She said something he could not understand. The mask made her words incomprehensible. She tried again and this time he heard, “Stay away.”
“I want to help you. You’re the one who writes the songs, aren’t you?”
“Stay away.”
Despite her face, the rest of her was a quite beautiful woman with perfectly formed wrists, ankles and neck, and a pleasing swell of breast beneath her ragged man’s work shirt and heavy blue cardigan and baggy jeans.
“You live down here, don’t you?”
She cowered in the rear of the opening, covering the eye-holes in the mask as his beam bore in.
“Why do you live down here?”
But as soon as he’d spoken he knew exactly why she lived down here. Her face. Of course. That horribly scarred and boiled face. “Would you come out of there so we can talk?”
She shook her head.
He went back to asking questions. “You work your way up the duct work and leave the songs on my piano in the middle of the night when nobody’s there, don’t you?”
Faintly, she nodded.
“But why? Why do you want me to have them?”
Once more she spoke and once more he had a difficult time understanding what she was trying to say. Finally, finally, he heard properly. “Turn out the light.”
“Why?”
“I want to take this mask off so you can hear me more clearly.”
“All right.”
He clicked off the light, lowered the long silver tube of flashlight.
He heard the rumple of rubber being pulled off. The opening was now a black pit with no detail whatsoever.
From the gloom, she said, “At night I lie here and listen to you play the piano and sing. You have a very sad voice.”
He laughed. “ ‘Sad’ as in pathetic.”
“No, ‘sad’ as in troubled. Hopeless. And that’s why I write the songs for you. Because you and I share the same kind of pain.”
“You could make a fortune with your songs.”
Now it was her turn to laugh, but when she did so it sounded morose. “Yes, I suppose I could get my face on the cover of People.”
“No, but—”
She sighed. “I write for my own pleasure — and yours, I hope.”
“Believe me, I love your songs.”
“You may have them.”
“What?”
“I’m making a gift of them to you.”
“But—”
“That’s a very serious offer, Mr. Hanratty. Very serious. Now, I’ve talked enough and so have you.”
“But I’d like to help you in some way.”
She sighed once again, sounding old beyond imagining. “You can’t help me, Mr. Hanratty. Only one man can. Only one man.” She paused and said, “Now go, Mr. Hanratty. Please.”
Her voice was resolute.
“I appreciate the songs.”
“If they make you wealthy, Mr. Hanratty, promise me just one thing.”
“What?”
“To never fall in love as foolishly as I did.”
“But—”
“Leave now, Mr. Hanratty. Leave now.”
He heard a rustling sound as the woman crawled to the back of her lair, lost utterly in the darkness.
He stared a moment longer at the wall of gloom keeping her hidden from him, and then he jumped down to the watery floor, and started his way back through the duct work.
In the morning, he called New York and a music publisher who at first would not even take his call. But finally, adamant, he convinced the secretary to put him through to her boss, who turned out to be a woman with a somewhat mannered accent and a strongly cultivated hint of ennui in her voice.
He made the call from his small apartment cluttered as usual with scabrous cardboard circles from delivery pizza, beer cans and overflowing ashtrays. Grubby overcast light fell through the cracked window and fell on his lumpy unmade bed.
She was about to hang up when he said, “Listen, I’m sure you get thirty calls like this a week. But I really do have songs that could make both of us really wealthy. I really do.”
“That will be all now,” the woman said. “I’m very busy and—”
“Two minutes.”
“What?”
“I just want two minutes. I’m sitting at an upright piano and all I need to do is set the phone down and play you one of these songs for two minutes and—”
A frustrated sigh. “How old are you?”
“Huh?”
“I asked how old you are.”
“Mid-forties. Why?”
Her laugh startled him. “Because you’re like dealing with a little boy.” She exhaled cigarette smoke. “All right, Mr. Hanratty, you’ve got two minutes.”
So he played. With fingers that would never be envied by concert artists. With a voice that not even the raspiest rocker would want. But even given that, even given his hangover, even given the grubby winter light, even given the mess and muck of his apartment — even given all that — there was beauty that morning in his apartment.
The beauty of the deformed woman’s pain and yearnings and imprisonment in a face few could stand to gaze on.
He played much longer than two minutes and somehow he knew that the woman on the other end of the line wouldn’t hang up. Because of the beauty of the melody and the poetry of the words.
By the time he finished the song, he’d forgotten where he was. He had given himself over completely to the music.
When he picked the receiver up again, he was sweating, trembling. “Well?” he said.
“How soon can you catch a flight to New York?”
“A couple of hours.”
“I’ll have a car waiting for you, Mr. Hanratty.” As hard as she tried, she could not keep the tears from her voice. The tears the music had inspired.
Hanratty went to New York with a checking account of $437.42. He returned with a checking account of $50,437.42 — and a contract that promised much, much more once Sylvia Hamilton, the music publisher, interested top recording artists in these properties. She was talking Streisand, for openers, and she was talking quite seriously.
As he deplaned, he caught the white swirling bite of the blizzard that had virtually shut the city down. He had to wait an hour for a taxi to take him directly to Kenny’s. Bentley had not wanted him to leave in the first place and told him that if he took more than two days off, he’d be fired. In an expansive mood now, Hanratty planned to finish out the week at the lounge, and then head immediately back to New York where Sylvia (not a bad-looking older lady whom Hanratty felt he was going to get to know a lot better) was already finding an apartment for him.
Coming in on the crosstown expressway was an excruciating crawl behind big yellow trucks spewing billions of sand particles beneath whirling yellow lights into the late afternoon gloom and watching the ditches where overworked and weary city cops were checking to see that the people who’d slid off the road were all right. Fog only added to the air of claustrophobia Hanratty felt in the back seat of the cab that smelled of cigarette smoke and disinfectant.
He saw the red emergency lights a block before the Checker reached the lounge. They splashed through the blizzard like blood soaking through a very white sheet. His stomach tightened the way it always had when he’d been a little boy and feared that a siren meant that something had happened to one of his parents or to his brother or sister.
Something was wrong at Kenny’s.
The police already had sawhorse barricades up, but in this kind of weather they were almost pointless. It was too bitterly cold to stand outside on a night like this and gawk at somebody else’s misfortune.
He paid off the cabbie and fled the vehicle immediately.
A tall, uniformed officer tried to stop him from going into the brick-faced lounge but after Hanratty explained who he was, the cop waved him in.