“I also do stand-up comedy now and then,” she said. She waited for him to laugh, and he laughed. “See? I made you crack up. That’s my line. Really, Benny…that is your name, right? Benny?” He nodded. “You didn’t really think I was going to off myself tonight, did you? Like someone in a movie?” Then she spun around, quickly touching him. “The mysteriously self-destructive and glamorous-but-funny lady on the edge of the bridge and of existence itself? And you, the brave macho rescuer? That’s such a male fantasy, isn’t it? Wow, for banal. Hey, are you one of those comic-book heroes? One of the Fantastic Four? Which one are you? Do I get to guess?” Without waiting for an answer, she went into her building, saying neither thank you nor goodbye.
When Benny returned to his apartment, the phone was ringing. “This ayatollah walks into a bar,” the caller began. It was her. “He’s got the ayatollah headdress, ayatollah beard, and ayatollah white robe, the little ayatollah sandals on his little ayatollah feet. And the bartender says, ‘Whattya have?’ The ayatollah says, ‘Let’s not rush things. First of all, which way is east?’ ”
The joke went on for a long time, and he laughed politely at its punch line. When she had finished it and had hung up, he stood there feeling a slow trickle of infatuation, like a poison or its antidote, dripping down onto his heart.
The next day, he drove by her building and dropped off a note inside her mailbox in the building’s vestibule. The note asked, May I see you? Somehow she found out where he lived, because two days later he received a mailed letter with her return address. Inside the envelope she’d folded a single sheet of paper on which she had written Yes. At the bottom of the letter the signature read Madeline Elster. Who was Madeline Elster? One of her aliases? Desdemona, Madeline Elster — circus names. Using Internet sources, he had managed to check her out: she was Sarah Lemming, exactly as she’d claimed, and she worked at the Cedar-Riverside Little Folks Center. That evening after drinking a double Scotch, he called his girlfriend, Reena, and told her he was sorry but their thing, their arrangement, was over, and they were through as a couple. Gazing at the minute hand of his watch, he patiently listened to her inevitable sobbing questions. It’s just not working, he said. Not working, as if they were an unemployed couple. He made his voice as vacuous as possible while she wept. You just had to wade through the tears to get to the opposing shore.
Then he called Sarah back, and they arranged to have lunch at a Mexican restaurant. On the appointed day, eating tacos, she spoke pleasantly and impersonally about her former ambitions as a musician; someday, she said, she would play Ravel and Bach for him, so that he could witness her at her best. She hadn’t been able to support herself as a rehearsal pianist or as an accompanist, and she’d been stymied by her expectations of what had been promised and what actually happened. A performance degree from a midwestern university: What good was that? Where was the future in it? There had been no future.
Even while talking, she had a slight stoop, as if she were ducking under a door frame. She bent slightly to camouflage her attractive
ness. Her posture was like an apology of sorts for her prettiness, not the demure kind that shy women tended to project, but another sort — impudent, but infected by reticence.
Neither of them mentioned how they had met. The subject no longer qualified as speakable. That temporarily desperate woman had been replaced by this one in front of him, eating tacos. This daytime Sarah conversed and was sensible about herself. But the nighttime one pestered his waking dreams. She leaned out over the river, and he saw himself reaching for her arm.
In one of his dreams, she and Benny were handcuffed to each other.
Eventually she agreed to have dinner with him, and in the weeks that followed they had other dinners, other walks. He would escort her back to her building, but she wouldn’t invite him in. She talked about children and music — especially the music of Bach, comparing it to intricate God-given architecture. When nervous, she grew stylishly knowing and flippant, and nightfall intensified the effect of a nocturnal joker self emerging from the rubble of daytime. She often gave the appearance of thinking about something she would not say. On the evening when she first wore eyeliner for him, she told him that she had grown up in Connecticut horse country, had gone to college here in Minnesota and had stayed around, had been married for a few months before she and her husband had ended it amicably. She had two sisters, both very rich. One worked in an investment bank; the other had married well. Her sisters both had kids — two apiece, along with the private schools, the ballet lessons, the soccer, French and Mandarin immersion. She herself was the black sheep of the family, the artiste. She spoke of her personal history as if it were a dull annoyance.
—
Now, many years later, gazing at Julian and seeing a remnant of Sarah’s face in the boy’s characteristic skeptical expression, Benny imagines those days — including the trip to the mall and a little gag they played on a clerk — as a charade of sorts in which he was being invited to try out different roles, shedding one after another as Sarah herself did, until he might find one that suited him, although what he didn’t understand at the time (as he does now, of course) is that what he mistook for a charade and a pastime, a stunt, a form of harmless amateur wickedness, was for her a tether that tied her to the Earth.
—
She called him a week later on a Wednesday night. “I want to play something for you,” she said. “I’ve been practicing and practicing. I’ll play it on my very own piano.” For comic effect she pronounced it “pye-ano.” She had never invited him into her apartment, so he felt that his patience might be rewarded at last, along with his curiosity.
After being buzzed upstairs, he saw that her door was already open, and she stood inside with her hand on her hip. She wore jeans and a pink T-shirt and was barefoot. The trace of some perfume shielded her lightly but protectively. Her living room contained a sofa and chair and coffee table in the big-box Swedish contemporary style of assemble-it-yourself furniture. Near poverty now had a kind of opaque, cool cleanliness and an odor of sanctimony. You didn’t have to sit down in cast-off wing chairs smelling of marijuana and mildew anymore, but the sparse impersonality of her living room had the quality of an emergency, as if no one had bothered to think about what should be located here or had the patience or inclination to arrange it. A few books were out. The human presence had been nearly eradicated from the room except for the scratched-up spinet piano in the corner. Other than that, the room had a claustrophobic cleanliness. Everything here seemed temporary.
“So,” Benny said. “A concert? What are we privileged to hear?”
She had disappeared into the kitchen and came back out with a cold beer, which she handed to him. He could tell that she had an agenda that included whatever she was about to play.
“So,” she said. “I’ve been working on this piece. It’s called ‘Ondine’ and it’s from this composer’s, Ravel’s, group of pieces Gaspard de la Nuit. There’s a story behind it. Do you want to hear the story?” Benny nodded, although he already knew the story. He had been a keyboard musician, and, though he’d never been capable of playing this particular piece, he knew about it. “So: Ondine is a water sprite. She’s very pale and intriguing. Seductive, too. She appears to the poet and she offers him a ring — a ring! how about that? — and she also offers him the kingdom of the waters although, duh, he can’t live there because he doesn’t have gills. Anyway, the poet tells her that he loves a mortal woman, so Ondine gets upset and jealous and angry, and she sulks. So like a woman, right? After she’s finished crying, she laughs and disappears in a shower of droplets on the windowpane. The point is, he can’t have her.”