We are
one,
Malcolm Moody used to say.
Let’s become one, Angie—what do you say?
Angie had never taken piano lessons, although people tended not to believe
this. So she had stopped telling people this long ago. When she was four years
old, she sat down at the piano in the church and began to play, and it didn’t
surprise her then, or now. “My hands are hungry,” she would say to her mother
when she was young, and it was like that—a hunger. The church had given her
mother a key, and these days Angie could still go there anytime and play the
piano.
Behind her she heard the door open, felt the momentary chill, saw the tinsel
on the tree sway, and heard the loud voice of Olive Kitteridge say, “Too damn
bad. I like the cold.”
The Kitteridges, when they came alone to the Warehouse, tended to come
early and did not sit in the lounge first but went straight through to the dining
room. Still, Henry would always call out, “Evening there, Angie,” smiling
broadly on his way through, and Olive would wave her hand over her head in a
kind of hello. Henry’s favorite song was “Good Night, Irene,” and Angie would
try to remember to play this later as the Kitteridges walked back through on their
way out. Lots of people had favorite songs, and Angie would sometimes play
them, but not always. Henry Kitteridge was different. She always played his
song because whenever she saw him, it was like moving into a warm pocket of
air.
Tonight Angie was shaky. There were nights, now, when her vodka did not do
what it had done for many years, which was to make her happy and make
everything feel pleasantly at a distance. Tonight, as sometimes happened now,
she felt a little queer in the head—off-kilter. She made sure to keep a smile on
her face and didn’t look at anyone except Walter Dalton, who sat at the end of
the bar. He blew her a kiss. She winked, a tiny gesture; you would have thought
it was a blink except she did it with only one eye.
There was a time when Malcolm Moody loved to see her blink like that.
“God, but you get me going,” he’d say on those afternoons he came to her room
on Wood Street. Malcolm did not like Walter Dalton and referred to him as a
fairy, which he was. Walter was also an alcoholic, and the college had let him
go, and now he lived in a house on Coombs Island. Walter came into the bar
every night that Angie played. Sometimes he brought her a gift—a silk scarf
once, a pair of leather gloves with tiny buttons on the side. He always handed his
car keys to Joe, and then after closing, Joe often drove him home, with one of
the busboys driving Joe’s car to give Joe a drive back.
“What a pathetic life,” Malcolm had said to Angie, about Walter. “Sitting
there every night getting stewed.”
Angie didn’t like to have people called pathetic, but she didn’t say anything.
Sometimes, not often, Angie would think that people might call her life with
Malcolm pathetic. This would occur to her as she walked down a sunny
sidewalk, or it might happen when she woke in the night. It made her heart race,
and she would go over in her mind the kinds of things he had said to her over the
years. At first he had said, “I think about you all the time.” He still said, “I love
you.” Sometimes, “What would I do without you, Angie?” He never bought her
gifts and she wouldn’t have wanted him to.
She heard the street door open and close, felt the brief chill from the outdoors
once again. From the corner of her eye she caught the motion of a man in a dark
coat sinking into a chair in the far corner, and there was something in the way he
ducked, or moved, that ever so slightly jogged her mind. But she was shaky
tonight.
“Dear,” she whispered to Betty, who was moving past with a tray of glasses.
“Could you tell Joe I need a little Irish coffee?”
“Sure,” said Betty, a nice girl, small as a child. “No problem.”
She drank it with one hand, still playing the notes of “Have a Holly Jolly
Christmas,” and gave a wink to Joe, who nodded gravely. At the end of the
night, she would have a drink with Joe and Walter, and she would tell them
about visiting her mother in the nursing home today; she might or might not
mention the bruises on her mother’s arm.
“A request, Angie.” Betty dropped a cocktail napkin on her way past, while
she held the tray of drinks in the flat of her uplifted hand; you could see how
heavy it was for her by the way she swayed her back as she moved around the
chairs. “From that man,” she added, moving her head toward the corner.
