Thank You for the Music (19 page)

She slept now in the room where the uncle had slept, and still a painting of a woman in a red rowboat hung in a gold frame near the window on the wall—the uncle's artwork. When first she'd moved in at age forty, she had looked at the picture as a shrine, her gratitude seeming to sink into the painted water, which was endlessly deep, the appropriate container for emotion whose power transformed that part of her that had come always to expect the worst. To her the modest house, divided into upstairs and downstairs apartments, was stunning; the windows framed the hills of a city she suddenly loved, and when the fog rolled in it seemed like heavenly blankets, whereas before she had hated its ghostly persistence in softening the harsh edges of faces and battered buildings, edges that always returned when the fog retreated.

Slowly she had grown accustomed to being the owner of the blue house on the wide, flowery street, accustomed to being a landlady to people downstairs who never seemed appreciative enough of the beauty they were renting. Mostly they were young people who were products of money. They took their fashionable clothes and clear complexions and high expectations of the future for granted, and this gave them an ease that tempered their youthful energy. At their age she'd been wild to escape, hungry and watchful of everything like a skinny animal. And yet all that watching— where had it landed her?

Her marriage at seventeen to a handsome thirty-year-old man obsessed with betting on horses had lasted two years, and then, pregnant and on her own, she had worked for Mad Maids, Inc., cleaning houses with two older women named Connie and Bonnie who suggested she go by the nickname Jonny just for the sake of the business. So she had, she had become a Mad Maid and taken a boy's name and each day life was good because Connie and Bonnie said it was good, and they all met in their uniforms every morning at dawn in a little café that looked out over the Pacific, where Jonny would sit on the round stool between the older women at the counter trying to dream up a future she could believe in. Despite the baby growing inside her, she'd had so many visions then— herself as pediatrician, herself as modern dancer, stewardess, so she could travel—she entertained all possibilities.

“You're smart, girl,” Bonnie would say, whenever she tried
to speak of the future. “You can do anything you want, can't she, Connie.”

It was because she liked words; Connie and Bonnie had never heard words like “ludicrous” and “countenance” and “rendering.”

“Hell, you could be a lady rocket scientist one day for all we know.”

But her own heart had been unable to hold on to the roots of her dreams; they dangled in space, then vanished. Moments came when she was suddenly overcome by fear so powerful she wanted to cry out, and so laughed too loudly, her face reddening when the false voice echoed in her head. She would swing violently into a region of self-contempt, seared by these feelings that seemed to her like revelations. “Yeah, I'm about as smart as a bowling ball without any holes,” she'd say. “And as lucky as the alley it's rollin' down.”

Years passed. Elizabeth worked, tended to her child, a wiry boy named Curtis, and slept. She did other things too— went to movies, bars, read magazines, fell in and out of love with men who were versions of her long-ago husband— obsessed men, self-involved men, addicted men whose love for her ran out after five or six months. For years she drank coffee with a woman who lived across the street, and the friendship gave her real pleasure, but she worked long hours, and her life was essentially a routine she endured. “Girl, you're one of us,” Connie and Bonnie started to say to her, and there came a day when she stopped hearing the irony and embraced it as a compliment. She began to feel she belonged with the women, that it was her lot in life. She had cut herself off from her parents, and even when her son began to look like her father, she had little desire to see them again.

And now Elizabeth was sixty, still called Jonny, though Connie and Bonnie were both dead. She worked alone, with a concentration that made cleaning a kind of meditation. The quiet days went fast. She did not mind the work because she knew she could quit, knew she could survive on the money she made as a landlady, if necessary. Her son had grown up and married a woman from Pennsylvania; they lived there, childless, content to be so. He was a decent man, warmhearted, but so busy on his little farm, so full of his feeling for the land he tended, visits were few and far between. He would call, expecting her to make him laugh with some story from her life, some little observation she had made. “The woman whose house I'm cleaning now has twin ferrets,” she'd say. “How am I supposed to clean with a couple of asshole ferrets on my heels?” she'd add, if the ferrets themselves weren't amusing enough.

She broke her ankle one day walking down Clayton Street after working in a pink Victorian. It hurt badly; she limped home in her white dress and white shoes, sweating with pain, and Bennet, one of the downstairs tenants, was outside on the front stoop with a glass of orange juice. He got up and helped her, though he himself, she knew, was thin because he was sick. She had known that the day he'd shown up to rent from her. His face had struck her immediately with what looked like willed happiness, but a dry rope of fear had risen in her throat when she considered his illness; they were always finding out new ways you could catch it, weren't they? And would he be bringing his friends around? But she had surprised herself by speaking through that fear and reaching another part of herself, not out of any allegiance to her own sense of morality, but as an instinctive response to the young man, whose silent presence was so oddly kind.

“The place is yours,” she'd told him that day, after showing him the rooms. And he had commented on their beauty and order as few tenants did. “You really keep this place nice,” Bennet said. “Honey, I was born to keep places nice,” she told him, and saw his eyes darken with amused interest.

