Reunion at Red Paint Bay

by George Harrar

  Haggling over the price of her piano—Amy wouldn’t like that. He would have to say he got the full amount and chip in the other twenty-five himself. “Sure,” Simon said. How could he ask for more than all a person had?

  “I got my truck, I could come around after work and pick it up.”

  “It’s pretty heavy.”

  Rigero flexed his arms a little. “I used to be a mover, and I have a lift on my truck. I can handle it.” He stood up and put out his hand to seal the deal.

  “You know,” Simon said as they shook, “maybe we better go over now before my wife gets home. She isn’t thrilled we’re getting rid of this. She might chase you away,” he said, laughing just a little.

  “Okay, I’ll meet you there,” Rigero said and headed for the pressroom.

  Simon grabbed his jacket and turned toward the front door. He had never noticed before, the self-segregation of the editorial and press staffs in their entrances and exits. Was it a pattern worth changing? “I’m off for the rest of the day,” he called to Barbara across the room, and she waved at him without lifting her elbow from her desk.

  The front door opened in as he reached for the handle, and Holly Green leaned up to press her cheek to his. Of all the girls in his class, Holly wore twenty-five years the best, he thought.

  “I’m glad I caught you, Simon,” she said, full of energy as always. “I have some stories for the reporter you assigned to the reunion story.”

  “Anything exciting?” he asked as he stepped back to let her in.

  “I was going to tell him about our senior weekend in Boston, the last one in the history of Red Paint High.”

  Simon remembered the trip well—the cheap hotel on the outskirts of the city, the room hopping after curfew, the tossing of the fake Roman statues into the pool, raiding the minifridges for every available snack. “I have to admit, we did ruin it for every other senior class.”

  “You can take kids out of Maine but you can’t take Maine out of the kids—that’s how our beloved vice-principal so condescendingly put it.”

  “In retrospect, I see his point,” Simon said. “But go light on the details with Joe. I don’t want to make us look too bad.” He gave Holly a little hug to indicate he had to leave and headed off to move a piano.

  “Nice place,” Rigero said as he walked around the sunny family room picking up whatever could be picked up—a ceramic giraffe, a wicker basket full of old political buttons, and a round shell-like object, pocked with holes.

  “Brain coral,” Simon said. “Davey found it out in the front yard. This area was probably under water once.”

  “Or somebody just tossed it out his car window driving by.”

  “That’s possible, too.”

  Rigero reached for one of the family photos lined up on the end table, then held it close to his eyes as if trying to discern some small detail.

  “It’s Disney World,” Simon said. “We made the obligatory trip last year.”

  “Looks like your kid had a great time.”

  “Davey was in heaven.”

  Rigero shrugged. “Don’t expect I’ll get there myself.”

  Simon noted the careful way Rigero set the picture back on the end table at the same angle as before, as if he was familiar with the room, or at least felt at home there. A thought crossed his mind, but how could he put it? “You didn’t happen to stop by here last Thursday night, did you, David?”

  Rigero looked up quickly. “Why would I do that?”

  “No reason,” Simon said. “Our son just thought he saw someone at the front door who didn’t ring the bell, and we were trying to figure out who it was.”

  Rigero laughed a little. “So you’re asking everybody?”

  “No, I mean, I just thought, since you knew where I lived maybe you stopped by for something.”

  Rigero squatted next to the old Endicott upright, leaned his shoulder into the side, and lifted the piano an inch off the floor. “About 250, I’d say. I’ve moved heavier.” He held up the small throw rug he’d brought with him. “We’ll shove this under it and drag it to the door.”

  “Sounds like a plan.”

  Simon heard the Volvo’s sputtering motor coming up the driveway and looked out of the front window. “Christ,” he said, “my wife.”

  “That a problem?”

  “Never can tell.” He hurried into the hallway and opened the door as Amy came through, humming. “You’re home early,” he said.

  She gave him a quick kiss on the cheek. “Don’t look so thrilled.”

