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to her.
    Linny Wallace came back from the ladies’ room. A pair of blue jeans and a white blouse that shone like silk, with a high collar. Her lips gleamed like a polished apple. She had bound her straight blonde hair up in a knot.
    It was Saturday night, things were at their zenith. Saturday night was a ledge with on one side the week past and on the other the week to come – it was precisely atop that ledge with the steep slope of duty on either side that they felt free and came with their requests. The bar of the Schooner was transformed into a honky-tonk with the ‘Maple Leaf Rag’, and a cluster of men at the bar sang along with the refrain to Tom Jones’ ‘Delilah’. Oh yes, I was worth every penny. Linny was being chatted up by two men at the bar, they were in high spirits. Over the course of the evening the same boy who had waited on me that afternoon brought me two more daiquiris, sublimely mixed by Mike Leland. (I know there are those who say that you’re no credit to your profession if you drink while you’re playing. What can I say?) A nervous man came over to me and asked if I could play some Erroll Garner.
    ‘I don’t play Erroll Garner,’ I said with a wink, ‘I play Ludwig Unger playing Erroll Garner.’
    Then I played ‘Misty’ for him. He looked around triumphantly from atop his bar stool, ready to tell anyone who would listen about his proclivity for Erroll Garner, but Linny was already engaged. One of the men she was talking to fetched three pints of Guinness; maybe they were hoping to have sandwich sex with her later on in their room. English girls do the weirdest things when they’ve had a few.
    After Leland had served the last round, I launched into Randy Newman’s ‘Lonely at the Top’.
    I’ve been around the world
    Had my pick of any girl
    You’d think that I’d be happy
    But I’m not
    I got up from the piano and slid onto the barstool next to Linny’s. Leland mixed me the final daiquiri of the day. The bar was emptying out. The man who’d asked to hear Erroll Garner said goodnight, all , but too quietly; I was the only one who heard.
    ‘You disappointed someone terribly this evening,’ Linny said. ‘A woman. I heard her tell her husband: he’s got to be the only pianist in the world who doesn’t know anything from Schindler’s List.’
    ‘A couple of weeks ago a woman stomped out of the bar because I didn’t launch into something from The Lion King . “Hakuna Matata”. Jesus Christ.’
    We drank in silence. The lime juice snapped at my gums.
    ‘Piano man . . .’ she said.
    I laughed quietly.
    She asked, ‘Is that something you become by mistake?’
    ‘By mistake is pretty much it. And it’s not hard to imagine that one day, by mistake, you stop being one too.’
    ‘So how does a boy from Alburgh mistakenly come to play piano in a bar?’
    I mulled that one over.
    ‘That’s a magic question,’ I said then. ‘The answer is a bridge that runs from then to now, from my very first memories to this very moment.’
    I told her about the city where I was born, Alexandria. Dutch mother, Austrian father. We lived in Kafr Abdou, a district popular with expats because it lay out of the way of the roar of hundreds of thousands of cars and millions of people – that infected larynx from which rose the hellish scream of sirens and honking and cursing. One day my father, an artist, failed to return from a trip abroad. Cut and run, halfway through the first verse. His shoes still beside the door, cigarettes still on the table. Not all failed marriages dissolve in strife and pain, sometimes it goes with a single sweep of the sword. I couldn’t remember any real split-up or any major sorrow. It had flown noiselessly, an owl in the night. It took five more years for my mother to fully realize that her husband had left her with a child and a house in Alexandria, and that he would never reply to the telegrams she sent to every corner of the globe where he happened to show his