Thank You for the Music

by Jane McCafferty

  “Speaking of that,” Noreen said, “how’s Griffin doing with the old lady? Bernadette?”

  “Berna,” I said. “She’s really not that old. She’s younger than we are, Noreen, in a way. I mean, her spirit is roughly Griffin’s age. And she’s got hardly a line in her face.” This part wasn’t true and I was embarrassed to find myself lying. “And she moves so gracefully. I understand now, I think.”

  “God!” Noreen said. “I hate how everyone ends up understanding everything! It’s weird, completely weird, and now you think it’s normal.”

  I could have said, “Noreen, look at you, in this lovely old house that you keep so nice, you who fears the water and chooses to get seasick every other weekend so your husband can have his boat and eat it too, you who spends a fortune getting your hair bleached twice a month because you’re terrified of looking old, look at all that and then we can talk about normal.”

  But I said nothing. I was not an aggressive person. I hated to hurt anyone, so avoided challenging conversation. And I was, perhaps, already planning how to talk to Abraham. I’d known Noreen for twenty-six years. We’d pushed children in strollers together. Nothing I could say would make her able to understand what I was feeling about life. She was a dear friend, but all the limits I had to respect with her made me lonely.

  Abraham sat in his truck listening to music and eating a piece of bread. I walked up to the truck and said, “How long had you been a landscaper?” I was nervous, and said had, rather than have, and felt the tips of my ears grow hot.

  “A landscaper?” Abraham said, “Is that what I am?”

  He looked bored, at first.

  “If not that, then what? What do you call yourself?”

  “Abraham Horell. And you? What do you call yourself?” The boredom in his face had given way to a kind of bemused smile. It was a windy spring day, with gray light and silence surrounding us. I was aware that I’d relive this moment in memory.

  “I haven’t come up with a word for myself yet. Don’t know what to call myself.”

  “Oh,” he said, flatly, and I worried I’d been too odd.

  “My name is Patricia,” I said. “Some call me Trisha.”

  “Trisha,” he said. “Nice name.”

  He got out of his truck. He was tall, in loose khakis. He left the music on. Miles Davis. He asked me why I was standing there at the edge of Noreen’s yard. Did I know her?

  “She’s an old friend.”

  “Do you know the old man?”

  “Not as well as I know Noreen.”

  “The old man takes her for granted. That’s my opinion. And I’ve only been around him three times. My father would’ve called him a horse’s ass.”

  That was all I needed. It was fuel. If he could see that much, he could see a lot of things.

  I looked toward the massive garden he had planted, the rich soil dark as his hair.

  “You do good work,” I said. And I stepped closer to him. I looked at his face. My heart was pounding because I knew that even this subtle gesture might look as wildly transparent as it felt.

  “Thank you,” he said, and I saw he wore a tiny star of an earring on one ear. “If you come back later, you can see the whole garden, the whole thing, finished.”

  “I think I will,” I said. And I tried to imagine that the final look we exchanged demolished any innocence between us.

  It didn’t. I did come back later, and he walked me around the garden, like a proud boy with a curious parent. My heart sank as I told him how lovely it all was. I came back twice that week, and it wasn’t until I brought him coffee the following week that he understood. I could tell by the way he took the coffee, brushed hair out of my eyes, lowered his chin to his chest, and held my gaze.

  Later that same day Abraham and I went to a place called Ruby’s Luncheonette. And I got to hear all about the sweet young man who had dropped out of med school five years ago, who was divorced, who had a child named Zoe Clare, whose ex-wife was “remarried to a rich dude” but still demanding child support, whose father, whom he’d adored, had recently died.

  Abraham spoke with ease, fueled by the bad, strong coffee of the luncheonette. His legs moved back and forth under the table, knocking against each other. I didn’t particularly like his style of conversation—it had that windblown quality, where you feel the person could be talking to anyone, but I didn’t admit this to myself at the time.

