Vivian In Red (35 page)

Walking into Allen’s place made Milo reconsider the benefits of married life with a wife actually in residence.

The place stunk like an alleyway. Half-eaten sandwiches and crusts crumbled away on plates, and various empty bottles—Milo dearly hoped these bottles were not all from that day or even that week—stood sentry on flat surfaces from the windowsills to the top of the upright piano.

Allen’s blond whiskers had grown in to a scraggly shadow that looked more like dirt that needed to be scrubbed off.

“For crying out loud, look at you! You got a nice place here and you’re living like a hobo.”

Allen was seated at the piano and started tinkling out the melody for “Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?”

Milo began picking up the dirty plates and taking them to the sink. “I can’t think in a place like this, so I’m going to clean up. Was that your big plan? Get me over here to be your housekeeper?”

Allen switched to “You’re the Top.”

“Yes, thank you, are you going to speak to me, or is this your new game now?”

Allen banged the keys and then whirled around on the piano bench, unsteadily, so it seemed to Milo from the entry to the kitchen. Allen said, “All right, keep your shirt on. I’m just having a little fun. I’ve barely seen you all week.”

“And it shows.”

“You got lyrics yet for ‘Love Me, I Guess’? I mean, other than that line?”

Allen and Milo had come up with that one the week before.

“Nothing that’s any good, not yet anyway. But it’s the last song, so I think my brain is wrung out.”

“What you need, friend, is a break. You’ve been working too hard and you can’t think straight. You know how in baseball, sometimes a hitter will just miss everything sometimes? Game after game? He’s thinking too much, right? Going after every pitch, getting desperate. Sometimes you gotta park your keister in the dugout.” Allen jumped up. “All right, you’re making me feel guilty cleaning up this slop by yourself.” Allen started grabbing the beer bottles with loud clanks and stacking them along the windowsill in a kind of parade. The afternoon sun made them glow amber. It looked something like a monument.

Milo didn’t care to ask how many days, or hours, that parade of booze represented. But Allen seemed spirited, not woozy or slurring, so that was something, anyway.

In short order they had the place spiffed up and already smelling better, as Allen hauled the trash out to the garbage cans outside.

Milo wandered the apartment in the meanwhile, pausing by the piano. Allen’s melody for “Love Me, I Guess” was propped up on the stand, with more notations and markings. He’d been fiddling with it, but from what Milo could tell through his squinting, not so much it would ruin his lyrics, which didn’t so much exist yet anyhow.

Allen banged open the door. “Aw, leave it alone for now, Short. Grab us a couple beers from the icebox and let’s dig into those sandwiches.”

Allen flopped onto the sofa and tossed his sandwich on the low oval table in front of him. “The wife wouldn’t stand for eating out here, but we’re bachelors far as I’m concerned.”

“So long as you clean up after yourself. No rule that says a bachelor, even a pretend bachelor, has to live like an alley cat.”

Milo felt strange eating out in the living room. Even at his own place he didn’t do that, though he supposed he could. He could eat in his bed if he had the notion. Milo smiled to himself.

“What’s so funny?” Allen asked through a mouthful of pastrami.

“Just that in my own place, I’m still living by my mother’s rules. Not that I want to throw my old food around like this other schmuck I know, but I always sit there at my tiny kitchen table by my lonesome.”

“You’ll get used to it, at least until you get married and the missus will tell you what to do. But I forgot, Mr. Milo ain’t never gonna do that.”

“Didn’t say that.”

“Too bad the young lass at Passover wasn’t your type, or we’d have found out for sure.”

“I never stood a chance, not that I wanted to stand a chance,” Milo added, pointing at Allen with his beer bottle before taking a cold swig that seemed to flood every corner of his sweaty, sticky self. Before Milo knew it, he’d glugged half of it down. “Anyhow, she’s got a fella that her parents don’t like much.”

“That’s a rough thing, being in love when people don’t approve.”

“You’re sentimental all of a sudden.”

“It’s all these love songs, I guess. They get to you after a while.”

“You speak from experience, eh? Your people didn’t like Dorothy?”

“Wasn’t Dorothy.”

“Oh. Right.”

The beer and the heat settled over Milo same as a heavy blanket. He leaned back on the sofa, after another bite of sandwich and long gulps of the cold bubbly brew.

After a few moments of rare quiet, Allen stood up quickly, walked to the kitchen, and returned with two more beers.
He handed one to Milo, settled down next to him on the sofa, and tapped his bottleneck to Milo’s.

“Saw Cole Porter at Elmo’s the other night. His wife was with him. Must be some arrangement those two have.”

Milo closed his eyes. “Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard.” The humming of a fan somewhere in the room lulled him. He sat up just enough to take another drink, thinking of some other subject to bring up. Cole Porter’s unusual tastes were not a subject he much longed to dwell on.

Allen spoke up again. “Girls are too much trouble anyhow. Always changing their minds about something, always wanting more money for this and that.”

Milo had no response to this, and took another drink, glad to at least not be thinking about the song, though he just thought about not thinking of it. Another swig might take care of that, too.

