This chapter is the heart of this story and the reason why I wrote it. The other three chapters just grew around this one.
Musical theatre nuts will notice many familiar references here, but for easier comprehension I have put together a playlist of all the songs mentioned in this chapter: youtube dot com/playlist?list=PLAjqYHNCc8WDkyPPq_Fx0GD52o2ECM1JE&si=hGCddWWMuKZfRMZ6
Another miracle that Loretta's exuberant presence brought into their home was revealed to Oliver on a Sunday afternoon about a fortnight into Loretta's living at the Arconia, when he returned from a trip to the playground with his grandchildren, whom his love was still too intimidated to meet.
He forewent announcing his presence with a hello when he heard Loretta call herself a witch, and carefully stepped through his apartment towards the kitchen, accompanied by a powerful belt, "You're the world!"
The haunting lines that followed rung a distant bell in Oliver's mind and by the time he appeared in the kitchen doorway, he was fully aware of Loretta singing the culmination of an old Broadway hit he used to love and desperately fight to get out of his head when the main theme had started to annoy his wife a little too much.
A glorious vision in her lacy cherry-print apron, Loretta was, apparently, cooking. As inexperienced of late as he was in the kitchen, Oliver concluded that the swift twirls and the graceful swinging of the hips with which she was gliding around the tiny room were added for aesthetic rather than culinary effect. She was smiling far too brilliantly for the original message of the song to come through – rather than that, she was tasting and enjoying the notes and the poetry in itself, apart from its meaning.
She had not noticed Oliver standing, completely enchanted and rooted to the ground in the doorway, and pretentiously popped two cloves of garlic into the pot simmering on the stove, cackling, "Here, you want a bean? Have another bean! Beans were made for making you rich!"
She giggled with content and with an over-done flourish of the arms grabbed two plates out of the cupboard next to the stove. Her leg stretched out pointedly but close to the ground like a ballerina's before she swung towards the opposite counter-top, hugging the plates to her chest with her eyes closed in rapture, and cocked her head to the side admiringly at the gentle clink the plates made when she placed them down.
One hand absently stirring the sauce in her own bright green pan, Loretta belted out the last verse, lingering sweetly wherever she could, and scoured the drawer underneath the counter-top for kitchen utensils. Prize in hand, she twirled again, this time, the other way. "Now before it's past midnight, I'm leaving you my last c- Oh!" She stopped mid-step and mid-verse, stumbling into a solitary spotlight in the middle of the kitchen as she became aware of her unwitting audience. "Oliver," she breathed out blankly, her smile diminishing into an uncertain one and a deep red blush rapidly starting to climb up her cheeks.
Remembering to close his amazed mouth, Oliver clapped his hands softly. "Please. Don't mind me," he said with a twinge of regret at ending this intensely intimate performance. "You're fantastic," he felt the need to add, momentarily lost for a better way to phrase his admiration.
Loretta let out an uncomfortably apologetic chuckle, fumbling to put away the forks and knives still clasped in her hand. The spell of the performance was broken but not the mood.
"I like to sing when I'm doing chores," she explained coyly, tapping her chin with her fingers – like she so often did in doubt – and leaning against the counter behind her, openly anticipating Oliver's approach. "But I always make sure people aren't around," she continued lightly when he slid his arms around her waist. "It usually annoys them."
His heart clenching with sympathy for the past experiences that must have given cause for this regretful belief, Oliver placed a gentle kiss on her lips. "Not one bit," he claimed, eliciting a tentatively hopeful smile from Loretta. Seeing his praise take effect, Oliver couldn't resist raising his tone in a magnificent crescendo in, "Don't even think about it!" before resting his forehead against hers and muttering sweetly, "I love it when you sing."
The moment was broken by a startling, rejected sizzling from the stove. Oliver jumped at the sound, and with a panicky hiss Loretta slipped out of his arms and to the stove to save the day – that is, the dinner.
From that eye-opening day forward Loretta's reticence started loosening up, one day at a time. Oliver would catch her in the middle of a riveting solo performance nearly every day, or rather whenever she was left alone long enough for the melodies to reach out of her soul which, Oliver was convinced, was composed solely of love and energy and music – and a secretly wicked sense of humour.
