Thunderstruck & Other Stories (5 page)

“I know,” she said, in a grande dame voice. Then she sighed.

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“It’s more daunting moving back in than I’d thought,” she said.

“But you’re all right.”

“I found the dishcloths,” she said. “And the desk.”

“And the birth certificate?” he asked.

“Yes.” More silence.

“Why don’t I come over this evening when I get back,” he said, “and I can—”

“Yes,” she said. “That would be nice.”

He’d imagined a woman who looked spun on a potter’s wheel, round and glazed and built for neither beauty nor utility. Unbreakable till dropped from a height. Her daughter the small blonde gone to seed. But the door was answered by a woman as tall as him, 5′10", in her late sixties, more ironwork than pottery, with the dark hair and sharp nose of her granddaughter. She shook his hand. “Stony, hello.” Over a flowered T-shirt she wore the sort of babyish bright-blue overalls that Berlin workmen favored, that no American grown-up, he had thought, would submit to. They showed off the alarmingly beautiful curve of her back as she retreated to the kitchen. Already she’d dug out some of the old pottery, and found a new tablecloth to cover the cigarette-burned oilcloth on the dining-room table.

“What I don’t understand,” she said. In each hand as she turned was a piece of a salad spinner: the lid with the cord that spun it like a gyroscope, the basket that turned. Her look described the anguish of the missing plastic bowl with the point at the bottom. His own salad spinner was waiting in a box in the new apartment. It worked by a crank.

“Who packed the kitchen?” she asked.

“I did,” he said.

“What I don’t understand,” she said again, “was that these were in
separate
boxes. And the bottom? Gone.”

“Oh,” he said.

She gestured to the wooden shelf—Murphy-Oil-Soaped and bare—by the window. “What about the spices?”

“That’s my fault,” he said, though before he’d come over he’d Googled
how long keep spices
and was gratified by the answer. He could see them still, sticky, dusty, greenish brown grocery-store spice jars, the stubby plastic kind with the red tops. He’d thrown them out with everything else that had been half used. “I got rid of them. They were dirty. Everything in the kitchen was.”

She shook her head sadly. “I wiped them all down in May.”

“Sally,” he said. “Really, I promise, the kitchen was dirty. It was so, so filthy.” Was it? He tried to remember, envisioned the garbage can of flies, took heart. “Everything. It’s possible that I didn’t take time to pick out exactly what was clean and what wasn’t, but that was how bad things were.”

She sighed. “It’s just—I thought I was moving back home.”

“Oh,” he said. “So—when did you move out?”

“Four years ago. When I retired. Sure. Carly grew up here, she didn’t tell you? I was always very happy in this house.”

“No,” he said. He’d thought they’d moved ten years ago. Twenty.

“Listen, I have some favors to ask you. If you could help me move some furniture back in.”

“Of course,” he said.

“There’s an armchair in the studio I’d like upstairs. So I have something to sit on. I was looking for my bed, you know. That really shouldn’t have been moved.”

“I said, I think—”

“It’s all right. Amos made it. He made a lot of the furniture here—the shelves, the desks. He was a potter.”

“I’m so sorry,” he said, because after Pamela died, he promised himself that if anyone told him the smallest, saddest story, he would answer,
I’m so sorry
. Meaning,
Yes, that happened
. You couldn’t believe the people who believed that not mentioning sadness was a kind of magic that could stave off the very sadness you didn’t mention—as though grief were the opposite of Rumpelstiltskin and materialized only at the sound of its own name.

“That asshole,” she said. “
Is
a potter, I should say.” She looked around the kitchen. “It’s just,” she said. “The bareness. I wasn’t expecting that.”

She turned before his eyes from an iron widow into an abandoned wife. “I figured you were selling the house,” he said.

She scratched the back of her neck. “Yes. Come,” she said in the voice of a preschool teacher. “Studio.”

It was raining, and so she put on a clear raincoat, another childish piece of clothing. She even belted it. They went out the back door that Stony had almost never used. In the rainy dusk, the transparent coat over the blue, she looked alternately like an art deco music box and a suburban sofa wrapped against spills.

The doorknob stuck. She pushed it with her hip. “Can
you?” she asked, and he manhandled it open and flicked on the light.

