Ghost Music (7 page)

I took a shower, and pulled on some loose-fit jeans and a blue-and-white-striped shirt, and played around on my keyboard. I was scoring the moment when Billy Wagner climbs into a horse-drawn carriage and the Bakersfield family gather around him to say good-bye, tossing up their hats and waving their handkerchiefs. I based the melody on an old British Boer War song “Good-bye, Dolly Gray.”

“Good-bye, Dolly, I must leave you . . . though it breaks my heart to have to go . . .”

I couldn't think why, but the music just flowed out of me, as easily as if I had written it already. Before I composed that score, it usually took me hours to write only half a dozen bars. Hours?
Days
, sometimes, and still I wasn't satisfied. I was my own pickiest critic, to the point where I really annoyed myself. But this morning I felt inspired. Uplifted, even. In fact I was enjoying myself so much that I had almost finished the entire score when my wall clock struck twelve and I remembered that Victor Solway had invited me downstairs for a drink at half-eleven. Shit. I brushed my hair, smacked on some Hugo Boss aftershave, and stepped into my loafers.

When I opened my front door, I found Malkin sitting right outside, so close that I nearly tripped over her. She looked up at me and gave me that thick, rattling purr.

“What do you want, puss? Are you checking up on me?”

Malkin retreated to the far side of the landing, but she didn't take her eyes off me.

“Where's your mistress?” I asked her. “Sorry, I'm right out of
tuna. But next time I go to Carmine Street, I'll bring you back some nice stinky swordfish, how about that? Stinky-winky swordfish?” You have to talk to cats in a language they understand.

Malkin closed her eyes disdainfully. I left her there, on the landing, and went downstairs. I could hear voices and laughter coming from the Solways' apartment. Tony Bennett, too, singing “Are You Havin' Any Fun?” I think if I ever feel like hanging myself, that will be the track I put on the CD player before I step off the kitchen chair.

I hesitated, thinking, do I really want to do this? But then I thought: come on, you're always too antisocial. You have to learn to get along with people. Even people who admire Tony Bennett. So I knocked.

Victor opened the door so quickly I could have believed that he was standing on the other side waiting for me. He was wearing a pink checkered shirt and red jeans that were much too tight for him, so that his penis looked like a picnic-size polony.

“Gideon! You made it! I thought you might have forgot the address!”

He barked with laughter, and ushered me in.

“Jack—Sadie—this is our new
opstairsikeh
! Gideon—meet Jack Friendly. And this is the lovely Sadie!”

Jack and Sadie were sitting in the living room. Jack got up and shook my hand. He might have been Friendly by name but he didn't look particularly friendly by nature. He was fortyish, not as tall as I was, but underneath his black designer coat and his black turtleneck sweater I could tell that he was very fit and well-muscled. The kind of guy who could hit you very hard, if he wanted to.

He had greased-back hair, and an almond-shaped face, as if he had Asian blood in him. His nose was pointed, but very flat, like a falcon's beak. He was wearing three or four silver chains around his neck, with various pendants hanging from them: a heavy silver cross, a bunch of four or five silver dollars, and a
hunched-up creature that looked like a baboon, with red crystals for eyes.

“Victor says you write music,” Jack challenged me. He had a hoarse, strained voice, with a distinctive accent that I couldn't quite place. Philadelphia, maybe. “Anything I might have heard?”

“Thom's Tomato Soup?” I suggested. “Mother MacReady's Self-Raising Muffin Mix?”

Jack stared at me and his eyes were like polished gray stones. “What are those? Like, jingles?”

“That's right.”

“I know that Thom's Tomato Soup one!” said Sadie.
“‘Come on home, come on ho
-
o-ome . . . to your family and your friends!'”

Jack turned around. Although he didn't actually say “shut the fuck up” out loud, the expression on his face said it for him.

Sadie said, “I think it's
beautiful
, that song! It always makes me feel like calling my mom!”

“What would be the point? Your mom's a vegetable.”

“So we have a one-sided conversation? It still makes me feel like calling her.”

