This was a new note. He loves this, I realized, and I appreciated that he didn’t make some apologetic remark about how I should see it in the springtime when everything was green. He loved it now and all the time. I leaned back against him and watched the dark gray clouds. They were moving fast along the opposite ridge, chased by an unruly winter wind.
“Beethoven’s Fifth,” I murmured.
“What?” Joe asked. It was hard to speak when every word was snatched out of our mouths and flung all the way to Canada.
“If I were orchestrating that.” I gestured at the sky. “Beethoven’s Fifth.”
He turned me to him and held me against his chest. There have been so many times that I’ve remembered that moment and clung to it for comfort. I can still taste the wind.
The Malones lived at the edge of one of those small villages that have a town square with a gazebo for summertime band concerts. Colgate and Hamilton were only a few miles down the road, and there was the feel of a college town, with a bookstore and a coffee shop that advertised cappuccino. We pulled into the driveway of a white colonial set back from the street. There were several towering old trees on the front lawn and I could imagine how impressive they must be with their summer foliage. Instead of pulling up in front, we circled around behind the house. There was a barn at the far end of the property, with fields and wooded hills beyond.
When I got out of the car I could see that the main house had been expanded in the rear. There was a stairway leading to a separate entrance.
“My apartment,” Joe said. “It’s a little strange being so close to my family, but I’m not here much and it makes those midnight crisis sessions more convenient.”
“Do Frank and Eva live here, too?” I had managed to extract from Joe that his brother had a wife who was “nice enough.” No kids. The fact was, Joe never said much of anything about these people. For all I knew, the dinner table could be populated by Addams family caricatures.
Joe’s apartment was a lot more lived in than the New York place. Someone had laid a fire in the fireplace, and it smelled like the woods, with raw pine walls and a table and chairs of Adirondack “twig” style. The bedroom had red and black plaid blankets and old kerosene lamps that had been converted to electricity. There were bookshelves filled with collections of plays, and the walls were covered with framed photos of airplanes. I heard a distant clatter from somewhere below.
“Who’s home?” I asked. The only vehicle, another pickup truck, had been parked down near the barn.
“You’ll meet everybody at dinner.” He threw my bag on his bed. “I figured you’d be glad for a rest while I’m at the airport. And there’s plenty of stuff in the refrigerator. I got you ice cream, cheese doodles, and Granny Smiths. Poke around.” He stood for a second, watching me sit there next to my suitcase. I knew what he was doing—photographing me with his eyes. When he blinked, I could almost hear the snap of the lens.
“It’s good to have you here, Anna,” he said. “Thanks.” Then he gave me a kiss and was out the door. I pictured the quick easy grace of him going down the stairs.
For the first time since my icy sprawl on Lexington Avenue, I felt a trace of doubt about ending it with Joe. Perhaps because my real life seemed so far off, the day had taken on a dreamlike quality and, like Dorothy, I had flown through the sky into another dimension. “Don’t be stupid,” I said out loud. I forced myself to remember the indignity of my Halloween nosedive. That was our future, an endless cartoon of pratfalls with Joe the beleaguered crutch. I sobered up in a hurry.
I had thought I would begin my inspection of the place the moment Joe drove off, but instead I lay back on the bed. My head was aching and my eyes had the dry, popped-out feeling they get from being overtired. The next thing I knew, the phone was ringing. For a moment I had no idea where I was, and then I couldn’t find the phone. I tracked it to the shelf under the bedside table and said “Hi,” figuring it would be Joe.
“Hello?” It was an older woman’s voice, pausing, then, “Oh. You must be Anna. This is Celeste Malone.”
“And were blurp do sing ner mada,” I said. When I first wake up I sometimes have a difficult time articulating.
“Excuse me?” she said.
I shook my head hard, hoping to rattle my synapses into submission. “How do?” I said.
Another pause. She must have thought I’d gotten into Joe’s liquor supply. “Fine,” she replied, all business. “I just wanted to make sure you’d arrived safely and to let you know that dinner will be at seven-thirty. Joe tends to be late, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
No, I haven’t, I wanted to say, but there were a lot of reasons I thought better of it, the main one being that I’d never get my tongue around it. “Gord,” I said. One-syllable words usually came out all right, so I knew I was in big trouble.