  As it turned out, we were there because Abraham lived upstairs, in a room.

  After coffee, and rice pudding, and saltines, and water, up we went. My head felt full of blood. My eyes watered. I bit down on the lipstick I’d applied hours before, then wiped it off on a tissue.

  You could stand at the window of his book-lined room and look down on the little main street, the unspeakably mundane workaday world, and the view gave me more reason to be there. He came up behind me, a kiss on my neck, which felt too cold, too wet, but I was relieved not to have to talk anymore, and relieved that the room was dusky, so that both my body and the pictures of his child framed on the dresser, a girl in a red hat jumping rope, were slightly muted.

  “Are you on the pill?” he whispered, and I told him I was, but he should use a condom anyway—diseases, I whispered. I hadn’t been on the pill for years, and the truth was, it had been two years since I’d needed to worry about any of it. The change, as they called it, was something I’d walked through as if it were a simple doorway. What change? I’d wanted to ask someone.

  I did not like his kissing—too pointed, almost mock-aggressive. I kept turning my face. But soon after, when he entered me, speaking to me gently, saying, “It’s okay, it’s okay,” and I whispered back, “I know it’s okay,” I did not expect to be weeping with the odd shock of joy that was simply intense sexual pleasure. I clung to him with misplaced emotion, as if he were someone I’d fallen in love with. And since no real love was anywhere in that room, save for in the face of that jump-roping little girl on the dresser, the pleasure ended in embarrassment for me.

  For Abraham, I’m not sure. He may have been used to these things. He ran down to the luncheonette and brought me up a Coke and a plate of fries. We ate them together in silence, and I kept my eyes wide on the window, and listened to the sound of my own chewing as if it could protect me from thinking things like Here I am, a middle-aged slut!

  As I sat there dipping fries into ketchup, Jude’s face, Jude’s voice, broke through like a light. I was gratified to feel I missed him. Missed my husband, whoever he was.

  I had four more late afternoons just like this one, and put an end to them because I understood how quickly they would put an end to themselves. Abraham’s last words to me were so ironic they provoke my laughter even now. “You’re wild,” he’d said. How unknown I felt, but not as foolish as you might imagine.

  I saw Abraham only one other time—two months later, driving through a blue day in his truck, with a dog, and a young woman, whose yellow hair streamed out the window. I honked my horn and waved, in spite of myself, and then he was gone.

  “Jude,” I said one night in the dark. It was raining, and we’d just watched a bad movie on television, both of us enduring insomnia. “I had an affair, you know.”

  “No, I didn’t know.”

  “He was very young. He worked on Noreen’s yard. It ended up meaning very little to me, but I thought I’d tell you. You’ve always been open with me.”

  “Have I?”

  “As I recall, a girl you loved once ate dinner with us. She loved my cooking.”

  “True. True enough.”

  “Jude, where are you? I can’t feel your reaction.”

  “I can’t either.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Maybe I’m relieved.”

  “Relieved?”

  “That you’re outside the shell of this marriage when I’ve been outside it for years.”

  He sat up and put his head in his hands. I felt that he wanted to weep, but had no tears.

 
“Jude?” My face was red; why had I told him?

  “Just don’t say you’re sorry.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Because I’ve been terribly unfaithful. More than once, you know. More than twice. You probably know this. Do you know this?” I didn’t say a word, but felt alone now, when I had imagined I’d already been alone. Does loneliness have floors like an endless skyscraper, and you keep descending?

  “Four times. Four affairs. The last one ended last year. I’ve been dying to tell you.”

  “Really? Why don’t we go downstairs and have us a drink, Jude. And you can tell me the story of our lives. You know, the one you forgot to tell me for the past twenty years or so. I’m such a good listener but you’ll need to give me some details.” I was on this new cold floor in the same old skyscraper and it seemed I had a new voice to go with it, a lower, more detached sort of voice, which was the very opposite of what I felt in the dead center of my heart. It was terror I felt. Because he’d stolen my sense of our past, and I had nothing to replace it with yet.

