Scattered Thoughts

Deborah Grabien

“The Royal Suite, madame. Et voila.”

The lift doors opened and she followed the concierge, high heels that had tapped harsh against the hotel’s marble lobby now silent against opulent rugs. He unlocked the doors and stood aside, letting her precede him. He was as sleek and unobtrusive as the rest of the George V, and just as luxurious.

“Merci, madame.” He accepted the folded money, along with its implicit dismissal. “If anything is not to your satisfaction, please let me know at once.”

“Of course.” Go away, let me lock the door, I know what’s coming, go away. She swept the room, corner to corner, searching for the piano. It was there, a nice Baldwin spinet. Her demand was the same, no matter the hotel: there must be a piano in the suite. “I’ll do that. Everything looks fine.”

Merci, au revoir.” The big doors closed quietly behind him. Another city, another suite, another concierge. Another piano.

* * *

Jane’s unpacking, such as it was, had become routine. One suitcase, full of clothing she didn’t care about, emptied out and hung up, lingerie put into drawers, shoes set side by side on the wardrobe floor. The clothes, the shoes, even the underwear, matched up nicely with the hotel suites; Christian Loboutin and Prada met the pricy flooring of a five-star hotel with ease and aplomb. There were benefits to wealth, not the least of which was the option of buying to fit one’s surroundings, thus pre-empting having to deal with other peoples’ surprise.

She wandered the suite, not touching the piano. On the floor beside the piano bench, a small custom packing crate sat, awaiting her attention. She avoided touching that, as well.

Another hotel suite, another city, another world-class view: Geneva, Athens, Milan. The views from her suite in Venice, at the Cipriani, had nearly managed to get her attention. She had stared for a moment across the lagoon, at the spires and roofs of the city shimmering in the near distance, then turned away. Prague had offered her windows framing the Castle, austere and beautiful. It should have soothed her, that blanket of visible history. She hadn’t bothered to notice, and she wasn’t soothed.

Now, outside the tall windows, the sun washed the Fountain of the Three Graces in the courtyard of the George V. Somewhere just beyond her vision, Paris moved along, going about its business, heading toward the hour when the offices would empty and everyone would hit the warm streets, making their way home to the banlieus, stopping for a coffee or a glass of wine along the way.

She sighed, a long, complicated noise that had nothing to do with contentment. There was a sterling silver ice bucket on the dining table, with a bottle of champagne cooling. There were also chocolates, the mark of a luxury hotel; in Geneva, it had been cut flowers and fresh fruit in a silver basket.

It took two glasses of champagne before the courage Jane had been waiting for finally kicked in. A chocolate, dark and smooth against the tongue. Another, and she squared her shoulders.

Okay, kiddo. Get it done.

The packing crate was plastered with warnings: Fragile Handle with Care Extremely Fragile. On her knees, snapping open fasteners, Jane had a passing thought: The damned thing’s almost as fragile as I am, and almost as easy to break. Another thought, cutting deeper: I didn’t matter to him. Not as much as this did.

There were other labels, customs approvals from Italy, England, Greece. It had been her only tangible companion since Richard’s death. The piano changed from place to place, but this, the crate and its contents, were constant.

She got it open, unmolding the dense foam, exposing the precious cargo. And here it was at last, two pieces ready to be joined and set where they needed to be: atop the piano, where they had sat for every moment of those six years she and Richard had spent together.

She took the mirror ball and suspended it carefully, delicately, from its heavy stand. A single touch sent it shivering, looking for light to catch and splinter.

He had done that, touched it and sent it dancing, every time he’d sat down at the piano. She saw him, hunched over the keyboard, swearing under his breath as he worked out a riff or a melody line, the mirror ball shining its borrowed light on the man, the instrument, the music. It had been his ritual, perhaps his muse. Now it was hers.

The June days go long in Paris, the lights that spark the night resting and dormant until well past ten. Eventually, the afternoon would slide into twilight, into the dusk and the gloaming, and become full dark.

At full dark, the overheads in the Royal Suite of the George V Hotel would get turned on, and catch the mirror ball, send its faceted enchantment out into whatever corner of the night held the voice Jane was waiting for.

* * *

Long after dark, Jane let herself into the quiet suite. She knew, even as she fumbled for the lights, that there was a confrontation waiting. She could feel it, an awareness of him, the need for him, moving under her skin like a shift in her own blood pressure.

Dinner had been eaten, if not noticed. There had been a time when she cooked ferociously and ate regularly, manifesting through sheer desperation an appetite she didn’t possess. It had been her drama, not his: a kind of panic, to get Richard to eat something, anything, trying to guilt him into joining her, to keep him alive.

