Strings

by Megan Edwards

  “Of course,” my mother said. “But Antoine won’t be here. He’s at a conference in Seattle.”

  Karen’s daughters were tiny clones of her and each other. They had the same white-blonde hair she’d had as a child.

  “Portia and Juliet?” I repeated when Karen told me their names.

  “I’m still a huge Shakespeare fan,” she said.

  I sat down next to Karen on the edge of the blanket where the two little girls were busy with their dolls.

  “They’re beautiful,” I said. “And you look great, too.”

  In fact, she did look good. She was wearing a white piqué sundress, and her hair had artful strawberry blonde highlights. She’d filled out a little, and I thought she looked happy, or at least content.

  “Thanks, Ted,” she said. “You look great, too.” She looked at me, and I knew instantly she didn’t mean it.

  Just then, my father emerged from the house.

  “Your dad loves the girls,” Karen said as he headed toward us.

  He plopped down on the blanket and twisted the lid off the small bottle he was holding. The little girls shrieked with glee as he surrounded them in a blizzard of iridescent bubbles.

  The grandchildren he’ll never have, I thought, and a wave of sadness washed over me as I sat there. My mother and Mrs. Hall were drinking white wine under the umbrella on the patio. Mr. Hall was setting up a croquet course on the lawn. I felt like Scrooge on a journey with the Ghost of Christmas Never. Wasn’t this the way things should have been?

  “I wish you could have met Antoine,” Karen said, almost as though she had guessed what I was thinking.

  “Is he your soul mate?” I asked.

  Karen’s smile faded into a look of surprise. “Don’t tell me you still believe in bullshit like that, Ted.” She paused. “I mean, it’s okay when you’re young and like to mope around wearing lots of black eyeliner, but—”

  She patted my thigh and shot me a condescending smile. Gazing at me with unmistakable pity in her eyes, she said, “Having kids changes everything, Ted.”

  Just then, Portia or Juliet crawled over and climbed up onto her lap.

  “Can you tell them apart?” I asked.

  “In the dark with my eyes closed,” Karen said. “But Antoine can’t.”

  Chapter 33

  Three days later I was in New York, and a few weeks after that, I moved into a co-op with a view of Central Park. I hired a new manager, and I continued to pursue the solo career Sophie had forged for me. Over the next several years, I also began to collect violins. As for my personal life, I once overheard a friend describe me as a “confirmed bachelor.” It surprised me a little at the time, but I’m sure most observers would have agreed. I spent all my time tending my growing collection of instruments.

  Expensive violins and their admirers reside in a small but global universe. As my collection grew, so did my involvement with connoisseurs around the world. It wasn’t long before I was involved in appraising instruments for individual owners, prospective buyers, museums, and insurance companies. I played the role of broker in an increasing number of transactions, and I was often called upon for consulting services. Although I still performed regularly, this new vocation gradually took center stage in my life.

  One Sunday night after I’d been living in New York for a couple of years, I turned on the television around eleven. I don’t usually watch network news, but I wanted to find out the latest about a New York transit strike. I poured myself a brandy, and when I sat down to watch, I was glad that I had.

  Filling the screen was the face of none other than my old friend Bill Cross. He was heavier, and he was completely bald, but I still would have recognized him without the caption: “Los Angeles Attorney William G. Cross,” it read, “of Kenworthy, Steinmetz & Hobbs.”

  Bill was standing behind a bouquet of microphones, and one question rang out above the hubbub.

  “Is it true you’re having an affair with Mrs. de Soto?”

  “Madeline de Soto is a friend and a client,” Bill said. “We are confident that she will prevail against the absurd, vindictive, and frivolous action that the U.S. Attorney has brought against her.”

  Another salvo of questions immediately erupted, but the footage ended. The news anchorman summed up the latest skirmish in the ongoing De Soto scandals, but I had no interest in a New Age huckster on a kamikaze mission. She might be a boon to the tabloid trade, but as far as I was concerned, the sooner the nation was rid of her miracle-claiming health spas, her misleading infomercials, and her snake oil products, the better.

  How could my old buddy be mixed up with an obvious bottom feeder like Madeline de Soto? I wondered as I jotted down the name of his law firm. But I couldn’t help smiling. It was great to see him in action.

  The next day, I called Kenworthy, Steinmetz & Hobbs. I didn’t really expect Bill to be there, but I hoped he would call me back. To my surprise, the receptionist put me right through.

  “Spencer! You dog!” Bill shouted.

  “Has fame wrecked you?” I asked, and he laughed.

  “Why didn’t I see how great it is to be in the limelight when I was running that damn light booth? I should have been Lancelot myself.”

  “Why Madeline de Soto?” I asked. “Why aren’t you saving the redwoods or something else that deserves it?”

  “Maddie’s got her flaws, but she’s always paid her taxes,” Bill said. “The Feds haven’t been able to nail her for drugs or medical fraud, so they’re trying to pull an Al Capone. She’s being railroaded.”

  “How did she find an angel like you?” I asked.

