Music for Wartime (37 page)

It was four thirty—the time when someone should have been finishing her hair, when one of her sisters should have been slipping her an early glass of champagne. Only she wasn’t allowed to envy that girl, that phantom self, the one about to marry an impostor.

She sat on Vanessa’s toilet, staring at the nail polishes clustered on the shelf like a little rainbow army. She slid her feet from her shoes and looked at her toes, dry and callused. In the alternate universe, she’d have spent all yesterday at the spa. And because her only other choice was to break down and cry over something so ridiculous, she plucked a bottle from the shelf—petal pink—and figuring that Vanessa owed her this, that sweet Vanessa might have
insisted
had she known, she took the bottle to the living room floor, along with one more drink, and made her feet pretty.

As she finished, Vanessa’s phone gave a short buzz. Melanie jumped, tipping over the polish, and a pink puddle oozed across the cream carpet. She stepped around it. Fifteen messages had arrived from the cellular cloud. None were Michael, and the first was Walgreens. The second was from the morning after the leak: “Evelyn K.,” the screen announced. A woman with a crisp British accent. She said, “Well, yes, let’s talk, Ness, but you know what I’m going to say. I’m going to tell you he’s a narcissist, and he thinks you’re his mother. That carousel just goes round and round again. I will most definitely be using the word
wanker
.”

Melanie had the brief instinct to jot down the message, as if Vanessa would step through the door soon and pay her for house-sitting. Instead she deleted it. She’d be passing the phone to the parents, who doubtless didn’t need confirmation that Michael was a wanker.

The message had verified something she’d felt in her bones: Vanessa couldn’t have known about Melanie, about the wedding. If she had, surely she’d have confided in this friend, or what was the point of asking advice? And if the friend knew, stronger epithets would have been employed.

The phone lay in her hand like a grenade. The other messages were all from the two days following the leak, six of them from “Mom.” They’d be panicked and wrenching, and Melanie understood that listening would be something she could never undo, a far deeper violation than going through the photographs.

And more dangerously: Somewhere in that phone, if she touched the right button, would be old texts from Michael. They’d be adoring or angry or sexual or mundane. They’d be cryptic. They wouldn’t be about
her
, but about whatever this tenuous, unkillable thing was they had between them. It would be like watching them kiss.

She mustered enough clarity—it might have been the most mature moment of her life—to see that this would be the worst thing she could do to herself. There were other places she could be. There were other ways to hide from the ghost of her wedding. She needed to leave, and not come back alone.

She picked up the tote bag of items for Jed and decided it was full enough: T-shirt, thong, inhaler, seashell, an Animal Control magnet, a very old pack of cigarettes. She carried her shoes—her toenails weren’t dry—and knocked on his door till he opened it, wild-eyed and happy. She put on her silly movie star voice. “This is good-bye, old friend!”

He blinked, and Melanie wondered what she looked like. Not good, presumably. He said, “Then you have to see the project!” Before she could make an excuse, he swept her back to the study, where there stood what looked like a huge dollhouse, or a bookshelf with a roof. Two cubbies wide, four rows tall, of freshly sawed plywood. In each compartment, a display. “I’m calling it
Dearly Departed
. Or possibly
Aftermath
. The outside will look like our building. I’m thinking of this photo-realist idea where I cover everything with paint that looks just like the thing itself, but—you know, it’s paint.”

As he pawed through the tote bag, Melanie explored the structure. On the third story, in the space corresponding to this one, a Golden Oldies record jacket perfectly filled the back wall. In front of it sat the infamous bottle of antidepressants and a cheap plastic apple. Next door, in what would have been apartment F: a Joe Cocker album behind three plastic film canisters. The fourth floor was full, too. A crucifix necklace in front of Louis Armstrong, a phalanx of chessmen in front of Glenn Gould solos. But Vanessa’s apartment was empty. “I wanted you to pick the music,” Jed said. “Check it out, I have opera arias for the Hungarian lady.” He pointed to the ground floor, where the back wall was indeed filled with Maria Callas’s face. “I want it to be like the music they’re hearing in heaven. Because I’m doing this whole thing with echoes. Right?” Melanie stooped to poke at the small leather satchel in apartment A, the calligraphy pens and ink bottles in C. “Do you think I should leave the Hungarians’ floor empty, though? Is that too literal? I mean, they’re not dead, but visually there won’t be balance. My adviser would hate that. Should I ask them for something?”