“Looking forward to meeting you,” she said with the tone of someone expecting the Bearded Lady. She hung up before I had to squeeze out any more grunts.
The first thing I did was laugh in a hysterical mirthless sort of way. I felt like calling Ma because I knew she’d appreciate the comic element. Instead, I dug into my vast supply of drugs—one of these, a couple of those—I swallowed an arsenal, and then stepped carefully into the other room, turned on the television and sat in Joe’s big worn-out leather chair. It was the E! channel, and who was plastered all over the screen but Michelle’s father, Deke Cross, with his child bride Dakota Blue tastefully attired in fringed bandeau and skintight capri pants. Even on the small screen I could make out three navel rings. The commentator adopted the slightly ironic tone that was supposed to signal her superiority to celebrity mania:
“And who made a last minute appearance at Elton’s concert but everyone’s favorite Native American pop star, Dakota Blue, and her multi-billion-dollar groom, Deke Cross. Elton tried to persuade Dakota to join him in an impromptu duet but she turned him down. Too shy, Dakota, or was it simply impossible to unlock your lips from your new hubby’s? One trendy restaurateur tells us he considered phoning the vice squad when this pair recently went a bit over the limit in demonstrating their devotion.”
I hoped Michelle had missed that one, but even so, the media was full of the newlyweds. In the divorce papers, which had leaked into the tabloids, Deke Cross had accused Michelle’s mother of a fondness for young boys. Filona counterclaimed that Deke enjoyed being spanked with wet panty hose. All of it was excruciating for Michelle, especially when some clever classmate hung a pair of damp panty hose from her locker. But I’d arranged to free up the dance studio two afternoons a week, and Michelle had taken advantage of the opportunity. I’d stopped by one day to find Rudy Steinberger standing outside the door. There was a small pane for viewing what was going on inside. I put my face to the glass to see Michelle spin across the room in a spectacular demonstration of flight.
“Wouldn’t it be wonderful to be able to do that?” I’d said to Rudy.
He nodded, and I could see he couldn’t talk around the lump in his throat. My heart broke for him as he headed off down the hall, his shoulders drooping, one sneaker untied.
I snapped off Joe’s television and went to the window. The snow was coming down in fat dollops. It had piled up on the windowsill and framed the pine trees on the distant hillside. The scene reminded me of a calendar that hung in the teachers’ lounge at Cameron. I wasn’t having much success at leaving the city behind. I stood there gazing, unmoved by the breathtaking view, instead fretting about the meeting of the board of trustees that might be transpiring at that very moment. It seemed unimaginable that they’d fire Duncan Reese halfway through the school year but he had been too unrepentant about his relationship with Jessica Lassiter. I wondered just how closely my own professional future was yoked to Reese’s.
This train of thought was hardly soothing. I turned away from the Grandma Moses view with intent to distract myself by some serious snooping. My Stieglitz gift lay prominently on Joe’s coffee table along with a pile of
Playbill
magazines and a Nestle’s chocolate bar. Joe was a serious chocoholic. A detective could easily track him down by following the wrapper trail: M&M’s, Clark Bars, Snickers. I’d seen him eat a tablespoon of raw cocoa once when he’d run out of everything else.
I walked over to a wall of photographs that was a series of a man and two boys standing beside an airplane in various stages of construction. One of the boys was clearly Joe, with rounder cheeks and white-blond hair. Frank was beefy even then, and wore glasses. The man’s face was shaded by a felt hat. None of the shots were particularly well composed and some were actually blurred. It surprised me a little that Joe would display such inexpert photographs.
I turned to Joe’s desk next, practically rubbing my hands together with guilty anticipation. Desks are a treasure trove for the seriously inquisitive. The first thing I noticed was the row of framed photos, mostly of me, across the top of the desk. But one, larger than the others, was lying facedown. I turned it over and looked into the eyes of an old woman. As the only smooth surface in a topography of wrinkles, they startled me. The portrait invited, demanded, study. I was so lost in it that I didn’t even hear Joe’s car door slam. He burst in, covered with snow, threw off his jacket and swooped me up in his arms. He had been so tentative with me lately that I was surprised by the extravagance.
“You smell wonderful,” he said, “wood smoke and shampoo.”
I shook the snow out of his hair and handed him the photo. “Is this your Gran?”
He nodded and replaced it on the desk. Facedown. “It’s still too hard to look at it.”
