April & Oliver (5 page)

“Bernadette suits you,” she says. “I think you’ll be happy.”

“Thank you,” he says hoarsely.

He waves at her, since it is apparent she is coming no closer, and lets himself out.

O
LIVER DRIVES IMPATIENTLY.
if he wants to make his tax law class by nine, there is no chance of stopping home for a change of clothes. The expressway
into the city is throttled; the traffic here is just as bad as in California. Why couldn’t he and Bernadette have chosen someplace
simpler for their graduate work? He turns off the traffic report; he has already passed all possible turnoffs for alternative
routes. For better or worse, he is committed to the road he is on.

Buddy permeates Oliver’s thoughts, not in distinct memories so much as a pervasive remembrance of his pigeon-toed walk and
bashful smile. Gone, he is acutely present. Oliver feels off balance. In practical terms, Buddy has not been part of his life
for years now, so why does he feel like an amputee? He glances at his watch; it is unlike him to be late. He has an irrational
fear that this singular tardiness is the beginning of a permanent change, and he will never get to class on time again.

Maybe it was this disorientation that contributed to his lapse in judgment last night. On one hand, April needed someone with
her, but did it have to be him? He could have taken her to his father’s place, or Bernadette’s. Then he would have nothing
to explain to Bernadette or himself. As it is, he doesn’t plan to mention anything; his second inconsistency of the day, and
it’s barely nine in the morning.

As traffic merges into the tunnel, Oliver becomes aware of a melody in his head. Has it been there since he first woke up?
Haunting and hypnotic, it feels like a Beethoven piece, but it’s not. Who, then? The car in front of him stops and Oliver
brakes hard.
Oh, God,
he thinks, it’s his own song, one of the last he composed at eighteen. As soon as he realizes this, the song strikes him
as juvenile and repetitive. He does not want to remember it, but there it is, wrapping itself around his thoughts like roots
circling in an overgrown pot.

Police lights whir at the mouth of the tunnel. A green Maverick lies crumpled against a guardrail. Cars inch by, straining
for a view. Oliver catches a glimpse of two paramedics hunched over someone with skinny calves and gaudy shoes, a teenager,
maybe. Then Oliver is inside the tunnel, its yellow tile walls arched around him.

April. He remembers one of the first awkward moments between them as adolescents. He was at his summer job, watering the Blue
Star juniper, the hose snaking to life in his hand, when he caught sight of April under the nursery awning, bending to smell
a gardenia. Perhaps it was because he did not recognize her at first that he was able to see her, the April Simone his friends
saw, with her long legs and tanned shoulders, wearing cutoff shorts and a tank top that exposed the curve of her spine, the
edge of her shoulder blade, the supple crease of her underarm. Her dark hair was pulled back in a makeshift knot, sweaty tendrils
glued to the nape of her neck. Oliver didn’t notice at first that the spray from his hose had veered onto the walkway. When
April looked up, revealing her face, he turned away.

From the time they were fifteen until eighteen, April faithfully came by the music studio where Oliver practiced five nights
a week, to listen to him. She came straight from her father’s bar, where she spent the afternoons busing tables and running
the dishwasher. Her father’s partner, Quincy, tended to keep her late, and on those nights Oliver practiced longer than usual.
Quincy worried him.

He remembers one of her visits. He doesn’t know why it comes to him now, inside the tunnel. The studio was dark except for
a single light illuminating a maze of sheet music scrawled in faint pencil, notes so quick and urgent they were indecipherable
to anyone but him. His fingers ached from hours of playing, but he didn’t stop. The composition was all but there when he
heard the click of the door. He didn’t know what time it was, only that she was late. It was always that way. The songs came
in the pressured moments of waiting, his hands straining to keep pace with his mind.

When he heard April’s footsteps behind him, he started the song from the top, eyes closed, mind awash. He felt himself rising
up from the bench, dispossessed from his hands at the keys. The studio reverberated, guitars quivering on their hooks, flutes
vibrating inside their cases. If April was breathing, Oliver could not hear it.

