* *
Chapter four: I take Dominique out dancing at the Copacabana.
It sounded great in my head. For some reason, when I originally thought of the idea, I pictured us both as excellent salsa dancers, like those people you see on TV with glittering gowns and suit jackets covered in sequins and wingtip shoes and gelled-back hair. But in reality we’re on the dance floor with all these couples who can actually do the steps, like really do them, and I realize that I forgot one tiny thing: I’m the worst thing that’s ever happened to dancing. The absolute worst.
At first I keep stepping on her toes, and she’s wearing these little flats, so every time I step on them, I accidentally knock her shoe off. Then I actually step right on her toenail and she yelps a little, but I think she tries to pretend it doesn’t hurt.
My mind is still flying, and sixteenth notes are cartwheeling on the ceiling, but Dominique helps me keep my focus off them. I wish I hadn’t eaten so many plantains, and my heart is thrashing around so hard I think my rib cage is going to turn to dust, but she doesn’t notice any of that. She only sees the guy who can solve all her problems. The person who can sweep her off her feet, help her confront her dad and fix everything that’s wrong in her life in one single, perfect day. Today I’m a hero.
Then she says something. She’s noticed.
“Hey, you’re moving really fast. Like, twice as fast as the music. Everything okay?”
“Sorry. I’m a terrible dancer.”
“And you’re breathing really fast. Do you want to take a break?”
“No, no, no, I want to keep going.” I grab her around the waist and try to dip her. She almost topples backward and has to grab my shoulders to get her balance.
“Hang on, let’s just take it slower. I know some of the steps. Follow me.”
She puts my right hand on her left shoulder and holds my left hand in her right. She stands with her feet together, then steps forward with her left foot, rocks back with her right foot and steps back on her left again. I try to mimic her, imagining each step is a note, and then she’s pushing against my hand with her shoulder, guiding us in a circle as we dance. I raise my arm and she does a twirl underneath it. But she doesn’t just do a regular, 360-degree turn. She spins, like, three times in a row. I didn’t even know you could do that.
She’s an incredible dancer. When you watch her, everything clicks. I’ve never seen someone make a wrist flick look sexy and fluid and passionate all at once, but somehow she does. Together we’re like one of those standardized test analogies: She is to dance as I am to music. It’s suddenly, indisputably clear that this is what she needs to be doing with her life. And somehow, with her on my arm, I’m incredible, too.
“How’d you learn to do this?” I ask.
“I took dance for ten years. That part was true.”
“Dom. You’re really good. It’s like your legs are made of … magic. Or rainbows. Or glittery Jell-O. Or —”
“Hey, Ben?”
“Yeah?”
“You’re stepping on my foot again.”
* *
The last chapter of One Perfect Day is the trickiest to coordinate. I’ve been waiting for this all day. Years. Lifetimes.
We have one more hour before we have to be back downtown for my last surprise. It’s a beautiful night, so we grab slices of pizza and walk toward Central Park.
“Where are we going?” Dominique holds on to my arm, just like I’ve seen a million other couples do in movies.
“To the golden age,” I say.
I stick my hand in my pocket and feel for the two tickets to the midnight screening of Singin’ in the Rain that I bought online. Just to make sure.
As we walk, I can feel my breath slowing and the visions fading away. Everything’s going to be okay. I’ve got this. Dominique makes this broken, hopeless semblance of a life feel whole and complete again. All I have to do is put my hand in hers and keep walking, and I know everything will work out. It has to.
“Wait,” she says, stopping short and tugging on my arm. “This is where we first met. Right here, on this sidewalk square.”
We’re standing outside Carnegie Hall. I look down at the sidewalk. It’s glittering, but I can’t tell if there are little slivers of mica embedded in the cement, or it’s just another thing my mind is making up.
“I thought we met at the fountain.”
“No. When I was on the field trip. I was standing in line for my bus, and you walked by me and gave me the world’s sexiest look, at this very spot.”
I pull her in close so we’re both standing in the square together. I lean in and wrap my arms around her.
“Right here?”
Right here, I met the only person in the world who can save me from this mess.
