Thank You for the Music (2 page)

Later Henry and I take the bus to Lydia's. He's dressed in a charcoal-gray sweater and faded jeans, construction boots and a pea coat. He's got his broadly sympathetic bookstore-owner face well scrubbed and shaved. I refuse to look at his curly haired beauty—though I can feel his eyes seeking mine—and in order to avoid his musings about whether Lydia will like the pink suede gloves he's bought her, I chat with the bus driver, who tells me he collected a hundred coats for the poor this year. He took the hundred coats to a shelter. He felt damn good about it, and Christmas was in his heart now, “unlike all the other years when I was a selfish bastard.”

“A hundred coats,” Henry says. “That's so tangible. I like that.”

“Next year I'm going to do the same,” I say.

“Why wait until next year?” Henry says. “Let's do it this coming week. We can go out to the suburbs and collect coats all day long.” (He's the sort who will actually do this.)

“Okay.”

“Seriously, me and you, next week. Coat collectors.”

I love when Henry makes plans with me this way.

The bus driver doesn't answer, and is quiet the rest of the ride, like maybe he's a little mad that we're stealing his idea.

“Merry Christmas,” we say, stepping down into the night.

“Uh-huh,” he says.

In Lydia's house we sip cider in the attic, where Lydia still has her childhood table and chairs and tea set and toys in a little alcove. It's her idea to take us up there, and Henry, of course, is overcome with tenderness and awe, for here he sits where his love once sat as a child thirty years ago. I feel like a giant, like I could bust the chair in two if I shift my weight. Maybe I secretly want to break everything I see. It wouldn't be the first time. I sip my cider and watch the two of them. Lydia's telling him about the imaginary world she and her sister inhabited up here. They had imaginary friends, Missy Looler and Tina, who were blue and tiny and wore clothing made of flowers. Missy Looler and Tina, Lydia says, were still here in spirit, and she asks Henry and me to get very, very quiet, so we could feel or hear these tiny blue spirits (only Lydia could make this poetic little request without seeming saccharine), and wouldn't you know it, Henry gets wide-eyed, Henry, who is thirty-five years old, becomes intimate with both Missy Looler and Tina! He looks across the table at Lydia as if he is willing himself to be five again, inserting himself into her own childhood memory, smiling, his whole body one long hush of blue fairies until Lydia finally says, “See what I mean?” and Henry says, “Missy Looler was on my neck,” and Lydia smiles and then looks at me as if about to say, “Did you feel them?” but, to her credit, says nothing. She must have sensed that I was the uncomfortable giantess in a memory I could not and did not want to enter. Missy Looler was not on my neck, nor was her cohort, Tina, but now they would be stuck in my head forever.

“Shall we go downstairs?” I say.

I'm sorry to say that everyone down there was a little too interesting for their own good, just like Lydia's father. My patience was wearing thin. Have you ever found extremely interesting people to be tiresome and boring? Their finest qualities—intelligence, charm, deep, broad vision and experience of the world—sometimes these are the biggest yawns of all. One of the beautiful sisters had lived in Portugal. She is generously articulate with her Portugal stories, inserting Portuguese words into her talk. She is also a bright-scarf woman, like Lydia. Another sister has played the harp since she was nine, and it shows. Beautifully. She makes the aunt in the roses shawl weep by the Christmas tree with its tasteful gold lights. “O Holy Night,” played the harp in the candlelit corner of the wreathy room—naturally she would play that one, that being the prettiest, most tasteful Christmas song. She has yellow hair, it hangs down, the little nephews with their pocket video games worship at her feet, a baby cries and is ushered into the other room. The weeping aunt, Lydia whispers, lost her husband to cancer three years ago. They'd been best friends all their lives. Thick, family compassion for her fills the room; she looks up with her eyes filled with tears and love, and with the knowledge that life is good and worth living, that she's part of a tribe. Lydia's mother picks up her clarinet, and I walk out onto the back porch as if I were still a smoker. It's cold out here. Nice. A person could close their eyes and feel they were anywhere.

When I look up I see a wiry old guy who may be sixty standing beyond the porch in the backyard, moonlit, wearing a green parka, his face lined and his hair under the hood a silver-white shock, as they say. He has that craggy old-time rumpled journalist look.

“What kinda individ-jull are you to leave a party like that?” he says, and cocks his head toward the house.

“What kind of individual are you to stand in the backyard all alone?”

“I'm the family bum.”

Something in my heart swells, as if he's told me, I'm your prince, your dream come true.

“What makes you think you're the family bum?” I say. I walk outside to join him. The night is a dark, cold relief.

“I hate Christmas, and I hate cozy rooms filled with loving people. My brother is especially on my last nerves tonight.”

“Is your brother Lydia's father? The handsome baseball-playing quilt maker?”

Somehow I manage to imbue those words with just enough scorn. I can see the family bum move wholeheartedly into his own face for a moment of real connection, and then retreat again.

“That's him,” he says. “Catalogue man.” He looks up at the thin black sky.

“I thought this family was perfect,” I say.

“Oh, it is. And I'm part of that perfection. You're old enough to know you need someone like me around to know how perfect you are, aren't you?”

He turns to survey my face. He looks thoughtful.

“I'm plenty old enough,” I say, and he smiles, inexplicably. It's a tired smile, one that probably belongs to someone else, some woman in his memory whom I've evoked.

“Hey!” a voice calls from the kitchen door. It's Lydia. “Come on, you two! It's time to go skating!”

Somehow she deepens our backyard bond a notch by referring to us as
you two,
as if the sight of us there in the darkness makes intuitive sense to her. The family bum takes my arm and escorts me through the dark toward the door.

