Manhattan Lullaby (11 page)

“Why did you have to teach him
that
song,” said Janie to Dolly as she brought two mugs of coffee over to the kitchen table and sat down.

Dolly looked up from the copy of
Rolling Stone
that she had been reading. “I told you. I didn't
teach
him the song. We were laying some soundtrack and I had him in the studio with me. I guess he just picked it up. Besides, you didn't tell me to censor his auditory input when you asked me to babysit for him until you and Don Juan got over your wedding.

Janie pulled a face and poured some cream into her coffee. “Please don't remind me. I still can't believe it happened to me.” A week had done little to soften the blow of the chaos on what should have been her wedding day. “Men! I mean you live with them. You sleep with them. You plan a life with them. You think you know them.” She threw her hands up in a gesture of despair and confusion. “How could I have been so wrong about Bradley?”

Dolly shrugged and spooned a couple of hundred calories' worth of demerara into her coffee. She had been wrong about every guy she had ever known. To her it was the normal state of affairs. “Personally I never understood what you saw in him anyway. I mean he was cute, but …”

Janie stared glumly into her cup. He
was
cute, wasn't he? But it was more than physical attraction. I liked him—as a person. How many men can you say that about these days?”

Dolly nodded in agreement and blew on her coffee to cool it down a little. “True, true.”

Chester, restored once more to his perch, took the break in the conversation as his cue to serenade his audience one more time. “
Blue moon
,” he began tentatively.

Janie threw a warning look in his direction. “One more time, Chester, and you are going to end up plucked, stuffed and surrounded by cranberry sauce.”

Chester hesitated, eyed the dish of peanuts, paused and then decided that now was probably a good time to sharpen his beak. He turned his back to the two women and reached for the piece of cuttlebone.

“Do you want me to take him back with me?” asked Dolly.

“No, it's all right. At least he gives me someone to talk to.” Janie sipped her coffee. “You know the worst thing about being single?”

Dolly shook her head. She had a few hundred ideas on that subject but decided that now was probably not the time to list them.

“It's the silence,” said Janie. “Without Bradley, this house is full of silence. I can hear it, pressing in on me, driving me crazy.” She put both hands over her ears in an effort to shut out the silence.

“I just leave the TV on,” said Dolly, “even when I go to sleep. There's always some man talking about something. It's kind of like having a pajama party, you know, except that everyone's wearing suits.” She finished her coffee and put the mug back on the table.

“You want me to make some more coffee?” asked Janie.

“No, that's O.K. I've got an early session in the morning. We're laying track for some sci-fi flick. I think it's called
Voyage to the Moon
or something like that.”

Hearing his cue, Chester looked up from the cuttlebone. “
Blue
…” he began hopefully, but one look from Janie said his beak wasn't sharp enough yet.

Dolly stood up and stretched. “Thanks for the coffee. Any time you want to talk about life, love and the pursuit of Bradley, you know my number. And like I said, if you get tired of Bobby Vinton over there I'll be glad to birdsit for you again.”

Janie walked her to the front door. Chester followed a few moments later, swooping down the hallway like a B-19 going in for a strafing run. He landed on the hall table, nearly knocking over the vase of winter flowers that rested there. Janie gave him a dirty look. “Thanks, but right now I need company, even the feathered kind. And who knows, one of these days maybe I'll actually be able to teach him to say something
I
want him to say.”

Dolly laughed. “You mean something like ‘Bradley is a shithead?'”

Janie grinned. “I was thinking more along the lines of ‘Hello' and ‘Good-bye,' but you have a point.” She opened the door to let Dolly out. There stood Bradley with one hand poised to knock.

“Well, looks like I picked the right time to say adios,” said Dolly, slipping past him and turning to raise her shoulders at Janie.

“No, wait!” cried Janie. But it was too late. Dolly was already down the steps and on her way up the street.

Bradley cleared his throat. “Hi,” he said awkwardly.

