by Sally Mandel
I tossed back some champagne and started chattering away like a nutcase. I couldn’t admit even to myself these scary feelings for Jake. The consequences were too scary and sad. No more best friends—I’d lose him and Pauline at one crack. I was petrified of Pauline’s ESP. She was giving me one of her brain-drilling looks, excavating for my deepest thoughts. My only recourse was to start going through every bloody note of Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata in my head so maybe I could throw her off the track. Last movement, tadadaDAH, tadadaDAH, tadadaDAH, tadadaDUM. Down, Bess. Down, girl.
When I got home, I stayed up the entire night practicing on my silent keyboard that has earphones so I don’t torture the neighbors. And it wasn’t just on account of jet lag.
I startled Mr. Balaboo the next morning by calling to tell him I’d take the gig in London.
“But you said you were worn out from traveling.”
“That was yesterday. I got a good night’s sleep,” I lied.
“You were complaining that you were just in London last month.”
“Not a complaint. An observation. I’d like to go. Do you think they still want me?”
“Of course they want you, but Bess-dahlink, should I be worrying about this? I think I’m worrying.”
But he booked me and off I went to Europe for another month, hoping I was suffering from temporary insanity and that when I came home again, I’d remember that Jake was my co-best friend and nothing more.
It turned out, however, that Pauline’s spooky vibes were transatlantic. The day I got back, she called to say that we were going to have a girl’s lunch—command performance, not a request. She’d already made a reservation at Ricky’s, a couple of blocks from my apartment. I was feeling queasy about the whole thing because the fantasies I’d been having about Jake were not suitable for her radar screen.
Pauline was sitting in a booth when I showed up. I only got my butt halfway down toward the seat when she said, “You’re in love with Jake, aren’t you?” She was pouring me a glass of bottled water at the time. I wished with all my heart that it was vodka. “Don’t look away, Bess,” she said. “I want to see your eyes.”
I sat all the way down and obeyed. To my disgust, I could feel tears starting up. “Nope, nope,” she said. “Bess, it’s okay. I was only borrowing him anyway.”
“Pauline, what the fuck…?”
“Shut up and listen,” she said. “I’ve been rehearsing this speech all the way in from the island.”
I nodded. What else could I do?
“Jake Minello has been crazy about you his entire life.” I started to protest but she held up her hand. “Shut up, Bess. He’s even still got that stupid tattoo.”
“What, the Rocky Beach one?”
“You’re such a dumbass,” Pauline said. “Rocky B isn’t for Rocky Beach, even if that’s what he told you. Remember how we were all so obsessed with the Rocky movies back then? The guys liked the gore and we girls talked about how they were so deep but really we just wanted to look at Sly’s body.”
“I remember,” I said, still clueless.
“Rocky stands for Stallone—inside the heart in Jake’s tattoo. That’s you. Stallone. And just in case there’s any doubt, he stuck the ‘B’ in for Bess.”
“You’re crazy,” I said. She just sat there. “He told you this?”
“Yeah. Ask Angie. She knows.”
“But we were just kids.”
“So why hasn’t he had it sanded off?” Pauline asked.
“A dozen good reasons. It would hurt, for instance.”
Pauline sighed. “You will always be his one true love.”
Oh, man, I thought. Here we go with the soap-opera stuff.
“I knew it when I moved in with him,” she went on, “but I figured it was never going to work out with you. You were with David and he was resigned. So what the hell, I figured since he was never going to get his dream, I’d make him happier than most, and I think I have.”
I was speechless. “I don’t see how you know this. Has he said anything?”
“Jake never says anything. But I know. Trust me.”
I thought about her antennae. It was hard to argue.
“I’m not over losing David.”
“That’s going to take a lifetime, honey. But it doesn’t mean you don’t love Jake.” She reached across the table and took my hands. “Listen to me. David was the love of your life, but Jake is your destiny.”
“How do you think those things up, Pauline?”
“It’s the truth. And take it from me, you stand in the way of destiny, you wind up as roadkill.”
We sat holding hands across the table. “Assuming you’re right about Jake’s feelings…” I said.
She rolled her eyes at me.
“Then what about you, Pauls?”
“Look, I’m not saying this is the easiest thing I’ve ever done, but this is how it was supposed to come out. I’ll be all right.”
“I can’t stand for you to be sad.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me.” She kissed my hand, put it back on my side of the table, and signaled the waiter. “My story isn’t over,” she said. “I promise.”
