NIGHT MUSIC
CHAPTER ONE
She had the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen. They shone like twin Earths rising over a lunar landscape, evoking a pulse of longing and remorse in a stranded traveler’s soul. I had never seen eyes like those, the color of Delft china, as brilliantly blue as drugstore glass, deep enough to wade in. And every once in a while when you caught her staring at the photograph on the Philco console, they sparkled like a Hollywood close-up. Not lit by tears, just memories breaching the light of day. That’s how I remember her. First the eyes. And lastly a melancholy burning in my brain that smolders still.
Delilah was thirty-three-years old when I met her. Not met her actually in the formal sense as people did in those days. We weren’t even introduced. I saw the sign in the front window, set my bag down on the sidewalk and rang her bell. It was a Tuesday, and I had slept on the oak benches at the Bus Depot on Fifth Avenue rather than cross the river and catch a streetcar to my father’s bungalow on Fremont Street. Ever since my sister Carla had snagged a good paying job with The Boeing in Seattle and left home in March, Pop was alone in the house. My abandonment was especially hard on my father. I felt the guilt weighing on my shoulders as I hunched against the light rainfall, determined to cut the tether and seek my future.
Delilah came to the door with a white turban wrapped around her hair and those bold, blue eyes staring out at me. I didn’t even notice her mouth, how sofa-cushion soft it was as it widened into an aloof gesture not unlike a regret. She wasn’t wearing any lipstick or rouge, just those incredible eyes shining like Streamliner headlights. There was no compassion in her gaze. I felt as if she were seeing right through me. I even turned to look back down the steps to
discover who was pressing on my trail, hot after the furnished room I wanted. No one there. No one I could see anyway.
“Are you here about the room?”
“Yes,” I said. “I saw the sign.”
“Well, I’m sorry, but I just showed it to a lady who wants it.”
I was driven to persistence by a pain in my backbone, stinky socks and a crick in my neck from using my duffle bag as a pillow. “Could I just take a look?”
When she looked up, her gaze caused a spark in my brain. Not much in itself, but in that second, my life changed course.