  “I’m just surprised.”

  “My three o’clock canceled.” She dropped her bag on the hall chair. “Why is a pickup in our driveway?

  He gestured toward the family room and the back of the man inspecting the piano. “I found a buyer. We were going to move it before you got home, but we can do it another time.”

  “Don’t be silly. I’ve made my peace with your getting rid of part of my childhood. Cart it away.” She moved into the room with her arm outstretched. “I’m Amy.”

  Rigero turned around and shook her hand quickly, then dropped it. “Nice to meet you, I’m David.”

  “David,” she repeated, “that’s our son’s name, but he insists we call him Davey.”

  “I’ve always been David.”

  “This will only take a few minutes,” Simon said, putting his shoulder to the piano as Rigero had done. “Why don’t you go get changed, Amy, while we move this out of here?”

  She leaned against the arm of the sofa, not going anywhere. “How did you find a buyer so fast?”

  So the questions began, leading to a predictable conclusion. “I put an ad in the paper,” Simon said, “like we talked about.”

  Amy thought for a moment, which was what he was afraid of. “The paper doesn’t come out till tomorrow.”

  Rigero smiled mischievously. “I guess I had an unfair advantage—I saw the ad early.”

  “All right,” Simon said standing up now, “you do the heavy lifting, David, and I’ll slip the rug under.”

  “You saw the ad early,” Amy repeated, circling them. “You work at the Register?”

  “Yeah, in the pressroom. Just started a couple of weeks ago.” He ran his fingers smoothly over the top. “This is actually a pretty good piece. The wood’s not warped at all.”

  “Have you tried playing it?” Amy asked.

  Rigero positioned himself at the side of the piano and found two grips for his hands. “Mr. Howe told me it’s out of tune—that’s why he knocked twenty-five dollars off, right?”

  “That I did,” Simon said as he knelt down, the rug in his hand.

  “You can always get a piano tuned right, but you can’t fix warped wood.”

  “So,” Amy said, her voice hardening now, “you’re an expert on pianos?”

  Rigero shook his head. “I just know wood.”

  “What else do you know?”

  “Ready, lift,” Simon said, and as the piano rose off the floor, he shoved the small rug under the two side legs.

  Rigero set the piece gently down, then rubbed his hands together. “I guess I know a thing or two about a thing or two.”

  Amy nodded. “Robert De Niro—This Boy’s Life.”

  “Yeah, he was great in that, wasn’t he?”

  “In a psychotic sort of way, yes.”

  Rigero grinned. “Nobody does psychotic better than De Niro.”

  Amy ran her hand over the top of the piano, a caress. “Prison,” she said, and both men turned toward her, “is that something you know a little about?”

  Rigero glanced at Simon.

  “What about—”

  “Amy,” Simon cut in but then didn’t know what to say. He had never been able to get her to hold her tongue.

  She regarded him a moment, then turned back to Rigero.

  “Rape?” he said. “Is that what you want to know about?”

  Amy stared at him for a few moments. “Maybe Simon didn’t tell you, but I’m a th
erapist, and my longest-running patients have been sexually assaulted.”

  Rigero rubbed his arm hard across his face, turning it red for a moment. “And like how many rapists do you have as clients?”

  “I don’t treat rapists.”

  “Then you only know one side of rape.”

  She dismissed his point with a flick of her hand. “You think there are two sides to rape?”

  Rigero shrugged. “There are two sides to everything, if you want to listen to them.”

  “Okay,” Simon said, stepping between them, “let’s move a piano.”

  He helped secure the old upright in the truck, positioning and repositioning, tying and retying. It took a half hour.

  “That should hold her,” Rigero said as he jumped off the back. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes from his rear pocket. The box was crushed at the top. He opened it up and tilted it toward Simon. One mangled cigarette remained inside.

  A generous offer, Simon thought. “No thanks, I don’t smoke.”