For an agonizing while Loretta still preferred to sing only when she was alone, or when Oliver managed to keep himself so quiet that she forgot he was around. Little by little, song by song and by carefully calculated sneaking, encouragements – and keeping silent when needed – Oliver earned his position, his first row seat to the singular show that was his beloved Loretta in her element.
There was something incredibly pure and intimate about hearing her sing without accompaniment. It was a side of her that only he was privy to, and with all its exuberant effervescence it was a fragile thing – a secret love for music and for opening herself up that she had only now dared to let heal and show. The rest of the world fell away when Oliver could listen to her distinctively deep and tender voice, and the space of the apartment was lifted out of the mundane everyday materiality and into a magical reality where seventy was the new forty and where nothing ever happened without striking a melodious chord.
Loretta was perfect without meaning to be. She improvized carelessly with the musical material by adding her very own feeling, a unique sense of art and surprising meaning to it. By being taken completely out of context, the songs became her own and, like a live puzzle, made up the crazy bombast of a musical the two of them were living in the comfort of their home.
The extent and precision of her repertoire astounded him right up until he started considering how much musical material he himself could perform off the top of his head. It takes a theatre nut to know another theatre nut, he supposed. And then he stopped being astounded and settled for amazed.
With Loretta by his side, Oliver's life was turning by the day into an actual musical. And he couldn't say he minded. His days became defined by the precious time he could spend with Loretta and by the musicals she was in the mood for. More often than not they didn't go together in the slightest with what she was doing.
One day as he went scouring for dips in the kitchen, he left Loretta curled up on the couch with her diary, and just as Oliver dug into the tzatziki, a strangely tender, "I had a dream, a dream about you, baby," wafted to him from the far reaches of the apartment.
When he poked his head back into the living room, he was met with the very surreal sight of his sweetheart purring the well-known phenomenal showstopper to her little notebook. Loretta smiled lovingly at the notes she was making, caressing the pages with her fingertips.
Oliver lingered in the doorway, hesitant to cut into this moment of solitary contentment. "Everything's coming up roses for me and for you," Loretta mused softly, precisely not how the song should be sung, and it was immensely moving.
The other day, although Oliver had assured her at least twenty times that he could take care of their two pets on his own, he caught Loretta cleaning out Mama G's cage with a blissfully lilting, "Small world, isn't it," carrying with her in and out of the bathroom where she scrubbed at the detachable cage floor.
"Lucky, you're a man who likes children," she chuckled along to the lyrics, leaning conspiratorially close to the parrot who self-righteously followed her along absolutely everywhere whenever Loretta let her out of her cage. "Lucky, I'm a woman with children," made Mrs. Gambolini bob up and down approvingly before she gently hooked her beak around Loretta's sleeve to indicate she was about to climb up to her shoulder for a ride back to the living room.
At first Oliver had even taken offence to how incredibly well Mrs. Gambolini immediately got along with Loretta, while still spitting slurs at her rightful owner. However, the feeling of forlorn rejection soon dissipated, as Loretta had a way of making everything all right – sometimes without even saying anything. Oliver remembered with tingling fondness how one morning, when as a rare treat the cheeky parrot had been allowed to join their breakfast, Loretta, chuckling good-naturedly, had reached out to him to wipe a speck of oatmeal from the corner of his mouth with her thumb and Mrs. Gambolini, copying her new favourite person, had climbed across Loretta's chest from her other shoulder to the arm extended towards Oliver, sashayed across the lithe bridge between the two people and tenderly nuzzled her beak against Oliver's cheek.
Scratching a relaxed Winnie's belly, Oliver watched his beloved fix the cage up again, with a contented Mrs. Gambolini nodding along approvingly and balancing for dear life on her shoulder. Not for the first time, Oliver was struck by how much their exotic pet made Loretta look like a happy little pirate – the kind who sits on a barrel and chants shanties instead of letting blood, and later on bandages her crew-mates up with gentle humming and a reviving peck on the temple.
"I've been thinking flowers – maybe daisies – to brighten up the room," the unwitting pirate warbled as she filled the bird's feeder, coaxed Mrs. Gambolini down from her shoulder, gently kissed the top of her head and let the Madame saunter back home.
