I had to stop. I got maybe ten or twelve bars into the piece, and I just had to quit. The sound was so beautiful I was just about to get sick, or have hysterics, or I don’t know, wet myself—something was going to happen, anyway, that’s for sure. Some people get that way when they see flowers or sunsets, or read poems, whatever. I don’t, I never have, but that damn piano. I stopped playing, and I looked up at Norris, and I couldn’t talk. He laid his arm around my shoulders. He said, “Yeah, me, too. I know I don’t deserve it, I’m embarrassed every time I use it just to sing scales, but I keep telling myself it’s a present for what I’m going to do. You have to believe that stuff, Jennifer, in our business.”
Norris always talks to me as though I were a real musician, the way he is, and the way Sally is. Sometimes I like it, sometimes I really don’t, because it’s not true and he knows it. He wanted me to play some more, but I got up from the piano and went over to him. I said, “Sally’s getting married.”
“I know,” Norris said. “Nice guy, too, Evan what’s-his-name. You like him all right, don’t you?”
I shrugged and nodded, that mumbly nod I do. Norris was watching me really closely. “She says you’re a bit antsy about the move to London.”
Sometimes I really wish I had the kind of parents who got divorced and never ever spoke to each other again to the day they died. “I’m not antsy about it,” I said. “I’m just not going.”
Norris laughed. “What are you talking about? Babe, listen, you’ll love London. I’m crazy about it, I’d sing there for nothing—hell, I practically do. Jennifer, you will adore England, you’ll have the time of your life. I promise you.” He was holding my shoulders, smiling down at me with those confident eyes that really do flash all the way to the balcony when he’s being Rigoletto or Iago. Show people feel things, like I said—they just can’t help knowing a good scene when they see one. Like Mister Cat, it’s their job.
If I was ever going to do it, now was it. I took a deep breath, and I said, “I was wondering if I could maybe stay with you.” Norris didn’t drop his teeth, or anything like that. He stroked my hair and looked straight into my eyes, and sort of chanted, “JenniferJenniferJenniferJennifer.” It’s an old joke—he used to tell me that that was my real name, that he only called me Jennifer for short. That was long ago, when I was little, when the name hadn’t yet started to bug me so much.
“I could take care of things,” I said. “I could do the shopping, the laundry, keep things clean, forward your mail. Water the plants.” I don’t know why I threw that in, because he never has any plants. “You wouldn’t have to pay a housekeeper. Or a secretary.” It doesn’t look right on the page, because it all came out in one frantic whoosh, but that’s about what I said.
Norris said, “Jennifer. Honey. Come and sit down.” And I knew it was all out the window right there. He pulled me over to the sofa and sat next to me, never taking his eyes from mine. He said, “Honey, it wouldn’t work. We couldn’t do that to Sally—you know she’d be devastated, and so would I, and so would you. Believe me.”
“I’d get over it,” I said. “So would Sally. New husband, new country, two new kids—she wouldn’t have time to be devastated about anybody. Norris, I could go visit her once in a while, that’d be fine, I’d love it. But I can’t live there, Norris, I just can’t, why can’t I stay with you in the guest room?” I’m writing it all down, just the way it was, as fast as I can, so maybe I won’t be too ashamed. But I might just cut it out later on.
Norris ran a hand through his own hair and then squeezed his hands together. He said, “Jennifer, I don’t know how to say this. I’m not in a very good place right now for having anybody living with me. It’s not just you, it’s anybody. I’m coming off a bad relationship—you remember Mandy?—and I guess I need some privacy, time to be by myself, time to think through a lot of stuff—”
I interrupted him. “I’d be in school most of the time, you wouldn’t even know I was there.” I wasn’t going to beg anymore, I wasn’t going to say another word, but it came out anyway. Norris didn’t hear me. He went right on. “Besides, going to England would be the best thing in the world for you. Trust me on this one, kid. I know how incredibly dumb this sounds, but someday you really will thank me. Really.”
Well, that was pretty much it, there’s no point in writing anything else about it. Norris said it was my turn to choose a restaurant, so just out of spite I picked a Russian place, way down in the Village and so fancy it looked like a crack house from outside. Before we went, Norris asked me, very shy and sweet, if I’d mind if somebody joined us for dinner, because if I would mind, that’d be fine. Her name was Suzanne, and I think she did something on the public radio. Actually, she was nice. My father’s women mostly are. She paid more attention to me during dinner than she did to Norris, asking all kinds of questions about school and my friends, and what kind of music I liked, and she pretty much listened to the answers. Afterward they took me home in a cab. Both of them got out and hugged me good-bye, and Norris told me he’d give me all kinds of addresses in London, and they both waved back to me as the cab drove away.
Three
We were supposed to leave in August. Sally wanted me to finish the school year at Gaynor, and meanwhile she had so much stuff to do before we’d be ready to go, I hardly ever saw her anymore. Besides the whole business of plane tickets and passports and clothes, and what to take and what to store, and what to do about the apartment, she had to keep on with her teaching and at the same time be looking around for somebody to take over for her. That was a thing, by the way. I don’t know how the singers were, but every one of the piano students went into major shock when she told them she was getting married and leaving the country. I’d never actually thought much about whether my mother was a good teacher or not—she was just Sally, it was what she did. Now, watching these grown people coming absolutely unglued at the idea of not being able to study with her anymore, as though she was the only piano teacher in the whole world, it suddenly made me look at her like someone else, a stranger. Practically everything was making me look at her that way, anyway, those days.
Like watching her with Evan. I haven’t put anything in about Evan so far, and I know I should have, I just kept feeling a little strange about it, even now. He’s about Sally’s age—which was middle forties then—and he’s not big, and he’s not good looking. He’s not bad looking, it’s just that you wouldn’t look at him twice on the street. A longish face, sort of diamond shaped, lumpy where the jaws hinge. He’s got hazelish-gray eyes that go down at the outside corners, and hair more or less the same rainy color, pretty thick except in the front, and it’s always a mess. Nice wide mouth, ugly nose. A horse broke his nose when he was a kid, thrashing its head around or something, and it never got set right. And later it got broken again, but I can’t remember how. Small ears, more like a woman’s ears than a man’s. And he’s thin—not skinny, but definitely bony. Sally couldn’t have picked anybody who looked less like Norris.
He came home with her a couple of days after she told me, and I grabbed an apple and three raisin cookies and headed for my room, the way I was used to doing when he was there. But this time he said, “Don’t vanish just yet, Jenny. I’d like to talk to you for half a minute.”
I already knew he didn’t talk like any English people I’d ever seen on TV. Like he said, “Half a minute,” not “‘Arf a mo’, ducks”—six years, and I haven’t heard anybody say anything like that—but he didn’t exactly talk Masterpiece Theatre English either. It’s a husky voice, deeper than you’d expect to look at him, and at least his mouth moves when he talks. I mostly understand English women now, but the men can drive you crazy.