He stabbed the button once again. He had a thin face behind the large nose, and pretty, dark brown eyes with heavy lashes. He was younger than she, not even thirty, but he would have to be far younger still before she could say what it was that came into her mind to say: A girl would kill to have those eyelashes.
The door closed again and again the elevator shook itself and slowly rose. She tried to think of some small talk. (Because it was simply what you did. You made small talk, you commiserated.)
Her eyes fell on his hands again, so white against the dark felt of his hat. She watched them moving, involuntarily, rhythmically, one at a time and in no apparent order, and thought briefly of a friend of her brother’s who had come back from overseas with what they’d called Saint Vitus’ dance. But was this kid even old enough to have been in the war?
Suddenly she said, “Are you the piano player, upstairs?” For that was how she and John had come to refer to him, The piano player, upstairs.
He turned his nose to her again, warily now. “I play,” he said.
She nodded. “We hear you,” she told him. “My husband and I, we listen,” she said. Every evening from seven fifteen until nine and Saturday mornings eight to eleven, which she preferred, since they woke to it. “You play beautifully,” she told him, although the music was obscurely classical and, because there were no lyrics, unmemorable to her.
But the compliment was like a drop of water on the dry wool of his face. His cheeks seemed to soften, color, even swell.
“I hope it doesn’t disturb you,” he said.
She held out her hand, the thin string of the bakery box looped around her wrist. “Not at all,” she said, although three or four times now she had hung on her husband’s arm to keep him from banging the broom handle against the ceiling. “We enjoy it,” she said. And then, at a loss for a more substantial compliment, she added, “You must have some beautiful piano.”
They had reached her floor and once again he put his forearm against the door to hold it for her. “A Steinway,” he said, his tongue poked behind his lips as if to suppress a boastful smile.
Stepping out of the elevator she said, “Oh, sure. The factory over in Long Island City.”
“A baby grand,” he added with such sudden animation that she thought for a moment he might follow her into the hallway to say more. But the doors were once again butting against his arm.
“No kidding?” She smiled at him. He was very young. “How’d you even get it up here?”
He gave his smile the go-ahead, moving to put his shoulder, too, against the elevator door. “It was already there,” he said. “Someone left it behind. They didn’t want it. The super said they couldn’t even rent the apartment for a few weeks because it takes up the whole bedroom and nobody wanted to pay to take it out. Can you believe it? A Steinway.”
“Lucky that you play,” she said. She would have put her gloved hand to his cheek, patted it gently to temper his sweet and sudden enthusiasm, were it not for the way the thumping doors were sending rebukes from the poor souls waiting downstairs. She put out her hand again, the bakery box rocking against her wrist. “That would have been something to see,” meaning getting a baby grand piano from Long Island City to the tiny sixth-floor bedroom just above theirs.
Little wonder, then, that the next morning when she woke to the heavy run of scales that began his three hours of practice, she saw in her mind’s eye Laurel and Hardy waving their hats beneath a dangling baby grand, saw them catching their fingers in piano lids or pressing their cheeks against the broad rump of a Steinway as they carried it, nimbly wavering, up a long flight of stairs. Saw in her mind’s eye that delicious moment when Stan—a version of the piano player himself, when you thought about it—smiled the sweet self-satisfied smile that always preceded the double take, the panic, the inevitable disaster. (Down, down, down the keyboard he went and down, down, down in her mind’s eye went the poor piano.)
Images that stayed with her even as John woke and sighed and cursed a little under his breath before he lifted the hand she had already placed on his belly and took her into his arms.
And there was comedy in this too, in the musical accompaniment—the scales that drew them to their first, stale-mouthed kiss followed by the inept and repetitious beginnings of some vaguely familiar but as yet unrecognizable piece as they shyly (still) got out of their pajamas. And then ineptitude giving way, on all their parts, to a certain confidence, even grace.