Those days had become a misty nonsense in her memory. She’d stopped noticing food at all beyond the bare minimum to keep her going; wine had one purpose, to dull edges grown sharp with loss and grief. Like the food on her plate, its quality and taste had become irrelevant.

Oh, damn.

Soft muffled notes, the barest whisper of sound, coming from the piano and from the air itself. It had to be the moonlight that had done it. There wasn’t enough light coming in through those tall windows, from the rooms on the other side of the courtyard, to have been trapped in the facets of the mirror ball. But the moonrise was high and sweet and strong, more than enough.

Hallo, love. Nice posh digs you’ve got here.

It was a breath, no more, but Jane slumped against the wall. There was no point, hugging the darkness. Light had brought him in, as it always seemed to do.

“Yes, I suppose they are.” The white keys on the piano shimmered slightly, calling her over. The mirror ball was moving slightly, catching stray rays and making them into prisms of brilliance in the dark. “What else would I do with all that money? Hire a gigolo? You left it to me, Richard, you tell me.”

He laughed. It was an uncanny sound, middle B on the keyboard, neither high nor low. She felt it down her back, in the depths of her loins. Richard had always sounded like his own piano, to her; she wondered if his wife had thought so, but she would never know that. Louisa had been the one subject she could never raise, not in all those years.

So, Paris? Not surprised, not really. Never did get a shot at taking you here, did I? Even on tour?

“No, you didn’t.” Nails, digging into palms, bringing flecks of blood to the surface of the skin. The wound was an old one, never healing. If the question had come from anyone but Richard, she would have thought it a deliberate taunt, but Richard hadn’t had a mean bone in his body. Any cruelty—and there had been some to answer for—had come through inattention, rather than malice. “No Europe for me. You took Louisa, remember? I stayed home in California, cleaning catboxes and being invisible.”

Yeah, I took Louisa. She’d have made my life hell if I hadn’t, you know? Anything for peace in the valley. You should have raised a fuss yourself, Janeybug. I’d much rather have taken you. That might have done it.

He’d slipped up the keyboard, a sympathetic stirring of string noise from under the lid. It was damped down, as if the soft pedal was in use; the piano’s small size kept things manageable. She’d learned that lesson the hard way in Rome, when she’d been given a baby grand. People in the adjoining rooms had complained to the concierge, especially after the night talk had become an argument. In life or death, Richard could get the maximum out of any piano that had ever been built.

“I should have made more fuss?” Here it was, the old argument, the one she could never win. She had a moment of clarity, as brief as it was tantalizing: End it. Find a way, just smash the damned mirror ball. Or draw the curtains, don’t let the light in. Learn to live completely in darkness. “I was nineteen, Richard. Remember? You were married, and famous, and I was nineteen and scared shitless that you’d leave me if I spoke up. Besides, I was too busy taking care of you, too busy watching you die slowly. Make a fuss? I didn’t have the nerve and I didn’t have the time. And you know it!”

Patterns, along the walls and the antique furniture. The mirror ball danced in a revolution like the earth hunting its own gravity, and she didn’t know where the light was coming from, but it was here, spattering the walls like the blood of a rainbow, against the curtains and cornices of the luxurious suite rented with the fortune Richard had left her.

There had been no promise involving his worldly goods, no wedding. That call from his lawyer had been so unexpected, she’d thought it was a mean joke: Ms. Berg, didn’t he let you know? Yes, half his fortune. The other half to his wife, yes, I’d strongly advise retaining legal representation in case Mrs. Halliday decides to contest…

That will, that will…Jane had gone into shock, and Louisa had gone berserk. She’d tried to take it, and she’d lost. Richard, even during those brutal final days of intermittent delirium, had been of sound mind under the legal definition. A string of witnesses had proven that to a court’s satisfaction.

So, what’s on for tonight, love? More arguing? I’d rather have a good long cuddle, but that’s not going down. So, what? You still narked at me for dying? Couldn’t help that, not really.

The ghostly breath from the spinet’s soundbox was tiara music, tinkling and pure: twinkle twinkle little star. He’d given her a t-shirt, back when the alcoholism had still been his biggest health issue, back before the stomach cancer, back when he could still walk, go places, make music, make trouble, make love: it had said I’m With Twinklefingers. She’d worn it every day for those last two weeks, making it talismanic. The shirt was at home in Sausalito, in a drawer, clean and folded and not even looked at since he’d died…

Right, okay, whatever. Not about me dying. Mad about me not getting rid of Louisa? You ready to cop to that yet, Little Miss Jane of Arc?

“Yes.”

