“That’s not what I asked you.”
She looked up and the light caught in her bottle-brown hair. “Is she still living out in that little haunted castle?”
“Yeah. The whole place shakes just when you walk through it.”
“Why’d they build it on such tall piers? Did the water get that high before they built the levees?”
“Beats me. You ever hear anything about her?” He handed her the hot sauce and watched her think.
“I heard she was depressed as hell, I can tell you that. Boney LeBlanc said she had a panic attack in his restaurant and had to leave just as the waitress brought her shrimp étouffée.” Evette shook her head. “And Boney makes dynamite étouffée.”
“She can play the hell out of a piano,” he said.
“Seems like I heard that.” Evette turned the page on her pamphlet. “Sings, too.”
“She needs to get a job.”
“Well, she knows how to drive a tractor.”
“What?”
“I heard her father forced her to learn when she was just a kid. I don’t know why. Maybe he was mad she wasn’t born a boy.” Evette took a long drink of iced tea. “I heard if a field hand left a tractor by the gate and a rain was coming up, he’d send Michelle out to bring it under the shed. Wouldn’t even let her change out of her dress, just made her climb up on the greasy thing and go.”
“Damn, I wouldn’t have thought she could operate a doorbell,” Claude said.
His wife cut her eyes over at him. “It might surprise you what some people can do,” she told him.
—
Two weeks later, Claude was sitting in his recliner, his mind empty except for a football game playing in it, when the phone rang. It was Michelle Placervent, and her voice struck his ear like the plea of a drowning sailor. She was crying into the receiver about how three notes on her keyboard had soured and another key was stuck. The more she explained what was wrong with her piano, the more she cried until she began weeping, Claude thought, as if her whole family had died in a plane crash, aunts and cousins and canaries.
“Michelle,” he interrupted, “it’s only a piano. Next time I’m out your way, I’ll check it. Maybe Monday sometime?”
“No,” she cried, “I need someone to come out now.”
Uh-oh, he thought. He hung up and went to find his wife. Evette was at the sink peeling onions, and he told her about Michelle. She banged a piece of onion skin off her knife. “You better go fix her piano,” she said. “If that’s what needs fixing.” She looked up at his gray hair as though she might be wondering if Michelle Placervent found him attractive.
“You want to come along for the ride?” he asked.
She shook her head and kissed him on the chin. “I’ve got to finish supper. When Chad gets home from football practice, he’ll be starving.” She picked up another onion and cut off the green shoots, her eyes flicking up at him. “If she’s real sick, call Dr. Meltier.”
—
Claude drove out as quickly as he could, sorry he’d ever tuned the worn-out piano in the first place. Giving a good musician a fine tuning is always a risk, because when the first string starts to sag in pitch, he gets dissatisfied and calls up, as if one little note that’s just a bit off ruins the whole keyboard, the whole song.
She was dressed in faded stretch jeans and a green sweatshirt, her hair unbrushed and oily. The house was as uncombed as she was. Claude looked at her trembly fingers and her wild eyes, then asked if she had any relatives or friends in town. “Everybody is dead or moved far away,” she told him, her eyes streaming and her face red and sticky.
He watched her, feeling suddenly tired and helpless. He tried to think what Evette would do for her, and then he went into the kitchen to make some hot tea. The cabinets looked as though someone had thrown the pots into them from across the room. The gas stove was an antique that should have been in a museum, and it was listing, the floor sagging under it. The freezer was full of TV dinners, and the pantry showed a few cans of Vienna sausages and beanie-weenies. Claude realized he’d be depressed himself if that’s all he had to eat.
When he brought the tea, she was in a wing chair, leaning to one side, her shoulders rounded in. Sitting on the bench, he carefully checked the keyboard by unisons and fifths but found nothing out of pitch, no stuck key. At that moment, he knew that when he turned around he would have two choices: to say there’s nothing wrong, get in his van, and go on with his life, or to deal with her. He inspected the alligatored finish on the George Steck’s case for a long time, examined the sharps for lateral play. Even while he was turning on the satiny bench, he didn’t know what he was going to say. Then he saw her eyes, big with dread of something like a diagnosis. Claude felt as though he were slipping off into quicksand when he opened his mouth.
