The Ballad of West Tenth Street
Page 12
“No thanks. So, you said there was something you wanted to talk to me about?”
“Oh, let’s have our tea first, enjoy ourselves. I hardly ever have people over. Such a treat. Mmm,” Kristen said, biting down on a cookie and taking a dainty sip of tea.
“Why’s that?” Sadie asked her, beginning to feel annoyed.
“Oh well, Paul doesn’t really like people around, says they stare at him. Being a genius he’s different, you know what I mean. He needs a lot of time by himself. He’s composing a symphony.”
“Really. And does the genius hide back there all day long?” Sadie nodded her head in the direction of Paul’s studio.
“He doesn’t hide—you really shouldn’t say things like that. He’s just not like other people, because he’s working on works of pure genius in his sanctum sanctorum. Oh, you were just teasing, weren’t you? That’s probably your famous English humor.” She let out a little laugh. “We don’t really get it, us Americans.”
“I was born and raised in Tilbury, Vermont.”
“Gee, really?”
“Yes, really. Now, you insisted I come over here to talk to you about something. What is it?”
Kristen’s face began working, her eyes darting around, looking for help. It came as the baby let out a snort, flopped over, then let out an ear-piercing shriek. It brought its fists up to its head and beat them against its skull, screaming louder.
Kristen flew to him, emitting a small grunt as she picked him up. “There’s Mommy, there, there,” she said, kissing its yellow curls. “Who’s my little genius, who’s Daddy’s special baby genius? Such a big-strong baby pudding.” She put it over her shoulder, her back to Sadie.
It made a wet, bubbling sound and stared at Sadie. Then opened wide, preparing to scream again.
Sadie saw her chance and gave it the Look. The Look was something you didn’t chance letting loving parents see, but the coast was clear. It was a look that bored into the other person’s eyes, said yeah, you. Now, see what my eyes are saying? I’m memorizing yours, and I’ll hunt you down to the ends of the earth and kill you, if you don’t stop it at once.
The infant snapped its mouth shut and crawled down its mother’s bosom, whimpering.
Kristen laid it back in its pen tenderly, pulling a blanket over its thick limbs.
“Isn’t he the most beautiful baby?” she whispered. She sat back down at the table. “When I first held him, in the hospital, I had a mystical experience. I knew what life was all about all of a sudden, what it means.”
“And what is that?”
“Oh, you know, of course you do.”
Sadie wanted to throw a sugar cookie right at the woman’s forehead.
“The thing is,” Kristen began. “Well, I’ve been reading this stuff about how the maestro, that’s what Paul is, is a kind of god to his pupil. Like Deen is. I mean, there’s nothing wrong, nothing’s happened, that goes without saying. It’s just that I was sort of thinking, well, what if once in a while you came and sat in on their lesson, brought some knitting or something. See, Paul won’t let me in there, not ever. I mean, I spy on him, that’s how I know there’s nothing wrong, but I also know that a relationship between a maestro and his pupil can get very, uh, strong.”
Sadie looked at Kristen, appalled. She was so angry that she waited for a minute, needing her words to be clear. “I don’t care what sorts of peculiar fantasies you drag in and let fester in your mind,” she said, “but leave my daughter out of them. And I don’t knit.”
“But I was just trying to be, like, another mom to Deen!” Kristen wailed as Sadie left. The door clanked shut.
Deen, I want to talk to you about your situation over at the Dresden’s,” Sadie said to her in the kitchen before dinner. “Kristen shanghaied me into having tea with her today and suggested the stupidest thing, she thinks you and Paul are going to fall in love with each other.”
Deen looked at her mother, her mouth open. She couldn’t believe what she was hearing.
Sadie thought, gawd, that was such an idiotic way of putting it, fall in love? The tiniest giggle rose to her throat.
Deen let out a snort. Sadie’s mouth twitched. Then Deen gave an involuntary gurgle, and before they knew it they were laughing, rocking back and forth, hooting with laughter.
