Heart and Soul (7 page)

“It looks good. You look good, Bess.”

I didn't say anything.

“So is this going to be a regular thing?”

“Nah, I'll be okay now,” I said. “You really did a number on me. Thanks.”

He was quiet for a while. I thought maybe he'd fallen asleep.

“Is there something I can do?” I asked finally. “By way of repayment?”

“If we're counting up favors here, you might as well just forget about it,” he said. “I'll always owe you big-time.”

“Oh, come on, what have I ever done except annoy the hell out of you?”

His voice dropped so I had to lean closer to hear him. “You stayed with me every day at the hospital when my mother was sick. You helped me pick out her stone. You arranged for the wake and the funeral. You met me at the beach more than once in the middle of the night when I couldn't sleep on account of losing her…”

I put my finger on his mouth. “That was different.”

“My mother died when you were getting ready for your jury at Juilliard. Don't tell me it was no big thing, Bess.”

We lay there in silence for a while.

“So how are we going to deal with this?” he asked finally.

“It'll be fine. Remember that
Seinfeld
episode where Jerry and Elaine did it as friends? And what about
The Big Chill
when the guy fucked his wife's best friend to give her a baby, and with his wife's blessing?”

“Hm.”

“You don't sound convinced,” I said, and flipped over so I could see his face better. He had that funny unreadable look again. “I hate it when I can't tell what you're thinking,” I said.

He grabbed a lock of my hair and gave it a tug. “Don't sweat it, Stallone. You're absolutely right. It'll be fine. Put some clothes on and I'll drive you home.”

And he was right. Other than sharing a little smirk the next time he stopped over, it was as if that night never happened.

Things settled back to the dreary routine. Wait on Dutch, listen to Dutch yell, argue with your sister and your mother, dream about a man who's on the other side of the world, try not to think about what might have been. My one great comfort was Amadoofus. Every day I found at least twenty minutes to sit down and play. It was like a visit with an old buddy and it sustained me and kept me at least partly sane. Of course, those sessions also reminded me of what I was missing. Sometimes Angie would grab a moment to stand and listen. In fact that's what she was doing the morning that all hell broke loose.

“It sounds like a heart breaking.” Angie was leaning against the door as Amadoofus and I wandered through some Grieg. “I don't know if it's yours or mine,” she said. I stopped playing and got up. We just held on to each other for a while. “We're trapped, Bess,” she said.

“It's only temporary.” But I didn't believe a word of it. Angie smelled like damp leaves. They were starting to fall off the trees, and she'd been out raking our yard, which was roughly the size of your average hanky.

“Even if Dad ever gets better, it'll be too late for us,” she said. “There'd never be enough money for me to go to school even if they still honored the scholarship, which they won't. And David Montagnier will find somebody else.”

“I'm sure he has already.”

“I was scared to ask if you've heard from him.”

“Last I knew, he was in Europe.”

Dutch shouted for his pain medication.

“You stay here with Amadoofus,” Angie said. No eighteen-year-old should wear such a dried-up old lady's face. Dutch yelled again, something about that goddamn piano, and I grabbed Angie's arm.

“Flip you for it,” I said, calling tails a fraction after I saw my quarter show heads. “I lose. Go make yourself a cup of tea and I'll deal with the emperor.” But then I heard the front door slam. “There's Jake. Get him to take you for a walk on the beach. I mean it. You're out of here.”

Dutch had hoisted himself off the couch and into his wheelchair. He was sweating and the veins in his neck were bulging red. “I'm sick and tired of you ignoring me so you can pound on the piano with that moody shit.”

“If I don't, I'll pound on you instead,” I said, reaching for a comb to fix his matted hair.

He batted it out of my hand. It went sliding across the floor. “I thought I heard Jake. Where is he?”

“With Angie,” I answered as he pushed past me in his chair. “And you're going where?”

“For a fucking stroll in the park.” He balled up his fists and slammed them hard against the door frame. “God
damn
it all, Bess.” Looking back, I should have realized he was at the end of his rope. There was blood smeared where he'd hit the wood.

“Let me through. I'll be right back with your pills,” I said.

