* * *
When I returned to my apartment that evening, Kate was waiting for me on the landing, with Malkin in her arms. She was wearing the same gray button-through dress and she looked even more pallid than she had before.
“Where have you been?” I asked her. “I’ve missed you. I’ve been worried.”
I bent down to kiss her but she half turned her face away and I ended up kissing the top of her ear. I opened up my front door and let her in.
“I knocked on your door a couple of times, when Victor was out.”
“You shouldn’t. I’ll never answer.”
“Why not? Have I done something to upset you?”
“No, of course not.”
She sat down in one of the armchairs with Malkin in her lap. It certainly appeared as if something had upset her, even if it wasn’t me. She kept glancing around the room, and she wouldn’t look at me directly.
“We don’t have as much time as I thought,” she said.
“Excuse me? Time to do what?”
“We only have six or seven weeks or so. Maybe less.”
“You’re doing it again,” I told her. “You’re speaking in riddles.”
“I’ve told you! I don’t have any choice! I can’t make accusations, even if I wanted to!”
“Accusations against who? Accusations about what?”
“You don’t understand!”
“Too right I don’t understand! Maybe I’m just natural-born dumb! But I can tell you one thing—I’m not deaf! I heard you and Victor the other night, yelling and screaming and throwing the furniture around! How long do you think I can put up with that?”
For the first time, she turned and stared at me. “You heard us?”
“I’m surprised the whole goddamned neighborhood didn’t hear you! You sounded like you were wrecking the place!”
She covered her mouth with her hand. Then she said, so quietly that I could hardly hear her, “You heard us. My God.”
“Kate, for the umpteenth time, tell me! What is it with you and Victor? Why can’t you just walk out on him? He’s going to do you an injury one day. Or worse.”
Kate stood up, so that Malkin had to drop out of her lap onto the floor. “I’m sorry, Gideon. I can’t do this. I thought I could, but I don’t think I have the strength.”
I took hold of her wrists. She still wouldn’t look at me directly. “Kate, listen to me. You can leave him. I’ll take care of you. I won’t let Victor do anything to you. I won’t even let him near you. You can stay here or we can go to my parents’ place or even find ourselves a hotel.”
She shook her head. “It’s impossible.”
“Nothing is impossible if you have enough determination. You don’t have to worry about money. You don’t have to worry about getting a lawyer. One of my best friends is a partner in Lukas, Daniel and Roland, and, believe me, he’s a shark.”
“No, Gideon. I’m so sorry. But if you feel like this, it’s not going to work.”
I tilted her chin up so that she had to look at me. Those rain-washed eyes looked darker than ever. “What you’re saying is that you don’t really love me.”
“All right, if that makes it any easier for you. I don’t love you. I never did.”
“You don’t mean that.”
“Yes, I do. You’re boring, trite, and you’re full of yourself. Just because you can tinkle out some catchy little jingle about toilet freshener, you think you’re some kind of modern-day Mahler.”
“You’re absolutely right. I am, and I do. But I can only do it so brilliantly because of you. And you’re not fooling anyone. You feel the same way about me as I feel about you. Maybe more, even.”
Malkin was rubbing against Kate’s legs, so Kate bent down and picked her up.
“Have a nice life, Gideon,” she said, and walked toward the door.
“So that’s it?” I asked her.
She turned her head and there were tears in her eyes. “Let’s just say that I misjudged you. It’s my fault. I expected too much of you. Just because you have so much music in you. Just because you can see things that nobody else can see.”
“Kate—”
“I’m sorry, Gideon. I don’t know why I thought it could work. It was selfish of me. I never thought about you. I never asked myself if you were strong enough to take it.”
“Kate, for Christ’s sake. Please.”
“Good-bye, my darling.”
With that, she left my apartment and went downstairs. I stayed where I was, waiting to hear her door close, but all I heard was the muffled sound of Pearl’s television, and the distant scribble of a police siren.
I went to the window and looked out. The day was still gray, and very still. I had never felt so sorry for myself in the whole of my life.
