Babylon and Other Stories (6 page)

“That was my name before I married Mr. Tanizaki,” she said. “I've had this book for a long time. That's why you have to be careful with it, and give it back.”

“Okay.”

“I trust you, Kevin. I know you'll take good care of the book, and practice every day.”

“Okay.”

“Do you understand? Say yes, Kevin, not this ‘okay’ all the time.”

“Yes,” he whispered. He was close to desperation. He had not told Mrs. Tanizaki that he had no piano to practice on, and was scared to tell her because she might say he couldn't take lessons anymore. Every two weeks his mother gave him an envelope with a check in it for Mrs. Tanizaki, and he brought it and laid it on the piano. It stayed there, undiscussed, until he left. They never talked about his family, or where he lived, or anything. The piano was their only shared element. Now he didn't know what to do. The book was ancient and valuable; he shouldn't have it. In his hands, as if by themselves, the pages flipped open, and he saw the long black lines stretching across the pages, notes rising and falling in small streams. As he looked, the notes wrapped themselves around him like ribbons of seaweed. He could not tell her.

He took the book home and laid it on his bed. Then he took his school notebook and ripped out three pages and fastened them side-to-side with Scotch tape. He took a pencil and drew middle C in the center of one page. It looked lopsided and thick and the bottom right side spread downward like something that had been left out in the sun and was starting to melt. He thought of Mrs. Tanizaki's face and Lawrence's chewing and the smell of food that laid itself over all his lessons, and he was angry then and ripped up the pages and threw them in the garbage can.

But the next day he started over and drew eight white notes and five black ones, enough for a scale and the simple exercises for the right hand, and in the bedroom he practiced from the book, his fingers rustling and tapping against the paper. Before figuring out that he needed to put the paper over a book from school, he broke through it twice and ruined it. Eventually he drew the best, longest-lasting one.

Rachel, cleaning out the garbage can a week later, found all his failed attempts. By this time she was showing, and although she wasn't too ungainly just yet, the consciousness of weight invaded all her actions, including the way she bent to pick up the garbage can or sat down on the couch to examine the piano pages. When Brian came home from work and turned on the news, she brought him a beer.

“Brian,” she said, “we need to get Kevin a piano, so he can practice. Maybe we can find him one of those—what are they, like a synthesizer? Those little flat things that shouldn't be too expensive?”

He looked at her, but not in the face. Lately she'd noticed he wouldn't meet her eyes; instead, he looked at her stomach or his gaze seemed to fasten on her neck, not quite making it any higher, as if seized by that weight she carried, her additional gravity.

“You want to buy a goddamn piano?” he said.

“Not a real piano,” she said. “Just something for him to practice on. He loves it, Brian. It's really amazing. He could turn out to be a genius, I mean who knows?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Or maybe if we gave Mrs. Tanizaki a little extra money, she'd let him go over there and practice on her piano. She can't use it all the time, can she? I bet she'd do that. I think she would.”

Brian put down his beer and held her hand and looked at her
lap. When he spoke, his voice was tender and soft. “Rachel, I don't know how to tell you this, but I want you to listen to me. I think you're losing it. I think you really are.”

The next morning she got a call from Brian's boss asking if he was sick, which he wasn't. When he didn't come home after work, she didn't call Steve or his parents. She wasn't going to ask anybody else where her own husband was, not in this lifetime.

A month passed and Brian didn't come back. Kevin practiced daily on the paper piano. He could play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Au clair de la lune.” On paper the melodies whispered and tapped, but on the piano, in three dimensions, the sound burst out so strong and plain that he was shocked. A lot of times, when he touched the wrong notes it wasn't because he didn't practice but because the keys were higher and farther apart than in his drawing of them. If Mrs. Tanizaki noticed his surprise or his fumbling readjustments, she didn't say anything.

“Good, Kevin,” she said softly. “Wrists up. Fingers bent. Don't look at me, it doesn't matter what I look like. Keep going. That's good.”

