“Hi,” said Jordan, standing at the door. He had chocolate on the corner of his mouth and she reached up to wipe it away, right there, outside, visible.
“Inside,” he said.
“Since when do you care?” Reeva wanted to taste it now, and she licked the corner of his mouth as he shut the door. She pushed him on the bed.
“Hey, you’re full of ambition today,” he said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Jordan took a pink piece of paper from his pocket, unfolding the leaflet—Linsey Hart’s face, the clean lines of her chin, the long hair in black and white.
“I know this girl,” he said. “Or at least, I knew her in middle school. It’s weird. She never seemed like the runaway type. She even asked me out once. Brave little thing. I wonder what happened.”
“How could you have been in middle school with her?” Reeva took off his T-shirt. It smelled of crushed grass and lemony sweat. He’d started running, he told her, he wanted to get into shape. She’d told him she liked his shape, and she did, the lean lines, no worse for a thousand brownies. She pushed her hand into his waistband. She was here for sex, after all, and part of her wanted it over with, part of her wanted her body to stop asking for it, stop aggressing her into this ridiculous situation. She got up and looked for a corkscrew on his counter, the one she’d lent him, one of the six or seven they owned. Dirty socks, candy wrappers. What was she doing here? The kitchen smelled like mildew and old cheese. The girl asked him out in middle school. It didn’t make sense.
“Maybe I skipped a grade.”
She found the corkscrew under a doily—she had no idea why Jordan had a doily, maybe his grandmother made them—and poured the wine into the two cleanest paper cups she could find.
“Still, you’d have missed her in middle school by years.”
“Maybe I skipped more than one grade,” said Jordan. The wine spilled down his chest and he rested his cup on a shelf, took a swig from the bottle of pinot noir.
“Excuse me?” Reeva looked at his eyes, so young, so clean, sort of horrible. He put down the bottle and reached for her, sliding his hands inside her jeans, reaching inside her and cupping her ass, always fluid in his sexual motions. Reeva felt it, but she was still calculating.
“Linsey Hart is only seventeen,” she said.
“Almost eighteen,” he said.
“Only almost eighteen.” He kissed her hard as she said it, but she pushed him away. “So how old are you, Jordan?”
Jordan didn’t stop massaging her, his hands between her legs, his mouth on her breast through her T-shirt, which was really Tina’s T-shirt; she’d borrowed it and just an hour ago it had made her feel sexy and now she realized how absurd she looked. It was a tight V-neck. It was pink and girly and she was not a girl.
A girl was missing. Where was Tina right now? At camp, she hoped, worrying about her hair. She couldn’t be approaching this same sort of life, this debauchery, this embarrassment. Her daughter wasn’t stained.
“How old?”
“Fine,” said Jordan. “I’m twenty.” He pushed at her hips, grabbing, maneuvering her onto the bed. The sex scent rose from the sheets. Did he ever wash his sheets? His mouth was on hers but it felt hard and wrong.
“Almost,” he said.
Reeva stared at his forehead. There was still a little chocolate, over by his ear. She shoved him away. He groaned and pressed her down on the bed.
“I like that,” he said.
“You’re fucking nineteen years old?”
“No,” he said and grinned. “You’re fucking nineteen years old.”
“Very funny,” said Reeva, trying to stand up. “You can’t be nineteen years old.”
“Right,” he said. “I can’t drink.” He picked the bottle up from the floor and pressed it obscenely between her legs. This would’ve excited her just yesterday, she thought. She was that base.
“You can’t drink,” she repeated.
“And I can’t buy booze, either.”
“Jesus Christ.”
“Jesus good or Jesus bad?”
“You can’t buy alcohol,” she said, as if it mattered.
“I have to get older women to bring it to me.” He tried to reach for her breast but she slapped at his hand. “Don’t be like that,” he said.
Older women. She felt it physically, her face melting, the old face beneath the plastic new one; she was an old lady, and he was nineteen years old. She got up and backed toward the door.
