Louisa

by Simone Zelitch

  Her face was pressed to the glass, and her paste-white knuckles looked like teeth. He tried to give her a look of desperation; he was a man, he couldn’t help it, that sort of thing. But she gestured him outside, and he managed to down that final shot before unsteadily appearing in the doorway.

  She gripped his hand. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing,” said Gabor. “What time is it now? I had no idea.”

  “Are you afraid to go home?” Louisa asked with knife-like earnestness.

  “Nothing’s wrong. Honestly, Angel, why are you here? I thought I sent you to copy my manuscript.”

  “But you don’t even have a coat,” Louisa replied. In fact, she’d somehow changed into street-clothes and what must have been her father’s overcoat lay over her quivering arm, smelling of her so strongly that he shrank back from it, and she saw it and trembled, red-faced and clumsy, and sputtered out, “I tried to find you—all day—to give it to you—and now you—”

  “Hey, hey,” said Gabor. By now, they were walking together, and the liquor made him feel at odds with his own body, as though, try as he might to shake her off, he only got more entangled until he almost stumbled over his own feet and found her sticky arms around him.

  “The coat—take it,” she whispered. Her voice was full of wonder now because it caught up some of his own breath. To his appalled surprise, Gabor had kissed her.

  Louisa went limp. Bracing his back on the lamp-post, Gabor managed to pull the two of them to something like an upright stance, and then he spoke hoarsely. “Go home.”

  “It’s—” Louisa began.

  Gabor cut her off with a push backwards. “I’ll take the coat. Go home before you’re missed.”

  Louisa’s face was brilliant now. She turned to go. Yet she couldn’t help herself. She had to turn and say, “Eva told me—translated—you must know, Gabor, you won’t lose this. You won’t lose me.”

  Those words, expelled with obvious effort, were the last she said before she turned and ran. The twilight was frosty. The whole day had been cold but he hadn’t noticed until now, and he buttoned that reeking coat and looked after Louisa as she ran, fleeting between lamp after lamp like a bit of ribbon. He rubbed his head and wondered if he could find a trolley.

  5

  IF GABOR HAD TAKEN a trolley home to Prater Street that night, he would have arrived drunk. I would have been slightly appalled, but I would have forgiven him, worked off his shoes and socks, and helped him into bed. I would have asked no questions; there would have been no need. We’d never lied to each other. But Gabor walked. The five kilometers he walked were hardly direct, though increasingly determined, as cold air wore down his intoxication.

  By the time he arrived, he was sober. I was, of course, awake. I’d hardly slept. The ashtrays were full; the dirty coffeepot was cold; the heater was broken. What was the sense? He gave me a nod; his face looked unnaturally flushed and his hands shook, but he didn’t falter as he took a cardboard suitcase out of the wardrobe.

  I asked him, “Going somewhere?”

  He seemed to bear me no ill will. His tone was mild enough when he said, “I meant to tell you. Somehow there hasn’t been time. I found a room with a friend, almost rent free.”

  “You have a room here. Rent free,” I said. “Come on, Gabor. Put the suitcase away. Tell me what happened.”

  “I’m almost twenty,” he said, as he threw this and that into the case. “I can’t stay here forever.”

  “I wouldn’t ask you to. Where is this room?” I asked him. “Take winter clothes for God’s sake, Gabor. Take some of your father’s sweaters.”

  “They’re full of holes.” Then he turned to me with unexpected tenderness. “You really ought to move out, Momma. It would give you an excuse to clean out the closets for good, get rid of all these old things.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked Gabor.

  “Sweaters, papers, those stupid drawings I made when I was a kid. Throw them away.”

  That was when I was supposed to ask him about what I’d found on the floor, but I could not bring myself to begin that conversation, so I only said, “That’s why you’re leaving? Because I’m untidy?”

  Gabor picked up the suitcase and said, “My flatmate plays the clarinet.”

  “What do you want me to say, Gabor?” I asked him. “Do you want me to play the clarinet?”

  “I’ll leave you my address,” said Gabor.

  Then he did something surprising. He kissed the top of my head. His breath smelled of pálinka.