“It was pretty damn funny, really,” Sadie said, wiping her eyes. “She’s such a busybody, isn’t she? And that baby, Christ, Deen, I’d no idea what you’ve been through. Just for the record, all three of you were nothing like that, that grotesque beast. But really, do you like your lessons with Paul enough to run that gauntlet each time? We could work something else out, really darling.”
“I didn’t want to go there ever in the beginning,” Deen said. “And I know this sounds kind of weird, but Kristen’s not that bad, if you stop and think how she has to put up with Paul, who I think probably is a great pianist. Elizabeth was fine, but really Munster, even I was starting to see her limitations. She’ll probably end up taking pupils more than anything, and then playing in some quartet out on Martha’s Vineyard every summer or something. I don’t want to end up like that.”
“Well, if you say you can put up with that gargoyle of a baby, you must really feel the lessons are worth it.”
“Haven’t you noticed that my playing’s changed?”
“Oh, Deen—you know I don’t know jack about music.”
“Sure you do, Munster. You just think you don’t.”
While these pleasant times were occurring in the pair of row houses on Tenth Street, other, less pleasant things were stirring and rustling in the neighborhood. An angry bum, his hood covering his eyes, stalked the nighttime streets, muttering and cursing. Holding his head up, sniffing, where was that fat old man, where were him and his fat, petted cat?
“Motherfucking cat sits there mee-owing, says love me, Mr. Fat Old Bum, love me everybody. And what do they do? Why they love even a cat. Some fuckin animal, just a shitbag covered in fur, that don’t know how to spell or write or even say it’s own name!
“He’ll come creepin back, my little boy, the one with them sunny curls once, all kissed and washed and tucked in every night, he’ll come roving back, creeping back to his old haunts. Can’t never stay away, them that has their old haunts, always lookin’ for Mamma in a tree branch, a patch of sidewalk, like they was back on that farm they was raised on, with the rows of beans and that nail that always stuck outta that step on the vee-ran-da. Oh yeah.”
A mayonnaise jar is unsealed. A finger with a long, crooked nail dips into the red paint inside it. Stirs it around, once, twice. Then points at the place it will mark, throttles, makes a long, low arch. The finger dips again, into the sanguine paint. Comes out, a drop hovering from it, makes another inverted curve below, then stabs back into the crimson, rushes out and defines a small loop. I’m lookin’ at you, from everywhere.
15
Gretchen sat in her wheelchair, in her usual corner of the lounge, lurking behind the potted plants. She was reading the part of Jane Eyre where she’s gone away from Mr. Rochester, then hears his voice calling to her in the night. She knew that that could happen, that a person could call out to some one far away, in another part of England.
She heard footsteps coming toward her. She stopped reading, not looking up.
“Naughty again, I see. Well, Miss Jane Eyre, you won’t catch me getting you anything from the kitchen just because you’ve missed dinner once more.”
Nurse Peterson moved closer, leaning over Gretchen. Gretchen wanted to move away from her, but gave no sign that she knew she was there.
“What’s this?” a male voice said.
“She pretends to read,” Nurse Peterson told him.
“You’re sure she doesn’t actually read?” the doctor said.
“Quite sure, doctor. She never turns a page.”
“Gretchen, you seem to have a special liking for this book,” the doctor said, moving closer to look at it. “Why don’t you show me which
part you like best? You could show me the page and I could read that part. Then we’d have something we could talk about tomorrow.”
“She doesn’t read it, doctor. But try taking it away from her. She goes wild. We had to have an orderly restrain her.”
“When did this happen? And why would you want to take it away from her?”
“Yesterday. Just look at the marks on my arms.”
“Again, why did you try to take it from her?”
“Well, we can’t just have the patients ordering us around, can we? I told her to give it to me so I could put her to bed but she wouldn’t. Just ignored me, like she always does, so I took it. She attacked me, like I said. I had to explain to my kids why I had scratches all over my arm.”
