Me for You Page 9

  “I know, I know, I know,” Sasha began.

  Rudy turned to her.

  “I know you play the piano all the time at work. But I’d so love it if you’d play something for me now. Something maybe you don’t play at the store.”

  It was as though she’d read his mind. Music that would just be for them.

  And so, instead of putting on the record, Rudy rook a seat at the piano bench, relieved not to be in that dang tuxedo, but rather in khakis, a dress shirt, and V-neck cornflower-blue sweater that Bee had always said made him look handsome. He began to play Erroll Garner.

  He turned to look at Sasha. She smiled, sighed, and closed her eyes.

  But as Rudy hit a high key on the piano, a twangy, dry thump came from under the baby grand’s open cover.

  “Must be a bit of dust,” Rudy said, as he stood and bent over to stick his head under the great lid of the piano. He lifted the damper of the key that had gone awry, and was trying to gently pluck away a bit of dust that had indeed adhered itself to the felt. The next thing he knew, his shirtsleeve was caught in the piano’s strings. His shirt was slightly too large, given that he’d lost weight in the past month. He’d gone from emotional overeating to undereating—quick slices of toast over the kitchen sink for supper. His sleeves loose and dangly. And now he was trapped, with one arm tangled in the wires. Somehow his cuff button was part of the mess. It was impossible to move his arm and see the snarl, without potentially damaging the string or damper. He didn’t care about his dang cuff.

  Sasha was now sitting up, her hands covering her mouth, laughing.

  “I know I shouldn’t,” she said.

  Rudy announced, cheerfully. “My arm has just been eaten by this piano. I cannot seem to untangle my shirtsleeve and I do not want to force it, in case it breaks the piano string.”

  Sasha shook her head vigorously, laughing, her blond hair falling across her eyes in the most endearing way. She got up, crossed the room to Rudy, and gave him a sip of wine from his glass.

  “Oh, how can I help you out of there?” she asked, her hand on her hip, the picture of beauty and competence.

  “My cell phone. Maybe I can call the piano tuner and ask him to come and get me out of this fix.”

  “What? Is the piano tuner like a doctor-on-call? He will just come over on a Saturday and remove you from your own piano? Rudy, Rudy, Rudy. We will cut you free and any damage to your shirt I can mend for you.”

  “Well, he’s been with me a long time.” Rudy felt ridiculous, but the kick Sasha was getting out of the situation made him feel more like Charlie Chaplin than an idiot. They’d tell this story at their wedding. Right?

  “Rudy.” Sasha was still trying not to laugh. “Listen to me—”

  At that moment the smoke detector went off, and they both leapt, the piercing shriek of the thing taking any rom-com mood out of the situation.

  Rudy instinctively moved to turn the smoke detector off, but his arm tugged at the precarious innards of the piano. He told Sasha where the step stool was, tucked beside the refrigerator.

  She grabbed and unfolded it, quickly scurrying up the steps, to silence the smoke detector. “There,” she said, climbing back down. “Now.” She blew a bright stray wisp of hair away from her eyes and raised a finger in the air. “The dinner.”

  The next thing for her to rescue. Rudy should start a list of all the things she’d rescued him from since he met her. She’d saved him at the store one day from a drunk who wanted to sing with him at the piano. Where had the security guards been? The next thing he had known Sasha was there, taking him by the arm and insisting he was needed in Cosmetics, where they looped through the labyrinth of makeup ladies to hide beside the MAC counter.

  “Don’t worry,” she called out now from the kitchen. “A little juice just bubbled over onto the bottom of the oven. Found the pot holders!”

  She returned to the living room just as Rudy’s back was beginning to ache from bending over with his upper half in the piano. He held the lid open with one hand, not wanting to end up even more compromised by a guillotine situation, in which case the paramedics might have to be called!

  “Now, silly, sweet man,” she said, “you do not need to spend the night with your head in the piano.”

  “I know, I know,” Rudy agreed. “What is wrong with my brain!” You’re in love, the wine told him. While this epiphany might be real and true, Rudy also knew that since his wife had died suddenly, and since he’d learned that she’d potentially been murdered, his brain raced anxiously from both hopeful conclusions to worst-case scenarios. Sasha was two minutes late for work? She’d been in an auto accident. CeCe’s husband Spencer seemed aloof? He was likely involved in some sort of malpractice ring. His dangling shirtsleeve got caught in the piano string? He’d spend the night curled inside the baby grand while the dinner burned down the house.

