The Garden of Betrayal - Lee Vance [19]
“I’d love it if you played for me sometime,” I said, trying to get the conversation back on track.
“For you?” she asked, with a hint of her previous assertiveness.
“As a swap. I’ll do something for you.”
“What?”
“Whatever you want.”
She laughed, and I felt relieved.
“You have any talents?”
“Beyond analyzing financial reports and building spreadsheets?”
“Right. Beyond that. I build my own spreadsheets.”
“Guy stuff. Opening jars, hanging shelves, burning breakfast.”
“Hmm …” She took a pen from her purse and scribbled something on a napkin. She pushed it toward me and stood up. “I’ll think about it. I have to go now. Give me a call sometime.”
I stayed to finish my coffee, toying with the napkin and wondering how soon I could phone without seeming too eager. Her sudden departure had left me edgy and heated. I called the next morning. We went on a second date, and a third. I was working a hundred hours a week, but sleep soon became less important to me than being with her. I saw her giggly, and tender, and tearful, and passionate. But she never offered to play for me, and—much as I wanted to—I never asked again, convinced she was still thinking about it, for reasons of her own. Her gift on the two-month anniversary of our visit to the biscotteria was a key to the Chelsea ballet studio where she was employed evenings, and the murmured information that she stayed on to practice most nights, after the dancers went home.
I left my office at midnight the next day, catching the E train from the World Trade Center to Twenty-third Street, winding my way north and west through deserted warehouse blocks to a drafty industrial building on the West Side Highway. The sound of her piano echoed down the stairwell like a beacon, and my heart pounded as I climbed toward it. Opening the door to the studio, I saw her on the bench and abruptly understood why she’d been puzzled by my question about becoming a pianist. She played as if transported, hands confident and face rapturous. She’d been born to be a pianist. The joy her music elicited in me was tainted by fear. Her deepest self was rooted in a world that a nonmusician like myself could never fully appreciate. She noticed me at the door, and the piano fell silent as she rose to greet me.
We made love on a blanket on the hardwood floor. After, we sat up against the wall in the dark, the blanket wrapped around us like a cloak. The entire western wall of the studio was glass, and we could see out over the highway and the abandoned piers to the Hudson River beyond. The lights of Hoboken glinted on the turbulent water, and the passing tugs and barges looked like toys. We shared small secrets, whispering for the pleasure of feeling conspiratorial.
“Not so much,” I said, when she asked if I’d been lonely as a boy. We were both only children. “I invented a baseball game that I used to play with dice, my team against historical teams or whoever was in town to play the Yankees. I kept box scores and statistics, and was always tinkering with the rules to try to make the probabilities work out like the real game.”
“It sounds like you were lonely.”
“Maybe,” I admitted. “What about you?”
“Pretty much the same. I was always daydreaming. My big fantasy when I was twelve was that I was married to a famous cellist and that we had a child who was a prodigy on the violin. We toured Europe as a family trio, and everywhere we went, people applauded and threw flowers. I had a whole schedule of performances worked out, that I took from a library book about Jenny Lind.”
Her recollection crystallized the apprehension that had been weighing on me since I’d opened the studio door—that she’d be happy only with someone who shared her passion and ability. I was afraid to ask what she daydreamed about now.
“Jenny Lind,” I repeated, to fill the uncomfortable pause in the conversation. An indistinct memory came back to me. “The Swedish Canary?”
“The Swedish Nightingale.” She dug an elbow into my ribs. “One of the greatest sopranos ever. Philistine.