SUNDAY MORNING, I AWOKE with a little movie playing in my head, in which a man (me) thinks he hears voices coming from somewhere on a lower floor of his London hotel and goes down to investigate. I saw myself pulling on a pair of jeans and quietly leaving the flat, saw myself on the stairway, luridly lit by the Exit sign, pausing for a moment to listen again to the voices. In the lower hallway, I peered into three different rooms along the way, and because I’d been told by Hannah that the third floor was being remodeled and hadn’t yet been furnished, I saw what I expected to see—empty rooms. But now, as I replayed all this as if I were watching myself in a movie, an image took hold in my mind’s eye, the image of something I’d seen in one of the other rooms: pushed into an alcove, a large square-shouldered object of some sort, covered with a paint-speckled dropcloth.
Ellen was still asleep. Though she’d claimed exhaustion last night after dinner, she’d got into bed with her notebooks and briefcase, pulled out a red pencil and a map of London, and begun the kind of methodical review that usually produced a chart or two and sometimes a time line. Her lamp was still on when I fell asleep. I dreamed of elevators—specifically, a thrilling kind of elevator without walls or ceiling, a rapidly moving platform called a “Vertigo” (or “Verti-Go”), purported to have been designed by a young boy. Two different times during the night, I felt what I assumed to be Ellen, in bed with me, starting to fool around, but then I would wake up and see her across the great divide, asleep in her own bed. And once, before I went back to sleep, I heard her trying to call out in a dream, the eerie, reedy wail trapped in the back of the throat.
Now I actually climbed from under the covers and pulled on a pair of jeans. Like the man in the little movie, I did indeed slip out of the flat and down the stairway to the third floor; I did indeed find a room with an alcove, a large, bare, beautiful room, with white walls and a blond wood floor and two tall, bright windows; a stepladder stood dreamily against one wall, and at the edge of an alcove, beneath the alcove’s long, graceful arch, was something covered with a dropcloth. Feeling oddly obedient (though I’m not clear about what or whom I was obeying), I moved slowly near. I took a corner of the cloth between my fingers and began to tug. It was a Bechstein, an upright, aged wood, so dark it looked almost black, with the kind of cracked, yellow-edged ivories that seemed to suggest a need for dental work.
I felt something like exhilaration—I guess it was because the piano was the first solid object, the first material prop, in my secret melodrama. It literally brought substance to these events, and now, in the telling, there was something to point to, something to show.
Or so I thought, quite temporarily. Doubt began to set in as soon as I started back up the stairs to the flat: What did the real existence of the piano prove? I was still the only person who’d heard the music. In fact, its actual existence only confused matters further, for if the piano was being played—whether by normal or by supernormal forces—shouldn’t anyone with normal ears be able to hear it? The Bechstein proved nothing, it was evidence of nothing.
On the upper landing, I turned, descended the stairs again, and returned to the third floor, doubting now my having seen the piano only moments before.
But there it was, standing across the white room, grinning dumbly. I went over, closed the fall-board, and covered the piano again with the dropcloth. As I did so, I experienced that deep sadness I’d felt days before in the sitting room opposite the hotel restaurant downstairs. I was drawn to the window, and I went and stood by it, looking out, though there was nothing particular to see: other houses, other windows, early-morning fog, no people, some pigeons on a granite sill across the way, a small, bike-cluttered courtyard below. And once again, my sense of time and place grew vague—there was nothing to anchor me to a specific identity, to a specific life—and the window’s appeal seemed that of an escape hatch, an exit; standing there, I felt the prisoner’s woe I’d felt before. There was the same invisible presence at my back, the same impulse to weep. I was suddenly, decidedly grief-stricken, without knowing the parent of my grief.
After about a full minute of this, I shook myself free and left the room.
Back upstairs, inside the flat, I went to the kitchen to put on the teakettle. But the teakettle was already on. My friendly helper, my extra pair of hands, was up to his (or her) tricks, and I took the recurrence of this little event as an apt beginning to the story I meant to tell Ellen.
I went to the bedroom, where I found her still asleep. I sat next to her on the bed. As soon as I touched her shoulder, she rolled over and looked at me. “Morning,” she said sleepily.
“Could you come out to the kitchen for a minute?” I said.
“Why?” she said.
“Just come, okay? There’s something I want to show you.”
I led her by the hand down the hallway, through the dining room, through the sitting room, and to the kitchen doorway. She was wearing her tiger-print nightie, and her hair hung down in her face; she looked like somebody out of La Dolce Vita. We stood gazing into the kitchen. I still held her hand. I pointed to the kettle, which was beginning to make its halfway-to-boiling rumble. “Look,” I said.
“Look at what?” she said.
“The kettle.”
“What about it?”
“It’s on,” I said, “and I didn’t put it on.”
Now she brushed the hair out of her eyes, dropped my hand, and began what appeared to be a medical examiner’s scrutiny of my face—she was looking for signs of foul play. After a moment, she said, “What are you trying to tell me, Cook? I know you didn’t put the kettle on.”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” I said. “The kettle’s on, and I didn’t put it on.”
In a voice reeking of pathos, she said, “Cook. I put the kettle on. What’s your point here?”
“You put the kettle on?”
“Yes.”
“You were asleep.”
“Well, I woke up. I woke up and put the kettle on.”
“When?”
“When you were in the bathroom,” she said.
“I wasn’t in the bathroom,” I said.
“You weren’t?” she said. “Then where were you?”
“When?” I said.
“When I put the kettle on, just five minutes ago.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You were asleep. You woke up. You put the kettle on. You went back to bed.”
“That’s right,” she said. “I thought you were in the bathroom. I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”
I shrugged, completely thrown. “Nothing,” I said. “Never mind.”
She leaned near me and sniffed around my neck and shoulders. “Are you feeling okay this morning?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess I’m just not quite awake.”
She kissed me on the cheek, went into the kitchen, and took down the box of tea from a cabinet. As I turned back toward the hallway, I heard her whispering something to herself, but I couldn’t make out the words.