2 a.m. at the Cat's Pajamas

by Marie-Helene Bertino

  The girl leans into Max. “You’re an asshole.”

  Max’s eyes are closed. “You’re a dear to say so.”

  Lorca and Sonny hang Max between them and make slow progress through the room. The topless girl follows them, still yelling, stopping when they reach the door to the lanes, as if cordoned off by an unseen fence. Her friend tosses her a shirt. Cape May, it reads, the most haunted town in America!

  They carry Max past Barbara, who waves the fingers of one hand as they go by, and through the doors to the parking lot. When they reach the car, Lorca realizes they are being followed by a girl in yellow heels.

  “I’m Daphne.” She points to Max. “He promised me a ride.”

  “A ride to where?” Sonny says.

  “The Cat’s Pajamas.”

  “What a coincidence,” Lorca positions Max unkindly in the backseat. “That’s exactly where we’re going.”

  During the ride, Max outlines his thoughts: He wants a sandwich, he is getting the Christ scratched out of him by the seat belt, he doesn’t see what the big deal is.

  Lorca smells Barbara on his hands. Desk chair and heavy cream. He went limp on her, so he will go back to his club and get drunk before Mongoose arrives. A flute begins in his gut. Every light on the street turns green.

  The tables are filled when they return and Valentine is halfway through her second set. She lifts her eyes from the violin strings to watch them haul Max through the club. They deposit him onto a cot in the back room and Sonny gallops down the hall to join Valentine onstage. Lorca removes a flask from his top drawer. Max pulls a joint out from an unseen place under the cot.

  “You go on in twenty minutes,” Lorca reminds him.

  Max exhales. “I might be a little late.”

  “We close at two tonight. Not one second later. If I have to turn off the electricity and pull you from that stage, I will.”

  Max leaps from the cot and growls into a hanging mirror. “You’re scared, brother. But we’ll figure out a way to pay that citation.”

  “Sonny told you?”

  “I guessed.” He slaps his face and yowls. “Is anybody ready to rock and roll?”

  Lorca leaves Max yowling in the back room to catch Val’s last song. She is an old-timer violinist and had been one of his father’s closest friends. Her hair is arranged in its familiar braid. Her considerable hands and arms make the violin appear dainty. She plays Stéphane Grappelli while Sonny chugs underneath her. “I’ll Never Be the Same.” There are enough people in the club so that not everyone has a seat but not enough that you can’t see the stage. This is Lorca’s favorite part of the night.

  Valentine’s pianist rolls octaves at the top of the piano. Her gaze lifts to meet Sonny’s, but he’s not a smiler. Here and there he gives her a civilized tremolo. There is no better technical guitarist than Sonny. Tight, chaste solos. Reasonable quotations. City musicians regularly call on him for studio sessions because he is reliable and even. If he promises something at the beginning of a riff, he delivers. However with age his hold on the pitch has slackened. It started with a note or phrase, occasional enough to seem like a fluke. Now it happens regularly. Lorca can jibe Sonny for his retreating hairline, his bullshit parking, his emphatic, misguided directions, but never this: that when his old friend plays he holds his breath, anticipating an errant sound, the way he does when newbies try the stage.

  Cassidy swings a bottle of rum to meet a glass.

  “Swing one around for me,” Lorca says.

  Alex sulks on one of the stools with Aruna Sha, in another mutinous dress. The ash on her cigarette grows and menaces over the clean floor. Their occasional Main Line hanger-on is with them, a friend whose name Lorca always forgets. The kid yearns to be Alex, this is clear in the way he orbits him, undercutting anything he says. He jaws on about jazz, the one time he saw a famous musician.

  “You can’t smoke in here, honey,” Lorca says.

  Aruna drops her cigarette into Alex’s beer. She searches her bag, then she and the Main Line kid disappear into the back. After a moment, Alex follows.

  Val swings her bow up for the final, shivering G. She holds it for several seconds as Sonny picks out the final chords. The audience applauds and makes demands but Val ignores them, so many of them go outside to smoke in the lull between acts.