Sometimes she rapped against the piano with a little stick, to help him keep time, and this made him feel sick to his stomach. Other times, while he was playing, she disappeared behind him, even leaving the room. He hadn't seen Lawrence for a while, and wondered if Mrs. Tanizaki had to go make Lawrence his sandwiches in the kitchen. These days Rachel wasn't making Kevin lunch anymore. When he got home he'd make it himself in the microwave and eat it alone at the table, the taps of Mrs. Tanizaki's stick still beating inside his ears. His mother would be sitting on the couch, looking out the window at the park, there and not
there at the same time. He thought the baby in her stomach was dragging her down; it was round like a bowling ball and maybe that heavy.

Rachel had decisions to make, had to figure out what to do— about her job, the rent, the future. The words
what to do
ran together in her mind until they lost meaning and became a chant instead,
whattodowhattodowhattodo.
At times she felt like she was drowning in air—too thick, it bore down until she couldn't move or breathe. The baby was due in two months. This much she knew: she was going to name the baby Jennifer, she was going to put little barrettes in her hair, she could practically feel the silky skin of the baby's cheek against hers. One day a fifty-dollar bill came in the mail, in an envelope with no return address. She was waiting to find the strength inside her, waiting for it and building it up. In the meantime she rested, and Kevin played piano in his room.

It was summer and Kevin did not have school. He stayed in his room playing the piano. The apartment was hot and dense. He played “Pop Goes the Weasel.” Rachel was lying down in the bedroom. Then the doorbell rang, and he answered it. It was his father. Kevin looked at him. Rachel had said that Brian was away on a trip, but he hadn't believed her. Maybe it was true.

“Hey, buddy,” Brian said, “how's it going?”

“Okay.”

“Just okay? Not good, not great?”

“Good.”

“Good,” Brian said, holding out a plastic bag. “Here, I brought you something.”

Kevin took it and looked inside. It was a toy truck.

“Can I come in?”

Kevin stepped aside, and Brian walked in. Rachel was standing in the living room, rubbing the sleep from her eyes. Each time she went to sleep she seemed to fall deeper and deeper, and it took her forever to wake up. Even the sight of her husband couldn't shake her into action; she stood there blinking.

“Hey,” Brian said. “I came to see how you guys are doing.”

Rachel rubbed her stomach. “It's a girl,” she said. “Jennifer.”

When Kevin closed the door, the sound of it made Brian turn around. He smiled at Kevin. Rachel and Brian sat on the couch, and he did all the talking. It was like he'd been storing up words all the time he'd been away, and when he got home and opened his mouth they tumbled out on top of one another, falling and falling. But the things he was talking about had nothing to do with his trip—baseball scores, stories about his job, jokes he'd heard. Kevin sat down next to him, on the other side of Rachel, and put his hand next to Brian's knee. He could feel the weight of his father's leg on the couch. A while later Rachel went into the kitchen to make dinner and Brian stood there in the doorway, still talking. After dinner, Kevin went to his room and could hear his parents' voices rumbling in a steady rhythm through the walls. With a book and the paper piano on his lap, he turned this rhythm into a song, making it the bass clef to a melody he made up as he went, a tap-tap beat up and down and around the scale.

In the middle of the night he thought he heard a scream and jumped up out of bed. Standing outside their door, listening, he heard his mother sob. Was it the baby? So heavy that it dropped out of her, ripping her open? “Mom?” he said.

“Go to sleep, Kev,” Brian said. “Everything's fine.”

Kevin looked at the closed door. “Mom?” he said.

Finally she called, “It's okay.”

He was still standing there, and Brian said, “Did you hear her, bud? Go back to bed.”

In the morning, they were still asleep when he left for his piano lesson. He drank a glass of juice and ate some toast and walked around the park, green and weedy now. He rang the doorbell at Mrs. Tanizaki's.

“Come in, Kevin,” she said. “Today I've got a surprise for you.”

He followed her into the house. Lawrence stood in the kitchen doorway, chewing. When Kevin passed by, he opened his mouth wide and showed him the pile of chewed-up food on his tongue. Kevin stared.

“When you're finished eating,” Mrs. Tanizaki called, “we'll be waiting for you, Lawrence.”

Lawrence smiled at him with his mouth still open and his tongue covered with food. His eyes were barely visible behind his glasses and his hair. Kevin sped past him.

“Sit over here, Kevin,” Mrs. Tanizaki said, pointing to the chair at the back of his room, where Lawrence used to sit chewing his sandwiches. “Where is your book?”

