That was it, then, Abe thought, the family.
It was a far cry from what he’d intended, but it was no doubt better than tapping out “Feelings” in some seedy lounge on the Jersey shore. He was forty-eight, old enough to know that the jazz pianist’s life he’d once envisioned for himself would not have suited him very well. In fact, when he thought of it now, it was as little more than a Blue Note fantasy, like becoming a writer or an actor. Mavis had always said that he wasn’t very adventurous, that all he really wanted was the anchor of a steady, predictable life. Toward the end she’d been plenty frank about it, When you get right down to it, Abe, you’re a stick-in-the-mud.
He walked behind the bar, took the canvas cash bag he’d brought from the bank around the corner, and began to fill the register. He’d just opened the quarters into the drawer when the phone rang.
“McPherson’s,” he said.
“Abe. Lucille.”
“You sound shitty.”
“It’s the mood, you know?”
“You need anything?”
“No. I’m just gonna sleep through it.”
“Well, if you do…”
“I know, Abe.”
He heard the click of the phone as Lucille hung up. Okay, he thought, his longtime chanteuse was in a mood and so wouldn’t be showing up for her set. But it was a Tuesday, the slowest night of the week, so with Susanne working the tables and Jake the bar, and Jorge busing and himself at the keyboard, the bar would make it through all right.
He glanced at the old piano at the rear of the bar and remembered the first time Mavis had leaned against it, dark-eyed and looking more experienced than she should have, this woman he’d later married and who’d promised to stay with him always but had run off with a guy who’d later made it big, and whose smiling face Abe continually confronted in record stores and concert billboards. He knew what Mavis’ flight had stolen from him: self-confidence, for one thing, along with the money she’d emptied from their accounts. All of that he could have gotten back one way or another, but what he’d never regained was the lightness of life, the sense of humor that had once so lifted him and made the good times roll and, more than his playing, brought buoyancy and joy to the people around him. That had gone with Mavis, and now seemed as irretrievable as the wedding ring she’d stripped from her finger and hocked at Forty-sixth and Eighth when Hell’s Kitchen still smoldered on the west side of the city.
Jake came through the door and seemed to read his face. “Trouble?” he asked.
“Just Lucille,” he lied.
TONY
Tony tossed the house keys to Eddie Sullivan. “She never locks the place, but just in case.”
Sullivan pocketed the keys. “Okay, Tony.”
“If the car’s not in the driveway, give me a ring. But if it is, go to the door, see if she’s inside. If there’s some other car there, take down the license number and bring it back to me. But don’t do anything else.”
Sullivan nodded heavily. “Everything’s okay, Tony.” His smile was sympathetic. “Sara wouldn’t never… you know.”
“Yeah, well, she’s seemed a little, I don’t know, a little tense the last few days,” Tony said. He walked Eddie out to the rusty old heap he’d been driving for as long as he could remember. “You ever gonna trade this fucking thing in?” he asked.
Sullivan shrugged. “It still runs okay. It’s like an old girlfriend now.” He grinned sheepishly, a thirty-five-year-old man still so shy and boyish, even the faintest allusion to women brought a blush to his face. “You know, I’m used to her.”
Tony surveyed the sloping bumper and rusty undercarriage. It looked pitiful, and it made whoever drove it look pitiful. “I’m gonna give you a raise, Eddie. So you can put something down on a new car.”
Sullivan’s smile widened. “Thanks.” He placed his beefy hand on Tony’s shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay. Sara, I mean.”
“Yeah,” Tony said, then watched as Sullivan hauled himself into his car and drove away. He knew Eddie wasn’t the brightest star in the heavens, but he was honest and reliable, and he could keep his mouth shut. A man with woman trouble could trust a guy like Eddie, a guy who lived alone, had never had a girlfriend, and might still be a virgin. Eddie took communion every Sunday at Our Lady of Fatima, and Tony guessed that he’d probably still be an altar boy if they let men his age do that sort of thing. Just the guy to check on a wife who’d been acting strange lately, Tony thought, a wife who hadn’t answered the phone for hours. A piercing dread hit him, the terrible possibility that Sara had left him. He saw the red Explorer drift out of the driveway, Sara at the wheel, with that cold look in her eye.
His cousin Joey stepped out of the warehouse.
“What are you looking at?” Tony blurted vehemently.
“Nothing,” Joey said, then retreated back into the warehouse.
Tony glanced out over the marina, a hundred boats precariously afloat. They seemed frail and unsteady, easily torn apart by high waves and raging winds, and for a moment he felt curiously like them, small and insubstantial before a dark, approaching storm.
STARK
He sipped a martini and watched the traffic move haltingly along Fifty-ninth Street. The Oak Bar was one of his favorite haunts. He liked the dark wood and whispery conversations, the well-dressed men and women who sat together at the polished tables. He wanted the men to be arms dealers and the women to be spies, the bar itself suffused with a supercharged intrigue, something out of Cold War Vienna, the icy cat-and-mouse world of The Third Man, where the only safety lay in secrecy and self-containment. In reality, the Oak Bar had nothing of this atmosphere. It was filled with out-of-towners and conventioneers. But Stark preferred to imagine it otherwise, a bar that shimmered distantly, enclosed in an elegant worldliness, cool, sophisticated, where his heart could rest unperturbed, like an olive at the bottom of a glass.
The woman who slid into the table next to his a few minutes later was in her mid-forties, but some good work had taken off a decade. She wore a dark blue skirt and white satin blouse that was partially covered by a silk scarf, black with small red roses. A gold dragon with large ruby eyes was pinned just above her right breast, wings spread, mouth open, fangs at the ready. He knew that she’d chosen it to signal that beneath the conservative clothes a voluptuous serpent twined. She ordered a brandy Alexander, swirled it with her little finger, sucked at a long, polished nail.
“I’m Evelyn,” she said finally.
He nodded.
“And you are?”
“Whomever you like.”
He’d responded in this way many times before, and so had learned that the woman in question either laughed and asked another question, or with a disgruntled shrug turned back to her drink and her quest, the distant hope that the next guy she approached would have no such obvious quirk.
The one called Evelyn laughed and swirled her drink. “Okay, let me think. Suppose I name you Frank.”
He offered his hand. “Frank,” he said. “A pleasure.”
She laughed again as she took his hand. There was a slight pink stain on her straight white teeth, and this imperfection lightly touched the small, unhardened part of him. In objects, he looked for perfection, but in people, the chipped and the cracked, the all-but-invisible fray at the hem.
“And what do you do… Frank?”
“Whatever you say,” he told her.
A carefully tweezed eyebrow drew into a lovely arch. “Really, you won’t tell me what you do?”