“What?”
“Turn around and look at your house.”
She swung and squinted into the light, examining the triple set of windows and then focusing through the glass to the scene across the street. She viewed with sudden shame and alarm the cluttered maw of her open garage, where Brad’s dust-haunted motorcycle leaned against the back wall, his fishing rods floated below the rafters, his golf clubs shone above an oiled leather bag, and his wrenches and pliers winked silver against the Peg-Board. She saw the workbench where he’d spent hours, the open garage door giving him light, tinkering with his brittle tin cars, repairing her blender, oiling the hinges on her briefcase. Marissa imagined the life Alice had watched unfold across the street, Brad setting up the ladder to clean the gutters, washing the cars, taking their daughter to her music lessons—levelheaded Brad, sober, singing under his breath the jukebox songs of their youth, waving to the neighbors. In short, the future Alice had lost a long time ago.
“Wow. I didn’t realize” was all she could say. “It was like watching a movie, wasn’t it? A years-long movie.”
“It’s my view,” Alice said. “Morning, noon, and night.”
Outside, a dusty mail truck squealed to a halt, and Marissa watched the postman slip the short envelopes of sympathy cards into her box. A pregnant cat waddled past her open garage, looked in a moment, and padded on. Alice fixed her a cup of coffee and a roll, and the two of them ate quietly. The conversation was brief and careful, each word chosen like a berry from a bush. Later, she walked across the street and pressed the button that brought the door down tight.
—
Marissa spent the rest of the week cleaning house after work, waxing floors, dusting the tops of picture frames, scrubbing bathrooms, boxing up her husband’s clothes for Goodwill, and it was a wild cleaning where the abrasive was not in her cleanser but in her motion.
On Saturday the doorbell rang, and it was the appraiser her daughter had asked to evaluate her father’s collection. A big ex–pro football player named Clint, he filled her doorframe.
“Hi, you Mrs. Marissa? Your daughter asked me to come up from New Orleans.”
“Uh, yes. She told me about you. Come in. It’s mostly upstairs, though there are things in the garage as well.” He walked past her, and the backwash of cologne cut her breath. She’d never seen so many teeth in a human. Hair swept back like a wolverine’s.
Clint carried a tablet, and a huge wallet protruded from the back pocket of his khakis. She led him upstairs and turned on the lights. “Well, here it is. Be sure to check the cabinets under the display counters, and there are a lot of antique guns back there in that closet.”
Clint pointed a big finger at the rafters. “All the old signs go as well?”
“Everything.” She looked around and saw a phantom Brad painting pin stripes on a toy farm wagon. “It’s not that I hate the stuff. I just don’t know much about it.”
Clint put up a hand, palm out. “I know. It’s my business to deal with husbands’ estates. Usually I can leave behind some prime thing. A family remembrance, you know?”
From downstairs she listened to him thump around for over three hours. When he came down his knit shirt was dusty. He asked to see what was in the garage, and after fifteen minutes he came back in and she offered him a cup of coffee and a donut. Clint tapped and fretted over his tablet at her dinette table, then sat back. She was afraid the old chair was going to explode.
“I’m an appraiser, but I also have a collectables company and auction house. I can charge you for the appraisal and head on out. But if it’s okay, I’d like to make an offer on the whole shebang.”
The accountant in her perked up. Well, here it comes, she thought. He’ll try to skin me in some complicated deal. The shebang probably won’t net a couple thousand dollars, but so what? It’s just stuff, she told herself, picking up her napkin and twisting it. Brad’s stuff. “What do you have in mind?”
“I can write you a check for the toys, guns, the Harley and sports equipment in the garage and have it all out of here in two days. I can only pay wholesale, but your alternative is selling it piece by piece online for years and years.” He gave the screen on his tablet a final tap. “It comes to just over a hundred and eighty-six thousand.”
She swallowed once, slowly, unable to think, stunned at the figure, thinking this must be her daughter’s idea of a joke.
