I spotted it on page two of The Times -- The Velvet Rhapsody had burned down and arson was suspected. Foul play wouldn’t surprise me, knowing that the owner had been familiar with the less salubrious side of life. On the other hand the place had been a fire trap, so who knew? I thought back to my bleakest days, and the glimmer of light that had been Fleur...
My mother had been a strong believer in after-school activities, so at the age of five I’d been enrolled in swim class on Mondays, Indian Guides on Wednesdays, and had piano lessons on Fridays. The swim lessons were a failure because I refused to duck my head under water, and at Indian Guides Jack Micklehouse called me stupid names until I gave him a black eye and his father complained to my mother. Music lessons being the least traumatic I stuck with them. I remember my teacher, Miss Anderson. She was pretty, smelled of pears, and I think I was in love with her. Somewhere early on she must have told my parents I had musical talent. I suppose you could say that’s where it all began.
By the time I reached my teens music ruled my life. “Practice, practice, practice.” This was the mantra of both parents and tutors; they pushed and prodded me, never allowing a moment’s peace. I would succeed. I would become famous; take my bows on the great stages of the world. I didn’t question their expectations. Not then.
Once enrolled at Juilliard, things fell apart.
The pressure I was under before was nothing to what I now experienced. I had been used to hearing I was the best, the golden boy. Now I was competing with others of similar or greater talent, and I was terrified. It was then I discovered pills could give me the lift I needed when exhausted, whiskey could bring oblivion. I was courting disaster, but the downward spiral gathered momentum and I did nothing to save myself. Always impatient, I became belligerent and argumentative. I didn’t, on several occasions, show up for lessons, and practice sessions became a thing of the past.
I quit Juilliard, probably just days before they’d have thrown me out anyway.
“You need a break, Son. A few months rest and you’ll apply to other schools.” The accusation in my father’s eyes belied his encouraging words, and my mother’s sad smile made me feel like a louse. I didn’t want to deal with any of it so I did something despicable. I disappeared.
I moved into a closet of a room in a run-down section of the Bronx, found a dishwashing job to pay the rent and keep my drinking at optimum level. Although angry and depressed, I was never tempted by the drug scene so I guess my instinct for survival wasn’t completely dead. I established a kind of routine; hanging out at the local saloon until the wee hours, sleeping late, working Wilbur’s Grill during the lunch crunch, then spending afternoons at the Tivoli where they showed old movies for a dollar entrance.
It was while I was watching Casablanca for what must have been the tenth time that I decided I’d had enough of dishwashing.
The Velvet Rhapsody wasn’t much of a place. The purple neon letters above the door proclaimed it a nightclub, but it was really no more than a dingy bar with a tuneless old upright occupying one dim corner. I was hired to play ragtime, but I played whatever I felt like playing. Management didn’t know the difference between a sonata and Joplin, and quality of entertainment wasn’t an issue with the clientele – probably couldn’t hear me above the chink of Red Dog bottles and the crunch as people trod on peanut shells that littered the cracked linoleum floor. I swung from Rachmaninoff to Bacharach, and back again. Might as well have been The Three Blind Mice.
The dark glasses were management’s suggestion, the dangling cigarette my personal innovation. I made up for the pittance they paid me by ingesting as much beer as I could swig in an evening. The booze was free, food was not, and I liked booze a lot better anyway.
I’d been there maybe a month when I noticed her. She was sitting at a table near the door, sipping wine and watching folks as they came and went. I couldn’t figure her out. If she was a hooker she sure wasn’t bothering to drum up business, but why else would an unescorted woman frequent a sleazy hole like this? She was nicely dressed, not designer type stuff, but her suede skirt and conservative blouse didn’t look like it came from Goodwill either. She was attractive in an undernourished sort of way, but I told myself I wasn’t interested. Didn’t I have enough complications without the ones she’d probably have on offer?
Removing my shades and making eye contact was a bad idea. Winking at her was worse. I did both. Rewarding me with a tentative smile she stood and, carrying her glass, approached the piano. Oh shit!
“Mind if I stand here? It’s kind of hard to hear your playing from over there.”
“It’s a free country.”
She leant against the piano, drumming her fingers in time to the music. For a couple of hours she stood there, taking a break now and then to head for the bar, returning with a refill for herself and a double for me. I appreciated the whiskey, it not being free like the beer.
We continued this way for several nights – her leaning on the piano, me sipping Jack Daniels between numbers and pretty much ignoring her. Then that became tedious so during breaks, feigning nonchalance, I began to ask questions.
“You in the business?”
“The business? What bus--? Oh, um, yes. Yes I am.” She lifted her chin and looked at me with large brown eyes that seemed to hold some sort of challenge, although I had no idea what that challenge might be.
“You don’t seem to have much of a client load. What’s your name?”
“Fleur. Fleur Farmington.”
She told me she lived in one of those classy brownstones over on Park. I figured from that bit of information she had a regular customer who was paying the rent. Maybe she entertained him during his lunch hour, leaving her with the evenings free. I told her my name was Jake something or other, which of course it was not. Spun some yarn about being recently released from the state pen.
I was beginning to have fun.
A pattern developed. I’d play the piano, she’d supply the booze and we’d indulge in light banter back and forth. I suppose you could say we became friends. There was, however, a moot understanding that information shared was voluntary. Trouble was I was becoming increasingly relaxed with Fleur, and fast developing the need to tell her the truth about myself. I resisted. Truth from me might mean she’d follow suit, and I suspected I wasn’t ready for that.
Then one night she caught me off-guard.