“Michelle, who’s your doctor?”
Her eyes went to the dark, wax-caked floor. “I’m not going.”
“You got to. Look at yourself. You’re sadder’n a blind man at a strip show.”
“I just need a little time to adjust. My father’s been gone only six months.” She put a hand on her forehead and hid her eyes from him.
“You need a little something, all right, but it ain’t time. You got too much time on your hands.” Then he told her what her doctor could do for her. That her depression was just a chemical thing. That she could be straightened up with some medicine.
He said many things off the top of his head and convinced her to make an appointment with Dr. Meltier. He talked with her a long time in that cold living room. When a thunderbolt lit up the yard and a storm blew in from the west, he helped her put out pots to catch leaks. He held her hand at the door and calmed her down so she wouldn’t call him out of his warm bed in a few hours, telling him that her piano had gone up in pitch or was playing itself.
—
A month or so passed, and Claude was cutting grass one afternoon when he saw Michelle’s old black Lincoln charging up the drive. She got out, smiling too widely, wearing a navy cotton dress that was baggy and wrinkled. He asked her to come in for coffee and listened to her talk and talk. The doctor had given her some medications to test for a couple of months, and her eyes were bright. In fact, her eyes showed so much happiness they scared him. She asked if he could help her find a job playing the piano for somebody.
“When you’re ready, I’ll help.” For years Claude had tuned pianos for places that used lounge pianists, and he knew all the managers.
She put four spoons of sugar in her coffee with a steady hand. “I’m ready right this minute,” she said. “I’ve got to make my music go to work for me.”
The piano tuner laughed at that, thinking the poor thing was so cheery and upbeat he should call Sid Fontenot, who managed the lounge in that big new motel over in Lafayette. “Sid’s always trying out pianists,” he told her. “I’ll give him a call for you.”
When he got off the phone, she asked, “How do you play in a lounge?” and Claude tried to keep a straight face.
“There’s nothing to it,” he said, sitting down with her and frowning into his coffee cup. “You must know a thousand show tunes and ballads.”
She nodded. “Okay. So I play requests. Whatever they ask me to.” She adjusted a thin watchband and then looked him in the eye.
Claude got up and put their cups in the sink. “Sid asked me if you can sing. You don’t have to, but he said it would help. You get a lot of requests for old stuff in a classy motel lounge.”
“I was good in voice,” she said, clasping her hands until they went white. And then he thought he saw a weak mood flash through her eyes, a little electrical thrill of fright. “How do I dress?”
He lathered up a dish cloth and studied her short coffee-brown hair, dry skin, the small crow’s-feet around her eyes. “Why don’t you go to Sears and buy a black dress and some fake pearls. Get a little makeup while you’re at it. You’ll be the best-looking girl in the lounge. Sid says he’ll try you tomorrow night in
the bar at nine o’clock. It’s the big new motel on the interstate.”
Claude’s wife had often told him that he invented reality by saying it, and he was thinking this as he talked to the medicated hermit-like woman seated in his kitchen. He was also thinking that the last place on earth he would want to be was in the piano bar of a Lafayette motel at nine at night. And naturally, the next question to come out between Michelle Placervent’s straight white teeth was, “Can’t you please come with me this first time?”
Claude took a breath and said, “I’d be glad to,” and she clapped her hands like an organ grinder’s monkey. He wondered what she was taking and how much of it.
—
He almost convinced Evette to come along, but their seventeen-year-old boy came down with the flu, and she stayed home to nurse him. She made Claude wear a sport coat, but he refused to put on a tie. “You want to look good for your date,” she told him with a smirk.
“Get out of here.” He turned red in the face and went out on the porch to wait in the night air.
