Thank You for the Music

by Jane McCafferty

  “You know, Bennet,” she said, “I like cleaning your place better than anyplace I’ve ever cleaned.”

  “I’m not sure what to say to that,” Bennet said, teacup in hand. He smiled, then adjusted his scarf, pushing it up on his high forehead. He looked especially thin, with lesions showing on his neck and the side of his face.

  What she’d meant to say, and would never feel comfortable saying, was that he had changed her life somehow, in some important way that she could not articulate. He’d done it with the ferocity of his kindness, with the trips he’d made to the market for her after she’d broken her ankle. With the flowers he left on her steps that he got from his friend, whose job was delivering flowers. And most of all with the easy way he spoke with her, right from the beginning, as if he really saw her, and not just a landlady-maid with dyed red hair and a cracked voice to go with her hands.

  Now, in his kitchen, she felt loosened to talk, to tell him a story she’d never told anyone else.

  “You know, Bennet, I was raised up in Kentucky by crazy Holy Rollers until I was fourteen. The only gay man I knew in that whole town was a poor man who ended up killing himself on New Year’s Eve. I think it was 1947. His name was Joe Beehan. I’d seen him every morning in the luncheonette where I went with my father for coffee the year my father had some money. Joe Beehan would sit in a booth by himself and eat alone in his dark shirts and when he looked up at me, he’d smile. I thought he was the handsomest creature around. God, he was handsome. He was a movie star.”

  “Do you know why he killed himself?”

  “Oh, who the hell ever knows anything. But I do know he was discovered with a man at three in the morning in the alley by Reiner’s hardware store. I imagine it was all over for him in that town after that.”

  “Never love a man in an alley by a hardware store,” Bennet said.

  “I remember how my parents acted after reading that news in the paper. Seemed to me they weren’t a bit sad. They were calmer than usual. They said, ‘Now that’s no surprise, is it, dear?’ ‘Not at all, Dorothy. Nothing makes a man so unhappy as walking down Sin Street. The real shame is he won’t ever see the Lord’s face.’”

  “And when I said, ‘Why not?’ they said, “‘Elizabeth, suicides sin against the Holy Ghost. The only face they get to see is their own. A suicide has to look in the mirror for the rest of time, Elizabeth.’”

  “My God,” Bennet said. “Isn’t that a sweet little story.”

  “Very sweet for a twelve-year-old girl. What did I know? I became interested in suicides after that. I’d walk by Mr. Beehan’s house every evening and look in the windows at his old bed and dresser and two pictures of a man framed on the wall by a blue wooden chair. I never have told anyone this story, Bennet. I hardly knew I remembered it so well.”

  “Was there anything else in the room?” Bennet said.

  “Don’t think so.”

  “I bet you wanted to climb in.”

  “I did. I wanted to climb in the window and lay in his bed. I wanted to lay in his bed and look at the moon shining in his mirror and try to feel what it was like to be him.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “It was odd. I took snow from his yard and packed it in a jar and kept it under my own bed until my mother or father dumped it out.”

  “Snow from his yard?” Bennet said. He had interest, not mockery on his face. He shifted in his seat and leaned forward, his sharp elbows on the table’s edge.

  “Don’t ask why. Maybe I thought I was taking the ground he walked on. And then every night before I slept I’d think of him, and how he must’ve felt in the car waiting for the old carbon monoxide. I’d just lay there and think of him and the damnedest thing was it was like I was falling in love with the man.”

  “I’d say you had good taste for a girl, Jonny,” Bennet said.

  “So sometime that year I developed a logic that said it’s better to kill yourself and be alone forever than be with a God so mean he couldn’t understand the human urge to get out of this crazy world.”

  Bennet nodded his head.

  “You know?” she said.

  “I think so,” he said. “But I’d be just as scared to be alone for all eternity.”

  His face had darkened. He looked down at the table. She was suddenly intensely ashamed. Speaking of death this way to a young man who’d have to face it much sooner than she would. She hardly knew now why it had seemed important to talk to him like this. To let him know that somehow at twelve years old she’d had a quirky wisdom, a certain feel for the suffering of others. To let him know she’d lost that wisdom along the way, but that knowing him, the sheer force of his kindness, had reminded her of who she might have been, had fear not ruled so much of her life.

