by Ty Knoy
Nick sighed.
Larry added, “Camille thinks her mother would have gone for you years ago. She thinks she would have left her father for you.”
“It was close,” Nick said. He held up his hand with the tips of his forefinger and thumb an inch apart and added, “That close.”
Larry sat down. “That would have changed the whole world, wouldn’t it have?”
Nick nodded. “It certainly would have. We wouldn’t be here on this day, that’s for sure.”
They both watched the football game for a few moments, remarking to each other on a play or so. At a commercial break, Larry said, “I have a request of you, Mr. Rohloffsen.”
“Sure. Anything,” Nick said. “And I appreciate your hospitality.”
“Cammy is very interested in what you’ve been telling her. Obviously. Could you just play along with it for a while longer? Don’t tell her you know Katherine is gone. Let her tell you herself, so she won’t know that I spilled the beans. I would appreciate it, and you probably want to get all you can of it also, don’t you?”
“That’s true.”
After a long silence, Larry said, “Two other things.”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
“Cammy said she told you that she and I are getting a divorce.”
“She did.”
“If we are, I haven’t been informed,” Larry said.
Nick laughed. “I didn’t fall for it. She embroidered it with the assertion that you and she have a conflict over moving to Boca Raton.”
“That much is real. I may have to keep this house so we can go back and forth—at least for a while.”
“Miserable summers down there anyway, I’m told.”
Larry nodded. “Also, she said she told you that I was having an affair with one of our employees.”
Nick laughed again. “I didn’t swallow that one either.”
“I’m not.”
“Personnel Management 101: Don’t screw the female underlings.”
“Or the male underlings either,” Larry chuckled. “Except that aspect of it wasn’t in the textbooks when I was in school.”
Nick wondered about that ménage à trois banter down on the square with the woman named Mo. It had seemed genuinely spontaneous to Nick, but he certainly wasn’t going to pry into that with Larry.
Nick and Larry talked a few more minutes about where they had grown up, where they had gone to school, and how Nick had known and met Victor Rohloffsen on a few occasions. “Do you think I should get back out there?” Nick asked, gesturing toward the door. “If we’re going to keep this charade going?”
“She’ll probably know that we’ve talked. Just don’t tell her you know. And”—Larry stood—“my condolences about Katherine. She was an alluring, charming lady, and I can certainly understand how she reeled you in—or almost reeled you in. She had a temper flare occasionally, without much notice—an artist’s temperament perhaps. You probably weren’t with her long enough to have experienced it.”
“Actually,” Nick said, “I did not experience it, but I was not the object—at least I don’t think I was the object. I did witness a spectacular manifestation. It wasn’t directed at me, though, unless she seriously missed her target.”
“I’m sure you weren’t the target,” Larry said. “She seldom, if ever, missed a target. I never heard her play, of course, but there are some tapes. We could have them copied onto a CD if you’d like.”
“Thanks,” Nick said. “I’d like copies.”
There was a knock, and Camille, in an elegant, dark suit, heels, and a white blouse—the way her mother had dressed for the Colorado concerts—opened the door. Nick and Larry stood, and Camille came in, put her hand on Larry’s neck, and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “You should get dressed, dear,” she said.
“Yes, I must. You look terrific, as usual,” he said, looking her up and down. He picked up a remote, switched off the television, and the three of them went out of the room and walked back through the kitchen. “I’m taking a quick shower,” Larry said. He touched one of her cheeks and then the other with his hand. “I’ll shave again too.” He went on into the hall toward the bedroom.
Camille settled again onto the sofa, and Nick seated himself. “So, how did these concerts in Colorado play out?” she asked.
Nick wanted to go back to what Katherine Anne had said about him on the train, but then he thought there was nothing to be added. He would wait to get back to the Iowa man in her life. “On the Friday night of her concert series,” Nick began, “the housekeeper, manager, or whatever she was came up on the road and passed out a notice to everyone—there were a couple of dozen by then—that this was a regular performance and that Margot would play only one piece that night: Pictures at an Exhibition.”
“I know every note,” Camille said.
“Unusual for a female to play,” Nick said. “It takes a lot of strength and power, but she did it magnificently, bouncing on the bench as she pounded the keys. She’s strong, and she played as if she were trying to prove something.”
“It sounded that way to me when she was practicing it at home,” Camille said. “I always liked the promenades. Never got tired of them. Did Victor happen by then, or during any of the performances?”
“His car—chauffeur-driven—came through just after Pictures ended, so my guess is that he was up on his balcony, listening. Those of us on the road were still milling about when he came through.”
Camille waited—expectantly, it seemed to Nick.
“The car didn’t stop,” Nick said.
Camille sighed.
“Someone—I didn’t know him—had brought flowers, and he handed them in over the deck fence from out on the road. The next day, I went into work until noon, and I bought flowers on the way out and put them in a saddlebag. As I rode up into my driveway, Margot came out of her front door and across the lawn, waving an envelope. She called me ‘Monsieur Rohloffsen’ and said mail had been delivered mistakenly to her box instead of mine.”
