Ghost Music Page 4

  I thought: no, I didn’t. But then I remembered that secretive smile that she had given me, and I thought: yes, I did.

  Seven

  I hadn’t even made the bed, not properly, just thrown the red and gold tapestry cover over it, so that underneath the sheets were still twisted like the Indian rope-trick and the pillows were all bashed in, but Kate didn’t seem to care.

  She crossed her arms and took off her yellow top. Then she sat back on the bed and pulled off her jeans. Meanwhile I was struggling to get out of my polo-shirt and unbuckle my pants.

  But after that brief moment of frantic comedy, it was beautiful. I fell back onto the bed and Kate climbed on top of me. She was skinnier than any other woman I had ever known, all collarbone and ribs and hips, and her skin was almost translucent. Yet she was so passionate, so greedy. She took my face in both hands and kissed me, thrusting her tongue deep into my mouth. Then she trailed her fingernails all the way down my sides, so that I jerked in nervous reaction when she touched my hips.

  “I never thought . . . nobody ever told me,” she panted.

  “Nobody ever told you what?”

  “Nobody ever told me this was possible.”

  There she was again, speaking in riddles. But right at that moment I wasn’t looking for logic. The afternoon sun was reflected from an upper window in the Franks Building, like somebody shining a searchlight on her. It lit up her hair, and shone on her shoulders, and gave her an almost unnatural radiance. I felt as if I were making love to a fairy queen, rather than a human being.

  I couldn’t help watching as I entered her, the way the glistening folds of her skin opened up, like dew-soaked lily petals.

  She rode up and down on me, her back arched, her head thrown back, and both hands raised. It was like no lovemaking I had ever experienced. I felt as if our nervous systems were wired together, and that everything that she could feel, I could feel, too. I could almost imagine tiny sparks coursing out of her body and into mine, and making me tingle everywhere.

  She began to gasp, higher and higher. I took hold of her hips, and pulled her down on me, harder and harder. I was very close to climaxing, and I couldn’t stop myself from letting out a loud haugh!

  She quaked, and trembled, and then she screamed. At least I think she screamed. It was almost beyond the range of human hearing. The glass of water on the nightstand shattered, and the mirror on the wall cracked diagonally from one side to the other.

  I lifted my head and looked at the broken glass, and the water running off the edge of the nightstand. “My God. I thought only opera singers could do that.”

  She half covered her face with her hand, but her eyes were smiling. “I’m so sorry. That’s never happened to me before. Ever. I always scream—but—”

  “Hey, it doesn’t matter. It’s only a glass.”

  “But your mirror.”

  “It’s only a mirror. Forget it. You were wonderful.”

  She carefully climbed off me and lay very close beside me, with her head resting on my chest. I put my arm around her thin, bony shoulder-blades and I felt as if I could have lain there for the rest of the day, and the following evening, too. She traced patterns on my stomach with her fingertip.

  “Do you believe in fate?” she asked me.

  “You mean, do I believe that whatever’s going to happen to us, it’s going to happen to us, whatever we do? I don’t know. Don’t you think we have choices?”

  She propped herself up on one elbow and stared at me, a little too close for me to be able to focus properly. “But it was fate that brought you here, don’t you think? Some old woman could have moved into this apartment. Or two gays, like Paul Cadmus and Jared French.”

  “Well, I guess. If Magician hadn’t been so successful, I never could have afforded it.”

  She touched the tip of my nose, and smiled. “You and I were destined to meet. I just know it. I’ve been waiting for you for so long.”

  “What about Victor?”

  “What about Victor?”

  “I don’t know. Are you unhappy with Victor, or shouldn’t I ask?”

  “It depends what you mean by unhappy.”

  She climbed off the bed and went to stand, naked, by the window. The sun was lower now, and the room was mostly in shadow. I lay there and watched her and I didn’t know what to say to her next. I didn’t even know how I was supposed to feel about her; or how she felt about me.

