The Violin Conspiracy(57)
“Settle?” Ray said. “How? They don’t want money. They want the violin.”
Kim shrugged. “We don’t know what they want. Maybe they want you to sell the violin and split the proceeds.”
“Well, that’s not happening.”
“That’s why I told you not to worry. You’re not there yet. At this point, I would ignore them. Don’t answer their letters.”
“And I sure as hell am not inviting them over for a cookout,” Ray said.
She laughed. “Yeah, I doubt they’d bring wine.”
“So you think I’m okay.”
“From what you’ve told me and what I’ve seen, that’s what I think. Plus think of the optics—slaveholder’s family making a claim against their former slave’s family. It doesn’t get more bizarre than that. Especially in today’s world, where reparation claims are being made by the descendants of enslaved people against the slaveholder.
“Go play your violin and stop worrying.” She looked over at the violin. “Can I see it?”
“Of course,” he said, opening the case. She duly admired the violin, and he closed the case again, as if not wanting the violin to hear the uproar it had caused.
With a lighter heart, he left the white office and the stunning view and returned to the grimy New York City streets. A yellow-and-red gyro stand on the corner of Fifty-Third and Sixth smelled amazing, so he ordered falafel and rice with extra white sauce and headed uptown to Hunter College.
He had to admit that he liked being out in the world by himself, playing whatever music he felt like playing. He liked jazz clubs and now sought out more of them to keep playing, even when he didn’t have classical performances scheduled. He loved the showmanship of the French-Italian jazz violinist Stéphane Grappelli—the loose easy elegance of how the Frenchman would throw out a musical sentence and pick it up again, always seeming cool and utterly engaged. Ray wanted to do that: to bring enjoyment to anyone who would listen.
When he’d first tried his hand at jazz, it was a mess. Like most classically trained musicians who relied on strict training, he was most comfortable following the road map that a composer laid out. Ray would pour himself onto the classical route, which had clear signposts and a yellow line down one side. With jazz, there were no signs; the GPS just said, “Go.” Jazz charts provided a simple melody he was just supposed to riff from—he wanted to read every note, lock in on each finger pattern. How would he even begin? He started by listening to the opening melody of a song, then adding a few notes in the same key, then changing the key for a while, then somehow, miraculously, returning to the original key, all while making it seem effortless. This took a lot of practice. When he thought he had it, he had to think again. It was fun, challenging, and exercised new muscles in his playing.
Janice would not have been pleased: Ray was moving up in the world of violin performance and, in her view, he had to make his mark in the classical realm, not dabble in jazz. Doing both would mean that Ray had too many irons in the fire.
Nonetheless, in New York City, he always made time for the legendary Birdland Jazz Club, sitting in on the jazz combos—when they’d let him. The first few times were a bit rough—he’d played a jazzy, bluesy minor Dorian mode instead of a major Mixolydian mode—but he hadn’t cared, and the other musicians hadn’t, either. Each session improved, and soon he was jamming with several regular standards under his belt.
New York City, Ray found, had many drawbacks: crowds; an often-confusing and daunting subway system; high prices for food, lodging, travel. But all the drawbacks were worth it, Ray decided as he looked out at Birdland’s audience, glowing in the red candleholders’ dim light: New York City women were, without question, beautiful. Check out the left wall—the tawny-haired woman with the tight dress running her fingers suggestively around her wineglass, or the high-cheekboned Black woman sitting with a pimply faced guy at a table two back from the stage. And those were just the people who leaped out at him—there were dozens more, here and out on the street.
Pity that none of them seemed to want to get to know him beyond buying him a drink between sets, or asking for his autograph outside the stage door, or having a conversation that started with anything other than “How long have you been playing?” The attractive women who seemed to take an interest in him were mostly in the look-but-don’t-touch category, and things almost always stopped at looking: Was it them? Was it him? It was probably him.
He looked the part, but had zero game.
He’d been a loner all his life, with few close friends, and that hadn’t changed much. He’d imagined the musician’s life would be filled with gorgeous women. This might have been the case for huge rock-and-roll stars, but thus far, in Ray’s classical and limited jazz experience, he was more likely to trip over a microphone cord than to have an admiring fan invite him for a drink and slip him her room key.
So after the Birdland performance, when a tall slender woman with an extravagant hairdo approached him, he thought he’d struck gold. She wasn’t really his type: Her hair, curled elaborately, was clipped with barrettes and dazzled with glitter. Her makeup, too, overwhelmed. It looked like someone had loaded a box of crayons into a gun and fired it onto her face. And oh, her outfit! Her white pants looked spray-painted onto her very long, slender legs, and her crop top—about a size and a half too small—was the brightest shade of electric blue that had ever been manufactured. In her yellow-and-white high heels, she towered over him.