  “You scare her, you know,” he said. “The German girl.”

  He left then, and I lit another cigarette and listened for the closing of the door below. Then, I watched him through the window, walking off with that suitcase. He must have been exhausted. What was his hurry? What might I smell on him? I walked around the dinosaur of a flat with its greenish, lumpy walls, its warped floor, the gas leaking from the stove. It had been the flat, no doubt, that scared Louisa. Now, empty of the prospect of Gabor’s return, it swelled. What were the rooms like with that mysterious clarinetist? I doubted they existed at all.

  BUT THE ROOMS DID exist. In fact, he got a full night’s sleep there, and in the morning, a Monday, he met Louisa at school and told her about his new digs. She was delighted. Though of course, he added, there was no question of her visiting. Too small and too appalling. And the piano—

  “There’s a piano?” Louisa’s voice hit a shrill note. Gabor, walking a careful distance from her, managed to reproduce the piano in a way that wouldn’t offend her vanity. It was an old, clunking upright, though, of course, it was better than nothing. Now he could work at home. Louisa broke in: “There are wonderful pianos at the Academy.”

  “Angel, face it. I can’t get real work done there.” Whether Gabor referred to limited time or some other force of nature, who could know? A clever young man, my son; he managed to hold off on the address of his new room for so long that Louisa felt too ashamed to ask. He promised he would meet her after school. It would be wonderfully vigorous, after composing, to walk to the gate where girls in green jumpers clustered like the leaves of wild violets.

  “It’ll be too cold soon,” Louisa said. She added, “You won’t come.”

  Gabor didn’t give those words the benefit of a denial. He said, “I expect you’d track me down.”

  Louisa felt his statement to be a rebuke, but what could she do? He appeared again on Tuesday and on Wednesday. Louisa kept running ahead and rushing back again. He caught himself in time to push her out of the way, knowing her face held the memory of that kiss.

  The first afternoon Gabor didn’t meet Louisa, she found the lodgings. She didn’t say how. He was, to all appearances, glad to see her. The slight hadn’t been deliberate, he said. He’d just lost track of time. She brought a sack of apples, past their season now and rather mealy. She looked out of place in the room. The clarinetist was cooking macaroni on a hot plate, and there was music paper thrown everywhere, and the window didn’t close all the way, which was for the best because the central heating turned the air to lava. Still, Louisa smiled stoically and leafed through the sheet music on the piano.

  “What’s this?” she asked. It was a handwritten copy of three songs by Duke Ellington.

  “Something I’m working on,” Gabor said, not exactly a lie. He’d hoped to earn a little cash playing in clubs.

  “Is it for Dramatic Soprano?”

  “Angel, stick to Schubert.”

  “Old Schubert?” Louisa giggled then and said, “Professor Lengyel looks a little like him, you know. All chin and forehead. What a clown!”

  “A powerful clown. He can make a career for you, you know,” said Gabor. “When are you leaving for that tour?”

  “Oh that. Not for ages. Besides, it’s not even completely sure I’ll go,” Louisa said. “Really, the other girls will be the ones who get to show off. They’re such divas.”

  Gabor took the pink ribbons from Louisa’s h
air, and two heavy locks fell on either side of her face. He shook his head. “You’re not diva material. There’s no pretense. That’s the miracle of it. There’s nothing but that voice.”

  He knew he shouldn’t have touched her or said a word of encouragement because afterwards she stayed for hours, sharing the macaroni and margarine, though she ignored the clarinetist, and expressing opinions on art and music which he realized, as though in a dream, were things he’d said to her months before.

  “Now you must go,” Gabor said. “Tibi has to practice, and besides, it’s late.”

  Louisa seemed prepared for this. “I won’t go at all until you let me sing the Lied.”

  “Let the girl sing,” Tibi the clarinetist said from his bed.

  Gabor spoke dully. “You’ve got the only copy.”

  As it turned out, she’d brought along a surprise: three clean copies in a hand so tidy and precise it brought on a chill. On the piano rack, in the dimmish light, he hardly recognized it. Before he could protest or fully prepare himself, he was seated at the piano forming the initial chords, and she sang the Hungarian words.

