At the third floor, the elevator stopped haltingly, bouncing them both on the balls of their feet. The doors slid open to show the familiar green walls, the chipped ledge and decorative mirror that marked each floor. A smell of frying onions.
They both looked out at the empty hallway and then she turned to him to say, “No one,” as if this were indeed a small mystery.
He stabbed the button once again. He had a thin face behind the large nose, and pretty, dark brown eyes with heavy lashes. He was younger than she, not even thirty, but he would have to be far younger still before she could say what it was that came into her mind to say: A girl would kill to have those eyelashes.
The door closed again and again the elevator shook itself and slowly rose. She tried to think of some small talk. (Because it was simply what you did. You made small talk, you commiserated.)
Her eyes fell on his hands again, so white against the dark felt of his hat. She watched them moving, involuntarily, rhythmically, one at a time and in no apparent order, and thought briefly of a friend of her brother’s who had come back from overseas with what they’d called Saint Vitus’ dance. But was this kid even old enough to have been in the war?
Suddenly she said, “Are you the piano player, upstairs?” For that was how she and John had come to refer to him, The piano player, upstairs.
He turned his nose to her again, warily now. “I play,” he said.
She nodded. “We hear you,” she told him. “My husband and I, we listen,” she said. Every evening from seven fifteen until nine and Saturday mornings eight to eleven, which she preferred, since they woke to it. “You play beautifully,” she told him, although the music was obscurely classical and, because there were no lyrics, unmemorable to her.
But the compliment was like a drop of water on the dry wool of his face. His cheeks seemed to soften, color, even swell.
“I hope it doesn’t disturb you,” he said.
She held out her hand, the thin string of the bakery box looped around her wrist. “Not at all,” she said, although three or four times now she had hung on her husband’s arm to keep him from banging the broom handle against the ceiling. “We enjoy it,” she said. And then, at a loss for a more substantial compliment, she added, “You must have some beautiful piano.”
They had reached her floor and once again he put his forearm against the door to hold it for her. “A Steinway,” he said, his tongue poked behind his lips as if to suppress a boastful smile.
Stepping out of the elevator she said, “Oh, sure. The factory over in Long Island City.”
“A baby grand,” he added with such sudden animation that she thought for a moment he might follow her into the hallway to say more. But the doors were once again butting against his arm.
“No kidding?” She smiled at him. He was very young. “How’d you even get it up here?”
He gave his smile the go-ahead, moving to put his shoulder, too, against the elevator door. “It was already there,” he said. “Someone left it behind. They didn’t want it. The super said they couldn’t even rent the apartment for a few weeks because it takes up the whole bedroom and nobody wanted to pay to take it out. Can you believe it? A Steinway.”
“Lucky that you play,” she said. She would have put her gloved hand to his cheek, patted it gently to temper his sweet and sudden enthusiasm, were it not for the way the thumping doors were sending rebukes from the poor souls waiting downstairs. She put out her hand again, the bakery box rocking against her wrist. “That would have been something to see,” meaning getting a baby grand piano from Long Island City to the tiny sixth-floor bedroom just above theirs.
Little wonder, then, that the next morning when she woke to the heavy run of scales that began his three hours of practice, she saw in her mind’s eye Laurel and Hardy waving their hats beneath a dangling baby grand, saw them catching their fingers in piano lids or pressing their cheeks against the broad rump of a Steinway as they carried it, nimbly wavering, up a long flight of stairs. Saw in her mind’s eye that delicious moment when Stan-a version of the piano player himself, when you thought about it-smiled the sweet self-satisfied smile that always preceded the double take, the panic, the inevitable disaster. (Down, down, down the keyboard he went and down, down, down in her mind’s eye went the poor piano.)
Images that stayed with her even as John woke and sighed and cursed a little under his breath before he lifted the hand she had already placed on his belly and took her into his arms.
And there was comedy in this too, in the musical accompaniment-the scales that drew them to their first, stale-mouthed kiss followed by the inept and repetitious beginnings of some vaguely familiar but as yet unrecognizable piece as they shyly (still) got out of their pajamas. And then ineptitude giving way, on all their parts, to a certain confidence, even grace.
Did he hear it, she wondered as she glimpsed her husband’s face through half-closed eyes and saw what was quickly becoming a familiar look: a kind of determined concentration, a grimace to the lips, and a far-off gaze to his eyes that marked a consummation that she was beginning to suspect turned him in on himself far more than it would ever turn him out toward her. She imagined it was akin to the look the piano player upstairs wore as he worked the keys, that kind of crazy-eyed focus on the task that could obliterate all distractions, even the very instrument under his hands. Does he even hear the music, she thought, arching toward him as he labored above her. Does he even see my face?
This was something she had never anticipated before she was married, the painful, physical struggle he seemed to wage with himself in the course of their joining. She had thought it would all be whispered endearments, only pleasantly breathless. She was surprised to learn that there was labor in it, pain and struggle as well as sweetness.
There was still more music to listen to after they had fallen apart. She thought she was beginning to recognize some refrain, or maybe he was just going over the same notes. With her eyes to the ceiling she said, “It’s a baby grand.”
Her husband turned his head on the pillow. He might have been startled to find her there. He frowned, and then hesitated, and then whispered, disbelieving, “You can tell already?”
There was one window in the corner of the bedroom, its sill worn to velvet, looking like velvet even in the weak, winter morning sun that came from beneath the wooden blinds and marked the new day. Another day. She grew giddy with laughter, convinced as she was, and would remain, that there was portent in his misunderstanding, that their child’s life had indeed begun at that hour. Their baby grand, first of four.
II
Either the wind kept them all away or the entire population took to heart the notion that the beaches were closed after Labor Day. In the deserted parking lot, on a Sunday morning that was only, after all, in mid- September, the wind moved a thin scrim of sand across the bleached asphalt, brushed it along the ground in wide, crossing arcs that thinned and ebbed in much the same way the beige sea foam thinned and ebbed at the edge of the beach that was just beyond the trees.
The wind took the sound of the slammed car doors, the slammed trunk, and sailed it off like a black scrap, over their heads, back toward the long highway and the crowded towns and the churches on shaded avenues choked with parked cars. It took their voices, too, but more gently. The parking lot was empty and so there was no need to cry out after the children as they ran ahead.
“Not a soul,” Mary Keane said to her husband, the wind lifting her words, tossing them gently back over her shoulder, the way it moved the colorful tails of the scarf she had tied under her chin. In her arms she had bundled a wool blanket and a tufted pillow and a stuffed bear, and her husband stepped in front of her to take everything from her arms at once, leaving only the bulge of her belly under the green canvas car coat.
“They’re all in church,” he said and saw the flush of guilt, or of wind, on her broad cheeks. The wind lifted his own thinning hair-those long strands he combed back over his crown-made it stand, briefly, on end.
Something done right-at least so far-this suggestion of his, whispered to the ceiling this morning, his hand on her thigh. That they skip Mass just this once and head to the beach.
Some weeks ago, a tropical wave had slipped off the African coast, as if (he’d thought, reading the account)
