Into the Night

People didn’t seem to write to Dell to any very great extent. Not because they were afraid to, probably, as much as because the world in which she and they moved was too swift to wait for letters to catch up. A phone call said everything that needed to be said. Yesterday’s keenness for a get-together, by the following day might already have cooled to disinterest, or somebody else might have come along in the meantime.

There were no photographs of the two principals in her present life, nor of her former husband either, the man who had later married Starr, but then this last wasn’t to be wondered at. She’d probably torn them all up at the time of the debacle — as Starr herself, apparently, had torn up the one in her room when things unraveled later.

There was a whole row of medical bills, all from the same doctor. The first had just the amount. The second had “Please” added to it in handscript. The third bore an imploring “Third notice.” The final one had the sum x-ed off, and the notation “How about tonight?” in its place.

“So that’s how she took care of that,” Madeline caught on with a sudden flash of wry insight.

She left little notes on the piano a couple of times after having been there. “Was here. Had workout. Mad.” And one time, just to make it sound plausible, “Is ‘The Blues I Get from You’ a good title?”

The next day there was a curt answering note from Dell, left in the same place. “Can it. I don’t do blues, remember? If you’re going to work at my piano, do material I can use, at least!”

Madeline thumbed her nose at it.

Madeline knew a time would come when she’d start talking about her former husband, and that time came. If a woman loves a man, she is bound to talk about him sooner or later to her confidante. If a woman hates a man, she is equally bound to talk about him sooner or later. She wouldn’t be a woman if she didn’t. She wouldn’t have loved, she wouldn’t have hated, if she didn’t.

Madeline bided her time, threw out no leads, dropped no hints, planted no verbal traps. It would be freer, fuller, if it came by itself. It came by itself.

She was browsing through sheets of music one day, looking for something new to break into her repertoire. She came to one and she started to hum her way through it. Then she broke off and put it down so sharply it almost amounted to slapping it against the piano top. Madeline looked up at the sound. She could make out the title on the cover, upside down, from where she was. “That Old Feeling.”

“No good?” she asked.

“Too good,” Dell said. “It’s more than a song, it’s an actual experience. I know, because I’ve been through it. I saw you last night and I got that old feeling.” She turned to Madeline. “What the hell,” she said. “You don’t want to hear this.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Why? Just because I pick up some sheet music and get in a mood? That doesn’t mean I have to tell you a sad story and bring us both down.”

“Sometimes it helps to tell it to another person, whatever it is,” Madeline said. “To get it off your own chest.”

“And onto yours instead? What’s the point?”

“That’s what friends are for.”

“Don’t give me that,” Dell snapped. “I don’t know what friends are for, but it’s not to listen to all the garbage people got locked up in their hearts. Maybe it’s what psychiatrists are for, but not friends. So why should you listen? What’s in it for you?”

Madeline shrugged. “Maybe I’ll get a song out of it.”

“A song?”

“Or an idea for a song.”

“I told you,” Dell said. “You don’t get the good ideas by looking inside other people. You get ’em by looking inside yourself.”

“Maybe looking inside other people, or listening to what’s inside other people, is a way I can find out what’s inside myself.”

Dell thought about that. “Yeah,” she said after a moment. “That makes sense. Well, I can stand it if you can. But I’m warning you, you might want to pick up a violin and accompany me. It’s that kind of a story.”

“Sad, huh?”

“It’s the story of a marriage,” Dell said. “There are two kinds of marriages. Bad ones and imaginary ones, because the real ones aren’t good and the good ones aren’t real.” She shook her head. “I don’t know where to start.”

“How did the two of you meet?”

“We first met at the mail desk of the Eastland Hotel in Portland, Maine. We were both up there on our time off. All I wanted was my key. Instead, the clerk handed me a message. Before I even looked at it I said, ‘This can’t be for me, I don’t know anyone in this town!’ I was right. It was for some Swede named Miss Nilson and they’d put it in the wrong box. The ‘i’ was looped, looked like an ‘e.’

“He smiled at me, and I let him. He began to talk, and I let him. I liked him almost from the minute he first began to talk. Before we separated he said, ‘Now you can’t say you don’t know anyone in this town anymore.’