Here it was again: the table covered with pots, Picasso dancing, though now Picasso was covered up to his waist in mold. The smell was terrible. He saw the art he’d brought out nine months before, which he’d stacked carefully but no doubt had been destroyed by the damp anyhow. He felt the first flickers of guilt and tried to cover them with a few spadesful of anger: if it hadn’t happened to her things, it would have happened to his.

“Here everything is,” she said. She pointed in the corner. “Oh, I love that table. It was my mother’s.”

“Well, you said not the basement.”

“You were here for only nine months,” she said. She touched the edge of the desk that the blue pots sat on, and then turned and looked at him. “It’s a lot to have done, for only nine months.”

She was smiling then, beautifully. Raindrops ran tearfully down her plastic-covered bosom. She stroked them away and said, “When I walked in, it just felt as though the twenty-five years of our residency here had been erased.”

O lady
, he wanted to say,
you rented me a house, a house, not a museum devoted to you and to Laskeriana and the happiness and failure of your marriage. You charged me market rent, and I paid it so I could
live
somewhere
. But he realized he’d gotten everything wrong. She had not left her worst things behind four years ago, but her best things, her beloved things, she’d left the art hoping it brought beauty into the lives of the students and summer renters and wayward
other subletters, all those people unfortunate enough not to have made a home yet. She loved the terra-cotta sun that he’d taken down from the kitchen the first day. She loved the bed made for her in the 1970s by that clever, wretched man, her husband. She bought herself a cheap salad spinner so her tenants could use this one that worked so well. If Pamela had been with him that day nine months ago, she would have known. She would have seen the pieces of key chain and clucked over the dirty rug and told him the whole story. This was a house abandoned by sadness, not a war or epidemic but the end of a marriage, and kept in place to commemorate both the marriage and its ruin.

“It was such a strange feeling, to see everything gone,” she said. “As though ransacked. You know?”

He’d never even called the French landlord to ask about Trudy the lusterware duck, and right now that seemed like the biggest lack in his life, worse than Pamela, who he knew to be no longer on this earth. He should have carried the duck to America, though he’d scattered Pamela’s ashes on the broads in Norfolk. He should have flown to Bremen, where she was from, to startle her mother and sisters, demanded to see her childhood bed, tracked it down if it was gone to whatever thrift store or relative it had been sent to—Pamela was the one who taught him that a bed on display is never just furniture, it is a spirit portrait of everyone who has ever slept in it, been born in it, had sex in it, died in it.
Look
, she said.
You can see them if you look
. He had done everything wrong.

“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry,” he said, and then, “It was already broken.”

There’s a handsaw hanging on the wall of my living room, a house key from a giant’s pocket. It’s been there a long time. “What’s your saw for?” people ask, and I say, “It’s not my saw. I never owned a saw.”

“But what’s it
for
?”

“Hanging,” I answer.

By now if you took it down you’d see the ghost of the saw behind. Or—no, not the ghost, because the blue wallpaper would be dark where the saw had protected it from the sun. Ghosts are pale. So the room is the ghost. The saw is the only thing that’s real.

These days, though it grieves me to say it, that sounds about right.

Here’s how I became a singer. Forty years ago I walked past the Washington Monument in Baltimore and thought,
I’ll climb that
. It was first thing in the morning. They’d just opened up. As I climbed I sang with my eyes closed—“Summertime,” I think it was. Yes, of course it was. “Summertime.” I kept my hand on the iron banister. My feet found the stairs. In my head I saw myself at a party, leaning on a piano, singing in front of a small audience. I climbed, I sang. I never could remember the words, largely because of a spoonerized version my friend Fred liked to sing—
Tummersime, and the iving is leazy / jif are fumping, and the hiver is rye …

Then a man’s voice said, “Wow.”

In my memory, he leans against the wall two steps from the top, shouldering a saw like a rifle. But of course he wouldn’t have brought his saw to the Washington Monument. He was a big-boned, raw-faced blond man with a smashed Parker House roll of a nose, a puny felt hat hanging on the back of his head. His slacks were dark synthetic, snagged. His orange cardigan looked like rusted Brillo. He was so big you wondered how he could have got up there—had the tower been built around him? Had he arrived in pieces and been assembled on the spot? “Wow,” he said again, and clasped his hands in front of himself, bouncing on his knees with the syncopated jollification of a lovestruck 1930s cartoon character. I expected to see querulous lines of excitement coming off his head, punctuated by exclamation
marks. He plucked off his hat. His hair looked like it had been combed with a piece of buttered toast.