Michelle picked him up, and he had to admit that she looked blue blood sharp. He imagined she must have bought a girdle along with her velvety black dress. On the way to Lafayette, as the Lincoln drifted above the narrow flat highway through the sugarcane fields, Claude got her to talk about herself. She told him that she had been engaged twice, but old man Placervent was so nasty to the young men, he just ran them off. Her grandfather had wanted to tear the old house down “from bats to termites” and build a new one, but her father wouldn’t hear of it. She said he’d worn the building like a badge, proof that he was better than everybody else. “The only proof,” Michelle said. “And now I’m trapped in it.” The piano tuner didn’t know what to say, other than that she could always look forward to hurricane season, but he kept his mouth closed.
The lounge was a long room, glass walls on one side, a long bar with a smiling lady bartender on the other. He introduced Michelle to Sid, the manager, a bright-looking man, savvy, dressed in an expensive suit. Sid smiled at her and gestured toward the piano, and the next thing Claude knew, she was seated behind a rebuilt satin-black Steinway playing “Put on a Happy Face,” her high-heeled foot holding down the soft pedal. After a while, the room began to fill with local oilmen and their glitzy women, plus the usual salesmen sprawling at the tables, and even a couple of cowboys who lit like dragonflies at the bar. A slim, tipsy woman wearing tight white jeans and spike heels approached the piano and made a request, putting a bill into a glass on the lid. Michelle stared at the money for a moment and started “Yesterday,” playing for a full six minutes.
Claude sat at a tiny table next to the glass wall overlooking the swimming pool and ordered a German beer. He’d never done anything like this and felt out of place. When he did frequent a bar, it was a place with Cajun music on the jukebox and a gallon jar of pigs’ feet on the counter. Michelle finished the tune, looked over at him, and he gave her the okay sign. She smiled and sailed into another, then tickled off a half dozen more over the next forty-five minutes. At one point, she walked to Claude’s table and asked how she was doing. Even in the dim light he could see that her eyes were too intense, the way a person’s eyes get when they’re having too much fun.
The piano tuner wanted to say, Lighten up on the arpeggios. Slow your tempo a bit. But she was floating before him as fragile as a soap bubble, so he gave her the thumbs-up and said, “Perfect. Sid told me you can have a hundred dollars for four hours, plus tips.”
“Money,” she squealed, bouncing back to the piano and starting the “Pennsylvania Polka,” playing with a lot of sustain pedal. A brace of oilmen looked over briefly, possibly annoyed, but most people just leaned closer to talk, or patted their feet. Claude signaled her to quiet it down a bit.
For an hour and a half he watched as Michelle played and grinned at people coming to her tip glass. She sang one song through the microphone over her keyboard and drew a moderate wave of applause. She was a good-looking woman but had never learned how to move around people, and Claude got the feeling that folks who studied her close up thought she was a little silly. He sat there wishing there was an adjustment button on the back of her head that he could give just a quarter turn.
Eventually, the piano tuner became drowsy and hungry in the dim light of the lounge, so he walked across the lobby to the restaurant and treated himself to a deluxe burger basket and another cold bottle of beer. He sat there next to the plant box full of plastic flowers and worried about Michelle and whether he’d done the right thing by turning a Creole queen into a motel lounge pianist.
As soon as he left the restaurant, he could tell something was not exactly right. A young couple walked out of the lounge with quick steps, and then he heard what she was playing: Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2. Sid appeared at the lounge entrance and waved him over. “Michelle’s really smoking our Steinway,” he said, yelling to be heard over the music. “You know, this crowd thinks classical music is something like Floyd Cramer’s Greatest Hits.” Claude looked into the room where customers seemed to bend under the shower of notes like cows hiding from a thunderstorm. Some of the loud salesmen had stopped selling mud pumps and chemicals to listen, and the two drunk cowboys had picked up women and were trying to jitterbug.
The manager put a hand on Claude’s shoulder. “What’s going on? She’s got to know that’s not the right music for this place.”
“I’ll talk to her.”
Sid watched the performance. “She’s smiling a lot. Is she on something?” Sid knew musicians.
