The Best Thing for You (18 page)

Yes, Anika said politely.

Now, the living room. This is one of the nicest suites in the building, I think, because of this room. The ocean view, as you can see, and quite spacious too, compared to the bedrooms. You’ll be spending a lot of time in here, I imagine.

Yes, Thom said, looking at Anika. I guess we will.

That’s settled, then, Phyllis said.

Phyllis will know where to send it on, Anika said now.

It doesn’t really look like he wanted it, though, does it? Thom said. It almost looks like he left it behind deliberately. Wrapping it up that way, and hiding it the way he did.

They spent some time trying to construct a personality out of the furnishings they had seen when they first walked through the apartment – Gabbeh rugs, spare teak furniture, Naipaul novels on the shelves. A large bureau dominated the smaller bedroom (art deco, Anika thought, coveting it), and a single black and white photograph of a nude male torso graced the fridge.

Gay, Thom suggested, and she shrugged, not disagreeing. There was a large gay population in the West end. Early for their appointment, they had stopped in to a busy coffee shop two blocks away, only belatedly realizing that the other customers were all male, and Anika was drawing wry half-smiles. It had been excellent coffee.

Not poor either, Anika suggested now. I guess diplomats do all right.

Maybe the drugs are inside, Thom said, peering at the metronome’s base.

Anika smiled, half at their own tired furniture on these honeyed floors, half at Thom’s doggedness when he found an idea he liked.

You have that little screwdriver for your glasses, he said.

She fetched it from its sleeve in the silk lining of her glasses’ case, but when he got the back off there was no cache of pills or baggie of white powder, only the machine’s tiny mechanism, shiny and oiled and apparently in order.

I give up, Thom said.

That evening they took it down the hall to Phyllis’s apartment and explained where they had found it.

No, he didn’t leave a forwarding address, I’m afraid, she said. She tapped a wrinkled finger against her lips and turned the metronome over in the light of a table lamp. Blueness came and went in the dark wood like an illusion, or a bruise.

It’s pretty, isn’t it, Phyllis said finally. Very David. He collected antiques, as you saw. Exquisite taste, he had. Only the best.

It’s broken, though, Anika said.

Drugs, maybe? the older woman suggested, with no hint of excitement or the least loss of poise. Thom punched Anika lightly in the arm.

We thought of that, Anika said gravely. Thom unscrewed the back but there was nothing inside.

No, I wouldn’t have thought it of him, Phyllis said. David was a decent, hard-working man. But you never know. Taped to the pipes, you say.

Taped to the pipes, Thom said. Would you like it?

Oh, I’ve no room for more clutter, she said brightly, fluttering her hands at forty years’ of possessions – books and tables
and lamps and chairs and embroidered cushions and potpourri pots and china and plants – her two-bedroom layout the distorted mirror image of their own. You keep it, she said. It’s a pretty thing.

She knows we don’t have many pretty things, Anika said that night. They lay in bed, wide awake, adjusting to the traffic noises, not overly invasive, and the unfamiliar quality of the darkness.

Yet, Thom said. (This was a fixture of their conversations, as window shopping was a fixture of their weekends.)

He adjusted a pillow between his shoulder and her head and pulled her legs between his. They had not lain this way, just awake and talking, Anika thought, in a long time.

It’s like he wanted us to find it, Thom said. Let’s keep it, for a while anyway. Maybe get it appraised.

David, Anika said experimentally, as though the feel of the name in her mouth might yield a clue.

David, Thom repeated.

David had stepped into a little shop in the Village, musical antiquities, and was standing before a locked glass case of metronomes when he heard a voice behind him say, Are you a Jew? Because I will only sell to a Jew.

David turned and said, Are
you
a Jew?

No.

Then what’s wrong with them?

The woman was in her fifties, probably, with fashionable clothes (tight pants, blue leather jacket, scarf of some mottled, bronze, filmy stuff) and hair (Roman emperor), dramatically plucked brows, a deep slash of a mouth, and a harsh, guttural accent.

You have every right to ask me that, she said. Nothing is wrong with them. And I am somewhat melodramatic. It depends on the piece. You like this one?

She selected a key from the ring on her belt, unlocked the cabinet, and withdrew a tall, pear-shaped wooden metronome with a lovely symmetrical grain on either side, on an elaborately carved scrollwork base.

Eighteen thirty-six, Vienna, she said. Twenty-five thousand. Maelzel. The case is signed on the inside. You could buy this one.

What about the blue one?

Maelzel, she repeated. The inventor of the metronome. Believe me, when I was a girl, I loathed Herr Maelzel.

Piano lessons?

She didn’t answer. David could not decide whether he liked her or not; splintery women could go both ways. He watched her wind the metronome, set it down on a nearby table, and let it go.

Hear it speak with its velvety throat, she said, and he decided she was monstrous, and the only possible thing was to enjoy her enormously. The tock was rich and round (definitely not a tick), evoking a lost world of stone and wood and firelight and horses and cream. But it was not James, somehow, and like a vessel he was filled, this trip, with thoughts of James, and returning home to James. He needed something leaner, more astringent, elegant but a bit stark and forbidding, too.

What about the blue one? David said.

The woman had apparently taken a liking to him, and began to show him around her store. The carpets were dark red, and the walls – turquoise – were hung with instruments on nails: lustrous horns he did and didn’t recognize, strangely tortured
shapes, flutes straight and curling, a family of saxophones and another of strings, a bitty inlaid guitar. A grand piano, a Steinway, was clearly queen of the room, but there were also a harpsichord, a daintier clavichord, and the sheer, tempting sheen of a gong. In glass cabinets built in around a cold fireplace he counted fifty metronomes, coffin and pear. The bookcases held hundreds of scores. She walked around touching lamps, casting spoons of light and shadows onto the walls. All these gypsy colours and noisemakers, David thought: is this what it’s like inside her head?