Eventually, as Loretta became more relaxed and significantly less self-conscious, Oliver dared take part in her fun without fright of scaring or embarrassing her into sudden silence. A fine example of their collaboration happened once after Charles and Mabel had just left their place with a juicy new notion about a murder mystery Loretta had delved much too devotedly into for her own good, as she herself had admitted, and the little hostess was tidying away glasses and empty dip bowls from the table with an energetic, "With the price of meat what it is, when you get it, if you get it. Good, you got it."
The pair of them – for Oliver was in charge of inspecting the dip bowls to make sure they were empty before being placed into the dishwasher – returned, bare-handed, to the living room just in time for Loretta's, "And I'm sure they can't compare as far as taste," to allow Oliver to jump in and effortlessly take over the dashing male part of the darkly comical duet with, "Mrs. Lovett! What a charming notion, eminently practical and yet appropriate as always."
Loretta gave him a genuinely surprised, thrilled grin and missed a line when Oliver wrapped his arms around her waist and took her for a twirl around the room, and he felt his lyrics deep at his very core. "How I've lived without you all these years I'll never know!"
Torn between finishing their task and dancing the day away with his love, Oliver carefully released Loretta and wiped down the coffee table with a napkin, before disposing of the latter. Loretta followed his movements around, keeping the tempo perfectly and scrunching her nose adorably at his musical replies. It was incredible how well they harmonized without having ever even mentioned the musical to each other, let alone rehearsed it.
Entranced by the thrilling rush of the catchy waltz, they met again at the end of their deliciously fiendish verse, "It's man devouring man, my dear – and who are we to deny it in here?" They abandoned the song in favour of a hearty bout of satisfied laughter, arms loosely draped around each other, marvelling through mirth at the jackpot they had won with each other.
When their laughter settled down, the light-hearted glimmer fell away to reveal Oliver's eyes flaming with such fervent passion as he looked at Loretta that it was a safe bet that had he been a far younger – and perhaps taller – man, he would have picked her up at that very moment and carried her like a prize back to their bedroom. As it was, in the living room they remained, where Loretta, whose face was flushed and eyes twinkling wickedly, eagerly crashed her lips against Oliver's and was drawn into a tight entanglement of desire and appreciation.
For minutes afterwards they remained entwined in a comfortable embrace, the sides of their heads resting against one another, and the pair of them simultaneously realized that their shared wish to never let go was, at this moment, as plausible as it could ever get for two people.
"I've always wanted my home to be filled with music," Oliver confessed softly against Loretta's ear. It was an extremely intimate confession. Yes, he was Oliver Putnam, whose hits and flops both always sang and who always leaped at the chance to bring musical entertainment to any party, but he was also the father of a vet, who had never had his whole family voluntarily singing to pass the time and to just have fun. And now his new family – his incredible Loretta – had given him this immensely fulfilling gift, skipping and smiling gently like it was nothing.
"And more specifically, musical music," he added in a moment, taking a calming breath, and the two of them drew apart just enough to look at one another. Loretta's brilliant eyes were sparkling tenderly as if she could comprehend the full depth of Oliver's words.
"The whackier the better," he chuckled, his gaze caressing the lovely features of the precious woman in his arms. "I want to walk into a gory murder plot of a waltz when I come home. I want to be played out of the kitchen with a little bit too early Christmas or belting good-bye to blueberry pie."
Loretta let out a tinkling laugh, her sweet sentimental eyes tearing up. "Thank you," she whispered, seizing in that single breath her admiration and love for his vulnerable openness and her gratitude for his acceptance of a quirky old girl who couldn't control the lilting voices in her head.
Some musicals got more stage time than others – some by accident and some for good reason. It was a very rare day when Henry Higgins had to wait, but a much more frequent occasion when they were opening new windows. Setting aside the fact that the vocal range of the lead was great for Loretta, Oliver sometimes wondered why he was so often sung to have brought the cakewalk back into style during laundry and why they always needed a little Christmas, until one day he caught Loretta sniffling out a gentle, heart-wrenching rendition of a love song for Loretta's no-longer-but-for-a-long-while-estranged son.
