62

Stella was right.

I will never feel Rebecca’s embrace again. I will never make love to her. And Rebecca will never take Richard in, whispering his name.

Some night I will take the warm arm extending from across the threshold, and cross into that foreign country that so resembles this. What is it reflecting now, that mirror in the next room? We don’t have all day, my father used to say. You can’t look at yourself forever.

Stella is on the phone in the dining room. It’s a roomy apartment. One of Stella’s clients, a man with complicated Las Vegas debts, has vanished. Until he returns I experiment with his clothes.

He tended toward size thirty-eight, and as Richard I am a forty-three. I can see why debts sucked the client dry, custom-made shirts, hand-lasted shoes. I lean against the desk in his dressing gown, a present, I surmise, from a woman who could not have known him well. It is a beautiful blue, shimmering, and it fits me.

“Connie, consider this. Maybe,” Stella says, “he still has feelings for you, too. I know he feels happy you’re going to go ahead with the baby.”

Now and then Stella passes the archway and our eyes meet. She rolls hers, and I give her a Richard-Stirling smile, the accustomed role, another consecutive night, standing-room only. I owe this to Stella, letting her play lawyer, but I have no interest in the outcome. Or do I? Maybe it brings back pleasant associations.

Connie and Stella make complicated arrangements, pay phones, airport phone booths, cellular devices. “It’s not the money,” Stella is saying. In law, when they say it’s not the money you can be sure it is. My fingers tingle. There is somewhere I have to be tonight. But I still have time.

“Don’t talk to me about cash,” says Stella. “He has no earthly use for it.”

Connie’s voice is so far away it makes me feel fond of her, urgent as she is, grasping.

Tonight Stella has brought pictures of her baby, pink and open-eyed on a white flannel pillowcase. I don’t tell her that I remember her baby well.

I wait for full evening. I can look out the window and see someone come home from work this time every night. There is a narrow driveway, a manicured square of lawn on either side. Each night the young man stops the Toyota, sets the brake, steps before the headlights and stoops to unlock the garage.

“Maybe he likes to pretend,” I hear Stella saying. “Maybe it lets him imagine he’s a living man again. I mean, how can a dead man get a divorce?”

The car barely fits. The garage is small, and there are boxes, old clothes, piles of old magazines competing for space. He pulls the garage door down, and then locks it with a padlock. He gives it a tug. He tugs it more times than he needs to, testing it compulsively.

Tonight he skips back down the steps and I think at first that he is obsessed, as usual, with locking the garage. He unfastens the padlock, swings open the door, and vanishes into the interior.

I am on my feet, parting the curtains.

“Of course you still have strong feelings for him. I have strong feelings for him,” Stella says. “He has that effect on people.”

The young man hurries out with a large red squirt gun, the size of an actual assault weapon, two of them, one under each arm. He fires one up at the street light, an arcing stitch of water. He has brought home these toys as a surprise.

“Don’t cry,” says Stella. “No, I don’t know where he is. I swear it. My absolute word.”

She looks back at me, shaking her head, a friendly conspirator, but she frowns, puzzled. I am already leaving, already gone.

The young man runs up the steps, leaving the padlock dangling, and I am running with him, in his shadow, closing around him like a hand. Taking what I need.

“Tonight,” says the heavy man with curly hair, a short-sleeved shirt, no tie. “If you’re ready.” He chews the cap of a pen, tapping a paper clip, the bright wire trapped under his forefinger. He wants to smoke; it isn’t allowed.

“Of course I’m ready,” I say. This is a voice I have never used before, and I try it out a little further. “And I must say I’m delighted.” It’s a nice voice, female, young, insipid enough to be pleasing.

He is pleased. “It’s a little unusual for us to take on an unknown here at Arch Street. I mean, we’re not EMI, but we’re booked four months in advance. But I listened to the demos you sent over and I felt that I didn’t have any choice.”

I laugh, a pretty sound, and say, “Maybe you didn’t.”

He touches me, once, on the hand. He withdraws his hand and gives a little cough.

Down the corridor he stays one step behind me, and says, “Your work reminds me of someone else’s.”

“Really?”

“I don’t even like to talk about her. It’s a terrible thing.”

White tile on the ceiling, carpet on the walls. A woman sits behind a pane of glass, drinking coffee from a white paper cup.

The coffee has seeped through the seam of the container, brown freckles. The voice comes from the speaker above the window, her lips moving silently, although I know only I can hear the delay, her voice looping through an amplifier before it reaches the room.

“We need a sound level,” she says.

I say nothing.

“If you want to just play a little.”

They are cool at first touch, but not cold. The black reflects my fingertips as they hesitate, barely touching the keys. I close my eyes, and follow the silence out to the limits of the room.

Just be there, I tell him. I need you.

One note and the piano would fill, as a moment fills, complete. I am afraid. I keep my eyes closed and I know I can’t do it.

“Take your time,” says the woman behind glass.

The day it happens we are happy, the station wagon air-conditioned, the air only half-cool, one of the vents releasing warm air, like the air outside. My father drives with both hands on the wheel listening to the radio, a baseball game, something I know he will never understand, but a tradition he honors anyway, saying approving things in his Scottish accent about the score, the players, trying to be American, and succeeding.

My mother sees it first, the car coming on sideways across the bridge, the tires not screaming, a sound like something deep in the ocean, a recording of whales. The note is so low my insides vibrate to it, lungs, private organs, all of me singing with this lowest A flat.

“Charles!” she says. She was wearing a hair clasp, a red barrette, like a girl.

Like that: as though we rehearsed it, as though this was our second time through, our second chance at living, not our first, not our only lives. And for years after that I cannot see, until that night on the boat.

I want to be there, he says. I feel honored.

You’ll do wonderfully.

I open my eyes, look to my right, at the inquisitive face behind glass. I smile. I take a deep breath.

And play.