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The Piano Player
F
our nights a week Angela O’Meara played the piano in the cocktail lounge at
the Warehouse Bar and Grill. The cocktail lounge, commodious and comfortable
with its sprawl of couches, plump leather chairs, and low tables, was right there
as soon as you walked through the heavy doors of the old establishment; the
dining room was farther back, with windows overlooking the water. Early in the
week the lounge tended to be rather empty, but by Wednesday night and
continuing straight through Saturday, the place was filled with people. When
you stepped from the sidewalk through the thick oak doors, there was the sound
of piano notes, tinkling and constant; and the talk of the people who were slung
back on their couches, or sitting forward in their chairs, or leaning over the bar
seemed to accommodate itself to this, so the piano was not so much
“background” music as it was a character in the room. In other words, the
townspeople of Crosby, Maine, had for many years now taken into their lives the
cocktail music and presence of Angie O’Meara.
Angie, in her youth, had been a lovely woman to look at, with her wavy red
hair and perfect skin, and in many ways this was still the case. But now she was
into her fifties, and her hair, pinned back loosely with combs, was dyed a color
you might consider just a little too red, and her figure, while still graceful, had a
thickening of its middle, the more noticeable, perhaps, because she was
otherwise quite thin. But she was long-waisted, and when she sat at the piano
bench, she did so with the ease of a ballet dancer, albeit past her prime. Her
jawline had gone soft and uneven, and the wrinkles near her eyes were quite
pronounced. But they were kind wrinkles; nothing harsh—it seemed—had
happened to this face. If anything, her face revealed itself too clearly in a kind of
simple expectancy no longer appropriate for a woman of her age. There was, in
the tilt of her head, the slight messiness of the very bright hair, the open gaze of
her blue eyes, a quality that could, in other circumstances, make people
uncomfortable. Strangers, for example, who passed her in the Cook’s Corner
shopping mall were tempted to sneak an extra peek or two. As it was, Angie was
a familiar figure to those who lived in town. She was just Angie O’Meara, the
piano player, and she had been playing at the Warehouse for many years. She
had been in love with the town’s first selectman, Malcolm Moody, for a number
of years as well. Some people knew this, others did not.
On this particular Friday night, Christmas was a week away, and not far from
the baby grand piano stood a large fir tree heavily decorated by the restaurant’s
staff. Its silver tinsel swung slightly every time the door to the outside was
opened, and different-colored lights the size of eggs shone amidst the various
balls and strings of popcorn and cranberries that adorned the slightly bent-
downward branches of the tree.
Angie was wearing a black skirt and a pink nylon top that parted at her
collarbone, and there was something about the tiny string of pearls she wore, and
the pink top, and the bright red of her hair that seemed to glow along with the
Christmas tree, as if she were some extension of its festivities. She had arrived,
as she always did, at precisely six o’clock, smiling her vague, childlike smile,
chewing on mints, saying hello to the bartender, Joe, and to Betty, the waitress,
then tucking her handbag and coat near the end of the bar. Joe, a thickset man
who had tended that bar for many years and had the watchful eye of any good
bartender, had come to the private conclusion that Angie O’Meara was really
very frightened when she showed up at work each night. This would account for
the whiff of booze on her minty breath if you happened to be close enough to
smell it, and it accounted for the fact that she never took her twenty-minute
break—although she was allowed to by the music union, and encouraged to by
the Warehouse owner. “I hate to get started again,” she said to Joe one night, and
that’s when he put it together, that Angie must have suffered from stage fright.
If she suffered from anything more, it was considered nobody’s business. It
was the case with Angie that people knew very little about her, assuming at the
same time that other people knew her moderately well. She lived in a rented
room on Wood Street and did not own a car. She was within walking distance of
a grocery store and also the Warehouse Bar and Grill—a walk that took
precisely fifteen minutes in her black very-high-heeled shoes. In the winter she
wore very-high-heeled black boots, and a white fake fur coat, and carried a little
blue pocketbook. She could be seen picking her way carefully along the snow-
covered sidewalks, then crossing through the big parking lot by the post office,
and finally going down the little walkway toward the bay, where the squatty
white clapboard Warehouse sat.
Joe was right when he imagined that Angie suffered from stage fright, and she
had years ago learned to begin swallowing vodka at five fifteen, so that by the
time she left her room half an hour later, she had to hold the wall as she went
down the hall stairs. But the walk cleared her head, while leaving her with
enough confidence to make her way to the piano, open the keyboard, sit down,
and play. What frightened her the most was the moment of those first notes,
because that was when people really listened: She was changing the atmosphere
in the room. It was the responsibility of this that frightened her. And it was why
she played straight through for three hours, without taking a break, in order to
avoid the quiet that would fall over the room, to avoid again the way people
smiled at her when she sat down to play; no, she didn’t like the attention at all.
What she liked was playing the piano. Two bars into the first song, Angie was
always happy. For her, it was as though she had slipped inside the music.
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