The Borrower (5 page)

“You found me out,” I said. He had big shiny teeth. He held out his hand.

“I’m Glenn,” he said. “I’m the penis.”

“I’m sorry?”

“The pianist. For tonight.” He nodded toward the empty grand piano in the corner.

“
Oh.
” Which explained the tuxedo. “I’m Lucy.”

He glanced casually but not very subtly at my left hand. “Actually—I normally play percussion with the St. Louis Symphony. I think this is called slumming it.” He laughed, and the bartender handed him something brown with ice. “Are you a librarian?”

“We’re easy to recognize.”

“No, not at all—I mean, you just look younger. Than some of these people.”

“Thank you,” I said, and he finally exhaled. I told him where I worked and how little I enjoyed these events.

“I was a librarian once. At the music library at Oberlin, as an undergrad. My main job was to erase pencil marks from the last season’s orchestra scores. And then as soon as I was done, they’d wrap up their next set of concerts, so I could never actually finish.”

I laughed. “I spend much of my day erasing crayon marks.”

“Hey, a lot of books would be improved by a little crayon!” Pretty lame, but I’d give it to him. He’d already finished his drink. “Usually I get to people-watch while I play, but I see they’ve turned the piano to the wall tonight.” He glanced at a man in a cheap suit and apron who was jutting his chin toward the piano and tapping his watch. Glenn put down his glass and dried his hands on the cocktail napkin. “Damn. I always freeze my hands right before I have to play.” He put them up to his mouth and breathed on them. He was attempting to lock me in some sort of twinkly, hypnotizing eye contact, and it was working. “Any requests?”

“Something to make them give money.”

He laughed. “I’ll work in ‘Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?’ Hey, listen.” He took a deep breath, as if I didn’t know what always came after the words “hey listen.” “I’m rushed here, and like I said, I won’t get time to mingle tonight, but I’m actually premiering a piece next weekend. Or, this orchestra is premiering
my
piece. It’s jazz though, really, not at all boring. You should come.” I raised my eyebrows and nodded. “I mean, I’ll be up on stage and everything, but there’s a party after that.”

“I might be up for it,” I said.

He took a business card out of his pocket, wrote a street address and “Starr Hall, 3:00, Sat., Dec. 3” and his number, and put it in my hand. He lifted my hand up toward his face and for a moment I thought he was going to kiss it. “Do you pray?”

“I’m sorry?”

“Do you play. Piano.”

“Yes.”

“I thought so. Good fingers.” He grinned over his shoulder as he walked to the bench, his teeth white as his shirt.

I turned and saw Rocky staring at me from where he’d stationed himself by the olives. “The great thing,” he’d said to me once, “is that since no one feels comfortable approaching me, no one feels awkward if I’m alone at a party. They think it’s my natural state. So I don’t have to worry what people think of me, and I get to sit there and observe.”

“You do
not
mean that,” I’d said. “And people
don’t
think that, either.” Watching him now, I realized they did. But there must have been a time, in grade school, at least, when it was the opposite, when children gave him all their attention, whether good or bad. I wondered when the switch happened.

My glass was empty, and as the bartender refilled it I vowed to slow down. I scratched quickly and ferociously at the backs of my thighs. My rash was worse, even though I hadn’t worn shorts or a skirt for over a month. I knew it was that desk chair, though, because now my back was red, too, right up to my shoulder blades.

There were four men standing near Janet Drake, but the one straight across from her had to be her husband. He was a head taller than everyone else, and his eyes seemed to follow a frantic fly around the room. None of the other men, with their broad shoulders and belly laughs and booming voices, could be described as effeminate. Mr. Drake’s face was scrunched into what he must have thought was a wry smile, but it looked more like he was trying to condense his entire face into the space right between his eyes. He appeared to be giving short answers or opinions every few seconds, bobbing his head forward quickly like those plastic birds that dip themselves into the water glass. He was as out of place in the room as the librarians, despite his tan and his necktie full of semaphore flags.

I wondered if Sonya would let Ian stay up to finish
Treasure Island
.

