the song was over.
The room gasped for breath.
Then Jean saw them again. A flash of black and red as the young woman fell exhausted into the man’s arms. Laughing, he held her there, rubbing the small of her back and, at the end, lifting her head so he could reach her lips.
Jean felt the beer toss out of her hand onto the front of her jeans. A welcome splash of cold.
“Are you okay?” Reuben was right there.
“No,” she said. “We must go.”
Six weeks ago. Jean forces herself to run the scene through yet again, a government agent studying the moment of connection, the passing of secret information.
First there is the thatch of black hair falling over the broad moon face, the collar open and loose, the arm reaching up to Colette’s neck, touching—no, caressing—her skin. The tenderest laugh imaginable.
Could she have been mistaken in the dim light, the murky air of a bar on a hot evening?
She’d know his profile anywhere, and Colette’s—two in the world she’d never mistake. The light stamped them into a grey cut-out on the wall.
It was a crazy ride, Colette. There’s still a breeze in the air; you can’t deny it.
He landed in our neighbourhood like a gymnast from an Elysian trapeze, carrying the smell of jasmine, green tea, and five years of our lives.
The windows were wide open. It was late October, and the streets were littered with fiery maple leaves and remnants of the Sunday paper. Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 suddenly crashed into our house—through the walls, into our living-room-vibrating our tender eardrums. It came from the grandest of pianos — Yoshi Takahashi’s. His tightly manicured fingers dashed over the keys, sinking, then springing with athletic bounce to the next chord. Our new neighbour. There were hints of his good looks—our mother’s smile and overheard conversations—and we even saw him once as he dashed the short distance from his black T-bird to the yellow door of his house, 115 Dundeen Square. Our neighbour! World famous, not quite thirty years old, and perhaps (dare we imagine?) lonely in a new city. Did he speak English? We asked around. Some. He spoke Music, the word that was still a mocha cream in our hearts, a bleeding centre of dissolving sensuality we were so eager to swallow.
One Sunday afternoon in the winter, when no one was home but us, we opened the living-room window wide so the air blasted a clear current from his house to ours, then cranked up the hi-fi so it filled the sub-zero wind with the latest Rolling Stones—and he knew we were hip. We were in this together, Colette, not a dime’s worth of separate thought between us as our eyes gleamed anticipation. We plotted to meet him.
“Let’s bake a cake!” I cried in a moment of inspiration.
“We can take it over as a welcoming gift.”
“What kind of cake?” Colette eyed the pantry shelf.
Gripped by a sudden, delicious image I scooped out two boxes of Betty Crocker mix and dropped them on the counter.
“A piano cake!”
It took hours mixing and baking, then cutting one layer of Devil’s Food cake into ladyfingers for the black keys. The other layer we shaped into the piano body - baby grand, aerial view. White cake became the white keys, and everything was glued and glazed with icing.
“It’s beautiful!” we sang, staring at our shiny sculptured feat, a Liberace-lush edible piano. Yet when it came time to wrap it in foil and hunt up an Eaton’s box the proper size, I was suddenly seized with terror. Who were we after all? Twelve and thirteen years old, ungainly adolescents with a pagan offering to our chosen god. Colette urged us on, seeing no obstruction to the unfolding drama. He’ll slam the door in our faces, I imagined. Or laugh. Or bow politely, then press the door shut in our faces. Oh, Colette. Oh, Jean. We hugged each other breathlessly before setting out to the cool cement walk.
He wasn’t home.
Funny, the car was there. Perhaps he was working. We didn’t quite know what to do, though I was vastly relieved. Colette wanted to take the box home and go back later, but no, I said, let’s just leave it on the doorstep with a note. Okay, what shall we write? I pulled out a piece of paper, flattened it against Colette’s back, and printed: “PLEASE EAT THE PIANO. Jean & Colette (your neighbours).”
Was that good enough? All right, Colette said, and we stuck it under the box and left it on the mat. Later in the afternoon we looked over and the box was gone.
“He’s taken it!”
“Maybe he’s eating it right now!”
The thought of him at that moment crunching down on our home-baked cake incited giggling, a fit that lasted on and off till bed-time. We knew we were stepping into the shallow water of a miracle.
Later, another evening, we had tickets to his concert with the symphony. Tickets that came from a benevolent relative, pleased to see our excitement for the “classics”. The music we half listened to; it was the spare shape of him there, balanced against the gleaming black Steinway with his dark eyes focused artfully inward that we clung to, our heads pressed against the brass rail of the second balcony. Each time he tossed his head or plunged his arms into the black-and-white nest of keyboard, Colette jiggled my elbow.
“Look at him!” we squealed, sometimes so noisily that our neighbours, serious music students following scores, scowled, even put their fingers against pinched lips. What did we care!
When it was over and he had bowed, accepting with gracious humility the shouted “Bravos” and accompanying ovation (in which we participated lustily and I felt hot tears, leakage from my inner self, brush down my face), we headed for the greenroom. We were determined to meet the Dream head on. In the corridor, our heads bobbed up and down in the sea of adults.
“I see him!”
“He’s coming out of the room!”
“His hair’s drenched in sweat!”
We watched as, one by one, he shook hands with friends, vague acquaintances, strangers. Up close his face was large, moonlike, and dark. We could see grey hammocks of fatigue slung under his eyes. It was our turn. With red, beaming faces we introduced outselves.
“We live across the street from you. Remember the box of cake . . . ?”
Then there was the explosion, and Colette and I were at the centre. His strained face broke into a delighted smile as he gathered us into his kimonoed arms.
“Ahhh. The piano cake girls.”
What a beginning! Our smiles stretched to breaking and rocketed off our faces into the world. He told us to stay back so he could drive us to the party at his house. Moments later we were there, dropped from the everyday blandness of our household into the exotic temple of his world, a house paved in white carpets, with huge pillows on the floor like beds, wine and cigarettes, the laughter of musicians, the heady smell of success-and us. We were whisked to the middle of it, as if he’d been waiting all along.