  The Cubanistas set up: Max on vocals and lead guitar, Gus on timbales, Sonny on keyboards, and Emo Sonofabitch Gladden on trumpet. Two of Emo’s friends sit in on percussion, congas and cajón. The Cubanistas have a following, mostly professors from the university having affairs, university kids studying South American culture, or women bowled over by the pidgin Spanish of a Cubanista brother.

  Max has donned the Cubanista uniform: beige riding pants slashed indiscriminately with pink sequins, faded button-down, beige band jacket. He skips sound check to snow the girl in yellow heels. Owner of the Club is his favorite put-on. It seems to require sweating and pelvic thrusts. Perspiration pumps down his cheeks from his orderly Afro. As long as he brings in a crowd, Lorca doesn’t care who he lies to.

  “I do sets on Friday nights, they’d have me play eeev-ery night if I could, Lorca’s a madman, but I tell heem, sometimes I have to do paperwork and filing, there’s a lot that goes into ronning a club.”

  “Of course you can’t play every night when you run a club,” she says, elongating the last word into a concerned three syllables. “What’s a Lorca?”

  “That’s a Lorca.” Max gestures to Lorca as if he is leftovers. “My right-hand man. He’s bean with me since the beginning. Together we turned this pile of cheese into the best jazz club in the world.”

  She swivels to Lorca as if he is a mirror to check her hair. “I thought the best jazz club in the world was Mongoose’s.”

  Max pouts. “Dar-leeng, no. Mongoose’s is a trash castle. You hear about the band he has playing for him now? What are they called? The traveling … something … The Triangles.”

  “The Troubadours,” Lorca says. “It’s the same house band with a different name. Rico and the boys.”

  “Naw,” Max stretches his leg on a stool. “It’s something like the Triangles.” The girl’s attention drifts to the stage, where Gus is warming up. “In any case, darling, they’re frauds.” He nuzzles the girl’s neck. She waves him off. He continues the tour, pointing to where the Snakehead hangs. “That’s the Snakehead I won in a card game with Steve Earle.”

  “What’s a Snakehead?” the girl says.

  “It’s like a classic Mustang, doll, only rarer and older.”

  She is unimpressed. “It does seem faded and creaky, like old things do.”

  Lorca, Sonny, and Max straighten on their stools. “Are you going to warm up?” Sonny says. “Or are you going to stand here playing tour guide?”

  Someone has barred the men’s bathroom door shut. A line forms in the hallway.

  “It’s been, like, fifteen minutes,” one of the men notifies Lorca.

  Lorca knocks. A commotion inside, a dropped plastic thing, and a curse. Lorca pounds. The door unlatches and Alex, Aruna, and the friend appear. Alex pushes past his father into the hallway. The men who have been waiting shuffle inside. Alex leans over the bar and smiles for a drink. He taps out a beat on his thighs. Gus catches a cymbal in midgasp. Aruna reaches for his hand. Lorca sees that his son is skinny, not in a lean way but in the way Sonny alluded to in the car. He cannot remember the last time he had a meal with his son. He cannot remember the last time he saw Alex eat anything. The sun-colored fingertips, the mottled bruises on his son’s forearms. Alex’s shape comes into searing focus, as if Lorca’s eyes have taken sixteen years to adjust to new light.

  10:50 P.M.

  Near the fountain at Rittenhouse Square Park, Sarina evaluates a display of pinwheels whirling in planets of green foam. “How much for the red?” she asks the man selling them.

  “Five,” he says.

  “Yikes. And the yellow?”

  “Six.”

  She na
rrows her eyes. “Why is the yellow more than the red?”

  “Bigger,” he says.

  Ben takes a seat on the edge of the fountain. Sarina will deliberate until she ultimately opts against buying a pinwheel. He innately knows her moods and tendencies the way you know on a flight, even with your eyes closed, that a plane is banking.

  Sarina blows into the yellow pinwheel. The man says, “Every year they perform A Christmas Carol here in the square. Have you ever seen it?”

  “Scrooge?”

  “It’s about rich people being assholes. Every year, here, where the richest people in the city live.”

  “Irony,” Sarina says.

  “Do you think any of them realize what they’re watching?”

  “I thought the richest people lived on the Main Line.” Sarina replaces the pinwheel. “I guess they can afford a five-dollar pinwheel.”

