2 a.m. at the Cat's Pajamas (17 page)

What will she tell her mother, who sewed every bead on the gloves she is wearing? Who said,
Try not to think of your father tonight
. No one at school knows her father is gone and Ben has nothing to do with that gray man loading suitcases into his smoking gray car in the middle of the gray night. He was a don’t-say-anything-that-takes-more-than-four-words kind of father. When looking at the world, he saw only how it was. Whatever he saw when he looked at Sarina and her mother and sister, he didn’t think he needed.

Sarina had hoped for an exchange with the universe: a good prom for a gone father. But she will receive no coupon. Drab girls named Sara have as much chance for divinity. This realization sucks, brick by brick, ascending into a wall inside her that will from this day forward allow her smile to open only so big. She is not special or pretty or chosen or royal. She is fatherless, only.

Boys. Tender with their cars. Feet that smell like churned earth. Sparse bureau tops, loose change, and a dry-cleaning
ticket. Dirty jeans, sun-faded socks. Upsetting smirks. Forearms dusted with freckles. Limbs long with no effort. They pretend to not care how they look. Her father’s shelf in the medicine cabinet was empty except for a roll of bandages and a comb that smelled like firewood. Boys. In packs at the edges of fields, hitting each other over some new level of video game, obscure band, skate trick, lit crit, rebound, offsides, descending line, whammy bar, pickup, layup, Walkman, eight-track, on the bench, down the line, over the shirt, under the bra, fumbling toward the clit. Boys.

Another suited jerk stops in front of her table. “Sarina?” it says.

It’s Michael Lawrence, the scrawny guy who sings in the school’s musicals. He takes several steps as if forced back by her beauty. “You are stunning. Jean Seberg, if she was a brunette.”

“I’ve never heard of that actress,” she says.

“Jean Seberg. From
Breathless
?”

How nice to have another boy treat her like a worthless thing, this time for not knowing a movie. Then he is wrenching her from her chair, does she not want to dance? Sarina doesn’t want to dance, no she can’t explain why, well then, let’s dance, you and me, oh Michael, oh, fine. Sarina rests her hands on his shoulders. They take one stiff step to the right, one stiff step to the left.

Across the room, Ben watches his date dance with Michael Lawrence, the human equivalent of not playing it cool. The song is about not understanding the person you’re with even after all these years and even after being given every
opportunity. It lasts for three minutes and fifty-three seconds. Over the course of it, Sarina and Michael cover one square foot of gym floor.

Ben, however, travels to hell and back.

The song finishes and Sarina thanks Michael for what will be her only dance. Next to her, someone clears his throat and for the first time that night, Sarina turns to find her date by her side.

“I’ll take it from here,” Ben says.

The smile Sarina extended to Michael dies. “You can take me home.”

Ben goes numb. Any thought she might be joking fades as he trails her through the parking lot to the Mustang. She gets in and shuts the door. He gets in and shuts his, sealing out noise from the outside. On another day that would be considered another killer feature of this car, but now the silence makes Ben’s suit feel a size too small. He suggests waffles at the diner.

“No,” she says.

The shape of his error grows and sharpens, causing his throat to close, his stomach to leaden. He cannot let her go home. He must rebound. Rally to overturn the momentum. He puts his mouth on her earlobe, sliding his hand under the strap of her dress. She forces him away. “Home.”

The Mustang rumbles to life. Ben is too upset to appreciate it.

Driving out of the parking lot, they pass the open doors of the gym, where a couple necks underneath wilting balloons. The boy bites the girl’s shoulder while she stares at the ceiling.
The balloons are black and gray, in coordination with the prom theme: Goth Night. Ben glances over to see if Sarina is watching too, but she is staring at the soccer field that in the fall is dotted with the banners of rival schools. Ben eases around each corner, so as not to further upset her. Her neck glows like the mussel shells his family collects on shore vacations. When they reach her street, it is quiet and carless. The Mustang shudders to a halt in front of her house.

Through the bay window, Sarina can see her mother napping on the recliner. The creak of the front door will awaken her and she will want to know everything: how the dress went over, what the other girls were wearing, how it was to dance with him, whether summer picnics will include him. Her mother will want to know whether in a world of unreliable fathers this boy is going to stick. How will Sarina tell her no?

Sarina’s hand pauses on the car door. She needs to gather herself into a girl who can lie,
It was great!
This terrible boy would not understand. After ignoring her all night he can at least allow her this time, unexplained. Around her the chirruping bugs, the dilations of stars, the smell of the rosebushes, even the arrogant moon seem to pause.

How would she have said good-bye to her father, even if he had stayed to hear it?

Sarina will move to college and tell this story at parties, her mouth spiced with alcohol. What was the name of that guy who did that thing? her girlfriends will say. At your prom? She will take a bong hit and yell:
Ben Allen!
in smoke. She will meet and marry a gorgeous man whose first language is Spanish. Finally—restitution from the universe. They will have sex
on unpronounceable beaches. They will move to Connecticut where nothing has edges. One day, her sister will call and say come back, Mom’s dying, and Sarina will drag what’s left of this home to this curb in boxes they bought at the Shop and Save. In that moment, she will have gone far enough to measure how little progress she has made.

