes, and the occasional long tone that nobody was likely to leave humming.

“Sure,” I said.

Dario’s eyebrows went up. He knew my “sure.” It was the sound I made at work when someone asked me to rearrange a meeting I had already rearranged twice.

“You know the piece,” he said. “They’ll need a steady lead.”

I put my violin away before anyone could offer another consolation.

In the hallway, I bought a coffee from the vending machine. It came out the color of wet cardboard and hot enough to remove a fingerprint. Mara followed me, carrying her case by the handle.

“You played that opening beautifully,” she said.

I took a sip, though I knew better. “You played the rest beautifully.”

She gave a brief laugh. “I lost the beat before the bridge.”

“You found it.”

“My teacher used to say that after I got lost on purpose.”

She was making conversation. I was busy calculating how young a person could be and still have a teacher in the past tense. Dario came out of the rehearsal room with his pencil behind his ear.

“Bea, your solo score has the cut and my cues marked in it, right?”

I looked down at my case. The score was in the outside pocket, its corners softened by months on my kitchen table.

“Right.”

“Give it to Mara before Monday. The clean copies are wrong at sixty four.”

“I need to copy a couple of bowings first.”

“Then do that tonight.”

He went back inside. Mara pulled out her phone.

“I can send you my number,” she said. “Or I can meet you here Monday.”

“I’ll bring it Monday.”

She nodded. “Thanks.”

I carried the score home and set it beside my music stand. At bar sixty four, Dario had drawn a thick pencil line through eight measures and written oboe, then you beside Mara’s next entrance. My own penciled marks crowded the margins: a breath before the bridge, a warning not to rush, two arrows where I wanted more bow.

I copied my bowings onto a loose page. Then I put the marked score back in my case.

---

Mara missed Monday’s rehearsal. At six twenty, Dario read a message from her aloud because people kept asking where the soloist was. A cashier at the store had called in sick, and Mara had taken the shift.

At break, I sat with the third violins under the buzzing tube. Ruth, on my left, was retired and played with the fierce concentration of someone assembling furniture from a poor diagram. Colin, on my right, had returned to the violin after thirty years and owned a better instrument than either of us. We worked through our paired eighth notes. Without the solo, it was hard to tell what they were holding up.

On Wednesday, Mara arrived twenty minutes late, still in her polo. She apologized to Dario, to the concertmaster, and to the room in general. I thought apologies should be issued in order of usefulness, but nobody had asked me.

Dario tapped his stand. “We have the hall until nine. One run from fifty two, then the coda.”

Mara opened a clean score. From three chairs away I could see the white page with its unbroken block of music at sixty four. My case rested against my ankle. I touched it once with my shoe.

I could still give her the marked copy. Dario was speaking to the oboe. Mara was tightening her bow. There was time to cross the room.

I told myself she might have gotten the changes from Dario. A soloist ought to ask, anyway. I sat up straight and left my case zipped.

Dario brought us in. The cellos moved underneath Mara’s melody, and for a while the piece behaved. I watched his left hand rise toward the cut. At sixty four he cued the oboe to jump ahead. Mara played the first measure of the eight we no longer used. Her run landed across the oboe’s entrance, bright and wrong.

Dario stopped us. “From the oboe cue. Mara, come in after.”

“After which bar?” she asked.

“Seventy three.”

She turned a page. “I’m at sixty five.”

He stared at the score on her stand. The oboist lowered her instrument. Someone in the back said, “Oh.”

“Where’s the marked part?” Dario asked.

I bent over my case. The zipper sounded much louder than it ever had at home.

“Here,” I said.

He took the score, opened it to the cut, and looked at me. “I asked you to give her this.”

“I know.”

Mara was close enough to see my pencil marks. She took the score from Dario without looking at me.

We tried again. She found the entrance, but we had lost the shape of the passage. On the next run, the cellos waited for a solo phrase that no longer came, and Dario stopped to sort out their cue. When we reached the coda, the custodian appeared in the doorway holding a ring of keys. Nine o’clock.

Dario closed his score. “We’ll start there Tuesday. Mara, keep that copy. Bea, put the cut in your third part.”

Chairs scraped. Ruth asked me whether we still entered with the clarinet at the end. I said I thought so. I had listened to the solo for months and could not give her a confident answer about the part in front of me.

Mara was waiting by the vending machine when I came out. She had my marked score open to bar sixty four.

“You knew I had the clean copy,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you hand this over?”

My coffee from the audition was still a sour memory on my tongue. I did not buy another.

“I wanted you to miss something,” I said. “I thought Dario might hear that I was ready and you weren’t.”

She pressed the score closed with her palm. “I missed Monday and walked in late tonight. He already heard.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I could have asked you for it on Monday,” she said. “Then I wasn’t here Monday.”

She shifted the violin case on her shoulder. For a moment I thought she would leave. Instead she said, “I have a break tomorrow at three. Twenty five minutes. Can you make it to the store?”

“Yes.”

“Bring your third part. I need to hear what happens after the cut, not just read your arrows.”

---

At three the next afternoon, the store was full of people buying ingredients for dinner before they knew what dinner would be. Mara met me beside a stack of paper towels. Her name tag hung crooked. She had traded her break with another cashier, she said, and had to be back at the register at three thirty.

There was nowhere to play. We sat at a small table near the front window and spread our music between two abandoned shopping flyers. A refrigeration unit clicked on behind us. I tapped the rhythm of my third part with one finger.