“Don’t ever take any item I approve her having again, do you understand? Gretchen, I’ll see you tomorrow. Don’t worry about your book, it’s yours to do what you like with. Mrs. Peterson, we’ll discuss this further in the morning.”
Gretchen heard his footsteps move away.
The nurse waited till he was gone, then leaned over to whisper in Gretchen’s ear: “Now you’ve really gone and done it. Made me have to stand here and listen to that doctor tell me off, you sly little thing, when you’re the one who should be punished for attacking me. But just remember, your boyfriend there, the doctor, he isn’t here all the time. Sometimes I’m in charge.”
Robert Jeffries surveyed the boiler with sorrow. It was some piece of hundred percent union bullshit for sure. He took a socket wrench and began the pleasurable business of dismantling it. The new boiler hummed by his side, feeding the temporary connecting pipes he’d rigged. When he finished the job an honest boiler would sit on the block, every pipe the proper dimension and every solder a neat, non-union job. He’d even make it pretty too, and it would cost that old man upstairs less to run. He always took pride in doing good work, in proving you didn’t have to have some fancy card with a number on it, from the Brotherhood of Jackasses or whatever. But for this here job he took a special pleasure in doing it right, because how many homeowners understood the innate need of a man working with pipes all day long, and provided them with a tot of sippin’ whiskey at the end of the day? Good sippin’ whiskey too.
Ettie came in at noon with a tray. “Meester ask me to bring you lunch,” she said.
“S’okay, I brought my own.”
“In that bag?” Ettie said, looking at a brown paper bag with its top neatly folded. “Not enough for a cat in there. This better.” She took the linen towel off the tray and showed him. “The colonel, he say he think you a southern man too, he say Ettie, make southern lunch.”
“Man, oh man,” Robert said. “Fried chicken, collards, succotash, coleslaw, what don’t you got here, woman? Pone, where’s the pone? Shit, here she is, hiding her lights behind this here mountain of rice. Man, sure I’ll eat it.”
“He say too, you come for tea when you finish, that tea’s word for something else. Okay?”
“A-OK. Say, you cooked all this?”
“Yes.”
“You married?”
“Nope.”
“Maybe we ought to talk some. You ever been married?”
“Yes, a very long time once. He’s dead.”
“He ever belong to a union?”
“No, he cut cane. The rebels killed him.”
“Damn, that’s not right. You like movies?”
“Julia Roberts, yes! I love Julia Roberts, any movie, I see it four, five times. So romantic, always with the shining eyes.”
“You know they got a body double for those leg shots in Pretty Woman, but yeah, I like her fine.”
“You eat, maybe we talk tomorrow.”
“You okay with a black man asking you out?” he said, looking at her seriously.
“It’s nice,” she said, moving out the door.
“Ettie, Ettie,” he said, taking up a fork to eat her cooking. “You make an old man cry for his past.”
Sadie erased the phone message from Steve, the third one in two days. Oh crap, why did they always have to start acting like it was love? It was especially idiotic in this instance, he must be at least fifteen years her junior. And why did she always grow tired of them after a week or so? Because she was a bloody-minded bitch and simply using them, that’s why. Was it her indifference that made them want to woo her? What a laugh. Aw, it was all so fucked up, and she didn’t want to hurt Steve, but she was going to.
She’d call him back tomorrow. Tell him the truth, that she didn’t want to continue. Or lie, make some lame excuse, see if he’d be a good boy and simply fade away. Then she’d feel guilty, and then she’d get drunk, and then she’d wonder why the hell she’d been fool enough to give up some guy who was funny, had muscles like that, and loved to screw…. Oh, damn it all, there was no solution.
Sipping her vodka she stared at Brian’s cell number on the chalkboard. Funny, he hadn’t dropped in on them in a while. He usually popped in every two or three weeks. And over the years, invariably showed up during the few times she had a new guy. It never failed. Until now. Steve was the only one, Sadie realized, who’d never come down to the kitchen one morning to find a bleary Englishman smoking and staring at him.