Twenty-one
Over three weeks went by. We had an early snowfall, and across the street, kids were running around the park, throwing snowballs and pulling plastic sleds behind them.
All I can remember about those three weeks is darkness. Every day the sky was overcast, and if the sun appeared at all, it was only as a dim crimson disk behind the Franks Building.
I had been commissioned by CBS to write the incidental music for a new courtroom-style quiz show called Asked and Answered, and I had signed a contract with the DDB Agency for six new Diet Pepsi commercials. But all of my inspiration seemed to have walked out of the door along with Kate. I sat at my keyboard for hours, tinkling random minor-key melodies, but they were all too discordant for TV jingles. You can’t sell Diet Pepsi with music that makes you cry.
The best piece I wrote was a soft, sad song about walking through a snowstorm, trying to catch up with the woman you love. As the snow falls thicker and thicker, she disappears from sight, and you can only follow her footsteps. Gradually, however, her footsteps are obliterated, too, and you have lost her forever. I called it “Snow Blind.”
I drank too much zinfandel and spent hours staring out of the window, hoping to see Kate coming down the steps, or walking in James J. Walker Park, across the street. Knowing that I would never be able to kiss her and hold her in my arms again made me feel as if my stomach had been completely filled with lead, like a cold casting, and I had a dull metallic taste in my mouth.
When I was awake, I kept thinking over and over: why did she lose faith in me? Why did she think she was asking too much of me? She had told me more than once that I had vision and sensitivity and resonance. She had said I could make her friends come to life. So what did she think I was lacking?
It couldn’t be trust. I had trusted her, hadn’t I, even when she seemed to be talking in conundrums? I had stayed in Stockholm when she had asked me, even after I had seen things that would have turned my hair gray, if it hadn’t been gray already. I had followed her to London, and seen horrors and pain and mysteries that seemed to have no logical connection whatsoever.
Maybe she thought I didn’t have the stones to do what she was eventually going to ask me. But I had already witnessed more weirdness than most people get to experience in the whole of their lives, and even if I was baffled and confused, I was still reasonably sane, and I wasn’t so frightened that I wanted to back out altogether. Why had she taken it as a sign of weakness that I had wanted to know what in God’s name was actually going on?
When I slept, I had nightmare after nightmare. In one, I was running through the Westerlunds’ apartment in Stockholm, trying to catch Elsa and Felicia as they fled along the corridors in their nightdresses. In another, I was hammering with my fists on our bedroom window in London, while Helena Philips stood in the yard outside, blazing from head to foot, her eyes staring and flames leaping out of her mouth, so that the skin of her lips blistered and curled.
In yet another, Kate and I were making love. As she climaxed, she threw herself backward and screamed, so that the chandelier exploded and our bedroom windows burst inward. We were deluged in glittering glass splinters, and our bed was turned into a bloodbath.
&nb
sp; Every morning I woke up and put out my hand, even though I knew that Kate wouldn’t be lying next to me. Every morning I eased myself out of bed like a man twice my age, feeling as if I hadn’t slept at all.
I stopped playing music in the evening, in the hope that I could hear Kate’s voice coming up through the floor. But all I ever heard was Victor, talking too loudly on his cell phone or arguing or singing along with Tony Bennett. Either that, or Tony Bennett himself, singing “I Wish I Were in Love Again.”
Now and again I heard the red-haired woman. Almost every time she left the house, she seemed to forget something, because she would slam the front door behind her, and then immediately unlock it again, and slam it again, and then go out a second time, with yet another slam. When Margot was with me, and the redhaired woman left the house like that, she always said, “slam, bam, thank you, ma’am!”
Margot helped me a lot through those days. She would come around, and make me a sandwich, or one of her pasta dishes, but she didn’t try to cheer me up, or take my mind off Kate. She knew that I was hurting and that only time would heal what was wrong with me, not jokes.
