Hand on the doorknob, about to leave
his house for the day, or maybe two or three days – to meet me as it happens –
Lucien was suddenly immobilised by the sight of the ring on his middle finger.
It had been forced upwards by the strange, almost painfully contorted hold he
had on the knob, and struck him in that moment as being the tackiest, most
pathetic affectation imaginable. An overly harsh assessment, to be sure; he’d
found the ring, unpretentious sterling silver, on the road in Bangkok a few
years earlier, had until now thought of it as a kind of good luck charm, and
had even – this must’ve completely slipped his mind – received compliments
about it, albeit mostly from women who wanted to sleep with him.
What the fuck am I doing wearing this, he said aloud, it’s a
nut off a fucking Thai screw. A feeling of utter worthlessness rose up in his
stomach. He pulled his hand away and slid the ring back to usual place, a kind
of mirror ring of sunless and slightly blistered skin. But the feeling didn’t
go away. Right now I should mention that Lucien was given to fixations of this sort,
and knew that leaving them to fester untended was like putting out a casting
call for more severe problems. Once or twice I’d caught him walking down Smith
Street in his own world, a painful world, a crucible even, face locked in a
grimace that made no sense from the outside, strange emissions of effort coming
from his mouth, almost like a Karamazov, hands drooped limply together by his
solar plexus, like a sick kangaroo or Mr. Burns. And then of course he’d seen
me and gotten embarrassed, checked himself, smiled and straightened up and shook
my hand and become what ostensibly he was – a tall, athletic, intelligent,
handsome, exotic-looking dude – a maddeningly superior dude. There were other
occasions, too, on which I’d anxiously stayed out of sight, so as to watch him
for longer.
He tried to take the ring off. On this
cold July morning, however, it proved impossible. Even with hot water - Amy had taken all the soaps and other toiletries, which he was yet to replace - there
seemed to be no way of getting it over the first knuckle. Had it always so fit perfectly
into the contours of the knuckles beside it? He thought of plants grown so closely
together that they’d been forced into concessional shapes, a kind of mandatory
harmony. And then, all but resigned to it staying on by now, Lucien was lowering himself onto
his old three-seater when he quickly stiffened, took hold of the ring with the
thumb and index finger of his other hand – as if it needed to be carried – and
rushed to his bedroom. He opened the bottom draw of his bedside table. The bottle
he found was nearly empty and smelt of strawberry liquorice. As the last
vestiges blew into his hands, Lucien felt a bracing cold break out on the
affected skin. The artificiality of the smell dominated all his other senses in
an unnerving way, as if they were being permanently weakened by their deferral.
He ran his teeth along his tongue from back to front and shrugged his shoulders
a couple of times.
While pulling at the ring, now
lubricated and giving a little more than before, he wondered how Amy could have
not only derived pleasure from such a weird sensation but actually sought it
out as a means of improving their sex life. It was just another nuance of her
personality, he would later tell me, which could be added to the previous week’s
postmortem, to the wholesale realisation that so much had been hidden, or
partially hidden, from those faculties of judgment that should have followed
his awareness of who Amy actually was and who that person was to him, for so long and intimate a
period of time. It was more than rose-coloured glasses, man, rose-coloured
glasses don’t stay on for four and a half years. What was it then? I don’t
know. A weakness, a complex, a longing, wanting her to be perfect, wanting her.
*
Sitting on the edge of the bathtub
now, with strawberry lube all over his hands, Lucien let out a bemused, faintly
evil chuckle. He’d stained his good jeans. At least until evening, the ring
wasn’t going anywhere. Then he washed his hands, but, owing to the lack of
soap, the weird chemical chill persisted right up to when he was seated at her
piano and his fingers were caressing the keys like the faces of children. Three
more days and it would be gone too. Amy was having it ‘professionally moved’,
what ever that meant. At least, he thought, he wouldn’t have to put his back
out, as he’d done upon moving it in.
Willis of Montreal, Vertical Grand. Cheap in its time, plain worthless
now in all but sentimental currency. Dusty, out of tune, mahogany-coloured
stain faded so badly in places that it looked intentionally spotted. The
lathwork on the legs and on the two supporting columns for the oversized box
above the keyboard were, however, still more of less immaculate. Her grandfather,
a French Canadian whose lineage could be traced to one of the earliest
settlements in Québec, had ensured that it too was aboard the liner bound for
Melbourne, along with him and his new Australian bride.
To his surprise, Lucien not only
remembered a scattering of tunes from his childhood lessons but could play them
almost perfectly. It was the first time he’d ever played the Willis; the truth
was that Amy had never played it much either. Trying to think of the most
difficult song he’d learned before giving up, he figured that it must’ve been
Satie’s Gnossienne 1. But midway through a raspy but not altogether bad
rendition, he became so lost that the feeling aroused was one of genuine panic,
of being alone in a dangerous wilderness of some kind, a hunger, a disorientation,
a sort of awesome helplessness. For a long time – I’m talking hours – Lucien settled
on the last note he could recall correctly, with his fingers and, in an
effacing way, his mind. In fact, he wasn’t looking at the keys at that point
but at the ring. When at last I got the phone call and the bewildering
explanation of the morning’s no-show, Lucien had resolved never to give up that
piano, not for anything in the world.
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