The O Henry Prize Stories 2005

hurrying along a street downtown when a tubby, florid figure up the block began bouncing toward me, waving: el senor Alvear. He had on a beret and a muffler (no overcoat), and as usual he toted a wicker basket filled with bonbons. “Catch, catch!” he cried in his flugelhorn voice, and lobbed foil-wrapped candies at me.

Flushed, beaming, he bussed me on the cheek. “You’ve sent me a tycoon! The man has to have a full-size grand, no less.”

“You didn’t sell him one…”

“Anything larger than three-quarters was excessive, I told him. That only made him want to buy a full-size more.”

“A baby grand will do him fine.”

He cocked his head. “A smaller piano means a smaller commission for you.”

“Asi es.”

When I next stopped at Roberto's and Rosario’s, a Bluthner Aliquod baby grand loomed in the twilight of the living room. Rosario went to get me a glass of juice from the kitchen, where Lili was being given dinner by the maid. Roberto was talking on the telephone in the study. An odd dissonance charged the atmosphere. I sat down at the piano to try it out. Feathery action, pedals that yielded without the slightest creak, ringing tones in every range.

Roberto sauntered in. “How do you like it?”

“How do you like it, is the question.”

“Not bad for its size, I suppose.”

“But it's magnificent!”

“He knows it's magnificent,” Rosario said, stepping into the room. “He's just grumpy because he won’t be playing it himself.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, not for a while,” he conceded, chagrined. “My company bid for a job down south. It's so much bigger than anything we’ve done before, we didn’t think we’d win it. The word came yesterday. I’ve been put in command.”

“Everybody agrees that Roberto is the one best qualified,” said Rosario. “And it's such an opportunity. Still, what a wrench…”

“I’ll be marooned, away from my family.” Roberto made a gesture encompassing his wife, the Bluthner, me.

“You won’t quit practicing,” I growlingly admonished him.

“That I promise! Even if I have to use one of those mute keyboards.”

It was pouring outside. With his wet slicker and dripping curls, Miguel seemed to sweep the whole hectic vigor of the cloudburst into my apartment. From his sodden briefcase we extracted his music, damp at the edges. I brought him a towel, and he rubbed his crown into a spume of fluffy ringlets. “I have a message for you from Rosario,” he announced. “She's canceling her lesson tomorrow.”

Rosario had always notified me of such changes herself, and in good time. After weeks of specially assigned exercises, she had been eager to attack Scriabin's Prelude for the Left Hand.

“She's well?”

“Wonderful.” A manic treble suggested that he had shared a delicious secret with me. “She's gone to see Roberto,” he added, in the manner of one obliged to furnish a gross hint.

“Ah.”

“He's been away for over two months.” Then, as if discarding all restraint: “She needed to see him.”

“That's a long separation.”

Miguel couldn’t shake his itchiness. When he played, he hit many wrong notes. Suddenly he seized my arm: “She's pregnant!”

As soon as Rosario returned, I went to give her a lesson. She greeted me with news of her husband. An efficient housekeeper was fixing him wholesome meals. His project, though formidable, was advancing smoothly; if the weather continued mild, he would finish it on schedule. “And you’d be proud of him. He's rented a spinet: no matter how busy the day, he does scales for at least twenty minutes.”

I signed for her to sit down at the keyboard. She did, but remained motionless, looking straight ahead. Mainly to herself she said: “I missed Roberto. It was a mistake to sleep with him. Now he’ll inevitably presume… It will be that much harder to tell him. I’ll have to wait for the proper moment. Isn’t there some music about this?”

At the end of the session, I answered: “Transfigured Night. ” “That's it!” She brightened. “Schoenberg will be my patron saint.”

Rosario was one of those women who live on easy terms with pregnancy. Her condition remained almost imperceptible. A gossamer smile betokened the dreaminess that enveloped her and that seemed only to enrich her faculties. She devoured pieces as fast as I fed them to her, wanting to spend all her time at the piano when she was not with Lili.

Once he had made his disclosure, Miguel kept his own counsel- except for issuing the occasional contented sigh, and offhandedly mentioning his conviction that Rosario was carrying a boy.

I was early. The maid let me in. Believing that Rosario was not yet home, and tempted by the Bluthner, I began to toil over the Liszt sonata. I don’t recall how far I got before I became conscious of her standing in a doorway. She wore a look of horrified rapture.

“Please, don’t stop.”

“It may not be healthy for you to hear this when you’re…”

“I’ve never been stronger. It's now that I can face such things.”

I glanced at my watch. “We’d better start your lesson.”

The next week she told me that she had been listening to recordings of the sonata.

“Horowitz's version is all about Horowitz. Arrau conveys perhaps half of what's there.”

“Even that much is a miracle.”

“Then how to describe what you convey?”

“He has a vast repertoire. I don’t.”

She began a campaign to get me to perform the entire piece for her. Soon Miguel took up the same refrain. She must have spoken to Roberto about it as well: he wrote me a postcard appealing for a future “Liszt recital.”

That sonata is an intelligent, seductive cobra.

Rosario's labor commenced on a frosty afternoon about seven months after her initial visit to Roberto. In order to spare him anxiety, she put off alerting him until the last possible moment. Within a couple of hours, she was able to report to him that it was a boy, astonishingly robust. Ecstatic, he flew back on the next plane. His first impression: “The spit and image of Rosario!” The engineering project was so close to completion that he was able to turn it over to a partner and stay home to be with his son.

Miguel had accompanied Rosario throughout her accouchement. Inspired by his friends devotion, Roberto insisted that the baby's name incorporate both of theirs: Guelberto. Following some discussion, this became Gilberto, which quickly, via Gilbertito, contracted to Tito.

A few weeks after the birth, Roberto and Rosario held an intimate soiree where Miguel and I were the only guests-if one could apply that term to Miguel, a virtual member of the family in his capacity of tireless volunteer sitter, burper, bather, and diaper-changer. No sooner was my coat off than the two men bustled me into the nursery to behold the gurgling scion. Roberto urged me to offer him a pinkie: “He has the grip of a rock climber.” Miguel fussed with Tito's bedding and got him to smile. I noticed that he was neglecting his pose. Over dinner, he slipped back into it to act out the befuddled reactions of various hospital personnel who, on the night of the delivery, had taken him for Rosario's spouse and were at a loss to fathom how “this hysterical peacock,” as he described himself, could have managed to sire an heir. His mimicry had Roberto in stitches.

Rosario gave a recital in Roberto's honor, surprising him with Scriabin's Prelude and Nocturne for the Left Hand, along with several etudes by Kessler. Roberto, a stranger to all of these pieces, sat beside Miguel on the sofa, with Lili, in her nightgown, on his lap. His face assumed its satisfied cast. Miguel's was set in an identical expression.

Toward the tail of the evening, Rosario pulled me aside: “I don’t know how to laugh.”