Improvisato

by David Crossman

  “The wife and I went to see him at that special concert they set up— benefit for the families of the victims of the Trade, you know? Must say, that type of music had never been my cup of tea before, but that changed that night. Can’t say why, or what, or how, exactly, but—this is going to sound all la-la and posies, but you know what the wife said? She said her soul was born. Ha-ha! ‘Soul born!’ Ha-ha!”

  He’d always say that, whenever he retold the story—long after his retirement. Long after his wife had passed away. Long after the old people surrounding him, listening to him, had forgotten that he used to be someone important. Always, at this point in the telling, his chin would drop briefly to his chest. “Still, something happened.”

  His head would come up sharply. “Anyway, we wrote up a script. Nothing elaborate. Just ‘Morgue, St. Joseph’s. 10:00 tomorrow night’, put the answering machine back in the office, and listened as the calls came in, one after the other, starting about six o’clock.

  “None of the callers said a word. The message played, they hung up. All we had to do was set up a stake-out at St. Joseph’s, and wait!”

  One warm late-summer evening, a few months after the members of Caduceus had walked into Albert’s trap and surrendered, sheepishly, to officers Hawkes had personally selected for the purpose, Andrew Jeffreys and Bindy stood, hand-in-hand, at the head of Parliament Row. It was the first time they’d been back since the Trade was exposed and torn out by its roots, the rhizomes of which had become embedded in and drew their nourishment from the compost of avarice in both the medical and legal fraternities.

  “It don’t look any different, Drew, does it?” Bindy said, as they began to walk. “They ought to rename it Widower’s Row. There’s poor Mr. Dona,” she nodded at the Dona house, “whose wife didn’t kill herself, after all.”

  “Tanny did it,” said Jeffreys.

  Bindy mimed Tanny dropping the electric razor in Bella Dona’s bath. “Then she calls Dr. Marcos to come say it was suicide . . .”

  “. . . and collect the body.”

  They resumed walking. “Then poor Colonel Rivens . . . killed his own wife,” said Bindy, massaging the belly in which, over the next seven months, young Andrew, Jr., to be nicknamed Serge would gestate until his introduction to the world at large. “Well, she begged him to. Dr. Marcos tells her she faces a slow, painful death. Can’t see as he had much choice.

  “But she wasn’t sick after all; just symptoms from the medications Marcos was feeding her.” They stopped walking.

  “She was cursed with a rare blood type, like Woolie-Woolie.”

  “And she got harvested, like the rest,” said Bindy. “Don’t it just break your heart, Drew? Poor Colonel Rivens havin’ to go to jail, all because he loved his wife.”

  “The law’s gotta be pretty unbending, Bin,” said Jeffreys and the words, though he knew them to be true, tasted dry as sawdust on his tongue. “Else you’d have husbands killing wives, and wives killing husbands and claiming they’d been begged do it. He turned himself in, though, that will work in his favor.”

  They’d had this talk before, and Bindy was still enough in awe of her husband that she was willing to leave the legal complexities to his judgment. “Still, breaks your heart, don’t it? How could people do such things?”

  On the night of the concert, Angela and Phuong fussed over Albert’s attire until they were satisfied no further improvement could be made. Much of their effort, though, seemed somehow to dissolve as the minutes ticked by. Within an hour he looked as frayed around the edges as ever he had. His socks, even though they matched, seemed to beg for freedom from such strict orthodoxy.

  Watching from the doorway as he, Simon, Mr. Sweetman, and Jeremy Ash couched in conference—overshadowed by Otis—Angela turned to Phuong, shrugged and said, “I give up.”

  “Me, too,” said Phuong. “Give up!”

  Angela offered her elbow and, arm-in-arm, they walked to the kitchen.

  “He need me so much,” said Phuong. She was speaking about Mr. Sweetman, for whom she had developed a deep grand-daughterly affection which, though never finding its way to words, was reciprocated in countless little acts of expression, in the glancing exchange of winks and fleeting smiles.