One day I would feel angry with Kate, for taking me for granted. The next day I would feel angry with myself, for having allowed her to do it. The day after, I would simply feel lonely, and depressed, and I would sit playing “Snow Blind” over and over, and singing the lyrics in a whisper.
“The snowflakes fell so thick and fast
I couldn’t see where you had passed
You left me far behind
So many miles behind
Snow blind . . .”
One evening I sat on the stairs outside the Solways’ apartment for nearly three hours, hoping that Kate might come in or out. Victor arrived home shortly after 10:00 PM. He gave me an odd look and said, “Gideon! How are you doing, sport?”, after which I gave up waiting and climbed wearily back upstairs.
I thought of writing to her, or recording a message on a CD. In the end, I did both, but the letter was too long and read as if it had been written by a lovesick high school student. The CD was better, especially since I played “Snow Blind” on it, as well as telling her how much I missed her. I addressed it to Mrs. K. Solway, Strictly Confidential and put it into the Solways’ mailbox. I was taking a risk that Victor would open it, and play it, but who gave a shit? I had lost her anyhow.
One snowy morning, a little over a week later, I looked out of the window and saw Victor leaving the house, with Kate close behind him. I called out, “Kate!” although she couldn’t have heard me, and I knocked on the windowpane. This time, though, she didn’t look up at me, the way she had when I very first caught sight of her.
Victor stopped at the bottom of the steps and tugged on a pair of black leather gloves. He didn’t say good-bye to Kate, or even look at her, but started to walk briskly toward Hudson Street. Kate turned left, in the direction of Seventh Avenue, and it was then that I saw that she was carrying a wrapped-up bundle inside her overcoat. It was a baby, in the same blue knitted bonnet that I had seen before, with earflaps. I couldn’t see its face.
“Kate,” I said, although no sound actually came out.
I ran downstairs in my socks and opened up the front door. I took the steps three at a time. I jogged along the sidewalk a little way, until I realized that I couldn’t see her. She had vanished into the snow, just like the woman in my song. Maybe she had hailed a cab, or a friend had picked her up.
A black man overtook me. He was wearing a huge padded coat, with a padded hood, so that he looked like a quilt on legs. He turned around and stared at me in my T-shirt and my socks, and there was such pity on his face that I almost felt sorry for myself.
I climbed the steps back into the house and it was only then that I realized that my socks were soaked.
* * *
I saw her again two days later. I was climbing out of a taxi after a meeting on Madison Avenue when I saw her walking diagonally across the park, in her overcoat and her gray woolly hat. I pushed twenty dollars into the cabdriver’s hand and said, “Keep it.” Then I dodged across the street and into the park. This time I was determined not to lose her.
I glimpsed her between the trees, about eighty yards in front of me. She was walking quite quickly, and I could see now that she was pushing a stroller with a baby in it. I started to run. It was growing dark in the park and I knew that it would be closing soon.
I lost sight of her for a moment, but then I saw her again, and somehow she had managed to walk as far as the southwest corner of the handball court, over a hundred yards away.
“Kate!” I shouted. “Kate—wait up, will you!”
She kept on walking, and disappeared behind the fence. I ran after her again, but when I reached the handball court, she had gone.
I walked slowly along the path toward Seventh Avenue. It was so gloomy that she could easily have hidden behind the fence someplace or behind a tree or the low concrete wall that surrounded the boccie ball court.
I stopped. Six or seven scraggy-looking pigeons waddled around me, expecting me to feed them.
“Kate!” I called out. “I don’t know whether you can hear me or not, but I really miss you! I don’t care what I have to do, I want you back!”
My voice echoed flatly around the handball court. An old woman in a plaid coat stood watching me, only twenty yards away, with her toothless mouth turned down like a caricature of a witch.
“Kate! I need you, and I’ll do anything to make you happy! I’m beginning to see what you’re trying to show me! Whatever you want me to do, I’ll do it, I’ll help you, and I won’t ask any more questions! Did you listen to my song? I meant every word of it! I love you! I miss you, and I love you with all of my heart!”
