As she followed her husband down the front steps, she turned her head and looked up at me, and I was so taken by her smile that I totally failed to notice what was so unusual about her. Nearly three months would pass before I realized what it was, but when I did, it would make me feel like my whole world had collapsed, like some shoddily built stage set.
She was slight and thin-wristed, with ash-blonde hair that was cut in a very straight bob. She was wearing a short-sleeved blouse, in the palest of yellows, and high-waisted gray slacks. But it was that mischievous smile that got me – and the way her eyes narrowed a little, as if we already shared a secret.
‘Hey, Lalo, where does this thing go?’ called Margot, from the kitchenette.
‘What thing?’ I asked her, still watching the woman as she crossed the street.
‘This thing that looks like a fire extinguisher.’
‘That’s no fire extinguisher. That’s my batter dispenser.’
Margot came through to the living room, holding up the shiny metal gadget in disbelief. ‘Your batter dispenser?’
‘Sure. I couldn’t live without it. It makes sure that every pancake is perfectly circular. They still taste like latex, but they’re perfectly circular.’
‘Lalo, you stun me sometimes. You really stun me.’
It was a warm afternoon in the first week of September, on St Luke’s Place, opposite James J. Walker Park in Greenwich Village – a row of fine Italianate brownstones, with ironwork railings and pillared doorways, and even gas lamps outside. I was leaning out of my window on the second floor, with a cold bottle of Michelob Amber, taking a five-minute chill from putting up shelves.
I had moved into this apartment three days ago, but even with Margot to help me I was seriously beginning to believe that I would never get the place straight. The hallway was blocked with three tea chests full of books and music scores and pictures and orange enamel saucepans. The bedroom was wedged with suitcases bulging with clothes and cardboard boxes full of towels and CDs. I had never realized that I owned so much stuff. As my dad used to say, ‘You can’t have everything, son. Where would you put it?’
Margot twisted open a bottle of beer and came to the window to join me. She was short, dark and pretty in a heart-shaped Betty Boop way, with flicked-up hair and enormous brown eyes. She was wearing oversized Oshkosh dungarees and a tight pink-striped T-shirt, and fluorescent pink Crocs. She made me feel more like her big brother than ever, although she was at least six months older than I was, and in some ways, she was a whole lot wiser.
Margot and I had been friends ever since our first day at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. We had simply liked each other the moment we had bumped into each other by the noticeboard, and I had asked Margot if I could borrow her pencil. In the spring of 2005 there had been several weekends when our affection for each other had grown so strong that we had been only a heartbeat away from becoming lovers, but by the time I had managed to disentangle myself from Cindy the PMT Pianist (as Margot used to call her), Margot had started dating a nostril-flaring Cuban dancer called Esteban, and so we had never managed to get much more intimate than sprawling on a couch, drinking red wine and listening to Beethoven piano concertos and old Dire Straits albums. Now we knew each other so well that going to bed together would have felt like incest.
‘I just saw the people downstairs,’ I told her.
‘Oh, yes? What are they like?’
‘Mid-thirties, I’d say. Smart-conservative. Well-heeled.’
‘Well, you have to be very well-heeled to live here. You have to have diamonds on the soles of your shoes. Unlike East Thirteenth Street.’
‘Your loft is wonderful. It’s like Narnia.’
‘Sure it is. Teeming with intelligent rodents.’
I said, ‘How about I take you to the Cafe Cluny tonight, as a thank you for everything you’ve done?’
Margot looked around the apartment, with its high white ceilings and its shining oak floors. ‘You know, Lalo, what this place badly needs is a woman. In fact, what you badly need is a woman. Man cannot live by composing TV scores alone, even if he does have perfectly circular pancakes.’
I looked across at her. The trees outside made leaf patterns dance on her cheek. ‘I have you, don’t I?’
‘Of course you do. But you need passion. You need danger. You need somebody who washes dishes in the nude.’