{45}
Dominique
I glance up at the sky. There’s one faint white light cutting through the blackness.
“Look, there’s a star,” I say. I’m wrapped in him. An extra layer of Ben. A layer that, now that I’ve felt it, I don’t know how I’m ever going to live without. I whisper a silent prayer to the star: Thank you, thank you, thank you for letting him understand. Thank you for letting me keep him.
He hugs me harder now, and we stay that way for a few minutes, twisted into each other, gazing up at the sky. I hold him as tight as I can to block the wind.
“Hey,” I say, breaking the silence at last. “Do you think someone lives up there?” I point up to the top floor of Carnegie Hall, at the curtained window Cass and I spotted. The lights are off inside, so the window just looks like a dark rectangle now.
“There used to be. There were a bunch of apartments on the top few floors. Andrew Carnegie built them to house artists — at that time the concert hall wasn’t doing too great and he needed the extra rent money.”
“Wait, you’re telling me that at some point Andrew Carnegie was broke?” I imagine him sitting on the floor of the stage, eating rice and beans and beans and beans every night to save money.
“Completely ridiculous, right? That’s obviously not an issue for the Carnegie estate anymore, so a few years ago they decided to evict everyone and turn the apartments into rehearsal rooms. This one lady, Editta Sherman — she lived right there. They nicknamed her the ‘Duchess of Carnegie Hall.’ She was a photographer, and she lived in this massive rent-controlled apartment for, like, sixty years. It made the news because they evicted her, but she refused to leave. Even after everyone else in the building was gone. I remember looking up when I came here for concerts with my parents and seeing the light on in her window. When she was almost a hundred, she finally agreed to move. I always wondered what happened to her. And then, a few years ago, there was an obituary.”
“Hers?”
“Yeah. Would it have been so terrible to just let her stay here? She was a hundred years old and they ripped her out of her home. They really needed one more music rehearsal room that badly? Another place for a bunch of stupid violin players to play things dead people wrote?”
The doors under the brightly lit awning open and people pour out onto the street, all dressed up in suit jackets and gold watches and small red, boxy purses and high heels that look like torture devices. A concert must have ended.
“Let’s go,” Ben says abruptly, grabbing my hand.
We push past the crowd, like tiny fish swimming against the current. There’s so much chaos in the lobby, with people rushing to leave and putting on their coats and shuffling through their programs, that the ushers don’t notice Ben leading me through an unmarked side door and down a long corridor.
I follow him along an endless hallway, past a lot of doors with what look like offices inside. I’m struck by how nice it all is. No one sees this part of the building, and yet it’s almost as beautiful as the stage itself. Framed music posters from all sorts of concerts line the walls. I
don’t recognize any of them, but I assume they must be famous musicians who played at Carnegie Hall. We turn left, then right, then left, then left again. I wonder how many times Ben has been back here. By the way he’s acting he’s done this a million times.
“Are you sure you know where you’re going?” I ask.
“Not really, but we’ll figure it out.” He looks back at me with wild eyes.
Why are they so bloodshot?
“Wait, what if we get in trouble?” I whisper.
“Don’t be ridiculous, A Train. Things like that don’t happen on One Perfect Day.”
He has a harsh edge to his voice that I’ve never heard before. But what scares me most are his eyes. It’s like he’s looking through me. Like I’m not even here.
“We’re definitely not supposed to be back here,” I say, louder this time.
“Then they shouldn’t have left the door unlocked.”
We climb an iron spiral staircase for what feels like forever. Twisting up and up and up and up. Ben keeps going faster until he’s at least a floor above me, but I can hear his footsteps. I keep thinking some guard with handcuffs is going to pop out any second. God, this is stupid. Why am I doing this? Like I’m not in enough trouble as it is.
My heart thrashes in my chest. Turn around, turn around, turn around, it pleads. I keep climbing. Something’s not right.
I go up and up until I see Ben again. He’s standing in another long hallway with a row of doors. Outside each door is a small engraved plaque: ARCHIVES RESEARCH ROOM. ORCHESTRA ROOM. GREEN ROOM. PRACTICE ROOM A. PRACTICE ROOM B. PRACTICE ROOM C.