There it was, out at last. She’d never said it before, never admitted aloud, to him or anyone else. She didn’t know what had finally pulled it free: passage of time, the t-shirt, the opulence made possible by his dying, the fierce intolerable weight of him dying at all.Or maybe it had been that last thought of his, that little scorpion sting, calling her a martyr. All she was sure of, standing in the darkness and watching Richard’s inspiration rotate slowly on its stand, was that, at long last, she was furious.

“You’re damned right I am. Why, Richard? I don’t get it. I loved you, I supported you, I was there for you. How could you love her more than you loved me? I don’t understand. She was only there when she got to be Mrs. Rich and Famous. I never gave a good goddamn about that stuff.”

The words poured out, fierce, passionate, buried too long. And something was happening – she heard an echo, bitterness that might have been feeling or sound. Was it coming from the piano, no, that wasn’t possible…

Yeah, I know that. I always got that. Took it for granted, I’d say, and you let me, same as you let me do anything else I wanted.

Back to middle B, trying to calm her. It wasn’t working, not this time. She was shaking.

And yeah, I knew you were just a baby, really. But that thing about being nineteen, that’s bollocks. Never saw you frightened of anything. And Louisa didn’t get the best of me, Janeybug. The music did, and the tequila. You got the rest of it. Couldn’t give more than I had, could I?

“Stop it, Richard. Please?”

She was in tears now; the questions had come too late, the answers could never do her any good now, or Richard either. Of their six years together, too much time had been spent in different places. Too many hours of her life had been spent in the kind of paralysis she’d never felt about anything else: what if I tell him it’s her or me, what if he chose her, he would choose her and then I’d die, I couldn’t stand it, what if what if what if.

He was right about that much, at least. She’d given him no reason to think she was afraid of anything. He couldn’t have known…

Don’t cry, baby, okay? A glissando, high up on the keys, trying to make her smile. Can’t take you crying.

“Okay.” Her eyes had adjusted to the dimness, ceased being dazzled by the shadow and the slow galliard of patterns from the mirror ball. She twitched the curtains open, one window after another; moonlight flooded the room, finding the tiny individual facets.

The ball, it seemed, had been starved for light. The galliard became a faster dance, as the ball picked up speed, revolving, moving, turning the hotel room into a theatre and the walls into a screen behind an invisible stage, powering out rainbows that ran like a river, ceiling to floor.

“You never loved me.” She heard herself ask it, heard the question, the one thing she’d never been able to want a genuine answer for. “Did you?”

The answer was there before he gave it, there in the quieting of the ball’s motion, there in the sudden whispers from inside the spinet, dead hands and a damaged heart bringing regret to life in a major key.

Actually, I did. What, you mean you seriously didn’t know?

“No. I didn’t.” The world was moving, not just the mirror ball. The impossible patterns against the walls were lovely things, full of warmth and sun and moon and heart, everything she’d wanted from him and had never had the courage to ask for. “And I’m not sure I believe it. If you loved me, why did you stay with Louisa?

”Because I’m a lazy sod, that’s why. Bloody hell, Janeybug, you knew that. Told me often enough, didn’t you?

She said nothing. Too little, too late—but she’d finally got the courage up to ask him, and he’d answered, and that was something.

Of course, it was entirely possible that she was clinically insane, schizoid, whatever they called it. It was possible that his voice was inside her head and nowhere else, that the mirror ball he’d loved was no more than that, a shiny sparkling symbol of her inability to let him go with none of the great questions answered. It was possible she’d lost her mind, gone insane with grief after he’d died in his bed, looking twenty years older than his actual age, down to a hundred pounds. It was possible that all the pianos—Baldwin spinet or Bechstein upright or Steinway baby grand—were silent. It was also possible, she thought, that none of that mattered.

What, now you’re thinking you’re off your nut?

The middle B, his favourite key in life, faded down the keyboard, a deeper note, discordant in F sharp. She wondered if she was actually hearing exasperation.

Janey, the only thing you were ever off your nut about was me. Must be why we can’t let go of each other, you know?

“I know.” It rose at the back of her throat, love she couldn’t relinquish, love she couldn’t trust, not then, not now. Tenderness, so much of it. Odd, she thought, that it had all flown one way, from her to him, when they had both been alive to measure it. Now, river and sea were merging, and the flow went both ways. “I have to sleep, Richard. I’m so tired. I need to sleep.”

Yeah, you do that. Get some kip. See you later.

She felt something brush her brow, light as a feather falling: a kiss from the air. There were tears in her eyes, but they would dry, as tears always seemed to do.

Love you. No need to ask.

A soft papery ghost of sound, and the piano was quiet. The mirror ball, motionless at the end of its line, darkened. Paris crept into the Royal Suite, city of light, the here and now, silence and the murmur of another language, another country, a year after death.

Tags: Deborah Grabien, Fiction Archive