  Angela had watched the unfolding of the curious relationship between the old man and the girl who—despite her dicky heart, or perhaps in defiance of it—had made herself the Braemar’s chatelaine. Under her subtle ministrations, Sweetman had awakened from the go-through-the-motions-until-you-die stupor of the loss of his wife to find himself comfortably seated on life’s west-facing veranda, swaddled in the warm and gentle glow of the setting sun. He had his pipe—and on the genii of the smoke rising from its bowl, could project his memories: the dance of his life. He had his afternoon whiskey. He had new guests now and then whom he would regale with the macabre story that had begun “in these very walls”, minus the one fact that, at Albert’s request, had been kept from him, leaving him an undefiled memory of his beloved Suzie.

  Most of all, he had been adopted by a delicate piece of oriental porcelain who, about the same time every day, would join him on the veranda where, together in silence, they awaited the sun’s final setting.

  Phuong’s parents had come for her, of course, after the news broke, but their determination to bring her home, to persist in finding a legitimate donor, was not equal to her resolve to await her fate at the Braemar where, for the first time in her life, she was not only useful, but needed.

  “Penny for them?”

  Angela wasn’t startled. She had known for a minute or so since Phuong’s departure that Simon had been standing there, watching her. She had chosen to let him, and to see where whatever thoughts came to him as the result of the surveillance might take him. She didn’t turn around. “Hadn’t you better get ready for the concert?”

  “I am,” he said. She turned. He flicked the white collar signifying his profession. “This is my formal attire. One of the perks of the job.”

  Her returning smile was a warm mattress, enfolding him after a long, exhausting trek through cold and lonely lands. “Well,” she said, “it’s going to take more than a collar to get me presentable.” She stepped toward the doorway, against which he was leaning. He didn’t move. She tried to push by and, doing so, pressed against him. He didn’t yield. “If I remember my physics lessons, two objects can’t occupy the same space at the same time.”

  “They can but try,” said Simon, still not yielding. Nor did she. The result being that they pressed harder against one another.

  So absorbed were they by the moment, neither Angela or Simon was aware of another watcher. Albert, in a tuxedo into which he seemed to shrink as he watched, stood in the shadows. He saw them kiss. More than once. He saw them embrace. He saw Angela, at last, place her head on Simon’s shoulder, an act of surrender to which the vicar responded by cupping his hand on the back of her head, an act of protection.

  Albert had no idea of it at the time, but the bucket he would raise from the musical well at the concert hall that night would overflow with the emotions he felt at that moment. He turned away, and continued quietly to the bathroom.

  It was there he confronted a stranger, staring at him from the mirror. This man, in a tuxedo, with a shaved face, clean glasses, and a broken heart.

  He hadn’t even known he’d fallen in love with Angela. Hadn’t once occurred to him, not consciously. In fact he thought—as he’d watched her relationship with James Simon unfold—that he was happy for them, that it was a good thing.

  “That’s a surprise,” said Melissa Bjork from behind the shower curtain. He watched in the mirror as she pulled it aside and stepped, wet and naked, from the tub. “Would you hand me the towel, please?” He looked at the towel, then at the reflection.

  “I don’t think so,” he said.

  She laughed, reached for the reflection of the towel and, with it, began to dry the reflection of herself. “Didn’t see that coming, did you?”

&
nbsp; “No.”

  “She’s too young, Albert.”

  Too young for what? Albert wondered.

  “For you,” Melissa clarified.

  His age wasn’t the kind of thing he thought about, but, if asked, he wouldn’t have thought himself too old, which he must be if Angela was too young.

  For what?

  Albert realized he’d been watching her in the mirror. He turned to see her flesh in the flesh, but she wasn’t there. He turned back to the mirror, and there she was. “I like seeing you like that,” he said.

  She curtsied. “Why thank you, sir. I’m pleased the view meets with your approval.”

  Something about the gesture reminded him what he was looking at, and he suddenly became profoundly uncomfortable in a not altogether unpleasant way. “But I think you should . . . put it all away,” he said.