Sadie must have been about my age, but she looked at least five years older. She had bleached-blonde hair with dark brunette roots, pinned up with sparkly zircon barrettes. She was quite pretty, in a bruised, cheap way, with a fake tan and blotchy mascara and a bright scarlet pout.

She was wearing a low-cut sweater in strident blue, and jeans that were even tighter than Victor's. Her breasts were enormous, squashed together in her sweater like two orange party balloons, and spattered with dozens of tiny moles.

Victor said, “What's your poison, Gideon? Hey—I have some Thai whiskey if you're interested. One of my customers gave me a whole case of it. I didn't know whether to be flattered or insulted. Hey—at least I can ‘Thai' one on—get it?”

“White wine will be fine, thanks,” I told him. I was tempted to retaliate by calling him “Vic.”

He went over to an antique-style sideboard and opened one of the doors to reveal a minibar. The whole living room was furnished with reproductions, although some of them were very high-quality ones, and must have cost almost as much as the originals. There was a huge Empire-style daybed, on which Sadie was sitting cross-legged, and three hefty armchairs and a carved oak chest that served as a table. Everything was upholstered in dark crimson brocade, and even the walls were dark red, with gilt-framed oil paintings of sailing boats and racehorses and early explorers in the West Virginia wilderness.

I tried to imagine Kate in here, but somehow I couldn't. She was so feminine, and yet this room had no woman's touches at all. The only flowers were dried red chrysanthemums, under a glass dome on the mantelpiece, and there was no smell of perfume in the air or potpourri or even room freshener.

“You must make a pretty good living, then, writing these jingle things?” asked Jack. “Apartments like this, you don't get them for peanuts.”

“I struck it lucky, I guess.”

“Like Victor here? Victor struck it real lucky, didn't you, Victor?”

Victor was opening a bottle of Stag's Leap chardonnay with one of those carbon dioxide gadgets. He stopped long enough to point his index finger at Jack, almost as if he were aiming a pistol at him, and the look on his face was so malevolent that I thought at first that he wasn't joking.

But Jack let out a hoarse, unconvincing laugh, and changed the subject straightaway. “Do you play the horses?” he asked me. “There's a great nag running at Belmont Park this afternoon. Move the Cat, in the three twenty, fifteen to one.”

I shook my head. “I've only bet on the horses three times in the whole of my life. The first one threw its jockey, the second one ran around the wrong way, and the third one broke its leg and had to be put down, right there on the track.”

“Move the Cat,” Jack repeated, as if he hadn't been listening.

Victor handed me a large cut-crystal wine goblet with too much wine in it. Then he took hold of my elbow and said, “Come and take the tour. You should see what I've done in the bedroom.”

He ushered me out of the living room and along the corridor. On either side there were framed photographs of Victor with various singers and TV stars. Victor shaking hands with the Fonz. Victor with his arm around a stooped, gray-haired man in glasses who looked suspiciously like Perry Como. Victor standing next to Mickey Rooney, trying to look as if he were an old friend of his.

He opened the door to the main bedroom. It had been decorated as ornately as the living room, with a massive four-poster bed with twisty pillars, and heavy drapes in chocolate-colored velvet, and a large oil painting of a fat nude woman inexplicably milking a goat.

“This is what I always wanted,” said Victor. “Classic, you know? Ornate. I don't have any time for that minimalist stuff. I had enough of minimalist when I was a kid. One couch, one broken chair. Three of us boys in one bed.”

He sniffed loudly, and looked around. “Opulence, you know? That's what I go for.
Luxury
. A feeling of
pomp
.”

“It's pompous,” I agreed. “I have to give you that.”

Victor put his arm around my shoulders and gripped me tight. I was looking around for photographs of Kate, but I couldn't see a single one, which was strange, since there were so many photographs of Victor.

