The Man I Love (The Fish Tales, #1)(102)
They pulled it off. Noises Off was a smash and kudos rained down on Erik for the set design.
He had arrived.
He collapsed and slept through most of the winter break, reviving for Christmas with his brother. Pete had married at the tender age of twenty-four and had an infant daughter who decided her uncle was a custom-made mattress. Every afternoon Erik napped on the couch with his niece on his chest, her possessive pink fist curled around his finger.
“You’re so her bitch,” Pete said aloud, tossing a blanket over them. He kissed his daughter’s head, then Erik’s head, and tiptoed out of the living room, leaving them to drift off in the light of the Christmas tree.
Refreshed and restored, Erik drove over to Brockport State one January morning, a few days before the student body was due back. He wanted time alone to plan classes and putter around.
He was surprised to find the theater doors open. The work lights were on, throwing a harsh florescent wash on the stage. Someone was in here. A prickling wariness made the hair on his arms stand up and his eyes search for the nearest exit. Caution turned to curiosity when he heard a piano being played: the Bach Prelude in C.
C major, the friendliest key.
Killers didn’t play Bach.
His heart still thumping, he walked down the aisle and up the side steps to the stage. Now a voice was rising over the rolling arpeggios of the piano. The Gounod “Ave Maria” in a rich, clear soprano.
A girl is in here.
The hair on the back of Erik’s neck was up now, but not with fear. Intrigued, he made his way to the stage right wings, where the concert baby grand was kept.
A slim, black woman sat at the keys. Long, cornrowed hair gathered back into a thick ponytail. Her shoulders rolled like waves as she leaned arms and hands into the music. Her head tilted and dipped as she sang, riding the phrases out. Erik stared. And listened. For underneath this woman’s full, sweet voice, he heard another voice speaking to him. A little nudge in the side. A hand pulling at the tail of his shirt.
Who is that?
The woman sang the last “Amen” over the last fluid arpeggio. She lifted her hands, sustained the final note with the pedal and lifted her toe.
Erik let out the breath he had been holding, and a long, slow whistle with it. The woman’s head flicked back over her shoulder. A second of guarded surprise in her face, then a softening. A little bit more of her turned on the bench. Her eyes looked him up and down. Her mouth curved into a smile.
“Hello.”
*
By her own admission, Melanie Winter came from nothing. She grew up in the Langfield Homes in one of the poorest parts of Buffalo—“Buffa-low, baby, about as low as you can go.” Her father worked double shifts at the Trico plant, making windshield wipers until he dropped dead of a heart attack when Melanie was ten.
Her mother went out to work driving a bus, leaving Melanie and her sister in the care of their seamstress grandmother. Money was scarce. Discipline was strict. (“Fly swatter, baby, right on the back of the calf—you don’t want to feel it twice.”) The Winter girls were raised on tough love and pride. And music.
“Music saved me,” Melanie said, her hand stroking the keys of the baby grand. Erik leaned on the piano’s lid, chin in hands, listening. They had been talking for half an hour now. “Church choir first. Then Gramma bartered sewing for piano lessons. Recitals, school plays and shows, they saved me.”
Her mother didn’t live to see Melanie graduate from high school and go to the Eastman School of Music on a full scholarship. Her grandmother died shortly after, leaving her life savings to her granddaughters. Melanie’s sister took her money and ran, heading west to Chicago. Melanie, on her own in Rochester, hoarded her nest egg and took nearly eight years to earn her degree while working, keeping both soul and body alive. She gave piano lessons, voice lessons, and supplemented with any other kind of work she could find. She wasn’t too proud to sling hash. Wherever a community theater struggled, or whenever a school play was in need of help, she was there.
Now thirty-two, this position in Brockport’s theater department was her crowning achievement. But like Erik, she was feeling a bit of a fraud. “You know what I mean? How in the hell did I pull this off, and how soon are they going to find out I don’t have a clue how to teach at a university level?”
Erik, just past twenty-seven, knew exactly what she meant. He told her first about his own dubious means of getting the job, his own fears of being exposed as an interloper, and then went on to describe the fall semester and its accomplishments. “You definitely feel like a freshman again,” he said. “You keep looking around for the guy in charge and realizing it’s you. But you know more than you think you do. And if you don’t know it, you make it up.”
“Make it up. Sounds like a plan. I’ll just act like I know what the hell I’m doing. And it’s theater,” Melanie said, shrugging. “We’re in the business of making it up.”
Erik smiled, his eyes sweeping over her smooth, high forehead and her slanting cheekbones. She reminded him of Aisha Johnson, the Powaqqatsi queen, gunned down at age twenty. Something was stirring in him, an interest he hadn’t felt in months. Or years? A yearning to touch the energy of someone’s mind. A desire to step out of the dark and into the light of another human.
“Word on the street is they want to do Oklahoma! for the spring main stage production,” Melanie said. “To do Oklahoma! as my maiden voyage? You know how much vocal work that’s going to take? I think I’m going to be sick.”