“No, you are not paying for this,” I said, grabbing the check. Pauline was in a big hurry to put on her coat and stuck her arm in the wrong hole. I could see she was close to losing it but when I stood and reached for her, she waved me off.
“Gotta go,” she croaked. I stood out in front of the restaurant and watched her walk down Seventh Avenue toward Penn Station. Every now and then, she’d stop to dig a tissue out of her pocket. I couldn’t bear to think what her face looked like.
After that, I went into a kind of paralysis. I mean, what was I supposed to do, call up Jake and ask him for a date? Also, I couldn’t stop thinking about Pauline. She’d left a message on my machine that she’d moved into an apartment in Riverhead. I called her several times after that, but our conversations were mainly me asking if she was all right and her reassuring me that she was fine. What I was still waiting to hear was, I’m over him. My heart is not broken.
Jake phoned one Sunday in early March. “Hey, Stallone, feel like a little trip to the country?” he asked.
“Sure,” I said.
“What?”
“I said sure.” but I was gagging on a huge lump of nerves that had established squatting rights in my throat. Hey, Bess, this is Jake we’re talking about, not the frigging pope, I told myself. But under the circumstances, it felt like an audience with His Eminence might be a breeze compared to an afternoon with my old buddy Mister Minello.
“Can Phillip drive you to my house?” he asked.
“I’ll take the train,” I said. Phillip had been too much a part of my life with David to include him in this weirdness. “Is the two-forty okay?”
“I’ll pick you up at the station.”
“Bye.” I knew I sounded like I’d swallowed a gym sock but Jake wasn’t exactly normal either: There was a funny wrinkled quality in his voice, like it needed to be smoothed out.
I had an hour on the train to think about seeing him but my brain was in a jumble. My blood had heated up to about two hundred degrees. I caught hell from the old guy across the aisle because I kept having to open my window until I cooled down enough not to faint.
I saw him on the platform when we pulled in. Hands in pockets, jacket collar pulled up, jeans torn at one knee. I wondered what his heart was doing, that good heart, because mine was revved up like an Aston Martin. I stepped out of the train and straight into his arms. He kissed me, a long tender one. When we came up for air, nobody was left on the platform and the train was long gone.
“What the fuck is going on here?” I asked him.
His eyes looked like blue jewels. “I’ve been asking myself that question for twenty-two years,” he said.
“Exactly?”
“We were eight, in Betsy Smilowitz’s basement.”
“The
birthday party we all got caught playing sex games.”
“That’s the one.” Jake put his arm around me and we started walking. “I can’t answer for you, Stallone.”
“Do you … how’s Pauline?” I didn’t even know if he was in touch with her, but I had to ask.
He didn’t answer right away. I figured he was remembering a bunch of bad days. “She met someone this week, another teacher,” he said finally. “She’ll be okay.” Spoken like a man who consistently underestimates his unique and wonderful self.
Then he kissed me again. I knew he was trying to remind me that things were not the same between us. We weren’t old pals anymore, and life had dealt us both some ugly blows. When something sweet and good was offered, you’d damn well better reach out and grab it. All of it was in that kiss and I got the point. Finally he started propelling me up his driveway instead of the front walk.
“Where are we going?” I asked him.
“To the garage.”
“What for?”
“You’ll see.” There was that wrinkled sound again. He was hiding something inside his voice but I knew he wasn’t going to tell me a thing until he was ready.
We stopped at the garage door, which was pulled shut. I could feel the tension in his arm.
“You’re a nervous wreck, Jake. What’s in the garage? There better not be a surprise party or something. You know I hate those things and it’s not my birthday …” I had to stop and think. No, it wasn’t my birthday.
“Shut up, Stallone.”
Jake’s pickup truck was parked in front of the door. He squeezed around it and reached down for the handle. “Cover your eyes,” he said.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said, but I did as he said. I heard the door slide up. “Okay? Now? Can I look?”
“Yes,” Jake said.
I opened my eyes, and there in the middle of Jake’s garage on a square of old blue carpet stood Amadoofus.
I closed my eyes. Then I opened them again. Then I blinked a couple of times to make sure I wasn’t seeing things. There it was, a jigsaw version of the old piano, with hairline cracks covering almost every square inch, but it was Amadoofus all right.
“Oh, Jake,” I said. “Oh, Jake.”
He strolled over and pressed down a key. “Took me a while,” he said.
“I can’t. I can’t believe it.” I ran my hands over every inch. “How did you? It was totally shattered. You took it away in your truck.”
