Alice McDermott - After This

The rush hour that Friday night began with a wet snow. Sitting at her typewriter in her lambskin coat and hat, Pauline saw the first fat flakes pass like small shadows across the office window and expressed her disapproval of nature itself with a loud clucking of the tongue. Impatiently, she leaned down to pull her folded rain boots from the bottom of the desk drawer. Throughout the typing pool all the girls began to do the same.

An hour later, crossing the lobby of their apartment building, Mary Keane felt her own transparent booties squeak and slip on the linoleum floor, which was so streaked with mud and melting snow you’d think the steady stream of residents tramping home had crossed ditches and fields, not merely the four blocks of wet sidewalk between here and the subway. She carried her umbrella and a white bakery box now dappled with gray-a pair of apple turnovers for tomorrow’s breakfast.

The elevator was open and inside it a young man in a dark overcoat was holding the bucking door with his forearm.

Double-stepping, still uncertain of her traction, she hurried to reach it. “Gee, thanks,” she said, although, after a lifetime in her old walk-up, she still preferred to take the stairs. He dropped his arm as soon as she had stepped inside and some impatience in his posture conveyed the idea that he would have dropped his arm at that precise moment had she stepped inside or not.

“Floor?” he said, turning only his profile toward her. He wore a dark fedora and had a roman nose.

“Five,” she said. And then added, “Thanks again.”

Gloveless, he pressed a long pale finger into the elevator button that was a faded shade of ivory, seemed even to grind it in a bit, and then, stepping back, placed the hand into the pocket of his oversize coat.

They both stared into the lobby’s baleful yellow light. Tamed, the doors now remained impassively open. Through them, she saw another pair of residents-another young couple-swing into the lobby, laughing and shaking wet snow from their shoulders and hats. He pressed the button again, with his thumb this time, banging it a bit as if to make a stronger point. The elevator suddenly shook itself, coming to, and the doors slowly closed before the newcomers could look up from their clothes to cry, Wait.

Alone together in the little box that smelled of his wet wool and her wet fur and the various beginnings of other people’s dinners, he glanced at her and then politely doffed his hat, placing it over his heart as if for the national anthem. He raised his eyes to the numbers above the door.

“Some weather,” she said. He merely, barely, nodded. “Who knew it would snow?” she said.

Now he shook his head, shrugging a little, a wordless, No one knew.

He was pale as salt. Although along his jaw there was, beneath the pale skin, the outline of a black beard. His hair was cut short, but it was clear that left to its own devices it would curve, and then curl. He was not tall, but the fingers that held his hat against his overcoat were exceptionally long and thin. She saw how they moved one at a time against the dark brown felt, pressing themselves against the fabric almost imperceptibly, like a pulse under the skin. The way a child’s fingers might move in sleep.

At the third floor, the elevator stopped haltingly, bouncing them both on the balls of their feet. The doors slid open to show the familiar green walls, the chipped ledge and decorative mirror that marked each floor. A smell of frying onions.

They both looked out at the empty hallway and then she turned to him to say, “No one,” as if this were indeed a small mystery.

He stabbed the button once again. He had a thin face behind the large nose, and pretty, dark brown eyes with heavy lashes. He was younger than she, not even thirty, but he would have to be far younger still before she could say what it was that came into her mind to say: A girl would kill to have those eyelashes.

The door closed again and again the elevator shook itself and slowly rose. She tried to think of some small talk. (Because it was simply what you did. You made small talk, you commiserated.)

Her eyes fell on his hands again, so white against the dark felt of his hat. She watched them moving, involuntarily, rhythmically, one at a time and in no apparent order, and thought briefly of a friend of her brother’s who had come back from overseas with what they’d called Saint Vitus’ dance. But was this kid even old enough to have been in the war?

Suddenly she said, “Are you the piano player, upstairs?” For that was how she and John had come to refer to him, The piano player, upstairs.

He turned his nose to her again, warily now. “I play,” he said.

She nodded. “We hear you,” she told him. “My husband and I, we listen,” she said. Every evening from seven fifteen until nine and Saturday mornings eight to eleven, which she preferred, since they woke to it. “You play beautifully,” she told him, although the music was obscurely classical and, because there were no lyrics, unmemorable to her.

But the compliment was like a drop of water on the dry wool of his face. His cheeks seemed to soften, color, even swell.

“I hope it doesn’t disturb you,” he said.

She held out her hand, the thin string of the bakery box looped around her wrist. “Not at all,” she said, although three or four times now she had hung on her husband’s arm to keep him from banging the broom handle against the ceiling. “We enjoy it,” she said. And then, at a loss for a more substantial compliment, she added, “You must have some beautiful piano.”

They had reached her floor and once again he put his forearm against the door to hold it for her. “A Steinway,” he said, his tongue poked behind his lips as if to suppress a boastful smile.

Stepping out of the elevator she said, “Oh, sure. The factory over in Long Island City.”

“A baby grand,” he added with such sudden animation that she thought for a moment he might follow her into the hallway to say more. But the doors were once again butting against his arm.

“No kidding?” She smiled at him. He was very young. “How’d you even get it up here?”

He gave his smile the go-ahead, moving to put his shoulder, too, against the elevator door. “It was already there,” he said. “Someone left it behind. They didn’t want it. The super said they couldn’t even rent the apartment for a few weeks because it takes up the whole bedroom and nobody wanted to pay to take it out. Can you believe it? A Steinway.”

“Lucky that you play,” she said. She would have put her gloved hand to his cheek, patted it gently to temper his sweet and sudden enthusiasm, were it not for the way the thumping doors were sending rebukes from the poor souls waiting downstairs. She put out her hand again, the bakery box rocking against her wrist. “That would have been something to see,” meaning getting a baby grand piano from Long Island City to the tiny sixth-floor bedroom just above theirs.

Little wonder, then, that the next morning when she woke to the heavy run of scales that began his three hours of practice, she saw in her mind’s eye Laurel and Hardy waving their hats beneath a dangling baby grand, saw them catching their fingers in piano lids or pressing their cheeks against the broad rump of a Steinway as they carried it, nimbly wavering, up a long flight of stairs. Saw in her mind’s eye that delicious moment when Stan-a version of the piano player himself, when you thought about it-smiled the sweet self-satisfied smile that always preceded the double take, the panic, the inevitable disaster. (Down, down, down the keyboard he went and down, down, down in her mind’s eye went the poor piano.)

Images that stayed with her even as John woke and sighed and cursed a little under his breath before he lifted the hand she had already placed on his belly and took her into his arms.