meet you! I’m on my way to a date. It’s new, but I think I love him. Will you have dinner with me tomorrow? Let’s have dinner! Anyway—oh!” She dropped Audrey’s hand and ran back into her apartment across the way before saying more. Audrey fought with a sudden case of giggles. Just barely, she won.
When Jayne returned, she was holding a twelve-ounce minibottle of Moët & Chandon. “I’ve got, like, ten of these. L’Oréal Christmas parties—they hand them out like cards. Too bad they don’t give bonuses. Welcome to the building!”
Before Audrey could say thank you, Jayne was heading down the hall in beat-up New Balance running shoes. She didn’t jog. Instead she walked really fast, like those middle-aged ladies who circled the Central Park Reservoir in the early mornings wearing nylon track suits. Determined as ducks, and just as graceless.
After Audrey closed the door, she opened the bubbly, sipping straight from the bottle to keep the suds from spilling. She was relieved to find that the “Betty Boop!” wireless connection had faded, and when she tried to refresh “Diary of the Dead: Casualties of Chaotic Naturalism,” it was gone.
So she did her best to put the article out of her mind and watched as the Night Court theme song played. As she sipped Jayne’s bubbly, she wondered when she’d last made a friend aside from her boyfriend, Saraub, or her drug dealer, Billy Epps. She reached back into her memory as far as she could and realized that the answer was never.
5
The Piano Has Been Drinking
ZZZZ!-ZZZZ!
After a big move and twelve ounces of fizz, Audrey dozed. The story line from Night Court entered her dream. A smarmy lawyer with short, slicked-back black hair hunkered over her piano. He wore an old-fashioned notch-collared shirt and three-piece suit, and when he winked, he reminded her of all the charmers Betty had dated on the road. She’d always been surprised when they got tired of her bullshit, and walked.
“Have you ever built a door, darling?” he asked. His eyes were dilated like he was high, and in her dream, she smiled, because “darling” was a pretty word.
ZZZZ!-ZZZZ!
“Shouldn’t be hard for a bright girl like you,” he said, then turned back to the Steinway and began to bang out “Heart and Soul”:
—I beg to be adored, Heart and Soul!
His voice was low-pitched and strangely plural like that of a locust.
“I tumbled overboard…” His face hollowed as he played, and she saw now that his chin was dark with stubble, and the circles under his eyes were deep.
I fell in love with you madly! he sang, then he leaped up from the piano bench and ran at her with open arms. His voice got louder as he charged:
“BECAUSE YOU HELD ME TIGHT!”
She woke with a start. A man, in the room with her! A man, coming after her! But then, the television played a courtroom scene. A laugh track crescendoed with John Laroquette humping the blond defense attorney, the bailiff, the judge, then the camera. Equal-opportunity hump.
She rubbed her eyes. A dream. But the man in her dream had been different from the one on television, hadn’t he?
ZZZZ!-ZZZZ!
She spun in all directions and peered down the hall toward the front door. What the hell was that? A plague of locusts? Was this her tiny studio in Omaha? Saraub’s place on the Upper East Side? Oh, right, The Breviary.
ZZZZ!-ZZZZ!
She staggered out from the den and down the long, dark hall. Felt her way with her hands. What was making that noise? Still groggy from sleep and champagne, her thinking was murky.
ZZZZ!-ZZZZ!
She jumped, then sighed, and said aloud, “shit-all.” The intercom. She’d ordered Tandori Chicken from one of Jayne’s menus a half hour ago, before falling asleep. She pressed the TALK button and got staticky feedback in reply. “Hello?” she asked.
The she pressed LISTEN, and heard the Haitian guy with the 1950s uniform: “blah-hiss-blah-guy-blah-up?
Her stomach growled. “Send him up!” she said.
The bell rang a few minutes later. She swung the door wide without looking through the peephole. Saraub blinked at her. She blinked back.
“Hey!” she said. A rush of warmth filled her cheeks: You know, I just had the craziest dream, she nearly told him.
He leaned into the door. His breath was bad: whiskey and dog biscuits. He was a big guy; that meant a lot of whiskey and dog biscuits. “Want my piano back,” he slurred.
“What?” she asked.
He balled his fists into the pockets of his wax rain jacket. “You took my Frank Millers,