by Joni Rodgers
Kit smiled up at him and nodded.
“Are you coming to bed?” he asked.
“I’ve gotta toss in a load of towels first,” she said, because neither of them wanted to admit they were out of the habit of sleeping together, and it was really more comfortable if one of them just happened to fall asleep on the couch. Kit figured it was her turn.
“Fine.” Mel figured the same. “See you in the morning.”
He trudged up the stairs, and Kit picked up his boxer shorts from the living room floor.
Just Kiki. Just needed to talk. Just gotta throw in a load of towels. She couldn’t remember when it started being so easy to lie to him. Perhaps when he lost interest in the truth; when the truth started to weigh on him, but a lie slid off his back as easily as a bead of sweat.
The VCR started making a grinding noise. She ponked it on top with her fist, administering the Mel-chanical “RCA Field Maneuver.” The machine stopped grinding and flashed PLAY.
Kit knelt and turned the volume very low.
Miz Pistonpumper was saying something about inspecting the Falcon. Camera angle at her backside, she leaned in and over the engine, dragging her breasts across the gears and belts until her tight T-shirt was streaked with motor oil, so of course she had to drag it off over her head. She languored like an ermine through the interior, bent between the bucket seats, caressed the upholstery, licked the steering wheel, straddled the manual transmission, and pleasured herself on the gearshift, squinting, sighing, quickening, lips parting and pursing in rhythm.
The light and shadow of it played across Kit’s face.
“... and the sunlight kisses earth...”
“Too much.”
“... and the moonbeams kiss the sea...”
“Not enough.”
“... but what is all this sweet world worth... mmmm...”
“Watch it, watch it now.”
“... if you don’t kiss—MEEEEEEEEE...”
“No!”
“... eeeeeee...”
“Better. Now, ride it just a little while.”
“... if you-oo-oo ...” Kiki ad libbed, “... if you don’t kiss me...”
“Take it home.”
“Oh, babe, you’ve got to ki-i-isssss mmmmmmmeeeee.”
Albert’s flute tangled up around her, and Zeke’s soft-brushed Zilgian cymbal hushed the samba rhythm to a close.
Kiki looked over her shoulder expectantly.
“I’m outa spit, man,” Albert said. “Break time.”
The rest of the brethren agreed and mumbled toward the doorway, digging in their pockets for cigarettes and lighters. Kiki sat on her stool behind the microphone and selfconsciously sipped at her water bottle.
“I’m afraid everybody’s getting mad at me,” she said meekly.
“You’ll get it,” Xylo shrugged.
“It wasn’t my intention to make y’all practice a bunch of extra. I really thought I could just... you know—do it.”
“Oh, you could do it all right. You look real nice, and it’s like I told your mama, you got a powerful instrument there. You could walk outa here and do this gig right now. And most people would probably like you just fine.”
“Then I don’t understand,” Kiki said irritably. “Why are we still here?”
“I ain’t most people.”
Kiki went over to the piano and tried to look as if she were flipping through the binder of lyric sheets. As badly as she’d wanted this job, she was beginning to doubt that it could ever work out. Gravitating between Zen master and muleskinner, Xylo yelled at her if she stopped in the middle of a song, pounded on the piano if she kept going, criticized her for being
too soft, too loud, too slow, too fast, too timid, too confident, too interested in appearing to be not interested enough in appearing disinterested. They’d been either at the club listening to other acts or in the upstairs rehearsal space hashing over his sacred repertoire until eleven-thirty every night since her audition. Oscar and Chloe were happy enough at Grandma’s house, but the rest of the Euphonious Brethren were beginning to chafe.
Xylo startled her with his hand on her elbow.
“Nuances,” he said. And Kiki repeated, “Nuances?”
“Nuances.” This time he illustrated, both with the shading of his voice and a gesture of his hand.
“Suggestions, allusions, intimations. It’s the nuances that tell the story, don’t you see? And it’s the story that separates the performer from the artist.”
He pulled his piano bench from behind the keyboard and over to where she sat fidgeting with the mike stand.