THE STUDIO ROOM.
“I think this is it,” he says. Eyes glassy, hair wet and messy.
He tries the door. It’s locked.
“It’s okay,” I say. “It’s cool getting to see what it’s like up here. Let’s go back down.”
But he doesn’t hear me. He’s rummaging through his pockets, spilling receipts on the floor. He drops his phone and I pick it up, but he doesn’t even say thank you.
“Hey, you okay?” I ask.
Nothing.
Tissues rain to the ground. I had no idea one person could cram so much junk into a single pair of dress pants.
“Ben,” I say, even louder.
“What?”
“Let’s go back.”
“Wait.”
“This is making me too nervous. Let’s go. Please, let’s go.”
“Just a second.”
He opens his wallet and takes out his MetroCard. He carefully slides it up and down in the space between the door and the wall. He jiggles the doorknob, trying to pop the Studio Room’s lock.
There must be security guys in this building. One of them is going to walk down this hallway any second. Every creak, every shadow, makes me jump.
“I really don’t think we should be doing this,” I say. “They know how to install decent locks at Carnegie Hall. I don’t think it’s, like, a bedroom-door lock that you can just jam open with a credit card.”
“Got it,” Ben says, and the door swings wide.
This whole thing makes me want to throw up. What if the security guard calls the cops when he finds us, and we end up in jail overnight? Ben would get out immediately, of course, but my mom could never afford to bail me out. I’d have to sit in jail forever with a bunch of murderers.
Ben grabs my hand, pulls me in, shuts the door and locks it behind us. My nervousness fades a little when I see how beautiful the view is. Floor-to-ceiling windows line two of the walls. Midtown is bathed in sparkling light. The ceilings are so high just looking at them makes the room spin. There’s no furniture except for the stack of chairs and music stands lined up in the corner. Otherwise it’s sparse and grand and clean, with blond hardwood floors and creamy white walls. And there, on a long track that extends across the length of the windows, are the red drapes, pulled back in the corner.
“So this is where the Duchess lived?” I ask.
“Yep, this is the place.”
“Wow. I can’t believe one woman lived in here all by herself. It’s huge. It’s unbelievable.” Way too big for me and Cass. Or me and Ben.
“Do you think we should move in?” he asks, putting his arms around me.
I melt into him and forget everything. I fall. I forget there could be cameras and I forget how nervous I am and I forget the uneasy feeling in my stomach. I dive, headfirst, back into our dream.
“Well, we’d put the couch over here,” I say, pointing by the window. “I’ve always wanted a big white overstuffed couch with lots of throw pillows. And a cozy blanket draped across the arm, for when it gets cold.”
He twirls me on the shining hardwood. “What goes over here?” he asks, pointing to a corner by the door.
“A big bookcase, like the one at your house but taller, and bigger, and full of first editions.”
“Done, done, done!” Ben says, running around the perimeter of the big, empty room. “This is all ours, and we’ll fill it with everything you’ve ever wanted. What about a sculpture collection here? And we’ll have to have music. We’ll need an old phonograph. And these window treatments are no good at all. No, no, we’ll need something bigger, grander, on every window, cascading to the floor. And we’ll have to install a kitchen with granite countertops. And a washer and dryer. And the master bath with a Jacuzzi tub can go right in this corner, out of the way, just next to the master bedroom.”
I stand back by the door, and he keeps going, like a windup toy. Running around and around the room in circles. It takes me a minute to realize: I don’t think he can stop. I try to get a word in, but he’s not listening.
“Wait, Ben? Do you hear me?”
“And a collection of priceless instruments, right on this wall. Coltrane’s sax and Armstrong’s trumpet and Nadelstein’s violin. Hey, I wonder what the view is like from up here.” He shoves open one of the massive windows and jumps up on the ledge.
My skin surges with cold sweat.
“Ben, get down. You’re really freaking me out, okay?”
“God, it’s beautiful. You can see every star in the world from up here. Come over.”
“Please, please get down!”
“Dominique, you have to see this.”
