by W E DeVore
A soft knock came at the door and Ben’s worried voice followed it into the room. “Darlin’, please let me in.”
She opened the door and fell against him as soon as he closed it.
“How are we going to pretend that everything is alright?” she asked. “How am I supposed to go into the studio every day and act like he’s not dying?”
Ben held her to him. “Darlin’, I know what he means to you. You should think of this as a gift. He has precious little time left and he wants to spend some of that with you.”
She knew Ben was right. Stanley was counting on her. Counting on her to finish his final words. Counting on her to turn something ugly into something beautiful.
“Come on, darlin’,” he said. “Stanley’s asking for you. He wants to play with you. Don’t let him down.”
Q splashed some cold water on her face. Ben wrapped his arms around her waist and kissed her shoulder.
“Is Charlie still here? I need to tell him about the gig. If he finds out from someone else, he’s going to complain for weeks, just because he can,” she said, smoothing away the signs of her tears with her fingertips.
Charlie had a hard and fast rule: QT and the Beasts was a collective, not a top-down organization. If Q made a decision without him, there was always hell to pay.
Ben undid the long braid that held her hair away from her face and began to plait it for her. Having grown up with four sisters and dozens of female cousins, he was better at braiding hair than Q could ever pretend to be.
“I wouldn’t worry about Charlie,” he said. “He and that leggy banjo player were all over each other and fixing to leave. I think Walter told him before Stanley even talked to us about it. Horn players always stick together.”
He winked at her in the mirror and tied her hair. She tried to smile. “I guess I should text Sanger; let him know we’ll be stuck upstairs for a while, or at least until Stanley moves on to the next victim. He probably thinks we ditched him to deal with Tori on his own.” She reached into her pocket to retrieve her phone. It wasn’t there. “Goddamn this day. My phone’s gone.”
“Go play with Stanley, I’ll go look for it. It’s probably downstairs somewhere.” He took her hand and led her out of the bathroom and down the long hallway to the music-filled house.
She pulled him down to her. “I love you, Ben Bordelon.”
He whispered in her ear, “Best thing I ever did was offer you a ride home.”
Stanley called to her from the piano in the music room as soon as he spied her coming down the hallway. “QT, get your ass over here and come play with me, none of these other fools are brave enough.”
Q seriously doubted that. Even though Stanley Gerard was a living, breathing music legend, he’d played with everybody in the room more times than she could think of. She forced a smile and moved away from Ben to join him.
“I ain’t afraid of you, old man.”
She walked over and sat next to him on the treble side of the bench. While she wasn’t the least bit afraid of playing a duet with Stanley Gerard, she wasn’t foolhardy enough to take the rhythm part from him.
“Should have figured you’d like to be on top.” He elbowed her and snorted, pleased with his practiced joke.
“You figured correctly, my friend. What are we playing?”
She straightened her spine, preparing for battle, not sure what mood Stanley was in. But he just wanted to have some fun, not prove that he was still the baddest of the bad-ass New Orleans pianists in the room.
When he played the opening notes of a jazz standard that Q had been singing since her childhood, she smiled and said, “I love this one.”
“I know.” He leaned over and gave her a paternal kiss on her cheek.
She played the opening melody an octave up from where Stanley was playing a light chord progression.
“You take the first verse,” he said, as they rounded out of the last bar of the intro.
I never looked twice at starlit skies
I never felt one little butterfly
But now that you’re sitting so close by
I feel a few butterflies
Stanley picked up the second verse where she had left off. As they entered the bridge, Q startled him with a quick syncopation, but he quickly caught on. He laughed out loud and nudged her with his hips. “Nice try, young blood.”
Q sang the bridge without replying. Stanley slowed the tempo and lowered the volume before he started the third verse. She followed along as he sang:
I never played around with the birds and bees
I never made love by a moonlit sea
“No?” she asked. “You should try it sometime.”
He continued to sing and slowed the song nearly to a stop.
But now that your lips are kissing me….
He pretended to move in for a kiss and Ben scolded him from the end of the piano. “Watch it, Stanley…”
Q and Stanley looked up to find Ben filming them with his phone. Stanley winked at the camera and they sang the last phrase of the song, with Q taking the harmony:
I feel a few butterflies
She laughed and they finished the song with a simple Duke Ellington ending, dissipating the sorrow that had been lurking below her skin. Ben was right. Stanley was still here and every moment was a gift that she wouldn’t be wasting.
Ben ended his video and put his phone back into his pocket.
“You were supposed to be looking for my phone, not filming me with yours,” she reminded him.
He shrugged. “How often does my wife play a duet with Stanley Gerard?”
“All the time,” they answered simultaneously.
Q stood to go, but Stanley held her back, insisting that they play a few more of his favorites. She’d known as soon as she’d sat down that she was in for a thirty- to forty-five-minute set, but she still made a show of acquiescing.
Twelve songs later, she stood up, meaning it, and Stanley looked for another victim in the rapidly dwindling crowd. Q headed to the back of the house to go search for her phone, leaving Ben behind to use the bathroom and attempt to sweet talk a few of the stragglers into playing a gig at the Cove.
