Orfe

by Cynthia Voigt

  When Yuri wandered off with the people from the house, and we figured out where he must have gone, and Orfe went off after him and came back without him, everything changed. After that, after sorrow, there was only the last dance Orfe and the Graces played together. And after that there were only the Graces. Who, starting from their first album, for which they kept Orfe’s name, Yuri’s Dreams, have moved right into the spotlight. The Graces are music history.

  THREE

  While Jack and the rest of the Jackets accepted applause and admiration, Orfe sat on the edge of the platform. She wasn’t sitting exactly; she was more wrapped around her own stomach, to comfort it; she was mostly waiting. For the room, and her head, to clear enough so she could get out of there.

  She sensed more than saw his approach and heard him begin whatever he’d planned to say, “I’m Smiley’s friend—”

  Her head snapped up and she was answering, before she thought, “If you’re his friend, you ought to tell him he’s drugging the talent out of his hands. Out of his arms. Shooting down the drummer he could be if he wasn’t shooting up.”

  The taste of her own vomit was still in her mouth, she told me.

  Then she saw who she was talking to. Saw his dark, curly hair, the broad forehead and almost pointed chin, the dark eyes looking into hers. Saw the skin, pale under a sheen of sweat. Saw his hands jammed into his jeans, clenched. Saw what he had done to himself, was doing.

  It took a couple of seconds for his response to sink in, as if his words fell into her ears and got temporarily lost in the auricular tubes so it took them a while to get to her brain. “Smiley doesn’t shoot.”

  “You know what I mean,” she said, still trying to take him all in, not paying much attention to what she was saying. Feeling bad enough to weep, looking at him, feeling joy.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I do. I know exactly what you mean. I really hear you.” He knew, he told me, that she couldn’t understand what he was hoping she had just given him, which she couldn’t have given him unless he understood her perfectly, as she, he hoped, would understand him. Wanting so badly for her to understand, he repeated himself. “I hear you loud. I hear you clear.”

  Orfe lowered her legs, until her feet touched the floor, and stood up. She saw that he was tall, tall and skinny. Tall and skinny and strung out. It made her sad and sick. He saw all of that, although all he really saw, he said, was someone like a flame, and not just her hair, a flame like fire to burn you clean. He’d seen women like that before, he said, he’d seen women of all kinds in plenty, but never one that scorched him. Orfe scorched him.

  He lived in the house where Smiley lived, so he could ask Smiley what her name was, where she lived.

  If she had a guy. Or anything.

  Smiley was pretty fried, but he remembered the street where Orfe played. Yuri got out of the house then, because he knew what would happen if he stayed, got out and walked away what was left of the night, walked the sun up into the sky, walked away the morning, until around lunchtime he was waiting for her on the street.

  He was pretty sure she didn’t see him.

  He was wrong. Orfe saw him right away, standing in the doorway behind a moving throng of bodies, looking—if it was possible—worse than he had the night before. There was more gray in his pale skin or maybe green; his jeans and shirt looked like he hadn’t taken them off to go to bed; his hair curled lank down his neck. She didn’t much notice him or think about him, however; she had work to do.

  He was still there when she had finished, pocketed the money, and put the guitar away. He stepped out of the doorway and came toward her. She wasn’t surprised. “You look like shit,” Orfe said.

  “I feel about the same,” he said. “Are you hungry? I think I want some herbal tea—ginseng or something like that—but a place that has teas probably has food if you’re hungry, if you know any place. D’you know a place?” He knew he was having trouble making sense. He couldn’t braid his ideas right, as if he held all these different colors and thicknesses in clumsy fingers and he couldn’t get his fingers working right. He couldn’t get his mind and mouth working right. He didn’t want to scare her off.

  Orfe wasn’t scared, although it crossed her mind. She knew a place and they walked the blocks over to it, not saying much. What’s your name? they said, and Where did you grow up? and What are you doing here in the city, now?

  Yuri ordered a pot of tea. He gulped down the first cup blistering hot, and that perked him up. “I don’t want you to think I’m crazy,” he said.

  Orfe shook her head, she didn’t. “Drugged out,” she said.

