I Sailed with Magellan (36 page)

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Authors: Stuart Dybek

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We caught the light on Madison and crossed. In the middle of the block, a Salvation Army band played “O Come, All Ye Faithful” to the accompaniment of blaring traffic. The closer we got the more off-key the band sounded. The trumpet player, a gangly kid in wire-rim glasses, was the worst offender. His acne scars were violet in the cold, and his tone broke repeatedly like an adolescent's voice. I would have sympathized with him if each time he flubbed a note he hadn't blown louder. Beside him a tuba player oompahed a bass line that would have made him a natural in the Polka Gents. There was an old guy wearing woolly white earmuffs, thumping a bass drum with a matching woolly mallet, and a fellow with a beard off a Smith Brothers cough drop box playing an ice-cold-looking glockenspiel. They all looked cold,
and remarkably they all looked as if they were smiling, even the two brass players.
The woman's gait slowed as she approached them. She glanced at her watch, then joined the small group of people who stood listening to the carol. The band roused to a crescendo on “sing choirs of angels, sing in exultation,” and the trumpet player hit a flat note that had passersby shaking their heads, but he simply raised the bell of his horn higher into the falling snow and continued to play. Behind his thick glasses, his eyes were squeezed closed, and I noticed that the woman, too, had raised her face to the snow and closed her eyes so that the snowflakes crumbled on her lashes.
Amidst the small gathering, I had edged just beside her, closer than I'd dared before, close enough to catch the scent again. Inside my coat pocket I clutched the box of perfume, still waiting for the right moment. The carol hung suspended on the last refrain, drawing out the notes before raggedly collapsing to a conclusion. There was a smattering of glove-muffled applause and the tink of donations. She dug into her coat pockets as if searching for a coin, but came up with only a rumpled Kleenex. I took the opportunity to step forward, peel a bill from Uncle Lefty's wad, and drop it into the collection pot, and she turned, gazed directly at me, and smiled. Then, glancing at her watch again, she continued down Wabash, and the moment dissolved like the scent of her perfume as I watched her walking away.
 
