by Craig Nova
“Why don’t you play?” said Jack. “Isn’t that what we came for?”
“Yes,” said Stone to Kay. “Play.”
Stone took a chair from the wall and was about to sit down, but then thought better of it.
“Maybe I will just stand,” he said. “I’m a busy man these days, and I may have to go back down to my office. So play. If you think you can play.”
Jack looked out the window. Kay sat at the piano, her hands in her lap. Her hair was damp, and she pushed it away from her forehead. The only sound in the room was Stone’s asthmatic breathing. He reached into his pocket and rustled the papers there, took out a napkin, and rubbed it between his fingers. It was as though the bits of paper he carried around were worry beads and that when he was thinking things over, he wanted to have them in his fingers to help him come to some decision. He was old enough now not to care if anyone saw him or if he was dismissed as dowdy. So, dowdy, they call me? So, and what are you? His eyes weren’t dowdy, though, and he stood there, rustling around in his pockets and watching Kay’s hands.
She straightened her shoulders, rested her hands in her lap. She stared across the room, although she didn’t seem to notice the dirty, cream-colored wall in front of her. The wall had existed like a barrier for the musicians who spent time in this room, a fact that they could never get over, because even the best musicians, or particularly the best ones, repeatedly came up to a limit. Sometimes it was a technical matter, although the worst was one of feeling or lack of understanding. Sometimes they managed to push the barrier farther away than at other times, but it never disappeared.
“What are you waiting for?” said Jack. He was shivering now too, like Kay.
“I don’t know,” said Kay. “I guess I’m just thinking about things.”
“What’s to think about?” said Jack.
“We’ve come a long way,” said Kay.
“So what?” said Jack. “You’re not going to go soft on me now, are you?”
“No,” said Kay.
“Glad to hear it,” said Jack.
“It doesn’t hurt to think about how far you’ve come and what it cost you to get here,” said Kay. “Or about people you miss.”
“You want to know what I think about missing people?” said Jack.
Kay shook her head.
“It’s just that we came a long way,” said Kay.
“Especially if it’s from Europe,” said Stone. “I wonder where it was. You don’t have an accent, or not much of one.”
“You can get farther away than Europe,” said Jack.
“Oh, can you? Maybe you’re talking about Australia?” said Stone.
Jack went on looking out the window. Over the piano lid, the shadows looked like pieces of black nylon that were slipping to the floor. Jack shrugged. Stone went on breathing with a heaving sound. Kay began to play.
She started with some easy pieces, just exercises really, and as she played, the shadows of the birds slid across the piano and the floor of the room with a silence that was like dark ghosts of the notes she played. She moved on to Chopin, and as she did, the room was filled with the audible intake of air as Stone gasped. He listened without moving, as though caught in amber. She played other pieces, going up the order of difficulty, and as she did, Stone took a seat on the chair. Jack looked out the window. There were other pieces she went to now, not only more intricate, but also allowing for more interpretation, and as she went through them, she concentrated on the phrasing, on the slow, lingering moments in which the approach of silence allowed the full access to emotion, just a hesitation here and there, which for her had to do with the most profound longing, the uncertainty that is at the heart of any real love, if only because of the risk such devotion involves. She tried to recall that blue light and saw not only snow, but Briggs’s face. She had reached up to put her finger right against his, on the transparent material that had been between them. She tried to imagine what it would be like to touch him, without anything between them. When would that happen? Or when would she ever feel complete? The phrasing took on other shades, like the sensation of life making its tragic approach, right into her skin and muscles, into her bones, the ache and wonder of it leaving her with a keen, almost sexual excitement. How could this sensation be so filled with pleasure and promise, and yet have such a profound threat built into it, some accounting of time, some inexorable diminishing of everything that was precious?
She continued to play. Jack looked out the window. The shadows of the birds flitted around the room, across the wall, over her hair and hands, through the sounds that lingered in the dusty air. The bits of dust turned in the light and flashed now and then, just small flecks of gold in the otherwise dreary room, but which seemed to suggest the ephemeral and piercing quality of the notes she played.
