by Unknown
“Or the store, would be better,” Michael told her. “I head over to the store around eight o’clock, generally.”
“Okay, the store. Thanks,” she said briskly. Then she got off the line.
Conversations with Pauline were like business dealings nowadays, very starchy and efficient. This was preferable to how it used to be, of course (the tears and recriminations, the clatter of slammed-down receiver), but it always left Michael feeling oddly rebuffed. He hung up himself but then stood there a moment, one hand still on the phone.
The summer program started on a Monday, which made things very easy. Pagan simply slept over at Michael’s on Sunday night, instead of going home as he usually did at the end of the weekend. In the morning Michael went to work, and at nine-thirty he walked back across the street to the parking lot behind his apartment building. Pagan was already waiting there, lounging against the passenger side of the car and plucking tentative chords on his brand-new, shiny, hopeful-looking guitar. He’d had a sudden growth spurt over the winter. He slouched as if he were trying to return to his former height, a shock of thick black hair screening most of his face, and when he caught sight of Michael he seemed to have to untangle his limbs from each other before he could straighten. “What ho,” he said—his new favorite greeting, picked up who-knows-where. His voice was in that in-between stage, grainy and unpredictable. He wore blue jeans and an oversized T-shirt, more holes than fabric. Michael hoped the Maestro School didn’t have a dress code.
The car was already too hot for comfort, smelling of sunbaked vinyl; so they rode with both front windows open and the air conditioner blowing full blast. Michael had to shout to be heard. “You know where, exactly, this place is located?”
“Nope.”
“Would I turn north on Falls Road, or south?”
Pagan shrugged and plinked out a guitar chord.
“Didn’t you go there to check it out? Take a tour or something?”
“Nope.”
“Well, how did you hear about it?”
“Some friend of Grandma’s, I think.”
Michael took a chance and turned north, heading past a cluster of worn stone buildings and then through leafy green woods.
Much sooner than he had expected, they passed a white sign lettered in crayon tones of red and blue and orange, THE MAESTRO SCHOOL FOR THE ARTS, it read, GRADES 9-12. EST. 1974. “Damn,” Michael said, braking sharply. He took a left into a driveway, reversed, and cruised back toward the turnoff. It was no wonder he’d overlooked the place. All he could see was trees, no buildings whatsoever. But after several hundred feet of winding, rutted dirt driveway they came upon a huge old frame house with a placard reading MAESTRO SCHOOL! WELCOME! swinging from the porch eaves. Several cars and a pickup truck were parked in the packed-earth yard. A girl who seemed left over from the sixties sat in the porch swing piping on a flute. In spite of her studied pose—the curtain of straight blond hair cascading to one side, her filmy skirt flowing dramatically to the tips of her bare feet—Michael was affected by the sweet sound of her flute. When they had climbed the porch steps he refrained from asking her for directions, not wanting to interrupt the music. “We’ll just see if we can find somebody in charge,” he said to Pagan. He opened the screen door and stepped in, followed by Pagan, who carried his guitar between his thumb and two fingers.
In the front hall, dark and unfurnished, papered with cabbage roses and smelling of turpentine, they paused to take their bearings. A bearded man dressed all in black was leaning against the far wall whispering over a sheaf of papers. “Excuse me,” Michael said, and the man looked up. He was wearing a gold ring in one ear—something that could still take Michael aback. “Can you tell us where the music students should report to?” Michael asked.
“Just down the hall. The big room at the end.”
“Thanks.”
Michael couldn’t help glancing into doorways as they passed. He saw easels, a stack of two-by-fours, a little thicket of music stands. A woman in jogging shorts—another parent, he guessed—and a teenaged girl stood talking with an old lady who wore a vibrantly patterned dress with a South American look to it.