Melanie flipped through the stack of remaining records and found an Etta James one from 1973.
Only a Fool
. She pushed it carefully to the back wall. “I think Vanessa would have liked her, too.”

Out of all the things in the bag, Jed had settled on the stale cigarettes. He dumped them on the small floor in front of Etta. “These’ll be cool. I can get some height, once I glue it all. Oh, and look. The typewriter won’t fit, so I want to set it out for people to type their thoughts. Like this.” He pushed the Smith Corona, and the TV table it sat on, in front of the house. He waited for her reaction.

In a previous life, she’d have kissed him right then. She’d have led him to the bed. She wondered, though, not for the first time, if she’d ever really want someone again. What was the point, when you could never know him even a little bit?

There was a piece of yellow paper in the roller, so Melanie walked around and started typing. The keys were loud and deep.
It’s beautiful
, she wrote.
Let’s go get something from Zsuzsi
.

It wasn’t that she couldn’t bring herself to leave. But she found herself somehow invested in Jed’s project now, and its completion might feel like closure. She’d never answer her million questions or sort through all Vanessa’s things, but she could see the last room of the little museum filled. She slipped her shoes back on.

When they knocked at apartment B it was László who answered. He waved them toward the kitchen table, turtling behind with his walker. Zsuzsi wore a bathrobe over a nightgown, and she stopped washing dishes to sit with them, rubbing lotion into her palms. Jed explained the project—“a memorial to the ones we lost,” he called it—and asked if there was any small object she’d like to contribute. Melanie was taken aback by how vigorously Zsuzsi nodded, by how quickly her eyes filled. She grabbed Jed’s forearm. “This I have been waiting,” she said. She disappeared into another room while Jed and Melanie looked at each other bewildered and László eased himself into a kitchen chair.

She came back cupping something between her palms, and waited for Jed to extend his own. It was a stuffed gray mouse, worn moleskin stretched over a lumpy plaster body.

László let out a monosyllabic shout, angry rather than startled, then mumbled to Zsuzsi in Hungarian. She shot back, repeating something firmly until he was calm. She brought him a glass of water, and he reclined to stare at the ceiling, his head too heavy for his long, thin neck. Melanie wanted nothing more than to leave—she should have known this was a mistake—and she was surprised that Jed seemed so planted in his chair, waiting out the storm as if it were a real one from which he was responsible for sheltering the little mouse.

“This comes from my sister. She also is murdered by the gas, but many many years.”

Zsuzsi pronounced “gas” like “guess,” and Melanie fixated on this just as she’d fixated all week on Vanessa’s possessions instead of Michael’s death.
They were killed by the guess.

“László, he is okay. I tell you a whole story. Because you know that the gas comes back for a reason. Yes? And here you are this beautiful couple full of life. Do you see what it means to have your life in front of you?”

Jed said, “We do,” and he put his free hand solidly on Melanie’s knee. It was half a gesture of restraint, and half a display for Zsuzsi: Yes, we are a couple if you say we are, and we will stay a couple till you’ve finished your story.

László was fuming but quiet, drinking his water now like a shamed child, and Zsuzsi leaned close to Jed. “All my life I think, the gas will come back. And here we are almost to the grave until it does.”

Jed said, “But you got out safely. That was so long ago.” There was that empathy again, beaming from him like a light. Melanie wondered if this was how every day was for him, near-strangers confessing seventy-year-old secrets just because of those clear eyes, that forward hunch.

“In 1944, in October, I am standing in the line at the train station. They have in the lines families, and a line for the old men, and a line for the women with no rings, so here is me and here is my sister Kata who is seventeen, and I am twenty-four. Back when I am eighteen I am singing soprano at the state opera in Budapest, and I am called the ingenue. Many flowers, many men. But then 1939 I am no longer a star. I can sing at the Jewish music hall only. Five years pass, and I am in the line, and everywhere is crying and pushing, and László, he recognizes me. I have never seen him. He is only nineteen years old. Do you understand?”

Melanie shook her head, and was glad when Jed did too. “No.”