“Bridge Over Troubled Water” was written on the napkin and Angie kept
playing Christmas carols, smiling her smile. She did not look at the man in the
corner. She played every Christmas carol she could think of, but she was not
inside the music now. Perhaps another drink would help, but the man in the
corner was watching and he would know it was not coffee alone in the cup Betty
brought her. His name was Simon. He had once been a piano player, too.
Fall on your knees, O hear the angels’ voices…. But it was like she had fallen
overboard and had to swim through seaweed. The darkness of the man’s coat
seemed to press against her head, and there was a watery terror that had to do
with her mother; get inside, she thought. But she was very shaky. She slowed
down, played “The First Noel” quite lightly. She saw a large snowy field now,
with a crack of gentle light along the horizon.
When she finished, she did something that really surprised her. Later she had
to wonder how long she had been planning this without quite knowing. The way
she didn’t quite allow herself to know when Malcolm had stopped saying “I
think about you all the time.”
Angie took a break.
Delicately, she pressed the cocktail napkin to her lips, slipped out from behind
the piano, and walked toward the restroom, where there was a pay phone. She
did not want to bother Joe for her pocketbook.
“Darling,” she said quietly to Walter, “do you have some change?”
He stretched out a leg, reached into his pocket, handed her the coins. “You’re
the candy shop, Angie,” Walter said slurringly.
His hand was moist; even the coins felt moist. “Thank you, sweetheart,” she
said.
She went to the phone and dialed Malcolm’s number. Not once, in twenty-two
years, had she called him at home, although she had memorized his number long
ago. Twenty-two years, she thought, as she listened to the buzz of the ring,
would be considered a very long time by most people, but for Angie time was as
big and round as the sky, and to try to make sense of it was like trying to make
sense of music and God and why the ocean was deep. Long ago Angie had
known not to try to make sense of these things, the way other people tried to do.
Malcolm answered the phone. And here was a curious thing—she didn’t like
the sound of his voice. “Malcolm,” she said softly. “I can’t see you anymore. I’m
so terribly sorry, but I can’t do this anymore.”
Silence. His wife was probably right there. “Bye, now,” she said.
On her way past Walter, she said, “Thank you, darling,” and he said,
“Anything for you, Angie.” Walter’s voice was thick with drunkenness, his face
glistening.
She played the song Simon wanted then, “Bridge Over Troubled Water,” but
it wasn’t until she was almost through that she allowed herself to look at him. He
did not return her smile, and a flush went through her.
She smiled at the Christmas tree. The colored lights seemed terribly bright,
and for a moment she felt baffled that people did this to trees—decorated them
with all that glitter; some people looked forward to this all year. And then
another flush of heat rose through her, to think how in a few weeks the tree
would be stripped, taken down, hauled out onto the sidewalk with tinsel still
sticking to it; she could picture how awkward this tree would look, perched
sideways on the snow, its chopped little trunk sticking at an angle in the air.
She began to play “We Shall Overcome,” but somebody from the bar called
out, “Hey, a little serious there, Angie,” and so she smiled even more brightly
and played ragtime instead. Stupid to play that—to play “We Shall Overcome.”
Simon would think it was stupid, she realized that now. “You’re so schmaltzy,”
he used to say.
But he had said other things. When he took her to lunch with her mother that
first time: “You’re like a person in a beautiful fairy tale,” he had said, sunlight
falling across the table on the deck.
“You’re the perfect daughter,” he had said, out in the rowboat in the bay, her
mother waving from the rocks. “You have the face of an angel,” he said the day
they stepped from the boat onto Puckerbrush Island. Later he sent her one white
rose.
Oh, she had been just a girl. She had come into this very bar with her friends
one night that summer, and there he was playing “Fly Me to the Moon.” It was
like he’d had little lights flickering off him.
A nervous fellow, though, Simon had been, his whole body jerking around
like a puppet pulled by strings. A lot of force in his playing. But it lacked—well,
deep in her heart she had known even then that his playing lacked—well,
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