When it was over, he leaned on the piano. The room was silent but teeming; the walls retained the sound. April straddled the
bench with her back to him, the coarse denim of her jacket whisking his shoulder. Her long hair was in disarray, scented with
smoke from the bar.

“Quincy keep you?”

She did not answer. The dim halo of light reached the worn knee of her jeans, her fist resting on her thigh, thumbnail gnawed.
She was the kind of girl he would expect to have long, frightening nails, a color called Cherry Vanilla or Fire Truck Red.
Instead they were unpainted, bitten down to the flesh. Each time Oliver noticed this, it came as a surprise. Her Western boots
were silver-tipped, imitation snakeskin, as if she were someone to contend with.

“Can you do it again?” she said. “Slower this time.”

Oliver grazed his fingers over the keys without depressing them. He wanted to ask her something, but what? The question floated
in his mind, just below articulation.

April got up and slid down along the side of the upright piano, her usual spot. On the floor, she pulled her knees to her
chest and bowed her head. Oliver began the song with eyes opened this time. He noticed that her hands, now raked through her
hair, were in fists. She sat with her back to the piano to hear the music with her body as well as her ears.

Oliver tried to concentrate on the song as he had the first time, but he kept thinking of April in the steamy, windowless
back room of the bar, loading and unloading the dishwasher. He screwed up the last few notes and the song ended abruptly.
“I wish you’d quit that place.” He paused, waiting for the usual argument.

“It’s your best song yet,” she said. “You’ve turned a corner. Something’s new.”

He closed the piano lid and sat near her on the floor. “What about it? I could get you something at the nursery. The orchid
lady just quit. Or you could take my job when I leave.” He let the sentence trail off. She could have gotten into college,
too, had she applied. She looked up, her face flushed. He smelled booze and wondered why he hadn’t noticed before.

“They’d die,” she said. “The orchids.”

He thought of the creamy petals easily bruised, smooth as newborn skin. “I’m telling you, April, you don’t need this job.
You can do better.”

“Remind me,” she said. “How much is the scholarship for?”

“Don’t,” he said. “You know I turned it down.”

She looked at him with dark, unblinking eyes. Oliver had called Juilliard on his own, declining their offer before discussing
it with his teachers, his father, least of all April. “You could still enroll without the scholarship,” she said. “Take out
a loan.”

“Listen,” he said. “Stanford isn’t exactly chopped liver.”

“It is if you’re Oliver Night.”

“It’s only a piano, April. It’s not my life.”

She was silent.

“At least I have plans,” he said. “Which is more than you can say.”

He thought this would provoke her, but she only sighed.

“Sure, Juilliard would be fun, but then what? If you’re not Horowitz, you end up playing for tips in some sleazy bar. Or worse,
teaching in high school.”

“That’s not it,” she said. “You’re afraid you’ll like it too much, that it will swallow you whole.”

He laughed unconvincingly.

April stood and walked toward the door. Her boots did not look comfortable. Neither did the jeans. Oliver shut off the light
and took out his key. At the door, she accidentally backed up against him and then jerked away with a start.

“God, you’re jumpy,” he said.

She wrapped her jacket more tightly around her and slipped through the door. Outside, the air was cool and crisp, fragrant
with lilac. Oliver thought of orchids, Dancing Girls and Lady’s Slippers, too delicate to touch.

Along Sunrise Highway, traffic lights turned with no one to obey them. April and Oliver passed beneath the train trestle and
took the shortcut, down along the creek where they used to play. He noticed litter and beer cans, a single high-heeled shoe,
and a broken baby carriage turned on its head. April was walking unsteadily, wavering up and down the bank of the dry creek.
She tripped on a root, landing on hands and knees.

He bent to help her up but instead she rolled onto her back. “I’ve got the spins,” she said, covering her face with her hands.
“Don’t let Buddy see me.”

“He’s asleep by now. Come on. You can’t stay here.”

“You go ahead. I’ll get it back in a minute.”

Oliver sat down beside her. The half-eaten moon sifted in and out of low, fast-moving clouds. A breeze stirred the blossoming
maples, luminous beneath a streetlamp. Across the road above them, house lights went out one by one. A great place to get
mugged, Oliver thought, here where no one could see them. April laced her fingers through the sparse grass, her dark hair
fanned out around her face, oddly pale in the moonlight.