“See, Miss Kiki, you were brought up to be a performer. You were taught to strut your stuff all over the stage and blow everybody away with your powerful pipes and seduce everybody with your dazzling smile. And you did that so good, you got so much applause for that, well it just got easy to let that ol’ story slide, and pretty soon, it’s forgotten. But I need you to remember now, Kiki. I need you to remember the story.”
“Okay,” Kiki said, because she had no idea what he was talking about. “I remember but—well, maybe you could ... remind me?”
“Oh, I suppose I could, but I’m not so sure your mama wants me to!” Xylo laughed the same way he played—in easy, open chords and broad ranging melody. “No, Miss Kiki. Nobody can teach you to be who you are. But they sure can teach you not to. That they surely can.”
“So, all I have to do is unlearn something that nobody didn’t teach me,” Kiki sulked, “and then you’ll be happy.”
Xylo shook his head and smiled. “Kiki, you know what a red hot mama is, don’t you?”
“The front woman for a jazz band,” Kiki nodded, adding with as much modesty as she could, “I was the official red hot mama of the Fort Worth Jazz Festival in 1980.1 won a contest.”
“I can believe you did! I bet you delivered that package and blasted the doors off the place. Because that’s what a red hot mama does. She sings it out loud, she struts it out big. But the cool blues mama, Kiki, the cool blues mama, she just tells the story. She just gets born and falls in love and does what she has to do. It ain’t no performance, it’s her life. She knows what’s in her soul, and when she lets it go—”
Kiki’s eyes were starting to sting, not because she didn’t understand, but because she did.
“I don’t think I can do it,” she told him.
“Oh, I think you’re gonna work out just fine.”
“I’ll try,” she managed to mumble.
“No,” he said gently, “that’s your problem right there, Kiki. You got to stop trying to sing—and just sing. Stop trying to make everybody love you. Stop trying to give everybody what they want. Stop giving away everything except the story.”
“Yo, Xylo,” Zeke said from the doorway, “if I ain’t home by ten o’clock tonight, my old lady is gonna show me the wrong side of the door, man. She’s gonna show me down the hall.”
“I don’t even know if I got an old lady anymore,” Rueben grumbled. “I might as well be sleepin’ at my mama’s.”
“Nah, that’s Albert sleepin’ at your mama’s,” Zeke ribbed, and Rueben threw a phantom punch at him.
“Yeah, fuck you, man. Your mama’s so ugly, she got to open a homeless shelter to get somebody to sleep at her house.”
“Go home, my brothers,” Xylo smiled. “I believe our work here is done for this evening.”
They packed up their instruments and sound equipment with the usual banter and jabs.
“Bus leaves at five o’clock P.M., gentlemen,” Xylo reminded them as they headed out the back way. “We don’t want to be late and embarrass Miss Vivica.”
“Yeah, just like she don’t want to embarrass us!” Albert called over his shoulder. “Remember the Alamo, man. Remember the Alamo!”
Kiki looked at Xylo. He was laughing again, doing some kind of elaborate secret handshake with Albert, but he noticed her quizzical expression.
“Why don’t you walk down to the end of th
e block with me, and I’ll tell you all about it,” he offered. “Looks like Jackie’s Diner ought to be open for another half hour.”
“Oh,” Kiki looked down at her stretched leggings and oversized shirt. “I’m not dressed very—”
“You look fine, Kiki, just fine. I’d be most pleased to share your company. Shall we?”
The night was warm, but Florida never felt as stifling to her as Texas in the summer.
“Last time we were booked in Buena Vista,” Xylo told her as they walked, “your wonderful mama, whom I love like my own, booked us into the saddest gig known to the industry: the Alamo rental car office.”
“What?” Kiki giggled. “How do you play a rental car office?”
“Oh, it’s done,” he assured her, “this was an ongoing situation, although our predecessors were mostly of the country and western variety. See, the people come over on a bus from the airport, all unsuspecting how sometimes they’re gonna have to stand in line for quite some time to get them wheels. I guess the good people of Alamo want to prepare them for the herd mentality of Disney World. But to soften this cruel blow, they provide live entertainment.”