Oliver knew for a fact that she had had some sort of a squabble with Dickie, for this time he had stayed behind in LA when she flew back home. He didn't press her to share and he was more than convinced that she would mend the pieces the moment she got back to the West coast, but it was still difficult to watch her, for once accurately themed, outpouring of sorrow as Loretta flipped through her dear scrapbook. "Though I'll ask myself my whole life long: What went wrong along the way?" she sniffled with a vulnerable tremble in her raw voice. "Would I make the same mistakes if he walked into my life today?"
Oliver was all for expressively working through one's feelings but even he knew the limit at which wallowing in self-pity started weighing on the mind a little too much. For Loretta that was when she started musing about how "children can only grow from something you love to something you lose", and it was at that moment that Oliver decided to jump in and take her out to get dips and forget about her worries for a while.
It was extraordinary how much fun Loretta could have in a typical day. Everything she touched became special and alive with a kind of unforced light that only she could spread. And when they were riding the elevator down to meet their friends at the Pickle Diner, the little space became their very own stage when Loretta effortlessly parodied a Webber showstopper, "Well, all you need to know's that Charles is paying."
Her liveliness was infectious; however, it was rare that Oliver managed to come up with just the song he was in the mood for. He had forbidden himself from singing Death Rattle Dazzle at home after three weeks of performances in fear of it taking the magic out of the show. More often than not he was inclined to sing about Loretta, sometimes implicitly and then again, sometimes quite directly. She seemed to always know which song would hit the right spot and bring her peace of mind; he had to think, the right melody didn't just float out of him, like it seemed to do for Loretta.
Even so, in this new jolly cabaret that was his life, it was nothing out of the ordinary when he found himself ploughing through the materials scattered around his study with a rousing, "Come, friends, who plough the sea, truce to navigation, take another station. Let's vary piracy with a little burglary!" and heard a supportive, playfully gravelly, "Ta-ran, ta-ra!" from another room.
And it was nothing unexpected of him to trumpet out a lively, "Nothing else is built the same, nothing in the world," as he picked out his outfit for the day and with a boyish spring in his step marched into the kitchen to check if the colour scheme and his scarf matched with Loretta's dress today. "Has a soft and wavy frame, like the silhouette of a dame."
Loretta giggled to herself at his choice of song, her cheeks tinted approvingly with healthy flattery, and wiggled her shoulders with girlish playfulness – a vision of sunny contentment at the stove. It wasn't that she was just beautiful – and that word didn't even quite cut it – everything captured in that two-braided silhouette was so uniquely enchanting, from her kindness and good humour to the tragic wisdom and purity that glinted in her eyes when you caught her gaze at the right moment.
She could fill an entire room with her presence even when she hid timidly in a corner. And she could light up the very room with a gentle twitch of her lips without ever meaning to. She appeared blissfully unaware of how special she was whenever she absently went dancing around the apartment, light as a young girl, her eyes drawn to a new script, dreaming, "Matchmaker, matchmaker, make me a match," as if she didn't realize that she had already found her perfect match.
This even happened to become a subject of gut-wrenching trepidation for a fleeting instance one evening when Oliver sauntered home after spending hours on end traipsing around town with Charles and Mabel, hot on the heels of a compelling conundrum of a clue. He had grown accustomed to her warmly tingling voice welcoming him home, whether she was actually talking to him or humming obliviously to herself. In his heart Loretta had been placed into the middle of the inexplicable feeling they called home, and it was now always incomplete when she was over in LA for work.
This particular Thursday she was home, as was proven by the running water and the ballad carrying towards Oliver from the kitchen, managing in one swoop to wrap him in warm comfort and to sprinkle a pinch of worry into his frail heart.
"You have your work and nothing more! You are possessed," Loretta was singing. Although her voice was anything but accusatory, Oliver was suddenly overcome by the pressing guilt of being absent. He had been on the case, as he liked to say, for the past week, and although he didn't keep track, he was convinced that during this time Loretta had had more lunch engagements with Mrs. Gambolini than with him.
Both his heart and his feet dragged Oliver straight into the kitchen where he wished to soothe the ache of exclusion that must have been troubling Loretta. When he rounded the corner, he found her at the sink, scrubbing with a generous, graceful twist of the wrist at a bright yellow sauce pan while in her throat formed the following troubling lines, "There's something strange, there's something wrong. I see a change – it's like when love dies."
An unaccountable, terrible fear invaded Oliver at this tenderly nostalgic musing, and he experienced a sudden fierce animosity towards the infuriatingly precise librettist.