This fills me with good humor until I step inside and see Henry's face. For a moment I consider shaking him by the shoulders, shouting into his face, “I love you and this game has got to stop!”

“Where were you?” he asks, all concerned and flushed in the cheek. His worried brown eyes search my own. I shrug and smile. “Outside.”

“Oh,” he says, still looking at me, then looking over at the family bum, who is opening a bottle of beer. It's just this kind of response that keeps me hopeful as a stupid girl with a crush, hope that keeps me wondering whether really, deep down, it's me he loves.

Lydia might very well be an infatuation. In her pink suede gloves she is laughing now. If she keeps him at bay long enough, he'll get weary. And I'll be there, as Michael Jackson sang when he was eight.

She ushers us all toward the front door. Caravan time. We're off to the pond. Lydia's brother carries an enormous box of skates for all. The little ones are yelping for joy.

Folding chairs are lined by the edge of the pond, here where the moon is low over the pines, where the kids in fat snowsuits ring out Bart Simpson's version of “Rudolf,” and Henry is beside me in the cold night, so close when he turns to speak his breath warms my cheek, and my body is fired with dire restraint. Lydia calls us over. “Come on, I got skates over here old enough to be your mother!” I look out over the smooth pond and my heart quickens. I haven't been skating since age twelve. I'd been in love then, too, with a boy named Mickey Seems, who hadn't liked me much—I wasn't popular—but my friend had paid him two bucks to go “couple-skating” with me while they blasted Paul McCartney's “My Love”; I grew so nervous my ankles kept folding inward. Resentful Mickey Seems had to keep yanking me up while he rolled his eyes toward his friends. “Ya learn to skate at
Rush
or something?” he said. Rush was the name of the local school for mentally retarded kids. “No, but
you
did,” I snap back before falling.

We sat and put the skates on. Only the mothers of the smallest babies stay in the chairs. I keep away from the babies. Don't need my heartstrings pulled that way. Lydia's father is out there on the pond, gliding across the ice on one long leg. Lydia too can skate like that. They do their father-daughter crazy eight kind of thing (he had a long black scarf flying behind him, and those wide-whale corduroy pants), then joining them are all the cousins, mothers, kids, Henry, and even the family bum, who skates, it seems to me, with great sarcasm, like his body is mocking the activity, at least initially. I stand by the edge and watch for a while. I watch how the family bum's body soon takes over; he can't help it, he's a good skater too, and now he is doing it with joy, it seems to me, the joy that comes with the body's great skill, where cynicism finally has no chance.

Lydia and Henry are holding hands.

The inevitable sight of it means more than it should, and my heart falls like a boulder into the endless space that is now my internal life. Couple-skating, right here in front of the family, it's like an announcement, it means everything, their stupid fate is sealed, the answer is yes, Henry is gloriously happy, the two of them are giggling and stopped over at the other side of the pond, and he's got his black-gloved hands on either side of her arms, and he's saying something, and she's shyly looking down, and now giggling, and yes, it's like a movie, they are stars and they have to kiss.

And then Henry looks around to find me, to see if I've seen this, to see how I'm taking it, because deep down, he knows. He knows my agony, but next to his happiness what can it mean? It's like having your health on a spring day when your friend has the flu. You can serve her some chicken soup, bring her flowers, but the blue sky, the birds, the light in the trees, that sense of possibility shining behind her heavy curtains, it makes you want to leave the room where she's aching, and you do, and you forget all about her.

I give him a little wave, a thumbs-up sign. His smile of gratitude is so real it's like a good-bye. What I mostly feel now is a scathing relief, since this has been coming at me like a train I always knew would flatten me. The flattening itself is strangely easier to take than the anticipation of it had been. My body is almost at peace. Something so restful about desolation.

Again I give him a thumbs-up sign, and the family bum skates up to me and asks me if I'd like to get drunk after this little tradition is over.

I smile at him. “Drunk? Of course I'd like to get drunk. Smashed,” I tell him. “Trashed. Shit-faced.”

“Thatta girl.”

He drives a Toyota with cassette tapes scattered all over the floor, dashboard, and backseat. He puts one of the tapes in, and I'm surprised to hear it's all Steve Martin, saying,
“Those French people have a different word for everything!”
The curious thing is, we drive in silence, not laughing at Steve Martin, but listening to his outrageous humor as if it's a grave political speech, or perhaps a eulogy.

“This is funny,” I say.

“It is funny.”

I think of my brother's friend, who never laughed, but always said, “That's funny.” My brother called him the man who could recognize humor. I think to myself, It is Christmas Eve, and we are the people who can recognize humor.

“Maybe you should just take me home. You seem tired,” I say.

He looks over at me. We're stopped at a red light. “I'm old,” he says. “But I'm not a bit tired.” He takes Steve Martin out and puts in some jazz. Coltrane, which cheers me, and assures me he's a man of taste.

“I'm just recovering from the evening on ice,” he tells me. “I'll be fine after a while. I'm Cain, not Abel, okay? Call me
Unable
.”

I watch his profile as he concentrates on the road.

“That was a joke.”

I tell him I thought it was funny.

He pulls into the lot of a liquor store, asks if I'd like to wait in the car or come in. I decide to wait. I decide I want time alone in the dark car to think about life. Then, as soon as he's gone, I decide I've had enough time alone in the dark car thinking about life, so I jump out and join him in the store.

“I thought rum would be good tonight. A good rum.”

I smile. He looks so old under the lights. Out of nowhere I begin to think of him as Studs Terkel.

“Rum sounds good,” I tell him.

“Is that coat warm?” he says.

“It's fine, Studs.” It slips out. I could get hysterical laughing for no reason.

“Excuse me?”