The Trouble With Eden - Lawrence Block [98]
Bert’s fingers worked on the keys. “You’re too kind.”
“I’ve told you all this before.”
“I know. It’s funny, though. I can’t sing to a roomful of people. It’s not just that it’s a mental block because I do it from time to time but it doesn’t work, I can’t really get into it. And as a result I don’t sing well.”
“Couple of acting classes might help. Some version of psychodrama. Teach you to get out of yourself.”
“That’s possible, I suppose. The odd thing is, though, that I can’t sing when I’m completely alone, either. I embarrass myself for some odd reason. I can only sing” —his hands punched out a descending chord progression —“when I’m singing for you. Odd, no?”
Warren bent, nuzzled Bert’s ear, planted a row of kisses along his throat.
“You’re changing the subject.”
“Aren’t I, though,” Warren murmured, continuing. “It’s not odd, though. You love and trust me.”
“It’s odd that I love and trust anyone, don’t you think? Damn. It’s going to be hard to play this piano with an erection.”
“Doubt it’s ever been done before. Most pianists use their hands. A good idea, though. A little outré for television, but in the right club in the Village—”
“Devil. What do you know about a girl called Melanie?”
“She misses all the notes but I still like to listen to her, though I must admit I don’t know why. One gets on her side and cheers for her, I think. One hopes that, in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, she’s going to make it all the way through to the end of the song.”
“Not the singer. Melanie Jaeger, I think her name is.”
“Sully’s wife.”
“Oh, is she? I never made the connection.”
“Why?”
Bert was playing “I Get a Kick Out of You.”
“Tossed a pass my way tonight.”
“Melanie Jaeger? Where was this?”
“While I was working. Pretty obvious pitch.”
“Who was she with?”
“No one. Came alone, sat at the bar, and cruised the room like a piranha. She made her drinks last a long time. She wasn’t there for drinks or music. She was looking for someone to go home with. Found someone, too. No one I ever saw before, but she scored and took him right on out of there.”
“I’ll be damned. Melanie Jaeger. You’re sure she wasn’t meeting someone?”
“Not a chance. Nice little bit, too. Predatory cheekbones, and something special in her eyes.”
“One begins to visualize certain possibilities.”
“Just what I thought.”
Warren’s voice dropped an octave. “Why don’t you stop abusing that piano,” he murmured, “and abuse me a little instead.”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
A month after Bertram Ryder LeGrand’s second birthday, his father put the family Buick into a curve at seventy miles an hour. The car left the road and stopped abruptly when it came to a tree. The steering column crushed Jack LeGrand’s chest and killed him instantly. The girl who had been on the seat beside him went through the windshield and bled to death from a slashed jugular vein. The first state trooper on the scene had never seen a car so utterly demolished. The only undamaged object was a pint bottle of corn whiskey which had somehow survived the impact. There was an inch left in it, and after a look at the car’s two occupants, the trooper felt the need to finish the bottle himself.
Bert had no true memories of his father, but it seemed to him that the ghost of Smilin’ Jack LeGrand was always present in the brooding Victorian house in downtown Charleston where he grew up. It was his grandmother’s house and he lived there with his mother and grandmother and was nourished on the stories his mother told of his father. Smilin’ Jack had been an athlete, a hard drinker, at once a man’s man and a ladies’ man. Sarah Ryder seemed as proud of his faults as of his virtues. He had been the first man in her life and was to be the last. She had loved him quite completely, and yet it seemed to Bert in later years that his abrupt death must have been a relief to her. She was a shy, timid girl, and it could not have been easy for her to be the wife of such a man. It was infinitely easier to be his widow.
She raised him in his father’s shadow and at the