I waited for a while, but even if she had heard me, Kate didn’t answer. The pigeons warbled crossly all around me, and the traffic rumbled, and after a few minutes the old woman in the plaid coat sniffed and coughed and wandered off. I don’t know what kind of public drama she had been expecting, but she was obviously disappointed.
I walked slowly back to St. Luke’s Place, turning around every few yards to see if Kate might be following me, but the park was too shadowy now. When I climbed the front steps and opened the door, the first thing I heard was Tony Bennett singing “The Boulevard of Broken Dreams.”
I trudged up to the second-floor landing. I wasn’t angry anymore. I was tired, and dispirited, and just as confused by Kate’s behavior as ever. She must have heard me, when I first called out to her. Why hadn’t she stopped? She had nothing to be afraid of, and if she really didn’t want to see me ever again, all she had to do was say so. I was a thirty-one-year-old man, after all. I couldn’t pretend that it wouldn’t hurt me, but I would just have to learn to get over it.
As I reached the landing, however, I saw that I had an unexpected visitor. Malkin was sitting in front of my door, her paws neatly tucked in front of her.
I hunkered down and stroked her head, so that she flattened her ears. “Well now,” I said, “why are you here, puss? Brought me a message, did you? Or did you only come up here because you were hungry?”
Malkin stretched herself up and clawed at my door. I let myself in and she followed me inside. Without hesitation, she trotted across to the window and jumped up onto the sill. I went up to her and said, “What?”
Across the street, I saw Kate, with her stroller, although now the stroller was empty. She was looking west, toward Hudson Street, although I couldn’t make out what she was looking at. All the same, I suddenly understood what she was doing; and she must have sensed how close I was to understanding it, or else she wouldn’t have sent Malkin up here.
The visions that I had seen in Stockholm and London were flashbacks of traumatic events that had happened in the recent past, and these visions of Kate were flashbacks, too. Once I had fitted them altogether, I would know exactly why she needed my help. She wasn’t yet showing me the finished jigsaw, but she was giving me some of the most imp
ortant pieces. It was not only the Westerlunds and the Philipses who had suffered, it was Kate, too.
The baby in the stroller and in her arms—the baby she called Michael—he wasn’t a friend’s baby that she was looking after, he was hers. He was the baby that Victor had fathered—the baby whose loss had made Victor so angry that he never wanted them to try for another.
I walked around my apartment, switching on the table lamps, but I didn’t draw the drapes. I didn’t know if she was still out there, in the street, but I guess I was trying to give Kate a sign that I had seen the light.
* * *
I didn’t go to bed that night until well after 2:30 AM. I was hoping that Kate might come knocking at my door, looking for Malkin. But Malkin wolfed down a supper of liver pâté and prosciutto, which was all I had in the fridge, apart from some holey Swiss cheese, and then she curled herself up and went to sleep in one of my armchairs, as if she wasn’t expecting to be disturbed.
But the next morning, around 8:30 AM, I heard something drop through my apartment door. I rolled out of bed and found that Malkin had beaten me to it, and was sniffing at a large brown envelope. I opened the door at once, but there was nobody there. I stepped out on the landing, and called “Hello?” but nobody answered. As I did so, Malkin ran between my legs and fled downstairs.
I waited for a moment, and then I went back inside. The envelope contained two weighty objects, nearly six inches long, and even before I tore it open I knew what they were. Two new brass keys—obviously modern copies of antique keys, with plain bows but very complicated blades.
There was also a business-class air ticket for the following morning—Alitalia 7617 from JFK to Marco Polo airport, Venice—costing $7,618. And a sheet of notepaper with a handwritten address on it: Professore Enrico Cesaretti, Apt #1, Palazzetto Di Nerezza, Campo San Polo, San Polo, Venezia.
That was all. No note, no explanation. No invitation. Not even, “Dear Gideon, I’m sorry for everything I said . . . I really do love you after all.” But she didn’t really need to. If she had listened to the song that I had recorded for her, and heard me shouting out to her in the park, she would know that I forgave her everything.
Ghost Music Page 17