  Melissa wrapped the towel around her. “As you wish.” She sat on the hamper, so all he could see of her in the mirror was her head. A very pretty head, even with that hole in it.

  He knew that the reason he could see Melissa Bjork—though she had been dead four years—had to do with the workings of that mysterious little island the doctors in London had found in his brain, that place he had come to identify as his soul, the country where the music came from, where the dead came alive and projected themselves on mirrors, smoke, and moonlight.

  “Are you in heaven?” his mouth asked, much to the surprise of his brain.

  “I’m in you,” said the reflection, looking at him deeply with warm green eyes.

  “Green eyes,” he said aloud. “I love you, you know?”

  “So you said,” said Melissa Bjork.

  His heart rose to his throat as his tongue formed the next question. “Did you?”

  “Did I love you?”

  “Yes.”

  “‘Did’ doesn’t apply to love, does it? Love is forever; you either do or you don’t.”

  That’s exactly what Albert thought, too.

  “Besides,” she continued, “I told you so, on the porch. Remember?”

  Albert remembered. “Yes. But, did you . . . do you really love me. The way . . .”

  “The way James loves Angela?”

  “Yes.”

  “That’s a question only you can answer,” she said. “Do you feel loved by me?”

  He thought about that. “I think you were beginning to.”

  “Then there’s your answer,” she said, and he was happy with that. So happy, in fact, that tears began to trickle from his eyes. “I don’t want to be here,” he said. “I don’t like this place.”

  “New Zealand?”

  “Life,” he said. “It’s an evil place.”

  Still not taking her eyes from him in the mirror; not blinking, she said, “Evil and good. It’s a battle.”

  “That’s what Simon says,” said Albert. “Good leads to heaven.”

  “And evil?”

  “Doesn't.”

  “And the reason we’re here is to determine which way our soul will go. Simple when you put it that way, isn’t it?”

  “I think evil is winning.”

  The reflection of Melissa Bjork hung its head. “It seems that way sometimes.”

  There was no applause that night when Albert finished playing. One doesn’t applaud after a seduction, or at a funeral, or the death of a dream, the loss and rebirth of hope. The last chord, a C#, rang for a long time through the concert hall. C# is not an ending chord, it’s a transition. Maybe the audience sensed that, too, that the piece hadn’t ended, the player had simply stopped playing.

  After the last echo died away, someone took the handkerchief from his eyes, handed it to his weeping wife, stood up, helped her to her feet, and walked out. The rest followed in shuffling allotments: two thousand-odd unwitting penitents emerging from musical surgery, applying metaphorical pressure to the wounds until, at last, only Albert remained, sitting at the piano, his hands still pressing the final chord.

  As he’d played, he thought, and the piano translated those thoughts into music, and that is what the audience had heard: death—by fire, bullet, pen and knife; love—desired, found, betrayed, lost; hope—imagined, clung to, nurtured, dashed and always rising from its own ashes; pain—of heart, mind, soul and flesh; crashing waves closing over his head, the frigid embrace of oblivion, the hollowed-out corpse of Woolie-Woolie, the hollow eyes of Woolie One.

  The kiss that transferred the beginnings of love between Angela and James Simon.

  Melissa Bjork, stepping naked from the shower—with that bullet hole in her head.

  Harvest Lossberg, celebrated painter of cows skewered through the throat by a hatpin.

  Humanity so devoid of humanity that it traded in body parts, that it saw art in what was not art, heard music in what was not music, saw innocence as nonsense, right as wrong, up as down, in as out, evil as good, and good as evil.

  His fingers had torn the music from the maelstrom in his brain and thrown it at the instrument which such fury that they left blood on the keys. This was Albert’s musical indictment of the world, his judgment, his conviction, his sentencing, his execution. Were he God, it would have heralded the end of the world.

  No, more than that, it would have unmade time, so that none of the bloody skein that stained the fabric of existence had ever existed.

  Melissa Bjork would never have been, therefore could not have died in his arms—which also would never have been. They would be forever bound in the ineffable embrace of non-being.

  “To be, or not to be,” he whispered into the shaft of light that obscured the fact that the auditorium was empty.

