Dell shook her head. “I thought I was good at building castles in the air,” she said. “You not only build them, you turn around and start renting out rooms. Here you haven’t even written the song yet and you’ve got it on the Top Forty and the two of us splitting the royalties. What is it you want, exactly? I hope you’re not looking to move in here because I don’t want roommates.”
“Just a key to the apartment,” Madeline said. “I’d call first, to make sure you weren’t home.”
“I should hope so. The last thing I need is somebody walking in at the wrong moment.”
“I’d be very careful,” Madeline said dutifully.
“All right, it’s a deal,” Dell said. “You can have my duplicate key. On one condition. Anything missing it’s understood you take direct personal responsibility for and make good on it.”
“I agree,” Madeline said.
“Here’s the key, then.” Dell went over to her dressing table, opened a drawer, took the key out, and tossed it into Madeline’s lap.
“I’m not Santa Claus,” she let her know. “I might get a good workable song out of this yet, at that. For peanuts.”
After a good thorough wall-to-wall casing on the occasion of her first two visits in Dell’s absence, which revealed very little or nothing that she didn’t already know, she didn’t bother going there with any great regularity anymore. Paradoxically, and against all expectation, she found she stood to learn a great deal more when Dell was present, sousing and chattering away, than from her muted — and carefully sterilized — surroundings when she was absent. They had nothing to tell, no voice in which to tell it. What could they show her? A double strip of purple stamps in a desk drawer, a bottle of amber Chanel on a dressing-table top. A jigger of aspirin on a medicine cabinet shelf. A quart of the ubiquitous Canadian Club in the refrigerator, along with a six-pack of Heineken for those who were tapering off. Even her little blue booklet for telephone numbers, hanging by a loop beside the instrument itself, was chastely discreet. A liquor store. A music publisher. An all-night delicatessen, for those four-in-the-morning snacks — with whom? The place where she bought her shoes. Not a personal name in it.
Smart; she must have kept them all in her head.
People didn’t seem to write to Dell to any very great extent. Not because they were afraid to, probably, as much as because the world in which she and they moved was too swift to wait for letters to catch up. A phone call said everything that needed to be said. Yesterday’s keenness for a get-together, by the following day might already have cooled to disinterest, or somebody else might have come along in the meantime.
There were no photographs of the two principals in her present life, nor of her former husband either, the man who had later married Starr, but then this last wasn’t to be wondered at. She’d probably torn them all up at the time of the debacle — as Starr herself, apparently, had torn up the one in her room when things unraveled later.
There was a whole row of medical bills, all from the same doctor. The first had just the amount. The second had “Please” added to it in handscript. The third bore an imploring “Third notice.” The final one had the sum x-ed off, and the notation “How about tonight?” in its place.
“So that’s how she took care of that,” Madeline caught on with a sudden flash of wry insight.
She left little notes on the piano a couple of times after having been there. “Was here. Had workout. Mad.” And one time, just to make it sound plausible, “Is ‘The Blues I Get from You’ a good title?”
The next day there was a curt answering note from Dell, left in the same place. “Can it. I don’t do blues, remember? If you’re going to work at my piano, do material I can use, at least!”
Madeline thumbed her nose at it.
Madeline knew a time would come when she’d start talking about her former husband, and that time came. If a woman loves a man, she is bound to talk about him sooner or later to her confidante. If a woman hates a man, she is equally bound to talk about him sooner or later. She wouldn’t be a woman if she didn’t. She wouldn’t have loved, she wouldn’t have hated, if she didn’t.
Madeline bided her time, threw out no leads, dropped no hints, planted no verbal traps. It would be freer, fuller, if it came by itself. It came by itself.
She was browsing through sheets of music one day, looking for something new to break into her repertoire. She came to one and she started to hum her way through it. Then she broke off and put it down so sharply it almost amounted to slapping it against the piano top. Madeline looked up at the sound. She could make out the title on the cover, upside down, from where she was. “That Old Feeling.”
“No good?” she asked.
“Too good,” Dell said. “It’s more than a song, it’s an actual experience. I know, because I’ve been through it. I saw you last night and I got that old feeling.” She turned to Madeline. “What the hell,” she said. “You don’t want to hear this.”
“Yes, I do.”
“Why? Just because I pick up some sheet music and get in a mood? That doesn’t mean I have to tell you a sad story and bring us both down.”
“Sometimes it helps to tell it to another person, whatever it is,” Madeline said. “To get it off your own chest.”
“And onto yours instead? What’s the point?”
“That’s what friends are for.”
“Don’t give me that,” Dell snapped. “I don’t know what friends are for, but it’s not to listen to all the garbage people got locked up in their hearts. Maybe it’s what psychiatrists are for, but not friends. So why should you listen? What’s in it for you?”
Madeline shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get a song out of it.”
“A song?”
“Or an idea for a song.”
“I told you,” Dell said. “You don’t get the good ideas by looking inside other people. You get ’em by looking inside yourself.”
“Maybe looking inside other people, or listening to what’s inside other people, is a way I can find out what’s inside myself.”
Dell thought about that. “Yeah,” she said after a moment. “That makes sense. Well, I can stand it if you can. But I’m warning you, you might want to pick up a violin and accompany me. It’s that kind of a story.”
“Sad, huh?”
“It’s the story of a marriage,” Dell said. “There are two kinds of marriages. Bad ones and imaginary ones, because the real ones aren’t good and the good ones aren’t real.” She shook her head. “I don’t know where to start.”
“How did the two of you meet?”
“We first met at the mail desk of the Eastland Hotel in Portland, Maine. We were both up there on our time off. All I wanted was my key. Instead, the clerk handed me a message. Before I even looked at it I said, ‘This can’t be for me, I don’t know anyone in this town!’ I was right. It was for some Swede named Miss Nilson and they’d put it in the wrong box. The ‘i’ was looped, looked like an ‘e.’
“He smiled at me, and I let him. He began to talk, and I let him. I liked him almost from the minute he first began to talk. Before we separated he said, ‘Now you can’t say you don’t know anyone in this town anymore.’
“The next night he came over to me in the lobby, and took me into one of the lounges, and bought me a drink. The night after, he bought me dinner. When time was up, we came back to the city separately, but we had arranged to meet again after we returned, and we did. By that time, I was in love with him already. He wasn’t in love with me, I see that now. I was the one way out in front all through the whole thing. But we both made the same mistake: we both mistook my love for him for a return love on his part. When he kissed me, he was only answering my kisses, not giving me originals. When he held me in his arms, he was only completing the half circle of my own embrace. On the strength of this illusion, we got married; he said the words, I put them into his mind.