  Rigero flipped open a matchbox and pulled out the remaining match. He struck it against the lighting strip, then cupped his hand around the flame and guided it toward the cigarette in his mouth. Such delicate maneuvers, the ritual of smoking. “Your wife,” he said as he expelled the first long puff, “she was getting pretty hot in there.”

  Simon wondered at his choice of words. Not angry or upset—hot. “Like she said, she works with a lot of women recovering from, you know, being assaulted, so she’s kind of sensitive on the subject.”

  “I just didn’t expect it, her knowing.” He said this in an offhand way, not accusatory at all.

  “Sorry about that. Once she knew I hired from the prison she wouldn’t let it go. She actually guessed.”

  Rigero dropped his half-cigarette to the street and rubbed it out with his foot. “You can tell her I was in seven to ten for having sex with a woman who passed out on me halfway through. Five minutes’ pleasure, seven years’ pain.”

  Simon couldn’t imagine telling Amy this, but he nodded anyway, like one guy to another.

  On his way back to the house he pulled out a few weeds growing up around the front walk. At the door he turned toward the sun and let the warm rays soak his face till it began to burn. Then he went inside.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said, rushing into the hallway. “You brought that man into our house when I specifically warned you I never wanted to meet him.”

  “How could I know you’d be home early?”

  “That’s not the point,” she said, her body visibly shaking. “A person like that is toxic, and I didn’t want him anywhere near our lives. Now his disgusting hands will be playing the piano I never wanted to sell in the first place, the one I learned on and Davey learned on.”

  “You agreed it was taking up too much space, and it’s not for him anyway. He’s refinishing it for his sister who has three kids so they can have music in their lives.”

  “So he’s a music-appreciating rapist with a heart of gold. I’m touched.”

  Simon shook his head at her. “Why are you getting so hysterical over this?”

  “Don’t use that word on me,” she said. “Every time Freud wrote about an hysterical patient it was a woman.”

  “Okay, I take it back, you’re not hysterical. But why are you so upset? He made a mistake and served his sentence.”

  “Because women who are raped don’t get a few years’ term they can serve and then they’re free.”

  “So David deserves a life sentence? Or is that too good for him? Perhaps he should be strung up on the Common.”

  “Don’t be sarcastic.”

  “I’m serious. I really want to know—what’s the proper sentence for a rapist?”

  Amy thought for only a moment. “Shame, Simon, and that man doesn’t have any.”

  He sits on the wide-planked porch of the Bayswater Inn watching rain pelt the water. At times the wind changes direction and blows the thick drops far enough sideways to reach him under the broad roof. He doesn’t stir, even when the inn’s owner, Peter McBride, approaches him with a mug filled with a brown liquid, topped by whipped cream.

  “Compliments of the house, Mr. Chambers,” the innkeeper says as he holds out the tall glass. “It’s the specialty of the inn—we call it the Tonic. My grandmother used to say if this doesn’t cure what ails you, nothing ails you.” The man takes the mug and paper napkin. “The secret is using Jameson whiskey and untreated Vermont cream, no chemicals. Don’t stir it in. Drink through it.”

  He sips the sweet cream until the coffee pours through with a jolt of whiskey. He wipes his mouth on the napkin, leaving a dark smudge, which he folds out of view. “I’m not a coffee drinker,” he says, “but this is very nice.”

  The wind whips the halyard on the flagpole, making them turn toward the curving driveway. “I could listen to that all night,” McBride says. “I’ve always thought the best sounds on earth are a foghorn, a waterfall, and the rattle of the halyard against a flagpole.”

  “And the whistle of a train,” the man says, “one going away from you.”

  McBride moves behind his guest and takes hold of a large black handle, which he turns with some effort. The blue-striped awning begins rolling up, inch by inch. “Sorry,” he says, “can’t chance a gust ripping through it. You might want to move inside.”

  “A little rain never hurt anyone,” he says. But forty days and nights of it, that extinguished virtually every living thing. Six chapters after creation, God washed away humanity, repenting that He had made it. To whom does God confess?