Clint saw her distress and misinterpreted it. “But of course,” he began, “that’s just a starting number. Would you feel better if I evened the offer out at two hundred thousand?”
She took a breath. “That would be fine,” she said quietly, feeling somehow shamed.
Clint nodded and pulled out his checkbook. “Your husband had a top-notch eye for rarity and quality. But there’s one thing upstairs I won’t buy.”
“What is it?”
“I left it in a large box on the center table up there. It’s a big metal train set in nearly new condition.”
She blinked and shook her head. “I don’t really remember it.”
“Did you know there’s a handwritten note in the box? It said your husband got it for Christmas when he was nine years old. I can tell, even back then he knew how to take care of things. It’s real clean and all the little parts are there. Even the original cardboard boxes. It takes character to take care of something like that. He must’ve been quite a guy.” Clint took a long swallow of coffee and studied her face.
Marissa looked away. “How do the other widows feel when you buy their husbands’ belongings?”
Clint handed her the check and stood up. “Most people feel the way they’re able to.”
—
The last thing she did that day was clean the truck. She backed it out near the street, took off her shoes, hand-washed the pearly paint, then dried it with a cloth. While cleaning the interior, she found the supple new shoes and the flight attendant emblem she’d bought. She stood in the driveway holding her hand high to make the wings come alive in the light and imagining a young Alice swinging down the aisle of a rumbling DC-9, twenty pounds lighter, not a wrinkle under an eye or a single worry that life would ever be less than a sky-high ride to whatever she really wanted. It could have been like that. For the both of them. Marissa considered crossing the lane and giving her the wings. She knew they belonged with Alice, because they were part of her history. Instead, she shoved the emblem deep into the pocket of her slacks and made a fist around it until the metal feathers stung her palm, branding her with the memory of the days after Brad’s death, and at once she began to understand the importance of objects. It was all about connections. She wanted the wings, but at the same time she needed the link to Alice.
Out of nowhere came the thought that she should put on the wonderful shoes. She slipped her feet into leather as soft as lips, and then she was standing in a new, comfortable world. She seemed to be floating as she took three long steps down to the curb, looked up and down the empty street, and was carried across.
The Piano Tuner
The phone rang Monday morning while the piano tuner was shaving, and he nicked himself. The strange lady was on the line, the one who hardly ever came out of her big house stuck back in the cane fields south of town. The piano tuner told her he would come out, and then he wiped the receiver free of shaving cream and blood. Back at the lavatory he went after his white whiskers, remembering that she was a fairly good-looking woman, quite a bit younger than he was, in her midthirties. She also had a little money, and the piano tuner, whose name was Claude, wondered why she didn’t try to lose some of it at the Indian casino or at least spend a bit cheering herself up with a bowl of gumbo at Babineaux’s Café. He knew that all she did was sit in a hundred-fifty-year-old house and practice pop tunes on a moth-eaten George Steck upright.
Claude gathered his tuning kit, drank coffee with his wife, then headed out into the country in his little white van. He made a dozen turns and got on the clamshell road that ran by Michelle Placer
vent’s unpainted house, a squared-off antique thing set high up on crumbling brick pillars. Behind it were gray wood outbuildings, and beyond those the sugarcane grew taller than a man and spread for miles, level as a giant’s lawn.
As he pulled his tool kit out of the van, Claude recalled that Michelle was the end of the line for the Placervents, Creole planters who always had just enough money and influence to make themselves disliked in a poor community. Her mother had died ten years before, after Michelle had graduated with a music degree and come home to take care of her. He looked up on the gallery, stopping a moment to remember her father, a pale, overweight man with oiled hair, who would sit up there in a rocker and yell after cars speeding in the dusty road, as though he could control the world with a mean word.
The piano tuner remembered that Mr. Placervent began to step up his drinking after his wife died, and Michelle had to tend him like a baby until he dropped dead in the yard shouting at the postman about receiving too many Kmart advertisements. From that point on, it was just her and the black housekeeper on the home place, with a thousand acres the bank managed for her. Then the housekeeper died.