And now, her ankle throbbing as he helped her up the steps and into her living room, she was acutely aware of the strength in his thin shoulder, and aware of herself as a woman who hadn't touched another human being in years. How did that happen? she wanted to ask someone in that moment. How did it happen that a woman like me went for years untouched?

In his old blue Chevy he took her to a doctor an hour later, waited while her lower leg and foot were wrapped in a cast, and on the ride back home suggested she lay her head back and rest. But she felt she couldn't; she felt she ought to repay him somehow, or at least aim to entertain him a bit.

“So you like my perfume? It's called Lysol.”

“Sexy,” he said. “You like your job?”

“Do I like being an interior sanitation engineer? Hell yes, wouldn't you?”

He laughed. “What's the best thing about your job?”

“Sometimes I get the windows so clean I make them cry,” she said. “That's one helluva moment for me.”

He laughed again.

“You're all right,” she told him, and a silence settled into the car.

As he drove for a moment she turned to watch the side of his face, and saw a naked expression in his eyes that made her think of a child. She turned back to the road, remembering his touch as he helped her up the path. She wanted to reach over and touch his elegant hand on the wheel, and felt herself fill up with wonder in the face of this small, odd desire.

Months later they sat in his kitchen, Bennet with a vivid green scarf around his head, both of them in thick sweaters. Outside late autumn rain fell through fog. A candle was lit on the round table. They drank tea from a blue pot with the moon painted on the side of it—a gift from Bennet's sister Anne, who came by once a day, serious-faced in her bright skirts and sandals. Elizabeth had cleaned his apartment all morning, and now the tile floor and surfaces of the wooden counters gleamed.

“You know, Bennet,” she said, “I like cleaning your place better than anyplace I've ever cleaned.”

“I'm not sure what to say to that,” Bennet said, teacup in hand. He smiled, then adjusted his scarf, pushing it up on his high forehead. He looked especially thin, with lesions showing on his neck and the side of his face.

What she'd meant to say, and would never feel comfortable saying, was that he had changed her life somehow, in some important way that she could not articulate. He'd done it with the ferocity of his kindness, with the trips he'd made to the market for her after she'd broken her ankle. With the flowers he left on her steps that he got from his friend, whose job was delivering flowers. And most of all with the easy way he spoke with her, right from the beginning, as if he really saw
her,
and not just a landlady-maid with dyed red hair and a cracked voice to go with her hands.

Now, in his kitchen, she felt loosened to talk, to tell him a story she'd never told anyone else.

“You know, Bennet, I was raised up in Kentucky by crazy Holy Rollers until I was fourteen. The only gay man I knew in that whole town was a poor man who ended up killing himself on New Year's Eve. I think it was 1947. His name was Joe Beehan. I'd seen him every morning in the luncheonette where I went with my father for coffee the year my father had some money. Joe Beehan would sit in a booth by himself and eat alone in his dark shirts and when he looked up at me, he'd smile. I thought he was the handsomest creature around. God, he was handsome. He was a movie star.”

“Do you know why he killed himself?”

“Oh, who the hell ever knows anything. But I do know he was discovered with a man at three in the morning in the alley by Reiner's hardware store. I imagine it was all over for him in that town after that.”

“Never love a man in an alley by a hardware store,” Bennet said.

“I remember how my parents acted after reading that news in the paper. Seemed to me they weren't a bit sad. They were calmer than usual. They said, ‘Now that's no surprise, is it, dear?' ‘Not at all, Dorothy. Nothing makes a man so unhappy as walking down Sin Street. The real shame is he won't ever see the Lord's face.'”

“And when I said, ‘Why not?' they said, “‘Elizabeth, suicides sin against the Holy Ghost. The only face they get to see is their own. A suicide has to look in the mirror for the rest of time, Elizabeth.'”

“My God,” Bennet said. “Isn't that a sweet little story.”

“Very sweet for a twelve-year-old girl. What did I know? I became interested in suicides after that. I'd walk by Mr. Beehan's house every evening and look in the windows at his old bed and dresser and two pictures of a man framed on the wall by a blue wooden chair. I never have told anyone this story, Bennet. I hardly knew I remembered it so well.”

“Was there anything else in the room?” Bennet said.

“Don't think so.”

“I bet you wanted to climb in.”

“I did. I wanted to climb in the window and lay in his bed. I wanted to lay in his bed and look at the moon shining in his mirror and try to feel what it was like to be him.”

“I can imagine.”

“It was odd. I took snow from his yard and packed it in a jar and kept it under my own bed until my mother or father dumped it out.”

“Snow from his yard?” Bennet said. He had interest, not mockery on his face. He shifted in his seat and leaned forward, his sharp elbows on the table's edge.

“Don't ask why. Maybe I thought I was taking the ground he walked on. And then every night before I slept I'd think of him, and how he must've felt in the car waiting for the old carbon monoxide. I'd just lay there and think of him and the damnedest thing was it was like I was falling in love with the man.”

“I'd say you had good taste for a girl, Jonny,” Bennet said.

“So sometime that year I developed a logic that said it's better to kill yourself and be alone forever than be with a God so mean he couldn't understand the human urge to get out of this crazy world.”

Bennet nodded his head.

“You know?” she said.