Thank You for the Music (11 page)

The affairs had happened
before
Anita Defranz, most of them when Jude was in his thirties. Only Lily had been recent.

“So we can start there,” I said. “We can start with Lily. You tell me the story, and I'll listen up.”

I spoke with calm authority. I spoke in unconscious imitation of Berna.

“Lily is nobody you'd ever want to meet,” he said.

“But I need the story, Jude.”

“It will mortify me to tell you.”

“So be it.”

“She was in her twenties, she called herself a poet, I met her at Reed Carone's house, he was her professor at the time, she wore a beaded top, she was nice enough, in the summer she worked with deaf children, she was a
girl
, can we stop now?”

“Jude, it's interesting to me.”

“It was physical attraction, that's all. The most elemental kind. I'm sorry. We'd go to her crummy apartment. She was a slob, and I had to endure the presence of her roommate who called me the pig. Finally the roommate said the pig could no longer enter the sty, so it was a Howard Johnson's hotel. We went there weekly for seven months. Then she fell for a young buck from Cuba, introduced me to him so I'd get the picture of how far up in the world she was moving. I was relieved. And after that I've been faithful, and will be until I die.”

“Faithful.”

“I certainly love you. Nobody else.”

“Nice words, Jude, but who are we? I want to hate you. But then, that would be like hating my life. I don't want to do that. Do I?”

My eyes stung with tears.
My life,
echoed in my brain, and I saw myself as a little girl running down a road in Indiana, the first time I'd ever felt that sense of
my life!
I'd been stung by a bee. I remembered my father in the doorway of the kitchen, scooping me up. I cried, not from the bee sting but because I knew I had a life, and was alone living it.

“So what did Lily look like?” I said. “Like Anita Defranz?”

“More or less.”

“I'd like to hate you, Jude. For all those nights you fell asleep beside me, so exhausted, so spent. You wouldn't even talk to me! I'd like to kick you, and slap you. But I'm a dignified person who is now going out for a walk.”

I felt him watch me rise from my chair, and I was gratified that he was speechless.

We lived in silence for nearly a week—avoiding each other when we could, and then 120 roses were delivered to my door, the card simply saying, “From Jude Harrison,” which made me laugh until tears streamed down my face.

“Jude!” I hollered that day—he was upstairs painting. “Jude Harrison, this lunacy solves absolutely nothing! Where will we put them?”

He came downstairs—I stopped laughing as soon as I saw him, my heart recoiling—and together we quietly found vases and jars for each rose, and the whole house filled up with his apology. For a while, I was touched, and then not so touched. Now we had a friendly silence, sometimes broken with, “Want some scrambled eggs?” or “I need to paint in the kitchen today, if it's all right? I need that light,” or “How 'bout we go see Berna and Griff tonight?”

In the car that night Jude and I rode in silence. I felt so eager to get to Griffin's house, as if it were a holiday and I were a child in love with ritual. I knew we'd be served tea, I knew they'd be in pajamas, I knew I'd hear crickets and stories, I knew the house would have that inexplicable atmosphere.
Electrified by something,
I thought,
by mystery,
I decided, though even that word did not capture what I felt there.

They had company. It was only the third time we'd come to find them not alone. The first two times it had been old Jack J. Pree, no longer a fatso or an existentialist, but married and the father of twin girls. He was still Jack J. Pree, though, full of loud laughter, and no dull judgments, and when he left he lifted Bern off the ground for a hug. His wife was more like a stunned, wide-eyed owl. You could feel her observations were grist for the mill for the tale she'd tell her friend on the phone the next day.

Tonight the company was a stranger, an old man, very old, who we saw first through the window. I wondered if it was Berna's father.

We stepped inside; the kitchen felt like deep water. Berna's eyes were sad. Griffin was nowhere.

“What happened?”

“This is Charlie Demato,” Berna said. “He's staying with Griff and me for a while.”