Glenn started at the piano. He was good, not just the adequate party player who can rip off a twelve-minute Andrew Lloyd Webber medley. He sounded like he had at least forty fingers.

My second drink was half gone. I left the bar and headed toward Rocky, but Loraine caught me by the shoulder. “I saw you talking to people!” If I’d moved, she would have fallen down.

“Great party!”

“Yes, and you need to be ON. Tell them about the
PROGRAMS
.”

“Okay,” I said, and wiped her spittle off my cheek. I looked over to check that Rocky was catching this, but he was suddenly busy with the olives.

“And stay away from that angry woman. Don’t make things worse.”

“Okay.” I ducked out from under her hand, and the sudden absence of my shoulder sent her lurching across the floor toward a woman with an enormous sapphire necklace. Really, the more I drank the more tempted I was to walk up and lecture Janet Drake on the First Amendment. I loved the thought of her complaining to Loraine the next day that Sarah-Ann Drummond had accosted her at the party.

The rest of the night was a gin-flavored blur: dry tuna steak and soggy asparagus with a table of nine Hannibal socialites who couldn’t stop talking about the Leukemia Ball, a slurred speech from Loraine about “gifting our precious resources to our local libraries,” two hours of unexplained silent treatment from Rocky, and some superstealthy drunken spying on the Drakes. Halfway through dinner, Janet answered her phone, wrinkled her brow, said something to her husband, then laughed out a charming Daisy Buchanan explanation to the table and left the party, leading her husband by the hand. The one word I could make out with my superior lip-reading skills was “babysitter.” As in, “Our son has whined the babysitter into calling us and making us come home.”

I left a little early myself, and if Rocky wasn’t going to talk to me, he could find someone else to help him into his van afterward. I wanted to ask him what was wrong, but underlying all my interactions with Rocky was the remote fear that he would suddenly tell me he loved me. I didn’t know if it was true or not, and I had convinced myself that it probably wasn’t. But the thought had occurred to me about a year back, and unlike most imaginary conversations I had with people in the mirror, I couldn’t think of a good ending to that one.

On the way out, I put a dime on Glenn’s piano along with my phone number.

When I parked back home, I could tell that the actors were still in rehearsal: no lights on upstairs, extra cars in the lot. The building (redbrick, two towns north of Hannibal) was home to the George Spelvin Memorial Theater, and I was neighbor to its five full-time company members, all of questionable mental health.

One of the original actors had owned the building and willed it to the troupe. So there was no official superintendent, just Tim the artistic director with his short blond ponytail. I’d seen him tacking up flyers for the open apartment on the lobby bulletin at the library one morning, after I’d lived for a year in an expensive apartment in Woodward that smelled like buttermilk. I didn’t say anything to him then, but on my way out of work I tore off one of the little orange tags at the bottom of the paper. I’d seen him tearing off the first three himself that morning. I called the next day and he showed me the place that night.

“The walls are superthin,” Tim had said as I followed him up the world’s narrowest staircase. “But we’re all in either rehearsal or performance every night, so it should be quiet when you get home. Of course,” he said, turning around, scratching his head, smiling, “I don’t know what performances sound like from up here.” His teeth were yellow. His face was tan, but with thin untanned lines spreading from his eyes and mouth where wrinkles would later appear, as if he spent all day grinning into the sun. He started climbing again. “My own apartment is the one right next door,” he said, “and my partner, Lenny, is usually up here in the evenings, but he’s quiet. He’s the only one who isn’t an actor. Don’t even ask me what he does, I don’t even know what it’s called. There are numbers involved.”

“I really don’t mind noise.” I had made the mistake earlier of telling him I was a librarian. We came to what would be my door. “I work in the children’s section. It’s not like some great sanctuary of calm.”

The apartment was tiny and ancient, with loud hinges, and the kitchen was lined with heavy wooden cupboards. It smelled like cigarettes. The bathroom mirror was not a cabinet. I wrote him a check right there, holding it against the wall because there was nothing else to write on, and he was so happy that he picked me up and carried me out the door.

