The View From Penthouse B (4 page)

Edwin

T
HOUGH I USED TO
leave my retail employment off my résumé, I look back on it now with pride and nostalgia. To escape the long solitary confinement of my proofreading cubicle, I became a buyer-in-training, despite being not terribly well suited or well dressed enough to catch the eye of managers who might promote me. The job was the result of more parental networking, a propitious conversation between my mother and a stranger at a bridge tournament. And though a wrong turn professionally, it turned out to be the high point of my romantic history because Edwin and I met on the mezzanine level of Nordstrom in Farmington, Connecticut, in what now seems another life.

It was luck or kismet or just being on the right shift at the right time. The store’s famously unreliable piano player, Viktor, had come to work drunk.

“No, sorry, I do not take requests,” we sales-associates-in-training heard him say. He ranted about the stupid clichéd songs Americans always requested, which then led to a sarcastic rendition of “Chim Chim Cher-ee
.
” He punctuated his tirade with swigs from a Styrofoam cup, its contents clearly alcohol. When he stopped playing altogether and started muttering, presumably obscenities in Russian—acoustics were wonderful in his area—two security guards rushed over.

“Sir,” said the lead guard, reaching for his walkie-talkie, a hand on Viktor’s shoulder.

“Don’t touch me!” Viktor yelled.

“I think it’s time for your break,” said the guard.

Have I mentioned that we all knew Viktor, and all knew he was an émigré from Irkutsk who liked to assert his new American right to swear in two languages at anyone who policed the state, even if the state consisted of Nordstrom, Lord & Taylor, and Emporium Armani?

Those of us in adjacent departments were edging as close as we dared, tucking our IDs into our pockets so we could mingle with the curious shoppers.

“Don’t let him drive!” someone called to the guards.

“Name a musician who owns car,” Viktor yelled back. “And where in hell would I park in U S of A even if I owned little Japanese shitbox?”

A guard sniffed the contents of the Styrofoam cup and pronounced with too much glee and stereotyping, “Vodka!”

“Beeg detective,” Viktor sneered.

Now the head of HR was at the top of the escalator and racewalking toward the piano. We displaced salespeople moved several yards into the crowd, back toward our departments.

The reason a random Russian’s separation from the store is relevant to my social history is that while all of this was unfolding, a customer named Edwin Schmidt was buying athletic socks in the shoe department. He first heard the music stop, midpassage, then a discordant bass clunk of keys as if a big, angry fist had attacked the keyboard. Then he heard raised voices. He abandoned the package of socks under consideration, hopped on the up escalator, and came toward the noise. Arriving as both guards were raising Viktor from the piano bench, he stayed after the crowd had dispersed and gestured toward the piano’s keyboard and to the HR woman
May I?

“Play?”

“A few pieces I know by heart.”

He admitted later that he was showing off, starting with a gorgeous Liszt impromptu that drew sighs from the assembled shoppers and rubberneckers. The HR woman smiled the smile of someone who thinks it’s her lucky day and her own bit of genius recruiting. “Do you play other stuff?” she asked. With barely a pause between pieces, Edwin switched into a beautifully mournful rendition of “All You Need Is Love.”

“Are you a professional?”

“Yes and no. I’m a music teacher.”

The HR woman asked where, what time school got out, and whether his weekends were free. He said West Hartford, three p.m., and yes. Did she need references?

“My office is downstairs, a right turn after the restrooms. Come by on your break?”

“So I should keep playing?”

“Let’s get you into a jacket and tie first—follow me—and then we’ll call the next hour an audition.”

Before he left, with a gift certificate toward the purchase price of his new sports jacket and a voucher for our café, he’d played Rodgers and Hart, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Stephen Sondheim, more Beatles, and more impromptus. He returned that night with sheet music, and without being told, played songs that conjured snow, snowmen, winter. It was our huge February coat sale.

No wedding ring on those talented fingers, my coworkers and I all noticed. “Gay,” a few ignoramuses concluded because of his artistic gifts. I wondered aloud to Meredith and Taisha in Hosiery if our maestro was available. Both young and adventurous, they claimed the next move was up to me. When I did nothing, Taisha—safely married and on my behalf—strode to the piano and asked if he was married or seeing anyone. He looked up. She must have mentioned my name because there was a direct gaze into Hosiery, then a switch to a song I didn’t recognize.

