The Old Man(17)

“I can’t imagine. She’s twenty years younger than I am, and doesn’t know half as many recipes or old song lyrics as I do. All she has is a beautiful face and a great body, and she thinks he’s brilliant and sophisticated.”

“Got it,” said Caldwell. “Sorry to pry, but I wanted to know the general outline, so I’m not an insensitive roommate. You look great, by the way. He’s going to be sorry he doesn’t have you as time goes on.”

“You’re sweet,” she said. “But now I’m entitled to your story.”

“My wife died of an undiscovered aneurism at forty-five. I walked into the kitchen and found her sitting on the kitchen floor with a pot of soup on the stove that had boiled down to nothing and scorched the pot. When I found her, she still looked beautiful, normal, as though she had just fallen asleep. But her skin was cold.”

“Oh, I’m so sorry.”

“It was about ten years ago, so the wounds aren’t fresh. I was lucky to have her as long as I did.”

“What was her name?”

“Anna.”

“To Anna,” she said, and they drank.

“I’ve noticed that you put a lot of work and time in to the piano,” he said. “Are you preparing for a concert or something?”

“Back to me already?” she said. “I’m not really doing it for a practical reason. It was something I did before I met Darryl, and I taught while I was married. I think when the marriage ended it was the logical thing to cling to. Playing gave me something else to think about, and a way to fill the time. I could do something to improve myself—practice. Learn harder pieces that I never had time to learn before.”

“Well, those are all good effects.”

“So you don’t think I’m turning into a crazy old bat who sits in her apartment playing for nobody?”

“You’ve got a long way to go before you’re an old anything. And you can go back to playing for other people. You’ve already got me. And you could get students. You’re good enough to be a concert pianist.”

“Thank you. But nobody begins a concert career at forty-five.”

“So you gave the career up to marry Darryl.”

“I did win some prizes when I was young. I suppose I seem stupid to have given up my shot at success for a guy who was just going to dump me.”

“I don’t think it’s stupid. You still love your kids.”

“You’re just trying to make me feel better, aren’t you?”

He shrugged. “I know some bad, sad things that are true. So do you. But I’m reminding you of some better things that are also true. And since when is it bad to try to make a friend feel better?”

“Are we friends?”

“We will be.”

“Why do you think so?” she said.

“Because we’ve decided to be.”

After the second glass of Jameson’s, Caldwell said, “It’s time to order dinner.”

“I didn’t ask you to take me out to dinner,” she said. “I just said we should have a drink sometime.”

“We’ve had the drink. Now I’m hungry,” he said. “Unless you have another commitment.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Then have dinner with me.”

She looked at him, her head tilted. “You’re kind of a take-charge guy. I didn’t think you would be.”

“Don’t worry. I’m not a bully or a psycho. I am hungry, though.”

“I’ll have dinner on one condition,” she said.

“What’s that?”

“I want to sit next to you, on your side of the booth.”

“Then come on over.”

“Aren’t you going to ask me why?”

“I assume it’s so you can steal food off my plate.”

She moved over to his side and sat beside him. “You know a lot about women.”

“I guess I do,” he said. “Was that it?”

“No. I’m just afraid that after two drinks, one of us will say something that I don’t want overheard. One of us meaning me.”

“Well, now you can say whatever you want.” He picked up a menu and handed it to her.

She looked at the menu while he beckoned to the waitress.

After they had both ordered Zoe said, “I like this menu. It’s friendly food, the kind you don’t have to think about or compare to what you had in the south of France. All you have to do is eat it and go back to drinking.”

“A wise menu,” he said. “So tell me more about you. What were your parents like?”

“They were professors at the University of Chicago. One was a Russian physicist, and one was a Roman historian, but not the one you’d think. My mother was the physicist. She met my father in Rome and fell for him so deeply that she defected so she could have an affair with him. That’s what she told me. What about your parents?”

For an instant he considered telling her something that would further his plan to keep her friendly, but decided the story he’d compiled from the lives of several real Peter Caldwells would do that about as well as anything improvised. “We lived in a small town along the shore of Lake Erie in upstate New York. My father worked at the steel mill—Bethlehem Steel in Lackawanna—until it closed in the 1960s.”