The Good Life (26 page)

Patrick produces his crooked smile and taps her wrist. Aless's bone rings like a tuning fork. “Don't break my heart. Seven o'clock.”

Her querulous last note still wobbling through the air, Melanie curtsies to Patrick, who looks as if he might just be bullied into applauding. Aless can't bear it: signaling the accompanist, she vaults back onto the stage and repeats the last verse about the misery of silent love, actually hitting all the notes. To take over like this is showing off, but Melanie needs to know what real singing sounds like. Patrick, Aless notices with vicious satisfaction, looks rapt, as he always does when she sings.

After she finishes the chorus, Aless looks at Melanie and says, “Next time,
count
.”

Melanie flings waves of blond hair over her shoulder. “I'm a singer, not a metronome.”

Aless jumps back down to Patrick, who mutters, “For Pete's sake, Less, don't encourage her to sing again.” She feels herself turning toward him like a plant to the sun.

 

She met him five years ago, in her last year as a voice major at UCLA. Aless needed a pronunciation coach, and he answered her ad, casting an uneasy eye on the sheet music she handed him. “
Geliebte, schön Tod
. My lover, beautiful death? This is not healthy,” he said.

“I don't have to mean it. I don't even have to know what it means. I just have to sound like I believe it.”

“What if I tell you it means ‘I want a hamburger'?”

“Fine by me. I'll sing that with more feeling, anyway.”

His smile took its time. When it was finally installed, she wanted it to start from the beginning again.

“Why do you study voice?” he said.

She shrugged. “I'm a loudmouth. Why do you study German?”

“I'm a Nazi.”

“Liar. You've got
lazy
written all over you. What's the German word for
lazy?
”

“There is no German word for
lazy
,” he said, slung across the only chair in the room.

Aless kept herself awake that night, imagining Patrick's fine shoulders over her in the bed, although she might as well have imagined herself, with her unreliable upper register, at La Scala. The handwriting was on the wall. The
Handschrift
, she thought, and then, digging deeper into her high school German,
die schlechte Handschrift
, the bad handwriting on the wall. She saw no reason to tell Patrick that she knew a little vocabulary of her own, even if she couldn't pronounce it. The German word for
lazy
was
faul
.

Instead of dating, which she did with the few straight boys in the theater department, she and Patrick went to bars together, low-rent dives that smelled like sour bar rags and had names like Bluey's. He called them “authentic,” and she laughed at him. She also laughed the night that a regular patron in checked pants that showed his bony ankles slammed into their table, glared, and told them to go back to their disco. “I have a right to be here,” Patrick said after the drunk caromed away. Patrick had had a few drinks himself.

“Just don't expect him to be thrilled to see you, Joe College.”

“That is so unfair.” His face turned dark and self-important, which happened sometimes when he was deep into the gin. “He should respect me. I am a seeker.”

“What are you seeking?”

“Same as you. Enlightenment.”

“Leave me out of it. I like the dark spaces.”

Even his scowl was handsome. He went to the jukebox and punched in “One for My Baby,” then came back to the table and pulled her out of the booth.

“Go,” he said.

Maybe he thought sopranos who sang art songs didn't know Harold Arlen. She propped her hip against the table, pretending it was a piano. “It's quarter to three—there's no one in the place except you and me.” Concentrating on a loose jaw, as her teachers were always reminding her, she stroked the notes as if they were breakable. The bar quieted around them, and Patrick looked at her with startled attention. By the time she was done, people whistled, except for the guy two tables over, who was sobbing.

“I didn't know you could do that,” Patrick said. He gazed at her until she shrugged and looked away. The cocktail waitress was never nearby when you needed her.

“You're—transformed,” Patrick said. “Will you sing something else?”

“What, for free?”

“I thought you were an artist.”

“Who in the world told you that?” A blue neon light cast a thin shadow down his jaw, and the urge to touch it was nearly irresistible.

