Her mother. I realize I'm wincing. It's the one thing I could hold against him and he knows it. All those years he stayed in touch with my ex-wife — the witch — after she kidnapped Elise, exiled her to Russia — all that time I was cut off from my own daughter until it was too late, then much too late. The poisoning complete. He didn't deny it. He'd as much as admitted that my letters wouldn't get through. Nothing in, nothing out. In seventeen years I'd heard from them precisely three times. The first time, four years in, when her mother hit me up for $520,000.
"It's a Guadagnini," Apelman had explained. "Made in 1752, by an Italian master."
"Half a million bucks? For a cello?"
"Nothing like this has come on the market for years. Helen's right. It's a good deal."
"She's five years old, for God's sake!"
"And already accepted, personally, by Elena Dernova — "
No one even told me," I broke in, "that she was learning the cello."
Apelman waited for me to calm down. Then he told me I was right: she was too young yet, her body too small. But I could afford it, he said. He kept his tone careful, urgent. It was in my hands, he said, to have it ready for her — for when she was ready. He'd given me the same look then as he's giving me now. Almost under his breath, he added, "You should hear her play."
So it came to pass that Apelman, consummate networker, faithful go-betweener, brokered the international deal to buy my little girl a cello half again as tall as her and fifty times as old. Nine years of nothing later, I received a handwritten invitation to attend her debut in Russia. She was playing the Rococo Variations with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic. A big deal (only fourteen years old!). The invitation came in the post-not through Apelman. No return address. At the top of the page, in her neat teenage cursive, she'd written "Father." Both Apelman and Olivia urged me to go — I booked my tickets — then at the last minute Apelman, gray-faced, handed me another letter. From the witch: "Under no circumstances…" etc., etc. She would cancel the concert if it came to it. She'd somehow spooked out the whole scheme. I canceled my tickets.
"That means laying off the Leech," Apelman says, permitting himself a smile. He leans forward and punches me on the shoulder. It's like I'm one of those enormous bell carillons and the single clapper of his fist sets off a whole chorus of emotional peals and chimes within me. He might be everyone's friend, Apelman, but he's my only friend. He looks me in the eye. Then he says what I've been thinking ever since I picked up the phone and heard her voice a week ago — no — honestly — ever since I saw her last, blanket-wrapped and pillow-sized and hot with fever on my apartment stoop — "Family is family. You might only have one shot at it."
***
A MESS. I'M A MESS. Things are a little off upstairs, I know that. That was always a lark to Olivia-now she is the lark. Banging around in my belfry. My ass is back to its old pyrotechnic tricks. On top of that, I'm sore all over. It's all the reflection. Seeing Apelman hasn't helped. The past's a cold body of water for me and nowadays my bones ache after even a quick dip.
He's right, though. I'm sitting in the private wine room at Picholine trying to pull myself together. My daughter hasn't arrived. Our table's the only one there — I called in a favor. The sound of the restaurant wafts through the hallway — low voices, laughs, the tinkling of glasses — the place, recently renovated, seems a lot cheerier than I remember. An odious young man is attending me. He's got so much gel in his slicked hair it pulls his face back tight. Traversing the harried catwalk of the front room I noticed him eyeballing my outfit; I'm at one of the most overpriced joints in town and still this kid-waiter makes me feel overdressed.
For starters, I order the crab salad with the grapefruit gelée, the spiced squab pastrami and the sea-urchin panna cotta. Then I remember Apelman's advice. The Leech might take offense if I don't wait — Brits being sensitive about things like that. How sensitive are they, though, to punctuality? I bark at the waiter and cancel the order. He smiles as though I've just made his day. For a second I'm worried his face might crack.
Half an hour later, I tell him to check the restaurant, both rooms.
"Under what name?"
"Kozlov," I tell him. Her mother's maiden name. When he comes back I tell him, "Or Sharps. Jason Sharps."
I hear a rowdy burst of laughter from the main room. When Gel-head trots in again, I tell him I've changed my mind. I'll order a bottle of red wine. I'm in a wine room, for God's sake! As I drink the room shrinks around me. It feels damp now, and smells — it smells like the inside of a janitor's closet. It smells of sickness, of dripping fluids, of saturated tissues. Forty minutes late. Fifty.
My body feels alien to me. I don't know it at all, I want nothing to do with it, I disown it. There's something inside me and it's dying — not me. So this is how it feels. Betrayed by your own body. I'd thought she lived most of her life on the surface of her skin but she'd found a way to get beneath, my Olivia. She'd discovered the flesh was hollow. I flew into a jealous rage. She left me. I begged her to come back. Who picks up a smack habit in their thirties? I thought. After fifteen, sixteen years together- wanting for nothing. Well, wanting for something, obviously. She blamed her body and so did I. She quit time and time again and then, at last, the time came when she didn't need to quit anymore.
More than an hour late. I signal for a second bottle. I know Gel-head's smirking behind his mask. I want to smash it in. I've been getting like this lately: irate at people I don't know.
"Would you like to reorder any appetizers, sir?"
No, he's a good kid. Just doing his job. I shake my head, lean over to squeeze his arm — give him some man-to-man contact — but he skips back, bumping against the wire mesh screen of a bookcase-like cabinet. The dust-rimmed clinking of a hundred bottles fills the room. He freezes, gapes at me — untrained to deal with the moment — then scuttles out.
Don't get me wrong, I like kids — Olivia was thirty years younger than me. I even wanted to have some with her. The problem is there are just too many of them. You can't throw a brick on this island without concussing one. I wish I had more restraint. But I can't help but hate how they look at me, how they don't look at me, I hate their interchangeable bodies, their mass-rehearsed attitudes, their cars that look like boxes, like baseball caps, like artificial enlargements, their loud advertising, their beeps and clicks and trings, I hate how they speak words as though they're chewing them, how they assume the business of the world revolves around them — how they're right-and how everywhere this cult of youth, this pedamorphic dumbing-down, has whored beauty-duped, drugged, damaged, pixelated it and everywhere turned it to plastic.
I'm almost done with my second bottle. All this alcohol will do wonders for my piles. Ninety minutes. Gel-head comes back in and delightedly hands me a cordless phone.
"Henry?"
As with her call last week, I feel as though I've stumbled upon the middle of something. Her voice is slow, sleepy, warm with music. Nothing like her mother's. I'm surprised, anew, by its power over me.
"We're really sorry. We've been trying you at home all afternoon." I'm untrained to deal with this; I say nothing. After a long pause she says:
"We're sorry. We can't make it to lunch. We hope you haven't been waiting." "I've been waiting ninety minutes."
The line goes muffled and the sotto voce whispering starts. In the background I can hear the vague strains of a string instrument warming up.