  I got all their names. Besides Anita there was Lisa, the same Lisa again a year later, Savannah, and Lily.

  I sat and wrote the names down on a yellow tablet. I wrote them in a list, while Jude sat and rubbed his eyes. “Oh,” he said, “Patty, I forgot Patty. She was manic-depressive.”

  “No, Jude, not yet, I don’t want the stories yet. Just the names.”

  “If you count one-nighters there was also Rhonda Jean.”

  “Rhonda Jean,” I murmured, writing it down. “Rhonda Jean! Was she a country-and-western singer, Jude? Was that the year you were always listening to Tanya Tucker?” I held the list up so he could see. “Does that look like all of them?”

  He nodded. “You’re stooping pretty low with this.”

  “Just meeting you on your own ground, Jude.”

  “Certainly. But it’s ground well beneath you. You’ll probably leave me, too, and that’s understandable.”

  “Is that your hope? That I’ll leave you?”

  “No, no, of course not.” He yawned, and I thought tears filled his eyes. He looked down at his own hands.

  I was not ready to baby him. I took it girl by girl. I made columns for the following categories: duration of affair, age, hair color, height, weight, breast size, intelligence, family background, hobbies. This was beneath me, embarrassing even at the time. I was driven by an old fury finally coming to life.

  The affairs had happened before Anita Defranz, most of them when Jude was in his thirties. Only Lily had been recent.

  “So we can start there,” I said. “We can start with Lily. You tell me the story, and I’ll listen up.”

  I spoke with calm authority. I spoke in unconscious imitation of Berna.

  “Lily is nobody you’d ever want to meet,” he said.

  “But I need the story, Jude.”

  “It will mortify me to tell you.”

  “So be it.”

  “She was in her twenties, she called herself a poet, I met her at Reed Carone’s house, he was her professor at the time, she wore a beaded top, she was nice enough, in the summer she worked with deaf children, she was a girl, can we stop now?”

  “Jude, it’s interesting to me.”

  “It was physical attraction, that’s all. The most elemental kind. I’m sorry. We’d go to her crummy apartment. She was a slob, and I had to endure the presence of her roommate who called me the pig. Finally the roommate said the pig could no longer enter the sty, so it was a Howard Johnson’s hotel. We went there weekly for seven months. Then she fell for a young buck from Cuba, introduced me to him so I’d get the picture of how far up in the world she was moving. I was relieved. And after that I’ve been faithful, and will be until I die.”

  “Faithful.”

  “I certainly love you. Nobody else.”

  “Nice words, Jude, but who are we? I want to hate you. But then, that would be like hating my life. I don’t want to do that. Do I?”

  My eyes stung with tears. My life, echoed in my brain, and I saw myself as a little girl running down a road in Indiana, the first time I’d ever felt that sense of my life! I’d been stung by a bee. I remembered my father in the doorway of the kitchen, scooping me up. I cried, not from the bee sting but because I knew I had a life, and was alone living it.

  “So what did Lily look like?” I said. “Like Anita Defranz?”

  “More or less.”

  “I’d like to hate you, Jude. For all those nights you fell asleep beside me, so exhausted, so spent. You wouldn’t even talk to me! I’d like to kick you, and slap you. But I’m a dignified person who is now going out for a walk.”

  I felt him watch me rise from my chair, and I was gratified that he was speechless.

  We lived in silence for nearly a week—avoiding each other when we could, and then 120 roses were delivered to my door, the card simply saying, “From Jude Harrison,” which made me laugh until tears streamed down my face.

  “Jude!” I hollered that day—he was upstairs painting. “Jude Harrison, this lunacy solves absolutely nothing! Where will we put them?”