“Only old ladies with great tits.” He grabbed at her, suddenly inelegant. Nineteen years old. A prodigy in more ways than one, but still a baby, she was sleeping with a baby, she was a horror. He had referred to her tits. She hated that word. She hated this smelly little room, but he was pulling her back to the bed, his hot hairless hands on hers, thinking she was playing, how could he think that? He was pulling her back to him; his fingers dug into her crotch, pushing her jeans down. Nineteen years old.
“Cellophane,” she said.
He kept going, as if he hadn’t heard her, but she knew he’d heard it, and she knew he knew.
“Cellophane,” she said again. “Cell-oh-phane.”
Jordan put his hands up in the air, surrender. He wouldn’t look at her. He lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. She’d seen that ceiling. Knotty pine beams, gray cobwebs, a jagged crack in the paint over by the door.
He lay there while Reeva gathered her things—the corkscrew; a novel she’d lent him, Life of Pi, which Charlie had given her; her underwear from a few days ago, crusty with sex; she took the bottle from between his feet. It would make her weird and conspicuous, walking up Sycamore Street with an open bottle before noon. And she knew it was over and she only hoped he wouldn’t tell. He wouldn’t tell. He was nineteen. She was ancient. She thought of Charlie’s heavy arm and she knew she was going home to him, to their quiet shipwreck, to see what could be salvaged. The captain, her Charlie, didn’t even know they were underwater, halfway between the whitecaps and the bottom of the sea.
She walked out of his door without looking around first, without being furtive, with nothing to hide. And maybe he saw her and maybe he didn’t, but down the woods path, Mr. Leonard was walking through the oaks and maples, still at the height of their greens, pushing his antique bike with one hand, holding something pink in the other. It wasn’t until later that Reeva remembered that silhouette, that strange juxtaposition, old man, pink cloth, and wondered, and filled in the missing puzzle pieces. In the dappled light of her memory, he was holding Linsey Hart’s pink sweatshirt as if it belonged to him now.
24 SYCAMORE STREET
He hadn’t been sleeping; he hadn’t been eating; his gut was killing him, the cancer eating him from inside. He had moments of daily respite, and he spent those outside, walking, or on his bike. He felt it spreading exponentially, and it was both a gripping hurt and a fascination. It was as if he could see it in color, hear the cancer cells like notes, piling and growing on each other, a movement, an overture, a finale. He’d been lying in his bed, on his back, brittle as a bone, playing measures over and over, unable to stop. Borodin, Debussy. Handel’s Dixit Dominus, the soprano soloist answering the violins, a sinuous, winding conversation, lines like the floating of a feather, back and forth and down in soft stair steps, though air. Sometimes he played pieces his hands knew, but more often it wasn’t for piano, sometimes it was a bit of the Brahms requiem, the Zigeunerlieder, Hungarian gypsy songs. Back on one limb of his family tree, his father’s side, there had been Hungarian gypsies—they sang to him through the music, raucous, gorgeous voices. Sometimes it was Prokofiev, Verdi’s Macbeth, sometimes Aida. He hardly ever listened to recordings these days, his old turntable with the stylus that floated in a viscous mercury sea was off balance, and he didn’t want to take it in to the one shop left that repaired turntables in Fair Lawn. They would keep it overnight at least, and he needed it to be home, even if it wasn’t working. The music kept him up, effective
as the chattering of parrots; for all its lyricism, it broke his thoughts in an unbearable cacophony.