  He sniffs. “My prices are market.”

  Ben hurls one leg over the side of the fountain, then the other. The cold realization of the water pauses him. He tromps toward the other side.

  “What’s he doing?” the pinwheel man says.

  Sarina doesn’t answer but doffs her heels and leaps the wall. Knee-deep. She pushes through the cold water to catch up.

  On the other side of the fountain, a woman wearing a sequined hat calls out, “Hello! I know you!” She waves to Ben, who lifts his hand in a half salutation.

  “You do?” he says.

  “I know you! You were my husband’s lawyer. Bill Evans. That’s my husband’s name. You helped him when he got hurt at work. A beam fell on his head. You got us a nice settlement. Oh, bless you. I do know you. I do.”

  Ben is calf-deep in water. “How is Bill these days?”

  “He’s good, yes.”

  “Working?”

  “Oh no,” she says.

  “No,” Ben says.

  “It’s tough.”

  “I know.”

  “Of course you do. Bless you.” She nods at Sarina. If she is surprised to see two adults wading through fountain water on a bitter night she doesn’t show it. “Bless you both.”

  “Tell Bill hello,” Ben says.

  “I will.” The woman wrenches something out of her bag, a wrapper or a slip of paper, beelines for a trash can where she reconsiders. She calls out, “He’ll be thrilled!”

  They watch her leave the square.

  “Bill Evans,” Ben says. He pretends to notice his pant legs. “Good heavens, I’m drenched!”

  Sarina giggles.

  Ben hurdles the wall of the fountain. He takes Sarina’s hand and helps her climb out. For a moment they are two people holding hands. He lets go.

  “We can’t stand here cold and wet,” he says. “We should go somewhere and dry off.”

  “And get a drink,” she adds, slipping into her shoes.

  “I know just the place.”

  “Good-bye!” Sarina calls to the pinwheel man.

  “Good luck,” he says.

  “Tell me about the girl with lice,” Ben says, as they walk out of the park onto Pine Street.

  Pine Street maintains a long-standing race: how many apartments, houses, and stores can one street hold? There are no zoning restrictions: go! When each stoop or store window has a lamp on, the effect is akin to the afterhours daylight of a nuclear power plant. Sarina and Ben walk through this unnatural sunshine as she details the singing, the principal, Clare Kelly, the apples, the lice, the punch, the expulsion. She does not look at him while she talks. She already knows what she will see, so what’s the point? An open, happy mouth. Hazy, engaged eyes. Big deal.

  Ben does not look at Sarina. He already knows what he will see. The line around her mouth that appears when she is intent on exposing injustice: the cockamamie price of pinwheels or unfairness toward one of her students. A girl in constant negotiation with her bangs. She giggled when he said, “Someone has drenched my pant leg!” Her laugh has always been the only ungoverned thing about her. He tries to elicit it as much as he can.

  A bookstore on the corner is open. They hear tinkling music inside.

  “Should we go in?” Ben says.

  “Let’s.”

  Inside, whatever is not wreathed is tinseled. A knitting older woman behind the counter regards them through reading glasses. “It’s right there,” she says, pointing to a display table stacked with books. On the cover, a dragon gives a thumbs-up. Sunshine the Dragon Joins the Circus! “You’re here for the launch, right?”

  “We couldn’t wait,” Ben says.

  “You and everybody else.” The woman motions behind them. Sarina and Ben turn around. No one is in the doorway.

  “Would it bother you if we browsed?” Ben says.

  “Very little bothers me.” The woman returns to her knitting.

  The bookstore has three large rooms separated by archways. Sarina waits until Ben has chosen a book to sneak a glance at him; he does not like the edition and returns it, stalks through the archway to the other room and picks up another book, then, faking an errand to his right, sneaks a glance at Sarina.

  “We’re closing soon,” the woman says.

  “Give us a preview,” Ben says. “What’s the dragon do in this one?”

  “No previews,” she says. The needles make plastic thwacking sounds.

  “Scarf?” Ben guesses.

  “Sweater,” she says. “For my cat.”

  “Lucky cat,” Ben says.

  “He runs away with the circus.”

  “Your cat?” says Sarina.