  “Look at the time,” she said, without turning around. “I’d better go.”

  “Don’t you want to hear some more of my almost-beautiful music? I started to write a piano concerto once. It’s called The One-Handed Clock. I could play it for you.”

  “Maybe another time.”

  “And that means what? That there isn’t going to be another time?”

  She came back over to the bed, and knelt next to me, and kissed me. “Of course there will be. Don’t you understand? You and me, we’ve only just started.”

  I kissed her back. “In that case, I’d better stock up on drinking glasses, and mirrors.”

  We dressed. Somehow, once we had put our clothes back on, we felt quite awkward and formal. “Do you want me to help you with the dishes?” she asked me.

  “Don’t worry about it. But you could send Malkin up, to finish off those bits of tuna.”

  “I might just do that.”

  We kissed again, at the open doorway. She turned to go, and it was then that I asked her the question that I should have asked her as soon as she walked in.

  “In the park. Whose baby was that?”

  She didn’t turn back. She had one hand resting on the newel post at the top of the stairs, and her face was hidden by the curve of her hair.

  “His name was Michael,” she said. She hesitated a little longer, as if she were waiting for me to ask her another question, but something told me not to press her any further—not yet, anyhow.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll see you whenever.”

  She left, without another word I heard her go down the stairs, but strangely I didn’t hear her open the door to her apartment, and I didn’t hear her open the front door either. I listened and listened, but it was almost as if she had gone down the stairs and vanished.

  A few seconds later, however, Malkin came running up the stairs, purring, so Kate must have opened her apartment door to let her out.

  “Come on, puss,” I coaxed her. “It’s tuna time!”

  Malkin trotted after me into the kitchenette. I scraped the remains of our tuna steaks onto one plate and set it down on the floor. Malkin immediately started to wolf it down.

  I stood and watched her, feeling unexpectedly bereft. If there was one thing I had already learned about life, it was that the happiest moments are always over, and in the end we are always left alone again, with nothing but the plates to clear away, and the sun sinking down behind the trees.

  Eight

  Margot thought it was brilliant.

  “It’s brilliant! A wonderful new apartment, in a street with a bend in it! An adulterous affair with the wife of an international realtor with halitosis! How come you always fall on your feet, Lalo?”

  “Don’t forget the demented nude model upstairs.”

  “Even more brilliant! It’s like Alice Through The Looking-Glass!”

  We were sitting on a bench in James A. Walker park, enjoying the sunshine. It was warm enough to go out without a coat, but it wasn’t as balmy as it had been the previous week, and around the corner I could feel the first cold drafts of winter, coming from the northwest. Margot was wearing a chunky red sweater with green apples embroidered on it.

  Not far away from us, an old man in a raincoat tied up with string was slowly pacing around the grass, bending over now and again to pick up something. Cigarette butts? I couldn’t really tell.

  “So what are you going to do, Lalo? Are you going to see her again? You have to see her again!”

  “I think so. I’m not entirely sure. She said we had
just gotten started, but half of the time I don’t really understand what she’s talking about.”

  “What do you mean, you don’t understand what she’s talking about?”

  “It’s hard to describe. It’s like if I said, ‘How do you like my haircut?’ and you said, ‘Maybe next Wednesday.’ Like it could make sense. It’s perfectly good English. But somehow, when you try to analyze it, it doesn’t make any sense at all.”

  “Does it matter, if she’s good in bed? At least she doesn’t make love in a way that you can’t understand. My last boyfriend did, Patrick. You remember Patrick? I swear he learned the facts of life from a goatherd, in Uzbekistan or someplace like that. When I was trying to do one thing, he was always trying to do something else.”

  After a while, the sun sank behind the buildings, and it began to grow chilly.

  “Let’s go inside,” I suggested. “I’ll make you some Russian tea, with honey.”

  Before we left the park, though, I went across to the old man in the raincoat and I held out a ten-dollar bill. He looked at it suspiciously.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Anything you like. Food, cigarettes, hooch. I’m not telling you how to spend it.”