It had been a year since she had called him for a tuning. He stopped under a crape myrtle growing by the porch, noticing that the yard hadn’t been cut in a month and the spears of grass were turning to seed. The porch was sagging into a long frown, and the twelve steps that led to it bounced like a trampoline as he went up. He knocked and Michelle turned the knob and backed into the hall, waving him in with a faint hand motion and a small smile, the way Placervents had been doing for two hundred years to people not as good as they were, but Claude didn’t hold it against her because he knew how she had been raised. Michelle reminded him of one of those pastries in the display case down at Dufresne’s Bakery—pretty, but when you tried to handle them, they fell apart and your fingers went through to the goo inside. She was bouncing on the balls of her feet, as if she expected to float off at any minute. He saw that she’d put on a few pounds and wasn’t carrying her shoulders well, but also that there was still a kind of graceful and old-timey shape to her hips and breasts. Her hair was dark and curly, and her eyes were the brown of worn sharps on an old upright piano. A man could take an interest in her as long as he didn’t look in those eyes, the piano tuner thought. He glanced around the house and saw that it was falling apart.
“I’m glad you could come so soon,” she said. “C above Middle C is stuck.” She pointed over to an ornate walnut-cased vertigrand, and he remembered its rusty harp and dull, hymning soundboard. It would take three hours to get it regulated and pulled back up to pitch. He saw an antique plush chair with the imprint of her seat in its velvet, and knew she would sit there until he was finished. Claude usually talked while he did regulations, so he chatted as he unscrewed the fall board, pulled off the front, and flopped back the lid. After a little while, he found an oval pill wedged between two keys and fished it out with a string mute. When she saw what it was, she blushed. “This one of yours?” he asked, putting it on a side table. Her eyes followed his hand. “You remember Chlotilde?” He nodded. “She sure could cook, I heard.”
“She called it a happy pill. She told me that if things got too much for me to handle, I could take it.” She glanced up as though she’d told a secret by accident, and her eyes grew round. “I never did, though, because it’s the only one.”
Claude stole a look at her where she sat in front of the buckled plaster wall and its yellowed photographs of dead Placervents. It occurred to him that Michelle had never done anything, never worked, except at maintaining her helpless mother and snarling old man. He remembered seeing her in town, always in stores, sometimes looking half-dead and pale, sometimes talking a mile a minute as she bought food, medicines for the aged, adult diapers, coming in quick, going out the same way, enveloped in a cloud of jasmine perfume.
“You know,” he said, “you could probably go to a doctor and get another pill or two.”
She waved him off with two fingers. “I can’t stand going to doctors. Their waiting rooms make me want to pass out.”
“There,” he said, running a trill on the freed ivory. “One problem solved already.”
“It’s good to get rid of at least one,” she said, folding her hands in her lap and leaning forward from the waist.
“What problems you having, Michelle?” He put a tuning hammer onto a pin and struck a fork for A. His tuning machine was being repaired at the factory, so he’d gone back to listening, setting temperament by ear.
“Why, none at all,” she said too brightly and breathlessly. Claude thought she spoke like an actress in a 1940s movie, an artificial flower like Loretta Young who couldn’t fish a pill from between two piano keys to save her soul.
He struck the tuning fork again, placing it to his ear and tuned A440, then the A above that, and set perfect reference notes in between, tuning by fifths and flatting strings until the sounds in the wires matched those in his head. He then tuned by octaves from the reference notes, and this took over an hour. Michelle sat there with her pale hands in her lap as though she’d bought a ticket to watch. The piano’s hammers were hard, so he gave them a quick grind with his Moto-Tool, then massaged the dampers, which were starting to buzz when they fell against the strings. He went over the tuning pins again. “I don’t know if this job will hold perfect pitch, Michelle, but if a note or two falls back, give me a call and I’ll swing by.”
