Tony Bennett sings “The Very Thought of You” through the dining-room speakers, and couples dressed in evening gowns and dinner jackets clink glasses and speak to each other in low voices across candles and plates of pasta.
A few of the charity’s spokespeople make their way up to the microphone on the tiny stage next to the old Steinway & Sons piano to thank the guests and talk about the mission of the organization. I am stationed at the silent-auction table and supervise the handful of other volunteers who clear plates and refill drinks. The whole event is seamless and lovely. Except I can’t stop thinking about Paige. And Finn. And maybe them together.
Imagining a scenario where his hands are on someone else, especially my close friend, makes me physically sick, but what’s worse is the emotional betrayal. Attraction to someone else or even sex with them would feel like a punch to the throat, but his heart being elsewhere—his ability to go through the motions of a life with me and not actually want that life—that’s so much worse. That’s...unbearable.
I realize that I have been staring at the floor, lost in my own thoughts, when a volunteer taps me on the shoulder and I’m jolted back into the present.
“The music’s out. There’s something wrong with the audio, a short in the wiring, they think. They wanna know what they should do,” a soft-spoken young woman says.
I hadn’t even noticed Tony Bennett go quiet. I see Grant across the room. His job is to schmooze the crowd. He stands with his hand resting on the shoulder of one of the biggest donors, pointing out selections on a wine list. He pauses to raise an eyebrow at me, asking if I can help, no doubt. I see that the busser is tangled in cables and cords, trying to get to the bottom of the problem. He’s barely out of his teens, and looks like someone who knows his way around audiovisual equipment with his Dungeons and Dragons T-shirt and lip piercing, so I leave him to it and quickly make my way to the piano.
The place is always packed on Mondays and Wednesdays when it hosts sing-alongs after dinner, so there is a massive binder of sheet music inside the piano bench. I flip it open and land on “Wonderful Tonight” by Eric Clapton and start to play, filling the quiet in the room. A few people clap, as if I’ve saved the day. I see Grant shoot me a surprised smile and a thumbs-up from the bar. After about an hour of Righteous Brothers and Elton John, the busser fixes the audio just in time for most people to be gathering their coats and slowly saying goodbyes as they make their way out.
As I’m thanking my young volunteers and giving them all little gift bags for their help, Grant comes over with a plate of the night’s special, a tomato risotto, and gestures to the booth next to him.
“You, madam, have pulled off a spectacular evening and have not sat down all night. Please.” He motions for me to sit.
“Oh, Grant. That’s okay. It’s what I signed up for. I’m happy to do it,” I say, meaning it.
“You must be starving,” he says. “Join me. It’s the least I can do,” he adds.
So after the last couple people leave and the restaurant is otherwise empty, we sit down and eat warm crusty bread with olive oil and shaved Parmesan with outrageously delicious risotto and lots of red wine. Grant has always been an extension of Paige to me, mostly. With so many restaurants to manage, he was scarcely around, even when he did still live with her, so our coffee-in-the-garden mornings or movie nights usually didn’t include him. He seems different than I thought. Maybe I assume all men are like Finn—sort of emotionally unavailable and often distant with a wandering eye and a penchant for one-upping people at every opportunity. The one-upping thing I used to find sort of adorable. He’s a successful and confident guy, but his need to be right and always have an answer or a better story showed the crack in his armor, and his insecurity was exposed—at least to me. I liked the vulnerability he was unaware of. The other qualities were not so charming, but those developed slowly over time and snuck up on me, or at least I think so. If they were always there, I was blinded by love, I suppose.
Grant, however, seems to—I don’t know—listen without the need to scroll through his phone or trump something I say with a more interesting thing that happened to him, for example. It’s very...unexpected. I haven’t sat alone with a man besides my husband in years—probably since dating Finn. It feels a bit scandalous, if I’m honest. But why should it? He’s separated, and I’ve basically hired a friend to catch my husband cheating. I’m allowed to enjoy it, aren’t I? I’m not doing anything wrong.
“How did I not know you played piano?” he asked.
“I took lessons as a kid and then minored in music in college, actually. I don’t play too often these days, but—”
“New Year’s, four years ago?” he says, interrupting.
“Uh...” I start to ask what he means.
“You guys threw a New Year’s party at your place, and you played ‘Auld Lang Syne’ on Mia’s little keyboard when the ball dropped on TV.”
“Yes,” I say laughing. “I guess I did.”
“So I did know you played. How could I forget such a performance?”
“Right. Then, I guess I’m insulted. It was some of my best work.” I smile, remembering how I’d plunked out the clumsy tune with two fingers and sung along to the tinny, electronic hum it made. It’s strange how familiar yet distant Grant is to me. It strikes me that if I know things about him from Paige, like the fact that he sleeps on a mattress on the floor in the apartment above this restaurant because he refuses to buy furniture and make it a home, she’s probably told him secrets about me, and we likely know each other, in our shared loneliness, better than we think.
I know that, sobbing, he tried to reach into Caleb’s casket and pull his lifeless body up to hold him. I wasn’t there because they wanted a small funeral with only family, a couple hours north near his grandparents, but I can’t get the image out of my mind. I also know the funeral service was delayed because Grant collapsed in grief, and he could barely physically walk into the chapel. I know Paige pushed him away until the couch became the guest room, and now this room above the restaurant, and he became smaller and smaller and sits up there alone every night. She told me she wishes she could stop—stop taking away the only thing he had left: her. But she couldn’t. Still, somehow, unlike her, he walks out into the world each morning, and a stranger would never know the debilitating despair he suffers. I feel likeIshouldn’t know.
No matter what she might have told him about me over time, my problems seem pretty pathetic considering what he’s been through. It embarrasses me that he might know I haven’t had sex in months or that I eat sleeves of Oreos on the back patio at night after everyone is asleep, Oreos I retrieve from their hiding spot in my glove compartment. Or that I went psycho on a woman I thought Finn was having an affair with and couldn’t imagine loneliness more acute than feeling simultaneously abandoned and betrayed but also at fault for it because of my crazy paranoia.
I’m sure he knows, and this mutual knowledge of the other’s secrets seems oddly intimate suddenly, and I feel like I should go. But Grant tops off our wine and leans back in his seat, studying me a moment.
“Do you miss playing?” he asks. No one has ever asked me that before.
“Uh, yeah, I guess so. I mean, I don’t give it much thought. I played a lot of recitals, but never on a bar stage, so it was actually pretty cool,” I say.
“Well, I’m looking for someone a couple nights a week. I mean, I know you’re the busiest gal in town, but if it’s something you—”
“Oh, for piano-bar sing-along,” I blurt excitedly.
“Yeah, I thought about getting rid of it,” he says, “but folks love it, so...”
“Youlove it,” I add. “I’ve seen you dancing away to a terrible rendition of a ‘Don’t Stop Believin’’ medley more than once, don’t think I haven’t.”