“Music to stand in line by?”
“That is correct, Miss Kiki, and these are not happy people. They’re standing in, standing in, standing in the line one hour, two hours, more, getting all hostile and uptight. And we’re doing our best to play the music, saying, ‘Damn, this is one tough room.’ And these guys in their hangin’-out-over-the waist, one hundred percent polyester Sansabelts, Hawaiian luau shirts, big ol’ cameras hangin’ all down around their necks, they’re calling out, ‘Hey, y’all boys play some Jimmy Buffet. Play that honky ol’ Margueritaville song. Hey, don’t y’all boys know some Willie Nelson?’ And I’m saying to Zeke and Reuben, ‘Man, I play Willie Dixon, Willie Cantrell, and Blind Willie Johnson, but I’ll go to my grave a happy man without playing no Willie Nelson.’ But ol’ Jethro Clampit and his kinfolk, they start getting a little bit of bile up. They don’t appreciate being forced to stand in no line listening to the sounds of blackness, and then they all get their shorts in a big ol’ festival ‘cause Albert starts making some speculations about their lineage, specifically their uncle and/or cousin and/or father being one and the same individual, and pretty soon the management requests rather emphatically that we go on and leave, and we oblige in such a rush, we go and leave all the patch cords from the sound system laying on the floor. Damn. Had to go buy new ones on the way to the next gig.”
Kiki couldn’t stop laughing long enough to comment.
“Girl, I love your mama like I love my own,” Xylo said, “but that was one evil gig.”
“Obviously,” Kiki giggled, “you never played the Purmela Pork Festival.”
“Sweet Lord!”
“Or the Ledbetter Convalescent Home. Or the Karnack Bikerama.”
“Lord help us all.”
“Or the Louisiana State Penitentiary.”
“Oh,” Xylo cried, “now tell me my own sweet Miss Vivica never sent her precious babies into the Louisiana State Penitentiary!”
“A riot broke out right in the middle of our Streisand medley.”
“No, girl!”
“It’s the truth! I swear upon my mother’s cell phone.”
Xylo pulled open the door of the coffee shop. Kiki realized people were staring at them. Because they were laughing so hard, she supposed. She tucked her hands under her arms and tried to be quiet as she slid into a booth across from Xylo.
“We’re closing in a few minutes,” the waitress said, setting a sandwich and fries in front of an elderly man at the counter.
“Ah,” Xylo nodded.
“Can I give you something to go?”
“Oh, we were just going to have a quick cup of coffee,” Kiki volunteered, but Xylo placed his hand on hers.
“That would be most kind,” he said to the waitress. “We’ll have two coffees to go. One black, one cream and sugar.”
“So,” Kiki giggled, “as long as we won’t be playing any penitentiaries or rental car offices, I can handle just about anything.”
“I can promise you, I have no intention of going there. But as you know, your mama isn’t always as selective as we might hope.”
“She used to tell us, ‘If they’ve got enough money, they’ve got enough class.’ So I’ve done my share of evil gigs. And then, of course, there was Calloway’s. But I got myself into that one.”
“Calloway’s? Hi-de-hi-de-hi-de-ho,” Xylo sang. “That don’t sound too bad.”
“Oh, not Calloway’s as in Cab Calloway. Calloway’s as in Frank Calloway. It’s—I guess it’s what you’d call a cabaret. Or a men’s club. I mean, it’s not a strip joint. It wasn’t like—well, it was, sort of, but—anyway, I guess it’s hard to picture. The idea of me being an exotic dancer—the way I look now.”
“No,” Xylo said. “I don’t have a hard time with that at all. Only thing I have a hard time with is the idea of a lady like yourself casting such precious pearls before swine.”
The waitress brought the coffees in a bag and wordlessly set them on the table with their bill. Xylo handed her three dollars and thanked her, holding the door open for Kiki. There was an office building with benches and a fountain out front just a block or so further, and before he sat down next to her, Xylo handed Kiki her Styrofoam cup.
“To gigs better forgotten and better gigs in the future.” She lifted her cup and touched it to his. “Remember the Alamo.”