  Chapter TwentyNine

  Steam rose from the pot of paua chowder on back of the stove, framing Frenchie as she gutted the fresh-caught grouper, tossing the innards out the window to the waiting congregation of gulls. Kumara dropped a newly-peeled potato into the kettle of furiously boiling water. It was Saturday, meaning people would be expecting Frenchie’s smoked fish pie and abalone stew at the Kaingaroa Club Buffet, and she was running late, due in no small part to her participation in the discussion at the inn that morning, following her return from the concert three nights earlier.

  “They went back to get him,” said Frenchie, dabbing at the spot on her arm that had just been splashed by drops of boiling water, “Jeremy Ash and Otis or Wendell—or whatever his name is, seems to change with the weather.”

  “And he was gone?” said Kumara.

  “Gone.” Frenchie replied. “You’d better peel another half bushel them potatoes, Ku. I’ve got enough fish here for four pies and only potatoes for two.”

  Kumara complied in a desultory fashion. “Where do you think he went?” she said. “You think he tried to drown himself again?”

  “Lord, I hope not! Still. . .”

  “Still what?”

  “You never heard anything like that music, Ku,” said Frenchie. She stopped cutting the fish, and rested her hands—the filleting knife in one hand, a half-gutted fish in the other—its unblinking eyes seeming to attend with a certain detachment the unfolding of the conversation. “Like walking blindfold through hell and heaven, this fella said in the paper next day. That about sums it up.”

  She stared at Kumara in such a way that Kumara felt she was being looked through. She shifted a bit uncomfortably, then plunked another potato in the kettle.

  “Some of it even sounded Maori, if you can credit it! It wasn’t music, though,” Frenchie said, retrieving her gaze from her companion and fixing it on the fish. “Not anything I’d’ve ever called music, anyway. It was something else. Like . . . I don’t know. Some other kind’ve language altogether.”

  “What’chyou been smokin’, girl? He’s just a piano player,” said Kumara, nicking her nail with the peeler. “Crap! Look what you made me do. I just painted that nail a week ago.”

  Frenchie wasn’t listening to the present, she was processing the past. That music. Those sounds. Who ever imagined a piano could do such
a thing? “There wasn’t anything else to do when he stopped playin’ but just leave,” she said. “And that’s what we did.

  “I was one of the last. I turned just because I had to and there he was, sitting at the piano with his hands still on the keys. . .” She mimed the tableau, the fish in one hand, the knife in the other. “I could just make out Jeremy Ash there, in the wings, and Wendell just turned him around and they wheeled away.”

  A thought occurred to her. “You know why that was, Ku?” she said, raising her eyes once more, in which Kumara saw depths theretofore unknown. “You know why people just left, like that?”

  “Why?” Kumara said after a moment.

  “Because we were eavesdropping,” she said. Her senses rallied in agreement with the analogy. “That’s just what it was. We weren’t an audience, we were eavesdropping on a man talking to God. Yellin’ at Him, cursing Him, praying to Him, pleadin’ with Him.

  “That’s it, Ku. The man was at that place where you gotta just stop talkin’ an’ let God be God. That’s where he was when he stopped playin’. Just stopped playin’, ’cause he’d said all he had to say and God just told him ‘I’m God, and you ain’t,’ and that was that.”

  “Not like you to talk like that,” said Kumara, sucking her damaged nail. “You sound like Nunuku.”*

  It was a good thirty seconds before Frenchie spoke again. “How long we known each other, Ku?”

  “How long?” said Kumara , at the same time calculating from the day Frenchie ran over her dog, Lefty, which is how they met. Lefty died, but Frenchie arranged a funeral barbecue in his honor—by way of apology—so that was all right. “About eight years, I’d say.”

  “Eight years,” said Frenchie. “Too right. And how often, in all that time, would you say we’ve talked about anything more than work, family, the weather, and island gossip?”

  “Well, what else is there?” said Kumara , studying the half-peeled potato in her hand as if it aware that it was about to become something new and strange.