Rebecca Makkai - Music for Wartime

Melanie said, “You’ve been in the building a long time.”

“In Chicago it is sixty-six years. When I was young like you I sing for twenty years in the chorus at the Lyric Opera! But here in this building it is only fifteen years.”

“That’s still a long time.”

Zsuzsi laughed. “For you, yes.”

She said, “Did you know Vanessa Dillard, the woman who lived right above you?”

Zsuzsi broke a wide smile, the kind that should have infuriated Melanie but actually, against her will, made her feel warmer toward Vanessa. “She is lovely person. So beautiful! Frankly, I do not see why she should be in scandals.” She pronounced it “frenkly”—a softer version of the word. “She has parties always for her film workers. After the film is finished, up they come to her apartment and she gives wine.”

Assuming the present tense was a language issue rather than a senility one, Melanie pressed on. “There was a man named Michael. He came here.”

Zsuzsi shook her head, and for a moment Melanie thought she might say that no, he didn’t. “He stands outside in the street six, seven times and shouts like Marlon Brando. And the rest of the time is fight, fight, fight.” She pointed to the ceiling. “Or thump, thump, like rabbits.”

Melanie was careful to breathe. This was truly for the best, she told herself. More anger meant less mourning, at least of the traditional variety. “This man,” she said, “he was balding? Dark hair, a bit of a stomach. Michael.”

Zsuzsi swept the crumbs onto Melanie’s empty plate and walked them to the garbage. “No good for her, I tell her lot of times. But what man is not bad news?” She leaned hard on Melanie’s shoulder. Or maybe she was attempting to comfort her. “Frenkly, you are lucky you do not run off with him. People judge.”

“Oh. No! You’re not understanding.”

“In Europe, no one cares about this. The President of France, he has mistresses. But Bill Clinton has his little affair and they try to kkkhhh !” She put her hand to her neck like someone getting hanged. “In Hungary once there was a famous affair, a princess and a Gypsy. And do you know what we do? We name after the Gypsy a wonderful sponge cake. Rigó Jancsi. This is all we care! Does it make a good dessert. But you, you are young and pretty. You can find still a man who is free. Some women have babies now, forty, forty-five year old.”

“We weren’t having an affair. It wasn’t—” Melanie’s breath caught and she thought she might start screaming, so she stopped herself from talking at all. She wanted to get away from the kitchen. From the whole building, in fact. She thanked Zsuzsi for her hospitality. When she got back outside, her car was unlocked, as she’d left it. The box was gone from the passenger seat.

She intended to stay away a few weeks, returning equipped to handle things. Maybe with a sister in tow. But Saturday was the day of the wedding — the absence of the wedding, rather — and all morning friends called to say things like “I’m thinking of you,” then wait for her to say something back. Flowers arrived from her father. At one o’clock, a confused soul from the limo company called, confirming that no limo was needed. The next time her phone rang, she threw it across the room, picked up her purse, and took the Metra to the city, then a cab to Noble Square.

When she arrived, a dazed couple was trailing a real estate agent down the front steps. Melanie wanted to stop them, to say, “You know they all died in there,” but surely they’d already heard. It would account for the wife’s pallor.

She arranged Vanessa’s liquor bottles on the counter and sloshed some of the unopened cranberry juice from the pantry, with vodka, over ice cubes that Vanessa herself must have poured into the plastic trays. Or Michael. By the time she began circling the apartment with the Evidence box, she was on her second drink. She’d been gentle before, eyeing a shelf and plucking out only the most compelling things. Now, the word of the day was ransack . Papers, high school yearbooks, shopping lists, the contents of the medicine cabinet. No antidepressants here, but birth control pills — the last taken on a Thursday, probably with the glass of water that still sat crusting on the bathroom sink. They’d died on a Friday morning. Here, in the very back of the bedside table drawer, was the elusive charger for Vanessa’s phone. Melanie fished the phone from the box and plugged it into the wall.

It was four thirty — the time when someone should have been finishing her hair, when one of her sisters should have been slipping her an early glass of champagne. Only she wasn’t allowed to envy that girl, that phantom self, the one about to marry an impostor.

She sat on Vanessa’s toilet, staring at the nail polishes clustered on the shelf like a little rainbow army. She slid her feet from her shoes and looked at her toes, dry and callused. In the alternate universe, she’d have spent all yesterday at the spa. And because her only other choice was to break down and cry over something so ridiculous, she plucked a bottle from the shelf — petal pink — and figuring that Vanessa owed her this, that sweet Vanessa might have insisted had she known, she took the bottle to the living room floor, along with one more drink, and made her feet pretty.

As she finished, Vanessa’s phone gave a short buzz. Melanie jumped, tipping over the polish, and a pink puddle oozed across the cream carpet. She stepped around it. Fifteen messages had arrived from the cellular cloud. None were Michael, and the first was Walgreens. The second was from the morning after the leak: “Evelyn K.,” the screen announced. A woman with a crisp British accent. She said, “Well, yes, let’s talk, Ness, but you know what I’m going to say. I’m going to tell you he’s a narcissist, and he thinks you’re his mother. That carousel just goes round and round again. I will most definitely be using the word wanker .”

Melanie had the brief instinct to jot down the message, as if Vanessa would step through the door soon and pay her for house-sitting. Instead she deleted it. She’d be passing the phone to the parents, who doubtless didn’t need confirmation that Michael was a wanker.

The message had verified something she’d felt in her bones: Vanessa couldn’t have known about Melanie, about the wedding. If she had, surely she’d have confided in this friend, or what was the point of asking advice? And if the friend knew, stronger epithets would have been employed.

The phone lay in her hand like a grenade. The other messages were all from the two days following the leak, six of them from “Mom.” They’d be panicked and wrenching, and Melanie understood that listening would be something she could never undo, a far deeper violation than going through the photographs.

And more dangerously: Somewhere in that phone, if she touched the right button, would be old texts from Michael. They’d be adoring or angry or sexual or mundane. They’d be cryptic. They wouldn’t be about her , but about whatever this tenuous, unkillable thing was they had between them. It would be like watching them kiss.

She mustered enough clarity — it might have been the most mature moment of her life — to see that this would be the worst thing she could do to herself. There were other places she could be. There were other ways to hide from the ghost of her wedding. She needed to leave, and not come back alone.

She picked up the tote bag of items for Jed and decided it was full enough: T-shirt, thong, inhaler, seashell, an Animal Control magnet, a very old pack of cigarettes. She carried her shoes — her toenails weren’t dry — and knocked on his door till he opened it, wild-eyed and happy. She put on her silly movie star voice. “This is good-bye, old friend!”