  Rudy breathed in through his nose to calm himself, counting to four for each breath. Sasha was in her stocking feet now, with an apron tied around her waist, her beautiful hair pinned up in a clip. Rudy loved how at home she looked in the house.

  “We can leave a message for the piano tuner to come Monday and check the strings,” she told him. “In the meantime, why don’t you take off your shirt and leave it in the piano?”

  Of course. Rudy could make a perfect mango soufflé, which was what they’d have for dessert. He could sight read, stuff a pork chop, change the oil in his own car, and frame a picture in a pinch. But this obvious solution had not occurred to him. It was the cataclysmic thinking, but the truth was, Sasha’s proximity had the capacity to lower his IQ at times. This didn’t seem like a good phenomenon when you wanted to impress a new love interest.

  “I’ll have to change my shirt!” he yelped, wishing this hadn’t come out with such alarm. None of his fantasies of serving Sasha dinner included this scenario.

  “I assume you own more than one shirt?”

  Rudy felt his breathing and pulse slow. Sasha’s humor defused his silly expectation of the evening going off like a Harvey’s Brisol Cream commercial.

  “Yesssssss,” he answered. “Many in my closet upstairs. You can’t miss them.”

  Sasha returned shortly with a fresh Oxford shirt.

  Rudy took it from her and began snaking his arm out of his sweater. He was nearly there, about to twist around and pull his head through his sweater and shirt, which he’d unbuttoned from under the sweater, when he was overcome with embarrassment.

  “Turn around,” he implored Sasha.

  She giggled. “Okay.”

  “I’ll go into the bathroom,” Rudy told her, stepping toward the small bath in the front hall.

  Sasha called after him: “You know, Mr. Rudy, I have seen it all at the gymnasium locker room. Granted, ladies. But I have seen women blow-dry the underneath of their breasts as they rush to get dressed. Imagine!”

  Women blow-drying their privates did not make Rudy feel better about this date that had gone off the rails . . . or off the strings, ha ha. He mustered a laugh.

  Finally, as they ate, they listened to the Erroll Garner record—a pianist new to Sasha—whom she said was becoming a favorite. The beef bourguignon and salad and bread were all delicious, she declared. She even had enough room for the mango soufflé, which Rudy put in the oven just as they were finishing their meal.

  Rudy wanted to leave the dishes for later, but Sasha insisted they clean up together, to get the mess out of the way for morning.

  “You never sit down for long, do you?” he asked her, as she rinsed the plates and he loaded them into the dishwasher.

  She stopped, wiped her hands on a dish towel. “I find it hard to. It makes me anxious. I feel like if I stop moving something bad might happen.”

  “Like getting caught inside a piano?”

  Sasha laughed.

  Rudy added, “Maybe that’s why you are so thin! Slim, I mean.” Thin didn’t sound very complimentary, he decided. “I think that’s why I wanted to coo
k for you. This gal, she needs some calories! Some meat on her bones!” He felt silly as he clamored to compliment her, to wear this new identity with class—a widower dating a new woman for the first time in decades.

  As Sasha dried the salad bowl, she suddenly slowed her pace, pensive all of a sudden. She set the wooden bowl on the counter next to the drainer. She turned to Rudy, wincing a little, as though trying to choose her words carefully.

  “You know, I’m not an animal at the pound who needs rescuing.” Her typical light tone had lapsed into seriousness. “Not a project for anyone.”

  “Of course!” Rudy said. “You are brighter and more capable than just about anyone I know, for starters.” He was talking too fast, hating himself for making such a cliché comment about fattening someone up. He meant what he’d said about Sasha being so sharp and funny. But the truth was, Rudy did want to rescue her. Not in a naive, damsel-in-distress fairy-tale way, but in reality. He wanted to help her because he had feelings for her, and because—as a financially established citizen who’d lived here all his life—he was at an advantage to do so. And life simply was easier with two people. To wit: Rudy was being rescued in little ways by Sasha all the time. She had rescued the dinner out of the oven, retrieved fresh clothes for him, and now the kitchen was nearly spotless. Maybe Sasha needed someone to take care of, too. He knew Sasha had had a daughter. He didn’t want to pry, but maybe Sasha missed taking care of her.