  What is lost, what is lost

  We can not have back again.

  It is like a breath we’ve taken.

  We can not breathe it again.

  It is like good bread we’ve eaten.

  We can not eat it again.

  It is like a heart we’ve broken

  Or our own heart, lost in vain.

  Was it the same song? What had she done? Somehow, his hands built up the common melody and over it soared her voice, like light on water, swift and heartless. The high notes poured out of that girl with the loose hair and the empty face, and when she drew a hand to her throat, Gabor thought he would be sick.

  By then, it was well past ten, dead dark and very quiet. Gabor raised his hands from the piano and rested them behind his neck. “They’ll be wondering where you are, Lu. You’d better go.”

  “Aren’t you glad I came?” she asked him.

  “Of course,” said Gabor, though too quickly. “I’m glad.”

  Louisa wanted more, he knew. She didn’t move, but in her voice was the ghost of that second voice, the voice she sang with, not hesitant or modest. She asked, “Haven’t I earned a kiss?”

  Gabor didn’t rise from the piano bench, and without otherwise touching her, he kissed her on the lips. Then he got up and led her to the door. “You’ll miss the last trolley.”

  “No, I won’t!” she said. She was an awkward girl again, racing down the stairs two at a time as though Gabor could take that kiss away.

  Both men sat, saying nothing, for a while. Then, Tibi rose from the bed and scraped hardened bits of leftover macaroni onto brown paper. Without looking at Gabor, he said, “I didn’t know you composed.”

  Gabor said, “We all have hidden talents.”

  “That girl’s awfully young,” Tibi said. He walked to the piano and picked up the copies of the song. “She’s got a pretty voice, though. The real thing. It almost justifies what you did to that drinking song. And what was that text you adapted? It can’t be yours. Awfully sentimental.”

  “It suits her. She’s a sentimental girl,” Gabor said. “Not like the dancer I met yesterday. She lives in the back of a candy store. Nice to indulge two tastes at once.”

  “Didn’t you save any candy for your old friend?” Tibi said, laughing. He liked my son; he was happy for the company and an excuse to stop thinking about his own troubles. “I suppose now you’ll take up dancing, like a Russian.”

  “I,” said Gabor, “am going to be a fighter pilot and fly faster than the speed of sound.”

  The clarinetist set the music down, and taking up his own instrument, played a riff rather in the same style as the song. As he played, Gabor dressed down to his boxers and climbed onto the half-broken couch by the window. Cozy and well-exerted, he slept easily, as his companion practiced to make up for the time he’d lost that night.

  THE NEXT MORNING, the clarinetist left for his office job and Gabor was putting on his socks and considering if he ought to go have a coffee, when Louisa arrived. Again, she brought apples, and this time also bread and cheese arranged in a neat, white basket. The next day, she came again and stayed. It became necessary to dress and wash before nine and leave the flat before she arrived. Then, she started coming later, when he’d already returned, or earlier, when even the clarinetist was asleep.

  Once she was there, Gabor was forced to tinkle at the piano and scratch a few notes on paper. She would watch him as she peeled apples, sliced cheese, and stretched her long slim legs on the couch. Under her gaze he actually rewrote most of Ellington’s “Satin Doll” and added three more measures of a swing number he’d heard on the radio, and then he hid them both in case she’d see them and, God forbid, try to sing them. Sometimes he’d just sit, thinking about anything but music; the overheated flat brought oily sweat to the roots of his hair, and his legs cramped under the piano, and not for a moment, as far as he could tell, had Louisa stopped staring.

  He asked once, “Don’t you go to school?”

  “What good is school?” Louisa asked him. They were sitting on either end of the couch, and she had just peeled him an apple. The skin was on her skirt.

  “Well, really,” Gabor said, “you’re just a kid.”

  “I’m not,” said Louisa. “I don’t sing like a kid.”

  “You’re barely sixteen.”

  Louisa shifted herself up the couch and said, “I’m not a kid.” Then she gave a bounce, and said again, “I’m not,” and she liked the way the couch creaked so she bounced again and again, singing out: “I’m not, I’m not, I’m not!”