  He came up close to me. His chin was thick with white stubble, but he looked reasonably clean. He reminded me of the late Rod Steiger, for some reason. He didn’t take his eyes off me, not for a second, not even to look down at the ten-spot.

  “You should be careful,” he said.

  “Oh, yes? And why is that?”

  “Because some people can seem like they care for you, if you know what I mean, but all the time they have an agenda. They’re playing you.”

  “I see. And you think that’s happening to me?”

  “Just warning you, that’s all. I used to take people at face value, and look what happened to me.”

  He eased the folded bill from between my fingers as if he were trying to take it without me being aware that he had done it.

  “You’re a good man,” he told me. “You watch out for that young lady of yours.”

  “Oh, we’re just friends,” said Margot, taking hold of my arm.

  “I know that,” the old man told her. “I was talking about the other young lady. The one with the stroller.”

  “You know her?” I asked him.

  But all he did was crumple the ten-dollar bill into his cuff, and raise one finger as if he were testing which way the wind was blowing. Then he walked away without another word.

  “Weird,” said Margot, as he made his way around the chain-link fence and disappeared behind the trees.

  “You’re right,” I told her. “Mega-weird. Let’s go inside and have that tea.”

  * * *

  As I unlocked the door to my apartment, Margot sniffed, and frowned, and sniffed again.

  “What is it?” I asked her.

  “Paint,” she said. “It definitely smells like paint.”

  “Oh, that’s coming from Pearl’s apartment. Somebody’s painting a life study of her. She says it’s Jonathan Lugard, but he’s been dead for five years, according to Victor, so I don’t think that’s too likely.”

  I went through to the kitchenette and Margot followed me. She said, “It must be quite comforting, though, to be sure that somebody’s alive, even when they’re dead. I mean, if you really believe it, what difference does it make?”

  “I don’t know. None, I guess. Maybe that’s what ghosts are.”

  I boiled the kettle and made two glasses of Russian tea. Margot poured a large dollop of orange-blossom honey into hers, over the back of her spoon. Then she tugged off her ankle-length boots and stretched herself out on one of my sofas.

  “You definitely seem different, Lalo.”

  “You think so?”

  “Yes. I get the feeling that you’re expecting something to happen, but you’re not sure what it is. Maybe you’re expecting Kate’s husband to come tearing up the stairs and punch you on the nose.”

  “Well, maybe. But I don’t think so, somehow. It seems to me Kate and Victor have a pretty relaxed kind of marriage, to say the least.”

  “Maybe you’re waiting for Kate to say that she loves you.”

  “Hey, come on. We’ve been to bed together once, that’s all. I may not even see her again.”

  “There’s something about her, though, isn’t there? Something that’s stuck on your brain, like one of those jingles of yours.”

  I tried to sip my tea. It was so hot that it scalded my lip. I didn’t know what to say to Margot, but she was right. I kept thinking about the way that Kate had felt when she had rested her head on my chest; and the strange cloudy look in her eyes whenever she looked at me. I felt as if I needed to see her again, as soon as possible, just to touch her and make sure that she still wanted me.

  “I’ll tell you what,” said Margot. “Me and Dorothea and Jimmy the Squib and Duncan Bradley, we’re all going to Sal’s Comedy Hole tomorrow night, to see Maynard Manning. Why don’t you come along? Get yourself back in the real world, you know, where people talk baloney but at least it’s logical baloney.”

  “Yes, maybe I will.”

  “Come on, promise me. You need to get out more.”

  “Okay, already! I’ll come.”

  * * *

  For the next hour and a half, I played her some of the incidental music I had written for The Billy Wagner Show. I opened a bottle of zinfandel and poured us a large glass each. Margot lay back on the sofa and sang along with me, making up the words as she went along.

  “Nobody ever told me . . . I wish that they had said . . . how much it hurts when a concrete block . . . drops right on your head!”