  The truth was that cooking for Sasha, chatting over the meal with wine, listening to records, learning more about Hungary and her youth there, finding out more about her daughter if an appropriate moment allowed for the question—having Sasha’s company—was about the most romantic thing Rudy could think of. It wasn’t that he was a prude. He’d just been married so many years that he wanted meaningful companionship for a night, more than sex. No ripping off each other’s clothing and swinging from chandeliers.

  “Don’t worry.” Sasha kneeled before Rudy, who sat in a kitchen chair now, kneading his hands, looking down, ashamed by his inarticulateness. “I know you didn’t mean it that way.” She squeezed each of Rudy’s shoulders, her hands warm from the dishes through the fabric of his shirt. “I am sensitive.”

  She leaned forward as she balanced on her haunches before Rudy and kissed each of his cheeks, then his mouth. Her lips were soft and just a little damp and sticky from the wine and then they were gone. Rudy stopped trying to explain his feelings, trying to explain anything. He just watched her eyes. He couldn’t remember ever knowing anyone with gray eyes before. They rescued him. Whisked him away from everything that hurt.

  Sasha furrowed her brow, perhaps taking Rudy’s silence as hurt feelings instead of tongue-tied self-reproach.

  He took her hand and led her to the piano. Then he patted the bench. “Madam.” Sasha sat.

  “How about . . . instead of Chopin, a corny show tune, an octave lower to avoid my poor shirt sleeve in the strings?”

  “It would be a cutting-edge jazz performance piece to play with a shirt sleeve in piano strings, no?” Sasha poked Rudy in the ribs, bumped his shoulder with hers.

  Rudy began playing, a store staple he hadn’t resorted to in a while. It was a song he sang to CeCe when she was a baby. He sang it all the way up until her twelfth birthday. Their before-bed ritual had been Rudy reading two stories and singing one song. This had always been her number one request. Even long after his daughter had outgrown this ritual, Rudy still sang the song to her, amazed by the fact that it always made her buttoned-up face break into a smile. After-dinner bourbon gave him the courage to croon it for Sasha now.

  Rudy rolled out the first notes on the piano with a dramatic flourish—“Tea for Two” from the musical No, No, Nanette.

  He wiggled his eyebrows with silliness as he reached the chorus, then sped up the melody, “. . . Just me for you, And you for me alone!”

  Sasha laughed and sang along, pretending to sip tea from a cup.

  “Lyrics by Irving Caesar and music by Vincent Youmans,” Rudy told her as she continued.

  “I know this show tune,” Sasha said, tickling him below the ribs. “This couple, they want to live in nice place, afford rent. Play this for me next time at the store, would you?”

  Rudy gave a final lounge player roll of the keys all the way up to the dry-sounding plunk of the shirt-tangled string, made a little stage bow over the keyboard, and closed its cover. “But of course, madam. It will always be my pleasure!”

  “You, my friend,” Sasha proclaimed, “are a good man.”

  11

  Rudolph Knowles, Rudolph Knowles. As the department store whirled and chimed around him, Rudy was lost in playing a jazz piece from his favorite Charlie Haden album. He alternated between feelings of euphoria recalling his evening with Sasha, and exhaustion and worry, from a restless night’s sleep, dreaming of Bee and the murder investigation. He dreamed that Bee was in their driveway the morning the ambulance took her away, only she wasn’t in the ambulance, she was standing in her bathrobe, asking what had happened to her. And where had Rudy been, she wanted to know. Had they been in an accident? He was telling her he didn’t know yet when he awoke, drenched in sweat, freezing and sticky at the same time.

  Rudolph Knowl— Rudy realized that the department store PA lady was paging him. He continued to hit the keys, but more quietly now. Maybe he was imagining this—Rudolph Knowles, Rudolph Knowles. But there it was again—the voice as smooth as butterscotch pudding. What to do? Where to go? There were probably instructions in that thick human resources packet Rudy had never cracked. He never considered himself a true department store employee. He was a musician. A father, a downsized husband.

