The Night and the Music - Lawrence Block [56]
Even I was glad she was around, the woman in gray, the Merciful Angel of Death. To hold the door for them, and show them the light on the other side. And, if they really needed it, to give them the least little push through it.
We left halfway through the curtain calls, threading our way up the aisle and across the lobby. Inside it had been winter in Paris, with La Bohème’s lovers shivering and starving; outside it was New York, with spring turning into summer.
We held hands and walked across the great courtyard, past the fountain shimmering under the lights, past Avery Fisher Hall. Our apartment is in the Parc Vendome, at Fifty-seventh and Ninth, and we headed in that direction and walked a block or so in silence.
Then Elaine said, “I don’t want to go home.”
“All right.”
“I want to hear music. Can we do that?”
“We just did that.”
“Different music. Not another opera.”
“Good,” I said, “because one a night is my limit.”
“You old bear. One a night is one over your limit.”
I shrugged. “I’m learning to like it.”
“Well, one a night’s my limit. You know something? I’m in a mood.”
“Somehow I sensed as much.”
“She always dies,” she said.
“Mimi.”
“Uh-huh. How many times do you suppose I’ve seen La Bohème? Six, seven times?”
“If you say so.”
“At least. You know what? I could see it a hundred times and it’s not going to change. She’ll die every fucking time. ”
“Odds are.”
“So I want to hear something different,” she said, “before we call it a night.”
“Something happy,” I suggested.
“No, sad is fine. I don’t mind sad. As a matter of fact I prefer it.”
“But you want them all alive at the end.”
“That’s it,” she said. “Sad as can be, so long as nobody dies.”
We caught a cab to a new place I’d heard about on the ground floor of a high-rise on Amsterdam in the Nineties. The crowd was salt and pepper, white college kids and black strivers, blonde fashion models and black players. The group was mixed, too; the tenor man and the bass player were white, the pianist and the drummer black. The maître d’ thought he recognized me and put us at a table near the bandstand. They were a few bars into “Satin Doll” when we sat down and they followed it with a tune I recognized but couldn’t name. I think it was a Thelonious Monk composition, but that’s just a guess. I can hardly ever name the tune unless there’s a lyric to it that sticks in my mind.
Aside from ordering drinks, we didn’t say a word until the set ended. We sipped our cranberry juice and soda and listened to the music. She watched the musicians and I watched her watch them. When they took a break she reached for my hand. “Thanks,” she said.
“You okay?”
“I was always okay. I do feel better now, though. You know what I was thinking?”
“The night we met.”
Her eyes widened. “How’d you know that?”
“Well, it was in a room that looked and felt a lot like this one. You were at Danny Boy’s table, and this is his kind of place.”
“God, I was young. We were both so goddamned young.”
“Youth is one of those things time cures.”
“You were a cop and I was a hooker. But you’d been on the force longer than I’d been on the game.”
“I already had a gold shield.”
“And I was new enough to think the life was glamorous. Well, it was glamorous. Look at the places I went and the people I got to meet.”
“Married cops.”
“That’s right, you were married then.”
“I’m married now.”
“To me. Jesus, the way things turn out, huh?”
“A club like this,” I said, “and the same kind of music playing.”
“Sad enough to break your heart, but nobody dies.”
“You were the most beautiful woman in the room that night,” I said. “And you still are.”
“Ah, Pinocchio,” she said, and squeezed my hand. “Lie to me.”
We closed the place. Outside on the street she said, “God, I’m impossible. I don’t want the night to end.”
“It doesn’t have to.”
“In the old days,” she said, “you knew all the after-hours joints. Remember when Condon’s would stay open late for musicians, and they’d jam until dawn?”
“I remember Eddie Condon’s hangover cure,” I