As promised, we adjourned to the piano after dinner and Charlie lined up not one harmonica but a fleet of eleven, one for each key.
It had cooled a little, and Charlie lit the fire again. “All right,” he said. “This is how we play Fuck Your Sister.”
“We’re not playing anything if you’re going to call it that,” said Angelina.
“Smoke Till You’re Sick, then. We play every song that means anything to you two until you don’t want to hear them anymore. Are we all in agreement? This is your doctor speaking.”
“Some doctor,” said Angelina. “Doctors have drugs.”
“Fortunately,” said Dr. Charlie, “drugs Charlie supplies.”
He disappeared to the cellar.
Angelina looked at me. “You okay with this?”
“I’m okay.”
Charlie came back with a bottle. I use the word loosely: I judged it as about a double magnum—a jeroboam in champagne country.
“This is what is known as a pot gascon. Two and a half liters of Armagnac.”
If I got nothing else from the week, I had another bottle size to add to my pub quiz repertoire.
“Did I get the year right?” He tilted the bottle toward me. It was a 1963 vintage. My birth year.
“You certainly did. Shit, don’t open it for me.”
“It keeps. And we’re not here forever.”
I fetched balloons from the dresser in the dining area and Charlie poured three big measures. So much for going easy on the drink.
“So,” he said. “What’s on first?”
I’d had some time to think about it. While almost every love song reminded me of Angelina, we had few mutually special songs. Charlie didn’t need to know that.
“Australian song,” I said. “Nick Cave.” I played “The Ship Song,” released a few months after Angelina and I had parted. It was more acknowledgment of reality than cry of pain. But Angelina took over the singing and it became apparent that there would be no easy options tonight. It was equally apparent that what we were doing had nothing to do with working it out of our systems. No, this was a test: Do your worst, Adam, do the one thing you do better than me, the one thing you and Angelina have that she and I don’t, and let’s be sure that she won’t crack. A few hours after she’s cried an apology and a promise of uncompromised love. I may have seen a hard man in the mirror this morning, but I was surely looking at another one now with his elbow and his brandy balloon resting on top of the piano.
Fuck you, Charlie.
I played a few chords, hit a couple of wrong notes, and stood up, consciously putting a lid on my anger.
“I think that Armagnac’s finished me. Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” said Angelina. She squeezed my arm. “I’d still like to sing a few songs with you. It’s our last night.”
She sat at the piano and sang Sarah McLachlan’s “Angel,” about waiting all your life for a second chance. She played nicely, and her mature voice suited the song—as well as ripping my heart out.
Enough. I was over having our feelings laid out for someone else’s assessment. I took the stool back.
“This was one my father used to play,” I said, and sang “For Once in My Life.” Angelina, of course, had never met him. Nor had Claire. His memory was now shared only with my mother.
I sang about not letting sorrow defeat me, about being able to make it through, and, in memory of my dad, the man who I did not want to be but who right now I was happy to have in my corner, I fudged the augmented fifth. I felt a bit better.
It was after midnight.
“One more song each,” said Charlie. “Ladies first.”
Angelina took my place at the piano again. It was a good thing, because, though I was familiar with the song, I would have stepped away. Edith Piaf’s “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.” Angelina knew that I had played it at my father’s funeral. What message was she trying to send?
She sang the French song in English—“No Regrets”—which for me weakens it. A song in a foreign language that you understand but are not fluent in has a special poetry, and the English version is not an exact translation. Gone is the beautiful ambiguity in the line about lighting the fire with your memories.
Angelina was well into the song before I realized that it was not about me at all. She was looking at Charlie, and Charlie was looking right back.
If it was a staring contest, she won. Charlie dropped his eyes and turned away from the piano as Angelina sang the last verse. He topped up his glass, then walked back.
“That was the song we played at my old man’s funeral,” he said.
There was no cosmic coincidence here. For men of our fathers’ generation, “No Regrets” was up there with “My Way” on the funeral hit parade.
“Your turn, Adam,” said Charlie.
Angelina interrupted my attempt to think of something to take the tension down.
“Play the one you played last night. ‘Angelina.’”
That wasn’t going to do it.
“I said it was Adam’s choice,” said Charlie. There was an edge to his voice, the edge of someone who has had one drink too many. It had been a hell of a day for me, but surely worse for Charlie, even if he had ended up with the better outcome.
“Happy to take advice,” I said.
I sang it through, just as a song, not a cry of anguished love. This time I remembered the verse about doing my best to love her but being unable to play the game.
“Got a musical challenge for you,” said Charlie. “A bet, if you like. What’s the most original rhyme in that song?”
“Original or outrageous?”
“That’ll be the one.”
“‘Angelina’ and ‘subpoena.’” It’s a song of perfect rhymes. No “Ditta” and “bitter.”
“Agreed. So the question is: Who was the first lyricist to use that rhyme?”
“What do I win?” I said, and immediately regretted it. I could see us both doing something appallingly stupid.
I looked at Charlie and pleaded with raised eyebrows: Don’t do it.
