She grabbed the bag and went into the bathroom. He heard something clunk into the tub.
“Hey,” he called. “I asked you something.”
She came out and stood in the bathroom doorway. “ ‘I asked you something’?” she said. “Who the fuck are you? I told him I’d get high with him if he wanted. Okay?”
“Are you insane?” he said. “What, you came on to him?”
“And now would you fucking get out of my sight? Out of my field of vision?”
When he took a step toward her, she drew back her hand to hit him.
“Okay, we need to get out of here,” he said.
As they drove past the office, he saw a lanky woman in a pink uniform standing on the steps, watching them go.
—
“Here, I’ll tell you a story,” she said as they passed the exit for Warrensburg. “Will that put you in a better mood?”
“I’m sure,” he said. They hadn’t spoken since she’d told him to drop her where she could get a bus and he’d said that seemed appropriate.
“You’re not very encouraging,” she said. She lit another cigarette. “Okay, when my father was in the hospital? He was in so much pain that he told my mother, if she didn’t bring him these pills he had? That he was going to get God to send her to hell. He was going to, like, intercede with God. So when he was actually, finally going out, after, you know, months of this, my mother and I were each holding one of his hands, and he was whimpering. As if he was, like, coming.”
“How long ago was this?” he said.
She shook her head. “And I had this thing where I couldn’t stop giggling. And my mother slapped me. And right then, like that second, he went Haa and you could feel it in the room—everything, I don’t know, shimmered, and you could just feel it go.”
“How old were you?” he said.
Shook her head again. “This is my story.” She took a drag of cigarette. “I don’t need your editorial guidance.”
—
He walked from Hertz up to Ninety-Sixth and Broadway; it seemed important that he get across Ninety-Sixth before taking out his cell. “Listen, I’m around the corner,” he said. “I got Miltoned out. You want me to pick anything up?”
“Oh, good,” Fran said. “Good good good. I mean, not good that you’re Miltoned out, but you know, good that you’re back. I was just in the middle of playing the piano and we were just about to call Flor de Mayo. This is amazing, you couldn’t possibly have timed this better.”
Cammy’s voice: “Is that Daddy?”
“I see,” he said. “Well. Good.”
“Yes, it’s Daddy. She’s pumping her fist. She’s not really, but that’s the mood, or I guess that’s the vibe. I can’t quite put my finger on what the mood is.”
He took the elevator up and stood for a moment at the door, hearing the piano inside. It was that Schubert Impromptu—she’d never been able to get that Nude Descending a Staircase cascade of notes quite clean. One time he’d caught her listening to the Mitsuko Uchida recording, weeping. “Well,” he’d said, “you’re a lot better looking.” She’d said, “Fuck you, too.” When his key touched the lock he saw a pinprick of spark, betraying the hot energy bound in all things.
In the living room, Fran sat at the piano, backlit by sunset. Her calves below the piano bench, right leg forward left leg back, butt spread fetchingly, her chin up like an inspired Lisztian virtuoso’s, her hair hanging straight down and shimmying like a hula skirt. He sneaked the door shut, stood listening, then eased down to sit, knees up, against the wall in the foyer.
When she finished, he began to clap.
She turned around: “Oh, come come come. None of that. You’ll turn a girl’s head.”
“So where’s the Caminator?” he said.
She pointed with a thumb down the hall. “Denned up. Like a wolf cub. Like a flower, like a fire, like a fresh footfall in a long-forgotten snow.”
He rapped a knuckle on Cammy’s door.
“Daddy,” she said. She looked toward the living room. “I’ve been counting. That was the seventeenth time.”
“For what?”
“That she’s played that.”
“Babe, why didn’t you call me? Has there been, you know, behavior?”
“Not really. Just a lot of the piano.”
“Did she get any sleep?”
“It’s okay,” Cammy said. “It wasn’t all that bad.”
“Well. I’m back now. I wish you’d called me.”
“So Daddy?” she said. “Can you help me with geometry?”
He sat at Cammy’s computer; she knelt, a hand on his knee. If two sides and the included angle of one triangle are congruent to two sides and the included angle of a second triangle, the two triangles are congruent. “I don’t get why they even need to have this,” she said. “I mean, Duh-uh. All you have missing is the last side. Figure it out.”
“Right, I see what you mean,” he said. “Listen, let me go get a feel for things, and then I’ll come back and we’ll swarm all over this puppy.”
He went to the kitchen and opened a beer.
“So,” Fran called. “Did you have your father-daughter moment?” He came into the living room; she was still sitting at the piano. “I am fine, by the way, thank you very much for asking. Oh God, I sound so critical. What can I play for you? I’ve been on a total run with Schubert. As I imagine you’ve been told. Now what would you most like?” He’d had this said to him last night in a different context. “It doesn’t have to be Schubert. Tell you the truth, I think I’m done with Schubert.”
“Anything,” he said. “Maybe something on the austere side. Not a heartbreaker.”
“Oh, that is you,” she said. “Well. You in one mode. God, I hope I don’t sound as critical as I sound. Well. Austere. Yes. We have just the thing. Almost just the thing.”
She began to play, from memory, the first of the Two-Part Inventions. He listened to the two lines of notes snaking around each other. Amazing, still, in the general what-a-piece-of-work-is-man sort of way, even if no longer something to love a person for.
—
Margaret kicked in her Bottom Feeder piece on Tuesday, attached to an email saying it was her last, and to send whatever checks she had coming care of Sylvia Moss—was that the mother?—at an address in Jupiter, Florida. It was unpublishable and unfixable. It started out with her on the bus from Albany and a TV up front blaring game shows and then to how the planet was done for—okay, no argument there—and human life was a virus. (Wasn’t that in Naked Lunch?) She said it would be better to get shot trying to kill the president than to die “the slow death of consent”—an arresting phrase, but what did it mean, exactly? She said the whole ride long she pictured New York nuked before she could get there, then how sorry she was to see that it wasn’t. Then she had stuff in there about cancer—how did that connect to anything? Where would you even begin?
George Lassos Moon
Aunt Lissa’s saying something very serious, and bad Carl’s playing with the metal creamer thing. He thumbs the lid up, lets it drop. Tiny clank. Aunt Lissa says, “Are you following?”
“Absolutely.”