Did he hear it, she wondered as she glimpsed her husband’s face through half-closed eyes and saw what was quickly becoming a familiar look: a kind of determined concentration, a grimace to the lips, and a far-off gaze to his eyes that marked a consummation that she was beginning to suspect turned him in on himself far more than it would ever turn him out toward her. She imagined it was akin to the look the piano player upstairs wore as he worked the keys, that kind of crazy-eyed focus on the task that could obliterate all distractions, even the very instrument under his hands. Does he even hear the music, she thought, arching toward him as he labored above her. Does he even see my face?
This was something she had never anticipated before she was married, the painful, physical struggle he seemed to wage with himself in the course of their joining. She had thought it would all be whispered endearments, only pleasantly breathless. She was surprised to learn that there was labor in it, pain and struggle as well as sweetness.
There was still more music to listen to after they had fallen apart. She thought she was beginning to recognize some refrain, or maybe he was just going over the same notes. With her eyes to the ceiling she said, “It’s a baby grand.”
Her husband turned his head on the pillow. He might have been startled to find her there. He frowned, and then hesitated, and then whispered, disbelieving, “You can tell already?”
There was one window in the corner of the bedroom, its sill worn to velvet, looking like velvet even in the weak, winter morning sun that came from beneath the wooden blinds and marked the new day. Another day. She grew giddy with laughter, convinced as she was, and would remain, that there was portent in his misunderstanding, that their child’s life had indeed begun at that hour. Their baby grand, first of four.
II
EITHER THE WIND kept them all away or the entire population took to heart the notion that the beaches were closed after Labor Day. In the deserted parking lot, on a Sunday morning that was only, after all, in mid-September, the wind moved a thin scrim of sand across the bleached asphalt, brushed it along the ground in wide, crossing arcs that thinned and ebbed in much the same way the beige sea foam thinned and ebbed at the edge of the beach that was just beyond the trees.
The wind took the sound of the slammed car doors, the slammed trunk, and sailed it off like a black scrap, over their heads, back toward the long highway and the crowded towns and the churches on shaded avenues choked with parked cars. It took their voices, too, but more gently. The parking lot was empty and so there was no need to cry out after the children as they ran ahead.
“Not a soul,” Mary Keane said to her husband, the wind lifting her words, tossing them gently back over her shoulder, the way it moved the colorful tails of the scarf she had tied under her chin. In her arms she had bundled a wool blanket and a tufted pillow and a stuffed bear, and her husband stepped in front of her to take everything from her arms at once, leaving only the bulge of her belly under the green canvas car coat.
“They’re all in church,” he said and saw the flush of guilt, or of wind, on her broad cheeks. The wind lifted his own thinning hair—those long strands he combed back over his crown—made it stand, briefly, on end.
Something done right—at least so far—this suggestion of his, whispered to the ceiling this morning, his hand on her thigh. That they skip Mass just this once and head to the beach.
Some weeks ago, a tropical wave had slipped off the African coast, as if (he’d thought, reading the account) the continent itself had shuddered, and moved into the w
aters of the south seas, stirring the ocean and the air and the various inhabitants of small islands and southern shorelines, until finally it woke him this morning at dawn with the sound of the wind in the eaves, with some memory or dream of the Ardennes, and a hankering to see what the shudder of a continent did to the waters off Jones Beach.
Across the ceiling of his bedroom, the dawn had appeared to be made up of reflected light, light that moved with the rise and fall of the wind as if it were light reflecting off water—although the house was ten miles from any shore, smack in the substantial heart of his own spit of island, and even the neighborhood backyard pools had been drained and dismantled.
Beneath this watery light the room itself was in steady shadow. His wife was beside him, buried in pillows. He was fifty-one and would be a new father again by the end of the year. This morning, woken by the wind, he had put his thumb to each fingertip, counting decades.
The children ran ahead. A white trail of sand cut through the scrub pine and the yellowing beach grass, rising across the dunes and then dropping down again to the wide white beach that then itself dropped down again, sharply, a kind of cliff, a kind of collapse—the way the children felt their breaths collapse, coming to its edge, to the terrific thunderclap of the ocean.
