9
Deen climbed the brownstone steps and read the names by the buzzers. The building was dark, soot-stained, and grim. A rusty perambulator was chained to the stunted tree in front. Above her, inside the building, she could hear an infant shrieking. Its cries were a piercing scream that didn’t let up. She peered at the worn letters on the buzzer panel. There it was, dresden, 1W. The baby’s screams escalated as she pressed the bell. An even greater feeling of direness came over her as she realized the baby was in the apartment she was going to. She hadn’t wanted to go at all, now this.
“Yes?” a voice rasped from the speaker.
“It’s Deen Hollander. I’m supposed to see Paul?”
The only answer was the buzzing of the door. Deen pushed it open and entered an ochreous lobby with a marble floor and round fluorescent lights that made her hands look green. A door opened above and a voice called, “Up here.” She climbed the littered marble stairs, grit under her shoes making scratching noises. The wainscoting was painted with a thick layer of chocolate enamel, the same color as her spirits. The stairwell echoed with the screams of the baby.
A thin, pale young woman stood holding the apartment door open with her hip, a crimson-faced infant in her arms. Its mouth was open wide, and its eyes screwed shut, tears of rage leaking from them. It had golden curls and was the fattest, strongest-looking baby Deen had ever seen. Deen did not like babies.
“I’m Kristen,” the woman said, pushing a lock of tired brown hair from her cheek. Her face was anxious and timid, with rabbity teeth and olive stains beneath her eyes. “Paul’s wife. And this is Rinaldo. Aren’t you, my little genius?” She looked at her baby adoringly and tickled its chins. It stopped screaming and made a sucking noise.
Kristen motioned Deen inside. The door led directly into the kitchen, a room of remarkable squalor. Nappies hung everywhere from cotton lines, and chipped and dented baby paraphernalia covered the floor. The stove was caked in grease and the sink heaped with dirty crockery. A pine table painted blue sat in the center, covered by plastic dishes smeared with mush.
“I’ll bring you to Paul in a minute,” Kristen said. “He doesn’t like visitors, so I’ll let him get used to the idea first. I mean, he heard the buzzer, so he knows you’re here. He hears everything,” she added darkly.
The baby began grizzling and let out a cry. Deen flinched, praying it wasn’t the prelude to another bout of shrieks. It stopped to paw a fat red fist at the gobbet of mucus dangling from its nose, then stared at her with round, unfriendly eyes. In fact, its expression was surprisingly malevolent, Deen thought.
Kristen swabbed its nose down with a Kleenex and held the baby toward Deen, its thick cotton diaper drooping from its barrel-like limbs. “You want to hold him?” she asked.
“God, no,” Deen said. “I mean, uh…” She tried to think of a polite way to refuse. She was saved by a yell from the back of the apartment.
“Bring the bloody girl in, you cunt!”
Kristen’s rabbit face twitched. “He’s not at all happy about this,” she whispered. “Straight through to the room with the curtains over the entrance. Go on,” she said, giving Deen a shove.
Deen looked over her shoulder at the door, toward escape and freedom. She wished with all her might she had the nerve to make a run for it.
The hallway was dark, ending in an arch hung with faded red burlap curtains. Slipping through them, Deen entered a long room with a bay of tall windows at the end. Bookshelves lined the walls, filled with bound music folios, bundles of sheet music, and LPs. The only furniture in the room were a grand piano in the bay, a stereo cabinet, and an armchair facing it, halfway down the bare floorboards. Above its grimy yellow back she saw a man’s head with tufts of dark hair standing up, seemingly at war with one another. A hand with long fingers moved through them, redefining their battle lines.
“Let’s get this farce over with as quickly as we can,” he said, still not turning to look at her. “Your mother is clearly a woman used to having her own way. Or, rather, getting it. One should be precise in these matters. Stand by the piano.”
Deen walked to the piano and turned, facing him. She was miserable. This was all going to end badly, but at least soon, she hoped. A warming tingle of defiance stole into her being and she looked up, staring back at him.