“To the story,” Xylo said, “and a cool blues mama about to be born.”
“Today,” Ricki Lake announced, “I Had SEX with My Boss AND My Sister’s Sleazeball Husband!”
The audience writhed with one twisted expression of hatred and condemnation. Despite the heat of the studio lights, Kit shivered in her midnight purple teddy.
“She’s a hussy, pure and simple,” said an audience member, “and that Wayne person should be castrated.”
Applause, and Ricki directed a meaningful glance to the camera.
“I can’t understand it,” Mel said sadly, “I gave her everything. Two great kids, a three-bedroom house, two bathrooms, double garage. We just got a new microwave.”
“Kit,” Ricki wondered, “what was Mel not giving you that you hoped to find with another man?”
“It wasn’t Mel, it was—”
“How long have you been in love with Wayne?”
“I’m not in love with Wayne! I don’t even like Wayne!”
“Then it was pure sex? Raw animal pleasure?”
“No! No, it—it definitely wasn’t that at all! It was—it was— I don’t know. It... it all happened so fast.”
“So Kit,” Ricki said, holding a handful of notecards in front of her, “from the beginning. What happened?”
“Well, you see, there was this big storm, and Kiki was in Orlando visiting our mom when she got out of the hospital on account of she had to have this double radical mastectomy,” Kit started meekly, but had to speak up to be heard over the hue and cry. “I want to say that I never meant to hurt my little sister.”
Her voice was drowning in the tide of righteous indignation.
“I didn’t!”
“Kit has always had difficulty in her relationships with men,” said the clinical psychologist. “Her father, who favored her, died when she was young. Her mother plainly preferred her younger sister, who is smaller, prettier, more talented—”
“Would you stop with that?” Kit cut in. “I happen to be very talented.”
“At what?” An audience member leaned into Ricki’s mike. “Screwing?”
“Ya, ya,” Ander nodded. “She is most talented.”
“She really is,” Miz Pistonpumper added. “We’ve invited her to join the union.”
“I think she should let her sister slap her across the face as hard as she can,” another audience member was telling Ricki, “and then just move on.”
“Closure,” Ricki nodded wisely.
; “But Wayne was the one who came over here! See, Chloe is really scared of thunder, and she was just screaming, going ‘mommy mommy mommy,’ and so Wayne calls me up, and he’s going, ‘She won’t knock it off’ and ‘couldn’t we please just come over there’ because, you know, it’s a trailer house and all, and there were tornado warnings, and he just— And then he asked if it would be okay if the kids could sleep over, and I said sure, that they could sleep over with my kids, but then after I got them all tucked in and all, the power went out, and the roof was leaking, and somehow my shirt got wet from emptying the drip pans ... and I told him to stop it, but—but he wouldn’t stop it.”
“So, she invites him over in the middle of the night,” Rush Limbaugh stepped in, and Kit’s microphone suddenly shorted out. “His wife is out of town, her husband is conveniently at work, she’s strutting around braless in a wet T-shirt. Now she cries rape, and all the feminazis rally round to condemn this poor guy she lured into her spiderweb.”
“I told him to stop! I kept telling him, but—”
“But does she call the police? Does she tell her husband or her sister?”
“How could I? He—he was crying and—and he said he was drunk and he didn’t mean it and it would destroy her and that it was all my fault because—but I tried. I tried to make him stop.”
“Funny, I don’t see any bruises,” Rush said with huge mock amazement. “She must have really put up a hell of a fight.”
“I didn’t want it to happen...”
“Did you fight him, Kit?” Ricki asked. “Did you give him a sharp knee to the groin?”
The audience was very quiet, waiting for the correct answer, but Kit couldn’t think of a way to explain to them how he could hold both her wrists in one hand, how he kept telling her to be quiet or she’d wake the babies, how impossible it is to defend something that has no value.
“C’mon, Kit. A knuckle to the eye socket? Anything?”
“No.”
“Then it was your fault.”
“Yes.”
A howl went up. Kit looked away from Mel’s injured expression and into Kiki’s tearful one, which was worse. Even Ricki looked annoyed at this point.