I might have turned away, but Meredith was there, backup to Taisha’s bold overtures, prompting me to answer. I smiled and shrugged—
Sorry, can’t name that tune.

His right hand crossed over his left to punctuate his answer with one last chord. He called across the mezzanine, “It’s ‘Always,’ by Irving Berlin. He wrote it for his wife.”

I’m sure our three faces fell. Taisha must have said something like “So you
are
married?” Even from a distance, I could see him trying to take back the impression the lyrics had falsely suggested. He said something to Taisha, who then yelled to me, “Get over here, missy! Time for your break.”

“Lipstick,” Meredith commanded.

Was there ever a less subtle exercise in matchmaking? I made a slow walk over to the piano, trying to look unruffled and innocent, as if I didn’t know what their conversation had been about. With a sly smile Edwin announced to the passersby, “I’m now going to play ‘A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,’ also by the late, great Irving Berlin.”

I was thirty. No one had ever played a song for me without my first having requested it. Over coffee, I asked him to dinner at my new, barely unpacked studio apartment, and he accepted. Sometimes you see gestures that tell you everything about a person’s character and temperament, and that night I saw many such signs. First among them was his good humor after my scallops turned out to be ammoniated and nearly inedible. Edwin turned down my offer of substitute tuna sandwiches and celery sticks for a spontaneous outing to an Italian bistro in my neighborhood. We discovered that we shared two movies in common (
Casablanca
and
Dirty Dancing
) on our list of top five. From that first night, I could so easily see myself across the table from him, who’d be relaxed and lenient about whatever I served. I could also see us taking trips together, nothing strenuous or exotic, Edwin sliding onto unoccupied piano benches aboard ships and in restaurants, his staying calm when flights were canceled and luggage lost. I’d get a piano. He didn’t make an overture in the direction of a kiss, so I did that myself, knowing that Meredith and Taisha would scold me for a lost opportunity. He took it well.

He proposed on the one-year anniversary of Viktor’s termination with a ring that needed to be sized, so we waited until it was back from the jeweler’s to announce our plans. It had been his grandmother’s, willed to Edwin upon her death. It was white gold and not exactly my taste, but I grew to love it. The diamond was flawless, and noticed by every single customer of the chatty sort whose purchase I wrapped in tissue or whose credit card I ran.

He always claimed he spotted me first, across a crowded mezzanine, but I think everyone knew that was Edwin evoking Ezio Pinza in
South Pacific.
He stopped his freelance playing, and I returned to fixing other people’s sentences when we moved to Manhattan and its Washington Irving High School; with our combined incomes and rent-controlled one-bedroom, we didn’t need second jobs. His students loved him.

It was only nineteen years later when the school’s award-winning a cappella group brought the mourners to tears with “Amazing Grace.” It surprised me and broke my heart all over again when they closed with a slow, sweet “Always.” Everyone grasped its meaning: The way we’d met, at a Steinway grand, had been Edwin’s favorite illustration of how music could change a life.

We Add Anthony

I
SHOULD HAVE KNOWN
we were leading up to a large lifestyle change at the Batavia when Margot sold her diamond engagement ring, as well as an enameled bullfrog with topaz eyes that she had never liked. Immediately she regretted another transaction—selling a string of pearls that she’d worn at her wedding, an engagement gift from her in-laws. A few times she arrived at breakfast looking a little glummer than usual, and when I asked what was wrong she said, “I dreamed about my engagement pearls again.” I told her that the pearls were a metaphor for her old life. Their replacement would be a metaphor for her new one.

“How’s that?” she asked.

I looked up from my cereal and newspaper. “I think it’s obvious: When your ship comes back in, or your book gets published, you’ll replace them and you’ll feel a kind of victory over hardship every time you look down at your bosom.”