She stopped. The sound of Stone’s weeping filled the room.
“I am afraid,” he said, looking up, shamelessly showing his face, “that I didn’t recognize that last piece. Perhaps I’m getting old. Perhaps an old man forgets things, but I can’t place it. Mozart, maybe, but too muscular for Mozart. So, can you tell an old man what it was?”
“It’s just a little something I’ve been working on,” she said.
“A little something you’ve been working on, my darling, my liebchen?” said Stone.
He reached into his pocket and took the used napkin and wiped his eyes and blew his nose. Then he started crying again.
“So,” said Jack. “Do you want it or not?”
He gestured to the piano.
“It needs to be tuned,” said Kay.
“Of course,” said Stone. “I will have it tuned. Please. I will go downstairs and call the tuner. His name is Gotts. I owe him a little something, but I will fix that. I will call right now. A little something she has been working on?”
He blew his nose.
“Have you ever entered a competition?”
“No,” said Kay.
“And why not?” he said.
“I never had the chance,” she said.
“That’s the long and short of it,” said Jack.
Kay closed the cover over the keys.
“I don’t know why that made me so tired,” she said.
“I do,” said Jack.
“Well, we have something to talk about,” said Stone.
“We don’t want to waste time,” said Jack.
“No,” said Stone. “Not a second.” He blew his nose again. “I wonder if this is good for an old man? Well, that doesn’t matter. Nothing else matters. What did you say your name was?”
“Kay Remilard,” she said.
“Jack Portman,” said Jack.
“Do you play too?” said Stone.
“A little,” said Jack. “But she’s got the talent.” He looked out the window. “I have other things I like to do.”
“Here,” said Stone. He gave Kay the key to the room. “You’ll need this. Take it.”
She put out her hand and cupped her fingers around the key. The shadows of the pigeons flitted over the floor, the walls, and then disappeared into the black of the piano top, as a shadow being absorbed by a shadow. The popping sound of their wings came in through the dusty window.
“You’ll have to trust me for the money,” said Kay.
“Money,” said Stone. “You want to talk to me about money when I have heard you play?” He made an impatient gesture with one hand. “Don’t bother me about money.” He took her hand in both of his.
“Thanks,” she said.
“Yeah,” said Jack. “We appreciate it.”
“I’ll get this room cleaned up,” said Stone. “I can’t imagine why I ever let it get this way. It is easy for an old man to get cynical, you know, and he does. But then something happens and you began to think maybe you have gotten mean-spirited. And old. But the important thing is to care again, don’t you see? It is like waking up from a sleep.”
Stone sat down and started crying again.
“I
don’t want to make a spectacle,” he said. “Give me a moment.”
“I’m glad you liked it,” said Kay.
“Liked it?” said Stone. He spoke again to the imaginary person. “She says I liked it? Am I hearing right? Oh, my darling, ‘liked’ doesn’t do it justice.” He shook his head.
“Let’s get some air,” said Jack.
“Yes, of course,” said Stone. “Get some air. Take care of yourselves. Rest. Get some juice. Tea.”
CHAPTER 6
March 25, 2029
“THEY’RE GOING to lock us out of our room,” said Kay. “Unless we get some money.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” said Jack.
The erratic descent of the elevator in the hotel was so predictable that it didn’t worry Kay anymore. It was like the creaking of a floorboard in an old house. The cage itself was made of wrought iron with scrollwork along the top, and it had a worn green carpet on the floor. Usually the elevator was filled with the perfume that the women in fishnet stockings wore when they brought those silent men here. Kay thought of the cables in the shaft, the long, drooping shapes of them like creepers in a jungle. The elevator went down, stopping and starting in the shaft, the lights from each floor momentarily cutting into the darkness of the cage. Each of them had had two hundred dollars when they first found themselves in front of the hotel, and now only Kay had any money left, and it was just a few dollars.
