I watched him as he brought the soda back up to his mouth, his lips reaching for the rim of the can. I felt as if I were looking at Alex for the first time. Even his painter’s pants were unusually white, blending in with the room.
“Is my fly down or something?” Alex asked, looking down at himself.
“Oh, no, sorry,” I replied, blushing, seating myself on the sofa. It was like perching on a massive snowbank.
“So,” he began.
“I didn’t expect you to live in a place like this,” I said.
Alex opened the bag and offered it to me. He slid a chip into his mouth and leaned back in the chair, perching his feet delicately on an ottoman. “I like it like this,” he said.
I looked at the photo on the side table, of two young men who looked like thinner, darker versions of Alex, and a woman with a full face and long hair swept up in a sensible bun.
I nodded toward the photo. “Is this your wife?”
Alex nodded without looking at me. “Linda Alice Pappadopolous. And my two boys. They’re both married and living in California.”
“Your wife looks very nice.” I picked up the picture and inspected it closely.
“She was. Linda made a home for us, for over thirty years. I’ve done my best to keep it up.”
“It’s a pretty incredible home,” I said, putting the photo back on the table.
“She had good taste, my Linda. To this day I can’t believe a woman like her married an ordinary Joe like me.”
I laughed.
“She was a lady. Educated. She was always trying to better herself, to enrich her life. Played piano like an angel. And you know me. I can tell a Budweiser from a Heineken, but that’s about it.”
“Where did you meet her?”
Alex slipped another chip into his mouth. “At a church supper. After we had eaten, she played the piano.”
He chewed thoughtfully, the crunching sound magnified by the relative emptiness of the huge room. “Actually, I heard her before I saw her. I was sitting there, drinking coffee, and she began playing the piano. It was incredible, like water flowing out and down around me. I’ll never forget it.”
Alex hummed a jumble of notes.
“‘Water Music’ by Debussy,” he explained to me after he had finished, eating another chip. “I’ve got it on CD if you want to hear it.”
I smiled and shook my head. “That’s O.K. I know the piece.”
We sat still for a while, watching the wind blow through the birches outside. For a long time after the divorce, my mother left Pappa’s toothbrush and comb beside the sink in her bathroom, as if he were away on a trip. Even the few items Ben left in my dorm room grew iconic as time passed; I didn’t touch his underwear or socks until I moved out. Removing them somehow erased the relationship we had had. I wondered if Alex found solace in his wife’s home, or if her things were a kind of punishment for him.
“I must say, you did a beautiful job on this house,” I told Alex.
“Oh, no, I didn’t work on this house. I’m an engineer by trade. I worked at the wire mill over in Georgetown. A friend of Linda’s did the renovation. But I had to quit soon after she got sick. I learned a lot watching the work here so I became a carpenter, doing odd jobs to make ends meet. I’ve always been pretty good with my hands.”
“You fell into it.”
“Exactly. Linda decorated this house by herself. She worked on it, the carpets, the artwork, for years, night and day. She had money from her mother. And she had a vision for the kind of home she wanted for her family. Even after she got cancer she worked on it. It was never quite perfect enough for her until just before she died. And I’ve kept it up just as she did.”
Alex rested his soda can on his belt buckle, and crossed his feet. His boot soles were worn down at the corners. “Would you like to take a look at my yard? I was thinking for your mother, it might be nice for her to fix that backyard up a bit.”
“I don’t know if my mother can afford it,” I answered.
“Oh really?”
“Our power’s been cut off,” I continued. “We can’t use the refrigerator or the air conditioner.”
Alex sat up, removed his feet from the ottoman, and placed them gently on the ground. “I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.
“The money my mother’s got, she’s got to live on for the rest of her life. And the renovation has been awfully expensive.”
Alex paused. “Renovation is expensive. No two ways about it,” he said.
“I don’t know what we’re going to do.”
“Would you like to take a break for a while? Would that be the easiest thing?”
“I just wish we hadn’t spent as much as we already have,” I replied.
“I don’t know if I can help you out there,” Alex said quietly.
A clock chimed from somewhere deep in the house.
“What bothers me the most is my mother acts so composed about everything, like nothing’s wrong,” I said.
“I’m sure your mother’s fine,” Alex replied.
“But she never tells me anything about the money she’s got or what she’s planning. She’s always certain nothing will go wrong, like there’s some kind of special immunity to her life. She doesn’t think about the future.”
From where I sat, five towns north of Pleasant Springs, with miles of woods and homes between my mother and me, I could clearly picture her at home now, alone, calmly searching through drawers and closets for candles to last her through another night.
Alex laughed dryly. “If you think so much about the future, sometimes you feel like there isn’t one. Growing old is a complicated business, Emily. You have to learn to enjoy your life today, to embrace what’s within your reach. You’re lucky. You’re lucky your mother is so good at enjoying herself.”
He smiled gently, his elbows resting on his knees, back hunched, his hands hanging before him. “Do you know what it’s like to get old?” he asked.
I paused. “What do you mean?”
“To know people who have died. To know your children aren’t children anymore. To know you’re never going to walk the Great Wall or go to Budapest or become a millionaire.