Charlie Demato, the old man, sat at the kitchen table with a bowl of oatmeal in front of him. He had sharp elbows perched on the table's edge, and he smiled up at us. “A pleasure to meet you,” he said. “You'll excuse my spirits,” he added.

“We had to put down Mr. Demato's dog today. He lost his wife three weeks ago.”

Jude and I expressed our sympathy. I felt we should leave. Surely Mr. Demato didn't need strangers like us. I said as much.

The old man looked up at me. “Please,” he said. “Please stay. Don't go.”

It was as if he were demanding that there be no more departures in life—nobody, ever again, would be leaving.

“Just sit down,” he ordered.

Griffin appeared, smiled at us from the doorway.

“Berna,” the old man said, “tell these people about Belle. Tell them so they know she wasn't just some dog.”

Berna said that he should tell the story. That it would help him.

“Excuse me while I get my album of photographs,” Mr. Demato said, and walked into the other room.

“He's staying with us,” Griffin said.

“We know.”

“It's part of how Bern runs the business. If some old person loses a pet and they live alone and they can't bear it, she invites them out here.”

“Doesn't have to be an old person,” Berna said. “Loneliness comes in all ages. A girl of twenty-two lived with me for six months one time. Turned out she had a lot to teach me. She stayed too long, she got herself pregnant, she ate too much, and made it impossible for me to meditate. But she was a teacher for me, I knew that all along.”

Mr. Demato was coming back to us, his enormous album in his arms.

“Ain't I a sight for sore eyes?” he mumbled, and laughed. “This goddamn album weighs more than I do.”

He sat down in the chair and opened to the first page.

“My wife, six years old!” he said, and clapped. “Deprived child. Never had a dog. Her mother claimed to be allergic. Her mother was a big liar. She hated me. My wife took after her father. Her father fell off a rooftop and died when he was thirty-two. Broke my wife's heart. Just a little girl. Never the same again.”

He flipped through a few pages. His breathing quickened.

“I am unprepared,” he said, “I am very unprepared. And I did many things to prepare myself. I rejoined the Catholic Church.”

We were all looking at him, trying to express something with our faces. Berna was up taking bread out of the oven. I saw that Mr. Demato's hand had started to tremble. “I went into the confession booth. ‘Bless me father, for I have sinned,' I said. ‘But God who made death is the real sinner,' I said. The priest said, ‘It is normal to be angry at death, and it's good to express your anger.'”

He looked up at us. He had urgent blue eyes. “You're all too young to understand,” he said. “You live with a woman for forty-eight years. Her biggest fault is too much garlic on her food, and maybe she had to get the last word in. Bitchy once a month, even after the menopause. We got the dog sixteen years ago. A mutt. A pup. She took care of it just like it was a baby. She talked to it that way. We'd had a baby together. A smart girl. The girl grew up and moved to San Diego. The girl got breast cancer when she was forty. Survived. We lived through that together. Luck was on our side. How lucky we were. And look here, she played piano!”

He closed the book of pictures before we could see. He rested one of his hands on top of it, the other hand coming up to cover his eyes. He stood up. “I'm sorry, I am not prepared. I wasn't prepared. For the weight of it. I am sorry to go on. Berna, may I go to my room? I thank you. The dog died a peaceful death in my arms. A lovely way to go. They should do it for human beings. You have a fine son. Good night, now. The dog was named Belle.”

As he walked away Jude's hand took my own under the table.

“He's a nice old man,” Jude said. “I wish I'd known one good thing to say.”

“Yes,” I said. “Me too.”

Jude squeezed my hand.

Then, the strangest thing happened. We heard the old man singing. Not softly. He was belting it out in there, a song I'd never heard.
“All the lilies, all the lilies, lighting up her face!”
He had a terrible voice, a comic voice, and who would have thought he could be so loud?

We sat and wondered if we should go to him. If this was a sign of unraveling. But nobody moved.

“The man needs to sing,” Berna said. She smiled.

