Coming Home (14 page)

And during the days, they looked for work.

***

Even at midday, the place smelled of beer and stale cigarette
smoke.  Weak sunlight filtered through the filthy windows and passed between
chair legs pointed ceilingward from empty tabletops.  The man behind the bar
was squat and compact, his face swarthy and pock-marked beneath a thick tumble
of dark hair.  He deftly polished a glass and hung it in the rack over his
head.  “I’d like to give you kids a break,” he said, “but I got no money to pay
a singer.  I gotta tend bar myself ‘cause I can’t even afford a bartender.”

“Will you please just listen to him?” she said.  “We’ve been in
New York for two years, and we’ve had nothing but doors slammed in our faces!”

“Two years?  Two years is nothing, lady.  This is New York. 
Singers here are a dime a dozen.”

“Not singers like him!” Casey said.

He sighed and picked up his rag.  “You two look like a coupla nice
kids.  Let me give you a word of advice.  Get the hell out of New York and go
on back where you came from.  Show business ain’t all it’s cracked up to be.”

“Screw it,” Danny said, and picked up his guitar and stalked out
of the bar.

“Why?” Casey demanded.  “Why won’t you even listen to him?”

“I already told you, lady, I got no money to pay a singer.”

“He’ll work for tips!”

He paused to study the determined set of her chin.  “You don’t
intend to give up, do you?”

“Not until you hear him.”

“Okay.  You win.  I’ll listen to him.  God knows why, because
there’s no way in hell I can hire him.  But the kid must have something going
for him to have a gorgeous dame like you pushing this hard for him.” 

“Thank you,” she said.  “Thank you!”

“Hey!” he yelled as she raced for the door.  “Just remember, I
ain’t giving him a job!”

She found Danny outside, leaning against the building, smoking a
cigarette.  “Danny,” she said, “come back in.  He’s agreed to listen to you.”

Those blue eyes regarded her coldly.  “Screw him,” he said, and
tossed the cigarette in the gutter.

The anger rose unexpectedly.  “Is that what you want?” she said. 
“Is that what you really want?”

Danny glared at her for a moment, then sighed.  “No,” he said. 
“It’s not.” 

So they went back inside and he sat on a wooden bar stool beneath
a lit Budweiser sign and sang
Elevator Embrace
, a love ballad she’d
written the previous summer.  When he was finished, a fly buzzed in the stillness. 
A lone patron at the end of the bar stared into his beer.  The bartender set
down his rag and came around the bar.  “What’d you say your name was, kid?”

Danny lay his guitar flat across his lap.  “Fiore,” he said. 
“Danny Fiore.”

“Well, Fiore, I’ll give you five bucks a night, plus whatever you
get in tips.  Three nights a week, Friday, Saturday, Sunday.  You play whatever
the patrons want to hear.  Any funny stuff and you’re out on your ass. 
Capisce
?”

Danny looked at him long and hard.  And nodded.  “
Capisce
.”

“And you might want to thank your lady friend, here.  I never
woulda listened to you if it hadn’t been for her.”

***

Juggling.  He was always juggling.

Two years in New York had turned Rob MacKenzie into a jack of all
trades.  His balancing act included the occasional fill-in gig, intermittent
studio work, one part-time job parking cars, and another making deliveries for
a Korean grocery.  He filled in the cracks between jobs by giving guitar
lessons for six bucks an hour, drawing his students from ads tacked up in Laundromats
and coffee houses and on bulletin boards at Columbia and NYU.  He squeezed in
songwriting time in bits and pieces, and in what he jokingly referred to as his
spare time, he and Casey wore holes in their shoes trudging from publisher to
publisher, demo tapes and portfolio in hand, hawking their songs.

Everywhere they went, they heard variations on the same theme: 
Nice
hook, but it’s too commercial/Nice hook, but it’s not commercial enough.
 
The excuses varied, but the bottom line was always the same:  thanks, but no
thanks.

