good boy.â The sight of him should have repelled me totally.
âIâll play more for you,â he said, moving toward the piano. âCome and sit beside me.â
I did. He began to play and sing, his voice gruff and pained, and, despite its rustiness, clearly professional.
I listened and as I listened, something in me started to break. I couldnât stand it anymore. I looked sideways at him, maybe I put my hand on his to make him stop the music. âMatthew,â I said, âWho are you? Where did you come from?â
He stared at me. Fear danced in the deep eyes, a small white figure gyrating in the distant blackness. âI am who I said I was and I am from where I said I was from.â
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
I KEPT MY EYES on him.
âI donât care about your wonderful house or your marvellous career or your important contacts,â I told him. âAll I care about is the wonderful person Iâve seen inside you. If you have some terrible problem, itâs all right. Iâll care about you anyway.â
He smiled. âThatâs very sweet,â he said, âbut â¦â
And then I told him about the song. About the fact that it was credited to someone else. He jumped to his own defence immediately. He said heâd allowed the other person to take credit because heâd been so young himself at the time. He saidâjust as my brother had saidâthat the songbooks were often wrong. And then he began to play several famous songs that had been recorded by well-known singers but written by lesser-known composersâto prove that such mistakes were often made.
Then he sang me two songs Iâd never heardâlovely songs that he said were also his. He told me that if I wanted a list of people to call about him, heâd be happy to supply names and numbersâbut then the mystery would be gone. âYou, too,â he said to me, âare full of mystery.â He played a little longer, then told me more about his wonderful houseââourâ house. He tried to teach me to sing one of the pretty songs heâd written. Then he asked me once again to take him home.
Back out in the night, the weather was wilder than ever, but a frenetic joy seemed to have overtaken Matthew as we hailed a cab. Despite the now bitter cold, he wrapped me in his coatâleaving him in only the panther sweater. He kept saying, âIâll get sick and youâll have to take care of me â¦.â
In the cab, he couldnât seem to stop kissing me nor to restrain himself from declaring, âYou are the love of my life.â
We decided we were starved and we headed for the Terminal, but first I had a package I had to drop off at the place where I did volunteer work. It was, by now, 11 p.m., and I felt reckless and young and important. It was the first time in my life Iâd ever taken a taxi to one place and asked it to wait while I completed an errand before going on to another place. I left my purse in the back seat of the cab as I ran to the door, through freezing rain, to deliver my parcel. I heard Matthew give instructions to the cab driver as though he often took cabs from one place to several others. He said heâd wait for me in the back.
When we got to the Terminal, he told me heâd spent all his money on the drugs, so I paid for the cab.
The streets were slick with frozen rain. Holding onto each other for dear life, we slid our way from the cab to the door of the Terminal, and giggling, burst in out of the hostile night. Matthew threw off his coat and insisted that he had to sit in the booth on the same side of the table as me, so that we touched all along one side as I ate.
He seemed enormously happy and was full of talk about our future. He loved to talk about how he would go out on the road and I would be waiting for him in our house. He expressed fear that I might be lonely there. I asked him whether any of the band