A week or so after the Melbourne Cup, Shanksy buttonholed me between sets.
“Still seeing the actress?”
I smiled a big, happy smile.
“Remember the joke about the nine-inch pianist?” said Shanksy.
“I’m being nice to her.”
“Pleased to hear it. I’ve got another one about a genie.”
Shanksy helped himself to a drink. “Bloke walks into a bar, and he’s got this tiny head. He’s a pinhead. Barman says, ‘What happened?’ Bloke says, ‘This genie appeared, stark naked, long legs, big tits, and offered me a wish. I say, ‘How about a little head?’ and…”
I laughed. I hadn’t heard it.
Shanksy took a slug of his soda water. “So the moral is?”
“Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth?”
He nodded. “And don’t get a big head.”
I wasn’t. On the contrary, I was painfully aware that the relationship was temporary, and not just because I had a flight booked for the end of December, only six weeks away. Angelina could do better than me. I was trying to keep my expectations in line with reality, which is to say I was trying not to fall in love with her. Or at least I was trying to deny that I had already done so.
* * *
We had finished dinner at Jim’s Greek Tavern on a warm evening in the courtyard. It had been several days since we had seen each other and I was mentally halfway to the upstairs loft in my apartment when she said, “Let’s have a drink at the bar.”
We walked to Victoria Parade and I ordered two glasses of sparkling wine while Angelina found a table.
Shanksy pulled a bottle of real champagne from the fridge. “On me,” he said. “As long as you don’t play.”
I gave him a look of mock offense.
He uncorked the bottle. “If I had a lady like that at my table, I wouldn’t be playing the piano.”
When I had poured our drinks, we clinked glasses and Angelina said, “So why? Why me?”
I could have laughed at the ridiculousness of the question. But apparently it was not obvious to her that a database architect and jobbing piano player of average looks would think that only a cosmic error could have delivered this beautiful, intelligent, and ambitious television star into his arms.
I told her all that. I added that I saw something of myself in her. We were both performers. Even at work, I wanted to show my client that I was worth what they were paying me.
She laughed. “You’re such a know-it-all. Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen. ‘Root i’ togevver, din’ vey?’”
“You know why I’m a show-off?” I said, compelled to prove that I knew the answer to that too. “When I was a kid, I had to play for my dad every day. I’d come home from school, and he’d say, ‘What’ve you got for me today, lad?’”
Angelina smiled at the hammed-up version of my dad’s accent, but didn’t laugh. “And?”
“At first, I’d just do an exercise better than I’d done it before, but later it was always a proper song. I’d pick something he liked—from his records. Now you understand why I know all that sixties and seventies stuff.”
Angelina refilled our glasses.
“My parents’ marriage was pretty screwed,” I said. “I felt I was doing my bit to keep my dad from leaving.”
Then I told her the part I had not told anyone else.
“When I was fourteen, I stopped practicing. I was a stroppy teenager and I was stuffed if I was going to practice piano twenty minutes every day so I could play for my fucking father who was never home and who I knew even back then was cheating on my mum.” I emptied my glass, again, and put it down. “So he left. Never came back.”
Some adolescent part of me was waiting for Angelina to draw away in horror. Of course she didn’t. Her eyes filled with tears and she took my hand.
“Don’t say anything,” I said. “I’ve never said that out loud before, and I know you’re about to say, ‘No, no, don’t blame yourself’—but you weren’t there. They made a bad decision getting married in the first place. Then they had to live with it because of me. And if I feel like being kinder to myself, and to him, I’d say he left when he decided he wasn’t needed anymore.”
“But he was, wasn’t he?”
“Probably,” I said. “But I’ve got some okay memories. If he’d stayed, all the bad stuff would have buried them.”
“Did you miss him?”
“I think I missed the good parts. A fantasy, not the reality of what he’d have been if he actually stayed. If that makes sense.”
“It makes loads of sense. My mum and dad: I can’t imagine them without each other. But I can relate to what you’re saying. About letting them down, driving them away, which is part of why … Then there’s me and Richard. I so much wanted it to work.”
“And we both blame ourselves.”
“You said not to say it wasn’t your fault—” she began.
“If you want to make me feel better, tell me why you chose me. Because this is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”
Angelina looked away for a few moments. “On the night you played for me, you were probably the only person in the bar who didn’t know who I was. And you liked me anyway. With the panda eyes and everything. Just for whatever was happening right then. Richard had been in a shit all night, and everyone was tiptoeing around him, and you saw it and made a joke of it. I thought, there’s someone who’s prepared to take a risk, do something for me, and he doesn’t even know who I am … And now you do.”
It was true. She had been more open than me in sharing her background, her uncertainty about her marriage, her plans and dreams. I knew who she was.
We looked at each other for a while, holding hands across the table.
“One of us has to say this first,” she said. “It doesn’t mean that there’s anything after December or that I’ve given up on my marriage, or that if I did…”
She was speaking slowly and that gave me time to go first.
“I love you,” I said. “It doesn’t mean I’m going to throw in my contract and run away with you and live happily ever after, but I love you.”
“I love you, too,” she said. “With all that stuff.”
If there was one conversation in my life that I could have over again, to keep the feelings but change the words, it would be that one. Because, at the same time that we declared our love for each other, we ensured it was doomed.