She walked into the kitchen and a surge of self-reproach pooled in her stomach as soon as she saw Sanger leaning against the stove with his jaw clenched in frustrated rage. She and Ben had completely deserted him for the last few hours. Lucky for her, their neglect did not seem to be the cause of his current state of ire. Tori Gerard paced back and forth on the other side of the room.
“Why are you making such a big deal about this, Aaron? It has nothing to do with you.” Tori put her hands on her hips to face him.
“Nothing to do with me?” he asked. “Call me old fashioned, but I think whoever’s sharing my fucking bed has a lot do with me.”
Before Q could back out of the room, Sanger saw her and turned his back to both women, gripping the edge of the stove either for support or to control his temper; Q couldn’t determine which.
“I’m sorry, y’all. Didn’t mean to interrupt,” Q said, edging past them. “I just need to go downstairs. My phone is missing. I think it fell out of my pocket in the courtyard.”
She moved towards the back door and Tori stopped her.
“Look, Q, I don’t want anyone down there.” Tori sounded exhausted. “I finally got it cleared out and I just want this fucking party to be over. You’re welcome to come back in the morning and look for it, I’ll even help you; but right now, I have to try to get Stanley to go to bed. He needs to rest, not stay up until dawn playing music.”
Tori was obviously well past done with the annual party. Q recalled something similar last year. Stanley begging everyone to keep jamming and drinking until the sun came up while his wife very nearly had to muzzle herself to keep from screaming, “Get out of my damned house!”
Knowing that Stanley really did need to take care of himself made her slightly more understanding, even if Tori had been running around behind his back w
ith another man. She was about to back down when Sanger approached, looking haggard and tense.
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll help you look.”
When Tori started to protest, he turned to her and said, “Do you think I want to spend one more minute in this fucking house with you? Let her find her phone. Go back to your husband.”
He put his hand on the small of Q’s back and pushed her out through the door and onto the glassed-in porch without waiting for a response.
“You ok, Sanger?” she asked.
“I’m fine, Clementine. Let’s just get your fucking phone and get out of here.”
They made their way down into the courtyard and Q instantly understood why Tori wanted everyone gone. The once magnificent ice luge had been reduced by several feet, producing a six-inch pool of water in the metal container that housed it. Every possible surface was littered with small, plastic shot glasses and Q spied a least a dozen cigarette butts in just about every potted plant.
Sanger sat down on the bottom step. He fondled a fat, purple hydrangea blossom through the railing and smiled up at Q. “They’re my favorite.”
She sat next to him and watched him fold his hands, resting his elbows on his knees.
“I’m sorry, it’s been a crap birthday, Aaron. I really did want you to have some fun,” she said, reaching over to squeeze his shoulder.
He nudged her with his leg. “You and me have a different idea of fun, Clementine.”
She laughed. “Yeah, I got that message loud and clear, cowboy. Next time, we’ll go dancing. Someplace with cold beer and A/C and no rain and definitely no married girlfriends.”
He scowled at her sideways. “I can only two-step.”
“Well, good. I love to two-step. My mama used to put on Cajun music and dance with me when I was little. I still remember it. We’ll turn you into a proper Cajun Jew yet, my friend.”
He finally cracked a smile. “You never talk about your mother. How old were you when she passed?”
“Four. I really don’t remember her much. Just her smile and she had this really low voice that sounded like honey.”
“Sounded like you, I bet,” he said, his expression softening. “What else do you remember?”
“She used to sing this French lullaby to me…” She paused, hearing her mother’s voice in her mind, trying to hold onto the faded memory. “Daddy was never the same after she died. It kind of broke him. I didn’t have any brothers or sisters, so I was on my own a lot. Hence today. Sometimes I forget that just because I’m having fun, it doesn’t mean everyone else is.” She suddenly realized how little she knew of Sanger’s life before he came to New Orleans. “You have any brothers or sisters?”
“A brother. Avi. He was two years older than me. Someone murdered him fourteen years ago. That’s why I am Detective Sanger and not Rabbi Sanger.”
He stared intently at the melting ice sculpture, its once magnificent glory warping as the heat slowly turned it to liquid.
“What was he like?” she asked, watching him.
“Funny. You never met someone so funny. You two would have gotten on like a house on fire. He would have loved today. Every minute of it,” he said, turning his face up to the sky and looking wistfully at the moon.
“What happened to him?”
Sanger grimaced and cleared his throat before speaking. “Somebody beat him to death – hate crime. But the cops didn’t care. To them, he was just an effeminate man who liked to wear make-up and heels, who got what he deserved for telling an inappropriate joke to a straight man. My father was always… uncomfortable with the way Avi was. Don’t get me wrong, he loved him to pieces, but once Avi started performing, they weren’t exactly close. He wouldn’t fight for him, wouldn’t make them see what a special man Avi was, so they’d punish his killer. It made me so angry, at first, the way those cops talked about him, like he deserved what happened to him. But finally, I decided that if I wanted people like Avi to be protected, I should do the protecting. So, I quit rabbinic school and joined the force. That’s about the time Tori and me…”
He glanced back up at the kitchen door.
