Ghost Music Read Free

usually free during the day?”
    â€œI’m a magazine designer. I do fashion layouts for
Harper’s
. Well, I used to. Not anymore.”
    â€œSo—at the moment—you’re free?”
    â€œIt depends on your definition of ‘free.’”
    â€œWell . . . if I said to you, come up again tomorrow around twelve, and I’ll make you some lunch, and play you some more of my almost-beautiful music, there wouldn’t be anything to stop you?”
    Kate said nothing, but continued to stare at me. Her stare was so penetrating that I began to feel light-headed, as if I had drunk too many tequila slammers. But Malkin started to scrabble at the tassels that hung from one of the spoon-back chairs, and I turned and called, “Hey, kitty! Cut it out, will you!” and that broke the spell.
    Malkin trotted across to Kate like a scolded kid, and Kate knelt down to pick her up.
    I said, “Listen . . . I understand you’re married and everything. All I’m asking you to do is come up and eat some salad. Working on my own all day . . . it almost turns me into a gibbering loony sometimes.”
    â€œOkay,” she said. She held up her hand so that I could help her back up onto her feet. Once she was standing, though, she didn’t let go. “You shouldn’t worry about Victor. Victor is a very strong character who believes that he owns the world. He wouldn’t imagine for a single moment that I would betray him.”
    I was very tempted to ask,
would
you betray him? More to the point, would you betray him with
me
? But it was a little too soon to be asking questions like that. I definitely felt that Kate found me interesting; but maybe she was bored, and she was teasing me for her own amusement. Every minute that went by, I noticed things about her that were increasingly attractive: the tilt of her nose, the way the sunlight shone on the upward curve of her lips, the faint blue veins in her wrists. But she had a guarded side to her, a prickly defensiveness, and I suspected that she was capable of putting down any man she didn’t like—in public, too.
    â€œRight,” I said, releasing her hand. “If you don’t think that Ishould worry about Victor, I won’t worry about Victor. How do you like tuna, with Chinese cabbage salad?”
    â€œSounds delicious. I’m sure that Malkin would adore it, too. I’d better not bring her, in case she’s a nuisance.”
    I saw her to the door. Before she left, she turned and reached up, touching my hair just behind my ear, like a conjuror pretending to find a nickel. Then she kissed me very lightly on the cheek.
    I watched her go back downstairs. Once she had gone, I quietly closed the door and went back into the living room.
    I stared at myself in the gilt-framed mirror, trying to see what
she
was seeing, when she looked at me. I always thought that I looked more like a second-rank tennis player than a musical composer. Six foot one, rangy, with kind of disconnected arms and legs, and the long, angular face of my Finnish grandfather Luukas, and the same ice-blue eyes. Same gray hair, too, when it came to that. But I like to think that I’m reasonably good-looking, in a Nordic Kris Kristofferson kind of a way, although Margot used to accuse me of looking morose for no reason.
    I picked up my guitar again and started to play the theme music to
Magician
, but I stopped in mid-chord, halfway through.
    â€œKate Solway,” I whispered, just to feel her name come out of my mouth.

Three
    Shortly before eleven o’clock that evening, I was working on the incidental music for
The Billy Wagner Show
when I heard car doors slamming in the street outside, and laughter.
    I hesitated, with my fingers poised over the keyboard of my Roland electronic piano. I heard more laughter, a woman, and a man’s voice saying, “You’re crazy. You know that? You’re totally crazy.”
    I knew I was