“He is a music lover. Every week he goes to the concert hall or the opera, and he remembers me from five years. I have at this time hair to my waist, all black. And he says to the other men, ‘We make a mistake. This woman is not a Jew, this woman is with me.’ So he takes me from the line, and the last time I see my sister is she is getting on the train.”

Zsuzsi put her face into her hands, almost an embarrassed gesture, and once Melanie reassured herself that Zsuzsi wasn’t crying, just bracing herself and collecting her breath, she tried to process the story. Jed had taken his hand off her knee and now it hovered over his own lap, as if he might need to catch something in a moment. László just sipped his water.

“Many years later, our old neighbor sends me this.” She meant the mouse. “It is my sister’s but she gave to the neighbor boy when he was crying. And they send it then back to me.”

Melanie was the one to talk. She worried that Jed, in all his patience, wouldn’t ask the question. And one more unanswered question would explode her. “Are you saying your husband was there in the . . . he was in the capacity of a soldier?”

Zsuzsi lifted her head. “He already loved me, from the opera. He knows my name, and he tells all the men this is his girlfriend. He does not save me just to save someone. He saves me because Cupid has hit.” She tapped her own rib cage. “He is musician too. At school he was studying the piano. Even now he plays. Frenkly, this is one blessing: The stroke takes from him the language of English, but leaves the language of piano.” She hit her palm on the table with conviction, as if this were the salient point of the story. “We spend three weeks together, and then he sends me to his cousin in Holland, and then I am on a boat to Norway, and he meets me in Toronto after the war and we are married.” She was talking again to Jed, and Melanie considered that she might need to readjust the look of horror on her own face. She settled for covering her mouth and nose with both hands. “He was Arrow Cross. Do you know what is Arrow Cross?” They both shook their heads. “I will put this way: They take it upon themselves. Without the Germans there yet, they take it upon themselves. But when the Germans come, Arrow Cross is still helping. This is when we meet.”

“And you
stayed
with him?” Melanie said. She couldn’t help it. “This is the same person?
Him?
” She refrained from gesturing, so that László could remain in the dark. He was contemplating his empty glass.

“I fell in love. Maybe it makes no sense.”

“Not really,” Melanie said, but only under her breath.

Zsuzsi said, “But I had no children with him. Is like the two of you. You are a beautiful couple, and you should not care what are the rules of married and not married and who is widow. You know: Not everyone survives.”

Melanie wasn’t following anymore. Was she the widow? Was Vanessa?

“And now you see: The gas comes back for us. We are gone in Cleveland and the gas comes back, and instead it finds other people. It finds your beautiful friend.” Zsuzsi began sobbing into her hands, and Jed found the right moment to touch her shoulder. Melanie, near panic herself, looked across at the old man, at the absent way he observed his crying wife. She wondered what Zsuzsi had told him to calm him down—if she’d lied to him about the mouse, or even about Jed and Melanie. Told him they were doctors, psychologists. She studied his face: his caved-in mouth, his long, unruly eyebrows. His blue eyes milky with cataracts.

Zsuzsi looked up at Melanie. “You forgive yourself now for moving on. It is good your affair has ended, yes? Those two go together to their grave, and you are here and finding love. But I know from the first time I see you that you worry you make this happen, that your sins made come the gas. And I tell you this story because you need to know it was not from you. It was from me.”

Melanie opened her mouth to say, “No, I never had an affair, I had an engagement and a betrayal and a collapsing of my universe, no, you’re very confused,” but Jed shot her a look—a gentle glare, a blaze of green—and it was like an emergency transfusion of clarity.
This story is not about you
, the look said.
Shut up.

“You cannot help that you fall in love with that man,” Zsuzsi said.

“No. No, I couldn’t. We don’t choose, right?”

Zsuzsi nodded vigorously. “Who is ever to choose?”

László started coughing, a thick cough that rattled his whole body, his hands braced against the table, and Jed jumped up to get him more water. He put the glass in front of him, but the cough continued with such intensity that he couldn’t stop to drink. Zsuzsi rose and stood behind him, lifting the glass to his mouth, and he breathed some water in, then dribbled it out into his white stubble. Eventually, the coughs spread out and stopped. He said something to Zsuzsi and waved her away.