  “Yeah. I know. I’m—” He didn’t want to make any promises to her, because they might turn out to be false. Not trustworthy, that was what drugs made you into. So no promises. “Listen,” he said, “when you—”

  He saw how she swung her face away at the words, as if she knew what he was going to name and was ashamed. He reached across to hold her chin and turn her face back to him—

  The softness of her skin, and the line of bone along her jaw, under the skin . . . He thought she must feel his hand shaking.

  “Listen. It’s as if—you do it for me. Get the poison out of me when you—I can’t do it for myself, I can only want to and wish I could, I can only feel like it and that’s the only feeling I have unless I can keep all that shit locked out. You know how I lock it out?”

  Orfe nodded her head. He took his hand away.

  “I’m going into detox,” he said, promising. “I haven’t—Since last night, the last time was before I saw you. Everything’s changed. You’ve changed everything.”

  “How could I?”

  “I can’t think, you know? It’s not—my head’s not—I was listening to you and I was okay.” He poured out another cup of tea. “I really liked that one,” he said, and he stumbled through a couple of lines of a song. “That one. You know?”

  “Of course I know. I sang it.”

  “Made me feel like a kid again,” Yuri said, and he looked like a happy little kid to her, for just a couple of seconds, for just a glimpse.

  “I wrote it,” she said.

  “No kidding? Then you’re really good, aren’t you?” he asked as if it didn’t surprise him in the least. As if it was the most natural thing. As if it was the way things ought to be. “That one’s the best. Except for ‘It Makes Me Sick,’ but you didn’t write that one, did you? I didn’t think so.”

  “How come?”

  He shrugged; it wasn’t something he could explain. “But you ought to know, when it makes you sick—you know?”

  Orfe looked down, hiding her face.

  “You speak for all of us,” Yuri said.

  Orfe could feel the anger in her eyes. Yuri pulled back from it, then leaned forward into it, toward her.

  “I throw up for all of you,” Orfe corrected him.

  “I didn’t think about it that way,” he said, “I just—grateful, somebody understood. That’s all I thought of.”

  “For all of us,” Orfe said.

  “I don’t blame you for hating it,” Yuri said.

  He didn’t blame her for doing it either. Of all the reactions, his was the first that touched her own.

  “I don’t think I ever want to see you doing that again,” Yuri said. “When you feel that way about it.”

  For the first time Orfe thought she might leave Jack and the Jackets sooner rather than later. Soon, in fact.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Well, okay,” he said. He was watching her, just watching. She felt, under the look in his dark brown eyes, the way the ground feels in spring, when the sun falls on it. She told me later, “He had sunlight in his eyes. I know, it sounds dippy.” It didn’t sound dippy to me.

  “Well, I wish,” Yuri said. “Like, if I could tuck you into my ear.”

  “You’d have to miniaturize me.”

  “Like Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.”

  “Like Raquel Welch in Fantastic Voyage. I won�
��t do it if I can’t be like Raquel Welch.” Orfe was laughing.

  “I’d just tuck you into my ear and take you along with me.” Yuri didn’t even feel that bad, right then, with Orfe laughing and the hot tea and hope.

  “That’s not much of a life, down inside someone’s ear,” Orfe said. “Think about it. If it was actual, it wouldn’t be any too pleasant.”

  “You could say I’m living in someone’s ear right now. If you say that, you know how it is for me. And I think I better go now.”

  Orfe nodded. Sitting there. Watching Yuri’s face, and his hands pull out a wad of money from his pocket to drop some onto the table.

  “But you wouldn’t give me something? Like that sweater? Just to take with me. Keep with me.”

  “It’s not mine.”

  “Well,” Yuri said, standing beside the table now, hands dangling at his side, knowing it shouldn’t matter so much about a sweater, if she would let him take it, if it belonged to someone else.

  “I borrowed it from a friend,” Orfe said.

  “An old friend?” Yuri didn’t know what she was telling him, and he didn’t want to know, if it was going to turn out to be something he didn’t want to know.

  “An old friend since I was a kid. Since grade school.”

  “Oh.” If he asked and she gave the wrong answer, he didn’t know what he would do. He thought he shouldn’t ask and decided not to. He could find out later, after. But what difference would it make to learn the worst right now? he asked. “A boyfriend?”