  How to make this sexy automaton stop? Everyone in the store went about his or her business. Sasha wasn’t working that day, so he couldn’t ask her. He looked across the tables of gloves and past the Coach pocketbooks for a familiar face in Cosmetics, but didn’t recognize anyone. He could go up to that office by the gift wrap and customer service window and inquire. But first he’d finish this song. Three more bars of “Send in the Clowns” and he’d be on the escalator.

  Bethany’s Shoe. Bethany’s Shoe. At his wife’s name, Rudy pounded the keys, and stopped playing abruptly. The PA woman spoke these two words with the same even tone. It sounded as though she were paging a woman: Bethany Shew. Or maybe there was a Bethany Shew who needed to report to men’s sleepwear or some such.

  Rudolph Knowles, Rudolph Knowles. Bethany’s Shoe, Bethany’s Shoe.

  For crying out loud! This was not the midlife crisis Rudy had envisioned. He hadn’t envisioned any midlife crisis, frankly, but certainly this must be something akin to that, or perhaps a stroke. Bethany would have known what to do. In a situation such as this he would turn directly to her. Call and describe his symptoms. Having a pharmacist wife, he found that he rarely had to go to the doctor except for his annual checkup. Perhaps the PA voice calling his name was a hysterical reaction to the fact his wife had been murdered, he thought, with an odd sense of calm. It was as though he were outside his body looking down upon himself. Bethany’s Shoe! Bethany’s Shoe! A pain shot through his temple. Murdered! Plus, there was the not-so-brilliant epiphany in the shower this morning that he’d wasted a chunk of his life in the “temporary” trade of playing show tunes while gazing mindlessly across a sea of Manolo Blahniks and Cole Haans five days a week. Maybe he’d been breathing the crisp, expensive smell of new leather for so long that footwear had invaded his consciousness. He tried hitting the song’s final high C with a flourish, but it looked more like a spasm.

  Rudolph Knowles, Bethany’s Shoe. As he closed the lid over the piano keys, his hands trembled visibly. Perspiration drizzled down his back. His skin felt slick, trapped inside the tuxedo. He arose, dizzy, clasped and unclasped his fluttering fingers then grabbed his satchel of sheet music from inside the piano bench. As he fled the store, he tried not to appear to be running.

  Was this a clue? He was going to return the det
ective’s phone calls again that afternoon. Jensen hadn’t been in that morning. By the time Rudy had gotten a call back, he was on his way to work. And then he’d gotten distracted by music, his lifelong first aid, and the slightly hung-over fuzzy-headed warmth of post-date memories. After Rudy had gone back to sleep the night before, he’d succumbed to a recurring dream—of Bee on her back in her white nightgown as she had been that last morning—and it had taken a nightmarish turn, with the blare of a phone ringing that he could not find in their room until he realized she was gone. He could not get back to sleep afterward, despite warm milk and Count Vronsky.

  Leaving the store, Rudy jogged through the mall’s corridors, past the too-sweet smell of the soft pretzel shop. Words continued to ring in his ears, two at a time, in the precise tone of the PA woman’s omniscient buttery voice. Get out. Go home. Help Bethany. Help her? How? You could not help a dead person. There were many other things you could do for them. Mourn them, miss them, curse them for dying, toss their ashes into the sea, light yahrzeit candles on anniversaries, somehow summon the strength to look through photo albums. Press articles of their last-worn clothing to your face and breathe, your brain groping for their scent, your heart resenting the fact that the cotton of the white eyelet nightgown was beginning to smell almost generic now, just another fusty piece of laundry. If anything, the dead should help us! The living were the ones who needed help. Why couldn’t the PA lady—with her ungodly amount of self-confidence—page Bethany to come down the escalator from Housewares and sit beside Rudy to turn the pages of his sheet music and console and catch up with him?

  Rudy crashed through the double glass doors and out of the mall. The bright sun seared his eyes. He grabbed the warm, smooth railing of a pedestrian overpass to the garage and panted, catching his breath. His head dropped to his chest. He needed to collect himself. Separate reality from hallucination. The PA—real or recorded—had paged him at the store. But they had not paged his dead wife. He was just woozy. People’s names were repeated through the ceiling’s speakers all day, every day. With great relief, Rudy now heard these statements in Bethany’s common-sense voice, rather than the bossy coo of the PA woman. Bethany always made him feel better about unsettling events, shooing away his worries with a simple explanation, warm squeeze of her hand, an understanding smile.