We kept them up out of reach on a shelf in the kitchen. Dutch's mood swings had been so crazed we figured we'd better play it safe. I gave him the medication with some tomato juice. He didn't want to get back on the couch, so I left him sitting in front of
Guiding Light,
the only soap opera that was on in the mornings. When I went out of the room he was growling at the screen. “Come on, Lil, show some spine for once and tell him to screw off.”

I closed the porch door behind me and sat down on Amadoofus's old cracked bench. In my mind, David was looking at me across the glossy surface of his piano, hearing every note I played so that his entrance was seamless, so that we were speaking in one voice through the music. My left breast ached like I'd pulled a muscle, but then I realized it was my heart that was hurting. I began playing my part of the
Scaramouche,
not galloping the way it was written, but like a blues riff, real slow and sad. I started getting into it, closing my eyes and hearing David partner the dance inside my head, remembering that during those perfect hours with him I hadn't felt alone.

I don't know how long I played, but it was one of those magical times when Amadoofus transported my fingers to a place where misery couldn't touch me. The jolt back to the real world was sudden and brutal. First came a howl like a battle cry followed by the crash of splintering wood. My eyes snapped open to see my father's hatchet shattering the dried-up timber of the piano casing. I sat paralyzed as Amadoofus shuddered under the blows. With each swing of the axe, Dutch roared like an animal, the force of his powerful arms raising him up out of his wheelchair. There was rage in his voice, but oh yeah, I could hear the joy, too. He swung high above his head and brought the blade down on the upper section of the keyboard. Fragments of yellowed ivory flew in the air. One piece sliced across my cheek, leaving a burning track. The sounding board was exposed like a rib cage and when my father struck again, the strings begged for mercy with a discordant twang.

I leapt to my feet and lunged at my father. I jumped on his shoulders and reached for the hatchet.

“Get off! Crazy bitch!”

I was pounding him and trying to grab the axe. He just kept swinging.

“You're finished with it now, girl!” I couldn't believe how much strength he had, stuck in the chair like that. He flicked me off him like I was a bug.

I landed on the floor. “You can never take it away,” I said even though he wasn't listening. “It's in my blood.” I held up my wrist and pointed to it. “It's in there. You want to get it out, you'll have to kill me.”

At that point, I couldn't have cared less if he split my head down the middle as long as he spared Amadoofus. But he raised the axe again and dealt the piano a deathblow. The keyboard came crashing down onto the pile of splinters. I heard myself screaming. It took me a while to stop. My father tossed the hatchet aside and said, “Now maybe we'll get some peace around here.” Then he wheeled out. A few seconds later, I heard his bedroom door slam.

Jake and Angie came home to find me lying on the floor with my head on the piano's shattered body.

“What the fuck?” Jake said.

“Dad.” Angie knew.

Jake reached out to pick me up but I slapped his hand away and spread myself across the remains of Amadoofus. Pitiful sounds kept rising from the twisted strings, as if he wasn't quite dead yet.

Jake knelt down on the floor. “Come on, Bess. Your face is bleeding.”

“Please go away.”

After a while, they left. Pretty soon there were shouts from the other end of the house. I'd never heard Jake raise his voice our whole lives. Some commotion, but I couldn't have cared less. I sat up and started picking through the pieces, trying to fit them together. All the king's horses and all the king's fucking men.

They couldn't get me off the back porch. Mumma came home from work and left a plate on the floor beside me like I was the family dog but I couldn't imagine eating. Beethoven was inside my head, the
Adagio
movement from the Seventh Symphony. Jake's lips were moving at me, but nothing was getting through except that majestic dying heartbeat.

I slept beside Amadoofus's corpse. The next morning, my mother came out with a warm washcloth and washed the blood and grime off my face. That felt good. She didn't say a word, just left coffee and toast. I was almost hungry until I thought about Dutch and then the hate twisted my stomach into sickness again.

Angie waited until Mumma left. They must have had their hands full with my father but I couldn't go near him to help. I was imagining a thousand different ways to kill him, mainly using parts of Amadoofus's mangled body. I could strangle him with the strings or choke him with the keys or batter him to death with the sounding board. I knew it was risky to go near Dutch when I was in this state. If I went to jail for murder, what would happen to Angie?

