Ghost Music (22 page)

“What's wrong, dude?” he asked me, as we sat at the bar, waiting for a lane to come free.

“Who says there's anything wrong?”

“How long have I known you? Usually, I can never shut you up. Tonight, the only thing you've said is, ‘where the hell did you get those yellow pants?' Oh—and, ‘excuse me, miss, there's some kind of bug in my garlic broccoli.'”

I didn't know what to tell him, so in the end I told him the truth. I even told him about Pearl and the painting.

He listened intently, occasionally raising his gingery eyebrows. When I had finished, he said, “Why worry about it?”

“I can't help worrying about it. It's all so goddamned inexplicable.”

“Sure it is. But most of life is inexplicable, isn't it? The simple truth is that we don't have the time to understand everything that happens to us, do we? We have to take some things at face value, no matter how wacky they are. Once, when I was going through the Orlando airport, I saw my grandpa standing in line for a flight to Seattle. I hadn't seen him in about five years. I was going to go up and say hi when he put his arm around this elderly Chinese lady who was standing next to him, and gave her a kiss like they were husband and wife. The year after, he died, and I never found out who that woman was, or why he was going to Seattle with her, and I didn't dare to ask my grandma.”

“Maybe your grandpa was a bigamist.”

“Sure, maybe he was. That's pretty much the same as being in two different places at the same time, isn't it?”

* * *

When I returned to my apartment that evening, Kate was waiting for me on the landing, with Malkin in her arms. She was wearing the same gray button-through dress and she looked even more pallid than she had before.

“Where have you been?” I asked her. “I've missed you. I've been worried.”

I bent down to kiss her but she half turned her face away and I ended up kissing the top of her ear. I opened up my front door and let her in.

“I knocked on your door a couple of times, when Victor was out.”

“You shouldn't. I'll never answer.”

“Why not? Have I done something to upset you?”

“No, of course not.”

She sat down in one of the armchairs with Malkin in her lap. It certainly appeared as if something had upset her, even if it wasn't me. She kept glancing around the room, and she wouldn't look at me directly.

“We don't have as much time as I thought,” she said.

“Excuse me? Time to do what?”

“We only have six or seven weeks or so. Maybe less.”

“You're doing it again,” I told her. “You're speaking in riddles.”

“I've told you! I don't have any choice! I can't make accusations, even if I wanted to!”

“Accusations against who? Accusations about what?”

“You don't understand!”

“Too right I don't understand! Maybe I'm just natural-born dumb! But I can tell you one thing—I'm not deaf! I heard you and Victor the other night, yelling and screaming and throwing the furniture around! How long do you think I can put up with that?”

For the first time, she turned and stared at me. “You
heard
us?”

“I'm surprised the whole goddamned neighborhood didn't hear you! You sounded like you were wrecking the place!”

She covered her mouth with her hand. Then she said, so quietly that I could hardly hear her, “You heard us. My God.”

“Kate, for the umpteenth time, tell me! What is it with you and Victor? Why can't you just walk out on him? He's going to do you an injury one day. Or worse.”

Kate stood up, so that Malkin had to drop out of her lap onto the floor. “I'm sorry, Gideon. I can't do this. I thought I could, but I don't think I have the strength.”

I took hold of her wrists. She still wouldn't look at me directly. “Kate, listen to me. You
can
leave him. I'll take care of you. I won't let Victor do anything to you. I won't even let him
near
you. You can stay here or we can go to my parents' place or even find ourselves a hotel.”

She shook her head. “It's impossible.”

“Nothing is impossible if you have enough determination. You don't have to worry about money. You don't have to worry about getting a lawyer. One of my best friends is a partner in Lukas, Daniel and Roland, and, believe me, he's a
shark
.”

“No, Gideon. I'm so sorry. But if you feel like this, it's not going to work.”

I tilted her chin up so that she had to look at me. Those rain-washed eyes looked darker than ever. “What you're saying is that you don't really love me.”