  “Quit it!” Gabor shouted, moving to stop her, as the couch rocked and the contents of the basket tumbled everywhere, but Louisa was delighted and she called:

  “Listen to it—it’s singing, singing, singing!”

  Then the couch gave way, and Gabor’s head cracked against the floor, and in a white flash of pain, he was aware that half of him was caught against splintered wood and the other half against Louisa, whose moist, bare, scented arm pressed on his cheek and whose head was somewhere at his armpit. She laughed and laughed, her mouth vibrating like a soft harmonica, and through the spring and crossbeam, Gabor was conscious of his illogical erection. And what could he do then? Tell me, what?

  Under such circumstances, Gabor told Louisa, he found it difficult to work. He’d see her at school, every afternoon. And, she asked, what about during the winter holiday? That was years away, Gabor insisted. It was best they didn’t meet every day in his room. Tibi had been kind about the couch and together they’d repaired it as best they could, but he did hint that perhaps Gabor ought to pay some rent, or at least share the grocery bill. Louisa said she understood. But the next day there were her three quick knocks, and she stood in the doorway with bread, cheese, and apples.

  “I’ll just leave it here,” she said. “You have to eat.”

  Then she’d look up with those pink cheeks and those sorrowful, excited gray-blue eyes, and he’d have to give her a kiss goodbye, which was no hardship. But she’d clamp one hand inside the doorway like a shoehorn, and invariably they would lurch inside, crack would go Gabor’s head against the wall, and that slim, strong girl would wedge herself into that moment of vulnerability, and what could he do then? Another day lost, which he could not, at heart, begrudge her.

  One morning, as he bent to tie his shoes, his skin prickled. Three heartbeats later, he recognized Louisa’s three knocks.

  Gabor did not so much as breathe. Three more. He could even make out the sharpness of the knuckles. After a very long time, he heard her footsteps as she walked away. He lay back with an old book on Dutch painting and didn’t look up until Tibi appeared at the door with the basket in his hand. He ate all the apples at once so that when he picked Louisa up at school he could tell her how much he enjoyed them.

  “I was out for a walk,” he said. “I couldn’t get
a thing done so I went to the Academy to look for you. Then I ran into an old friend.”

  “Male or female?” Louisa asked, flirting bravely, though she must have felt some new note in the conversation.

  “None of my friends can match your voice,” Gabor said, and there was enough sincerity in his declaration to allow Louisa to blush.

  She said, “Why won’t you let me sing your song for Professor Lengyel?”

  Gabor begged off with words about Lengyel’s narrow mind, and the argument was so old that he could speak his part by rote and felt comfortable enough to walk her home. But this time, just as they reached their usual corner, she pulled him against her and buried her mouth in his neck. She whispered, “Come down with me?”

  “Where?” Gabor asked.

  “You’ve never seen the cellar.” Her modulation told him she had practiced saying this. “It’s dark there.”

  Gabor felt a shiver run through him similar to what he’d felt when she’d presented the three copies of the manuscript. They stood below a bare chestnut tree now, the Bauer house in plain sight, and Gabor felt so embarrassed and exposed that he actually pulled his coat closer. “It’ll be cold there too,” he said.

  “It’s a coal cellar.” Louisa’s voice faltered now; there was something moving in her, this young girl who’d propositioned him outright, and Gabor felt her hand slip into the pocket of his coat and drop something there: a key. “I could meet you tonight,” she said, even less certainly.

  Netted by anxiety, Gabor made certain promises that he didn’t keep, and that night he went to bed very early, with the shade drawn and the covers over his head.

  He dreamed of the cellar. It would smell like old blankets and its grainy darkness, like the darkness of the blanket, would smother him. Fleeting, white, enormous, spreading, Louisa pursued him through the heaps of coal, leaving a trail which smelled of scented soap and apples, and into the coal-dust Gabor sank slowly and by degrees, first his feet up to the ankles, then his knees, and soon he was wading through coal-dust. He woke up with the blanket in his mouth.