Allen rambled on. “That’s what I like about you, Milo. You look out for me, right? You got me to give up the booze, telling me, ‘You’re embarrassing yourself and the show!’ Remember that? When you picked me up at the jailhouse? But you didn’t hate me for it, either. Looking at me like some of them did, like I was gum on their shoe, like they never got a snootful and raised Cain.”

Milo touched the cool bottle to his face. “Well, you’re a pal, Allen. We all trip up sometimes.” Milo chuckled as Allen slumped sideways against his shoulder. “All those beers catch up with you? Speaking of a snootful. Allen?”

Milo craned his head around, trying to see if Allen was even awake. He couldn’t tell at that angle. He jiggled his shoulder a bit to rouse him.

When Allen didn’t react right away, Milo made to get up and untangle himself.

At first, Milo didn’t understand what was happening. He felt something wet, yet oddly solid, on his neck, and reached up to brush away the bug or worm or what, then that something moved, and Milo sprung off the couch, brushing wildly at his collar. He dropped the beer, which clanked against the table and fizzed itself out all over the floor, and Milo’s shoe and pant leg, too.

Allen slumped into the empty space he’d left. Allen was wide awake and alert, but his face was in the process of draining itself white, his pale eyes looking up at Milo with something almost like fright.

It was only then that Milo’s brain pieced together the last few moments and a sickening horror spread out from his chest. Allen had just kissed him, right on the neck, that’s what that was, he’d kissed him and even sucked softly on his skin.

Milo backed away two steps, shaking.

Allen put his elbows on his knees and knotted his hands into his hair. When he spoke, his voice was hoarse. “Please forget I ever did that.”

Milo couldn’t speak. Allen became a stranger before his eyes.

Allen’s shoulders began to shake, and he sniffed, and Milo understood he was crying now, but trying to hold it in, his thin frame quivering with the effort. With trembling hands and bile in his throat, Milo backed out of the apartment door, and ran down the stairs to the street outside.

A
s Alex strides across the Midtown apartment, my mind clicks back and forth between the physical reality in front of me, and the memory of Daniel in this space, our place, our home where we once shared bagels and a bed and a life. It’s like a projector toggling between two slides. One, a stranger in this emptied, sterile apartment. Two, my boyfriend and his strewn clothes and the kitchen pass-through counter littered with takeout boxes.

Alex goes straight to the nearly floor-to-ceiling windows and looks down. I find it endearing that he doesn’t try to play it cool. He wears the astonishment as casually as a favorite graying T-shirt. His long wavy hair falls so that I can’t see his face as he peers the many stories down to the street below. In the picture I’d printed out, his hair must have been pulled back, or it was taken long ago. In any case, I’d been surprised when he got out of the cab and approached me with his hand out. He was wearing a T-shirt from a band I’d never heard of, and a dark button-down shirt open over the top of that. He’s tall and lanky, and prone to slouch slightly in the way of people who are used to being the tallest in the room. With his dark clothing, it gives him the look of a tree bent in the wind.

“Wow,” he says. “I feel dumb for not bringing a camera.”

“We can get you a disposable one. I have one somewhere, but I’m pretty sure I packed it in a box.”

Alex scratches his head and looks down, his first sign of self-consciousness. “It’s not some kind of fun vacation, though, I know.”

“Don’t worry about it. You can want to have a camera. Maybe we can catch a show, since you came all this way. I can get us tickets to
Fosse
. I’ve seen it before, but I never get tired of it. Or there’s a revival of
Kiss Me, Kate
.”

Alex still faces the view, which isn’t spectacular or anything because we’re not all that high up by Manhattan standards. But everything is new for him here. A view of a brick wall would be novel. “I don’t want to sponge off you,” he says. “I’m doing that enough.”

“I already believe you’re not a fortune hunter, so please stop trying to convince me. It will just make the both of us feel more awkward than the situation already calls for, and I don’t know about you, but we’ve got enough awkward to last us a while, right? I asked you to come, and if I suggest something expensive, we’ll call it book research. I don’t mind, I’m happy to do it, but I don’t want to make a big deal of it. It embarrasses me as much as you, if not more.”

“Is it? Book research, that is?”

“How do you mean?” I ask, sitting down on a kitchen barstool.

“Will you put it in the book, then? If my mother is his child? If Vivian…had anything to do with the song?”

It hits me hard, then, that these two projects I’d managed to demarcate in my head—Vivian and my grandfather and his voice, and then there’s the book—were not exactly so separate after all. Though I’d bet the whole company this is not what Naomi and Uncle Paul had in mind when they set this ball in motion.

“Eleanor? Did you hear me?”

“Let’s just see if it’s true first. One thing at a time.”

Alex nods and picks up his bag, moving into the bedroom, which I’d pointed out when we first crossed the threshold. He could have argued with me, he could have insisted I answer directly, but instead he chooses to give me some space. Not for nothing that I want to help him. He makes it easy to want to help him.

I have to smirk at the irony. I’d taken on this project to protect Grampa Milo. I was supposedly making a stand for dignity, and then I go and dig up a love child and my grandfather’s song lyrics in someone else’s writing.