Tommy Wieringa - Little Caesar

At the word biscuit , the animal rushed forward and leapt at the biscuit in her hand. The height of its jump, the perfect timing with which it snapped shut it jaws, was a wonder of precision. The biscuit disappeared without chewing. I tried to get a conversation going, about how she was doing, about the children, whether she still played golf, but Wellington never let me get a word in edgewise.

‘He demands a great deal of attention,’ I said. ‘You must be careful that a little dog like that doesn’t cut you off from the rest of the world.’

Joanna nodded. From her eyes a river of love flowed in the little dog’s direction.

‘He must have been awfully lonely,’ she said. ‘Otherwise he wouldn’t act this way. That’s what they all say. He’s overcompensating. The Jack Russell is such a people’s pet, they forget that sometimes. But it’s all in here.’

She lifted a booklet from the top of a pile. Think Like Your Dog . Underneath it was a booklet from the same series, What the Dog Thinks of Its Master . Even more gruesome was Your Very Best Friend: Jack Russell .

‘Do you read all of that stuff?’

Joanna nodded vigorously.

‘I think you need to know what you’re bringing into the house. Most people have no idea at all, they just act.’

‘What happened to Black and White? Dead?’

‘They’re buried back in the garden. I had to put White down. That’s right, you knew them, the dears. Have you already been, up there?’

The index finger pointing, not followed by the eyes, in the direction of number 17.

‘Have you seen him?’

‘Yesterday. No, the day before. And you?’

She shook her head.

‘I don’t count anymore, they’ve wiped my name from the books. Isn’t that right, Welly? They don’t want the missus around, do they? I raised his children, but there’s no place for me.’

The bitter lines around her lips grew deeper.

‘With all respect,’ she said, ‘ you didn’t bear his children and you’re allowed to see him. So unfair, so cruel. They don’t want us around, do they, Welly? What they don’t know is how often he came down here, and not just for a cup of tea, oh no. .’

‘Joanna. .’

‘Would you like some milk? The English way, right, darling?’

I couldn’t stand to watch this life in free fall any longer. After the tea, I left. Around my heart was a hand that squeezed.

‘Can you play something from Schindler’s List ?’

I looked up at the middle-aged woman. She was tapping her ringed fingers rhythmically on the piano’s frame. I raised my eyes to the ceiling and pretended to be turning an internal searchlight on the archives of my memory. Then I sighed deeply and said, ‘I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t seem to find anything from Schindler’s List .’

She smiled as though I were a thing to be pitied. When the same woman came over later to ask whether I knew anything from Titanic , I was able to satisfy her with ‘My Heart Will Go On’, and asked her to forgive me for not sounding like Celine Dion. She looked at me as though the scent of my irony was not pleasing to her.

Linny Wallace came back from the ladies’ room. A pair of blue jeans and a white blouse that shone like silk, with a high collar. Her lips gleamed like a polished apple. She had bound her straight blonde hair up in a knot.

It was Saturday night, things were at their zenith. Saturday night was a ledge with on one side the week past and on the other the week to come — it was precisely atop that ledge with the steep slope of duty on either side that they felt free and came with their requests. The bar of the Schooner was transformed into a honky-tonk with the ‘Maple Leaf Rag’, and a cluster of men at the bar sang along with the refrain to Tom Jones’ ‘Delilah’. Oh yes, I was worth every penny. Linny was being chatted up by two men at the bar, they were in high spirits. Over the course of the evening the same boy who had waited on me that afternoon brought me two more daiquiris, sublimely mixed by Mike Leland. (I know there are those who say that you’re no credit to your profession if you drink while you’re playing. What can I say?) A nervous man came over to me and asked if I could play some Erroll Garner.

‘I don’t play Erroll Garner,’ I said with a wink, ‘I play Ludwig Unger playing Erroll Garner.’

Then I played ‘Misty’ for him. He looked around triumphantly from atop his bar stool, ready to tell anyone who would listen about his proclivity for Erroll Garner, but Linny was already engaged. One of the men she was talking to fetched three pints of Guinness; maybe they were hoping to have sandwich sex with her later on in their room. English girls do the weirdest things when they’ve had a few.

After Leland had served the last round, I launched into Randy Newman’s ‘Lonely at the Top’.

I’ve been around the world

Had my pick of any girl

You’d think that I’d be happy

But I’m not

I got up from the piano and slid onto the barstool next to Linny’s. Leland mixed me the final daiquiri of the day. The bar was emptying out. The man who’d asked to hear Erroll Garner said goodnight, all , but too quietly; I was the only one who heard.

‘You disappointed someone terribly this evening,’ Linny said. ‘A woman. I heard her tell her husband: he’s got to be the only pianist in the world who doesn’t know anything from Schindler’s List.’

‘A couple of weeks ago a woman stomped out of the bar because I didn’t launch into something from The Lion King . “Hakuna Matata”. Jesus Christ.’

We drank in silence. The lime juice snapped at my gums.

‘Piano man. .’ she said.

I laughed quietly.

She asked, ‘Is that something you become by mistake?’

‘By mistake is pretty much it. And it’s not hard to imagine that one day, by mistake, you stop being one too.’

‘So how does a boy from Alburgh mistakenly come to play piano in a bar?’

I mulled that one over.

‘That’s a magic question,’ I said then. ‘The answer is a bridge that runs from then to now, from my very first memories to this very moment.’

I told her about the city where I was born, Alexandria. Dutch mother, Austrian father. We lived in Kafr Abdou, a district popular with expats because it lay out of the way of the roar of hundreds of thousands of cars and millions of people — that infected larynx from which rose the hellish scream of sirens and honking and cursing. One day my father, an artist, failed to return from a trip abroad. Cut and run, halfway through the first verse. His shoes still beside the door, cigarettes still on the table. Not all failed marriages dissolve in strife and pain, sometimes it goes with a single sweep of the sword. I couldn’t remember any real split-up or any major sorrow. It had flown noiselessly, an owl in the night. It took five more years for my mother to fully realize that her husband had left her with a child and a house in Alexandria, and that he would never reply to the telegrams she sent to every corner of the globe where he happened to show his face. All that time she waited for him, living as though nothing were amiss, as though at any moment she might see him standing out there in the garden, that he would come up the steps at a single bound and take her in his powerful arms. Going on as though nothing had happened was her way of protesting against the unfairness of fate. The situation called for, no, it cried out for weeping and wailing or perhaps the racking of silent sorrow. But she gave in to neither, and lived her life in a grand display of denial.

*

Mike Leland closed the bar. I asked him for a bottle of Rémy Martin and the keys to the lounge, so that Linny and I could carry on the evening there. A little later he turned off the spots above the bar. At the front door he lifted his duffel coat from the hook and swung his heavy body into it. His wink was slow with fatigue.