Into the Night

“She lived it. ‘God bless the child who’s got his own.’ You can’t wait for other people to give it to you, you can’t live on crusts of bread from other people’s sandwiches. ‘God bless the child who’s got his own.’ If you don’t take care of yourself, you’re always going to be the kid outside the candy store, nose against the glass, looking in, wondering why everybody else has got the candy and all you’ve got is a cold nose and an appetite.”

Later, she asked Dell how her gentleman friend would feel if he knew she sold his gifts.

“Take it from me,” Dell said, “he doesn’t want to know. Because if he knew, he’d think he had to be upset about it, but why should he? He gives me diamonds because he can’t give me money because that would give our relationship a name neither of us wants it to have. But what’s a diamond beside money disguised as beauty? He could give me fake jewelry and it would look the same when I wore it. Diamonds are an acceptable way for him to give me money, and if I invest that money instead of wearing it, all I’m being is smart. But he wouldn’t like it if he knew, because it would mean looking at something he doesn’t want to see.”

“And God bless the child,” Madeline said.

“Amen to that. You know how to write a song? Start off with a feeling — your own feeling, not one you got secondhand from a song. Something you feel as deeply as Lady Day felt that song. Then write a lyric that’s so good it’s got the melody curled right up inside it.”

“I’d have a better chance,” Madeline said, “if I had a piano. That’s why my melodies are so bad. I’m trying to hear the notes in my head. If I had a piano, I could sound them out, write down the melodies that I hear instead of guessing at them.”

“So save your pennies and buy yourself a piano.”

“I haven’t got enough pennies. And even if I did, I don’t have room for a piano. I was thinking—”

“Oh?”

“There’s plenty of time when you’re not here,” she said. “If I could come here when you’re out, not all the time but whenever I’ve got something I want to work out on the piano all by myself. If I did that, I think I could come up with some lead sheets that wouldn’t look like the Morse code in Slovakian.”

“Was that what I called your song? Yeah, I guess it was.”

“And if I came up with something decent, you’d get first crack at it. Since you’d be helping me with it, you could even be coauthor, in case the song turned out to be a big hit and other singers covered it.”

Dell shook her head. “I thought I was good at building castles in the air,” she said. “You not only build them, you turn around and start renting out rooms. Here you haven’t even written the song yet and you’ve got it on the Top Forty and the two of us splitting the royalties. What is it you want, exactly? I hope you’re not looking to move in here because I don’t want roommates.”

“Just a key to the apartment,” Madeline said. “I’d call first, to make sure you weren’t home.”

“I should hope so. The last thing I need is somebody walking in at the wrong moment.”

“I’d be very careful,” Madeline said dutifully.

“All right, it’s a deal,” Dell said. “You can have my duplicate key. On one condition. Anything missing it’s understood you take direct personal responsibility for and make good on it.”

“I agree,” Madeline said.

“Here’s the key, then.” Dell went over to her dressing table, opened a drawer, took the key out, and tossed it into Madeline’s lap.

“I’m not Santa Claus,” she let her know. “I might get a good workable song out of this yet, at that. For peanuts.”

After a good thorough wall-to-wall casing on the occasion of her first two visits in Dell’s absence, which revealed very little or nothing that she didn’t already know, she didn’t bother going there with any great regularity anymore. Paradoxically, and against all expectation, she found she stood to learn a great deal more when Dell was present, sousing and chattering away, than from her muted — and carefully sterilized — surroundings when she was absent. They had nothing to tell, no voice in which to tell it. What could they show her? A double strip of purple stamps in a desk drawer, a bottle of amber Chanel on a dressing-table top. A jigger of aspirin on a medicine cabinet shelf. A quart of the ubiquitous Canadian Club in the refrigerator, along with a six-pack of Heineken for those who were tapering off. Even her little blue booklet for telephone numbers, hanging by a loop beside the instrument itself, was chastely discreet. A liquor store. A music publisher. An all-night delicatessen, for those four-in-the-morning snacks — with whom? The place where she bought her shoes. Not a personal name in it.

Smart; she must have kept them all in her head.