“Depression medicine.”
He sniffed. “Well, I guess that music’ll drive you off the deep end, all right.”
After the big rumbling finale, the drunk cowboys let out a rebel yell, but no one applauded. Claude walked over, bent down, and put his hand on her back. “That was good, Michelle.” What else could he say to her?
She looked up at him and her eyes were wet, her skin flushed and sweating. “You don’t fool me. I know what you’re thinking. But I couldn’t help it. I just got this surge of anger and had to let it out.”
“What are you mad at?” He felt her shoulders tremble.
She didn’t say anything at first, then she shrugged. “I’ve been sitting here thinking that I’d have to play piano five nights a week for over twenty years to afford renovating my house.” She straightened up and looked over the long piano at the bartender, who had both hands on the bar, watching her. “What am I doing here?” She ran a palm down her soft throat. “I’m a Placervent.”
Claude pushed her microphone aside. “Your medications are maybe a little out of adjustment,” he said in a low voice, wishing he were anyplace on earth other than where he was. He glanced over at Sid. “You ought to finish this set, though.”
“Why? I can survive without the money. I mean, I appreciate you getting me this job, but I think I’m ready to go home.” She seemed confused and out of control, but she didn’t move.
He was sure his face showed that he was getting upset himself. She stared down at the keys until finally, one of the cowboys—really just a French farm boy from down in Cameron Parish, wearing a loud shirt and a Walmart hat—came up and put a five in her tip glass. “Hey, lady, can you play any Patsy Cline?”
An injured little smile came to her lips. She straightened her back and started to say something to him, but instead she looked at Claude, at his embarrassed and hopeful face. Her mouth closed in a line, and her right hand went down and began picking out an intro. Then, to his amazement, she started to sing, and people looked up as though Patsy Cline had somehow come back to life, but without her country accent, and the whole room went quiet to listen. “Crazy,” Michelle sang, soft as midnight fog outside a bedroom window, “crazy for feeling so lonely.”
—
He didn’t see her for a long time. At Sid’s lounge, someone spilled a highball into the Steinway, and when Claude was over there to straighten it out, the manager told him she was still playing t
here on weekends, and off and on at the Sheraton, and a little at the country club for the oil-company parties. He said that she’d gotten her dosage pretty regulated and was playing well, except toward the end of the night when she would start singing blues numbers and laughing out loud between the verses as though she were telling jokes in her head. Laughing very loudly. The piano tuner wondered if she could ever get on an even keel. People like Michelle, he thought, sometimes their talent helped them fix themselves. Sometimes not. Nobody could predict.
—
In the middle of December she called him to come tune a new console she’d bought. She’d finally gotten a carpenter to put knee braces under the front steps so Lagneau’s Music could bring a piano into the house. They’d told her they didn’t want the George Steck as a trade-in, though, and wouldn’t move the big vertigrand down into the yard for a million dollars. It was built like a wooden warship and weighed nearly eight hundred pounds.
When Claude got there, the entry was open, so he stepped around the dark giant of a piano at the head of the long hall that led to the back porch. He noticed the new piano in the parlor, a cheap, ugly blond-wood model he couldn’t believe she’d chosen.
Michelle appeared at the far end of the hall looking wild-eyed, her hair falling in loose, dangling ringlets. She was wearing rust-smudged tan slacks under a yellow rain slicker and was lugging the end of a half-inch cable in her cotton gardening gloves.
“Claude,” she said, shaking her head, “you wouldn’t believe the trouble I’ve had this morning. I asked Lagneau’s crew to push the old piano into the hall, but the rollers on the bottom locked up. Just look what they did to the floor.” She swept a hand low. The floors were so covered with two-hundred-year-old divots brimming with cloudy wax that he couldn’t spot much new damage. “They managed to get it up on this old braided rug, and I figured I could tow it off the back porch and let it fall into the yard.”
He looked in her eyes to see what was going on. “You gonna skid this thing down the hallway on this rug? We can’t just push it ourselves?”
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