“I don’t care if you are making the worst decision of your life,” Pierrot said. “Because I want you to belong to me so badly.”
It was very short. She liked that. They went into a door single and unmarried, and came out a couple. Just like a transformation that occurred in a magician’s box.
They had a dollar that Mimi had given to them as a wedding present. They had to decide what to do with it. They decided on getting their photo taken. When they each saw how nice and cleaned up the other one looked in the photo, they were delighted they had chosen to have their photos taken that day. It was a black-and-white photograph. For reasons he could not even be sure of himself, the photographer decided to add a touch-up to the photograph. He took a little paintbrush and added a dab of pink paint to both of Rose’s cheeks.
? ? ?
“LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, I am giving a toast to a girl I have known my whole life. We were left as babies at the same orphanage. We were put in cribs that were adjacent to one another. And the moment I turned my head and saw her on the other side of the bars, I said, I’m going to propose to that baby.”
At one point in the evening Pierrot sat beside the pianist. They engaged in a four-hand tune that sounded like a hundred pianists playing all at once. As the girls in the bar began to feel tired their heads sank forward, as though they were lost in reading novels on the train.
Pierrot had tied soup cans to the back of his bicycle. They made a rattling, clattering, wonderful sound, like a drunk party girl falling down the stairs with bottles in her hand. There was a nip in the air. Later that night they sat on the rooftop, wrapped together in a blanket, and looked up at the constellations in the sky. Rose knew what they were from looking through the telescope at McMahon’s house. But she decided to rename them all for Pierrot.
“There’s the Unicorn. See its long magical horn?”
“Oh yes!”
“There’s the Pony with the Broken Leg.”
“Don’t look at that constellation. It’ll make us too sad.”
“Look at the Cartwheeling Girl.”
“That one’s my favorite.”
“I like the Girl Who’s Puking over the Toilet after the Orgy.”
“She needs to slow down!”
“The Boy Blowing Out His Birthday Candles.”
“Oh! How old is he?”
“Eleven,” they say at the same time.
“All I want, Pierrot, is for you to be happy. I can’t make myself happy. Nobody can really make themselves happy. But they can make other people happy.”
“Don’t say that! Don’t ever worry about me. If ever I’m standing in the way of your happiness, I swear I will throw myself right off a roof. All I want is for you to be happy. I’m broken, and you’re perfect. You come first.”
“No.”
“Yes, I insist. Please. It will make me so happy if we just agree on that.”
“Okay. I love you, Pierrot. You’re the only thing and person I’ve ever loved.”
“What did I do to deserve someone as wonderful as you? If I knew I was going to die tomorrow, I wouldn’t mind, because this is the perfect feeling. It doesn’t get any better than this in the entire universe.”
Rose’s white undergarments were all over the floor—like eggshells on the ground. They felt silly because they both began to cry.
45
NOCTURNE IN PINK AND GOLD
On Saturday night, sometime after closing, there was a fire on Saint Catherine Street. The Savoy Theater went up in flames, like a page in a book. Its fuse box had exploded. It was as if the building had had a heart attack. Perhaps it was just the building’s time to go. The fire trucks came, but there was nothing anyone could do. Pierrot was now out of work, like most of the pianists and just about everybody else in the city, it seemed. On top of that, Rose was also unemployed.
The landlady came right into their room on Sunday. She begged them for rent. She took Pierrot’s trousers and shook them upside down to see if any money came out. They wouldn’t get out of bed to stop her. They were too hungry and tired.
People were being evicted everywhere. Pierrot and Rose stopped on the street to allow movers to pass in front of them. The possessions of an apartment were being loaded onto a cart pulled by a white horse. There were black spots on the thighs of the white horse that looked like the footprints of children in the snow.
The movers were carrying a dusty red couch. There was a green piano among the possessions. The sound the piano made when jostled by the couch was curious and soft and lovely. Pierrot hadn’t played a piano in weeks, so there was no way he was going to pass by this one without playing it. He had resisted heroin, but there was no way he could resist this piano. He leaped onto the back of the truck and scrambled over the furniture before anyone could stop him. He sat on a kitchen table and began to play the green piano. It played so gentle and sweet.