We ate her warm, fresh bread.
“The lilies, the lilies, the lilies in the snow!”

We laughed a little. The song did not soften, if anything he got louder and more off-key. It went on and on. We almost got used to it.

We learned Griffin had been accepted to veterinary school in Philadelphia. We drank to that—brandy. I kissed him.

When the old man fell silent, we all rose from the table. He's sung himself to death, I thought, as we all seemed to tiptoe toward his room.

But the old man met us halfway there. He was bundled up in a parka. He said he was going out for a walk. He was going to sing in the great outdoors, he said. He was not prepared, he said. We saw he was weeping.

I wanted to embrace this man. But he was nobody any of us could embrace. He was a force for whom you simply had to get out of the way. You had to move aside and let the old man go into the great outdoors, unprepared.

We saw him, later, Jude and I. We were in our car, beginning our ride back home. The old man was headed back to Bern and Griffin's house, where he would find fire in the stove, and some companionship, and something else I don't want to shrink by naming. We didn't stop and ask the old man if he needed a ride up the hill.

“If I lost you,” Jude said, “I'd be walking like that. I'd be out walking alone for the rest of my life.”

His words had the near ring of sincerity, and touched me for a moment, even as I didn't believe them.

“I couldn't stand it,” he said. “You're my whole life.”

“Well, I hope if you sing you sound better than he did,” I said, and Jude said nothing, wounded, perhaps, that I wasn't engaging his fears.

For the first time in years, I rested my head on Jude's shoulder as he drove. This was more awkwardness than it was comfort. But it was something. We rode through the dark like that, in a new kind of silence, a silence made of fading echoes, the echo of an old man's song, the echo of pain and resentment and lies that break hearts, the echo of all we'd ever meant to be for one another.

We were hungry. We stopped and had a meal in an all night diner, Jude and I. The booth was aqua and small. We ate in silence. We could hardly take our eyes off each other.
We are what we are
, we seemed to be saying in that quiet.
We are what we are.

We were filling up so we could go on home to continue our broken, indelicate story.

T
HE SOLITARY PARENTS
, each in a parked car at midnight in front of the enormous inner-city high school, were mostly exhausted as they sat waiting for the ski-trip bus to pull up. This ski bus was always late, but the parents came on time anyway.

Some closed their eyes, heads back, while others stared through the dark windows into the darker Pittsburgh night as if it were an opponent who'd already beaten them down. Some leaned forward on the steering wheel and chewed gum. A few curled up in backseats, heads against doors, and when fifteen minutes had passed and the bus had not arrived, they slept, the buzz of talk radio lining their dreams, caller after caller fervently opinionated about Elian, the little Cuban boy whose mother had drowned trying to get to America.

Finally, one man got out of his car. He could no longer stand his own company in that small space. He'd had a large cup of Mini-Mart coffee; if he had to be up, then why not be truly awake? He wanted to pace on the sidewalk in the dark of this rather mild January night, and smoke. This, he imagined, might be a signal to some other parent in a parked car to get out and talk. Just some small talk. Hey, what's up? Ski bus is always late, so what are we doing here? Why can't we take the hint and show up late? He smoked, the ember blazing its orange invitation. Come on, people. Aren't we all people here? How 'bout a little human interaction? Like in the old days?

Whatta ya say? Anyone still alive?

Maybe everyone was sitting there judging him for inviting cancer into his lungs. A slovenly weakling at the mercy of a horrible appetite. “I just started smoking again last week after ten years of quitting,” he considered yelling. “So wipe those superior looks off your faces!” though he couldn't see their faces. If he yelled anything at all, they'd think he was crazy. Then they'd all lock their car doors, like people had when he used to walk certain places with his black friend Darren in the seventies. Darren would say, “Watch the hands as we pass by.” And you'd see all these white hands reaching for their locks, and Darren would smile sweetly at each car, and sometimes even knock on the window and shout, “Good evening!”