She nodded. “Whenever you’re out this way, you can stop in. If something’s wrong with the piano, I’ll be glad to pay to get it fixed.” She smiled a little too widely, like someone desperate to have company, which the tuner guessed she was. He sat down to play a little tune he tested instruments with, but then stopped after half a minute.
What the tuner remembered was that he’d never heard Michelle play. Judging from the wear on the hammers, she must have practiced all the time, so he asked her. She stood, fluffed her skirt, and walked over with a goosey step. Claude expected she might wring the notes out more or less in time, the way most players do, but after about ten measures of “As Time Goes By” he could hear that she had a great natural touch, laying the hammers against the strings like big felt teardrops and building note words that belled out into the room. Claude was moved by what she was doing with his work, for the notes were hers, but the quality of the notes was his, all the more recognizable when she began playing Bach.
Claude had hung around recitals long enough to know a little about classical music, though he’d seldom heard it out here in the cane fields. He leaned against the velvet chair and watched her long fingers roll and dart.
When she began a slow, fingertippy introduction to “Stardust,” he had to sit down. He’d heard the song played by everybody and their pet dogs, but her touch was something else, like Nat King Cole’s voice made from piano notes, echoing and dusty. She used the old bass sustain pedal to milk the overtones out of the new tuning, lifting each note from the page to give it wings, and Claude closed his eyes to watch the melody float slowly around the room.
The piano tuner was the kind of person who hated for anything to go to waste and thought the saddest thing in the world was a fine instrument that nobody ever touched, so it made him uneasy that someone who could play like this lived alone and depressed in an antique nightmare of a house ten miles from the nearest ear that knew what the hell her fingers were doing. When she finished, he asked, “Michelle, how do you spend your time?”
She folded her music and glanced at him out of the corner of an eye. “Since my father’s gone, there’s not much to do,” she said, turning on the bench to face him. “Sometimes the people who lease the land come by to talk. I have television.” She motioned to a floor-cabinet model topped by an elaborate set of rabbit ears.
“Lord, why don’t you get a satellite dish?”
She turned over a hand in her lap. “I really don’t watch anything. It just keeps me company when I can’t sleep at night.” She gave him a kind of goofy
, apologetic smile.
He began to slip his tools into their felt pockets. “As good as you play, you ought to get a decent piano.”
The corners of her little mouth came down a bit. “I tried to get Lagneau’s Music to bring out a new upright, but they said the old steps couldn’t hold a piano and moving crew.” She placed an upturned hand on George’s yellowed teeth. “They told me they’d never get this big thing off the porch. We’re seven feet above the ground here.”
“You can’t take it out the back?”
“The steps are worse there. Rotted through.” She let the fallboard drop over the ivories with a bang. “If I could get a new instrument, I’d push this out of the back door and let it fall into the yard for the scrap man.” She passed a hand quickly above her dark hair as though waving off a wasp.
He looked up at the rain-splotched plaster. “You ever thought about moving?”
“Every day. I can’t afford to. And, anyway, the house…I guess it’s like family.”
Claude picked up a screwdriver. “You ought to get out more. A woman your age needs…” He started to say she needed a boyfriend, but then he looked around at the dry-rotted curtains, the twelve-foot ceilings lined with dusty plaster molding, and then back at her trembly shoulders, realizing that she was so out of touch and rusty at life that the only man she should see was a psychiatrist, so then he said, “a job,” just because he had to finish the sentence.
“Oh,” she said, as though on the edge of crying.
“Hey, it’s not so bad. I work every day, and I’m too busy to get blue.”
She looked down at his little box of mutes and felts. “I can’t think of a thing I know how to do,” she said.
—
At supper, Claude’s wife was home from her little hole-in-the-wall insurance office, and he asked if she knew Michelle Placervent.
“We don’t carry her,” she said, going after a plate of red beans and rice and reading a pamphlet on term life.
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