I was a little kid.”
The saw blade took a bite of me, eight tooth marks per inch. Cheap steel, the kind that bent easily. I had my hands at the dull side of the saw.
How did we get here
, I wondered, but I’d had the same disoriented thought when I believedI’d fallen in love with him at first sight, lying in the same bed:
How did this happen?
“I could jump,” he said. “What do you think I was doing up that tower when you found me? Windows were too small, I didn’t realize. I’d gotten my nerve up. But then there you were, and you were so little. And your voice. And I guess I changed my mind. Will you say something, Marya? You’ve broken my heart. One of these days I’ll kill myself.”
I knew everything about him. He weighed exactly twice what I did, to the pound. He was ambitious and doubtful: he wanted to be famous, and he wanted no one to look at him, ever, which is probably the human condition—in him it was merely amplified. That was nearly all I knew about him. Sometimes we still told the story of our life together to each other: Why had I climbed the tower
that
day? Why had he? He had almost stayed in Philadelphia. I’d almost gone back home for the weekend but then my great-aunt Florence died and my folks went to her funeral. If he’d been five minutes slower he wouldn’t have caught me singing. If I’d been ten minutes later, I would have smiled at him as he left.
We were lucky, we told each other, blind pure luck.
7.
One night we were at our standing gig, at a cabaret called Maxie’s. It hurt to sing, with the pearls sticking to the saw cuts. The owner was named Marco Bell. He loved me. Marco’s face was so wrinkled that when he smoked you could see every line in his face tense and slacken.
There’s a land beyond the land we know
,
Where time is green and men are slow
.
Follow me and soon you’ll know
,
Blue happiness
.
My green dress was too big and I kept having to hitch it up. It wasn’t too big a month ago. At the break, I sat down next to Marco. “How are you?” I asked.
“Full of sorrow,” he answered. He leaned into the hand holding the cigarette. I thought he might light his pomaded hair on fire.
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“
You
do it, Miss Porth. With your—” He waved at the spot where I’d been standing.
I laughed. “They’re not all sad songs.”
“Yes,” he said. There was not a joke in a five-mile radius of the man. He had a great Russian head with bullying eyebrows. Three years earlier his wife had had a stroke, and sometimes she came into the club in a chevron-patterned dress, sitting in her wheelchair and patting the tabletop, either in time to the music or looking for something she’d put down there. “You’re wrong. They are.”
I said, “Sometimes I don’t think I’m doing anyone any favors.”
Then Gabe was behind me. He touched my shoulder lovingly. Listen: don’t tell me otherwise. It was not nice love, it was not good love, but you cannot tell me that it wasn’t love. Love is not oxygen, though many songwriters will tell you that it is; it is not a chemical substance that iseither definitively present or absent; it cannot be reduced to its parts. It is not like a flower, or an animal, or anything that you will ever be able to recognize when you see it. Love is food. That’s all. Neither better nor worse. Sometimes very good. Sometimes terrible. But to say—as people will—
that wasn’t love
. As though that makes you feel better! Well, it might not have been nourishing, but it sustained me for a while. Once I’d left I’d be as bad as any reformed sinner, amazed at my old self, but even with the blade against my neck, I loved him, his worries about the future, his reliable black moods, his reliable affection—that was still there, too, though sullied by remorse.
I stayed for the saw, too. Not the threat of it. I stayed because of those minutes on stage when I could understand it. Gabe bent it back and it called out,
Oh, no,
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