She was vivacious. The piano, not the girl playing it. In fact, I hardly think I even saw her–so enamored, rather, by the craftsmanship of the beautiful imported Pleyel that sat, spot-lit, before me not unlike a beautiful whore seducing me with her restalyne-plumped lips and tauntingly libertine bosom.
Yet like all hallowed, mystical moments, this one too was malleable, by anything. My buddy Fred bumped me just then-hard. Coming at me as if he were a torpedo having been shot from across the room. Giddy, giggling, ten notches beyond tipsy, he spilled half his Martini all over my suit. It was just enough to startle me out of my ethereal fantasy and I turned to him, informing him that he was drunk.
How I’d forged a friendship with a guy named Fred has always been beyond me.
Yet there he was, babbling on in some slurred accent about some girl he’d met–and something about Parochial school.
“You know, it’s funny,” he mumbled. “It’s funny, man, you think–you spend your whole life thinking you want a certain type of chick, that you know what you want, and then,” he paused just to laugh himself silly. “–And then you meet this chick and all it takes is having this one tiny thing in common.”
Apparently they’d both attended Catholic schools and for this reason, at this moment, he believed that she was “the one”.
“Hey man, why you being so weird?” Even in his intoxicated state I was obviously still naked.
I hated the way he elbowed me whenever this wasted. I had no choice but to blow him off, albeit kindly. “That her? Oh yeah, she’s gorgeous. Go buy her another drink, I need to use the pisser.” (And please let’s eschew the trip to the ER this time.)
I made my way down the side, down the staircase. The set was nearly over, and I would not leave have not hearing, if only just the last few notes of that enigmatic sound.
Nearing the stage, I finally noticed her, albeit having to push myself a bit in order to drink her in. She was not someone you’d look twice at on the street, but in front of that Heavenly instrument, she may as well have been a Greek Goddess, her virtuoso hands moving effortlessly over those ebonies and ivories; I felt a lump begin to form.
And then it was over. And then the lights dimmed. And she walked off the stage as uneventfully as Nicole Richie’s last book reading. I ran quickly backstage, although I felt as if I was fluttering.
Before a gaudy backstage mirror, bare bulbs framing the dusty, scratched, lipstick-stained glass, the lady peeled off her false lashes and cried. You’d think by now she’d be inured to this cheap, albeit almost paradoxically breathtaking, routine.
She didn’t seem the least surprised that I was there. “How was it?” she asked. “The performance I mean. By the looks of you, I’d think you’d find it recondite.” And with each little thing she did–the removal of the lashes, the makeup, then the wig–she began to look more and more, real, like a bizarre anthropomorphic allegory of all Isabella Rosellini’s tawdry performances combined to paint this picture-this arresting scene before me now.
“Well, I admit I have not seen your act before, but I am quite the connoisseur.” And I lauded her–her talent, her skill, the way those long fingers of hers had the capability to both tap lightly and hammer later.
“It’s all machination,” she scoffed. “You’d never really get it.”
Her real hair was atrocious and she brushed at it vigorously, angrily, as if she were taking out years–perhaps decades–of abuse and pent-up god-only-knows-what on her poor struggling, scraggly coiffure.
“Do you want me to leave?”
“No,” she said.
And I took her home with me that night. I showed her my collection of WWII memorabilia–my plates, my canteens, my photos, and puttees. She admired them as well as she could, I felt. My own gut decided her incapable of cracking even a fraudulent smile.
She left around 3, and while she refused my offer to call her a cab, I did follow her out into the puddled street, at least so that I could watch her disappear into the murky night. I knew then and there that I’d never see her again. And then gurgling sounds came suddenly from a gutter nearby.
“Fred, you fool!” I ran to his side, picked him carefully out his own puddle of vomit. “I can tell you had macaroni again,” I said, tongue-in-cheek, while slinging one of his limp arms over my shoulder and literally dragging him back to the apartment.
“The girl,” he garbled, once spread on my couch like the sloppy tippler he was.
“The girl of your dreams,” I murmured, doing something in the kitchen.
“Yeah. She plays the piano,” he said. “Obsessed, man, for real.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Mmm hmm. I’m thinking she might actually be better for you.”
And I saw no point in arguing.