“You know, Jake, you act like a loser but I don’t think your heart’s really in it. There’s something about you that tells me you’re used to better things; that your life has gone in an unanticipated direction. I like you, Jake, although you probably don’t want to hear that.”
“Most people aren’t what they seem. Has your life gone the way you want?” That last sentence came out involuntarily, because I most certainly did not feel like dealing with what she was into. But I was safe because she didn’t take the bait.
“No, it hasn’t,” she said, and let the matter drop.
“Why’re you so skinny?” I felt particularly nasty that night. She ignored that too.
Several evenings later I learned that I hadn’t completely dodged the bullet.
“Jake, how about we get together later? Come over to my place for a nightcap.”
Her words again caught me off guard, but more so the air of bravado with which she uttered them – as though she’d had to pluck up courage to extend the invitation. Maybe she was new at the game. Yes, that must be it.
“No strings attached, Jake. Okay?”
I stared at her hard, and thought I caught a sheepish expression flit across her face.
“Sure, Fleur. I’ll come.”
She scribbled on a napkin, and handed it to me. “Here’s my address.” See you about one.” She headed for the door, seeming anxious to escape now the offer had been made.
I spent the next hour debating.
I liked her.
Paying for sex was something I’d never done.
Maybe it would be for free. Sort of a favor for a friend.
Either way would cause complications I didn’t need, so I went home to bed.
Fleur didn’t show up the next night, or the one after that. I stared at the door, willing her to appear.
I approached The Rhapsody’s bouncer.
“Hey, Charlie. You know Fleur, the woman who hangs around the piano?”
“Nope.”
“Wondered if maybe she came in on Tuesday when I was off?”
“Nope.”
Dialogue wasn’t Charlie’s forte.
I knocked on the door of No. 8 Park.
A stranger answered. She was young, little more than twenty-three; twenty-five at the most. The paleness of her cheeks emphasized the red puffiness around her eyes. She looked familiar.
“Sorry to bother you. I’m looking for Fleur.”
“You must be mistaken. Nobody by that name lives here.”
Dragging out the scrap of paper Fleur had given me, I handed it to her. "I’m looking for this address.”
“This is the address but, as I said, nobody called Fleur lives here. Look, I’m in kind of a hurry…”
“Do you know anybody in the neighborhood who--”
She sighed, looked annoyed. “What’s the last name?”
“I don’t… Wait… It’s Farming… Yes, Farmington. That’s it.”
Her expression was odd.
“That was Flo… That was my sister’s name. But her name was Florence – Florence Farmington.”
“Is she here?”
“Are you a friend of hers?”
“Yes.”
“How well did you know her?” She was suspicious now.
“Look, I really need to talk to her.”
“Florence is dead.” She slammed the door in my face.
I was too stunned to feel upset, that would come later. But I needed to know what had happened to Fleur. I bought a paper and checked the obituaries.
Unnoticed among the mourners at the funeral parlor, it was easy for me to copy names from the guest book.
I hit the money with the third call, the two previous women having hung up after asking questions to which I could not supply answers.
“Yes, Florence and I were friends. We kind of lost touch a couple of years ago, right after she got sick. She didn’t seem to want to talk to me any more, and I just let it go. I feel terrible I didn’t push her more. Maybe it wouldn’t have happened. Look, I knew Fleu—Florence from way back. I’ve been out of the country for a while and I don’t know what happened to her. I don’t feel I should bother the family right now, you know how that is. Anyway, she mentioned your name to me once and…”
“She did?”
“Yeah, said you were a good friend.”
“Oh. Well, um, okay. Florence died of an overdose of painkillers. She had cancer you see. I guess it all got too much for her. If only I’d stayed in touch. She refused to have anything to do with any of our old crowd, almost like she was ashamed of her illness or something, or maybe she just didn’t want us feeling sorry for her. All I know for sure is that we let her down.”
I’d been wondering why Fleur pretended to be a prostitute, and now I thought I had the answer. She had, at first anyway, assumed I was the type to seek the company of only a certain kind of woman, and I’d certainly provided her the opening she needed for the lie. Perhaps the night she invited me for a nightcap she’d have admitted the truth. In any event, she had wanted company. And what had I done? I’d made assumptions about the invitation that had probably not been true. I too had turned my back on a friend.
There was no sudden epiphany, no sudden finding of the right path, no decision to mold myself into a better person. Things just got worse. I told myself Fleur was only somebody I’d run into in a bar, and I bore no responsibility for her demise. But I was unable to shake the lousy feelings, and I sunk into deeper depression and self-pity. I quit showing up for work.
One night I arrived on my parents’ doorstep, drunk, filthy, half starved. I still have no recall of the days leading up to that final degradation.
Rehabilitation was a long, slow process. I suffered pain, both physical and emotional, and more than one setback. My family stood by me through it all, and Lord knows, I did not deserve their support and encouragement. Even I, miserable human being that I was, couldn’t let them down again so I stuck it out. After many weeks drying out in a private clinic, and several months of serious head shrinking, I started to think I might get things together.
I began to play the piano again.
I read through the newspaper story once more, with a mixture of sadness and elation; sadness for the loss of Fleur, elation because I’ve climbed out of a deep, dark pit and come a fair distance on the path back to respectability. There are places where stumbling is a threat, an example being my daily longing for a drink. I’m told that will become easier with time, although right now I can’t foresee that it will. I’m in class again, working on my Masters and hoping to teach music eventually.
I’m also writing music. There’s something that’s been going around and around in my head for a while now. The melody is haunting, but it’s too simplistic. The piece I envision has more layers, textures that a listener will uncover only after listening many times.
I shall call it “Fleur” once it’s done.
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