Now this, she said, taking down a score and opening it for his perusal. His mouth quirked briefly as he bit down a smile. He was a little afraid, in his laughing way, to confess to her he couldn’t read music.

First edition? he asked politely.

She laughed, and showed him the cover – torn, chartreuse and cream, with enormous fading letters in an almost illegibly ornate gothic type. German.

Bach, she said.
Die Kunst der Fuge.

So she is German, David thought.

She opened to the title page and pointed to a signature, also illegible.

Artur Rubinstein, she read.

She flipped through the pages, stopping every now and then to draw his attention to pen marks on the score.

Annotated, she said.

Valuable?

Clearly not to you.

She closed the score and put it back on the shelf.

I was just looking for a gift, he said. For a friend.

A musician?

No.

Bravo, she said, and he turned to leave.

But where are you going? she said. All day long, musicians. Their big scarves, their little gloves. So respectful, so knowledgeable. May I confess to you my horror of musicians? Of students? They like to carry their instruments on their backs. The tips of their noses are always pink, like mice. They like to buy my scores. They like to stand in my store and stroke the pages. They think they can catch talent like the clap, though even the most talented of them has no talent. Even their arrogance is false. They carry water bottles like athletes, they grow their hair long to suggest untameable passions, they practise until their fingers bleed, they close their eyes when they perform. We live in the culture of the orgasm, the pursuit of the orgasm. The Juilliard School, Carnegie Hall, the Tchaikovsky competition, these are the orgasms they strain and strain to achieve. Their teachers are no better, they are old panders, merely. What I say is nothing new. The true artist venerates nothing. I tell you, I despise them all.

What about the blue one? David said.

Are you a Jew?

He decided the woman’s business must be failing, and she was probably deranged.

Why do you keep asking me that? he said, genuinely curious.

I owe the world a moral debt, the woman said. We all do, of course, but mine is bigger than most. It is not a debt I can pay in cash. I cannot write a cheque to this organization and that organization and then I am free. I must
live
in the right way. You understand the difference between spending and living?

I hope so, David said, genuinely again, though she might well have meant to insult.

I will explain why I keep asking you this question, she said. But it is a long story. If I make some tea, you will have some?

I’d love some tea, David said.

In the back of the store, through an archway, was a sitting room with a couple of velvet chairs, a settee, and tea things on a low table. Here too were a desk, a laptop computer, and the props of a business, ledgers and files and pigeonholes of invoices. One corner was stacked floor to ceiling with boxes of various shapes and sizes.

My business is quite complex, she said, returning – from what he guessed was a bathroom, in a cupboard behind a bead curtain – with an electric kettle. She set it on the table and plugged it into the surge protector that also served the computer. Delicate, she continued, and not always strictly legal. Aha, I have interested you. You think, she speaks so highly and mightily of morals, yet she deals in stolen property?

Goodness, David said agreeably, taking one of the lemon cookies that she, in a nice Bohemian gesture, offered in the paper drawer they had come boxed in rather than on a plate. He wondered if they learned this sort of thing at finishing school, when to
stop.
He wondered why he suspected her of having attended a finishing school. She poured the tea, Earl Grey, and answered the unspoken question in what she said next.

Her name was Ulrike Weber, and she was born in Tübingen, a famous old university town in southwestern Germany, a couple of years after the end of the war. Her mother was gentle and calm, clean and pious, a thrifty woman who loved Schiller and Christmas and attended free lectures at the
Musikverein
with her friends. Her father she knew as a formal, distant man who worked long hours at the University (he lectured in medieval history), yet with a streak of indulgent silliness he reserved just for her. She was an only child, and for her first decade or so a good girl, the best – quiet, studious, affectionate, obedient, a little dreamy. (Milk? she offered, proffering a china jug, and when he declined she let three drops fall in her cup, three
twirling ribbons in the clear liquid.) The three of them lived in a two-bedroom apartment, a little small, perhaps, but filled with nice things: comfortable chairs and books and a tiny fireplace with a blue-tiled hearth that was her special place to sit. There were a few
objets d’art
, too – an ancient Greek clay wine-cup, a couple of icons, an empty, iridescent perfume bottle, the blue metronome – pretty things that were put away when guests came to visit because, as her mother explained, it would be sad to see them handled casually, and broken.

One day in her early teens (the century’s early sixties), a truck stopped in the narrow street in front of their apartment, and a piano was winched up on a crane and gently swung through the empty window frame (a glazier had been called the day before), to alight in the middle of their front room. From that day on her relationship with her parents began to deteriorate. Her mother, it turned out, had ambitions. A teacher was found, and Ulrike began the arduous business of mastering an instrument for which she had little natural affection and no aptitude whatsoever. She managed to muscle through her first couple of years on sheer determination; progressed, in fact, at a speed that was not unusual given that most beginners were a half or even a third her age, but that her teacher and mother misinterpreted as talent. But by her third year she had had enough. Mother sat in her chair, daughter sat on her bench, score sat on its ledge, and metronome sat queen of all, reproving an increasingly rebellious Ulrike with her sternly waving finger and strict regulation of every moment’s action and thought.

I won’t! Ulrike said, flinging the score to the floor because she dared not touch the blue metronome itself, once so precious and delightful.

You will, her mother said, picking up the score and replacing it in front of her, while the metronome made dispassionate
comment on the seconds and minutes and hours and days and months and years they had spent trapped, together, in these newly hateful little rooms. When her father returned home from the University he, too, offered stern reproof.