“You’re going to have to catch me up, cowboy.” Q rubbed her eyes and yawned as her body finally acknowledged its fatigue.
“We grew up together, but we were never together, not like that, until right before Avi died. Tori was like this firebrand. She was gorgeous, smart, independent, and just plain fucking amazing,” he replied.
“So, she dumped you?” Q guessed.
“No, that was the problem. She wanted me like I wanted her. It was too intense. I couldn’t handle it,” he said, slicking his hand through his curly hair. “You have to understand. My dad was on me about marrying her and I never wanted to get married that young and there I was sleeping with a woman that I couldn’t stop thinking about being with, all the time.”
“Sounds terrible. I can totally see why you wouldn’t want to be with someone like that,” she said derisively.
He looked down and shook his head. “It sounds ridiculous now that I say it out loud, but that was my thought process at the time. Twenty-three-year-old men are dumb, what can I say,” he explained. “Avi had just died. And then my mom got sick. And my father always wanted us to get married and I didn’t want to give him what he wanted.”
“So, you broke up with a woman you loved to spite your dad?” Q asked.
“I guess I did. Anyway, our worlds always kind of orbited each other. I thought us running into each other here, after all this time, was some kind of sign. Some kind of way for me to…” He paused, reaching for the right words.
“Be happy?” she suggested.
“Something like that. When I confronted her about it upstairs, she acted like it wasn’t a big deal. Said when she and Stanley got married, she thought she was still in love with me. But when I’d ask her to be with me, that last time in Dallas, she’d decided to make her marriage right. Now she loves her husband and realizes that she never loved me. At all. That the last month had more to do with her and Stanley and less to do with me.”
“Well, I doubt that last part’s true.”
Q took his hand in hers and rested her head on his shoulder, wondering how much of Tori’s behavior had to do with Stanley being sick and dying. She considered the possibility that caring for someone with Stage 4 cancer may have just worn Tori down because Q wanted to believe that someone who two of her dearest friends loved, had some redeeming qualities.
“Sanger, nobody knows what goes on in someone else’s marriage. Stanley has a well-deserved reputation for running around on his wives. Maybe she had a good reason,” she said. “The man has pretty girl ADD. Bad.”
“He ever make a play for you?” he asked.
Q was surprised by the idea. “No, of course not. I dated his son. I don’t think he ever thought of me like that.” She turned and rested her back against the stair railing, curling her legs to her chest. “Besides, when Stanley and I met, he wouldn’t have even considered it.”
He leaned his elbows on a higher stair and stretched out his legs. “Why?”
She tried to think of an abbreviated version to tell him, but after Stanley’s revelation this evening, she felt like telling the entire story.
“After Arabi, I wasn’t the same. Obviously. I broke up with Savion. I dropped out of college. I moved out of Bubbe’s and into my old apartment on Esplanade. I played piano from the time I woke up until I couldn’t play anymore. It was the only thing that made sense to me. After I played all the classical pieces I could think of, I moved on to jazz and blues and finally Stanley Gerard. I’d been trying to play the solo from ‘Champagne Nights’ for three days solid…”
“’Champagne Nights?’” he asked
Q sang the chorus and the hook for him:
Champagne nights when I’m holding you so tight
I keep dreaming ‘bout the way you smile
On those champagne nights
It was the kind of song that lived in ev
eryone’s subconscious; lurking, waiting, biding its time until it could get stuck in your head on a skip-loop for a day or two.
Sanger smiled. “My mom loved that song. I didn’t know that was him.”
She nodded. “Anyway, after I’d about driven myself crazier than I already was, I walk the nine blocks from my house to his and I knock on his front door.”
“Had you met him before?” Sanger asked.
“Just a couple of times. Savion took me home for dinner to meet him. We were getting serious before everything got ruined,” she explained. “So, Stanley, he opens the door and I say ‘teach me the solo from ‘Champagne Nights,’ and he takes one look at me and tells me to come back to the kitchen and eat something first. I’d lost like twenty pounds that I really didn’t have to lose to begin with; he probably thought I was strung out on drugs. So, I follow him back and he fixes me a big plate of red beans and rice and puts it in front of me. Asks me why I broke up with Savion. Why I dropped out of college. Tells me to eat. Tells me he won’t help me unless I explain myself to him.”
“Did you tell him?” he asked.
She nodded slowly before continuing, “After I tell him, he just stands up and he takes me to the music room. He points to the piano and leans against the fireplace. ‘Show me what you got, young blood,’ he says. And I play and it’s awful and embarrassing and finally, he asks me if I actually know how to play piano.”
She laughed at the memory.
Sanger grinned at her. “What did you do?”
“What do you think I did? I showed off, as best I could, anyway. I played this Chopin Etude I’d performed at a competition in high school. The right hand does this crazy descending arpeggio and the left hand has the melody the whole time, doing something that’s barely rhythmically related to what the right hand is doing.”