Patty thought for a few minutes. After what seemed to me to be an eternity, she finally said, “You have a good point.”
It was obvious to me that Patty wasn’t happy whatsoever with my answer, however.
As I entered the kitchen in the main house, Daniel and Charley Swift were just leaving.
“Hello, Jim! Kris, Will, and their friends are still eating breakfast,” said Charley.
Charley gave Patty and me a big hug, and Daniel shook our hands.
I said, “You guys look as if you’re going somewhere.”
Charley nodded. “Kristen and Will sent us on an errand.”
An errand? “Where’s Harry?” I asked, confused.
“We gave him the day off after he put that party together yesterday.”
“Oh,” I said. I hadn’t thanked Harry for all his hard work, and I felt a little ashamed at that.
“Have a nice day, you two!” Daniel added as he and his wife left.
Kristen noticed my expression, and laughed. “Don’t worry about Mom and Dad,” she said. “They’re happy for an excuse to take a day trip to Chicago.”
“Oh,” I said, still feeling guilty.
Kristen jumped up from her chair and almost tackled me as she gave me a kiss. “Good morning, Oogie!”
“Hi, Sweetness!” I said, trying to appear cheerful.
I looked at the table, and saw Lynette, Camille, and Will with some plates of pancakes.
Kristen saw my look. “Are you hungry?”
“No,” I said. “I ate an orange.”
“How about you, Patty?” Kristen asked.
“I don’t think…”
“Sit down!” Kristen ordered. “Lynette, put some pancakes on a plate for Patty.”
Patty was a bit bemused by Kristen’s remark, and Lynette immediately got up and started moving some of the extra pancakes onto one of the empty plates next to the stack.
I felt a bit left out, being the only one that was still standing after Patty and Lynette sat down. “What are the plans for today, Goddess?”
“I let Will hear the tape you made for me, Jim.”
Kristen didn’t need to tell me which tape she was talking about. Unless I was seriously mistaken, it was the Without You tape. “Oh?”
“It moved me,” Will said, softly.
I shrugged. The performance moved me as well, but somehow, I felt a bit embarrassed that Kristen played the tape for her brother without telling me first.
Patty looked puzzled. She stared at me for a few seconds before finally asking, “A tape?”
Somehow, this whole discussion was getting too intimate for me. Patty’s eyes widened right before I made up my mind.
I left the main house and ran back to the apartment. I started to go upstairs to the main bedroom, but remembered that we didn’t have any locks on the bedroom doors. I took a quick detour and locked myself into my studio and turned on the DND light.
To say that I felt bad was a gross understatement.
For the last few months, I thought that everything was going fine. Thanks to Patty’s assurances during the Senior Weekend, I actually stopped thinking of myself as a terrible rapist. I was no longer dwelling on my misdeeds with the tickets.
Why were Kristen and Patty both bringing up the past now? Just yesterday, Kristen told me how suicidal and lonely she felt when we first met. Then, this morning, Patty told me that I was worse than the guy that raped Patty and turned her life upside down afterward.
I no longer felt worthy of Kristen’s love. Not only that, I doubted that I deserved the friendship of Patty, Lynette, Camille, and Will.
After what seemed like an hour or so, I glanced at the intercom light to see if it was blinking. It wasn’t. I was right: nobody loved me.
I started playing the Moonlight Sonata on the upright piano. For some reason, my mind was taken back to the Danish musician-comedian Victor Borge, who I once heard play the introduction to this song, doing a simple segué into Cole Porter’s Night and Day, and finally into Happy Birthday To You. If memory served me correctly, Victor Borge called this the “Moonlight Sinatra.”
I fumbled at the keyboard, missing the shifts in melody and roundly butchered my attempt at reproducing Borge’s joke, and finally got up out of the stool in disgust with my inability to play a simple musical parody.
Frustrated, I felt like throwing things. I lifted a box of open reel tapes and saw a music book that Mr. Proilet gave me last spring.
Curious, I put the box down and picked up the music book. I tried to remember the name of the song that Jean indicated in the book. I looked through the table of contents until I saw the name Canon, which struck a chord in my memory. Turning to the page indicated, I saw the composer’s name, Pachelbel. This was the song that Mr. Proilet played for me those months ago.
I set the music on the piano and started playing.
The song was very simple, but grew more complex as the song progressed. Despite its complexity, I found the strains of the song quite soothing.
Without thinking, I started playing my original melody that my teacher told me sounded like this song as a counterpoint to Canon. It wasn’t particularly easy, but I was determined. After a few moments, I found that the arpeggios of Canon worked nicely against the more structured “verses” of my own song. I shifted completely away from Canon to my song when the chord progression diverged.
From out of nowhere, words flew into my head.
I was no longer sitting at the upright, as I had shifted over to the electric piano that Kristen and I purchased in Lafayette. I played a simple melody line with my right hand while holding the sustain pedal down, listening to the notes ring out like church bells.
There was a part of me that wished that I was recording this particular effort—I knew that any attempt to reproduce this arrangement again would come out different.
There was also another part of me that realized that something just shifted in my world. I couldn’t put what changed into words, though.
I gained strength as more words came to me seemingly from nowhere—but at the same time, from everywhere.
I continued playing the keyboards, but not really paying any particular attention to what was coming from my fingertips. I was singing, but instead of a song of despair, it was a song of freedom and redemption.
I closed my eyes and thought about Kristen tuning her guitar just the day before. I thought about the way she fingered the song Vincent, a song that reminded her of her past life. I realized what I missed the day before. As she played the song, she wasn’t looking at the strings of her guitar, but looking directly at me!
Kristen wasn’t telling me about her loneliness and how she felt when we first met to make me feel guilty, and neither was Patty! The two girls were instead telling me how much has changed for the good since that time. Kristen, in particular, was telling me how much her life has changed for the better!
How many times did Patty tell me that I moved on from the power hungry little twerp that tried his damnedest to humiliate Kristen and ruin her life? How many times did Kristen tell me the same thing?