Angelina was standing stock-still. I had never heard the rhyme outside this song, but I am an experienced user of limited information. Three times a week.
I could think of only three contenders, unless it was a show tune, which was a strong possibility. That’s where you find the witty rhymes. It would be a lottery among the Lerner-and-Loewes and Stephen Sondheims.
The trick option was Dylan. Most people wouldn’t have asked the question if that was the answer. But Charlie wasn’t most people.
Then there was the parody-or-comedy-song option. The leading contender would be Tom Lehrer. “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.” Except he only made three studio albums and my dad had them all. That rhyme was not there. Sammy Cahn, maybe. He used to do songs to order. Maybe for some famous legal colleague.
My final option was the undisputed king of rhyming. Better still, I knew where the lyric would fit. Write it down, Sheilagh.
Charlie still had not told me what he was wagering. Please don’t say Angelina. Because then I’ll have to fake a wrong answer.
“Angelina,” said Charlie. “Get it right and you can sleep with her. One last time.”
All right. Just sex. That wasn’t a problem at all. I would just have to deal with the emotional consequences later.
“W. S. Gilbert, in Trial by Jury,” I said.
I think astonishment would be a good word for the expression on Charlie’s face.
“Fuck,” he said. “I wouldn’t like you on the other side of an acquisition.”
“I believe I get a say in this,” Angelina said. Her tone made it clear that Charlie had crossed the line.
“No,” said Charlie. “You don’t. If you wanted a say, you should have said so before Adam answered the question. Anyway, you’ve chosen every other night.”
Big difference between choosing and having someone else choose for you. Of course I wasn’t going to sleep with Angelina if she didn’t want it. She knew that. Perhaps it was on that basis that she let it go, at least for the moment. She was simmering.
Charlie got to choose the final song. No surprise there. I wondered what he would request if he was drunk in a piano bar. I imagined him walking up with a twenty in one hand, scotch in the other. It would have to be a song of his unstinting, self-sacrificing love for Angelina. Nothing obscure. “You Are the Sunshine of My Life”? “Wonderful Tonight”?
“‘Bird on a Wire,’” he said. “Leonard Cohen. Do you know it?”
Deduct half a point. The title is “Bird on the Wire.” Written in Greece, circa 1968. Kris Kristofferson said he wanted the first two lines on his gravestone. Joe Cocker did a nice cover. Which is to say, I know it.
“Bird on the Wire” is not a song of love for another. It is a song of reflection, perhaps of apology, but mostly of self-justification. For the first time all week, Charlie was giving away something significant.
I played an intro, and after Charlie half sang, half talked the first couple of lines with me, I let him go on alone. He slowed it down, sang around the lyrics a bit, repeated lines, putting a lot into it. Angelina had backed away from the piano.
The second verse is the only part of the song that expresses unalloyed affection for another, the sentiment I had expected Charlie to opt for. He sang an alternative version. The knight who had saved all his ribbons for his loved one was replaced by an accusation, an excuse, and an ugly image: of the singer being twisted by their love.
I glanced at Angelina. Her expression was blank, closed. In the time we had spent together as lovers, I had never seen her look that way—and I was glad I hadn’t.
When Charlie finished singing about the pretty woman who had tempted him, about swearing to make up for it, he added another verse, one that I didn’t know:
Don’t cry, don’t cry any more, I’ve paid for it.
So Charlie had had an affair. Angelina had a better reason than turning forty-five or Charlie’s heart problem—or me—for wanting to leave her twenty-year marriage. And she had not told me.
Christ—maybe she didn’t know. Or not until now. Was Charlie, at the end of the week, saying: There’s this one extra thing that may affect your decision? Only after Angelina had passed the point of no return.
Whatever the truth, Charlie had had the last word. I was beginning to wonder if the week had ever been about Angelina and me.
Then Angelina said to me, “Do you know ‘Angel of the Morning’?”
She had positioned herself between the piano and Charlie, and we were lined up as we were on that July evening in 1989, with Charlie in the place of Richard.
This would be our last song together. I took it up a semitone to A sharp.
Angelina sang, in a voice given timbre by time, but still with the purity that you don’t hear in speech:
There’ll be no strings to bind your hands.
I did not look to see Charlie’s expression, because in my mind I was living that exact moment again.
Play another chord and I’ll break your arms.
I played the F.
Not if my love can’t bind your heart.
The first time, she had surely sung it for Richard. The second for me. Now?
Angelina put her hand on my shoulder, pressing with the beat. Was she thinking of the Barrett Browning sonnet, too?
I picked up the music, and we played and sang like it was 1989. Angelina was gripping my shoulder so tightly I could barely go on as she asked someone, one of us, to slowly turn away from her.
It was late. The fire had gone out. Charlie had not touched his harmonicas. No one spoke.
I didn’t need to say that I would not be claiming my trivia prize.
Angelina, tears running down her face, turned to me, kissed me gently, and, in front of her husband, said the words she had said to me fifty times before, long ago and far away.
“Good night, Dooglas.”