Play

Rachel Myerson

Liv met Benny at a birthday party. Chocolate cake, green balloons, and a row of bottles on a windowsill for the grown-ups, untouched because everyone was exhausted. Benny drank. He walked in late, after they’d sung “Happy Birthday” and children had ground cake into the beige rug. The hosts exclaimed “Benny came!” like he was famous and poured whiskey into a paper cup. He looked famous: tall enough to duck through the door, slabs of white teeth, and an emperor’s nose her grandmother would have adored. She’d always warned Liv never to trust a man with a small nose. A face needs character, she liked to say. Liv hadn’t understood until now. She wanted that nose pressed against her. To run a finger down its jagged edge. 

The first thing she noticed, though, were his feet. They were much larger than your average big feet, clownish. So big he probably had a difficult time finding shoes, couldn’t just walk into any old shop and buy a pair, like Liv’s husband had that morning while she waited for him outside, rocking their baby to sleep in the stroller. He’d worn his new shoes out the shop, glowing neon white in the weak winter daylight, and walked them home. She’d continued on to the birthday party, relieved and resentful.

The baby was still asleep in the stroller, parked in the hallway. She’d slept through all the screaming and relentless Disney songs and the front door opening and closing as people came and went. Liv sat up too straight in a ring of mismatched seats circling the living room, waiting for her to wake up. She made dreary small talk with the man on her left, then watched the rain. Nothing exciting happens anymore, she thought, before Benny came. 

He took up so much space, though he hunched his shoulders inwards, like he was trying to shrink, and sat quietly in the corner. Liv tried not to stare but he was the most interesting thing in the room, in the city. He didn’t look up as she walked past to check on the baby, still deeply asleep, breathing sweet and sour. So beautiful. 

When Liv returned, her chair had been taken by a mum she recognized from the park and didn’t want to talk to. She didn’t want to talk to anyone but Benny. She wondered if he’d complain about the party later to a fresh-faced girl with no bra who knew where to buy his shoes. If he’d roll his eyes at the knotty-haired mothers breathlessly exchanging breastfeeding tips, the germy children bouncing off the walls or, worse, forget to mention it. When the seat opposite him freed up she launched herself onto it. He ignored her again. The Disney playlist finally ended, and rain thrashed against the window, filling the quiet.

Benny stood up and, keeping his head down, collected the dirty paper cups and bowls of half-eaten cake, stacking them neatly. Liv watched his empty seat nervously. He threw them in the trash then sat back down and stretched out his legs, long and gangly, plugged with dirty cream sneakers. She wiggled her foot away, afraid he’d stomp on her toes, and wished she’d worn better socks. Maybe if hers were black instead of mismatched shades of pink he wouldn’t dismiss her as one of the moms. 

She was and she wasn’t one of them. There was more life in her. It fizzed and gurgled, wanting to come out. She thought too much about flashing a stranger from her bedroom window, piercing her tongue, running away. 

“Hi,” she said, loudly. 

Benny caught her gaze and dropped it. He was tanned, like he’d just come back from vacation, like if she got close enough, she’d smell the bottom of the ocean on him. 

“I’m Liv. What’s your name?”

“Benny,” he said to the floor. He was shy! How ludicrous. She shuffled her toes back, grazing the cloudy sole of his shoe. 

“I had a piano teacher called Benny at school,” she said. It was a lie. He was called Daniel, and a pervert. He liked to share the stool and rub his thigh against hers as she plodded through her scales. 

Once, he locked them inside the music room. At dinner, she mimicked him thrashing the key around, swearing when the door wouldn’t open, and laughed so hard lasagna caught in her throat. “WHAT?” her mother screeched and whacked her on the back. That was the end of piano lessons. 

“I’m a piano teacher,” he said, looking into her eyes for the first time. His were green, the rarest color. “Well, I teach on the side.” 

Liv glanced around the room, which had begun to empty out, children zipping their jackets while the hosts washed up. She leant in closer. It felt illegal to be talking like this, but of all the lies she could have told… “I’ve been thinking about taking up piano again,” she said, snatching the cosmic nudge like it was the last slither of cake. 

He blinked. It was impossible to tell if he was stoned or bored. Neither were acceptable; she wanted to dazzle him. “I had to stop because he groped me.” 

Now Benny looked aghast. She twitched with pity, then annoyance. How was he so innocent? Liv looked away, checking if the rain had stopped. She didn’t have time for this.

“I can teach you.” His eyes were back on her. His lips were parted, like he was breathing heavily. And that nose. She’d never seen one so erotic. They looked at each other for a long time. 

“Ok.” 

*

Benny lived on a boulevard lined with old trees so tall they blocked the light. The leaves smelt heady, like tomato vines, and sheltered the bicycles beneath from the rain, which hadn’t stopped since the party last week.

To get to him, Liv had to climb a spiral staircase to the fifth floor. Each step announced her assent with an echo, and when she got to the top she could barely breathe. Heartbeats rolled around her chest, competing for space, like when her baby somersaulted inside her, limbs rippling across her stomach, alarmingly close to the surface. 

Benny swung open the door before she knocked, revealing a long room flanked with half-shuttered windows. It was empty except for a huge piano, right in the middle, and a cream, boucle-covered armchair to one side. The chair of a woman. Liv walked inside, hunting for hints of her. There was nothing. 

The apartment was a different, static sort of lonely to her chaotic one. More sad than scary. “Nice place.” 

Benny, still standing by the door, shrugged. “I need to decorate.” 

“How did you get the piano inside?” 

Benny walked to the windows. Pink Vs cut through his bare feet, tanned and enormous. So he had been on vacation. He snapped the shutters close so the room, briefly, turned black, then slid them open. Branches tumbled in; the tops of the trees, they were that high up. Suddenly, the room was spectacular. “I hired a crane.” He smiled, at ease here, and she envied him. 

It would have been better to stay home and sleep, make up for the night before, when she’d sung to her baby in the shadows, flickers of her grandmother’s ghost behind them, just out of reach. The tiredness crumpled in and she went to the armchair. It was musty and soft like a childhood blanket. 

She heard Benny’s feet padding against the stone tiles as he left her, but her head was too heavy to turn. Tears strained against the back of her throat. She wouldn’t be able to hold them back for long. 

He returned with tea, pink like medicine, in a tall glass with no handle, hot enough to burn her fingertips. As she set the glass on the floor to cool, a shoal of pink splattered onto the base of the chair. Benny smiled at her again from the piano stool, like he didn’t mind that the chair would be stained with her forever. Hold me, she wanted to say, but he didn’t hear her over the music.

The song was slow and somnolent; an empty lullaby, or the soundtrack of a haunted house. Liv didn’t like it. And she didn’t like the way Benny flicked his wrists as his fingers roamed the keys, an unexpected flourish that made her stomach twinge. He wasn’t supposed to perform for her. He was supposed to play—intuitively, cosmically—that song, the one that existed between night and day, that brought her grandma back so they could sit, embracing, on the comfortable chair, admiring his emperor’s nose. 

But she stayed anyway, her tears dirty with the mascara she’d worn to be beautiful, because it was easier to be lonely here. Easier than returning to her new baby and her husband with new shoes who thought they were the same sort of “new,” waiting for her on a street with no trees.