He didn’t know exactly what they were after when they came, but he did know he was safer playing the notes more logical than any conversation. They knocked on the door at eleven PM, a posse, a little flock of men with uniforms and nightsticks, with huge silver flashlights. He was wearing a gown, his mother’s, champagne silk, open in the back like a maw, and he saw himself in the mirror, so he tugged it to the floor, never mind that they might see through the stained glass. He grabbed his robe and wrapped it around his body, all bruise from within. The gown rested like a half-melted woman in the hallway. Perhaps he’d worn it for two days, though he didn’t remember putting it on, he rarely remembered putting it on, only that he was safer in his mother’s dresses, that he used them when he was most lost to anchor himself to the corporeal world. He hadn’t needed to leave the house after his Wednesday library trip; it had rained and he hadn’t felt like biking or walking, only drinking tea and playing his music or thinking his music, and what crime was there in not leaving his house? For a minute he thought they were coming about the dresses. But what crime was there in a dying man wearing his dead mother’s dresses? And who should care? He was almost old, after all. He was dying. He’d felt old for decades now, since his aunt was gone, older still since he lost the job, older still since he’d lost the order inside his body, since he was being consumed.
He opened the main door and they spoke through the screen.
“Mr. Leonard?” It was the one he knew, Beau, from around the corner on Pine, only there was nothing casual in his posture, nothing that made Mr. Leonard even think he might offer coffee to this man. The light was horrible, so he shaded his eyes.
“That’s a little bright,” he said.
“Oh, is it?” asked another one of them, whose chest was huge, pigeon huge, puffed, his voice too round for someone older than ten, Mr. Leonard thought. He held his beam closer, like a sword, like a challenge.
“That’s enough, Pete,” said Beau, lowering his own beam.
“Of course,” said Mr. Leonard. “It’s halogen, isn’t it? Or one of those mercury-vapor lights? You want to come in?” He was humming as he spoke. An old habit. The kind of habit that used to make people think he was strange. In fifth grade, humming the angry rhythms of Mars from Holst’s The Planets while he gave his report on the solar system. It wasn’t his fault; his mind couldn’t separate one from the other.
“We have some questions, sir. You know about this missing girl?” It was Pete. His beam was lowered, but still erect, an offending object, still threatening.
“Linsey Hart was my next-door neighbor,” said Mr. Leonard, suddenly alert.
Pete grunted. Beau shuffled, then stepped inside. Mr. Leonard backed up. The lights.
“I’d like you to sit,” Beau said to Mr. Leonard.
“I’d rather stand,” said Mr. Leonard, thinking that his robe had a hole where the belt loop was worn. Too much tugging taut over the years. They all gazed at the gown on the floor. They stepped around it. When it was off, it was ridiculous to imagine he had been wearing it.
“Sit,” said Pete, and gave him a little shove. It didn’t hurt. “Christ,” Pete punctuated Mr. Leonard’s collapse, and turned back to the hallway, tapping the dress with his toe. “What the hell is that?”
“A gown,” said Mr. Leonard.
“Calm down, Pete,” said Beau.
There were four men in his living room, and he looked at the piano longingly. He stepped past Beau and Pete and someone else, whose face he couldn’t see under the hat brim, hat still on, very rude of him, and sat on his bench, reaching the single safe shore in the house. He had no slippers, and suddenly his feet were very cold; his toenails felt as though they were freezing off his body.
“I don’t like that you said she was your next-door neighbor,” said Beau. “I would think you might say she is your next-door neighbor.”
“Christ, Beau,” said the third man from under his hat. “You gonna lead him or what?”
He had a high tenor tone; he sounded like a child. All these children in his house, at his piano. Mr. Leonard wanted to introduce their recital. Instead, he fingered the keys, not pressing enough to sing them. But he heard them just the same, the melodic line from The Damnation of Faust.
“I said was.” He was humming. Stop, he thought, but he couldn’t. Maybe they could hear him and maybe not. Maybe they heard the music and maybe they heard the words or maybe they just heard what they wanted to hear.
“Because she’s going off to college,” he finished. But it didn’t matter, Pete was holding up their search warrant, and the two men whose names he didn’t know were already moving things, his things, pressing their thick fingers between the spines of his bound scores, tearing at the records as if they might house something other than moments, something other than performance, something other than simple music.
“What are you looking for?” he asked Beau, who was gently opening the piano. He couldn’t bear that, it was like someone was prying open his mouth. Even Beau, who had sat at that piano.