“Oliver,” she said. “I fucked up.”

He leaned closer, wanting to hear more, but knowing that if he asked, she would clam up. He searched for the right thing to
say, but all that came to mind was the song.

“Oliver,” she said again. “Why don’t you ask that girl Daisy to the prom?”

He cursed himself for waiting, allowing her to change the subject.

“She’s sweet on you,” she said.

“If I wanted to, I would.”

“Scared?”

“No,” he said, laughing.

“I think you are.”

“If I need a shrink, I’ll pay for one.”

She sat up, her knee pressed to his thigh. She looked worse now. Shaky and hot. “You’ve never done it, have you, Oliver?”

“Jesus,” he said.

“Free advice. The first time make sure you face her. A girl likes to know who’s there.”

“You’re drunk.”

“And don’t kiss if you don’t mean it,” she said seriously. “There’s nothing worse than obligatory foreplay.”

“What makes you think I need your advice?”

“Because you went out with Maryellen Kowalski three times and never kissed her good night.”

“First of all, that’s none of your business, and second, maybe I didn’t want to. Maybe it would have been one of your so-called
token gestures.”

“Or maybe you don’t know how.”

“Piss off,” he said. Her knee on his thigh was creating heat. He was sure she felt it, too. “I’m out of here,” he said.

She leaned forward on all fours, one hand on either side of him. Oliver smelled whiskey on her breath, salt in the air, the
heady fragrance of buds. His gaze traveled the curve of her jeans, the sway of her back, the arc of moon-white flesh inside
her blouse. Her eyes were steady, fixed on his.
What the hell,
he thought,
let her humiliate me. I’m in for the lesson of my life
. Her hair grazed his cheek, her breath so close he could almost taste the liquor. “Oliver,” she said. “Go to Juilliard.”

It took him a dazed minute to realize what she had said. April stood and walked precariously up toward the sidewalk. He waited
for a long moment, praying for his hard-on to go down. He had half a mind to go after her, pin her to a tree. But she was
right. He was afraid, not of sex, but of her.

He got up slowly and followed her down the street. They walked in silence until they had reached her house. Juilliard, he
thought. And she was in a position to give him advice? April, the dishwasher?

“Go ahead,” she said. “I know what you’re thinking.”

“Really,” he said. “So now you’re a psychic.”

“Slut is more like it.”

“Is that what you think of yourself?”

“A shot for every table I wipe down,” she said.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Overtime pay.”

Oliver blinked, confused.

“What was I supposed to do? Admit I’d never tasted whiskey? Me, who works in a bar?”

His skin went cold.
God,
he thought,
don’t let her be talking about Quincy
.

She hugged herself, looking up at the dark window of her bedroom. “The first time was the worst because I didn’t know how
to drink yet. By the third round I couldn’t find my way back to the bar stool.” She laughed in a jittery way, like someone
pulled out to sea. “Quincy was feeding me shots with his mouth and I was saying Oliver is waiting for me at the studio—it
was the night before your tenth-grade recital and I wanted to hear you play the whole thing from start to finish—but I never
made it to the practice or the performance because I was home in bed with what I told you was the flu, but really I was throwing
up.”

“April, that was two years ago.”

“He was pissed because I was so far gone he had to drive me home and drop me off a block from the house in the hope that no
one would see us and I’d be able to find my way to the back door. He wanted me to admit I’d brought it on, but I wouldn’t,
even though it was true I’d had a crush on him since I was twelve, but even then, all I ever wanted was a kiss, which is the
one thing he’s never done.”

Oliver said nothing.

“See, I’m a fuckup.”

“Someone should shoot him.”

“I played my part.”

“He’s forty years old.”

“He says being wet is the same thing as saying yes.”

“I don’t want to hear any more, okay?”

She looked down.

Oliver put his face in his hands. “This has been going on since you were fifteen?”

“For the next six months he didn’t even look at me. Then it happened again. Then a month later. Now it’s just what we do.”

“Have you been to a doctor? Do you at least use protection?”