Poco a Poco (Ma Non Troppo)

Emily jumped visibly every time the store’s electric door chime sounded.

Jesus, relax already, Nikki said. He probably won't even come in today.

Roger Greenwood had been coming into the store every morning for several weeks now to order a cup of coffee and then stand at the counter chatting amiably about himself and the many things he knew. This fascinated Emily, who came from a place where people took care to either not know too much or to conceal that knowledge.

She'd never met anyone who made their living as a composer, even if most of it sounded like someone trying to remember a long-forgotten hymn while kittens ran back and forth across the keys. But Berkeley was turning out to be full of people engaged in pursuits she either hadn’t heard of or wouldn't have thought viable.

Roger held his spot at the counter with one boney elbow and one hand propped against his oversized head. Occasionally his long fingers would trace an unheard passage on the counter while he spoke. Eventually he'd say something like, “Well, I’ll let you get back to work,” even though Emily hadn't stopped working the entire time.

Nikki was less charmed by the daily performance. He’s a glorified piano teacher, she’d say after he left. Emily knew Roger was basically full of it. All the same, the effort he put into impressing her was very flattering.

What she couldn't figure out on this cringey Monday was why she had agreed to drive down to Half Moon Bay with him the weekend before. On the upside, she now knew that she was allergic to mussels and that she hated grappa. What bothered her was that she wasn’t sure what happened after Roger kindly yet graspingly helped her out of the car and up to her apartment.

First place

Emily Lillibridge got her first apartment in Berkeley by way of Aaron Spink, the older brother of a high school classmate. Aaron and his wife Deena lived in the modest one-bedroom a few blocks south of the UC campus while they attended seminary. When Aaron finished, they went off to the Philippines for a three-year mission project. Since the apartment was rent-controlled they held on to the lease and sublet to a series of students.

Aaron warned Emily over the phone that the place wasn't anything special. When Emily arrived after work on Friday with her first load of stuff, she found that the place was, in fact, a pit.

The counters and stovetop were deep in grease and the oven harbored the traumatic memory of some ill-conceived experiment involving curry, pickles and offal. The bathtub was several shades of tan and stank of patchouli and the toilet wore a fuzzy green boa. The only windows in the unit faced north onto a yard with a tall sequoia in it and beyond that an apartment building even taller than her own, so the amount of natural light was minimal. The upside of this was that you were less likely to notice the carpet, a low-pile number that had started off as a questionable combination of brown and green and only grown more repulsive in the unwashed decade that followed its installation.

Emily went out that evening to buy cleaning supplies and rent a carpet steamer. She spent most of the weekend on her knees or in some kind of a crouch, scrubbing, scouring, wiping and polishing. By Sunday evening her back and shoulders and thighs and calves were screaming, but the job was done and place was hers.

She was just getting out of the rickety old elevator, on the way back up from her last trip to the dumpster, she ran into Kenji and Dale from down the hall. They were going up to the roof and said she should come too. She started to protest but they laughed and pressed her back into the elevator with them and hit the button for the top floor.

It had rained off and on all afternoon, rinsing the air of its usual haze and after two days stooped over, the view from the rooftop staggered poor Emily. In the west, the setting sun reflected thousands of times, from cars on the bridges in the bay and from the windows of the towers of the city as it sank toward the sea beyond. In the east, the tree-covered hills seemed to leap toward the sky.