He kneels, presses his stomach against the sill and edges his way outside, then stands back up again, so that his back is pressing against the windowpane. Outside. My legs are frozen — if I walk over to the window, I’m afraid I’ll distract him and he’ll slip. But if I stand here, I’m afraid he’ll go out farther and do something even more dangerous. Is he trying to climb up on the roof? His feet are trembling. He’s going to lose his footing. I know it. He’s going to lose his balance and fall.
There’s only one thing I can think of to do. I quickly flip the lock, fling the door open and yell down into the stairwell. “Help me!” I scream, as loud as I can. My voice echoes back down to the lobby. “Help! Is anyone here? Please!”
A man’s voice cuts through the silence. “Hello? Is someone up there? Hello?”
That’s when it ends.
{46}
Ben
Page 7 of 83
Interview #3: Milo Tristan
Relationship to patient: Younger brother
Q: What do you recall about that day, Milo?
MT: I remember waking up early and sitting in bed for a few minutes. I’d gone out with my girlfriend the night before and was pretty tired. Then I got up and was on my way to the bathroom to brush my teeth, and I remember walking through the hallway and seeing Ben getting dressed in his room.
Q: The door was open?
MT: Yeah. He was, uh … um, he was shaking and talking to himself and getting dressed in this really nice suit that he only usually wears for recitals, which was weird because it was, like, 7:30 in the morning. He’s a violini
st. You already know that. But anyway. I knew my parents wouldn’t want him leaving the apartment, because he’d been really sick that week. But I thought if I could just be home with my parents alone, I could finally convince them that he needed help.
Q: What time did he leave?
MT: I think he ended up leaving around eight.
Q: And your parents were both home at this point?
MT: No, my mom was grocery shopping and my dad was still asleep. So now I’m just waiting for her to come home, and I’m nervous because I keep thinking Ben’s going to come back before she does, or she’s going to decide to run more errands. But she came back around ten and I asked her to go into Ben’s room with me.
Q: And you showed her what was in the closet.
MT: Yeah. And I was also nervous because my parents never really wanted to listen when I’d tell them I thought something was wrong with Ben. It’s almost like they let him do anything because he’s this musical genius and they don’t want to mess with his talent or his process. My mom was in complete denial at that point, but if she saw this, I knew she’d finally understand. She had to.
Q: Would you mind telling me about it?
MT: [Sighs] Okay. I’ve been trying to figure out how to describe it. Like, nothing I could say could do it justice. It was like a spider web made of steel. There must have been ten thousand violin strings stretching from one side of the closet to the other, winding together in patterns. It looked infinite. Like it took him thousands — maybe millions — of hours to complete. They were looped around pushpins and tacked to the wall, to the ceiling, to the floor, everywhere. There were so many strings it was almost like metallic fabric. You could barely even see the walls behind it. And then I looked more closely and noticed, uh, the floor was covered with wood — shards and splinters and chunks. Like wood chips. I knew his old violin was missing from the living room, but I thought he’d just taken it into his bedroom to play it or something. But he’d destroyed it. We waited hours for him to get home. My mom was crying. Then she was furious. My dad just kept pacing back and forth through the living room, shaking his head. We called Yaz and Claire and some of his friends at school. No one had seen him. His friends — Jun-Yi and Jacob and Kelly — actually said they’d been avoiding him the last few months because he was acting so weird. I’d wondered why I hadn’t seen any of them in a while. So we finally pulled up the online statement for his credit card. The one my dad gave him for emergencies. I have one, too, and I’ve maybe used it once. But there were thousands of dollars in charges from the last week. Seventeen pages of different kinds of strings, at $130 each. Dozens of violin bows, every one of them costing more than a year of his college tuition, Mom told me. Two tickets for $200 each to La Bohème. A room at the Four Seasons for $1,700. We called to see if he was there, but he hadn’t checked in yet. Finally he walked in around midnight, and at this point I didn’t even want to look at him. But it was hard not to. His eyes were wild, just darting all over the room like he’d done drugs or something. I know my brother and I know he’d never do that, but something was seriously wrong.
Someday, Somewhere Page 19