The sand here, at their feet as they looked down from the dry cliff, was dark gray, the color of a thundercloud. The children bowed, putting down their toys (plastic machine guns, a football, a shoe box filled with green army men and small, camouflaged jeeps), unlaced their sneakers, and jumped down, arms raised, heels digging into the falling sand of the seawall.
Not a soul.
At the foot of the dunes, John Keane dropped the wool blanket and the tufted pillow and the teddy bear, unhooked the quilted hamper from his shoulder and his wife’s hand from the crook of his arm. He felt the wind raise the sand and fling it, stinging, into his cheek, saw his wife pull the folded edge of her scarf over the side of her face, turning away from him and the blowing sand.
He picked up the wool blanket and moved it farther inside the dunes, to a shallow valley where even the sound of the moving air seemed suddenly to retreat. He spread the blanket, walked out again to lift the tufted pillow and the bear and the plaid quilted hamper, then returned a third time to give her his arm.
She stood, holding the edge of her colorful scarf over her cheek, shading her eyes with the other. Her face made harsh and unlovely by the sand and the wind and the deep line between her eyes.
“Sit back here,” he said. “You’ll be out of the wind.”
Under her chin, the bright red-and-blue tails of her scarf rose, writhed, paddled the air. “I can’t see them,” she said.
He looked toward the ocean, the forlorn image of the abandoned sneakers and toys—the shoe box had already lost its lid—at the edge of the known world where the sand disappeared and there was only water and sky.
“I’ll tell them to come up,” he said and knew she would not move—some vestigial habit of her race or of her sex, this frowning vigil at the edge of the sea—until he had returned them to her sight.
He crossed the wide breadth of beach, hearing their voices coming to him on the wind before he saw them at the shoreline. The two boys were stamping at the creamy edges of the waves—making small explosions of water and wet sand—his daughter down on her haunches, examining something, a mussel or a crab or just the mysterious, bubbling holes that opened and closed like mouths under the retreating waves.
Beyond them, the ocean was high, whitecapped, agitated. There were disks of black and gray as well as gold among the rushing swells. In the panhandle, in the Carolinas, metal blinds had been drawn, iron awnings brought down on the white houses that were bunkers now, among the palm trees and the flamingos. But here the sky was mostly blue and clear, except for a few white, rushing clouds just above the horizon.
Some vestige of his race or of his sex made him think, whenever he looked out across the ocean: As it was before me and as it will be long after I’m gone. For the second time today, he touched his thumb to his fingertips. He could make it to the 1980s or 1990s, perhaps even to the next century, when the new baby would be grown, maybe with children of his or her own. But even with the best of luck, it would not be equal to the time he’d already spent.
He called to them. “Come up,” he said against the wind. “Your mother wants you up.”
The wall of sand the sea had made, the cliff, the collapse, seemed smaller now with their father standing on top of it, his hair raised in the wind. They scaled it quickly, in wide strides, their arms pumping.
He put his hand out to his daughter, pulled her up easily over the edge. And then bent to gather the shoes and toys, swinging the canvas straps of the two toy machine guns over his shoulder (surprised to find that some mistaken memory had caused him—momentarily—to be surprised to find they had no weight). Jacob, the oldest, ran to retrieve the cardboard lid while Michael, his brother, lifted the shoe box, shifting the contents—green army men, toy bayonets, machine gun, camouflaged jeeps—taking roll.
With his thumbs hooked over the lid, the boy carried the box up the beach, behind his father and brother and sister, feeling the drag of sand but feeling, too, that with a small effort he could overtake them.
Their mother stood at the base of the dunes, her hands seeming to cup her broad face as she waited for them.
“Back here,” their father said. “We’ll be out of the wind.” And once more gave his wife his arm. The children ran before them, the boys running up and down the sides of the dunes, sand slipping, as if they had no choice in the matter, as if the world itself were tilting, the little girl imagining shipwrecked and island-lost, and only her father’s cleverness (there were guns slung over his shoulder) to keep them safe and warm.