“Dumb postman,” Camille said with a crooked smile.
“It was the first time I’d seen her up close, and I had the vague feeling I had seen her before.”
“You’d seen her through the fence,” Camille said.
“That wasn’t it,” Nick said. “I couldn’t place it. I noticed that the letter was for Eduardo, not for me, and I was wondering how she knew my name. But she was talking by then about the motorcycle, half in English, half in French.
“I remembered asking her if they had motorcycles in France, and she had laughed lightly and affirmed that, indeed, there were motorcycles in France, but that mostly they didn’t make ‘such melody.’ I complimented her on her music and took the flowers out of the saddlebag. I sort of feverishly discussed the pieces she had played—I was well-versed in that type of banter—and I named composers and titles and remarked on details of how she had handled this passage and that passage. And then I popped the question. I’m normally rather shy. I don’t know what got into me, really.
“I told her I had just filled the tank with gasoline and was going to ride up into the mountains for a couple of hours and asked if she would like to go along. I’ll never forget how she rolled her eyes to look at the sky for a moment.
“And then she said, ‘Oui.’”
Camille, leaning forward with her mouth open, shook her head, inhaled deeply, and shook her head again.
“It’s all true,” Nick said. “I remember it like it was yesterday. I’ll never forget how she rolled her eyes to the left and up to the sky before she said, ‘Oui.’ What a charming, charming beauty.”
Camille sat straight back. “I never knew this about her.”
“We had to get her a jacket, gloves, and a sock hat from my house. I helped her get her hair under the hat, and our hands touched for the first time. I swea
r to you, Cammy, it was magical. The feeling shocked me. It was the real thing. Right then, I knew I would call Gayle and tell her it was all over.
“You said your mother had never been on a motorcycle. I can tell you, you were right about that. She climbed on easily enough and put her arms around my waist, but as we started out, it became obvious that she was faking the nonchalance. She hung on very hard and tried to keep herself upright as the bike and I leaned into turns. Soon, though, her grip relaxed, and she stopped fighting the leans. In the mirrors, I began seeing her looking around. The stocking cap blew away, and her hair fluttered in the mirrors.”
“You didn’t wreck, did you? That wasn’t how she hurt her hand, is it?”
“Oh no. I was very careful. As we got higher, up into the mountains, water was running across the road in a few places, where the road was in the shade and snow was still under the trees. Snowcaps were still on the peaks. Up in thinner and cooler air, Margot kept her head out of the wind, pressing her face on my neck, first one side of my neck and then the other. She had quickly caught on that she could anticipate turns and leans based on transmission shifts.
“We rode for half an hour up through turns in granite and pines, and then we topped out in a pass at eleven thousand feet. The engine coughed a few times, gasping for air, and suddenly we were in high meadows of grass and yellow flowers. I stopped the bike along the road and shut off the engine.
“All was quiet except for the tick-ticking of the exhaust tubes, and the sun was very warm. I put down the kickstand and helped your mother off the foot pegs. She put her arms across her breast and, even though I had found gloves for her back at the house, she put her hands, gloves and all, under her arms. Tears fell from behind her sunglasses, but she was smiling.
“We walked along the road, looking at the flowers.”
“You must have kissed her then,” Camille said. “Or weren’t you going to tell me that?”
Nick felt himself blush. “I wasn’t going to mention it, but you guessed it. I still didn’t know what got into me. She was okay with it. Quite okay with it.”
“Good for her! Good, good, good for her,” Camille said, waving a clenched fist.
“What?” Nick said, leaning back.
“Somebody finally really loved her. She had you then, didn’t she?”
“Yes, but—but—” Nick stammered. “You said not an hour ago that no matter what she did, your father always loved her.”
“He did in a way,” Camille said. “It was loyalty of a sort. Loveless loyalty. Anyway, he never threw her over. So what happened with you?”
Nick put his elbow on the sofa arm and put his forehead down into his hand. “Give me a moment here.”
Silence followed.
Nick felt suddenly sleepy, but he raised his head and went on. “When we rode back down, it was more treacherous than up. I was frightened, and a couple of times I slowed and took the bike onto the pea gravel in places where there was on the road. Margot—your mother—was oblivious. She trusted me.”
“You know,” Camille said, “if you had married her—” She paused.
Nick nodded. “Yes?” he said, thinking, but unable to say, that she would still be alive and well today and would still be playing.
“If you had gotten through all the complications—those you did not even know about—and she had revealed this French woman act, revealed the existence of Cindy and me, and you had left Gayle, and your parents had stopping screaming—”
Nick interrupted, thinking of the call he had just made to his mother. “My parents, especially my mother, would have raised hell. I began thinking about how my father and mother would react, even when I first kissed her, up in the high meadow.”
“You might not have made her as happy as you think. Even with all your money, you could never have put her on tour.”
“I didn’t have any money then. I would have had to talk my dad into sponsoring her. I thought of all of that.”
“So is that why you bailed out?”
“No. No. I didn’t bail out,” Nick said, wondering when he said it if it was true.