  He came downstairs—I stopped laughing as soon as I saw him, my heart recoiling—and together we quietly found vases and jars for each rose, and the whole house filled up with his apology. For a while, I was touched, and then not so touched. Now we had a friendly silence, sometimes broken with, “Want some scrambled eggs?” or “I need to paint in the kitchen today, if it’s all right? I need that light,” or “How ’bout we go see Berna and Griff tonight?”

  In the car that night Jude and I rode in silence. I felt so eager to get to Griffin’s house, as if it were a holiday and I were a child in love with ritual. I knew we’d be served tea, I knew they’d be in pajamas, I knew I’d hear crickets and stories, I knew the house would have that inexplicable atmosphere. Electrified by something, I thought, by mystery, I decided, though even that word did not capture what I felt there.

  They had company. It was only the third time we’d come to find them not alone. The first two times it had been old Jack J. Pree, no longer a fatso or an existentialist, but married and the father of twin girls. He was still Jack J. Pree, though, full of loud laughter, and no dull judgments, and when he left he lifted Bern off the ground for a hug. His wife was more like a stunned, wide-eyed owl. You could feel her observations were grist for the mill for the tale she’d tell her friend on the phone the next day.

  Tonight the company was a stranger, an old man, very old, who we saw first through the window. I wondered if it was Berna’s father.

  We stepped inside; the kitchen felt like deep water. Berna’s eyes were sad. Griffin was nowhere.

  “What happened?”

  “This is Charlie Demato,” Berna said. “He’s staying with Griff and me for a while.”

  Charlie Demato, the old man, sat at the kitchen table with a bowl of oatmeal in front of him. He had sharp elbows perched on the table’s edge, and he smiled up at us. “A pleasure to meet you,” he said. “You’ll excuse my spirits,” he added.

  “We had to put down Mr. Demato’s dog today. He lost his wife three weeks ago.”

  Jude and I expressed our sympathy. I felt we should leave. Surely Mr. Demato didn’t need strangers like us. I said as much.

  The old man looked up at me. “Please,” he said. “Please stay. Don’t go.”

  It was as if he were demanding that there be no more departures in life—nobody, ever again, would be leaving.

  “Just sit down,” he ordered.

  Griffin appeared, smiled at us from the doorway.

  “Berna,” the old man said, “tell these people about Belle. Tell them so they know she wasn’t just some dog.”

  Berna said that he should tell the story. That it would help him.

  “Excuse me while I get my album of photographs,” Mr. Demato said, and walked into the other room.

  “He’s staying with us,” Griffin said.

  “We know.”

 
; “It’s part of how Bern runs the business. If some old person loses a pet and they live alone and they can’t bear it, she invites them out here.”

  “Doesn’t have to be an old person,” Berna said. “Loneliness comes in all ages. A girl of twenty-two lived with me for six months one time. Turned out she had a lot to teach me. She stayed too long, she got herself pregnant, she ate too much, and made it impossible for me to meditate. But she was a teacher for me, I knew that all along.”

  Mr. Demato was coming back to us, his enormous album in his arms.

  “Ain’t I a sight for sore eyes?” he mumbled, and laughed. “This goddamn album weighs more than I do.”

  He sat down in the chair and opened to the first page.

  “My wife, six years old!” he said, and clapped. “Deprived child. Never had a dog. Her mother claimed to be allergic. Her mother was a big liar. She hated me. My wife took after her father. Her father fell off a rooftop and died when he was thirty-two. Broke my wife’s heart. Just a little girl. Never the same again.”

  He flipped through a few pages. His breathing quickened.

  “I am unprepared,” he said, “I am very unprepared. And I did many things to prepare myself. I rejoined the Catholic Church.”

  We were all looking at him, trying to express something with our faces. Berna was up taking bread out of the oven. I saw that Mr. Demato’s hand had started to tremble. “I went into the confession booth. ‘Bless me father, for I have sinned,’ I said. ‘But God who made death is the real sinner,’ I said. The priest said, ‘It is normal to be angry at death, and it’s good to express your anger.’”