At least the studio work was beginning to bear fruit.  He was
building a reputation as an axeman who not only possessed the necessary chops
but who could always be depended on to show up on time, clean and sober, and
earn every penny of his pay.  So even though the world wasn’t exactly beating a
path to his door, enough studio work came his way to pay the bills.  He was
doing what he loved and getting paid for it, and in Rob MacKenzie’s book, that
made him a rich man. 

It was his love life that was dismal.

In his matter-of-fact way, Rob accepted the fact that he was no
Adonis.  In spite of his lanky body and his odd assortment of features, women
had always found him attractive.  He’d never been able to figure out what it
was about him that attracted them, but he didn’t waste time dwelling on it.  He
was too busy enjoying, for Rob MacKenzie liked women.  He liked the way they
walked, the way they smelled, the silken feel of their skin.  Maybe that was
part of his charm:  Rob not only liked women, he respected them.  Most guys
treated females like they were nothing more than a collection of body parts. 
Rob didn’t buy into that philosophy.  He liked to make love to the entire
woman, not just to some faceless body.  As a result, he often remained friends
with a woman long after any sexual relationship between them had ended.

But in New York, he had little opportunity to meet women, less
time to spend with them, and no privacy at home.  And the women had it no better. 
Any woman who could afford to live alone was out of his league.  So Rob
MacKenzie, for the first time since he’d lost his virginity at seventeen, was
going without.

Then he met Nancy Chen.

It was 4:15 on a Friday afternoon, and he was one of a handful of
people riding the escalator down to the first floor of Bloomingdale’s.  If fate
hadn’t intervened, he never would have noticed the woman a few steps ahead of
him.  But as she stepped off the escalator, the belt to her raincoat caught in
the mechanism, yanking her off balance and imprisoning her.

Rob dropped his shopping bag and rushed to her rescue.  He lost a
brief tug-of-war with the escalator, whose jaws refused to release their
prisoner, and in a desperate move, he yanked the belt free from its loops and
let it go.  While he and the woman watched in silence, the machine sucked it
in, like a single strand of spaghetti, and swallowed it.  Then, simultaneously,
they turned to look at each other.

And his heart hit the soles of his sneakers.

Common sense told him she was all wrong for him.  Nancy was the
elder daughter of a wealthy Park Avenue cardiologist, in her junior year of
pre-med at Columbia, and, as she explained to him over coffee, she didn’t have
time for dating.  Besides, her parents disapproved of interracial marriage, and
Nancy, being a dutiful daughter, had promised to date only Chinese boys.  She
explained regretfully that although she found him attractive, anything more
than a platonic relationship between them was out of the question.

He didn’t hear a word she said.

She was the most exquisite creature he’d ever seen, and he wanted
to spend the next thousand years studying the graceful movements of her hands,
the sway of her black hair, framing her face in a silken curtain, the trembling
of her full lower lip when she gazed at him from beneath sooty lashes.

But it wasn’t meant to be.  She was already late for dinner, and
her parents would be worried.  She thanked him politely for the coffee and for
rescuing her from the clutches of the Bloomingdale’s monster, shook his hand,
and walked out of his life.

He watched her disappear into the rush hour crowd jamming the
Lexington Avenue sidewalk.  And then he did what any red-blooded American male
would have done.

He followed her.

***

Early morning fog swirled around Manhattan’s upper east side, and
Rob tried to look inconspicuous as he leaned against a lamp post a few doors
down from Nancy Chen’s apartment building.  But in this neighborhood,
inconspicuous was impossible, and if the doorman saw him, he’d have the NYPD on
his ass and some big-time explaining to do.

A blue-haired matron in a full-length fox fur appeared out of the
fog with some kind of leggy dog on a leash.  Like Cassius, the dog had that
lean and hungry look.  Translated, that meant he probably ate scrawny young
guitar players for breakfast.  The dog bared his teeth.  The woman paused, and
Rob saw a momentary flash of fear on her face.  He smiled his most engaging
smile, and she sniffed, averted her eyes, and hurried past.

