Upright Piano Player (16 page)

“Since there’s no restriction on space,” she would reply, “why turn a message into a puzzle? Please, send it again in English.”

After Ocean Avenue crosses the Intracoastal Waterway it continues for about a mile before it reaches the intersection with U.S. 1. The road remains flat, but the neighborhood goes
downhill. The store signs are suddenly brash, anticipating the competition of the highway ahead. The local Hair & Nail, a modest business with four chairs and a permanent staff of two, optimistically announces itself with a two-story sign on top of its one-story building. Opposite, a fiberglass marlin leaps through the roof of a fishing tackle shack. Close to the road, the deli has rigged up enough neon to constitute a driving hazard.

Only two enterprises hold back. One is a florist’s where the grimy windows disguise the fact that what’s on offer is an Inter-flora service and not flowers, at least, not real ones. By the door, half a dozen silk blooms gather dust in a dry bucket. Like plain pets in a dogs’ home they have been waiting a long time for someone to take them home.

Next door to the florist, forming a little enclave of nonaggression, is an Italian restaurant. It is a family business that for thirty years has been content to let its food do its advertising. Nessa has booked a corner table for 8:00.

“Henry, why don’t you sit yourself in the middle, looking out. Jack and I have been here so often we
know
there’s nothing to see.”

The restaurant is catching its breath after the bustle of the early-bird crowd and not all the tables are taken.

“The hectic time here is between 5:30 and 7:00 p.m. The old-timers eat earlier every year. Soon the doctors will be advising anyone over sixty to get all their eating done before noon,” Jack explains.

Henry looks around the room. It’s true—apart from an elderly couple dining with a middle-aged woman, presumably
their daughter, the oldies have gone home and the crowd is quite young. The place feels intimate, the lighting soft, the once-white tablecloths laundered to a low-wattage gray. A tropical fish tank acts as a room divider, screening the diners from the reception area by the front door. Henry tells the story of a client who installed a £40,000 aquarium in his corporate lair. It took up the whole of one wall facing the client’s desk. The office joke was that the fish found it relaxing watching the boss work.

The story reminds Jack of Terry Cartwright, the owner of a recording studio in New York. He, too, had fish tanks around the place.

“Terry was a big guy, must have been three hundred pounds easy—a fabulous eater, who lunched at the same place downtown every day. He had this nickname, ‘Terry Two Cabs.’ Everyone called him that, not to his face, mind you. The story goes that his secretary had once sent a cab to pick him up from the restaurant at the usual time of half past two. At three, the restaurant had rung her asking if she could send another cab. They said Terry had eaten the first one.”

Henry learned that Jack had been an actor in New York.

“My career wasn’t distinguished, but it was consistent. When I wasn’t waiting table, I was waiting around.”

Henry had smiled.

“And then I lucked into doing some voice-overs—that’s how I met Terry. I was good at it. I could do accents and read fast. Pretty soon, I stopped going to auditions and just did radio commercials and voice-overs for television ads. It was well paid, but essentially a foolish business. If you’ve got any
brains you can only do it for so long. Maybe that’s why I lasted twenty years.”

Henry had always thought it strange that America, such a bold and swaggering presence on the world stage, liked its humor to be self-deprecating. Over the years he had run into countless Americans who had belittled themselves to raise a smile. It was often disarming, though he had soon discovered that it was not always a guarantee of humility.

“I know a little about it,” Henry said. “I feel sorry for the people who do it. It seems to me they usually get thirty seconds of time to accommodate fifty seconds of script.”

“Yes, that, and more. I’ve got some outtakes of a session Orson Welles did for Findus Foods. I’ll play it to you sometime. Orson hated doing it. Me, I just took the money. Lots of it. When I came down here, I didn’t need to work. I planned to be a tennis bum, but I got bored, so I bought a place where I could wait table again. How crazy is that?”

Nessa relaxes. She has eaten very little, but if the men notice they say nothing. The talk has been light, the subtext of the evening ignored. As Jack and Nessa confer about a dessert wine, Henry sees a slight commotion at the table of the elderly parents and daughter. The father is getting up, the women holding out restraining rather than helpful hands. The man persists, though he has trouble straightening his legs once he has hooked them from under the table. Once upright, however, he has no trouble walking. He is wearing a pale green corduroy suit, unique in this room of short-sleeve shirts
and chinos. It gives him an academic air, an impression that is heightened when he speaks. He has stopped at the table next to Henry’s, where two couples have been enjoying a boisterous evening as three bottles of red wine have followed two rounds of predinner cocktails.

“Would you mind keeping the noise down, please. We’re finding it difficult to hear ourselves think.”

On his way back to his wife and daughter, the man smiles at Henry as though Henry had been complicit in the complaint. There is a lull. The offending diners are stunned into silence, but only momentarily. One of the women says loudly, “Well at least we’re not all half dead.”

“Speak for yourself,” Nessa says.

“I’ve got something to show you.”

Eileen fished in her bag and brought out an envelope from Boots.

“I haven’t had a chance to look at them myself yet.”