“Here’s the oboe,” I said. “Then I have these two notes. You enter after the second pair.”

“I thought you were with the cellos.”

“I thought so too, until last night.”

Mara looked up. “You haven’t played it through?”

“I kept checking my entrances. I forgot to count what you were playing.”

She drew a little circle around my entrance in her score. She did not copy any of the bowings I had written into the solo.

“Do you hate all of these?” I asked.

“No. I don’t know yet.” She pointed to an arrow near the bridge. “This one makes me run out of bow before the long note.”

I started to defend it, then remembered that she had made the long note work at the audition. She changed the bowing in her own copy. I watched her do it. The score had been mine for four months, but the pencil was in her hand now.

At three twenty eight, she tucked the pages under her arm.

“I can’t stay tonight,” she said. “Friday after my shift, maybe. I’m supposed to close, but I’ll ask someone to trade.”

“Text me when you know.”

“I will.”

She did text. On Friday she was still fifteen minutes late.

I waited on the steps outside the rehearsal hall with my case between my feet. At six fifteen, I considered going home. I could have sent her a recording of the third part. I could have told Dario I had tried. I was rehearsing both messages in my head when Mara came around the corner at a run, carrying a paper bag that smelled of oranges.

“I should have texted,” she said before I could speak. “I got out and had to wait for the bus. I’m sorry.”

“You did get the shift traded?”

“I owe Tina a Sunday opening.”

I unlocked the side door with the key Dario had left at the community center desk. We had booked the small meeting room, where a stack of chairs stood against the wall and the ceiling lights had switches we could control. Mara turned off the one that buzzed.

I took my cheap rubber mute from its coin pouch. I kept it there because the little piece vanished in the lining of my case, and because my downstairs neighbor had once come up to tell me exactly how many times I had played a difficult passage. Mara had a mute too, a heavy one that made her violin sound thin in the small room.

We began at fifty two. Without the orchestra, she entered late.

“Again,” she said.

We tried with me tapping the missing oboe cue against my knee. She came in on time, but my third part sped up as soon as she joined me.

“Is that what happened in your audition?” she asked.

I stopped. “What?”

“At the bridge. Dario kept pulling you back.”

I had noticed him moving his hand. I had decided he was impatient.

“Yes,” I said. “Probably.”

Mara set her bow across her lap. “I can follow you if you stay where the beat is.”

It was an irritatingly reasonable request. I played the two notes again, slower, and kept the space between them even when her melody arrived. On the third try, I heard how her entrance crossed mine. If I hurried, I crowded the first note she had room to hold. If I stayed put, it sounded.

We made it through the coda twice. Mara missed one entrance and stopped us herself. I missed another while watching her fingers. We agreed that at the concert she would look toward me after the oboe, and I would keep my bow moving through both pairs of notes. She photographed the page with the cut before we packed up.

On Tuesday, Mara arrived before me. She had marked the cut in two colors and told Dario she had traded her concert night shift for Sunday morning. Dario said, “Good. From fifty two.”

We got through the passage without stopping. At the coda, he made us repeat the last ten bars because the third violins swallowed their low D beneath the violas. I had been playing cautiously, afraid of making our small part too noticeable.

“More string,” Dario said to me. “Mara needs that note.”

We tried again. The low D stayed audible this time. Mara’s high A rested above it for four beats. I could hear a slight wavering between the notes from where I sat. Dario lowered his hands.

“Fine,” he said, and turned to the brass.

That was Dario at his most lavish.

---

The concert was on a Saturday in the town auditorium, where the stage smelled of warm dust and somebody had taped the curled edges of the carpet near the basses. Ruth arrived with peppermints for our stand. Colin arrived with a new shirt and asked us to check whether the tag was showing. I tucked it in for him with my bow hand.

Mara came through the stage door carrying her violin and a paper bag of dinner. She wore black instead of her store polo. She had time to eat half a sandwich before Dario called us to tune.

“You’re here,” I said.

“I checked the bus schedule three times.” She looked at my music. “You have the cut?”

“I practically wore through the paper.”

“Good. Read it anyway.”

The audience filled about two thirds of the seats. I spotted my downstairs neighbor near the back, though I had not invited her. Perhaps she had come to inspect the source of the noise. When Dario raised his hands, I forgot to wonder.

The opening went well. Mara played with the same clear sound she had brought to the audition, though from my chair I could also see how hard she worked for it. At the bridge, her left hand lifted from one position to another with barely a sound. During a rest, she glanced at Dario and waited. He did not have to pull her back.

At fifty two, I set my bow on the string early. The oboe played her cue. I gave Mara the first pair of notes, then the second, keeping the space between them as we had in the meeting room. She looked over. Her entrance crossed mine exactly where we had found it.

We had agreed to watch each other there. She watched me through the next bar as well, until the cellos took over. I turned back to my page before I lost my own place.

Near the end, Ruth’s bow brushed mine during one of our rests. We separated without knocking a stand or making a face. Colin breathed beside me, ready for the low D. Dario’s hand opened. All three of us entered together.

The note came up through the floor and through the neck of my violin. Mara held her high A above it. I could hear her bow change, a small rough edge in an otherwise steady sound, and then the two notes rang cleanly together.

On the fourth beat Mara lifted. I kept my bow moving until Dario’s hand closed. The low D stayed under my thumb for a breath after the room went quiet.