I stopped and she didn’t say anything for a long time. Then she said:
“Look, sweetie, listen. I hope your wife comes back. I really do. But if she doesn’t, well, you’ve just got to start getting some perspective. She might be a great person, but life’s so much bigger than just loving someone. You got to get out there, Steve. Someone like you, you don’t belong with the public. Look at me. When these bandages come off, am I really going to look the way I did twenty years ago? I don’t know. And it’s a long time since I was last between husbands. But I’m going to go out there anyway and give it a go.” She came over to me and shoved me on the shoulder. “Hey. You’re just tired. You’ll feel a lot better after some sleep. Listen. Boris is the best. He’ll have fixed it, for the both of us. You just see.”
I put my glass down on the table and stood up. “I guess you’re right. Like you say, Boris is the best. And we were a good team down there.”
“We were a great team down there.”
I reached forward, put my hands on her shoulders, then kissed each of her bandaged cheeks. “You have yourself a good sleep,” I said. “I’ll come over soon and we’ll play more chess.”
BUT AFTER THAT MORNING, we didn’t see much more of each other. When I thought about it later, it occurred to me there’d been some things said during the course of that night, things I should maybe have apologised about, or at least tried to explain. At the time, though, once we’d made it back to her room, and we’d been laughing together on the sofa, it hadn’t seemed necessary, or even right, to bring all of that up again. When we parted that morning, I thought the two of us were well beyond that stage. Even so, I’d seen how Lindy could switch. Maybe later on, she thought back and got mad at me all over again. Who knows? Anyway, though I’d expected a call from her later that day, it never came, and neither did one come the day after. Instead, I heard Tony Gardner records through the wall, playing at top volume, one after the next.
When I did eventually go round there, maybe four days later, she was welcoming, but distant. Like that first time, she talked a lot about her famous friends-though none of it about getting them to help with my career. Still, I didn’t mind that. We gave chess a try, but her phone kept ringing and she’d go into the bedroom to talk.
Then two evenings ago she knocked on my door and said she was about to check out. Boris was pleased with her and had agreed to take the bandages off in her own house. We said our goodbyes in a friendly way, but it was like our real goodbyes had been said already, that morning right after our escapade, when I’d reached forward and kissed her on both cheeks.
So that’s the story of my time as Lindy Gardner’s neighbor. I wish her well. As for me, it’s six more days till my own unveiling, and a lot longer still before I’m allowed to blow a horn. But I’m used to this life now, and I pass the hours quite contentedly. Yesterday I got a call from Helen asking how I was doing, and when I told her I’d gotten to know Lindy Gardner, she was mightily impressed.
“Hasn’t she married again?” she asked. And when I put her straight on that, she said: “Oh, right. I must have been thinking about that other one. You know. What’s-her-name.”
We talked a lot of unimportant stuff-what she’d watched on TV, how her friend had stopped by with her baby. Then she said Prendergast was asking for me, and when she said that, there was a noticeable tightening in her voice. And I almost said: “Hello? Do I detect a note of irritation associated with lover boy’s name?” But I didn’t. I just said to say hi to him, and she didn’t bring him up again. I’d probably imagined it anyway. For all I know, she was just angling for me to say how grateful I was to him.
When she was about to go, I said: “I love you,” in that fast, routine way you say it at the end of a call with a spouse. There was a silence of a few seconds, then she said it back, in the same routine way. Then she was gone. God knows what that meant. There’s nothing to do now, I guess, but wait for these bandages to come off. And then what? Maybe Lindy’s right. Maybe, like she says, I need some perspective, and life really is much bigger than loving a person. Maybe this really is a turning point for me, and the big league’s waiting. Maybe she’s right.
CELLISTS
IT WAS OUR THIRD TIME playing the Godfather theme since lunch, so I was looking around at the tourists seated across the piazza to see how many of them might have been there the last time we’d played it. People don’t mind hearing a favourite more than once, but you can’t have it happen too often or they start suspecting you don’t have a decent repertoire. At this time of year, it’s usually okay to repeat numbers. The first hint of an autumn wind and the ridiculous price of a coffee ensure a pretty steady turnover of customers. Anyway, that’s why I was studying the faces in the piazza and that’s how I spotted Tibor.
He was waving his arm and I thought at first he was waving to us, but then I realised he was trying to attract a waiter. He looked older, and he’d put on some weight, but he wasn’t hard to recognise. I gave Fabian, on accordion right next to me, a little nudge and nodded towards the young man, though I couldn’t take either hand off my saxophone just then to point him out properly. That was when it came home to me, looking around the band, that apart from me and Fabian, there was no one left in our line-up from that summer we’d met Tibor.
Okay, that was all of seven years ago, but it was still a shock. Playing together every day like this, you come to think of the band as a kind of family, the other members as your brothers. And if every now and then someone moves on, you want to think he’ll always stay in touch, sending back postcards from Venice or London or wherever he’s got to, maybe a Polaroid of the band he’s in now-just like he’s writing home to his old village. So a moment like that comes as an unwelcome reminder of how quickly things change. How the bosom pals of today become lost strangers tomorrow, scattered across Europe, playing the Godfather theme or “Autumn Leaves” in squares and cafes you’ll never visit.
When we finished our number, Fabian gave me a dirty look, annoyed I’d nudged him during his “special passage”-not a solo exactly, but one of those rare moments when the violin and clarinet have stopped, I’m blowing just quiet notes in the background, and he’s holding the tune together on his accordion. When I tried to explain, pointing out Tibor, now stirring his coffee beneath a parasol, Fabian seemed to have trouble remembering him. In the end, he said:
“Ah yes, the boy with the cello. I wonder if he’s still with that American woman.”
“Of course not,” I said. “Don’t you remember? That all came to an end at the time.”
Fabian shrugged, his attention now on his sheet music, and then we were starting our next number.
I was disappointed Fabian hadn’t shown more interest, but I suppose he’d never been one of those particularly concerned about the young cellist. Fabian, you see, he’s only ever played in bars and cafes. Not like Giancarlo, our violin player at that time, or Ernesto, who was our bass player. They’d had formal training, so to them someone like Tibor was always fascinating. Maybe there was a tiny bit of jealousy there-of Tibor’s top-drawer musical education, of the fact that his future was still in front of him. But to be fair, I think it was just that they liked to take the Tibors of this world under their wing, look after them a little, maybe prepare them for what lay ahead, so when the disappointments came they wouldn’t be quite so hard to take.