It was a good place to live. I could use the washing machine in the costume room, and I could get in free to the plays and even bring friends. I just couldn’t run the dishwasher or flush the toilet between six and eleven, and I couldn’t wear shoes in my kitchen, since it was right above the stage. Occasionally, I’d worry that Tim and Lenny were in the middle of some horrible domestic dispute, only to realize they were just running lines.

That night, though, as I collapsed onto my mattress still dressed, I could tell something was off. The rehearsal was so loud I could hear it from upstairs. I could sometimes hear plays when my windows were open to warm weather and the sound came through the wonky old vents and bounced off the bakery next door, but it was November. And late. And the play was
Uncle Vanya
—not usually a raucous affair, aside from the gunshots. Half an hour later, I was still awake and the noise was louder, coming up the stairs, and then someone was banging on my door.

When I opened it, Tim practically fell into the room. There were at least twelve people behind him—the actors and the sometimes-actors and the stage crew and Lenny—all laughing hysterically, but instinctively trying to keep the noise down, as if there were anyone left in the building to wake up. Tim said, “Oh my God, Lucy, were you asleep? We’re so sorry!”

“No! I just got in!” I don’t know why I was always so anxious to prove I wasn’t one of
those
librarians, the ones who had left the benefit early to feed their cats.

“We need your help! You and only you! And you can’t tell!” He lay down on my floor, limbs splayed like a starfish, and the others poured in behind him, one carrying a dingy wedding dress.

Apparently, Beth Hopkins, the red-haired actress who lived right above me, had left town right after rehearsal and needed to be revenged for some past prank involving the prop table. They had spent the past two hours replicating every photograph in her apartment with themselves as the subjects, taking on the same poses. So her brother shaking hands with Senator Glass would be replaced in its frame by Tim shaking hands with the assistant stage manager. Tim showed me that one on his digital camera—they’d both donned suits and were standing on the stage. “Lenny can change the background with his computer!” The woman who was currently playing Yelena cradled a baby doll in another shot. They had done fifteen photos already. They were hoping it would take Beth Hopkins several days to notice the changes.

Lenny showed me a framed photo he’d carried in with him. “This is you, okay?” It was a bride and groom, dancing in a ballroom. “You look
exactly
like this woman. Don’t you think? You both have that sort of Audrey Hepburn tiny-person thing, but with the long hair, right?”

I didn’t have much choice—and by now I was laughing too, caught up in the theatrics of it all—and so I ran to the bathroom to put on the dress, still musty from whatever production of
Much Ado About Nothing
it had last been washed for. When I came back out, feeling only slightly creepy and Miss Havisham-y, they had moved my coffee table and TV to make room for the crowd scene. I posed, dancing, with Lenny, whose complexion came closest to that of the Asian groom in the photo. Someone had put Ella Fitzgerald on my stereo. Tim held the camera and directed us all, telling the fake wedding guests to look happier, to cover their faces a little if they could, telling me to step more in front of Lenny and gaze into his eyes.

They got three or four good shots, then ran off to shoot some sort of night scene on the roof. I was strangely deflated when they left. It didn’t feel quite right to invite myself along, and I had to work the next morning, but I still felt somehow that these were my people—these crazy, brave, and unapologetic souls—and yet, as useful as I’d been as a prop, they had failed to scoop me up and adopt me, to recognize me as one of their own.

They’d mistaken me for a librarian.

T
here are two possible explanations for the gift Ian gave me that December. One is that he knew only subconsciously what he was doing. The other is that he was making a conscious cry for help. But I don’t believe it could have happened by chance. Was it Freud who said there’s no such thing as a mistake?

It was December first (“The first day of Advent!” he announced), and he came clomping down the stairs, tracking ice chunks and salt to my desk. He reached into his coat pocket and handed me a complicated piece of origami, made of white paper and decorated in red and green marker around the edges. I held it up and tried to decide what it was, but I knew better than to guess out loud. The last origami he’d given me was supposed to represent Elvis’s head.

“It’s a Jesus!” he said. “In a manger!” Ian’s glasses were covered in steam, so I couldn’t even see his eyes, just his enormous grin.

I turned the paper so it looked like a small bundle lying on an upside-down trapezoid. “Oh, I get it,” I said. “This is beautiful! Thank you!”