Jenny and her boyfriend have a garden plot behind their apartment, in which they’ve grown tomatoes all summer. Tomatoes dominate the top-floor flat: stacked in jars along the kitchen wall; spread out, single-thickness, on area rugs scattered about; lashed to the ceiling molding that demarcates the kitchen from the living room, the living room from the bedroom. The hanging fruits are grape-sized, green and red, and still attached to their vines, making the apartment into a Surrealist’s vineyard.

“You look glamorous today,” she says as I wind my hair out of the way into a knot. I can’t imagine what’s glamorous, but I have been experimenting with eyeliner. I make some small talk about the week, about makeup, about Smile, the Brian Wilson recording and concert at Carnegie Hall that she attended, a surprise from her boyfriend. As she excitedly described the concert, which moved her to tears, I attempt to steel myself for the lesson.

It doesn’t matter how familiar I am with the teacher, how comfortable, how friendly. Despite the fact that I’m paying for a service, something I practice for and need help with and am willing to invest in, I’ll do anything to distract them from making me play. Or I used to. Sick as it makes me feel, I’m prepared to play scales badly, to mangle improvisation over a D-flat blues. Before I can do either of these, however, I have to crack my shin on the first hurdle I never manage to clear: tuning.

“How’s your A?” she asks, pulling her bow across her A string. I do the same. I’m sharp, but only just barely. She looks at my fiddle disparagingly. “You should just get fine tuners on every string. Then you could be in tune all the time,” she says. Through some silly, outmoded Puritanism, I’ve held out against fine tuners. I may play fiddle music, but my instrument still looks like a classical violin, snobbishly attached to the bully difficulty of the pegs. What’s worse, my ears aren’t so discerning. I tolerate crappy speakers, night traffic, and less than perfect 5ths, which only embarrasses me when I have to tune in front of somebody else, especially someone with ears as finely trained as Jenny’s.

Perched on the kitchen table, she sets her fiddle down and I hand mine over. “This is the last time I’m going to do this for you,” she says, teasing but sincere. “Next week, you have fine tuners.” This won’t happen. Charlie is the only fiddle fixer-upper I know, and I can’t get to him without a car. Plus, my pick-up is attached to that tailpiece and I don’t know how to reattach it, never mind that it was never very strong and really doesn’t work any more. And with a full set of fine tuners weighing us down, I’ll lose the last glimmer of classical violinist identity. As Jenny deftly manipulates the pegs into a more perfect place, I take a step back, careful not to tread on the tomatoes.