He wore faded green canvas pants and shirt, like those of a boiler man’s, work boots, and a tweed jacket so worn it was white around the lapels. His face was dark, with a beaky nose that twisted to starboard. His gray eyes had a mean little light in them and his cheeks were sunken. His hair was still dark but white whiskers glinted on his jaw. He was looking her up and down like a buyer at a cattle sale.
“Little girl, five foot three. Tawny hair, healthy, plenty of calcium. Fairly sturdy about the shoulders, but for the most part still an unformed blob. Say ‘Polly want a cracker.’ Go on, say it.”
“Polly want a cracker,” Deen said tonelessly.
“Not very much, apparently. Let me see your hands. No, closer—in front of me. Don’t ever touch me. Hold them out. Now palms up.”
Christ this is weird, Deen thought as he studied her hands. There was a purplish flap of skin on one of his eyelids. She hoped it was precancerous.
“Move your thumbs, no, you imbecile, the other way, as far back as they’ll go. Now go away, sit at the piano.”
He sank back in his chair and closed his eyes. Deen sat at the piano bench and looked out the windows. There wasn’t much to see, some weedy-looking trees, trampled plots, a rusting barbecue.
“Your name,” he said.
“Deen.”
“I don’t like it. How is it spelled?”
“D-e-e-n.”
“That’s not a real name. Try again.”
“Ondine.”
“Far better. No blobbishness to that. Play something cheap. Now.”
“What do you mean, cheap?”
“Don’t ask me questions! Cheap, something immortal, such as ‘Send in the Clowns,’ you know what I mean! Anything but whatever bloody so-called classical music you think you know.”
Deen had in fact thought a good deal about what she’d play for him when he asked, as surely he would. She’d been rather proud of her choices, Bach’s English Suite in G Minor, and Liszt’s Transcendental Etude. She thought they’d display not only her skill but also a rarified taste. Now bitterness flowed in her soul, he was a lout and a lunatic, and she’d had just about as much as she could take of his crap.
She took a breath and launched into the Beatles’ “Happy Birthday,” not merely playing it, but vamping it, bringing every bit of loathing she’d harbored for years into the crude tune. She hoped he’d never heard anything so foul in his life. Her rage brought her to new heights of kitsch: she imagined she was playing it at a joint in Rockaway Beach, men pounding the tables and couples in mating colors singing along and hollering, their mouths wide with merriment.
When the last chords subsided to her pedal work she examined the piano with respect. It was a Steinway D, and it had a wonderful tone. She stroked its side, silently apologizing for playing something so unworthy of it. She didn’t look at Paul. As the minutes passed she decided she’d never look at him, no matter what.
The silence stretched out, strung like a spider web between two buildings, a long, nearly invisible thread, with the strength of an armored division. In it Deen imagined every possible humiliation, every crack-brained, horrible thing he might say. Thirty minutes passed.
“Ah,” he said finally. “The waiting was good for you and I needed the rest. Your mother is paying me by the hour, after all. Inside this room you will think of yourself, and be, Ondine. We will begin by putting your head in a vise and extracting everything you ever knew, or thought you knew, about classical music. I will exert a mesmeric power over you and you in turn will come to worship me. Until that day I expect the utmost obedience. You will also—Oh, bloody hell!”
The infant genius had begun shrieking again
, its screams climbing to ear-piercing blasts. Paul clapped his hands over his ears then scrabbled for a cigar box under his chair. “Get out!” he said to Deen.
“Your mother called,” Kristen said as Deen entered the kitchen. There seemed to be no other way out of the apartment. “She more or less told me to give you tea. Anyways, to keep you here a little while. She’s hanging new curtains in your room and wants it to be a surprise. Oops, guess it won’t be now. She’s English, right? If I have to give you a cup of tea every time I’ll have to talk to her about what my time’s worth too. Paul’s time’s worth a fortune, everyone knows that, not like mine, but still. And just so you know, I don’t do any fancy stuff with teapots and all that, a mug of Constant Comment’s my brew. I drink it for my liver. Having a baby’s hard on the organs, you know? Did Paul say for you to come back? He never takes students. Pupils, he told me to say, yelling it, like yelling’s going to make me hear better. Uh, is this okay or could I like ask, how your mother’s going to pay? Could you ask her if like, she could pay half check, half cash?”