I should have stopped right there and watched her disappear into the crowd, content with the acknowledgment of her smile, but the musicians launched into “The First Noel,” and suddenly it felt so lonely there listening to them by myself that I started after her again.
She was already across Monroe, and I had to cross against the
light and dodge through traffic. She stopped at the Wabash entrance to the Palmer House hotel, and a bellman with a luggage cart pushed by, momentarily shielding her from view. I sped up so as not to lose sight of her as I had in Field's, but she remained standing before the entrance, watching an airline bus with dark windows load up passengers while guests returning from shopping sprees bustled around her. A doorman in green livery, with a whistle piercing enough to carry over the roar of the El, hailed a Checker cab, opened the passenger door, and gestured toward her. For a second I thought she was going to get into the cab, and I had an impulse to rush up and toss the perfume in after her, though what I did was stand there frozen. Then another woman and a man, both dressed for the theater and laughing uproariously over some private joke, dashed past her and grabbed the cab instead. It swerved off into the snow, taking their merriment with it, and she turned as if a decision had been made for her, and walked through the entrance.
I trailed behind her past an arcade of shops, then up a broad flight of marble stairs to the vaulted lobby on the second floor, with its coral-and-green expanse of carpet. Mirrors and marble reflected the electric candlelight of the brass sconces. A Christmas tree, not the equal of Field's but magnificent all the same, rose up to a mezzanine. At a grand piano, a pianist rippled Christmas tunes as if they were Chopin. Gone was the bustle at the outside entrance, the lobby seemed serene. I was no longer one of a crowd on a snowy street. Since she'd smiled at me outside, I'd lost the camouflage of anonymity integral to my impossible schemes.
She went straight to the front desk and spoke with the clerk, then crossed the lobby to the elevators. For a moment outside the hotel she'd looked nervous, indecisive, a little lost. Now, she had that air again of someone absorbed in her own private world.
She stood alone at the bank of elevators, smoothing back her hair, then pressed the button and the doors opened. Had there
been a crowd waiting I might have squeezed in with them, but not with just the two of us. I didn't want her to look at me as if I was some weirdo. She looked out at me without the slightest hint of recognition. She was freshening her lipstick. I could imagine the elevator filling with her perfume. The doors slid closed. I'd been acting weird, but I knew what was really crazy was my feeling that I missed her.
I watched the ascent on the panel of lighted numbers. When the elevator stopped on the nineteenth floor and began to descend, I walked to the front desk. In the time it had taken the elevator to rise I had formulated my best plan yet, not just some fantasy but one I knew would work.
I waited while the desk clerk whom the woman had just spoken with gave an elderly guest a room key, then stepped to the desk.
“Can I help you?” the clerk asked, somewhat curtly, I thought. He had a way of enunciating that fit with the intimidating lobby.
“I want to leave something for one of your guests,” I said, suddenly conscious of my own enunciation.
“And that would be for whom?” he inquired, cocking an eyebrow.
He was dressed in a gray suit, his striped tie cinched so tightly against his white button-down collar that it made his face look flushed, as if he was slowly strangling. And then I recognized that particular flush, the capillaries purple and broken beneath the rawness of a close shave. I'd seen it often enough from childhood when I'd gone to the taverns with Uncle Lefty. It was the complexion of a drinker, and that boosted my confidence.
“It's for the woman you were just speaking with. The woman on nineteen. Could you just put this in her box?” I took the turquoise-and-gold box out of my pocket and placed it between us on the counter.
“And you are Mr.——?” he inquired.
“Mr. Perry. But it isn't necessary to include a name,” I hastened to add when he started writing it down. “She'll know who it's from. She's expecting it.”
“That's Perry with a
y
or an
i
?”
“An
i
, but no note needed, thanks. Just please place it in her box.”
He eyed the perfume suspiciously, as if I might be smuggling in a bomb. He still hadn't touched it.
“I'm afraid that's not possible, Mr. Perri,” he said, accenting the last syllable of my name as if it was the city in France.
“Why not?”
“I'm sorry to say, Mr. Perri, that hotel policy prohibits anything that might intrude on the privacy of our guests.”
“You don't take messages?”
“I'd be happy to take a message, Mr. Perri. Who is it for?”
“I explained that,” I pleaded, but I could see that pleading with this guy was the wrong tactic. “Look,” I said more confidentially, in a way I thought Uncle Lefty might handle the situation, “it's a surprise gift.” I thumbed what felt like five of the bills from the wad in my pocket and slid them, folded under my hand, across the counter.
“I thought she was expecting it,” the desk clerk said, but his voice was lowered and he took the bills.
“It's one of those surprises that you don't know you've been expecting until you get,” I explained, pushing the perfume toward him the way I'd slid the money.
The money disappeared as if by sleight of hand into his trouser pocket.
“I'm sorry to say, Mr. Perri, that as much as I would like to accommodate you, I still can't deliver your … gift.”
“But you took the money,” I whispered.
“Mr. Perri, for your kindness I
am
going to share privileged information. I cannot deliver this,” he said, his manicured fingertips nudging the perfume back to me across the counter, “because the lady in question is not a guest at this hotel.”
“Bullshit! I saw her going up to her room,” I said louder than I meant to.
“It wasn't
her
room that she went up to. Now please, Mr. Perri, don't require me to call security. Put this expensive little box that you got from God knows where back into your pocket and leave.”
“I see. Thanks,” I said, stuffing the perfume back into my coat pocket. I felt ridiculously obtuse.
“If you'll excuse me then,” the desk clerk said and turned to answer a buzzing phone.
I headed directly for the exit. I wanted to get back to the anonymity of the downtown streets.
“Mr. Perri!” the clerk called urgently behind me as if one of us had forgotten something.
I turned without stopping, walking backward.
“Happy holidays, Mr. Perri!”
I hurried down the marble stairway, through the arcade of shops that were shuttering their windows, and past the doorman warming himself inside the door and gazing out on the snowy street, where the traffic had thinned. Snow was accumulating on sidewalks and streets now that rush hour was over. It muffled the lights and the church bells chiming a carol. Perhaps the woman was looking out over the misted lights, watching it snow from the nineteenth floor and hearing the bells. They were probably the bells from St. Peter's. Far across the city, the snow by now would have drifted over the empty lawns of St. Adalbert, erasing a new grave. Grates were drawn over display windows, shop lights blinked out. Down the block, the Salvation Army musicians had disbanded. Almsgiving, like shopping, was over for
another day. I walked to Field's, but the revolving doors were already locked. Only a single door remained opened, where a guard was ushering stragglers out of the darkened lobby, and I kept walking, unable to return the gift in my topcoat pocket, unable to give it away.
The Coast of Chicago
Childhood and Other Neighborhoods
Brass Knuckles
Copyright © 2003 by Stuart Dybek
All rights reserved
 
 
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
19 Union Square West, New York 10003
 
 
Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincott
 
 
eISBN 9781429931441
First eBook Edition : May 2011
 
 
First edition, 2003
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the editors of the periodicals in which these stories have appeared: “Song,”
Harper's;
“Live from Dreamsville,”
Chicago Magazine
(as “Old Grandma's Rocking Chair”) and
The Pedestal
(as “I Sailed with Magellan”); “Undertow,”
The Atlantic Monthly;
“Breasts,”
Tin House
; “Blue Boy,”
TriQuarterly;
“Orchids,”
DoubleTake;
“Lunch at the Loyola Arms,”
The New ϒorker
; “We Didn't,”
Antaeus
;
“Qué Quieres,” TriQuarterly;
“A Minor Mood,”
The Iowa Review;
“Je Reviens,”
Harper's,
Thanks are also due to the anthologies in which “We Didn't” was reprinted:
The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction; Getting It On,
Soho Press;
The Best American Short Stories 1994,
Tobias Wolff, editor;
Prize Stories 1994: The O. Henry Awards.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dybek, Stuart, 1942-
I sailed with Magellan / Stuart Dybek.—1st ed.
p. cm.
I. Title.
PS3554.Y3I3 2003
813'.54-dc21
2003049052

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