  She was funny, Margot, but she had a wonderful voice. She could sing anything from blues to light opera, but her specialty was zydeco songs, like “Would You Rather Be an Old Man’s Darling or a Young Man’s Slave?” She was terrific, Margot.

  Eventually my wall clock chimed seven. “Lalo—I really have to go,” she told me. “My fridge is empty and I need to do some heavy-duty shopping.”

  “We could go out for pizza if you’re hungry.”

  “No, I’m so sick of pizza. I need actual food. I’ve even run out of tofu.”

  I showed her downstairs to the front door. She gave me a warm, squashy-breasted hug and she smelled strongly of vanilla musk. She said, “Tomorrow, remember. You need to get back to reality.”

  “I promised, didn’t I?”

  She went skipping down the steps and I closed the door behind her. As I started to climb back up the stairs, I saw an elderly man standing on the second-floor landing, half-hidden in the shadows, looking down at me. White-haired, skeletal-faced, with bushy white eyebrows. He was wearing a pale gray smock with dozens of paintbrush marks all over it, like birds’ footprints, and a floppy gray beret.

  “How’s it going?” I called out. But the elderly man didn’t answer. Instead, he turned his back on me and disappeared up the next flight of stairs.

  I reached the landing and looked up, but there was no sign of him. I didn’t even hear a door close. I guessed he must have been Pearl’s friend, the one who was painting her life study. Pretty darn unsociable, whoever he was.

  I let myself into my apartment, switched on the flat-screen TV that stood in the corner, and poured myself another glass of wine. I hadn’t called my parents since the weekend, so I picked up the phone and dialed their number in New Milford. All I heard was my mother’s voice warbling, “This is the Lake residence! Randolph and Joyce are unable to come to the phone right now, but they would absolutely love to hear what you have to tell us, so please leave us a message. And make it heartfelt, won’t you?”

  “Dis is da plumbah,” I said, in a thick Bronx accent. “I’d love to come by and fiddle wit your cistern, sweetheart.” Well—it served her right for being so precious.

  I eased myself back in one of my armchairs with my feet propped up on the coffee-table, and watched My Name Is Earl for a while. Earl, as us
ual, was talking about karma. I think I would, too, without question, if I lost a $100,000 lottery ticket and then found it again, the way that Earl had.

  Actually, I was beginning to think that Kate was right about fate, and that karma was at work in my life, too. As every day passed, I was beginning to feel more and more like a bit-part player in some long-running TV drama, in which everybody knew the storyline except me. How can you make choices when nobody explains to you what the choices are? Just stand here, Gideon, and say these lines. Don’t worry what they mean.

  There was a quick, soft knocking at my door. I went to open it, and it was Kate. There was karma for you. She was wearing a black roll-neck sweater and jeans, and her hair was tied back with a black velvet ribbon. She looked pale, and she was chafing her hands together as if she felt cold.

  “Hey,” I greeted her. “I didn’t expect to see you again so soon.”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Sure, of course you can. You just missed Margot. How about a glass of wine?”

  “Yes, thanks.” She sat down on the end of one of the sofas, clutching herself tightly.

  “Are you feeling the cold?” I asked her. “I can turn up the heat.”

  “No, no. I’m fine. I was wondering if you were free for the next two weeks.”

  “Free? When? To do what?”

  “To come away with me.”

  I brought her a glass of wine and then I sat down next to her. “You want me to come away with you? You mean on vacation?”

  “Well, kind of. I’d like you to meet some people I know. You don’t have to worry about the cost—I’ll pay for everything.”

  “What’s Victor going to say?”

  “Victor won’t know.”

  “Oh, come on, Kate. You and I will both disappear for two weeks, and Victor won’t even get suspicious?”

  “Gideon, you’ll love it! When you see this family’s apartment, you won’t believe your eyes! It’s truly spectacular. Marble bathrooms, antique furniture. Views out over the harbor.”