Read Online She's Not There by Jennifer Finney Boylan - Free Book Online Page A

that stood there. There were seven pints on top of the piano now, plus the one on the music stand.
    Outside, on Oxford Street, rain was hammering down. Everyone in the pub was drenched, and the pub
smelled
like wet English people. It was a Saturday night at Mr. Pitiful’s, where I had a job playing piano in the corner. Sometimes my friend Johnny Cooper from Manchester played tenor sax with me, but he wasn’t there that night. Johnny was a student at the London School of Economics, which was right across the street from where I lived in Marylebone, just off Fitzroy Square.
    I’d been in London for four months now, studying literature. One day, I’d left my flat with an ad in my pocket that I’d torn out of the back pages of TimeOut magazine. “British Center for Gender Study,” read the ad. “Support and Information Services.”
    It was a long walk down to Soho, but it was pleasant enough to follow Tottenham Court Road down toward Oxford Street and Piccadilly. The British Center for Gender Study was just off Piccadilly Circus. They had counselors you could talk to.
    I got to the British Center for Gender Study, which had no sign on it. I feared it might just be some guy’s apartment, some hairy beast in a sleeveless T-shirt who would answer the doorbell and say,
Okay, c’mon in, dude. You can call me Tinky.
    I stood outside the British Center for Gender Study for a long time.
    I didn’t go in.
    The next night, in Mr. Pitiful’s, I was playing the blues. It was raining hard. There was something maniacal about the way I was playing. During a break, one fellow came and sat next to me and said, “Are you all right, Yank?” and I said I was fine. Then I played “Bye Bye Blackbird.”
    Mr. Pitiful’s—which was really called the Plough—was a dark cave, with a black tin ceiling and faded red velvet booths and a gas fire that always seemed to be on the edge of flickering out. It was full of old men who sat there not talking to one another, smoking. They liked hearing me play the old songs, though, and when I particularly pleased one old fart or another, he’d buy me a pint and have the bartender place it on top of the piano.
    I was pretty good at playing rinky-tink. “Me and My Shadow,” “Sugar Blues,” “Nobody Loves You When You’re Down and Out.” Occasionally I’d throw in something cheerful like “Here Comes the Sun,” but this was almost never a good idea. The denizens of the Plough didn’t come in there to get cheered up.
    As I played that night, watching the pints march down the top of the upright, I was thinking about a girl. I’d met her at a party the night before, a few hours after I’d walked toward, and failed to enter, the British Center for Gender Study.
    We’d met at a party, locked eyes across the room, and gravitated toward each other. Simultaneously we’d said, “Who
are
you?”
    She was Donna Fierenza, a student at Brown, just in London for the weekend to see her brother, Bobby. I liked him. One good thing about Bobby Fierenza was that he had a lot of chest hair. He also had a good laugh and played electric bass.
    Donna wanted to be an animator. “I’m not just talking cartoons, Boylan,” she said. I told her I was a writer, which was nice. Saying it almost made it true.
    She grabbed a bottle of Johnson’s baby powder that was sitting on the table. “Yuh ever do this?” She shook it into her hair, then my hair, turning it gray. “This is what we’ll look like when we’re old,” she said.
    As it turns out, she was wrong. I don’t look anything like that now, although I probably would if I didn’t go the salon every couple of months and pay the extra hundred dollars for foil highlights.
    Donna was from Massachusetts and had a shocking accent, which was working-class North Shore Italian:“My fatha wuhks in