“All right, if that makes it any easier for you. I don't love you. I never did.”

“You don't mean that.”

“Yes, I do. You're boring, trite, and you're full of yourself. Just because you can tinkle out some catchy little jingle about toilet freshener, you think you're some kind of modern-day Mahler.”

“You're absolutely right. I am, and I do. But I can only do it so brilliantly because of you. And you're not fooling anyone. You
feel the same way about me as I feel about you. Maybe
more
, even.”

Malkin was rubbing against Kate's legs, so Kate bent down and picked her up.

“Have a nice life, Gideon,” she said, and walked toward the door.

“So that's it?” I asked her.

She turned her head and there were tears in her eyes. “Let's just say that I misjudged you. It's my fault. I expected too much of you. Just because you have so much music in you. Just because you can see things that nobody else can see.”

“Kate—”

“I'm sorry, Gideon. I don't know why I thought it could work. It was selfish of me. I never thought about you. I never asked myself if you were strong enough to take it.”

“Kate, for Christ's sake.
Please.
”

“Good-bye, my darling.”

With that, she left my apartment and went downstairs. I stayed where I was, waiting to hear her door close, but all I heard was the muffled sound of Pearl's television, and the distant scribble of a police siren.

I went to the window and looked out. The day was still gray, and very still. I had never felt so sorry for myself in the whole of my life.

Over three weeks went by. We had an early snowfall, and across the street, kids were running around the park, throwing snowballs and pulling plastic sleds behind them.

All I can remember about those three weeks is darkness. Every day the sky was overcast, and if the sun appeared at all, it was only as a dim crimson disk behind the Franks Building.

I had been commissioned by CBS to write the incidental music for a new courtroom-style quiz show called
Asked and Answered
, and I had signed a contract with the DDB Agency for six new Diet Pepsi commercials. But all of my inspiration seemed to have walked out of the door along with Kate. I sat at my keyboard for hours, tinkling random minor-key melodies, but they were all too discordant for TV jingles. You can't sell Diet Pepsi with music that makes you cry.

The best piece I wrote was a soft, sad song about walking through a snowstorm, trying to catch up with the woman you love. As the snow falls thicker and thicker, she disappears from sight, and you can only follow her footsteps. Gradually, however, her footsteps are obliterated, too, and you have lost her forever. I called it “Snow Blind.”

I drank too much zinfandel and spent hours staring out of the window, hoping to see Kate coming down the steps, or walking in James J. Walker Park, across the street. Knowing that I would never be able to kiss her and hold her in my arms again made me
feel as if my stomach had been completely filled with lead, like a cold casting, and I had a dull metallic taste in my mouth.

When I was awake, I kept thinking over and over: why did she lose faith in me? Why did she think she was asking too much of me? She had told me more than once that I had vision and sensitivity and resonance. She had said I could make her friends come to life. So what did she think I was lacking?

It couldn't be trust. I had trusted her, hadn't I, even when she seemed to be talking in conundrums? I had stayed in Stockholm when she had asked me, even after I had seen things that would have turned my hair gray, if it hadn't been gray already. I had followed her to London, and seen horrors and pain and mysteries that seemed to have no logical connection whatsoever.

Maybe she thought I didn't have the stones to do what she was eventually going to ask me. But I had already witnessed more weirdness than most people get to experience in the whole of their lives, and even if I was baffled and confused, I was still reasonably sane, and I wasn't so frightened that I wanted to back out altogether. Why had she taken it as a sign of weakness that I had wanted to know what in God's name was actually going on?

When I slept, I had nightmare after nightmare. In one, I was running through the Westerlunds' apartment in Stockholm, trying to catch Elsa and Felicia as they fled along the corridors in their nightdresses. In another, I was hammering with my fists on our bedroom window in London, while Helena Philips stood in the yard outside, blazing from head to foot, her eyes staring and flames leaping out of her mouth, so that the skin of her lips blistered and curled.