Oh well, if Brian wasn’t going to come stomping in in his boots to get rid of this one, she’d just have to do it herself.
If you were to navigate the Cap’n’s bloodstream, become an Argonaut small enough to slip inside a human vein, you’d see the molecules inside him growing grumpy, forming cliques, dysplasias. Little weird noodles attacking some big old cell, sticking themselves into it. The endless, wearisome mutations of age. Trek through his aorta, feel with your own fingers the layer of fatty deposits hanging down like greasy confetti.
The outside of the Cap’n lay on his blanket inside the decommissioned railroad depot, feverish and low in spirits for days. Titus prowled around his supine form and the broken ground outside, killing rats and mice and eating them with wondrous relish, then laying himself down to sleep next to the fat, beached form that he knew and trusted. In his lowest moments the Cap’n reached out and stroked Titus’s fur, thanking the gods that this one creature was still with him. Titus let out a purr that shook and trembled his insides, then lay back, in the comfortable sprawl of a carnivore with a stomach full of raw flesh. Thus the old captain and his cat shared hours of sleep in the dusty, strewn depot, two more objects among the broken furniture.
16
Kristen stood at the sink. She was shaking. Her pale cheeks were mottled and red. She hit the counter with the flat of her hand. Why couldn’t Deen understand that she was just trying to help? It was important, a duty, for grown women to offer guidance to girls on the brink of maturity. Just like her aunt Natalie had when she’d been growing up, though sometimes the hugs got a bit messy, with all the tears and lipstick and stuff, and Aunt Natalie, well, they’d had to put her in a home.
Kristen, in all truth, lied to herself mightily with her next thought. She thought how much she liked Sadie. She was so bohemian, such a character, and hadn’t she stayed unmarried since Ree (Ooh, Kristen thought, Ree…it’s almost like I knew him) had passed away? That’s the term Kristen invariably used for death.
Yes, she really liked Sadie. And Deen, she almost felt like her older sister or something. Maybe one day Deen would be famous too, and say how this wonderful woman had a big influence on her. Yes, the wife of my great teacher, a wonderful woman named Kristen.
But so far Deen didn’t see what a good friend Kristen was to her. She would eventually, but first she had to be led with loving patience. But still, why did Deen have to be so mean? Say that awful thing? Actually laughing as she told her, “I don’t think my mother was that keen on your plan, whatever it was—she didn’t tell me.”
Tears welled in Kristen’s eyes. Either Sadie was so plum fucked-up, no, I mean wacky, bohemian but essentially nice, that she sort of forgot what they’d talked about, or, or, that little brat was lying her head off.
“Today we will make music in extremis. I will make sounds and you will repeat them to me on the piano.” With that he stood, leaped onto his chair, then flew off it, letting out a series of caws that beat the air like metal.
Deen played three triads with dissonant notes.
“Jesus! No, not that bloody fucking way! Like it sounds!” he screamed. “Here, maybe this will help.” He took off his scarf and tied it around her eyes. It smelled of sweat and lighter fluid.
“Fat-assed bitch!” he yelled.
Fat-assed bitch, Deen played, making the final chord explosive.
“Damn, that’s nice!”
Mozart’s “Damn that’s Nice,” a light, frolicking air.
Next she heard the sound of water falling into a porcelain basin. “The Piss Song.” A progression that started in a minor key, plopped, then ran up to a drizzle.
“Good,” he said eventually. “You can take that ridiculous headgear off. We are going to proceed to Liszt this week. Perhaps you think this is a step up. It’s not. Liszt is for idiots. You will assuredly think you already know the piece—you do not. I will give you my own transcription of it. You will study it and learn it before you even think of playing it, analyzing its structure. It’s fucking hard to play, even if it is for idiots. Here is the score. Many people think of this piece as kitsch, which has always endeared it to me. Now go, and give my regards to that hellhag out there.”