My sister crept over and sat down on the cement floor. She didn't say anything at first, just took my hand and stroked it.

“I love you, Bessie,” she said finally.

I didn't answer, but salt stung in the wound on my cheek.

“She didn't stay in their bedroom last night,” Angie went on.

I didn't get what she meant at first.

“She slept on the couch,” she said.

Then I looked at her.

“I heard her tell him that if he wasn't crippled she'd leave him.”

I opened my mouth to talk but all that came out was a croak.

“What? What, Bess?” Angie said, holding my hand to her cheek.

“Just … one … big … happy … family.”

I
asked Jake to cart Amadoofus away.

“You sure you're ready for that?” he asked me.

“Can you do it soon?”

When he left to get his truck, I picked a souvenir from the rubble and put it in a shoebox—the key for middle C, which had turned even yellower over the years.

Jake showed up an hour later and took Amadoofus away. I didn't ask where they went.

After that, the house seemed to ooze an ugly hopeless smell. The only person holding her head up was Mumma, who was exhausted and pissed off all right, but that wasn't the whole picture. All of a sudden, she'd started bothering with her appearance. Those faded house-dresses wound up in the rag pile and she trotted out attractive clothes she used to save for weddings and wakes. Every morning before going off to work she'd read us a list of things to do. It was pretty unnerving, this lifetime nonperson suddenly becoming the queen of efficiency. Already, after only a few weeks on the job, she'd gotten a small promotion, and I could understand why.

Mumma had moved back into the bedroom with Dutch, but things had changed between them. I heard him using words like “please” and “thank you” in his conversations with her, and once when he didn't know I was looking, he reached out and took her hand. But Mumma had put up a wall and seemed to be studying him over it as if he were some kind of species in the zoo. I'd catch her with this look on her face that read
How did I ever wind up with him?
There was a sharper edge to her, as if the blurred outline was coming into focus. It didn't occur to me that maybe I'd never really bothered to take a close look.

One evening about two weeks after my father killed Amadoofus, Angie and I were sitting in the kitchen playing gin. It was getting dark earlier, and as soon as dinner was over I just marked time until I could go to sleep. That night, Dutch had been cleaned up and was in bed watching
90210.
Angie and I flipped our cards over without talking. There wasn't really anything to say anymore. But then Mumma came and stood in the doorway. She had a strange look on her face. I couldn't tell if somebody had died or just won the lottery.

“Bess, you'd better come,” she said.

“What is it?” Angie had just picked up the ace I was looking for and I was in no mood for bad news.

“Someone's here to see you.”

Angie and I got up and followed her. I don't know what I expected. Those last weeks had taught me that thinking too much was a dangerous proposition. I'd learned to shut down my brain, move my body around like a machine, and do what was required. I was your basic robot-woman, and as far as I knew robots didn't have a hell of a lot of imagination. In my stupefied state, I was not exactly prepared to see right there before my eyes, standing just inside the front door, Monsieur David Montagnier. He was wearing a tux, with his white bow tie hanging loose, and he was emitting about eight hundred watts in the hallway. I thought I would pass out from love.

“Fuck me,” I whispered. This time I couldn't help it.

“Bess,” my mother said with that new no-nonsense tone.

“Sorry.” It took me a few seconds to remember that once upon a time I had had a life and that there were things you were supposed to do when a person came to call. I went up to David and stuck out my hand. He took it, but drew me closer and kissed me on both cheeks. Somehow I found the wits to make the introductions. Angie looked surprised all right, and a little intimidated, but even with all that she was checking him out. It still makes me smile to think of it. If it had been Ludwig van Beethoven himself in that doorway, Angie would have had that look:
Yes, all right, I'm impressed, but exactly what do you want with my sister?

David turned to Mumma. “I'm sorry to show up unannounced. There seems to be something wrong with your telephone and I've just gotten off a plane.”

“In that?” I asked, indicating the tux. I was hoping he hadn't noticed how evil the house smelled.