  He had to take a nap, he told her, after one more cup of tea and moments of silence that for Elizabeth were awkward.

  “Well, it’s been nice chatting, as usual,” she said.

  “As usual, come again,” Bennet said, walking her down the hall to the door in his thick purple socks.

  Upstairs Elizabeth paced around her own kitchen and dining room, smoking, unsettled inside, for she was not accustomed to confiding such old memory to anyone, not even herself. She walked to the mantel, where pictures of her parents stood framed before the mirror. Both shots were uncharacteristic: her father smiling with his head cocked to one side, a man of thirty in a summer breeze, plaid shirt wind-whipped around a vigorous body; her mother with the neighbor’s puppy on the back stoop, wearing a sleeveless dress printed with apples and pears, long teeth sunlit as they bit down on her lower lip as if to keep from laughing. These were handsome lies, and they had never become more than that for Elizabeth, who must’ve imagined that choosing these shots to frame could have somehow diminished the real memory of their cruelty, which sat like a locked room and had been there forever; a cold fact, intransmutable, mostly left alone.

  She sat on a chair by the window now, and closed her eyes, thinking of Bennet, of how he would pick his friends up off the ground when he saw them, wasting his strength, overflowing with energy whose source was strictly spiritual at this point. She thought of the day months ago when he’d come toward her out on the sidewalk with the same joy, and she had feared that intimacy and backed away, saying, “Hello there, Bennet,” sounding and feeling so much like her mother in that moment she had lost her breath.

  And what would Bennet have said today had she continued her story, told him the end of it, how she’d been beaten with a belt until her legs and back bled, two days after her mother had shown her father the small red diary where she’d written about Mr. Beehan and God? Beaten until she felt she had frozen for good from the inside out.

  Elizabeth did not visit Bennet again for a while; he had many other visitors, and he was growing weaker; she could see that from her window when he walked up the street from the N-Judah. She had seen him riding in the cable car twice, once with a man who held his hand, once when he sat alone, his eyes peering out at the landscape as if trying to drink it up.

  Lately she left food on his steps, fresh bread from the Tasahara, and oranges and notes saying to call on her if he needed something.

  One day as she was leaving the house of one of her employers, the woman stopped her at the door.

  “Say, Jon, did I see you talking with Bennet McGee the other day in front of your house?”

  “I don’t know, did you?”

  “Is it possible?”

  “Sure. He’s a good friend.”

  “Really? Really? Oh my God! That’s just wild! He is so wonderful! He and Barry and Jed were so much fun at those council meetings!”

  “I’m sure,” Elizabeth said, noticing the woman looking at her differently, trying to figure out why a man like Bennet would have her as a friend.

  “That guy—oh, man, it’s always the really beautiful guys who get sick. It’s like you feel someone like Bennet should escape it, but the nicer they are, the more doomed they seem, or something.” />
  “Seems to me the guys who aren’t so pretty get sick too,” Elizabeth said.

  “Oh sure, sure, you’re right. God, I feel helpless, like I never know if I’m doing enough.”

  “Well,” Elizabeth said, “none of us are ever doing enough. Ain’t that the story of the human race?”

  Her employer laughed as she stepped out the door into a brilliant day.

  Three days before Christmas Elizabeth sat on the ledge by her bay window facing the street. Bennet approached the window in a huge black overcoat and a cowboy hat he wore for humor. But he was not funny. He was so thin, so white, that Elizabeth had to look away. But he came up to the window and smiled at her, an old man.

  “Want to come in?” she said, and didn’t wait for his answer. She hurried to the front door. “Come in,” she said. “Come talk.”

  “I have to catch a flight home. For Christmas. I just wanted to wish you a happy holiday.”

  “Oh, well, that’s nice. I’m glad you’re going home. Oregon, right?”

  “Got any plans?” he asked her.

  Bennet’s sister pulled up in her small white car.

  “Not this year. I’ll take it easy this year.”