“What do
you
want?” asked Janie tersely, still clutching the doorknob and half decided to slam the door in his face.

“I wanted … uh … that is, can I come in? I think we should talk.” He made a move to take a step forward.

But Janie stopped him in mid-step. “Isn't it a little late for talking?”

“Please.” It sounded almost like begging, which is what it was. And it had the desired effect. Janie let go of the doorknob and moved back a few steps into the hall. Quickly Bradley joined her before she changed her mind.

“I—” He reached out to touch her, but she shrugged off his hand.

“You wanted to talk, so talk,” she said, folding her arms across her chest.

Realizing he would have to make his pitch fast, Bradley started to speak, but Chester interrupted. “Hello, Good-bye. Bradley is a shithead.”

Bradley looked both surprised and offended. “Nice things you're teaching the bird to say.”

“I didn't teach him that. He just picked it up.”

“Oh? I suppose people all over town are saying it.”

“No,” replied Janie. “Just people on the Upper East Side, and parts of Westchester and Long Island.”

She had made her point. Bradley let it drop.

“What's he doing back here, anyway?” he grumbled.

“
He
lives here.”

Bradley sighed. Things weren't going at all the way he had envisioned. Somehow he had managed to convince himself on the way over that she would have had time to calm down in the last few days, even that she might be just a little pleased to see him. He had been wrong, of course. “Look, I just came here to talk—”

“And I just went to the synagogue to get married.” Her tone was light but it carried the full weight of her feelings just the same.

Bradley began to turn red. “I—I'm sorry about that. That's why I came over here tonight. I wanted to apologize. About the baby and—”

“Apologize?” replied Janie, savoring the word as though it had some strange and alien flavor. “You can
apologize
for stepping on my foot. You can
apologize
for your father being late. You can even
apologize
for being unfaithful to me all those months. But a baby … a baby you can't
apologize
for.” She turned and went down the hall into the kitchen.

Chester rolled his wicked orange eyes in Bradley's direction, gave his best diabolical parrot chuckle and took off after her.

Bradley stood still. He felt like a stranger in his own land. A very unwelcome stranger. Then he heard her running the tap. He heard the sound of dishes clattering against one another in the sink. He took a deep breath and marched forward.

She had her back to the door, both hands in the soapy sink.

“I was not unfaithful to you,” he stated, standing in the kitchen doorway.

She stopped washing the cups but left her hands in the water. She did not turn around. “Oh? You and another woman had a child together. What would you call it? A pledge of your love for me?”

Bradley sighed. “It's not like I ever … I mean I never even … It was only a plastic cup as far as I was concerned.”

Janie shook the suds off her hands and turned to face him. “What you
put
it in is not really the issue here, is it?”

“What do you mean? It's not as though I
enjoyed
myself. It's not as though I did it for pleasure.”

“Whether or not you enjoyed yourself isn't the point either,” cried Janie.

“Well what is the goddamn point, then?” demanded Bradley, who was getting upset because he couldn't defend his position if he didn't know what it was.

“The point is, that (a) you deliberately kept what you were doing a secret from me all that time—”

“I wanted to surprise you.”

“Believe me, I was surprised. My mother and father were surprised. My whole family is positively reeling from the surprise.” She reached for a dish towel to dry her hands. “And (b) whether you put it in a plastic cup or a banana daiquiri, and whether you enjoyed yourself or not,
you
have a baby. And I'm not about to raise another woman's child. If I want to devote that much time and energy to a child, I'll have one of my own. Now, if there's nothing else …” She waved a hand in the direction of the front door.

Bradley held his ground. “Don't you love me anymore?”

Janie sighed. He would have to bring up emotion and spoil her logical argument. “Whether I love you is not the issue here. As it happens, I probably still do, more or less. But I've thought it over and I realize that I can't live with you and whatsitsname. I'm being honest and I want you to know that, my anger aside, I think it would be false of me to try and pretend I can accept this situation when I can't. I'm sorry, but that is how I feel.

