They were still talking politics at the other end of the table. Lucy heard Alida say, “This like scenario…” Scenario?
“That totally makes sense to me,” Lucy said. “You’re a gourmet cook because your mom cooked out of cans. I’m a lousy cook because my mom was so into haute cuisine — she had whole shelves of French cookbooks — but never had the time to do anything properly. She’d come in with this casserole and say in her two-packs-a-day-of-Tareytons contralto, ‘It’s just a simple daube de boeuf provençale—and it was horrible, like chunks of saddle leather floating in a lake of grease and vegetables. But it was from France, not Montana, so we had to sit down and say how brilliant she was to have found the recipe. God, we had so much cassoulet, and carbonnade, and noisettes of this and noisettes of that, that I’d’ve died for one of your frozen turkey TV dinners.”
It was fun to make Minna smile. Her face lost its usual mistiness and came into sudden focus, again putting Lucy in mind of Marilyn Monroe. In her teens, she must’ve been like flypaper to the boys, and even now it was hard to credit that she must be only a couple of years younger than Lucy’s mother. Thinking of her mom, turtle-faced, peering short-sightedly from behind the chained door of the Coral Gables condo, Lucy said, “I only have to get near the stove to start feeling I’ll mutate into her and produce something utterly inedible with a fancy French name.”
Augie was saying, “That’s just not a biggie for me. The way I see it, the gut issue—”
“Politics!” Minna said. “You know we lived once in Washington, D.C.? Augie loved it, of course, but I just couldn’t wait to get back to the Pacific Northwest. That awful climate. Summer in D.C. — it’s like a sauna! And the people there, they’re so different from Seattle people, they didn’t hardly seem real to me.”
Lucy tried to imagine Minna hanging out with National Security Council types and their wives in the age of Nixon and Kissinger.
“Martians!” Minna said with a conspiratorial giggle.
She’d’ve been — what, in her early thirties? — in those chauvinist days, and a prime piece of cocktail-party prey. “You had to fight them off — the men, I mean?”
“Oh, yeah, I got to be a champion wrestler in D.C. And in Seattle, too, back then. You know how it is. I bet you’ve slapped a few faces in your time.”
Lucy heard Alida say, “Like when I was at preschool, I used to think Hitler lived on Bainbridge Island….” What was this about?
Minna leaned toward Lucy. “Had to slap Augie’s once. Right around the back of the bank. He was getting fresh before we even got inside the car.”
Augie was saying, “Nah, that dog won’t hunt, Alida.”
Minna said, “That old Ford of his, it was a wreck. His students used to laugh at him for driving it. But he had such a way with words.”
“Hey, what are you two yakking about down there?”
“Mind your own beeswax,” Minna said; then she and Lucy cleared the plates from the table.
There was blackberry cobbler for dessert, wolfed down by Alida. “Yummy!” she said to Minna, suddenly a child again.
“At CollierParnell,” Lucy said, “did you work closely with an editor?”
“Oh, yeah — Charlie Shaw. Good man. He made me empty my box of commas. Come to think of it, he just about eviscerated my entire system of punctuation. He was big on what he called ‘sentence speed,’ and thought my grammar was too fussy and academic.”
“But the text itself? Did he ask for revisions or like suggest incidents that were needed here and there?”
“No, he hardly changed a word. He just pulled out all the punctuation.”
At least the issue had been broached, and Augie seemed to take it in stride. When Alida left the table to go to the bathroom, Augie looked at Lucy and shook his head from side to side. “She’s a delight.”
WAKING EARLY Saturday morning to the first slivers of gray light between the blinds, Lucy heard the irregular chatter of typewriter keys coming from Jefferson’s library across the hall. What was he writing now? A sequel to his blockbuster, a Horatio Alger story of a poor European boy making good in rich and generous America, or one of his dry-as-dust polemics for Foreign Policy magazine? Whatever…Listening to the pleasant, distant clackety-clack-clack of Augie at work in the gloaming, she fell asleep again, only to wake up, almost immediately it seemed, but actually two hours later, to the sound of a piano down below: over and over again, the same sequence of notes, though never twice in exactly the same rhythm. Then came a deep, resonant chord struck first hesitantly, experimentally, then again with confident force.
She took a shower, giving a wide berth to the hostile scale on the bathroom floor. Her weight had begun to frighten her lately, a problem she dealt with by hiding it under muumuus and shunning those escalating red digital numbers. She dressed to the accompaniment of Augie exercising his democratic freedoms at his Steinway grand, then poked her head into Alida’s room next door. The bed was empty, and it looked as if she’d upended her bag and shaken out every piece of clothing in a tumbled heap.
Downstairs, Augie was alone, sitting at the piano.
“Poor old Schubert. What did he ever do to deserve the way I murder him? Alida went off to the beach, Minna likes to sleep in on weekends, there’s coffee over there.”
From the squared-off kitchen area, Lucy called, “Do you want some?”
“No, I’ve been tanking up on caffeine since five-thirty.”
“Do go on playing. I like it — even if the piano’s better than the pianist. How long have you been learning?”
“Three months. From scratch. I couldn’t read a note of music when I started.” He tinkled out a few bars.
“Sounds like you’re doing great.”
“If I could learn to play just this one sonata semi-fluently before I die…” He went back to practicing a wobbly arpeggio, not at all embarrassed by Lucy’s presence.
She found it pleasant to sit on their cruddy old sofa, sipping at her coffee and listening to Augie hacking away, banana-fingered, at the keys. During a pause, she said, “Is that in A major?”
“B flat. Number Twenty-one. His last.”
Behind Augie’s halting notes, she was beginning to hear the ghost of a performance on disk that she was sure she had at home. There was something more than mildly megalomaniacal, she thought, about an absolute beginner tackling a work so obviously difficult and emotionally lavish. But that was Augie, and being Augie he’d most likely crack the sonata before his deadline. Still, it was strange that a man so ambitious and doggedly competent should have failed to make full professor at UW — or was it that only in retirement, in his new life on Whidbey, that he’d uncovered in himself this ferocious willingness to beat the odds?
His practice was interrupted by a string of thin electronic beeps. Augie shut off the alarm on his watch and closed the piano lid. “Two hours,” he said. “My daily stint.”
“You’ve read The Pianist?” Lucy said offhandedly, looking at the piano rather than at him.
“Oh, didn’t they turn that into a movie? No, I haven’t read it. Ironically, as a historian I’m not that big a fan of memoirs. Of course they have their uses, but their narrators are chronically unreliable.”
“You might like this one, just for the bits about music.”
“I’ll have to check it out,” Augie said, his tone of voice suggesting that this wouldn’t happen anytime soon.
“The odd thing is that Sp — Spuzz — Szpilman saw almost the exact same thing as you did. Like when you were in Lodz…is that how you say it?”