  “Come to my house! Come with Jack the flower man! My parents’ house, I mean. The Cascades and everything.”

  “Oh, no. Oh, no, not me. I don’t travel.”

  “Call Jack. He’s driving tomorrow. He needs company or he falls asleep. I love Jack, Jonny. I don’t want him falling asleep at the wheel and you could keep him awake.”

  “Or put him to sleep even quicker,” she said and laughed. But to her great surprise, she was imagining it.

  “Look up Jack Verona. It’s in the book.”

  His sister was out of the car now, placing Bennet’s suitcase in her backseat, along with a bag filled with wrapped presents. How did he manage it all?

  “Come on, Ben,” she called. “We gotta go. Hi, Jonny!”

  Elizabeth waved. She was glad he had this sister, whose face fought grief with a determination that verged on rage. It kept her efficient and dependable.

  They drove off.

  Elizabeth drank scotch that night and called Jack the flower man while listening to pop songs on the radio in the dark. She left a message on his machine, and the next morning he called her back.

  “Can you be ready, like now?” he said.

  “Sure can,” she said, surprised that she’d have no time to change her mind. She hadn’t been out of the city in decades. She did not really want to go, and yet here she was, packing an overnight bag with great care, and looking around the disheveled apartment for prized possessions to take with her, as if she were going away forever. Her shelves were crowded with little trinkets and statues, her tables crowded with magazines and pieces of odd material, and she decided she had no prized possessions. It came as a mild shock, for she had a collector’s nature.

  The night sky was packed with stars that nearly touched the Cascades, the snow shining brilliantly in the blue light of a nearly full moon, the silence in the valley made deeper by the low-pitched whistle of wind. Elizabeth stepped down out of the van into the landscape, pulling her coat tightly around her, her bones stiff from the long ride with Jack, whose black lab had sat between them like a patient child, watching the road. Jack and Elizabeth petted the dog, told stories of dogs, talked to the dog, and it had been enough.

  “We just walk down the path here and then the house will appear. Follow me,” Jack told her, his bearded face blue-white in the moonlight.

  “I climbed that with Bennet once,” Jack said, pointing to the mountain. “He was so fucking quick.”

  The house was a stone bungalow with a slanted roof, the windows brimming with light.

  “Come on in,” said a man’s voice, and suddenly in the front hall Bennet’s father took their coats, and Bennet approached them using one crutch to walk. He still had the black coat on. He looked ancient, and happy.

  “I can’t believe you came!” he said to Elizabeth. He stared at her. She wagged her head. “First time I made a trip in forever,” she said, smiling at him, smiling around the room and trying to get a sense of where she was.

  It was a big family; soon children flocked around Bennet as he sat on the couch. A small yellow-haired girl in red overalls kissed his face.

  Elizabeth had found a seat near the Christmas tree; its bulky size dwarfed her as she sat back. The warm room was all hard wood and old furniture and framed photographs on the walls. Bennet kept calling across the room, introducing her to people.

  “Excellent that you came!” his brother said, and crouched down by the chair to chat. “So how’d you get a name like Jonny?”

  She told him the story, making it quick and funny. Then Bennet’s aunt was handing her a scotch. “How ’bout something to eat?” she said.

  “No, I’m just fine, I’m just fine.”

  She was overwhelmed to be in a room where so many people were hugging each other, holding each other’s hands, laughing and talking and tending to the fire. She felt the depth of the family’s intimacy and history filling the house, and looked at them all from a great, warm distance, filled with admiration, but also with an intense awareness of Bennet. She could feel how he heightened the mood, and framed the night in sorrow so deep nobody got near it. It was the single dark current running through the living room’s center; they tiptoed over it, and each one laughed louder, talked more, in order not to feel the current rising. Sorrow had a smell like metal that cut through the scent of pine and hot cherry pie.

  “Here’s your pie,” a lovely girl told her, handing her the plate.

  “Thank you.”