He and Pagan seemed headed toward an assembly room of some sort, if the rows of folding chairs he glimpsed through the double doors were any indication. Just before they reached it, though, they passed a little room in which a piano was playing. The tune was gentle and measured, as delicate as a trickle of water, so that Michael found himself hushing his footsteps in order to catch each note as it fell precisely into place. He stopped, finally. Pagan kept walking. Through the door to his left Michael saw a woman sitting at an upright piano with her back held perfectly straight, not the slightest curve to it, and her hands placed absolutely level on the keys. He couldn’t see her face; just her hair, smooth brown hair descending to her white collar where it turned under evenly all around in what he believed was called a pageboy.
“Pageboy.” The word startled a memory out of him—a picture of a young woman pressing a handkerchief to Pauline’s forehead—and he said, “Anna?”
She stopped playing and turned and then smiled, unsurprised. “Hello, Michael,” she said.
“Anna, what are you doing here?”
She laughed. She let her hands drop away from the keys. He could see now that she was older, but she was one of those women who look basically the same as they age, adding only a faint line here, a gray hair there without changing in any fundamental way. “I’m the piano teacher,” she said.
“Well, what a coincidence!”
“Not so much as all that,” she said. “Who do you think told Pauline about our summer program?”
“She never mentioned it,” Michael said. “Gosh, I . . . what a shock! I thought you lived in Colorado or someplace.”
“Arizona,” Anna said. “But I left there after my husband died.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
“And I’m sorry about your divorce,” Anna said.
“Oh, that’s okay. I mean . . . Well! It’s good to see you!”
“You, too. I hope your grandson will like it here.”
“I’m sure he will,” Michael said. “So. Well. Okay, goodbye!”
She sat there smiling at him, her posture faultless, hands crossed palms-upward in her lap, while he waved and backed out of the room and stumbled down the hall to find Pagan.
Anna Grant. Well, she wouldn’t be Grant anymore, of course. He didn’t know the name of the man she’d married—had never even met him, and couldn’t remember hearing of his death, although surely Pauline must have mentioned it. Pauline’s friendship with Anna had dwindled into one of those distant, annual-Christmas-card arrangements, and whenever she said something like, “Oh! This is from Anna! Look at how big her daughter’s grown!” Michael would just grunt and go on opening bills.
And yet . . .
And yet, in some part of his mind, Anna had always stood for the way things might have been if he had chosen differently. Not that he could literally have chosen Anna. She had never given him a glance; he scarcely knew her; they had exchanged maybe half a dozen sentences in their lives. But more than once during his marriage, on those occasions when Pauline had been at her most exasperating, Anna was the woman he had envisioned as her alternative. Anna would never smash a coffee cup in a temper! Anna wouldn’t rip up his newspaper when she thought he wasn’t listening to her! Or burst into tears in public, or spend his money on frippery, or wake him from a sound sleep to ask him if he loved her!
Sometimes he fantasized that at the very end of his life, he would be shown a sort of home movie of all the roads he had not taken and where they would have led. Suppose, for instance, he had listened to Sister Ursula in ninth-grade science class and decided to be a doctor. If somehow he’d found the money, won a college scholarship . . . and then the movie would show that during his second year of medical school he had volunteered for a drug experiment in order to help with expenses, and the experiment had backfired and he had
died at twenty-four. Or had not volunteered, and gone on to discover a cure for cancer. Or had joined a medical mission to deepest Africa, where . . . Oh, all these forks, forking again and yet again!
Suppose that on that day in 1941 when the three girls brought Pauline into the store, he had fallen not for Pauline but for Anna. Suppose he had been smart enough, wise enough, to prefer the quieter, calmer, less exciting girl, and they had started an intelligent conversation about the war, the state of the world . . .
In which case, he might not even have enlisted. It was Pauline who had led him to enlist, with her patriotic enthusiasm that he now recalled as unbecoming fervor. Well, no doubt he would have been drafted anyhow, sooner or later. But he and Anna would have had a mature and considered courtship, and they would have married in a dignified ceremony and produced children who were . . . oh, more related to him, somehow.
He had laughed at himself for these notions. He had given a little huff of a laugh all alone in a room. But still, from time to time he had indulged in them.
