“Fine, go ahead,” Mitch said, because there was no stopping him. Teddy’s need to play was too urgent.
He and Les headed into the kitchen, where Les sat at the big trestle table with his shoulders slumped, staring at nothing. Mitch wiped the cold grease out of the bacon skillet with a paper towel, added butter and a little milk to the egg pan. Then he fired up the two burners under them with a kitchen match. While he waited for the pans to heat back up, he chomped on some of the French bread, which was rapidly taking on the character of biscotti.
In the Sunset Lounge, Teddy launched into a slow, heartfelt rendition of “More than You Know,” the same song he’d been playing earlier that morning. Mitch felt quite certain that he would never, ever hear that song again without thinking of being stranded up here at Astrid’s Castle in the middle of this ice storm with those two dead women.
“That was their song,” Les mentioned to him quietly.
“Whose?” asked Mitch, gazing out the kitchen windows at the snow. It was coming down so hard he could barely see across the courtyard.
“Teddy and Norma. They loved each other for years and years. They thought I didn’t know. But you always know, Mitch. Love can’t hide.”
The pans were getting good and hot now. Mitch laid the cold cooked bacon strips back in, then went to work on the eggs, stirring them into the sizzling butter and milk. “Yet she married you, Les,” he pointed out.
“That’s right, she did. And we were happy together. Or as happy as any married couple can ever really be, which is not very.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because the love goes away, that’s why. If you’re lucky, you can maintain a degree of affection. Not wake up every morning hating each other’s guts. But the love can’t last. Never has, never will. That’s a myth.”
“I don’t know that I agree, Les. It doesn’t stay the same, I’ll grant you that. But it can grow.” Not that Mitch had ever put this theory to the test. Maisie had died on him before their second anniversary. Maybe her endearing little eccentricities and foibles would have grown to annoy him. Maybe his endless hours in a screening room would have driven her into the arms of some alpha go-getter with wavy blond hair and a functioning set of social skills. Maybe Les was right, and they would have ended up hating each other.
But Mitch refused to believe this.
The bacon was sizzling and the eggs were hot again. Mitch found plates and forks and served them heaping portions. They dived in like starved field hands. It all tasted remarkably like school cafeteria chow, but Mitch was in no mood to be fussy. “If two people end up unhappy,” he said, munching, “it simply means they didn’t belong with each other in the first place.”
“You’re still a young man, Mitch,” Les responded as he ate. “Listen to someone who has a few years on you: The longer any couple stays together, the worse it gets. You let each other down too many times, shatter each other’s dreams. Believe me, I’ve seen it happen. My first wife, Hildy, dumped me less than three years after we got out of college. That’s how long it took her to realize I wasn’t going to become the next Stephen Sondheim, just the next Lester Josephson. As for my second wife, Janice, that was my doing.”
“What happened?” Mitch asked as Teddy continued to serenade them from the Sunset Lounge.
“Nothing, really. I just woke up one morning and realized that all she and I had to look forward to in life was growing old and sick and scared together. I couldn’t deal with it, so I fled. Left her to raise our little boy, Tyler, on her own. Tyler’s in his junior year of high school now. Hates my guts even more than Janice does. Never so much as speaks to me. Down the road, when he has kids of his own, he’ll never let them meet me. And when I’m lying on my deathbed in some hospital somewhere, tubes sticking out of my nose, he won’t come to me. I know this. And I can’t blame him. Hell, I abandoned the poor little bastard. But I couldn’t help myself, Mitch. You see, I have this crazy idea that I’m supposed to be happy. Spent too damned many years in advertising, I guess. Writing TV commercials about impossibly happy people leading impossibly happy lives-all thanks to that brand of miracle fabric softener or toilet bowl cleaner they’re using. If you do that long enough, Mitch, you start to believe in it. Hell, you have to believe in it if you want to be good at your job. The downside is that you can’t help measuring your own life against the one that you’re creating. You start expecting your own forty-two-year-old housewife with her forty-two-year-old butt to look like a twenty-year-old fashion model, because, damn it, that’s who plays forty-two-year-old housewives in TV commercials. Everything’s enhanced, prettified, fake. Mind you, on Madison Avenue, we don’t call fake. We call it aspirational.”
Mitch cleaned his plate with a chunk of bread, studying Les. “What will you do with yourself now-stay here or get back in the game?”
“Short-term, that’s Aaron’s call,” Les replied. “Long-term, I’m a sixty-two-year-old man in a young person’s game. They don’t want someone like me anymore. They want the MTV crowd. Edgy, outrageous. Kids selling to kids. Being candid, I’m not even sure I understand what they’re selling anymore. I saw a commercial on TV the other night for this new palm-sized communication thing and I swear I didn’t know whether they were pushing the thing or the software inside of the thing or the satellite provider that hooks your thing up with somebody else’s thing. I’ve been out of it for too long, Mitch. I’m a dinosaur.” Les finished his breakfast and gazed around at the quaint, roomy old kitchen. “My time here with Norma has been like an escape from reality for me. Right now, I can’t imagine what I’ll do if I have to leave. Maybe I’ll just stay right here in Dorset.”
“And do what?”
Les didn’t say. Instead, he groaned, “God, I wish that man would play something else.” Teddy was still working his way through a seemingly endless series of riffs on that same song, their song. “Have you had enough to eat, Mitch?”
“No, never. But this will hold me.”
“We’d better go get that firewood.”
Des had put yellow crime tape over the dishwasher, so Mitch made do with putting their dishes in the sink while Les grabbed work gloves and a storm jacket from out of the mudroom. Mitch had stashed his own outer gear in the entry-hall coatroom when he came in from logging duty. Les tagged along with him while he fetched it.
“Teddy had better come with us,” Mitch said as he got into his down jacket. Its outer layer was still wet from working out in the ice. The same went for Spence’s jacket hanging next to it. “We’re supposed to stick together.”
They headed into the Sunset Lounge, where Les called out, “Grab your coat, Teddy. We’re going out for firewood.”
Teddy smiled thinly at them from behind the keyboard, but did not respond. Or stop playing.
“Des wants us to stick together, Teddy,” Mitch added. “Let’s go.”
“This piano is all that stands between me and a total meltdown,” Teddy said in a firm, quiet voice. “If you try to pry my fingers from it, I will die. I am not exaggerating.”
“You need to come with us, Teddy.”
“That’s not going to happen, Mitch. Kindly leave me be. I’m not a danger to anyone. I’ll be fine right here, just as long as I can keep on playing.”
“You know, I really can’t deal with this right now,” Les huffed impatiently. “Let’s just leave him.”
“Fair enough,” Mitch agreed, because there was truly no point in discussing this any further with Teddy. The man wasn’t budging.
He and Les returned to the kitchen and charged out the back door into the stormy outdoors. It was so cold in the castle that it didn’t even seem that nasty out, even though the wind was howling and the snow stung their faces. It was a wet, heavy snow. At least four inches had fallen so far on top of last night’s ice. The footing was poor, the walking excruciatingly slow. It went something like this: First Mitch’s right foot sank down through the fresh snow, then held for a brief moment, then crashed through the icy crust with a kerchunk down into the older snow underneath. No sooner would he yank it up and out, then, kerchunk his left foot would crash on through.