“Every morning I look in the mirror and half-expect to see the face I had when I was forty. I still feel the same way I did back then, good and strong, but then I see my face. It’s a little death every morning, I’m telling you.”
Alex crumpled the top of the chip bag closed. “And believe me, a day can be filled with a dozen painful revelations like that,” he continued. “That you can’t lift something you used to, or hear a sound as clearly, or remember what color your first bicycle was. But then you see a photo of yourself when you were younger, and you can remember so many little things—what the air smelled like, what color the sky was. Even what you were thinking.”
Alex lowered his head and was silent, as if lost in one of those photos. “But you learn to let those moments wash over you,” he said finally. “It’s best to focus on today. You have to live in the moment.”
He picked up the soda, finished it with a long, last swig and, after struggling for a moment, crushed the empty can with his hand.
THE NEXT MORNING, Alex arrived early, bringing hot coffee in Styrofoam cups and bagels with lox and cream cheese. “How are you feeling, Hanako?” he asked brightly as soon as he came up the stairs.
My mother, pale and wrapped in a bathrobe, nodded and smiled. “Much better, although I could use some coffee,” she said.
Suddenly, the kitchen light blinked on, and the refrigerator’s hum filled the room.
“Hey,” Alex exclaimed, slapping his hand against his leg, “we’re in business.”
“How did this happen?” my mother asked. She turned to Alex while opening the lid to a cup of coffee. “Nothing has changed since yesterday.”
Alex smiled and shrugged his shoulders. “Let’s just say I’ve got some friends at the power company.” He tore apart a bagel and stuffed a large piece into
his mouth, leaving two tiny buds of cream cheese at the corners.
“Why, thank you very much, Alex. You needn’t have concerned yourself with my small problems,” my mother said, although she was smiling and some color came back into her face.
“Besides, we’ve got a lot of work to do. Got to get that bathroom done before Pavarotti comes around.”
“Yes, yes,” my mother replied, looking up at him. “Thank you, Alex.”
Alex took a huge gulp of coffee. “Do you want siphonic flush?” he asked.
“‘Symphonic flush’?” my mother said.
Alex laughed, wiping his mouth with a paper napkin. “No, no. Siphonic flush. It’s a kind of toilet. It sucks water quietly and quickly down the drain. Much more subtle than a regular flush toilet.”
“Sounds modern,” my mother said, nodding. “I like the idea of a modern, impressive bathroom.”
“We barely have electricity,” I reminded her. “Maybe you should be shooting for something closer to a hole in the ground and a wooden barrel to bathe in.”
She ignored me, launching into a long discourse about Italian marble tubs, like the ones she had seen in her decorating magazine.
“If not Italian marble, then at least cast iron. Or pressed steel. But no plastic. When I’m taking a bath, I want to feel quality, to have my spirits lifted,” she said.
Alex took another bite of his bagel and stuck a hand in his shirt pocket, then patted his back pockets. “Speaking of lifting your spirits, look what I have here,” he said, holding up three tickets. “Next Wednesday. Pavarotti at Lincoln Center. What do you say?
My mother clapped her hands. “Oh, Alex! How lovely!”
“A warm-up, Hanako,” Alex said. “Before the big day.”
INSTEAD OF DRIVING into New York City, my mother insisted on taking the train into Grand Central, the shuttle to Times Square, and then the local uptown subway to Lincoln Center. “You can never predict traffic,” she said, declining Alex’s offer to take us in his truck. “And the Met closes its doors to people who are late. After all, it isn’t a movie theater.”
She was happy and talkative for the whole journey into town, pointing out the constellations painted on the ceiling of Grand Central Station while briskly ushering us from the train to the subway. She was proud of her familiarity with the station’s underground intricacies, having taken this route countless times, and laughed as she berated me for relying on taxis whenever I visited the city.
As we got off the subway at Sixty-sixth Street, we passed an old man strumming a beat-up electric guitar next to a newspaper kiosk. “Delightful!” she exclaimed, her high voice piercing through the vibrating roar of the subways around us. “This man playing down here, Pavarotti singing up above,” she said, dropping a dollar bill into a grimy baseball cap on the ground. “There is music everywhere.”
We found our seats high up in the Met’s second balcony. From there, the stage seemed strangely small and tilted, as if we were peering down into a puppet theater. People were just beginning to stream in, their footsteps muffled by carpeting, their voices serious and low. I sat by the aisle, with my mother to my left and Alex on her other side.
“Don’t you think they look like popcorn balls?” Alex asked, staring up at the large glittering clusters of lights suspended overhead.
“I get excited when they pull them up into the ceiling just before the orchestra starts to play,” my mother said, flipping through the program. “You feel something grand is about to begin.”
People quietly continued to flow in, until the seats were completely filled. The lights, attached to long poles, began to rise toward the ceiling. Alex watched them go up and looked past my mother, who was sitting forward in her seat, to me. He nodded excitedly. Then the theater slowly darkened and the music began.
I HAD NEVER seen La traviata on stage, but knew the music, even some of the libretto, from my mother’s repeated record playing at home.
Even in the darkness, I could sense her anticipation, her back not quite touching the chair, her face completely still as light from the stage reflected images of the singers across her glasses.