  “Oh, it was a friend-of-a-friend thing. One of them remembered some work I did for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar back when I was at Briscoe and Pitt and asked me to join her defense team. I never expected to get my picture in the tabloids, though. Or get linked to Madeline romantically. Ha! If they only knew!”

  “Have you gone back into the closet or something?”

  “No, but I’m on my own right now, and nobody’s done any poking into my past. They will one of these days, and a whole new set of rumors will erupt.”

  “So how are you?” I finally asked. He sounded happier than I’d ever heard him.

  “Good,” he said. “My kids spend most weekends with me.”

  I caught him up on my own life, and before we hung up, we promised to keep in touch.

  “I come to Los Angeles every couple of months,” I said. “Let’s at least have lunch.”

  “I come to New York sometimes, too,” Bill said. “Let’s get drunk.”

  Amazingly enough, Bill and I actually did get together the next time I went to L.A., and after Madeline de Soto’s tax evasion charges were dropped, his role on her defense team made him a desirable speaker at conferences and trade shows. Such engagements brought him to New York several times a year, and he always found time to meet me for drinks or a meal.

  “I guess I’m just not the type to have a ‘significant other,’” Bill said one night over beers at McSorley’s. “I always think I’m open to the possibility, but ... ” his voice trailed off.

  “I don’t think I’m the type, either,” I said.

  Bill looked at me, and his face was suddenly serious.

  “You’re wrong, Ted,” he said. “It’s weird, but whenever I look at you, it’s as though I should be seeing two people. Like you’re a photograph with one face blacked out.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Olivia.”

  I stared at him. Why would he bring her up after all this time?

  “You two had something.”

  “Yeah, we did. In high school.”

  “Are you telling me you never think about her?” Bill leaned forward and tapped his index finger on my chest. “I think about her every time I see you.”

  “I
think about her,” I admitted.

  “Is that all you ever do?” Bill demanded. “Think?”

  “She’s married,” I said. “Don’t you read the papers?”

  It had been impossible to ignore all the news coverage when Olivia announced her engagement to Arturo Ricciardi a couple of years before. He was a wealthy Italian nobleman old enough to be her father. The wedding made headlines on both sides of the Atlantic, not unlike when Grace Kelly tied the knot with Prince Rainier.

  “Yeah,” Bill said. “I know. And it’s just wrong. You were supposed to marry her, you big jerk.”

  •••

  I couldn’t bring myself to tell Bill about what had transpired between Olivia and me a few years before. I could hardly allow myself to recall those few blissful encounters and all I had done to ensure that none could ever follow. Only now can I think about it. Now that the Merino Rose sits accusing me more relentlessly than Bill Cross ever could.

  Old buddy, how could you read me so well? Was I such an open book to everyone but myself?

  Chapter 34

  The next time I saw Bill was in 1999, at my father’s funeral. I had seen my dad only two weeks before, when he and my mother stayed overnight on their way home from Scotland. Having long since turned the reins of Spencer Luggage over to a new management team, my father had been pursuing his retirement vigorously on glamorous golf courses around the world. He was back on familiar turf at the Beverly Hills Country Club when he suffered a massive heart attack and succumbed before reaching a hospital.

  The next night, as I lay on my boyhood bed, I pondered my mother’s suggestion that I live in the house on Mulholland Drive. “It’s yours now, Ted,” she’d said. “It’s too much for me now and I know Dad would be pleased if you carried on here.”

  Would he? I’d never know. Things were never the same between us after I refused to become part of Spencer Luggage. Although my father hadn’t ignored my career, the feeling that I was a permanent disappointment had never left me.

  I slept fitfully. Before dawn, I wrapped myself in a terry cloth robe, descended the curving staircase to the entryway, and passed through the living room on my way to the kitchen. The smell of Marlboros lingered in the air. The old man had never succeeded in giving up smoking, even though he’d tried countless times.

  “I’ll die with a cigarette in my mouth,” he used to say, and he was very nearly right. He was about to light up after the fourteenth hole when he collapsed.

  After making myself a cup of coffee, I walked through the rest of the house. I passed the guest room where Olivia had stayed, and the bath where we had embraced that night so long ago. When I reached my father’s study, I sat down in the leather wing chair facing his rosewood desk.

  The room was dim, and I could almost see him sitting across from me, hands folded, waiting for me to speak. But what was there to say? The only thing left of him was the scent of tobacco. I sat there in silence as the first rays of daylight stole around the edges of the drapes and raked across the big desk.

  Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder, and I turned to find my mother standing behind me.

  “I didn’t mean to startle you, Ted,” she said.

  “I couldn’t sleep.”

  “I haven’t slept much, either, these last few days.”

  I stood and moved to face her.

  “Mom, I’m so sorry,” I said, kissing her cheek. She looked so pale, so tired.

  “He loved you,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I’m not sure you do.” My mother moved to a bookcase directly behind the big desk. Pulling out two thick albums, she opened one, revealing page after page of carefully preserved newspaper and magazine clippings: Time, Newsweek, Harper’s, Esquire, The New York Times. And there were programs, too, from Vienna, London, San Francisco, Sydney. But how—?