Colin watched her carefully lift the flap of the envelope and take out the wallet of photographs.

He was sitting there fully dressed. As soon as the doctor came round and gave the okay, he would be free to go. He had been in hospital for five days, longer than anyone expected. He had reacted badly to the anesthetic. Blood pressure too low, or something. His arm was now in plaster from below his elbow to his fingertips. The blokes in the ward had wanted to scrawl a few greetings on his cast, but he had told them to forget it. If he had to wear the bloody thing, the plainer the better.

Eileen showed him the photographs, holding them up like the “show-and-tell” cards her mum had used with her little brother when he was behind with his reading.

“Next.”

They were all of him.

“Next.”

She must have taken the pictures the first night he was in hospital—while he was lying there, drugged up and well out of it. Given that the prints were from Boots, the quality was not bad.

“Just keep them coming, will you?”

She had used the anglepoise reading lamp on the bedside table as a light source and the screen around the bed to bounce the light back onto his face. Quite arty-farty. For one close-up she must have had the camera down by his chin, pointing up. His swollen black eye looked like a blue hill, the stitches on his eyebrow showed up as stunted trees against the skyline. She was a quick learner. The swelling had gone down a bit since then and the stitches were coming out in two days.

She was looking pleased with herself. “Not a pretty boy, then?”

“Yeah, you didn’t have to take a whole roll to prove that.”

“Well, what do you think?”

“I think you should stay your side of the camera, that’s what I think.”

He could tell she had used his Leica. It was the first camera he had ever owned; stolen it from the glove box of an Alfa when he was twelve. Normally he would have passed it on, but there was something about the way the camera felt in his hands, and he had decided to keep it. For weeks he went around with the unloaded camera clicking at this and that. The shutter action was so quiet it was like a spy camera. It went on from there; even when the thieving and temper landed him in various correction centers, he went on snapping.

Now he had three cameras—the Leica, a Nikon, and a Polaroid for the bedroom. He vowed he would never go digital.

He had met Eileen when he was doing an evening a week at the local camera club. Glamor shots. Most of the losers who turned up were pathetic—just there to poke their lenses into places they had no hope of poking their dicks. For him it was about money. Eileen had been booked as a model. She wanted to be the next Sam Fox, but she was better than that. Not as big, but better.

They had a drink after the session and he had offered to give her some help. In a month, she had moved in and they had been putting a portfolio together ever since. She was a natural, not one dodgy part on her body. Usually there was something to hide; if they had a great backside the face would make you throw up. Very few had a full deck. She would not let him do porn on a proper camera. It was fine on the Polaroid for them, but not for the book. He could wait. For the time being there would be money enough in the Page Three shots. Anyhow, the Polaroids had come in handy to wind up that freak in Chelsea. He had got that right. When he had looked in the window he had seen the paintings on the wall. The man obviously liked naked.

Whenever Henry was away, Mrs. Abraham found time to do a few little extras. Henry was a tidy man, but inevitably he left his mark on the house. There were splashes on bathroom mirrors, smudges on doors and cupboards from hands blackened by newsprint. In the kitchen she found smears of shoe polish on the floor and in the hall there were always kick-marks on the skirting board under the mirror. Mrs. Abraham noted the signs of Henry’s occupancy with a cold eye and cleaned up behind him. By the time she left the house at 1:00, only the clothes in the wardrobes would say that this was a house where a man lived alone.

When he traveled she did the things she could not manage in a normal week: shampooing the carpet, washing the paintwork, getting the curtains to the cleaners, or most fiddly of all, dusting the books. That Henry never noticed these ministrations did not discourage her. The enemy was dirt. It was her own private war.

With the books, she did a shelf at a time, starting with the top shelf and working down. It was obvious that Henry did not arrange his books logically or by category. Nevertheless,
she imagined that he had a system and it was not for her to question why a gardening book by a Russell Page should be next to a memoir of a life in the theater by a Peter Brook. She took great pains to ensure that each and every book went back to its pre-allotted space. In point of fact, Henry did have a system, based on the height of the book and the color of the book jacket’s spine. He avoided color clashes and blocks of a particular color and tried to space taller books at intervals across a shelf so there was a uniform look. If the spine proved too vibrant to fit in, he would simply throw away its dust jacket. He was slightly ashamed of this system and knew that the disposal of the jackets was financial folly.

Mrs. Abraham was at the top of the stepladder when the Polaroids slipped out of the book. As fate would have it, like toast, all three photographs fell butter side down. She came down the ladder still clutching the host volume of poetry and expected she would be retrieving some misplaced pictures of a young Tom or of a smiling Nessa.

She turned over the two close-ups first—so the final picture came as something of a relief. She realized that she had thought the close-ups were of Nessa. It was not that Mrs. Abraham was particularly shocked. Sex was sex and bodies were bodies and she had done enough laundry in this house to know that it had never been a convent. But for all that, she did not have Nessa down as someone who would open her legs for a camera, at least not with a straight face, so to speak. So who was this girl? Did Henry know her?