“‘Libiamo, ne’ lieti calici,’” she whispered to me, as the music began. “A very important song.”
From our seats, I could barely make out the details of Pavarotti’s face, although his girth and dramatic gestures were unmistakable from any distance. And while his voice could be heard clearly throughout the opera house, there wasn’t anything loud about it. He caressed the audience with his sweet, earnest singing, as if this were the last time he would perform the piece.
I watched my mother listen. While she seemed uncomfortable in her chair—her handbag and jacket a jumble in her lap, her arm awkwardly pressed against her left side because Alex’s bony elbow had taken up the armrest—she appeared surreally serene. Her lips slightly parted, the expression on her face fixed. Only her posture changed. When the tenor finished, she broke out into a bout of feverish applause.
“WELL, THAT WAS something,” Alex said, standing and clapping as the lights came up. “I really liked that last duet.”
“‘Parigi, o cara.’ I’ve seen Pavarotti sing it a number of times, but he was especially good tonight.” My mother paused before putting on her jacket. “I’ll tell him that when I see him next month.”
I had momentarily forgotten about Pavarotti’s visit. And after seeing him here, in front of a full house, after four standing, stamping ovations, after the shouted bravos and cheers, it felt more unlikely than ever that he was going to show up at our house.
As we filed out of the theater, I grabbed Alex’s arm. “Hey, I’ve got an idea. Do you think we could get my mother backstage to see Pavarotti?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know, see if we can go backstage. Even if it’s only for a few seconds, so my mother can see Pavarotti, just to touch base.”
Alex looked doubtful. “I don’t know. I’m sure they’ve got pretty tight security.”
“Oh, it’s not necessary,” my mother said, shaking her head vigorously.
Alex looked down at her with an uncertain smile. “I suppose it can’t hurt to try. Wait for me by the exits. I’ll see what I can do.”
He hurried down the aisle toward the empty orchestra pit.
“This is exciting!” my mother said, poking in her handbag as we walked out the door. “If I had known, I would have worn something a bit more formal.” She fished out a hand mirror and checked her teeth. “I hope he doesn’t think I underdress when I come to the opera,” she added.
Ten minutes later, Alex returned, walking slowly up the inclined walkway, shoulders slumped. “Doesn’t look good. There’s a list with the names of people who are allowed backstage, and you’re not on it,” he told my mother gently.
My mother straightened up, and held her handbag across her chest. “Not to worry. It’ll be fine. No need for anything more than that. Shall we go?”
“Why don’t we leave a note with someone?” Alex said.
We looked at each other. “Sure,” I said.
“But we don’t have any paper,” my mother countered. We checked our pockets and handbags for something to write on. Alex produced an invoice from a hardware store, I offered my program, my mother had nothing.
“Do you think perhaps we should get some proper paper?” my mother asked. “Not that we should go to much trouble, but if this is going to be delivered to Pavarotti…” Her voice trailed off.
Alex glanced at me, the corners of his mouth tightening to suppress a smile or a frown, I wasn’t sure. My mother led us to the gift shop, where after much examination, she selected a card with a Klimt painting on the front. Alex wrote the note as my mother dictated, drafting it once on his hardware invoice before copying it onto the card. And before handing it over to a bald man at the theater entrance, Alex waved the card at my mother and kissed it.
We stood outside the Met for a while, watching the fountain in the front. My mother looked trium
phant in the moonlight. As the water leapt in the night air, I thought about Pavarotti, entertaining friends in his dressing room or at some restaurant nearby, oblivious to the three of us out here, and wondered why my mother was so confident.
EIGHT
Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s voice echoed through the bathroom as Alex, on his hands and knees, laid down wide squares of vinyl on the floor. He relished the task, taking his time, as it would be the last thing he needed to do on the house. He hummed along with the baritone, who, as Don Giovanni, was looking forward to a night of romantic conquests. The tape recording sounded slightly warped at times, because, I suspected, my mother had played it often while taking steamy baths.
“Do you know the story of Don Giovanni?” Alex asked me as I cleared out the linen closet, picking out the dingy, old towels from the usable ones, separating the adult sheets and pillowcases from those decorated with bananas in pajamas and sleepy choo-choo trains.
“He was a notorious womanizer,” I said, reaching over to the tape player and turning down the volume. “He had affairs with something like a thousand women and left them all, or so the story goes.”
“Oh yeah?”
“But in the end, the women get their revenge. Don Giovanni goes up in flames, which, I think, means he’s headed for hell.”
Alex carefully cut the vinyl around the base of the toilet. He patted the underside of the bowl. “I got a good deal on this,” he said. “Not ‘symphonic,’ as your mother would say. But I figured regular flush toilets have been working all right for years, so no need to spend more money.”
“What about that?” I asked, pointing at the glistening lime-green tub.
Alex chuckled. “I told your mother that a marble tub would be too cold and impersonal, kind of like bathing in a fountain in a park. I convinced her to go with a bright, cheerful color, to add some sparkle to the bathroom. So, in the end, we got a fiberglass tub. Looks good, don’t you think?”
Meeting Luciano Page 15