In yet another, Kate and I were making love. As she climaxed, she threw herself backward and screamed, so that the chandelier exploded and our bedroom windows burst inward. We were deluged in glittering glass splinters, and our bed was turned into a bloodbath.

Every morning I woke up and put out my hand, even though I knew that Kate wouldn't be lying next to me. Every morning I eased myself out of bed like a man twice my age, feeling as if I hadn't slept at all.

I stopped playing music in the evening, in the hope that I could hear Kate's voice coming up through the floor. But all I ever heard was Victor, talking too loudly on his cell phone or arguing or singing along with Tony Bennett. Either that, or Tony Bennett himself, singing “I Wish I Were in Love Again.”

Now and again I heard the red-haired woman. Almost every time she left the house, she seemed to forget something, because she would slam the front door behind her, and then immediately unlock it again, and slam it again, and then go out a second time, with yet another slam. When Margot was with me, and the redhaired woman left the house like that, she always said, “slam, bam, thank you, ma'am!”

Margot helped me a lot through those days. She would come around, and make me a sandwich, or one of her pasta dishes, but she didn't try to cheer me up, or take my mind off Kate. She knew that I was hurting and that only time would heal what was wrong with me, not jokes.

One day I would feel angry with Kate, for taking me for granted. The next day I would feel angry with myself, for having allowed her to do it. The day after, I would simply feel lonely, and depressed, and I would sit playing “Snow Blind” over and over, and singing the lyrics in a whisper.

“The snowflakes fell so thick and fast

I couldn't see where you had passed

You left me far behind

So many miles behind

Snow blind . . .”

One evening I sat on the stairs outside the Solways' apartment for nearly three hours, hoping that Kate might come in or out.
Victor arrived home shortly after 10:00
PM
. He gave me an odd look and said, “Gideon! How are you doing, sport?”, after which I gave up waiting and climbed wearily back upstairs.

I thought of writing to her, or recording a message on a CD. In the end, I did both, but the letter was too long and read as if it had been written by a lovesick high school student. The CD was better, especially since I played “Snow Blind” on it, as well as telling her how much I missed her. I addressed it to
Mrs. K. Solway, Strictly Confidential
and put it into the Solways' mailbox. I was taking a risk that Victor would open it, and play it, but who gave a shit? I had lost her anyhow.

One snowy morning, a little over a week later, I looked out of the window and saw Victor leaving the house, with Kate close behind him. I called out,
“Kate!”
although she couldn't have heard me, and I knocked on the windowpane. This time, though, she didn't look up at me, the way she had when I very first caught sight of her.

Victor stopped at the bottom of the steps and tugged on a pair of black leather gloves. He didn't say good-bye to Kate, or even look at her, but started to walk briskly toward Hudson Street. Kate turned left, in the direction of Seventh Avenue, and it was then that I saw that she was carrying a wrapped-up bundle inside her overcoat. It was a baby, in the same blue knitted bonnet that I had seen before, with earflaps. I couldn't see its face.

“Kate,”
I said, although no sound actually came out.

I ran downstairs in my socks and opened up the front door. I took the steps three at a time. I jogged along the sidewalk a little way, until I realized that I couldn't see her. She had vanished into the snow, just like the woman in my song. Maybe she had hailed a cab, or a friend had picked her up.

A black man overtook me. He was wearing a huge padded coat, with a padded hood, so that he looked like a quilt on legs. He turned around and stared at me in my T-shirt and my socks, and there was such pity on his face that I almost felt sorry for myself.

I climbed the steps back into the house and it was only then that I realized that my socks were soaked.

* * *

I saw her again two days later. I was climbing out of a taxi after a meeting on Madison Avenue when I saw her walking diagonally across the park, in her overcoat and her gray woolly hat. I pushed twenty dollars into the cabdriver's hand and said, “Keep it.” Then I dodged across the street and into the park. This time I was determined not to lose her.