I thought about it later and decided there must have been several pretty, kind girls Eli had taken to the apartment. They must have babbled to Gretchen and she must have looked forward to them coming, to the ease they brought, to the idea that Eli would be happier. When I came none of this happened. It didn’t occur to me until later that Gretchen could have seen some of herself in me. And the way she treated me — with forbearance and mild annoyance — was much the way she treated herself.
Eli had been six and Paige four when they had lived in a commune with their parents. Eli never told me the details, but with their father there had been drinking, other women, violence. I couldn’t tell what degree of violence, and I don’t know against whom — the kids, or just with Gretchen — if it was occasional, once or twice, or often. She persuaded the husband to leave the commune and try farming, but after a time she left with the kids. I don’t know how she picked Maine; all her family lived down south. My guess was that she left for the farthest place she could think of.
She must have thought she had been successful, with Eli there, serious as if he were running a command center from his room. Everywhere the music magazines he was studying, piles of movies by directors he was becoming “completely familiar with.” The two of us once rode the bus to Portland for a Bergman retrospective. We were a somber affair, our messenger bags strapped across our backs, our heads bowed in discussion, analyzing camera angles, architecture, a woman’s face. The woman’s cheekbones jutted out and then the camera had gone to a building with lots of windows. What was the intent, we wondered. How beautiful Eli looked. Once he learned he was beautiful he would become less beautiful. It was the way it surprised you, really, the way it hid, then bloomed. His limp, sandy hair hanging down his cheeks. The unhealthy pallor of his skin, like something not colored in yet. He wore clothes in off shades — a yellow too drained to be called mustard, an infirmary green. Always with him I thought not of color, but of memory of color. Even his eyes were the flattest, stillest blue.
When I had first moved to town, I would often stay after school to play the piano while the music teacher did her grades. One day — before I knew Eli — I watched him pass back and forth in the hall, carrying a manila folder as if he had messages for the president. He was tall, lanky but not skinny, with broad shoulders and a vertical walk, not stiff — he had a nice walk — but there wasn’t much sway. My music teacher stood to the side of the door in her argyle skirt and wool sweater, as if she was only going to watch, but when he got close, she said, Eli, let’s see what you have.
He came in with the photographs he had developed in the school’s darkroom. They showed buildings in Portland, gray sky, not many people, only wispy kids who looked lost in the corners of the pictures. Over the summer he had gone there and stayed on sofas and took pictures of homeless kids. He met them in the bus station and bought them sandwiches.
My teacher lifted each by the corner, then said, Thank you, Eli, for sharing these with us. She poured tea into a Styrofoam cup. She said, Anne plays the piano. I sat scrunched in my chair, a small girl with mousy brown hair, my hands knotted in my lap.
Do you play Beethoven? he asked.
Sometimes, I said.
I like Beethoven a lot, he said, as if it were a singular thing, which for us, up there at the tip of the country, it might have been. He told me they had just gotten a piano in the antiques shop below him. My teacher’s face remained still, but she looked as if she wanted to be nodding it.
My mother didn’t like the shop; she worried over the prices they charged. The day I went to see the piano, it had been raining and the owner was making spiced apples in a Crock-Pot. Clusters of furniture divided the room. Close to the entrance were ornamental pieces — velvet sofas, Chippendale chairs, French confituriers, gilded fireplace screens. Further in were cruder pieces, cupboards with punched-tin doors, benches with peeling paint. Table lamps gave off a low light.
In the back room, the two guys sat at their desks, Eli with camera pieces spread out on newspaper, and the owner, Henry, running reports. Henry looked like a photograph of a country person. Every touch was right, including the denim cap and crinkles around the eyes. Still, he wasn’t shut to the world the way so many of the locals were. And his store had beautiful things, things I otherwise wouldn’t have seen in Jonesport. I imagine, he said, showing me the piano, you’ll find it pretty decent for these parts. For these parts, my mother would have repeated after she took us out of the shop. But really it was a game, you could never tell where someone was from, city or local.
I began to play a piece by Couperin, tentatively at first, only feeling the keys. But as I played, the music expanded. It was as if someone, if they could have seen inside me, would have seen streaks of colors and shapes. Afterward, I went outside and stopped in front of a puddle to find the building reflected there. Light skimmed over it, and it wavered in the wind. It was amazing to me — one couldn’t look at a building in a puddle and not know that it existed, that all of life existed there, only a different life. Where did the second life go, if not further? If there were people inside the building when it was reflected, weren’t they reflected as well? Eli bending over the table, screwing in a lens, the man passing him the screwdriver, all the lamps on, then off, the office chair still indented where Eli had sat. When someone moved, does something inside the puddle move? No, of course not, but yes, something inside moved.
While I had been playing, Eli had been leaning against the wall, watching me. We didn’t say anything then, but after that he sought me out. He must have been looking for someone to tell his secret to, though when he finally told me, he only told part of it. We were following the road that led to Beals. It was early winter and cold. We walked with our hands in our pockets, his nylon coat swishing. He described the floor plan of the apartment, and I didn’t pay much attention until his voice changed. The attic, he said, was reached by a ladder in his closet. It had been empty when they moved in, and Gretchen stuffed it with all the knickknacks she couldn’t throw away — felting projects, macramé baskets for hanging plants, rainbow stickers with “Jesus” written on them.
He’d go up when his mother and sister were out. That fall, around the time I had moved to town, he found a half-height door hidden behind moving boxes. The door didn’t have a knob or latch. He opened it by prying with a butter knife — marks on the wood showed how someone had done this before. He found a crawl space inside, and said that it was empty except for a painting leaning against the wall. He pulled out the painting and brought it to the window. It was old, he said, folk art style, but not country, not kitschy. He tried to talk about the painting — a boy with a bird, he said — but digressed into German expressionism, its influence on film, the use of dark, foreboding buildings, the tropes of monsters.
We passed clusters of mobile homes, taking in the flamingos and lawn chairs, the unlit Christmas lights from the year before wrapped along the metal stair railings, the turf carpets lining the stairs. I let him talk on about monsters. With Eli, I had learned to wait, to learn in bits and string them together later. He said that there was something wrong with the painting. That he’d looked at it until he couldn’t hold still anymore, then put it back, scraping his arm against a nail, knocking boxes over, burrowing through until he got to a shoebox of old photographs.