Pagan began to practice a whole new style of speech. “Right on!” he would say, at every conceivable opportunity, and “Personally, no,” or “Personally, yes.”
“Would you like another ear of corn, Pagan?”
“Personally, no.”
Michael gathered that this was the way people talked at the Maestro School. Also, “Some of us do; some of us don’t.” Or “Some of us are; some of us aren’t.”
“Will you be spending this Sunday night at my place, Pagan?”
“Some of us will; some of us won’t.”
“What is that supposed to mean?” Michael exploded.
Pagan just raised one eyebrow—another recent development.
And his clothes; oh, Lord. Leather sandals with no socks—for a boy!—and baggy drawstring pants without a front fly, for heaven’s sake, and an influx of new T-shirts (though somehow they already looked old) advertising names like the Band and James Taylor. James Taylor was his hero. Pagan would sit on Michael’s couch, not on the seat but on the back of it with his bare feet tucked between the cushions, and languidly strum a few chords and sing in a nasal drawl about him and his guitar always in the same mood, or don’t let him be lonely tonight, or never been to Mexico but sure would like to go. He had a chrome-hinged black guitar case now (evidently it was considered gauche to carry an instrument naked, even if one’s sole form of transportation was a Buick Regal sedan), and this too looked old, in spite of its staggering cost, because he had plastered it with bumper stickers and might even (Michael suspected) have given it a few purposeful kicks and scuffs. From the looks of it, you would think he’d spent decades hitching around the country playing for free drinks in seamy bars.
Anna said he had talent. She said that Mr. Britt, Pagan’s teacher, had mentioned how quickly he caught on to things.
“Well, I don’t know where he gets it from,” Michael told her. “The Antons have never been musical.”
They were sitting on the front porch at the school. Michael had noticed her in the porch swing as he drove up into the yard and he’d told Pagan, “Guess I’ll go say hello to Mrs. Stuart”—referring to her in this formal style because both last week and the week before he had invented reasons to come inside when he dropped Pagan off, and he didn’t want Pagan getting any ideas. “Why don’t I meet this Mr. Britt of yours,” he’d said to Pagan the first time, and “Let’s have a look at your practice room” the second. On both occasions Anna had seemed pleased to see him, had greeted him graciously and appeared to have no trouble finding conversational topics. She’d inquired the first time about his old store, whether it still existed, and asked where he lived now and how he liked it and described her own living arrangements (a house just off Falls Road that she was renting with an option to buy). Their second encounter took place after she had learned that her daughter was coming for a visit, and that provided all kinds of material on the subject of children in general. “Of course, now, Lindy,” Michael had said, “our oldest . . .” and he had paused, not certain how much Anna knew.
Anna had said, “It must be hard not to have any idea of her whereabouts.”
“Yes,” he’d said. “You never do get used to it. It seems you ought to, but you don’t.”
She had nodded but asked no questions. She wasn’t a prying kind of person, he’d noticed.
Now Michael toed the porch swing back and forth as they watched the students arriving—long-haired teenagers wearing ragged shorts or those absurd drawstring pants, and the dancers (a separate species) all angles in their clingy black leggings that must have felt miserable in this heat. Anna herself wore what amounted to her uniform—a white cotton shirt, short-sleeved to show suntanned arms lightly dusted with freckles, and tailored slacks, gray today, and flat black oxfords. “Elizabeth gets here tomorrow,” she was saying, “and it didn’t occur to me till this morning that I’ll have to plan some kind of meatless meals. She’s a vegetarian.”
“We had one of those for a while,” Michael said. “Karen. Our youngest.”
“Did Karen eat seafood?”
“Nope. But she ate dairy.”
“Elizabeth eats seafood, at least. So it won’t be all that difficult. In fact I may just pick up some crabmeat tonight if I have time after work.”
“Why don’t I bring you some,” Michael said.
She hesitated.
“We’ve got great crabmeat at the store,” he said. “Trucked in fresh every day. I could pack a pound in crushed ice and deliver it to your house.”
