Free A Separate War and Other Stories by Joe Haldeman Page B

in a museum, and she said no, the dealer only claimed it was a twentieth-century copy. It hadn’t cost enough to be that old. I looked forward to trying it out; I could get strings at the store the next day and tune it up between students—maybe I’d have it sounding like something when she came in for her four o’clock lesson.
    She said she’d look forward to it, and we got to work on the wine and food. We talked of this and that, and then I played her some old ballads on her small guitar. The food of love, the poet said, and we moved back into her rumpled bed.
    I woke to the smell of coffee, but she was already gone; a note by the pot said she had an eight o’clock class. I made a breakfast of leftover cheese and bread and cleaned up a bit, feeling unnaturally domestic. Went back to my place sort of drifting in a state of I-don’t-deserve-this-but-who-does? Shaved and showered and found a clean shirt, and got to the store an hour and a half before my first pupil.
    The chitarrone looked authentically old in the cold fluorescent light of the store’s workroom. I cleaned it carefully with some Gibson guitar spray, but resisted waxing it. That would make it prettier, but would have a muting effect on the sound, and I was intensely curious about that.
    Over the course of the day, during two dead hours and my lunch break, I replaced the strings one at a time and kept tuning them up as they relaxed. I tuned the thing two whole tones low, since it obviously hadn’t been played in some time, and I didn’t want to stress it.
    It had a good sound, though, tuning: plangent, archaic. It was a real time trip. They don’t make them like that anymore—or they do, but not for working musicians like yours truly. A twenty-one–string nightmare, I don’t think so.
    The other guys at the store were fascinated by it, though, and so were two of my students. But not the one I wanted to see and hear it. She didn’t make her four o’clock.
    I called and her phone had been disconnected. After work, I rushed over and found her apartment door open, the living room and bedroom bare. The super, miffed because I’d interrupted her dinner preparations, said the place had been empty since June, two months. When I tried to explain, she looked wary and then scared, and eased the door shut with two loud clicks.
    The chitarrone, lying diagonally across the car’s backseat, was solid and eerily real. As I drove home it played itself at every bump in the road, a D diminished, slightly out of tune.
    Amazon.com didn’t have The Chitarrone for Idiots , or for madmen, but there were plenty of lute books with medieval and Renaissance music, and it was easy to incorporate the instrument’s bass drone strings into the melodies. There wasn’t much call for it in jazz and rock gigs, but I brought it along when folk groups were amenable. I’d worked out some slightly anachronistic pieces like “Scarborough Fair” and “Greensleeves” that were easy to play along with, and singable, and they led to the unlikely gig that demonstrated the thing’s true power.
    I got a call from a music professor who asked whether I really had a chitarrone, and he got all excited when I demonstrated it over the phone. Could I clear up two weekends in February and play with his consort at the upcoming Medieval Faire?
    In fact I was free those weekends. We set up a couple of practice dates, and he faxed me some sheets. They were lute and therobo parts, and it was easy to cobble them together into something that used the instrument’s resonant bass strings.
    We met at the professor’s crumbling-but-genteel Victorian mansion. He’d gathered eleven students who played an assortment of modern replicas of period string, wind, and percussion instruments, and they were all enthralled by my medieval Rube Goldberg machine. The professor, Harold Innes, was especially impressed, not only