So much for charming the local gentry.

Nancy emerged from her building, wearing a leather coat that
screamed affluent and carrying a red canvas bag large enough to hold the Statue
of Liberty in case she got a sudden urge to tote it around.  She greeted the
doorman and strode briskly in Rob’s direction, and he stepped away from the
lamp post and planted himself squarely in her path.

She nearly collided with him.  Conflicting emotions flitted across
her face.  It was dismay that remained.  “What are you doing here?” she asked.

“Waiting for you.”

She shot a glance over her shoulder.  “How did you find out where
I live?”

For a smidgen of a second, he felt guilty.  But it passed.  “I
followed you home the other night,” he said.

Her eyes widened.  “If we are seen together,” she said, “there
will be trouble.  Meet me at the bus stop around the corner.”

In the anonymity of the crowd waiting for the bus, nobody gave
them a second glance.  “Why are you following me?” she asked.  “I told you I
don’t date white boys.”

“Who’s talking about dating?  Can’t we just be friends?”

“I can see it in your eyes,” she said.  “You want to be more than
friends.”

The bus chugged up in a cloud of exhaust fumes.  The door opened,
and the line of people began to crawl.  “What difference does it make,” he
said, “what your parents think?  You’re over eighteen.  It’s your life.”

Nancy dropped her fare into the slot and moved on, and the line
came to a halt while Rob scrounged in his pockets for change.  “Move it, bud,”
some guy behind him said.  “You think we got all day?”  The hair on the back of
his neck stood up, but he ignored the gibe, dropped his money into the slot and
plunked into the empty seat beside Nancy.  “If you really wanted to see me,” he
said, “you could.”

“I am Chinese,” she said.  “I was raised to honor my elders, for
they have more wisdom than I.”

“Are you telling me you’re not capable of making your own
decisions?”

“It isn’t a matter of capability.  It is a matter of honor and
respect.”

“Well, I happen to honor and respect you.  Doesn’t that count?”

“I’m afraid,” she said, “that what you feel for me has little to
do with honor and respect, and more to do with hormones.”  She stood up. 
“Excuse me,” she said, swaying as the bus came to an abrupt halt.  “This is my
stop.”

He chased her down the aisle of the bus.  When they reached the
sidewalk, she took off at a pace so brisk he had to sprint to catch up with
her.  “At least let me carry your bag,” he said.

“I’m quite capable of carrying it myself.”  She paused in front of
a brick building with a wide granite staircase.  “My first class begins in five
minutes,” she said.  “I’m sorry, but I must say good-bye now.”

As a stream of college students flowed around them, he said, “I’m
not giving up this easy.  I’m Irish.  I don’t know when to quit.”

A flicker of a smile lit her face.  “Good-bye, Rob MacKenzie,” she
said.  “It has been very nice knowing you.”

And without a backward glance, she walked away.

***

Danny raced through the Hotel Montpelier’s service entrance,
buttoning the shirt he’d changed on the uptown bus.  Tucking it into his pants,
he stopped to examine his reflection in the huge stainless steel refrigerator. 
Using the refrigerator as a mirror, he ran a comb through his hair and tied the
black bow tie that completed his stunning ensemble.

The kitchen was in its usual chaos.  Enrico, the head chef, saw
him with the comb and began wailing about sanitation.  In Italian, Danny told
him to kiss ass, and the older man stomped off, muttering that it hadn’t been
this way when he was a boy in
Firenze
.  Leon, the young black guy who
bused tables to pay his way through law school, swung through the double doors
from the dining room.  “Where you been, man?” he asked in that molasses drawl. 
“You better watch out for Emile.  He’s gunning for your lily-white ass.”

“Great.”  He grimaced at his reflection.  “Will I pass muster?”

“You’ll do, Fiore.  But Emile’s some ripped.  He’s looking to have
your head on a silver platter.”