  “No. I guess Enny won’t mind about her sweater if I tell her why.”

  “Well. What will you tell her?”

  “I’ll tell her you liked my singing, my songs. She likes them too. She always did. Always—”

  But he was gone by then, out the door and onto the street, the sweater in his hands, sweat oozing down the back of his neck, down the inside of his thighs. Orfe didn’t try to follow him. She didn’t know if she’d ever see him, or my sweater, again.

  * * * * *

  Yuri never talked about his time in detox and rehab.

  * * * * *

  When the steel door closed behind Yuri, and he stood on the sidewalk under a gritty gray sky, he had a couple of addresses in his pocket for places to go next, where he could find a room with people who knew what he’d already faced and what he faced next; and who might be able to steer him to a job he could do well enough to keep it. He felt shaky, he said, and he thought he probably looked shaky too. Except not as shaky as he had weeks ago when he went in through that same steel door.

  The first thing he did was go back to the Atomic Café. Jack and the Jackets were no longer playing there, so he went to the house. He wouldn’t go inside, although he thought he could have and been all right. He didn’t go inside because he didn’t want to risk it, not in the smallest way. He said he knew it was the risk of being lost, entirely, and lost forever.

  So he stayed on the stoop even though it was drizzling rain and he didn’t have a hat. Smiley stayed under cover in the open door, propped up against the door frame, his hands moving constantly to pockets, chest, behind him, his fingers playing against the wooden frame, not really looking at Yuri. “We’ve got some good stuff in here. You’re looking cool, man. C’mon in, don’t be a stranger.”

  “Where are you playing now?” At the expression on Smiley’s face he specified, “Jack and the Jackets, if I want to hear you, where do I go these days? Orfe,” he said.

  “At the Ivry Gate sometimes,” Smiley said. His left hand played along the edges of his T-shirt. “When there’s no one they like better they can get.”

  Yuri nodded. “Thanks, man.”

  “But I’m not playing with Jack anymore.”

  “Who’re you playing with?”

  “I’m looking for a new group. I heard of someone, I’ve got to check it out, it’ll be cool, I think. Lotsa money. Lotsa good stuff.”

  Yuri nodded. “Luck, man.” But Smiley needed, he said, more than luck; it would take a miracle now, for Smiley. Behind Smiley, the house sat waiting like a death trap, its mouth open, to eat you alive.

  “Orfe neither,” Smiley said. His right hand flew up to his face. “I thought you’d pay attention to that. She quit, Jack chewed nails for a while, it pissed me off too. I don’t know where she is; she hangs out with that friend of hers.”

  “What friend?” Yuri didn’t know anything about Orfe.

  “The college kid. They’re trying to get a band together, I heard, but she didn’t look like she knew anything about music. The college kid. Orfe’s got some funny friends, if you ask me. I dunno, Yuri, it doesn’t seem like she treated the rest of us right; does it seem that way to you?”

  Yuri shrugged. He wouldn’t want to work with Smiley. But Smiley was so far gone it wouldn’t do him any good to be told that. And if he’d been reasonably clean, it would just break his heart. The truth wasn’t exactly good news. The truth wasn’t exactly the kind of thing that made you sit up and start singing. Yuri didn’t want to waste his breath on Smiley, and he didn’t want to hurt Smiley, so he didn’t say anything. “See you. Sometime.”

  “Yeah, around, man.”

  Smiley would have forgotten Yuri by the time the door closed, that was what Yuri thought, before he’d gotten halfway down the hall, that was Yuri’s bet.

  Yuri took Smiley’s news for a slow-down signal and went to one of the rooming house addresses he’d been given. He unpacked the underwear and shirts from his knapsack into a bureau. The room was small, but it was his. The couple who owned the boardinghouse seemed okay, aware but not judgy. His life was getting back into a better direction. He got himself hired to clerk in a hardware store a couple of blocks away, the first of the places he asked at. He happened to ask, they happened to need someone, problem solved. He signed himself up for a couple of the outreach education courses that were offered free in the evenings, Beginning Accounting and Intro Biology, the first because he thought it would be useful to know and the second because he thought he ought to understand himself better.