“Yeah, but I got to the dump and I just couldn’t do it. So I turned around and brought it all back here. It was a good project. I learned a lot about how pianos are put together.” He put his finger into a gap on the keyboard. “There’s just this one piece I couldn’t find.”
“Middle C. It’s in my safe-deposit box. Jake. Oh, Jake.”
“You said that.”
I put my arms around him. “Nobody ever had such a perfect friend.”
He didn’t look so happy.
“But that’s okay, Jake,” I said. “It’s good that we’ve been friends forever.”
“First.”
“Yeah, I mean before.”
“Before what, Bess?”
I was so used to the “Stallone” treatment, it always freaked me out on those rare occasions when he called me Bess. It felt very sexy. In fact, all of a sudden I was feeling pretty sexy in general.
“It’s kind of chilly out here,” I said, leaning back in his arms.
“You need to put some of that weight back,” he said. “I’ve got doughnuts.”
I followed him inside the house, but when we went into the kitchen, I said, “Jake, I’m actually not all that hungry.”
He kissed me again, and then again for good measure.
“Let’s go in here for a while,” he said, leading me toward the bedroom.
Jake unbuttoned my sweater, very slowly, letting his knuckles brush lightly against my breasts. When did this old buddy of mine learn to be so maddeningly tantalizing?
“Do you ever wear a bra?” he asked.
“Now and then,” I said, letting my sweater drop to the floor. “Take this off,” I said, unzipping his sweatshirt. His flesh felt smooth and warm against me.
“I wish we could bring Amadoofus with us,” I said.
“Let’s not get carried away,” Jake said.
But I did get carried away, and so did he. I felt the need to explain. “I want you to know it can actually take me longer than two minutes,” I said.
“You’ll have to prove it,” he said.
“Maybe I should take my socks off for the next round.”
He moved down to the end of the bed and peeled them off. Then he put my toes in his mouth one by one. That was one I’d forgotten about. It made me a little wild. But even so, this time it did take longer, mainly because there were other people in bed with us—David and Pauline and even my baby, who would have been a toddler by now. As usual, Jake knew.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I guess I’m still not over everything.” I didn’t want to say David’s name.
“I don’t expect that,” Jake said. “Not now. Not ever.”
I had to kiss him again for that.
“Pauline’s here, too,” I said.
“Not for me,” Jake said. “You were always in this bed, no matter what other body was lying here.”
“Don’t you think it’s kind of ridiculous, us two old cronies from the sandbox?”
“No,” he said.
The funny thing was, even with everybody else hanging around in here, I still had the feeling of being exactly where I belonged and even that David and Pauline and my little girl agreed with me.
Jake gave me the keys to the place, and the following week I came back out with a suitcase so we could have a sleepover before I had to fly off to Belgium. I brought the middle C for Amadoofus. Jake slipped it into place and set up a heater before he left for work so I wouldn’t freeze to death in the garage before he got back.
I sat there at the keyboard just messing around and before I knew it I was playing the Bach Prelude in C major. I felt like it was my own private memorial to David and that I was telling him that I’d heard what he was trying to say on my answering machine. Finally, after all the months of grief, I thought I understood. Just like he’d helped me up every time I fell on my butt onstage and sat me back down at the piano and told me I could do it, he was saying with every sweet, singing note, “Yes, it’s sad. I know you’ll miss me. But you have to move on. And when you play especially well, you’ll think of me because I’m in the music. I am the music, and as long as you keep playing you will never, ever lose me.”
I finished the Prelude. Then I dropped the cracked and battered lid, laid my head down on it, and stretched my arms out to hug that old piano. It wasn’t exactly like holding Jake, or David either, but I have to say, at that particular moment, it felt damn close.
Acknowledgments
The completion of this book would have been impossible without the kind assistance of many people, including Mark George, Gino Rafaeli, Harold Schonberg, Jerome Lowenthal, Jean Bernard Pommier, Patty Kopec, Cipa Dichter, Francoise Davis Mallow, Tony Regna, Blake Rowe, Fouad Salloum, Delana Thomsen, Gino Francesconi, Richard Clark, Cindy Belt, Jim Murray, Jacob Lateiner, Alexei Kuznetsoff, and most especially the generous and gifted Sandra Shapiro. I am indebted to my invaluable agent, Andrea Cirillo, and to the Ballantine team, especially Shauna Summers, Charlotte Herschet, Linda Marrow, Kim Hovey, and Gina Centrello. And thanks as always to Barry, Ben, and Sarah, who fill my life with music.
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