“Janie, I—” He took a step forward.

“No.” She held up her hands to shield herself. “Now please leave, before I do something dumb and decide to let you stay.” They were brave words, but her voice was breaking.

He looked at her standing there in the kitchen, her face flushed, her eyes brimming with unshed tears, and he knew he had probably never loved her more than he did right then. It was the first time in all the years he had known her that she had displayed any sort of vulnerability at all. The first time that she was not Janie the corporate woman, but just Janie the woman who had suddenly found that there are some things in life you can't control, that sometimes, no matter how careful you are, the balance sheet just doesn't come out right. “I'm sorry,” he said, and he meant sorry for both of them. And he turned and went to the front door.

“Bradley is a shithead,” crowed Chester triumphantly.

“No, he is not!” cried Janie, throwing another peanut at the parrot and listening as the front door opened and closed.

Two hours later, unable to sleep from too much coffee and too many emotions, Janie got out of bed, got dressed and went for a walk.

It was a cold, still night, clear enough to see the tiny pinpoints of distant stars even from the bottom of Manhattan's blazing pit. She walked north for no particular reason, and after a few blocks she found that she was feeling a little better. Colder, but better. Still, at least walking was
doing
something and anything was better than sitting at home listening to the silence of her life folding itself around her like some large, contented cat. At least out here there was some sound, some life, even at this hour. Suddenly, amid the comforting bleats of the taxis and the hissing of the warm geysers of subcity steam as they erupted from the manholes, she heard another sound. A dog barking.

She stopped and looked around. It was late for anyone to be out walking a dog. And then ahead, in the next block and walking toward her, she saw a dark stocky figure preceded by a bouncing white ball of fluff. They both looked familiar even from this distance, and she smiled slightly and began to walk toward them. Evidently she was not the only one who preferred to ward off the chill within with the cold without.

“Hello, Steve,” she said, drawing abreast of the figure.

Steve Curtis's thoughts were miles away, in Fairfield, Connecticut, to be exact. He was preoccupied with examining the most recent blow to his parental status. His ex-wife, Brenda, had called earlier in the evening to say that Bethany and Jared had decided that they wanted to call their stepfather, Bubba, “Daddy” from now on, and she just wanted him to know. Steve had spent the rest of the night trying to find the term for how he felt about that piece of news. By one o'clock he had found it.
Lousy
. And that was why he was out walking Tony in the middle of this cold, cold night. That was also why he didn't even hear his own name the first time Janie called him.

She tried again. “Steve?”

He looked up from beneath the brim of his hat, but before he could even recognize the source of the voice Tony was dancing up and down on his hind legs in greeting. Janie reached down and patted him on the head and, satisfied, he snuggled up next to Janie's booted foot, under the hem of her fur coat.

“Janie?” asked Steve, not believing his own eyes.

“It's me,” she said, giving a crooked little smile. She was glad to see him in one way and sad in another. Only pain brought people out walking at this time of night, and Steve Curtis was a nice man. She didn't like to think of him suffering any more than he already had, but those big puppy-dog eyes told her that he was. “What're you doing out on a night like this?

Steve indicated the bichon. “Walking the dog.”

“At two a.m.?”

Steve grinned. “You're right. It's more like the other way around. I couldn't sleep and he's keeping me company.”

“Where's Lavinia?” It was too cold to stand still, and so they automatically began to walk.

“She's on another buying trip to Europe,” replied Steve, though he didn't sound too interested. “But even if she wasn't, she's not the type who wants to know you in the middle of the night. Says she needs her beauty rest or whatever.”

“Oh,” said Janie. “And what about Marilyn?”

“Lavinia didn't want her and Tony fooling around and making little bichons while she was gone, so she sent Marilyn to stay with a friend who has a spayed bitch. God forbid we should have a litter of pups, eh, Tony? I mean, it might interfere with her plans.”