Deen sat glumly at the blue table while Kristen made the tea. Next to the table, hunkered down in a netted crib, the baby slept, its wide bum in the air and its face resting on a meaty forearm. Suddenly it blinked open one eye and stared at her balefully. Deen stared back, thinking, you and me bud, someday, alone in an alley.
“So how’d it go?” Hamish asked her when she got home. “He attack you or anything? I heard he used a mallet on his last wife. And that conductor he attacked, he went for the head that time too. I checked him out on the Internet. He’s got a classic sociopath’s MO, just in case you’re interested. Did hard time for the attack on his wife. Geeze, Munster can really pick them, can’t she? Maybe she’ll find a nice child molester for me to study with, alone. You really okay? Did he act fairly normal?”
“God, I don’t know. I mean, he didn’t really scare me. But I listened to a couple of his recordings and I think I have to go back. They have the most horrible baby. It’s like a ball of stinky bodily fluids, you should see it.”
“Geeze,” Hamish said. “That’s nasty. Tell you what, I’ll get out my old lacrosse helmet for you to wear. And I’ll program your cell phone to dial 911 first, then auto-dial me, okay? Just don’t ever let on to either of them that you have a cell, keep it in your pocket when you’re there, right where you can get at it.”
10
Sadie was on her way home from a meeting with Ree’s lawyer, a boring one regarding certain offers made by ad firms for a couple of Ree’s songs. She found it amusing to think of his “Mayhem Monday,” a song about the soul-destroying effects of commercialism, being used to flog SUVs. So much for the revolution.
It was just past six and not having wanted to fight the commuter crowds on the subway, she’d decided to walk from Chambers Street. But now she was growing tired and longing for that first drink. She trudged on. A MILLER LITE sign winked at her from a tavern window: Hello darlin’, it said. In an instant she was slipping off her pea-coat and ordering a Ketel One, rocks, and lime please. Ahhh.
“Just the thing, huh?” the bartender said, putting a fresh bowl of pretzels out for her. He was an old-fashioned bartender, one who liked to see his customers take a healthy interest in their booze.
Sadie looked around her, taking note of the joint. It was her kind of bar, no swank to it, a serious-minded establishment with a long mahogany bar, black vinyl stools, and old photographs and memorabilia on the walls. It was getting depressingly difficult to find a bar of this sort left in Manhattan.
She debated with herself whether to order another. Oh, what the hell, why not? Brian had gone back to London the day before and one more would take the gloominess off letting herself into the house and hearing its echoes. Not that she missed Brian a bit, of course. That’s what she told herself anyway, hoping she might eventually believe it. She nodded to the bartender, who’d been keeping an eye on her; he came over and poured her another.
“Hi. I see you every morning, when I’m getting equipment out of my truck,” a young blond man said, coming over to stand next to her. He set his bottle of Heineken down and smiled.
Sadie looked at him, her eyebrows knit in concentration. Gawd, it was that good-looking stone mason.
“Oh, you’re doing work at number seventeen,” she said.
“Yeah, more stonework for the rich people. Some of the people in this town, they’ve got so much money they have gold bars for eyeballs. I usually do jobs in Connecticut. Live there. Those people at seventeen, they got a place there and another place here. You know that site down in the Yucatán? Chicken-something? Where the stones are as tall as men, all perfectly fitted together? Now every asswipe with dough wants to be a Mayan king. I get to do some interesting stuff, but the clients are freakin’ assholes. This one guy wanted me to go to Maine and dig up some rock formation on a hilltop. To put in his yard in Greenwich. As a ‘focus point’ for the landscaping, he called it. I took one look at the photo and told the guy fucking NASA couldn’t shift that rock. Let me buy you one, okay?”
A few days later, on a bright Saturday in early November, Hamish and Liall were practicing guitar in the garden, working on a Guns N’ Roses song they were reshaping quite radically. Above them, in the living room, Deen was studying a score. The French doors to the balcony were open.
“Put that egghead stuff away and do keyboards for us,” Hames called up to her.