The plaid blanket was already spread in a gap between the dunes, the tufted pillow on it, the lunch hamper, and the teddy bear who had not been lost, not drowned in the wreck, after all. She threw her arms around it, an extravagant reunion. “If it weren’t for me,” her mother said dryly, smiling, “you would have left him behind in the car.”
Too soon to eat, they agreed, and her husband gallantly gave her his hand again as she lowered herself to the blanket, first onto her knees and then, carefully, onto the pillow. Straightening himself, he palmed the football like a younger man and called the boys to follow him out to the beach.
She leaned back on her palms, the wool prickly against her skin and already dusted with sand.
There was the now oddly distant knock of the waves against themselves and the softer yet similar sound of the football meeting their hands. There was her husband’s voice, Go out, now, Keep your eye on it, Good, and the voices of the boys, mostly complaining: My turn, Hey, Interference. The ball a kind of shadow passing before her, between them, across the sun itself or so it seemed.
Annie, her daughter, had claimed the corner of the blanket, sitting perversely, her mother thought, with her back to the ocean and to her father and the boys on the windy beach. The worn bear (cherished now that she had recalled its existence) on her lap. She was not speaking, but her lips moved and her eyes were clearly engaged in a conversation of some sort—she frowned, she shook her head—and despite the echo of the ocean falling down on itself, the slap of the football in their hands, and their voices, carried on the wind, it was this conversation as it played like light across her daughter’s features (she raised her eyes, made them smile) that absorbed the mother’s attention.
Mary Keane watched her daughter and felt as well the punch and turn of the baby not yet born and saw the similarity of the mystery of them both—the baby unseen, moving an elbow or a foot, the means to an end all its own, unfathomable; her daughter with the unseen life playing like reflected light over her face, her lips moving in a conversation forever unheard.
She slipped her hand under her belly, shifted her weight on the pillow, and looked up to see the boys returning, windblown, kicking up sand. Her husband behind them, bo
yish, too, with the red flush across his cheeks and the thinning hair scattered every which way across his head. The baby rolled, roiled, beneath her ribs and the beach grass shuddered in the wind. He sat beside her heavily, while the two boys fell on the shoe box full of soldiers, carrying it off to the foot of another dune—for this had been their plan all along, to re-stage Okinawa or Omaha Beach, continuing the war game they had begun last night in their room, across the sheets and blankets and pillows of their twin beds, in one of those hours of grace when they had not quarreled and their parents had not called to them to put out the light. They had named each member of their platoon—Murphy, Idaho, Sarge, Smitty—ambushed some Germans, and collected commendations from Patton himself. This morning when their father had come into their room to say, “We’re heading for the beach,” the dissolution of the plans they’d made to continue the push toward Berlin right after Mass was quickly compensated for by the possibility of dune and sand—Okinawa, Omaha Beach, North Africa and Rommel.
It was their father who had put the football in the trunk.
Now they scattered their men across the sand and among the bending stalks of sea grass. Their sister heard the changed pitch of their voices, the harsh and breathy pitch they used when they were speaking for someone else in an imaginary game. She rose to join them. The bear was still in her arms but once again forgotten.
“Can I play?” she asked finally, understanding, even at six, that the timidity of the question invited a single reply.
“No.” Looking to each other, not to her.
She watched them. The orders they barked were low and intimate, running under the sound of the wind.
“Can I have a man?” she asked.
“No,” again, but now their parents on the blanket together looked toward them.
“Boys,” their father said, a warning. And a single green soldier was plucked from the shoe box of reservists and replacements and tossed her way, through the air. She picked him up from the sand. The mold had shaped his features precisely, a strong jaw and a sharp nose, the little combat helmet and a sash of ammunition across his chest. Unlike the men her brothers preferred, this one had no rifle pressed to its shoulder, no hand grenade about to be thrown, but stood instead with his arms extended from his sides, palms out. His head was slightly raised, as if whatever he confronted was still at some distance, and was larger than just another man.
After This Page 3