The elevator stopped at the ground floor, and Jack pushed the bars of the gate aside. The lobby was deserted, although the ashtrays next to sofas were filled with sand that looked like the beach at the end of the Fourth of July. Cigarette butts, foil wrappers, half-eaten candy.
They stepped out of the elevator and Jack touched her arm and nodded toward the clerk, who sat at his desk. Blood dripped from the clerk’s yellow, nicotine-stained fingers, which he had cupped under his nose. The suddenness of the nosebleed left the clerk absolutely still, as though he were trying to be invisible. His eyes moved toward Kay. The blood spilled over his fingers and began to drip onto the desk’s green blotter.
“It’s just a nosebleed,” said the clerk. His hand was cupped as if he were trying to hold water to drink.
“What’s a nosebleed?” said Kay.
“It’s nothing,” said the clerk. “You bleed from the nose.”
“Does it happen a lot?” said Kay.
“No,” said the clerk. “I never get nosebleeds.”
“Here,” said Jack. He took a handkerchief from his pocket. “Lean forward. That’s the way.”
“I don’t know what causes it,” said the clerk. “Just happens, I guess. There’s a tenant here who has fits.” The clerk shrugged.
“Why don’t you go wash up?” said Jack. “Isn’t that your apartment there?”
He pointed at a door behind the clerk.
“Yeah,” said the clerk. “But what if someone comes in and wants a room?”
“I’ll watch the desk for you,” said Kay.
The clerk looked one way and another. No one else was around.
“Thanks,” he said. He held the handkerchief to his nose and stood up and then looked around again, just to make sure. Kay had never seen a ferret or a mongoose in a trap, but she recognized the motion. An anxious movement from side to side.
The clerk went through his apartment door, closing it quickly so that Kay couldn’t see his sad, mismatched furniture and the posters he had on the wall, large ones from a model airplane convention. With the door open just a crack, he said, “It won’t be a minute.” Then he closed it.
On the papers in front of Jack, and on the floor too, there were a series of red circles about the size of a coin. Jack looked at them with the particular interest a trapper or hunter would have in blood spoor. Outside, people walked past the glass door of the hotel, bent forward, pulling their coats together. The sky was clear, but it had gotten colder.
Kay watched a woman in fishnet stockings who was walking up and down in front of the hotel, looking one way and then pacing again, her movement, her gestures, all suggesting impatient hunger.
“Maybe you can stand out here and then we’d go to a hotel with some guy and we’d just take what he had.” Jack looked out the window. “It’s got possibilities.”
“I don’t want to do that,” said Kay.
“Why not?” said Jack.
She shrugged.
“I just don’t want to,” she said. “All right?”
“Have you got something against killing one of these jackasses?” said Jack.
“And then what do we do?” said Kay.
The clerk came out and said, “Thanks,” and Jack looked at him, thinking it over. Kay said, “Come on, Jack. Let’s go.”
Outside, the stars appeared in the sky like a couple of blue sequins on a black dress. At the horizon there was a smear of red from the crimson lights of the city. Kay reached over and took Jack’s arm.
“Come on, Jack, we don’t have to be that way, do we? Not to each other. That’s the important thing.”
“I’m just worried about the money,” he said.
“No one is a friend to you like me,” said Kay. She turned her face up to his and tried to catch his eyes, but he was too ashamed to return her gaze. Instead they walked along for a while with Kay holding his arm with both of hers.
“You know, Kay, if anyone tried to do anything to you, why, I’d . . .” He made an economical gesture, not violent so much as like a butterfly collector putting a specimen into the killing jar.
“I know,” she said.
“No one is going to get by me where you’re concerned,” he said. “You can trust me about that. I’m here to make sure no one bothers you. So don’t worry. You can really trust me. You know, I’m devoted to you. Like a brother.”