He opened his backpack and took it out.

“Open to the last page,” she said. “I want you to learn this piece. This section in your book is just a small part of the piece. But Lawrence knows the whole piece and plays it very well, so I asked him to play it for you. And I want you to listen to it very carefully.”

“Okay.”

“Lawrence, are you ready?”

Lawrence came into the room with his mouth closed and sat down on the piano bench. Kevin looked at his slouching back. All he could think about was bits of food falling out of his mouth and landing on the white and black keys, and when Lawrence started playing he could barely hear the music. He was thinking about the food, and the notes were wooden and dull. He closed his
eyes. Lawrence's fingers moved over the piano without ceasing, and he pictured them and made them into his own fingers, and then he was playing and finally he could hear the piano. He heard it without Lawrence in it. And there it was. The notes lined up, partnered and separated and circled, moving swiftly through a clear, empty hall; there were no smells in this place, just a pale and pure background, like water. Then he thought, This is the castle. These are the dancers.

A cascade, a chord, a castle.

The music stopped, and he opened his eyes. Mrs. Tanizaki smiled down at him, not at his face but at his hands, and he looked and saw they were balled into fists. Lawrence made a snorting sound.

“Thank you, Lawrence,” Mrs. Tanizaki said. “Kevin, would you like to thank Lawrence for his performance?”

“Okay.”

“Kevin,” she said.

“I mean thank you,” he said.

“No big deal. Can I go now, Mom?”

“Yes, Lawrence.”

He slipped heavily off the bench and disappeared into the kitchen, where Kevin could hear him opening and closing the refrigerator door, then took his place at the piano.

“Now, you try,” Mrs. Tanizaki said, opening the book.

Kevin's fingers moved thickly, sluggishly through the first bars, and it sounded nothing like what he had just heard. He thought about his paper piano and his mother and his father there or not there and his fingers making empty sounds on a flat surface and he bit down, hard, on the inside of his cheek. His fingers stopped.

“It's all right, Kevin,” Mrs. Tanizaki said. “It takes practice. If
you go home and practice, you'll be able to play the piece, I guarantee it.”

He looked at her dark eyes. She was the teacher. He bent his head over the keys.

When he got home his father was not there. His mother looked dazed, and kept moving her hands over her swollen stomach, from top to bottom, over and over.

“I don't think he's coming back this time,” she said. “He packed a bag.”

Kevin set his own backpack down, as if it incriminated him, and put his hands in his pockets.

“The duffel bag,” Rachel said. “He took the duffel bag this time.” She looked at Kevin, his thin arms poking out of his T-shirt. “Sit down at the table,” she said. “He's not coming back, okay? But we're going to be fine. I'm going to make lunch.”

She heated up some soup in the microwave, then brought it to the table and poured him a glass of milk. She sat down opposite him and crossed her arms. “How was your lesson?”

“I'm not going back,” Kevin said.

“What do you mean? You love the piano.”

He shook his head. He picked up his spoon and slurped down some soup. Even though he'd had his eyes closed during Lawrence's performance, he couldn't stop picturing his hands moving quickly, unhesitatingly, over the keys, gathering the notes into perfect strands, as Mrs. Tanizaki watched. The two of them sat together at the piano under the pool of light. It was their world, and he did not belong in it. He saw himself walking slowly toward them, a sheet of paper in his hand, and Mrs. Tanizaki didn't hear him; but Lawrence turned and saw Kevin and he was laughing, his head flung back.

“I hate her.” He couldn't say her name. “I'm not going back.”

“You really don't want to? You don't like the piano anymore?”

“I'm not going there anymore.”

“Come here,” she said. “Stop eating and come here.”

He obeyed, walking around the table and standing next to her. They looked into each other's pale blue eyes. Then his lower lip, still orange with soup, trembled, and tears slipped down his cheeks. Rachel felt her blood pump in her veins—moving through her, waking her up—and she put her hands on the slight, slack muscles of his upper arms.

“I won't let you stop,” she said, and her fingers sent strength into his skin. Her voice was the world's warmest sound. It pulled and pulled him until he found himself leaning close against her, and he pressed his forehead to her neck.