  “Sunshine the Dragon.”

  “He does not,” Ben says.

  “What would be my motivation to shit you? He sells popcorn and funnel cake. His dream is to become a trapeze artist but he’s a dragon so he’s too heavy. His weight would snap the trapeze.”

  “Can’t he fly?” Ben says.

  The woman approves. “Now you’re using your noggin.”

  Ben produces his wallet. “Ring us up for one, please.”

  They return to the street.

  “Do you think Sunshine the Dragon will learn trapeze?” Sarina says.

  “I have a feeling everything is going to be fine.” Ben winks.

  Sarina’s blush swells from her neck into her cheeks. They reach the place he knows, a cigar bar in the basement of a restaurant. She no longer cares about the train. She will take a cab. Or sleep in a stairwell on a pile of rats.

  “What is going to happen to that little girl?” Ben says.

  Sarina knows he means Madeleine, who she hopes is home, sleeping under a heavy blanket. She speaks with an optimism she doesn’t feel. “Everything is going to be fine.”

  11:00 P.M.

  Mark Altimari stands in the doorway of Madeleine’s bedroom, watching her sleep. Her fists are clenched beneath her chin as if even in dreams she must protect herself against foes.

  Corrine, Madeleine’s mother, is in the kitchen, making one of their simple dinners. Mark can hear her distracted singing. Madeleine is three.

  Mark wants to drink wine and dance to his new record. He wants to palm his wife’s full rump. He wants to order pizza. But Corrine believes in saving money, in slow meals and something to eat while you’re cooking them. She cuts slices out of a peach while the sauce simmers. Billie Holiday plays. Mark flips through his record collection to select the next album.

  They are good at being together. Leaving space. Leaving notes. Bringing home slabs of Locatelli, her favorite cheese. His tangy smell.

  They were in the first wave of young couples to settle near Ninth Street, bringing new energy to the Old World market. Mark would have preferred a house in the country but Corrine said the city would be their daughter’s best teacher. They bought a shop and Mark sold handmade cheeses. Corrine manned the cash register and worked at The Courtland Avenue Club at night. They were respectful of the other shop owners, who in some cases had been there for fifty years. Their business grew so Mark bought another shop, across town. Then another. Walking home eve
ry night, a wedge of Locatelli or a fistful of lavender tucked into his apron pocket, he tried to shake the dread fortune produced.

  Corrine’s knife stills, as if she has detected a kink in the air. “What’s that sound?” she says.

  Mark places his nose in the space where her shoulder meets her neck. Steals a slice from the cutting board. “No sound, dear.”

  “Listen,” she insists.

  Billie Holiday’s voice has been twinned. He looks to the record player for explanation.

  “You don’t think,” she says, but interrupts herself to place her finger over her lips. He lowers the volume. Billie’s voice recedes. The other gets louder. It is coming from Madeleine’s bedroom, but it couldn’t be their daughter, who has yet to say her first word. She doesn’t seem interested in talking and trails kids her age in verbal skills.

  I hear music, mighty fine music …

  A gust of air, a sudden shove. As if all of the house’s atoms had been paused on the brink of propulsion and this is their cue. The silverware drawer bursts out of its track. The forks and spoons rise into the air. The plate lifts, each peach slice orbiting it like a private solar system.

  Corrine releases her grip on the knife. It stays in the air. She turns her shocked eyes to Mark.

  The singing is unworried and clear. The saucepan lurches, in fits and starts leaving its heated place, skirts the stovetop, and falls to the ground. Corrine lunges to catch it but misses. The sauce ruins itself over her arms. She squeaks and plunges them under the faucet’s cold water.

  The glasses in the cupboards, the cookbooks, the recipe box, hover a foot off their perches. The dish towels ascend above their wooden rods.

  “What is this?” Corrine says.

  The voice is oblivious to the mayhem it’s causing.

  Mark stumbles into the back bedroom to find their baby clutching the bars of her crib. She is singing. He halts, scared to approach this unfamiliar creature. Madeleine holds the last, joyful note. Mark lifts her out of her crib and returns to the family room, where everything is collapsing. Corrine dodges the kitchen items that have been abandoned by their arrangements with gravity. Mark silences the music.