“I was performing in London and barely caught my flight. Mrs. Stallone,” he said to Mumma. “I'm sorry about your husband. How is he?”

“It's a slow recovery, but thank you for asking,” Mumma said. “Wouldn't you like something to eat after such a long trip?” Mumma was poised and gracious. I wasn't used to feeling proud of her.

“Actually, I was wondering if I could speak with Mr. Stallone for a few moments,” David said. “I realize it's a lot to ask but I'm not a total stranger, really.” He smiled at me. I guess I'd thought that I'd never see that phenomenon beamed in my direction again. I wondered why the entire house didn't fall down from how my heart was careening around like a pachyderm on crack.

“I have to warn you, he hasn't been much for company,” Mumma said. If that wasn't the understatement of the millennium. Pauline was allowed to watch the soaps with him so they could gossip about his favorite characters. Except for her and Jake, Dutch would barely speak to anyone. Even Corny from the firehouse gave up when my father told him if he showed up with his bleeding-heart face one more time he'd buy an attack dog.

“Let me just go and check,” Mumma said, and went off to drop the news on Dutch. That left the three of us standing there.

“You're thin,” David said to me, and turned to Angie. “Is she eating enough?”

“There's a new tailor who's supposed to be reasonable,” Angie said.

David looked confused.

“It upsets my sister to see my clothes hanging loose,” I explained. “I promised to get them taken in. So exactly what are you doing here?”

David smiled. I knew he liked it that I wasn't big on slinging the bullshit.

“I've been on the phone from Europe with Harold Stein,” David said. “He apprised me of your situation.”

“He's been checking in,” I said guiltily. It had hurt to hear his voice and I think I was sometimes a little short over the phone.

But before I could get any more information out of David, Mumma came back.

“He'll see you,” she told David. “He's a little … cranky,” she said.

“Yuh,” I said. “Think Jabba the Hutt.”

David disappeared with Mumma. Angie and I stared at one another. I don't know if my eyes were as big as hers, which were approximately the size of Brazil.

“What the fuck is he doing here?” I said.

“That's the handsomest man I've ever seen in my life,” Angie said.

Mumma joined us and we all went into the kitchen to wait it out.

“What did Dad say?” I asked Mumma.

“I don't know. They were talking Dutch.”

“Wait,” I said. “To Dutch?”

“No,” she said. “Mr. Montagnier, your friend…”

She was having trouble with what to call him. I knew how she felt. There was the French pronunciation, plus that formality of his.

“He thanked your father for seeing him,” Mumma went on. “Then he asked him something in a foreign language. It has to be Dutch because your father answered him.”

“Dutch speaks Dutch?” This was news.

“Well, you know he was born in Holland. Your grandmother was from there.”

“The perfect mother,” Angie said. She meant that Dutch never tired of telling us how wonderful his mother was and how beautiful life was back in the old country where people had values. His mother died when he was eight and he came to America with his Italian father who he didn't like much.

“I thought he'd forgotten it after all these years,” Mumma said. “He's a nice man, your David. I've never seen anyone famous up close. It's strange how he looks almost like his pictures but not really.”

“Well, he's not my David,” I said.

“I wouldn't be too sure,” Angie said. It's always so naked when she says something direct.

“What are they talking about in there?” I said. I shuffled and reshuffled the cards like I was trying out for a job in Vegas.

“Mumma, you'd better learn how to play gin,” Angie said. I was too freaked out to make the leap.

After what seemed like twelve hours—Angie said it was twenty minutes—David showed up in the kitchen doorway. Maybe it was his tux, but the thought went through my head that he was going to bow from the waist and say, “Good evening, I'm David. I'll be your waiter for the evening.” I started to giggle. Then I choked. Then Mumma started pounding my back and I had to get a paper towel to wipe my eyes. It was quite the display. After I got myself under control, David sat down at the table. His legs were so long, they got all tangled up with ours. With all the chair scraping, the three of us girls automatically glanced toward Dutch's bedroom. That sound ordinarily guaranteed a temper tantrum. But there was nothing coming from the other end of the house except silence. I wondered if David had killed him as a special present to me, and that's when I knew I was this close to losing it completely.