What I happened to be looking down at was an advertisement on page two of the
Times.
To distract her, I jabbed at the paper and asked, “Do you believe this: ‘Mary-Jane with Cut Out Detail’—four hundred and ninety-five dollars! Who buys shoes for five hundred dollars these days?” I held up the page. The shoes were pictured and very beautiful, and looked to be of the softest silvery leather.

Margot put on her reading glasses, leaned over, and read from the fine print at the bottom of the ad. “Bal Harbour, Beverly Hills, South Coast Plaza, Las Vegas, Honolulu, Dallas. Ha! As if there’s any money left there.”

Margot thinks that no one in the United States, regardless of employment or liquidity or reserves of gold bullion, has anything left. She puzzles over the society snapshots in the Sunday Styles section, its smiling couples still raising money for the arts, still raising debutantes, still in black tie and designer gowns, still in possession of the jewels from the days before the black Fridays and Mondays.

This particular exchange sticks in my mind because of the phone call that interrupted it. As soon as she noted the caller ID, Margot left the table and headed into the den.

I heard only murmuring, followed by laughter. Then she was back, still on the phone but now speaking to me. “Are you home tonight?” she asked. And then back to the caller: “My sister is a matchmaking consultant. She’s often on duty at night.”

I said, “I’m home.”

“Do you know where we are . . . ? That’s right. North side of the street. Just give the doorman your name. He’ll point you to the right elevator.”

“Who’s coming over?” I asked, as soon as she clicked her phone shut.

“A man. An acquaintance.” And then—too gently, too psychiatrically: “His name is Anthony. You’ll meet him and you’ll form an opinion.”

“About what?”

“His suitability.”

“For what?”

She picked up her coffee cup, pantomiming
refill.
The swinging door between us closed, and I waited for her return.

After a conspicuously long absence—
she’s bringing water back to a boil for her French press
, I thought;
not dodging my question, not stalling
. Finally she returned, an English muffin split and toasted on a plate. She walked by me, clearly heading for her desk. “Bills to pay,” she said.

I called after her, “Now I’m really nervous. Now I’m thinking you need your apartment back. And this Anthony is a therapist who makes house calls, who’s going to be present when you break the news to me.”

She backtracked and scolded, “Where do you get these ideas? I don’t want my house back! I want more people around, not fewer.”

“Including me?”

“Gwen! You’re the reason I want more people around! I like the company. I think we can accommodate another.”

Thus I learned that Anthony was interviewing for residency. And as much as I was looking unhappy and worried, and as often as she’d promoted democracy and equality—this, she was telling me, had to be her decision and her pocketbook’s.

“Did you think about consulting me before you advertised for a roommate?”

“I didn’t advertise. It just happened. Literally on the street.”

“Not a panhandler, I trust.”

“Of course he isn’t a panhandler! He was picketing outside what used to be his office. I can’t remember—which one went under? Merrill Lynch? Goldman Sachs?”

“Lehman Brothers.”

“There was a whole bunch of them picketing. He had a baby in one of those slings that hang around your neck.”

“A baby? How are we going to have a baby here?”

“It was a borrowed black baby for extra effect! One of his coworkers, a fellow picketer, was there with her twins, so he took one. His signage didn’t hurt, either, in terms of catching my attention.” She demonstrated—exaggerated scrutiny, eyes bugging out.

“What did it say?”

“To most people, his slogan would have meant nothing. But it’s what stopped me cold. And when I tell you, you’ll understand what drew my eye.”

“‘Will work for food?’” I asked.

“No,” said Margot. “Much more . . . coincidental. And relevant. Believe it or not, the sign said
NEXT STOP: THE POOR HOUSE
! You can imagine how that hit me! I had to ask him if he knew about my website, didn’t I?”

“Did he?” I asked.

“Absolutely not. Which made it all the more kismetish. I gave him my card so he could check out my blog,” she continued. “He did. Right on the spot! On his phone! By this time, I’d kind of joined the picket line, so I was filling in the personal and domestic blanks. These financial types are always good with their gadgets, so he’s reading and marching and talking and patting the baby’s back. Eventually I left, and there was an e-mail waiting for me when I got back here. ‘By any chance, do you have a room to let?’ I said no. He didn’t give up. He wrote back, ‘Even for a month or two? Even a sofa? Pretty please.’”