After This Read Online Free PDF Page A

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 sixthfloor 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.
     
And there was comedy in this too, in the musical
accompaniment—the scales that drew them to their first, stalemouthed kiss followed by the inept and repetitious beginnings of
some vaguely familiar but as yet unrecognizable piece as they shyly
(still) got out of their pajamas. And then ineptitude giving way, on all
their parts, to a certain confidence, even grace.
     
Did he hear it, she wondered as she glimpsed her husband’s face
through half-closed eyes and saw what was quickly becoming a
familiar look: a kind of determined concentration, a grimace to the
lips, and a far-off gaze to his eyes that marked a consummation that
she was beginning to suspect turned him in on himself far more than
it would ever turn him out toward her. She imagined it was akin to the
look the piano player upstairs wore