I thought he had told me her death was four years ago. “Did you take the photograph?”
“Yes, not long before she died. I see it there in her face, that she’s leaving.” He went over to the fireplace and dumped a log on top of the coals. It was clear that the subject of his grandmother had been dismissed for now. He poked at the fire and when he turned to me again, he was smiling.
“I like this,” he said. “The little woman waiting by the hearth.”
“Oh, yeah, the little woman,” I said. “You can move me around, you know. Park me by the fire, or stand me up by the stove. I come with accessories, a set of bellows and an apron.”
He opened his mouth to make a wisecrack and thought better of it. I figured he was thinking about sex, but that topic was just a little too fraught for levity. Under the circumstances, making love seemed out of the question.
“Your mother called,” I said. “She woke me up from a nap and I wasn’t very coherent.”
“She got me at the office. We’re supposed to join her for a drink. You ready?”
That was an easy one. “No,” I said.
But as soon as Joe went to the bathroom—with the door open, of course—and changed out of his wet slacks, he announced that Happy Hour at the Malones’ was a command performance.
There was a door through Joe’s kitchen that led down a flight of stairs into the foyer of the main house. Since I got sick, I’ve learned to make an instant assessment of the disabled-friendliness of an environment. Just standing in the hallway, I could already tell that this place was a nightmare. To begin with, the foyer had two loose rugs for catapulting me into the Flying Starfish, which is what I call the spectacular fall when all parts of me are off the ground simultaneously. In the living room beyond, the pile of the wall-to-wall carpet rose to a height that was only appropriate if you happened to be a lion on the prowl for wildebeest. For those of us who have trouble lifting our feet, it spelled certain disaster. So having determined that I’d need a four-wheel drive to get to the living room sofa, it was additionally daunting to note that every square inch of surface visible through the doorway was covered with pricey little knickknacks. Just the sight of all that porcelain produced spasms in my fingertips.
Standing there beside Joe, I began flicking my wrists violently. Sometimes that helps ward off spasms, but of course, this was the precise moment Celeste Malone chose to enter the foyer from the kitchen. She had started toward us with her hand extended but stopped in her tracks as I flapped at her like some hyperactive hummingbird.
“It’s MS, actually,” I said. “I have multiple sclerosis. How do you do?” Mrs. Malone looked like she’d just jammed her finger in a lightbulb socket. Her mouth made a perfect little O while her hand remained extended, stiff enough for chin-ups.
“Mother, this is Anna Bolles,” Joe said. “She wanted to tell you herself.”
“I’m sorry to be so abrupt,” I said. Joe’s arm around my waist was a help. “I’m afraid I was a bit nervous.” Break it to them gently, was what I had counseled myself, and even then, only if you have to. Kind of like I’d dropped a Toyota on her head from ten stories up.
I had to give her credit. She was nothing if not poised, just shook my hand and gave me a ghastly smile. She was very well dressed, I noticed, in a designer pantsuit and a cashmere cowl-neck sweater.
“Let’s have a drink,” she said, turning on her heels in a crisp military maneuver. “Joseph, the usual? And what can I get for you, Anna?” Joseph? Who was Joseph, the butler?
“A glass of wine would be lovely,” I said, figuring it out.
“Red or white?” Her voice made it sound like a test.
“Either is fine,” I answered. A woman of undiscriminating tastes, that’s me, as long as it does the job and renders me totally unconscious in a big hurry. Well, at least the cat was out of the bag, so to speak. A cat with a serious limp and memory lapses like you wouldn’t believe. I reminded myself that since these were my last few days with Joe, it didn’t matter. But pride is a potent vice, and I sure would have liked to leave a decent impression in my wake.
“Come sit by the fire,” Joe said, and led me through the shoulder-high pile toward the sofa. He sat me down and went to help his mother. I took the opportunity to look around. The room was done in off-white, beige, and taupe, with a few accents of Chinese red here and there. You’d think with all those figurines, there’d be some sense of personality, but it was instead handsome and completely without character. Even the leftover Christmas decorations were stark—a creepy white branch on the mantelpiece reminded me of Boris, the skeleton that hung in the corner of our freshman biology class. There was a grand piano in one corner, however, that did add a touch of humanity, though its lid was down and there was no evidence of music anywhere. Silenced, perhaps, by the intimidating severity of the room.