Victor said, “When I started out in real estate, I used to visit all of these uptown apartments, you know, and some of them, they were so luxurious, you only had to walk inside and your suit felt cheap and your shoes felt cheap and
you
felt cheap. I remember standing in this entrance hall on the Upper East Side, waiting for my client to show. It had brown marble floors and brown marble pillars, and I remember looking at this marble table and thinking, my whole year's salary wouldn't buy me that table. That
one
fucking table. And here was this apartment, this entire apartment, with a view over Central Park, and it was
crammed
with tables. Not only tables, but chairs and couches and bookcases and beds and paintings and statues and Christ alone knew what else.”

“Well, I know the feeling,” I told him, wishing he would stop squeezing my upper arm to emphasize every item of furniture. “I started out in a studio on East Sixteenth. It was so small I had to climb out on the fire escape to get dressed.”

Victor at last let me go. He walked over to the bedroom window and looked out into the gray, rainy yard. There were sunflowers planted in the window box outside, bright yellow and blurry, and the rain was making them nod their heads. I wondered if Kate had planted them.

“I made myself a vow,” said Victor. “I swore to myself that
I
was going to live like that. I was going to have all of that antique stuff, and my address was going to be so goddamned prestigious that I would never have to explain to nobody that I had class, and substance. Know what I mean by
substance
, Gideon? Substance, that's not just money, that's like
depth
. Money gets you envy. But substance gets you respect.”

He paused for a moment, still staring out of the window. “There's only one thing that's lacking in my life. Can you guess what that is?”

“A boat? Your own private jet?”

He turned away from the window. He didn't look at all amused. “Family,” he said, prodding my chest with his forefinger. “Family—that's what's lacking. A Solway dynasty. Like, what is the point of having all of this fucking substance, if you don't have nobody to pass it on to? A son to send to Princeton, and be a lawyer maybe, or the CEO of some investment bank, and give me about a dozen grandchildren. First-generation substance, that's okay. But second- and third-generation substance, now you're not just talking respect, you're talking
reverence
.”

“Surely it's not too late for you to have kids.”

“Nah,” he said, shaking his head, as if it was out of the question. He didn't explain why, but I strongly felt that this was not the moment to bring up the subject of the baby boy that he and Kate had lost.

“How about you?” he asked me. “You going steady, or anything like that?”

“Not right now. Too busy to have a woman in my life.”

“You must be pretty damned successful, buying one of these apartments, at your age. How old are you?”

“Thirty-one. It's the hair that makes me look older.”

“No, I would have guessed thirty-one. I'm good at telling people's ages. It's not the color of their hair, it's their confidence. Older people don't scare so easy. You—you're still a little wary. Know what I mean by wary? But you're not scared of me, are you, Gideon?”

“Should I be?”

He gave me a carnivorous grin. “Depends if you're straight with me. If you're straight with me, you don't have nothing to worry about.”

“Why wouldn't I be straight with you?”

“Exactly. Successful young man like you. Thirty-one, and bought your own apartment on St. Luke's Place. That's something.”

“Well . . . I still have a long way to go,” I admitted. “I just hit pay dirt with a couple of songs, and I was looking to move to someplace quiet, with a whole lot more space. A friend of mine at CBS told me this place was coming up. I liked it—who wouldn't?—and that was it.”

Victor slapped me on the shoulder. “You're a pretty spontaneous guy, Gideon. You don't take life too serious. I like that. Me—I like to have my fun, don't make any mistake. But underneath, you take my word for it, I'm totally focused. Totally,
totally
focused. You—what did you have to do to get rich?—
blinkle, blinkle, blinkle
on the ivories, that's all. Don't get me wrong, you got natural talent.
But me, I had to fight for what I got, inch by bloody inch. Iwo Jima wasn't in it. But I raised the flag in the end, Gideon. Just don't any bastard try to take it down again.”

“Right,” I said, raising my eyebrows, and I remembered what Kate had told me about Victor's temper. He didn't exactly frighten me, but at the same time I decided that it would probably be wiser not to rub him the wrong way. Like by telling him that his bedroom looked like a nineteenth-century whorehouse, or that I was flying to Sweden to spend two weeks with his wife.

As I carried my shoulder bag out of the main entrance of Arlanda airport, it was snowing. Not heavy snow, but light, mischievous whirls, like ghosts; and the wind was freezing.