“What's the story?” I asked David.

“I just made a proposition to your father. Could I possibly have a glass of water?”

Mumma and Angie shot out of their seats while I sat there gawking at him. I was playing a Brahms
Intermezzo
on the kitchen table, which is something I do when I'm truly nervous. I can do it while barely moving my fingers so nobody notices. David took a long drink, leaned on his elbows to look at Mumma. She had that dazed look that I suppose I got when his face was that close.

“You may be aware that I had a long, successful partnership with Terese Dumont,” he told her, and waited for Mumma to acknowledge this with a nod. “After she retired, I decided to pursue a solo career,” he went on. “I believe I made a fair try.” True, he'd played with most of the premier orchestras and given solo concerts all over the world. I'd kept clippings of things he'd done since we met.

“I didn't enjoy it,” David said. “I was losing my interest in performing and even wondered if I was through with music as a career.” A little moan escaped from my mouth as I imagined the pain. This was something I could identify with. “But then I heard about this pianist named Bess Stallone.”

“Where did you…?” I started. But David raised two fingers without taking his eyes off Mumma.

“For several weeks, whenever I was in town I eavesdropped on her practice sessions,” he went on. “Mrs. Stallone, there are many pianists with technical mastery of the instrument, but Bess is special. She has tremendous emotional power. I know of no one like her.”

He got up to pour himself more water. I found out later how airplanes will do that to you, suck every last drop of moisture out of your body until you feel like you've been crawling across Death Valley. At the moment, I was thinking how it hadn't taken him long to feel at home.

“What I've realized over the past few weeks is that I miss the musical partnership. It's what gratifies me as a pianist. If I'm to continue with music, I need Bess.”

I saw Mumma shake her head as if she was trying to make his words settle into her brain. I was having the same problem. “But,” I said. There were maybe a hundred and twenty
buts
that occurred to me off the top of my head and that was without even trying.

“Please, Bess,” David said, “if you'll just let me finish.”

“Finish,” Angie echoed at me. I'm famous for figuring out the end of a movie by halftime, but I was having serious trouble getting to the resolution here. I clamped my mouth shut, which as we all knew was entirely against my nature.

David leaned against the kitchen counter. “I've been one of the lucky ones,” he said. “Success has provided me with a great deal of money, far more than I need. I've been fortunate with investments here and in Europe. What I proposed to Mr. Stallone is a barter arrangement. I'll supply the funds to pay for whatever home care is needed until he recovers. I'll supplement Angelina's scholarship, and I'll pay Bess's living expenses so that she can devote herself to music full-time. In return, I'll have my new partner.”

Anybody looking in the window would have thought the three Stallone women had just seen the Virgin Mary hop out of the freezer with a Popsicle in her hand. It was quiet for a long time. Angie was the first to get her wits back.

“And Dutch … my father … actually agreed?” She must have figured he'd want us around forever, if only for torture purposes.

“After some thought,” David said. “He doesn't seem particularly happy with the current situation.”

We were all silent. Then Angie spoke up again. At least somebody had her brains switched on. “You're talking about a loan,” she said to David.

“No,” David said. “You've got what I need and I'm more than willing to pay you for the sacrifice.”

“Wait,” I said. I was beginning to feel like your basic brisket, shrink-wrapped, price-tagged, and oven-ready. “There's something wrong with this.”

“I don't want to leave my job,” Mumma blurted.

David, who must have figured we'd all fall down and kiss his beautiful feet, was looking a little disappointed.

“What did our father say?” Angie asked.

“It took some time for him to understand that I'm getting the better deal here. He's a very proud man.”

But not of me, obviously, I was thinking. Why would anybody want to pay all that money for old pain-in-the-ass Bess?

“You wouldn't have to quit your job, Mrs. Stallone,” David explained. “You can hire whomever you want to care for your husband.”

“He won't want anyone else,” she said with a sad smile.

“That doesn't mean you have to listen to him, Mumma,” Angie told her. Mumma blinked. This type of notion was still real new.

“Beg your pardon,” I said, “but unless I'm mistaken, this proposal has something to do with me.”

“It has everything to do with you,” David admitted.