“When Mother was being Margot, you thought she was what? Mid-twenties? She was actually thirty-seven. She always looked young. When she and Cindy and I were out together, young men would think the three of us were sisters. Some young guys would hit on her.”
“I was twenty-three—a naive twenty-three.”
“If she still had been trying to be a star, could you have done without children? Children of your own, I mean? Did you think about that? Two more pregnancies, say, as she came to her forties, would have made stardom even more remote. What would she have done? And how would that have worked for you? Or did you love her so much that you could have made do with two stepdaughters?”
Nick smiled faintly, simultaneously shaking his head and shrugging.
“With at least one madly in love with you,” Camille added without smiling.
“You’d have gotten over it,” Nick said. “I can ski, but otherwise I’m not that great a guy.”
“So, how did it unwind? Did you call it off? Did she call it off? Or shouldn’t I ask?”
“You shouldn’t ask, but I’m going to tell you anyway,” he said, thinking that since Katherine had died, it was okay to tell. But he also wanted Camille to understand perfectly well that he had not caused her mother’s injury.
Camille stood abruptly and said, “How about a glass of lemonade? I’m going to get some for myself.”
“I’ll take a glass of water,” Nick said. “I’m an up-and-coming diabetic.”
Camille picked up the cups and went to the kitchen while Nick closed his eyes and remembered his time with Margot, Katherine Anne, Margot, Katherine Anne, over and over again.
Camille put tumblers and coasters on the table beside the aerial picture. “Okay, let’s have it. I think there’s still something important about her that you don’t know. I suppose that if she rode off with you all afternoon on a motorcycle, up into the mountains on icy roads, she also took you to bed that night.”
“Let’s just say I was still there the next morning. It was the music. Just the music.”
Camille smirked. “I see. She played the piano all night?”
“Well, okay. It was more than the music. The next morning, she made Eggs Benedict. The house manager was gone. She said she had hired her only for a week to help her settle in and stock the house with food and had sent her back to New York on Saturday morning.
“We had downed a bottle of wine that night, and she offered to open another for breakfast. I think she was kidding, but anyway I declined. In the middle of breakfast, somewhere between kisses, she asked, ‘May I have a ride with you up to Monsieur Rohloffsen’s party this afternoon, s’il vous plait? I don’t want to drive up that road.
“She also said she had misplaced her invitation. I told her I had a pass for two.”
“As usual,” Camille said, “she had everything figured out.”
“I hadn’t heard from Gayle since Thursday,” Nick went on, “when she had hung up on the Chopin. I was sure it was all over, that I would never see her again. When I went back over to my house—it was about two o’clock in New York by then—there was a message on the answering machine.”
“Uh, oh,” Camille said.
“The machine didn’t time stamp, but the message had to have been recorded within the last hour. It was Gayle saying she had finished her songs at the church, was at LaGuardia, and was coming to Denver. She said she was hoping to get there in time to catch at least part of Victor’s party.”
“She was no dummy,” Camille said. “But you went ahead and took—what should I call her?—Margot up to the party?”
“I called LaGuardia, but Gayle didn’t answer the page, so I supposed she was on the plane.”
“What were you going to say to her?”
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“I was going to put an end to it. Tell her not to come. Tell her it was over. Tell her I had fallen in love with someone else and it was all over. I called Stapleton Airport down in Denver and left a message that I was going to the party, that I had to go, and that I couldn’t come down to meet her. I told her she should take a cab up to the Big Lodge, that I would arrange for the lodge to pay off the cab. I had firmly decided I was going to break it off as soon as I saw her.”
Nick held his hands out, palms up. “And then I took your mother to the party.”
“No trouble crashing her in?”
“No, crashing her out became the problem. She came out her front door that afternoon in a blue gown, wearing flats but carrying heels. She put the heels into a saddle bag, gathered her skirt to her hips, and climbed on.” Nick remembered telling her to hold the skirt tight on her lap, away from the spokes and chain, that he didn’t want her doing an Isadora Duncan on the way up. “In front of Victor’s house, she held onto my shoulders as she stepped off, and the skirt fell back into place, bringing the curtain down on the last view I ever had of her gorgeous legs.
“With one hand on the bike seat, she put the heels on and put her flats into the bag. The ride up had somewhat rearranged her hair. It looked a little crazy, but it still was charming.” He pointed past Camille’s shoulder to the shelf of pictures across the living room. “It looked a lot like the hairdo in her wedding picture there.”
Camille glanced over and back. “Fifties style, I guess.” She shrugged.
“I still have those flats, by the way,” Nick said with a smile. “They’re in my car, right on the front seat. I drove down here with them beside me.”
Camille gasped and said, “You kept them all these years? Hidden from your wife?”
“Anyway,” Nick said, “one of the gatekeepers was a deputy sheriff in uniform. He merely glanced at the invitation—it was for Nicholas Rohloffsen and guest—and waved us through. She immediately took a comb out of her purse and went looking for a powder room.”
Camille leaned back and put her finger on her temple. “So my mother wasn’t remembering you from that Leap Year night at the bar?”