“Huh,” she said, not looking up. “What I play is real music, not King Crimson.”
Liall looked intrigued. “You mean, she could just pick up and play whatever we were playing? I mean, if she wanted to?” he asked Hames.
“Sure. She can play anything if she hears a few chords. She’s got an amazing ear.”
“I’m gonna be able to play like that someday. Be able to pick up a guitar and play anything. Hey, your mother really just show up at breakfast this morning with her new guy? Say like, hi, this is Steve?”
“Yeah. She does that once in a while. They’re usually idiots. But they don’t last long.”
“Brian gets rid of them,” Deen said from above.
“How’s he do that?”
“Oh, I don’t know, he just sort of makes them fade away. I think he makes Munster embarrassed about them. They are usually almost criminally stupid.”
“That one’s showing off, with that tight shirt of his,” Liall said.
“I know, disgusting, isn’t it? Wants everyone to know he’s got a six-pack.”
“Oh, gross,” Hamish moaned.
Just then an object came sailing over the garden fence and landed with a plop near the boys’ feet. It was a large man’s handkerchief tied into a hobo’s knot. Hamish knelt to untie it. A piece of writing paper was folded inside. Opening it, he drew out four guitar picks and read what was written on it in large, shaky letters that sloped uphill at a gallop. “Tea, children? This Afternoon? Your mother too.”
Deen came down the iron steps to look. “These are real tortoiseshell,” she said, holding a pick up to inspect it. “They’re supposed to be the best but you can’t get them anymore. I think Colonel Harrington likes hearing you play.”
“That’s the old guy next door?” Liall asked. “He wants us to come to tea? What’s the deal with that—he one of them, or what?”
“You mean, a pervert?” Hamish said. “I don’t think so.”
“Well, he asks you to get something just don’t bend over with your back to him, okay?”
The three children marched over to the colonel’s at four o’clock. Deen had asserted that tea was always at four, saying this in such a lofty manner that the two younger boys could not argue with her.
The door was opened by the carnation-cheeked cook, who smiled delightedly at them. “It’s so good you children come,” she said, leading them to the back parlor. Deen snuck a look at the grand piano in the front room as they passed the door.
Colonel Harrington was sitting in a tapestry-work armchair by the fireplace
, in which several logs burned. Several other armchairs made up a circle around the fire, each with a small stand next to it. In the middle a mahogany trolley held silver trays of tiny sandwiches, next to a low table with a teapot, cups, lemon wedges, and sugar. Hard by the colonel’s side, a tiered cake stand was filled with powdered cakes and cookies. A flowered china bowl brimming with Pringles was perched on the mantelpiece.
“Ah my dears, what a pleasure,” he said, beaming rather vaguely at them. “A fine treat, to see you here, in my little nest.”
“This is Liall MacFarland,” Hamish said. “The other guitarist.”
“A great pleasure, my boy,” the colonel said, offering his hand. “A fine Scottish name. I have always been partial to the Scottish peoples. You of course are Presbyterian, I am sure. Of a stern nature? Yes, of course, thought as much. Ach and have some tea noo, will ye me lad.”
Hamish, Deen, and Liall looked at each other and mentally shrugged, whatever. They sat, wiggling to install themselves in the overstuffed chairs. Everywhere they looked around the room there was some fascinating object. Deen was especially taken by a large glass dome containing a dozen or so stuffed hummingbirds on a branch. Hamish looked goggle-eyed at the food. He had just lately begun to grow and was finding his mother’s lackadaisical approach to food an agony.
“Deen, my dear, would you do the honors and pour the tea? I’m so old and fat I spill it over everything. Thank you, yes, sugar and lemon. I’m firmly of the more is better school, as you can see.” The colonel waved his hand about the room. “Now you young ones tuck in.”
“Did the lady who let us in make these?” Hamish asked, picking up a lemon madeleine and sniffing it with a look of rapture.
“She did.”
“And these?” he asked, holding up one of the tiny sandwiches. “All of it?”
“Yes.”
“Wow.”
As the children were politely stuffing themselves, their mother arrived home to find Brenda muttering over a table she was polishing.
The Ballad of West Tenth Street Page 8