He must have made a sound because the blonde braids he adored so much swung sharply to the side and Loretta greeted him with a radiant smile at the end of the verse. "Hi," Oliver replied distractedly, wandering purposefully to her side.
Loretta resumed doing the dishes and gently humming the repeating haunting melody as Oliver keenly took in her peaceful profile, which fluttered with frequent mischievous side-ways glances.
It was an absurd, ridiculously pressing worry and he felt completely stupid to ask, "Do you mean it? The song, I mean." Trying to brush off the sneaking unease in his gut, he put on an unbothered smile that didn't reach his eyes and added, "Wh-what you were singing."
"What?" Loretta said softly, distracted by washing her hands. After a beat she recalled what she had been singing and laughed almost nonchalantly, in a pensive but light-hearted way that coaxed the worry to leave Oliver's mind, "Oh, no! No!"
She dried her hands in a kitchen towel before twirling his way. "It's just a song. Half the time I don't know what I'm singing about," she admitted, grabbing him gently by the shoulders and placing a decidedly lingering kiss on his cheek.
Returning to her task, she picked up the sauce pan and started drying it with the towel. "If anything, it should be the other way around," she mused as she stepped over to the cupboard to put the pan away. "I'm the one who's away at work way too often."
Casually she resumed humming as she adjusted the pots and pans in the packed cupboard. Then with a jerk, she turned back to him, and her eyes were wide with fond concern. "You weren't- You weren't worried, were you?"
"Oh, no, no…" Oliver waved it off with feigned ease.
"Oh, Oliver…" Loretta muttered, effortlessly seeing through his unworried front. Her head tilted to the side, she fixed him with an affectionate gaze, and wrung her hands together in front of her. Even from the length of the kitchen, Oliver was focussed solely on her tender sparkly eyes.
"I've never been so happy as I am with you – and I've never… never ever loved anyone… like this."
She took Oliver's breath away. Loretta looked so simple and yet thoroughly ethereal as she confessed her deepest feelings to him, blooming there in the middle of their kitchen. She didn't see any reason for playful evasiveness and there was no mystery about her. The personification of purity, she poured out her heart to him like it was the most natural thing to do – although her breath trembled.
There was a beat of light breathless silence, and Loretta dropped her hands limply to her sides. Blissful tears of relief welled up to glisten in her eyes and she confided in a little, earnest voice, "And I would very happily live in this moment forever."
With an enormous effort Oliver broke out of his adoring trance and hurried – almost flew – forward, wanting nothing more than to show this precious woman how ardently and wholeheartedly he reciprocated her feelings. Loretta smiled up at him with brilliant panicky delight as Oliver wrapped her in his generously possessive embrace. Cradling his beloved, Oliver became exhilaratingly aware that Loretta's last song included a passing, "You found a wife."
It was clear that she meant it about not wanting anything to change. About a week later Oliver happened upon her in their bedroom, dreamily untangling her braids for the night as she softly crooned, "If music is no longer lovely, if laughter is no longer lilting, if lovers are no longer loving, then I don't want to know."
The song – completely out of original character – swayed calmly through the still evening, warmly defiant of everything outside of their little fairy tale life.
"So if, my friends, if love is dead, I don't want to know."
Although they spent most of their time fully enjoying the fact that they were no longer alone, the lavish vastness of the Arconia apartment allowed them to sometimes lose track of one another. One particular afternoon, sitting at the dining table and having been editing away at the podcast for what seemed like an eternity, Oliver was struck by the realization that he wasn't aware of whether Loretta was home or not.
He sat still for a minute, staring down the empty hallway and listening keenly. Then, on a whim, he warbled into the warm silence, "Do you love me?"
There was a beat of a delay before a perfectly in tune, "Do I what?" echoed back to him from the living room, where Loretta was, in all likelihood, reading.
"Do you love me?" Oliver repeated patiently, grinning at the comfortable silliness that had grown out of their first moment of harmonizing at the piano on that first disastrous opening night.
A lengthy pause followed, a consideration perhaps of the rest of the song and its message.
"Yes, I love you," Loretta rewrote the lyrics to the uniquely alluring melody.
Oliver gave a peacefully contented nod and resumed his work, and all was right with their little world.