  McBride leans against an empty Adirondack chair. “I’d sit out with you if I could, but we’ve got a lot of work to do before the school reunion here next week. Things get pretty chaotic for a few days. I hope you won’t be put out.”

  “It won’t bother me at all,” the man says, a most agreeable guest.

  He remembers the music most of all—the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth, the strange meditation of violins and harp that always accompanied wakes at the Bays-water Inn. It seemed to him like music that didn’t want to end, as if the notes were bunching up at the edge of a cliff, refusing to be shoved over. He was the body watcher at so many viewings when he was a teenager that it took years to get the haunting melody out of his head. And now it has come back as he crosses the dining room toward the Viewing Room, a small outcropping off the west wing where the bodies of Red Paint’s most prominent citizens are laid out in their ornate coffins. He could have brought Jean here in her sleek bronze casket, surrounding it with large pots of white lilies. But what if no one came to her wake? What if no one remembered her at all?

  He pulls open the doors and sees two computers sitting on facing desks. He steps back and looks both ways to make sure he isn’t disoriented. The Viewing Room has apparently become a small media center, and where do people in Red Paint now go to say goodbye to their dead? He takes a seat at one of the monitors. The cursor blinks in the Google box, blinks and blinks, waiting for instructions.

  That evening he sits in the library and prints a short message in his clearest hand, all capitals. He walks over to the reception counter where an older woman is making notes in a ledger, her head down. It’s the first time he’s seen her there, and he wonders what position she holds in the McBride clan. Sprawled next to her on the counter is a muscular gray cat with an enormous lionlike head.

  “Oh,” she says, looking up after a minute, “I didn’t hear you.”

  It’s a familiar comment—I didn’t hear you, or I didn’t see you. Sometimes he feels like he could walk through people and they wouldn’t notice. Maybe just a little shudder and a momentary What was that? “Sorry to bother you,” he says, “but do you have a postcard stamp, by any chance?”

  “I can do better than that, I have a meter right here.” She gestures behind her and then extends her hand. He holds the card down along his leg. “Anything wrong, Mr.…”

  “Chambers.”

  “Of course
, the Rachel Carson suite.”

  She’s waiting for his answer. Is anything wrong? He hands over the postcard.

  “Paul Revere,” she says, noting the picture. “You should get one of our Bayswater Inn cards, show people where you’re staying. Only a dollar each, I have them here.”

  “Perhaps next time,” he says.

  She slides his postcard through the meter, then tosses it into a tray of outgoing mail, message side up. At this movement the cat raises its head off the counter and considers the human close by. He has never seen a cat like this one, so thick in the neck and face.

  “Have you met Terrence?” the woman asks, scratching the animal’s cheek.

  “Hello, Terrence.”

  “He looks like a bruiser, I know. The males get that way when they aren’t neutered, all bulked up for fighting. But inside he’s just a big sweetie.” Terrence holds his gaze.

  “That’s nice to know.” The man reaches out his index finger, and the cat takes a lick.

  “If Terrence likes you,” the woman says, “you must be all right.”

  The postcard showed Paul Revere on the front, galloping to warn the local militias of the coming British army. The message on the back said, “You should have come alone”—an unnerving few words. Then “Faithfully yours.” Amy’s presence, it seemed, had indeed spooked the sender, as Simon thought it might. Apparently gone was the possibility of meeting whoever this person was and discovering what payback he intended. If Amy were there he couldn’t resist showing her the card and saying I told you not to come with me.

  She was not there, and the kitchen where he stood seemed empty without her. The house seemed empty without Davey skulking about upstairs or outside, up to something. They had gone to visit her mother in Bangor, leaving Simon with an unusual night home alone. He had a sudden craving for pizza, everything on it, and ordered it delivered. He ate at the kitchen table, drinking beer, trying to dredge up feature story ideas.

  1. Is Red Paint happy? Do a survey to compare to national stats just released.