A bulky Lakers fan—cap, shirt, shorts—called to them from the bar. “Hey! Hey! Can you sing ‘New York, New York'?”

“No,” said Aless and Patrick on the same breath, and she felt her heart expand.

Still, she never should have sung for him. Twice in the next month she found him lurking outside her practice room, and when she hummed in the car, he stopped talking. In the face of his ravenous gaze she wanted to scratch herself or break things. One night at Willie's, where it was Dollar Tuesday, she caught herself singing along with the music video, saw his moist eyes, and said, “Don't you have a test coming up?”

He lifted his glass. “Day after tomorrow. Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger.” Then, a beat later, “Don't you have a callback tomorrow?”

“No,” she lied. A month before she had been foolish enough to let him know about an audition, and he called her three times a day after it was over, asking if she'd heard anything. If she had gotten the part, he would certainly have sat in the front row on opening night with his girlfriend du jour. Brooding over this, she almost missed his news: he had been chosen as August for the Fresh Men of UCLA calendar.

“You're not a freshman. You should have graduated two years ago”

“I am still fresh enough to be exploited for my beauty.”

Aless shrugged. “Say no.”

“The money from the calendar goes to battered women.”

“A picture of you in your briefs will work for the good of women?”

“I'll do it for the irony,” Patrick said.

“Like hell,” Aless said. She was on autopilot, thinking about Patrick without paying attention to him. He was carrying on about the calendar, subtly bragging, nudging her to tease him. Not until he said “I have met someone” did her head jerk up. She had missed some crucial transition—now Patrick's face looked unguarded, and he shyly stirred his drink. Ignoring Aless's profound silence, he told her about finding this new woman—Eleanora—in a bead shop. She sold him some dope. “She hardly uses it herself, but she believes in the free market. When she makes more than her target profit for a month, she gives to the food bank. I bought her a cup of tea.”

“You helped her hit her target. She should have got her own tea.”

“She's a masseuse. And she teaches yoga.”

“She doesn't sound like your type,” Aless said.

Patrick shrugged. “She's very real. She knows things I've never thought of asking. When I'm with her, I feel like I've landed on the planet of happy people.”

“Send back a signal to the home station,” Aless said.

He did better than that: he invited her to join them for lunch the next day. Aless invented a rehearsal, and he invited her for the day after. “Eleanora will like you,” he said. “Eleanora likes performers.” He created sentences that would let him say her name.

At home, Aless reminded herself that Patrick had never dated the same woman for more than a month. Even so, her breath fluttered when she entered the sandwich shop in Santa Monica. Patrick leaned across a table toward a woman who had long, straight hair and an earnest expression. She looked as if she carried finger cymbals in her woven purse.

“Namaste,” Eleanora said, bowing as Aless neared. “The holiness in me greets the holiness in you.”

“I know,” Aless said. “I took a yoga class.”

“Your name is really Alessandra. You should embrace that.”

“My parents were hoping I'd have a career in opera.” Aless made a smile. “Patrick says you sell dope.”

“It is restorative.” Eleanora's face took on a proud cast, as if she had invented marijuana and found it good.

“After I smoke, I wake up feeling like a litter of cats has walked through my mouth. It's fun while you're doing it, though.”

“We meet where we stand today,” said Eleanora. “Who knows where we will stand tomorrow?”

“I'm not going anywhere,” Aless said grimly. On the way home, she promised herself, she would stop at a liquor store.

She had been prepared to be overshadowed by a woman with a face like a rose, or whose laughter chimed. But with her long, straight hair and long, straight nose and chin that jutted like an accusing finger, Eleanora intoned apothegms about universal oneness while Patrick looked at her with an expression dazzled and lost.

That night Aless filled a juice glass with gin and toasted
l'amour
, which made every moment new and precious. Without love, a person might scarcely know she was alive. Her mouth numb, she sang every aria she knew—two—while the radio played “Mood Indigo.”