  Elizabeth was watching Bennet’s mother, who much of the evening had played the piano, singing, grandchildren flanking her. Now she stole a look at her dying son as he spoke to his ten-year-old nephew on the steps that led to a loft. Elizabeth watched the mother watching Bennet and saw what looked not like sorrow but raw hunger in her eyes, a hunger for her son’s whole life. She got up from the piano and called out, “Who needs what? A drink? Whip cream for the pie?” and Elizabeth looked away, feeling she had seen too far inside her.

  The room where she tried to sleep was cold, but under several quilts she was warm. Her bed was aligned near the door, facing the window. The white mountains were more than a light in the room; they were a voice. A low, heavy voice that sang to her. In beds on the other side of the room three others slept— two adults and a child. Elizabeth had gone to bed earlier than they had, pretended to be sleeping, and had watched as they quietly slid themselves under the covers.

  After the house settled into silence, hours seemed to pass, and Elizabeth waited for morning, when sunlight would blast through the rooms. Later, she could head back home.

  But for now she was a woman in a house filled with the stunning voice of the mountains. And after another hour she was a woman in flannel pajamas leaving her bed, a barefoot woman quietly walking down the dark hall toward the living room, where she had heard some other sleepless soul moving about. She hoped it would be Bennet, then felt guilty for that hope; he should be sleeping, he should be drinking deep sleep like medicine.

  But now she was at the end of the hall with a view of the living room, where Bennet stood before the sliding glass doors, still in his coat, a blanket draped over his head like a scarf. Should she whisper his name? Walk toward him, stand beside him? Talk to him, somehow? Or should she leave him alone, turn back and find her bed again?

  Her body was frozen in place; her hand pressed hard against the wall. “Bennet? It’s Jonny. Are you all right?”

  “Jonny,” he said.

  His head was bowed down into his hands.

  Her body did not move, but her heart, her spirit, whatever it was that filled her, rushed toward him and surrounded him so that she felt she had no choice but to follow it, to go to him, to say his name and feel her own trembling hand reach out to his shoulder. “Bennet, Bennet.”

  “I can’t fa
ce up to what I’ll never see again,” he said. She felt herself a small child in his arms as he turned toward her now, the black coat opening just enough for her stunned head to lay against his chest in the absolute darkness of love.

  STADIUM HEARTS

  WERE SOMEONE TO APPROACH ME SOMEDAY and demand that I define myself, as best I could, in one sentence or less, I would not need a long sentence, nor any time to drum up a few choice descriptive words such as “demanding,” or “tenderhearted,” or “brutally honest,” all of which would be true in some sense, the way that almost anything said about anyone can be true, given the complexities and vagaries of the human character. Instead, I would simply say, “I am a man who loves to drive.”

  I’m retired now from a small college, where for over twenty years I played the role of a basically decent though hard-nosed professor of philosophy, a thin, appropriately wild-haired aging man in a long dark coat, known for extracting from my students little wisdom teeth they never knew they had, and spilling the quiet drama of my lectures into the voids of their hearts, even when words in my mouth felt like mothballs, though real mothballs, I knew, had much greater purpose.

  I was probably never cut out for the job. Like most, I began in a state of feverish desire to leave the mundane world and enter the world of ideas, a desire whose source I know now was a kind of self-loathing.

  Having nothing to do with the college anymore, I wake up early each morning, dress, and walk out to my car, a ghastly old gold tank of a Buick I found for three hundred dollars two years ago. I stop at the donut store where the girl with green hair hands me a large cup of coffee and a newspaper, then gives me the condescending wink some young women like to give old men. But I like her. I imagine she is weary of her job, but she displays none of that.

  First I drive to a hilltop that overlooks the river. I park in a lot behind a green tilted-looking greasy spoon called Rudy’s, and I sit and read the paper and drink the coffee and look down at the water. You are no doubt thinking I’m a man of considerable nerve to be stealing your time like this simply to tell you how I begin my day. But how I begin my day is now essential to me, and dictates what happens during the rest of the day; when fueled by black coffee and the paper, I drive, usually on the highways, listening to a local talk show, enduring the relentless drill of loneliness without a trace of self-pity. In this world, things happen to you when you’re lonely that simply don’t happen otherwise.