“I’m not supposed to say,” said Beau, wincing as he dropped the lid on his own fingers. At least there was no wooden crash, thought Mr. Leonard.
“No,” said Mr. Leonard. “I suppose not, but perhaps I could help you if you told me.”
Beau considered this for a minute. “Maybe,” he said.
They weren’t going to find it until they told him, and they weren’t going to tell him tonight. What they were after was buried in the side yard beneath the slowly dying dogwood, wrapped around the tiniest of bones.
• • •
For a while, before his father died, Mr. Leonard thought he might be a composer. He was performing then, competing, medium-size gigs, but nothing beyond accompanying Met competition finalists in concerts in the park in the New Jersey suburbs, or his own big solo pieces in small college concert halls, his audience half retirees, half faculty, some of whom brought papers to grade while they listened. Once, he played at Nordstrom’s near Christmastime. He didn’t like that, felt oppressed by the stringent Easter lily perfume and the clattering of boot heels as they stepped off the bottom of the escalator, just missing the rhythm of the moving stairs. He’d called his father, because he started having music dreams, music he couldn’t identify, even by humming the bars over and over, which usually eventually found them their rightful names in the file drawers of his mind. He’d been teaching on and off at the Manhattan School of Music. He liked the intimate conversations with students in the tiny, mouse-and-cinnamon-scented practice rooms. Mostly upright pianos, mostly windowless rooms, so they had to make windows and light of the music. He hardly ever worked them through scales then, even beginners got simple pieces, because even at its worst, the beautiful bones of the music were better than the broken rhythms of simple scales, accompanied by the thunks and sighs of metal expanding inside the radiators.
“I’m thinking,” he said to his father, who was in Vienna, finishing an opera season. “I might go in a different direction.”
“South?” his father said. “Never trusted Florida.”
“No, I mean with the teaching.” Of course, his father was teasing. His father didn’t like to talk about Mr. Leonard’s music, only his own. He’d begin, and his father would overtake the conversation, as if they were in a race toward final punctuation.
“You know, those who can’t do—” He didn’t finish this old argument. Mr. Leonard never knew whether his father even wanted him to do, wanted to conduct his own son in some great Rachmaninoff concerto with the New York Philharmonic, standing ovations, no one could say there was any nepotism, Mr. Leonard having made it on his own, or whether his father would’ve been happier if his son had become an accountant, an orthodontist, anything but his own tortured successful road. Mr. Leonard knew his father took sixteen capsules every morning, heart pills, useless in the end, C and other vitamins, fish oil, Valium. He�
�d had the prescription since Mr. Leonard’s mother’s death, and he wondered whether his father had grown immune to the fog, because it never made him sleep, only move through the day instead of finding sticking points like flypaper in the corners of the room. The secret to his success.
“No,” he said. “I mean, I like teaching, and I have to pay the rent, but I’m having these music dreams.”
“Dreams of grandeur or dreams of measure?” His father breathed heavily into the phone, as if he was running in place while talking to his son. Mr. Leonard imagined the hotel room, ornate brass bed, thick brocade curtains, gold velvet upholstery, stainless, pine scented.
“Dreams of measure.”
“You have two choices, write it down, or do your best to forget,” said his father.
His adviser at Julliard told him he could take some more composition classes. He’d never loved them; he’d had one inspiring teacher at the beginning, then duds to follow, men trapped in their own simple rhythms, their own repeated tonics, I, I, I. Always leaning toward the minor keys, toward simple passions and dark clothing.
“No,” said Mr. Leonard. “I know how to write them down, and I can hear more than three or four voices, it’s orchestral. Not symphonies, I don’t think. Or maybe, maybe just movements.”
“You really need to take your time to become a composer,” said his former adviser, chewing a toothpick. Mr. Leonard used to love the stuffy little office where they’d gone over his plans semester after semester, but he was done now, done with the room, done with the soft arms of study. It was all his own heavy wagon now, the music.
When She Was Gone Page 9