  “He didn’t always tell you he was in the audience, Ted.” My mother had moved to the stereo now, and I stared at her as my own rendition of Saint-Saëns’s Violin Concerto no. 3 filled the room. It was a piece I had mastered as a boy and still loved for its charming tenderness.

  “He never listened to anyone else,” she said. “Only you.”

  I was silent—what was there to say? My mother vanished down the hall, and I sat down again, facing my father’s vacant chair.

  The music rose around me, punishing me with its sweetness. If you loved me, Dad, why didn’t you tell me? And why wasn’t your heart big enough to hold Olivia, too? You should have been playing with your grandchildren these last few years, not gadding about exotic golf courses.

  Despair slowly quelled my anger as the concerto’s final strains engulfed me. I could rage against my father’s stony silence, but I couldn’t deny my own. I could play my violin all night long, but when it came to love, I was mute. My feelings were like forgotten sheet music, notes on a page with no voice to express them.

  And now it was too late. He was gone, as utterly as my childhood, as incontrovertibly as a lifetime without Olivia. I sat there as the sun slowly illuminated his big empty chair, and I wept.

  Chapter 35

  My mother decided to move to a condo in Newport Beach that she and my father had purchased a few years earlier. When I came to visit her a month after the funeral, she was suffering greatly as she tried to choose the few belongings she would have room for in the smaller space.

  “My mind knows it’s time to set all this free,” she said, running her hand over the piano in the living room, “but my heart can’t get used to the idea.”

  I told Bill Cross what Mom had said over lunch in Venice, where Bill was pursuing a slightly Bohemian lifestyle in a small condo near the beach.

  “I don’t blame her,” he said. “I have fond feelings for your parents’ stuff, too.” He looked at me thoughtfully. “Especially that big brown leather recliner in the family room. Is it still there? Did it survive all the manhandling I gave it back in high school?”

  I smiled as I remembered the nights we’d stayed up late watching old horror movies on television. Bill always claimed the recliner.

  “Yeah,” I said. “It’s there.”

  “I liked the guest room I always stayed in, too,” he continued. “Your mom always put a special pillowcase embroidered with flowers on my pillow. ‘Those are sweet williams,’ she always reminded me, ‘just like you.’ I’ll never forget that.”

  Bill’s room was the same one where Olivia had stayed the one and only time she’d visited. I shook my head, trying to dispel the memory of that night.

  “It’s only stuff,” I said.

  “Yep. Just like your violins.”

  I looked at Bill, expecting to find the usual sly expression. But this time he only looked pensive, almost sad.

  “Strings,” he said. “So thin, and yet so difficult to sever.”

  •••

  Just before I left to catch a plane home, I took my mother’s hand in mine.

  “I’m too much of a New Yorker to live in Los Angeles, Mom, but don’t get rid of anything just yet.”

  She looked at me, tears filling her eyes.

  “I’m going to buy a house, Mom,” I said, blinking to hide my own emotion. “In Connecticut, I think. It’ll be big enough to hold all our furniture, and beautiful enough for you to love it. I hope you’ll visit often and stay as long as you like.”

  Within six weeks, I’d found a homestead worthy of my parents’ furnishings—not in Connecticut, but in Westchester County. A three-story colonial, the house has four fireplaces, eight bedrooms, countless shuttered windows, and a big red front door. It’s in Sleepy Hollow, a town known for headless horsemen and my neighbor to the west, whose last name is Rockefeller.

  Laugh if you will at the thought of a middle-aged bachelor living alone in eighteen rooms. If it elevates me to the ranks of the truly eccentric, so be it. All I know is tha
t I’ve been at peace here. My mother comes to visit every month or so, and she relaxes among the familiar furnishings. Having failed to provide her with grandchildren, the least I could do was preserve the household she and my father created.

  Several days ago, I made a trip to Westchester Airport to see my mother off. When I returned home mid-morning, I made a cup of coffee and sat down at my computer in the study. From my desk, I have a view through the maple trees beyond my driveway down to Hanford Road. I love that view and how it changes through the seasons. I especially love it now, as autumn breezes begin to bear away the rusty leaves.

  When I sit here, no one can reach my door without my notice. I am not protected, however, from surprises that arrive through that other portal I’ve recently grown so dependent upon: the Internet. As I sipped my coffee, a message flickered onto my screen from an unfamiliar sender. Thinking it was yet another unbidden solicitation from a mortgage broker or a software vendor, I very nearly hit the “delete” key without reading the attached message. I was immediately grateful that my trigger finger was slow. The letter was from someone no keystroke could ever erase.

  Dear Ted,

  It’s been so long. How are you these days? And I might as well follow that with another question to which I’m embarrassed I don’t know the answer. Where are you these days?

  I’m in Malibu. I bought a house here a few months ago, and my mother lives here with me. Teddie’s off being a grown-up now—studying theater at UCLA and living in a condo in Westwood.

  You may well be wondering why I’m writing after all these years, and I think you’ll find the reason ironic if you can bear with me through the long story.

  I don’t know whether you know about my marriage ten years ago to Arturo Ricciardi. I met him when he was living in Los Angeles, and during our years together we spent quite a bit of time at his villa in Italy just north of Florence. Arturo died there almost exactly a year ago.