They walked a couple of hundred yards before stopping in front of the gaming parlor. The place was filled with people who hung around looking for a sucker—usually a recreational player, or someone who hadn’t spent the time to keep up with each new release of the current games. A really good game had the intricacy of life about it, not only the complexity but the brutality too. Winning was like being able to escape fate’s most cherished and hidden details.
A brass bell that had come from a nineteenth-century sailing vessel was hung in the doorway of the place. It had been used to call out the first dog watch, the second dog watch, the morning watch, and now it had ended up here as a prop, just an antique. Jack stood under it, eyes on it, but still drawn to the bell as though seeing something he had always thought to be beautiful or romantic. He imagined the coast of Africa or South America, the creaking of a sailing ship in the light airs of a hot afternoon: What could be more attractive than a coast with peaks and dark vegetation visible through shreds of cloud?
“Hey,” said Kay. “How about him?”
She smiled at a man who had short hair, a face scarred by acne, and who wore glasses like a student, although it was obvious he hadn’t seen the inside of a classroom for a long time. Beautiful white teeth, which, Jack supposed, were false. Jack wondered how the man had lost the real ones.
“It’s your funeral,” said Jack.
The man came over like a fish rising through polluted water.
“Hey,” said Kay. “Do you know how to play these games?”
“Oh, I’ve played a few of them,” he said.
“They all look about the same,” said Kay.
“Yeah,” he said. “You know one, you know them all. Yeah. That about sums it up. What’s your name?”
“Kay Remilard,” she said. “This is Jack Portman.”
“Where are you from?” said the man.
“Here and there,” said Jack. “What’s the difference?”
“No difference,” said the man. He looked from one of them to the other. “Okay. My name is Hart. Do you want to play?”
“She does,” said Jack.
Hart had a checklist he usually went through before playing with a stranger: age, expe
rience, reflexes. Sometimes he’d drop something on the floor to see how fast a mark really was. Instead he just looked at Kay. As nearly as he could tell, she had a faintly academic quality, or the manner of a woman who had spent time in a convent. Or a conservatory. Maybe she played the violin. Frankly, though, he didn’t have much time to speculate about it, since he was playing on what was known as “deep margin”; he couldn’t say why he had been losing recently, but he guessed it was part of the cyclical nature of gambling. Every player knew this aspect of the life. Hart was borrowing the money to play and paying a high interest rate, calculated not in weeks or even days, but hours. He dropped a key chain, a little promotional piece of junk that was being given out for a new game, and it hit the floor with a click. Kay bent down slowly. When she picked it up, she dropped it and then made a grab for it and missed. Hart reached down for it.
“You can get dressed right back there,” he said.
“Thanks,” said Kay.
“You’re welcome,” he said.
Kay walked through the smoke of the place, her hips swaying a little, like the woman she had seen on the street the first night she had looked out the window of the hotel. When Hart turned back, he found himself face-to-face with Jack. Hart said, “Nice night, huh?” but he was thinking, Watch the bozo.
An attendant sat near the door of the changing room, but otherwise the place was empty. A bench went along one side in front of some small black metal doors. Closets? No, Kay thought, but they had something to do with storage. Lockers. Yes, that’s what they are. Sure.
Maybe, if she could get some money, she’d be able to control things a little better. For instance, she’d buy some clothes, new shoes, makeup, and then she could find out where Briggs lived. And yet she wanted to resist this; the obsessive impulse left her at once exhilarated and tired. Why couldn’t she just forget about him? But even as she considered this, she felt the panic of being without the desire for him, which left her with such clarity of feeling and purpose. She stood in the room, looking around. The first thing was the money. But even so, she let herself have the momentary pleasure of imagining what she would do when she found him, got him alone somehow, or maybe even came into his apartment when he was already there, sleeping maybe, naked under the sheets. She thought of standing there watching him breathe, of how she would slide a hand under the sheets, along his stomach. Then she shook this off and went back to thinking about the money.