coffee, I asked him to dinner at my new, barely unpacked studio apartment, and he accepted. Sometimes you see gestures that tell you everything about a person’s character and temperament, and that night I saw many such signs. First among them was his good humor after my scallops turned out to be ammoniated and nearly inedible. Edwin turned down my offer of substitute tuna sandwiches and celery sticks for a spontaneous outing to an Italian bistro in my neighborhood. We discovered that we shared two movies in common (Casablanca and Dirty Dancing) on our list of top five. From that first night, I could so easily see myself across the table from him, who’d be relaxed and lenient about whatever I served. I could also see us taking trips together, nothing strenuous or exotic, Edwin sliding onto unoccupied piano benches aboard ships and in restaurants, his staying calm when flights were canceled and luggage lost. I’d get a piano. He didn’t make an overture in the direction of a kiss, so I did that myself, knowing that Meredith and Taisha would scold me for a lost opportunity. He took it well.
He proposed on the one-year anniversary of Viktor’s termination with a ring that needed to be sized, so we waited until it was back from the jeweler’s to announce our plans. It had been his grandmother’s, willed to Edwin upon her death. It was white gold and not exactly my taste, but I grew to love it. The diamond was flawless, and noticed by every single customer of the chatty sort whose purchase I wrapped in tissue or whose credit card I ran.
He always claimed he spotted me first, across a crowded mezzanine, but I think everyone knew that was Edwin evoking Ezio Pinza in South Pacific. He stopped his freelance playing, and I returned to fixing other people’s sentences when we moved to Manhattan and its Washington Irving High School; with our combined incomes and rent-controlled one-bedroom, we didn’t need second jobs. His students loved him.
It was only nineteen years later when the school’s award-winning a cappella group brought the mourners to tears with “Amazing Grace.” It surprised me and broke my heart all over again when they closed with a slow, sweet “Always.” Everyone grasped its meaning: The way we’d met, at a Steinway grand, had been Edwin’s favorite illustration of how music could change a life.
We Add Anthony
I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN we were leading up to a large lifestyle change at the Batavia when Margot sold her diamond engagement ring, as well as an enameled bullfrog with topaz eyes that she had never liked. Immediately she regretted another transaction—selling a string of pearls that she’d worn at her wedding, an engagement gift from her in-laws. A few times she arrived at breakfast looking a little glummer than usual, and when I asked what was wrong she said, “I dreamed about my engagement pearls again.” I told her that the pearls were a metaphor for her old life. Their replacement would be a metaphor for her new one.
“How’s that?” she asked.
I looked up from my cereal and newspaper. “I think it’s obvious: When your ship comes back in, or your book gets published, you’ll replace them and you’ll feel a kind of victory over hardship every time you look down at your bosom.”
What I happened to be looking down at was an advertisement on page two of the Times. To distract her, I jabbed at the paper and asked, “Do you believe this: ‘Mary-Jane with Cut Out Detail’—four hundred and ninety-five dollars! Who buys shoes for five hundred dollars these days?” I held up the page. The shoes were pictured and very beautiful, and looked to be of the softest silvery leather.
Margot put on her reading glasses, leaned over, and read from the fine print at the bottom of the ad. “Bal Harbour, Beverly Hills, South Coast Plaza, Las Vegas, Honolulu, Dallas. Ha! As if there’s any money left there.”
Margot thinks that no one in the United States, regardless of employment or liquidity or reserves of gold bullion, has anything left. She puzzles over the society snapshots in the Sunday Styles section, its smiling couples still raising money for the arts, still raising debutantes, still in black tie and designer gowns, still in possession of the jewels from the days before the black Fridays and Mondays.
This particular exchange sticks in my mind because of the phone call that interrupted it. As soon as she noted the caller ID,