“Well, that’s awfully nice of you, but—”
“And then maybe you could invite me in for a drink.”
She studied him for a moment—long enough so that he felt the need to backpedal. “I mean, not that you’d be obliged to,” he said. “I would still bring you the crab even without the drink.”
“I’d be delighted to give you a drink,” she said, “but you’ll have to let me pay for the crab.”
“I couldn’t possibly.”
“Then I couldn’t possibly accept it.”
They looked at each other.
“How about this,” Michael said. “I don’t let you pay for the crab, but you would fix me dinner.”
Her smile deepened; it seemed to be concealing laughter.
“What,” he said.
“If I fix you dinner I’ll have to go grocery-shopping first,” she said. “So I might as well just pick up a pound of crabmeat while I’m there.”
“No, wait!” he said. “Okay, I take it back. How about two drinks? No supper, but two drinks. Three?”
Both of them were laughing now. “Three drinks!” she said. “How would you drive home? All right, you bring the crab, I won’t offer to pay, and I’ll send out for Chinese.”
“It’s a deal,” he said.
Behind them, the screen door opened and Pagan said, “You’re still here!”
“Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” Michael asked.
“Some of us are; some of us aren’t,” Pagan said, and he let the screen door fall shut again.
Anna lived on a tiny street a mile or so south of the school. Her house was a plain white clapboard, the narrow, tall, peaked, rectangular shape of the hotels in a Monopoly game, with a patchy front yard and overgrown shrubs. When Michael rang the doorbell she appeared immediately, looking somehow more put together—freshened up in some way—although she wore the same shirt and slacks he’d seen her in that morning. “Crab man!” he said, singing it out like a street arab, and he held up the plastic bag with its knobby, ice-filled bottom.
She took it from him and said, “Why, thank you,” and then, peering down inside, “Jumbo lump! You didn’t have to do that.”
“None but the best for grown daughters,” he said.
But what he really felt was, none but the best for Anna.
He followed her through a living room furnished with decent but elderly furniture and into the kind of kitchen he hadn’t seen in years—a
n expanse of rubbed-down blue linoleum, a sink on porcelain legs, a round-cornered refrigerator, and a huge electric range that must have dated from the forties. A person could have roller-skated in that kitchen; it was so large and spare. “Nice,” he told Anna, who was putting the crab away.
She must have thought he was joking, because she laughed. He said, “No, I mean it. Look at that counter! No mixer, no blender, no toaster . . .”
“I’ve moved around so much,” she said, “I haven’t had a chance to accumulate many belongings.” She shut the refrigerator door and turned to face him. “What can I get you to drink?”
“A beer would be good, if you have it.”
“Of course,” she said, and she opened the fridge again. The beer she took out was imported, fancier than he was used to. He wondered if she kept it for herself or for someone else. Was there a man in her life? This past couple of weeks he had been picturing her alone, complete unto herself, but how likely would that be for a woman as attractive as Anna? She was pouring herself a sherry now, moving in a slow, fluid way that reminded him of the dance students at the Maestro School.
In the living room, they settled at either end of the couch and then she said, “Oh! I didn’t ask if you wanted a glass.”
“I’m just an old Polack, remember?” he said. “I drink my beer from the bottle.”
He never referred to himself as a Polack. It must have been the influence of this house—its comfortable air of not trying too hard, not needing to try, taking its own gentility for granted. His mother’s doilies and crucifixes and even Pauline’s “modern” furniture seemed so earnest by comparison. He took a sip of the beer, which had a denser taste than his usual brand. “Where is it you’ve moved around to?” he asked. “Just Baltimore? Or all over.”
“Mostly out west,” she told him. “When Paul died Elizabeth was only ten, and I knew I’d have to get a job, so I went to Idaho where my in-laws lived. Then I taught at a school in Cleveland until it closed, and then in Albuquerque. And now here I am! I feel lucky. Faculty positions in music aren’t easy to find.”