  “Getting ready, I was the get-ready man, in get-ready mode,” he told me. “And making sure I could stay clean, keep myself clean. Making sure I’d be safe in my own hands. Otherwise, how would she be, you know?”

  He set up a schedule and kept to it. He went to classes, NA meetings, went to work, did homework, saved part of each paycheck. He didn’t go back to see old friends, “if you could call them that.” He felt flaky a lot of the time, “but that eased up too.”

  He did no more than keep an eye out for Orfe. He knew he’d find her, sooner or later, and he wanted it to be sooner but was more afraid of finding her too soon than too late. It didn’t take him long to hear where she was living—with me. That was just a matter of asking questions in a cafeteria, outside a library, on a street corner. He could have walked up to her anytime, it wasn’t that he couldn’t find her.

  It wasn’t that he didn’t know what to do with a girl either. There had always been girls for Yuri. He’d always been there for the girls too. Some lasted awhile, some lasted an evening, all of them he said he loved and meant it. Girls, women, females—he thought they were wonderful, the way they thought and the way they smelled and the way they were smoothly curved, the way they could cry, the way they had a whole variety of emotions and their ideas and their senses of humor and not one of them ever the same as any one of the rest of them. It wasn’t that Yuri didn’t know what love was. He’d had a lot of experience of love, falling into it, falling out of it, fending it off, gathering it in. In fact, he said, that was the trouble. He’d had so much experience that he couldn’t help but know that this time he was in a different league. In this league he still knew everything he knew, but he didn’t know anything compared to what he needed to know.

  There was never any question: Yuri was for Orfe, Orfe for Yuri. When he finally approached the street where she was playing, she saw him right away. Her fingers stumbled on the guitar, just an instant’s stutte
r. Her voice didn’t lose its place or melody—it just rang like a bell that has finally been struck true. Yuri waited until she was finished performing and had gathered up the money and had closed away the guitar. He didn’t even try to touch her.

  Because Orfe had no idea. That’s what he hadn’t known until he saw her, saw her face and heard her voice when she knew he was there, watching her. He knew he was going to have to let her teach him what she didn’t even know she knew.

  All of this thinking and knowing was going on underneath, all of this trying to understand—or at least trying to be sure he wasn’t misunderstanding everything—all of it was going on deep inside him. On the outside he was seeing her and going up to her, saying hi, asking if he could buy her something to eat and trying to hear her answer at the same time that he could barely breathe when her eyes looked right into his eyes, asking her if she’d like to take a walk but not saying—yet—where to, at the same time he was noticing that her wrists were stronger-looking than he’d remembered and being sure he told her he was drying the sweater, after hand washing it, so she’d know he was a responsible person and promising her he’d give it to her when it was dry so she’d know he planned to keep on seeing her. Trying to read her expression so he’d be sure she wanted to see him again. Inhaling the clean and clear smell of her and the sense of her standing close to him. Wondering what might happen. Jittery, on the edge of lust. He was about to start getting to know her, and his brain almost supernovaed with it.

  He’d never felt so alive, Yuri said. Being high was nothing compared to this. He felt like he’d been split open and was just lying there, while everything in the world poured into him, and he was holding the sides of himself open like a flasher’s coat to let it all pour in. He’d never known how roomy he was, inside.

  If there was something you could buy and take, anything like this, Yuri said, it would blow the top of your head off. Everybody who took it would just die of it all the time.

  Orfe had a sandwich with him, he carried her guitar, and they walked, talking all the time. He walked her around his life, apartment buildings, and schools—grade school, middle school, high school, the community college campus where he’d gone for three months before dropping out because he needed the money and the time for drugs. The steel door and brick building and high-fenced grounds of the rehab center. Movies, Christmases, teachers, friends, pets, thoughts about heavy metal and the homeless, government, God, dances, wars, pizzas, Lennon—they got as much told as they could. They sat around in the kitchen of his rooming house for the long dark hours of that first night, talking. When Orfe said it was time for her to get some sleep, Yuri walked her back to the dormitory, and they spent the early morning hours talking in the common room, each curled up in a chair.