“That was you?” he asked.

I nodded. Maybe he was some municipal employee, charged with keeping the noise down.

“You sound like a saw,” he said. His voice was soft. I thought he might be from the South, like me, though later I found out he just had one of those voices that picked up accents through static electricity. Really he was from Paterson, New Jersey.

“A saw?” I asked.

He nodded.

I put my fingers to my throat. “I don’t know what that means.”

He held up his big hands, one still palming his hat. “
Beautiful
,” he said. “Not of this earth. Come with me, I’ll show you. Boy, you sure taught George Gershwin a lesson. Where do you sing?”

“Nowhere,” I said.

I couldn’t sing, according to my friends. The only person who’d ever said anything nice about my voice was my friend Fred Tibbets, who claimed that when I was drunk, sometimes I managed to carry a tune. But we drank a lot in those days, and when I was drunk Fred was drunk, too, and sentimental. Still, I secretly believed I could sing. My only evidence was the pleasure singing brought me. Most common mistake in the world, believing that physical pleasure and virtue are in any way related, directly or indirectly.

The man shook his head. “No good,” he said very seriously.
“That’s rotten. We’ll change that.” He went to take my hand and instead hung his hat upon it. Then I felt his own hand squeeze mine through the felt. “You’ll sing for me, OK? Would you sing for me? You’ll sing for me.”

He led me back down the monument, the hat on my hand, his hand behind it. My wrist began to sweat but I didn’t mind. “Of course you’ll sing,” he said. He went ahead of me but kept stopping, so I’d half tumble onto the point of his elbow. “I know people. I’m from Philadelphia. Well, I live there. I came to Bawlmore because a buddy of mine, part of a trio, he broke his arm and needed a guitar player so there you go. There are two hundred and twenty-eight steps on this thing. I read it on the plaque. Also I counted. God, you’re a skinny girl, you’re like
nothing
, you’re so lovely, no, you are, don’t disagree, I know what I’m talking about. Well, not all the time, but right now I do. I’ll play you my saw. Not everyone appreciates it but you will. What’s your name? Once more? Oof. We’ll change that, have to, you need something short and to the point. Take me, I used to be Gabriel McClonnahashem, there’s a moniker, huh? Now I’m Gabe Macon. For you, I don’t know, let me think: Miss Porth. Because you’re a chanteuse, that’s why the Miss. And Porthkiss, I don’t know. And Miss Kiss is just silly. Look at you blush! The human musical saw. There are all sorts of places you can sing, you don’t know your own worth, that’s your problem. I’ve known singers and I’ve known singers. I heard you and I thought,
There’s a voice I could listen to for the rest of my life
. I’m not kidding. I don’t kid about things like that. I don’t kid about music. I was frozen to the spot. Look, still: goose bumps.
You rescued me from the tower, Rapunzel: I climbed down on your voice. I’ll talk to my friend Jake. I’ll talk to this other guy I know. I have a feeling about you. I have a
feeling
about you. Are you getting as dizzy as me? Maybe it’s not the stairs. Do you believe in love at first sight? That’s not a line, it’s a question. I do, of course I do, would I ask if I didn’t? Because I believe in luck, that’s why. We’re nearly at the bottom. Poor kid, you never even got to the top. Come on. For ten cents it’s strictly an all-you-can-climb monument. We’ll go back up. Come on. Come on.”

“I can sing?” I asked him.

He looked at me. His eyes were green, with gears of darker green around the pupils.

“Trust me,” he said.

I wasn’t the sort of girl who’d climb a monument with a strange man. Or go back to his hotel room with him. Or agree to move to Philadelphia the next day.

But I did.

His room was on the top floor of the Elite Hotel, the kind of place you might check in to to commit suicide: toilet down the hall, a sink in the corner of the room, a view of another building with windows exactly across from the Elite’s windows.