Two nights later, Patrick invited her to dinner. A week later, to lunch. He showed her Eleanora's pastels. He brought over Eleanora's dope. He called her first when he and Eleanora decided to get married.

Aless might have been able to sustain the disappointment of her young career, whose highlight so far was singing a radio-station jingle at a dingy studio in downtown L.A. She could have put off her ambition and waited for her big break, distracting herself with the occasional date with the occasional man. But she was living in actual fear of Patrick's visits and phone calls, the way he subpoenaed her to witness his happiness. Without a whiff of the old irony, he proudly announced that Eleanora planned to follow her yogi to India for six months. Patrick would go too, of course, and he wished he could convince Aless to join them. But since he could not, would she care to housesit while they were gone? The next day Aless found Our Lady of Mercies High School in Lompoc, not far from the high-security federal prison. The school was in immediate need of a teacher of voice and theater and required no teaching certification.

Aless took a long lease on an apartment in a building with a pool. Six hundred students were nearly adequate to block Patrick's memory, although the post cards that came from India assured her that he had not forgotten her. She would love it there. So many kind people!

After he and Eleanora returned, Aless expressed sympathy for Eleanora, who had contracted an intestinal virus in Delhi. Patrick assured Aless that the illness was not communicable, and she did not ask him how it had communicated itself to Eleanora. She was thinking of this with pleasing dislike late one night when the phone rang, too late to mean anything but sorrow.

“It's Eleanora,” Patrick said, and then his voice washed away in tears. At that moment, pressing the telephone receiver against her ear, Aless could not have identified the emotions she felt. “She's dead.”

Dizzied by her illness, she had been struck by a bus while crossing the street. The scene rose before Aless: Eleanora, her head unsteady, wandering idly in front of a charging commuter van. Her last thought might well have focused on the soul's movement from one plane to the next.

Patrick was in pieces. “Where can I go? She was my whole life.”

“It's terrible,” Aless murmured.

“Can I come to you? I need someone who understands.”

“Of course,” she said. But she hadn't understood just how much understanding he was asking for. While Patrick was in Lompoc, he arranged for an interview with Aless's principal. Pleased with his breadth of experience, the old nun granted him a tidy office where he counseled students, offered college and career guidance, and sometimes pinch-hit for the German teacher. He managed to see Aless most days, on lunch duty if nothing else. “I always knew we'd end up together,” he said one day over fish sticks.

“This isn't the end of the line,” Aless said. “You don't know what's around the next corner.”

“Eleanora would have liked to hear you say that.”

“I know,” Aless said.

“You keep her alive for me.”

“It isn't just me. She's in everything you see.” Aless stood up to get a second cup of coffee, improbably good—all the faculty drank it like fiends. These platitudes were the best she could do. If Patrick didn't push any further, they could stand for kindness.

 

Over his second glass of wine at dinner, Patrick says, “I'm holding myself back. Eleanora wouldn't want to see me like this.”

“That's true,” says Aless, dabbing at her forehead. Hot light flickers from the candles clustered on top of the refrigerator. A group of them stands also on the TV. Six are burning on the tiny kitchen table where Aless and Patrick are eating elbow to elbow. Eleanora made and sold candles, but Aless is pretty sure Patrick has run through the inventory she left behind. Tonight's assortment, along with the ghostly shadows they cast, are commemorative.

“But I can't just wake up and be different. I tried.”

“How?” Aless says. She's on her third glass.

“I took some classes after she died. I went to a dating service.” He has the grace to drop his eyes. “In the end the only thing I could do was come here.”

“Aless's repair shop for the bereaved and brokenhearted.” She hears the nastiness of her tone, and half-accurately adds, “I think of Eleanora every day.”

“She's the sort of person you remember. I want to find a ritual that seems right for her,” Patrick says. “Something that will finish the pattern of her life.”

“Her life was full of giving. She gave to others,” Aless says, the words losing their shape in her mouth. She is
tanked
.