In this moment, through the bay windows and over the wide sills, Sarina watches the woman in forty-watt light readjust her chin in sleep. Ben Allen watches, too.

She says, “That’s my mother.”

A
lex is outfitted in the uniform of a former Cubanista twice his size: lapel-less band jacket and pants the color of whole wheat, accented with pink sequins. The excess waistband sags below his hips. He has finessed his curls away from his face with Max’s hair grease, but they refuse to stay. They fall into his eyes as he huddles with Max onstage.

“Check out Tito Puente,” Sonny says. He and Lorca stand behind the bar, arms crossed.

Lorca trains his eye on the front door where, he worries, a fleet of cops led by Len Thomas will burst through any moment. “Probably a bad idea letting him play.”

“Everything is a bad idea,” Sonny says.

Max swills water at the bar. “No hazing,” Lorca tells him. “Don’t make him scuffle for chord changes.”

“That’s how you learn, buddy.” Max cha-cha-chas for the ladies and goes back onstage.

Alex likes to be close to the percussion when he plays. He takes the chair next to Gus and vaults his brunette guitar onto his knee. He noodles, alert as a puppy, as Max rains more love on the girl in yellow heels. Max explains in his thick baritone what she should listen for as he plays, why each note is important.

“Got it,” she says, irritated.

“Let’s go, Max.” Sonny yells through his cupped hands. Then he says to Lorca, “They look like a loaf of bread.”

Max cannot see Sonny through the stage’s glare when he purrs into the microphone, “Suck it, Vega, we go when we’re ready,” accenting the insult with a low kick. A cymbal hit by Gus. Max croons, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are the Cubanistas and we have come all the way from Cuba to play for you tonight.”

Cassidy snorts, pouring a pint.

“We would like to start with a
classique de la Cubanista
. It is called ‘Candela.’ We do hope you enjoy it.”

The Main Line kid hisses some important distraction into Aruna’s ear, but she swats him away. Her gaze is trained on Alex, who pats his wet forehead with the back of his wrist.

Max hits the first chord and bays to the ceiling, silencing the people who enter, shaking off the cold. The other musicians join. At first, they keep pace with each other, laying their rhythms over Gus’s timbales. Max rolls his shoulders in time. He calls out to the tin roof. In the space of one note, he sings three. He warbles up the ascending line. Hearing him sing is observing someone in great pain. He’s not reliable or even predictable. He’ll lead a song off a cliff if it means checking out a sound lurking in the valley. Lorca has heard him drift so far he forgets what song he’s playing, but he can make even venerable horn players turn.

Max howls, gargles tri-notes, making everyone in the audience feel they are in on something. Windmills, thrusts, beads of sweat on the crab apples of his cheeks. He chugs almost offstage, then stalks back to keen Spanish into the mic. Max could reason with the archangel on Judgment Day, or just a university girl out of her dress. He stays drunk, scared of the
part of himself that is able to blow his mind so far out. If he ever got sober, he’d be chatty and nervous, no better than the bums in the square playing chess with the pigeons, telling them he used to be a jazz great, and the pigeons would say,
The hell you were, Max. Checkmate
. Lorca knows so much of Max is bullshit. But when it comes to playing, he is the genuine article and has spent his life in service. For Alex to keep pace, he will have to adjust to quick-shifting harmonies and note patterns.

Emo Sonofabitch Gladden solos. How he plays the trumpet: like a son of a bitch. His fingers are thick as garden carrots, but deft. He blows a phrase and it sounds like a girl saying, “come here.”

It is almost time for Alex’s solo. Lorca strums his son’s chords on his jeans. He wants to play it for him, but he can only watch.

The song surges into a different tempo. Alex pauses on the edge like a Northeast girl waiting to jump into double-Dutch, searching for the right height, or some incalculable readying of sound. Max calls out that this is his party and he loves to sing. The ropes go over and under and over and under.

Alex chases after a few notes, but they don’t please him. He hunts for a run he likes more. Gus’s percussion supports him as he noodles. Alex listens for chords in the strings, his eyes at a fixed point over the crowd. He finds it. He lands it again. The people at the front tables stop talking. Holding silver-rimmed liquor bottles to the mouth of a drink, Cassidy stops talking. Even Max, spraying saliva into the microphone, nods. The song collects behind Alex’s lead. He licks at something
sparkling at the corner of his mouth. He takes a run, picks at a particular line, threads it,
yes
he says because he likes it, holds it, noses into it, asks if it has anything more, lets it go.

Lorca exhales. He guesses where his son will leap and is wrong every time.
Can’t catch me
, Alex’s tempos seem to say before leaping in wild directions. He’s better than this club already, it’s all over his posture, more like that of a visiting musician stopping off on his way somewhere better. An urge cracks beneath Lorca’s breastplate. He wants to be softer with Alex, encourage this tender talent. This is how it must feel to be a good father. But then the urge is replaced by helplessness; the amount of energy it would take to reverse the father he already has going would be too much. He can’t be expected to do that plus operate a club. If Alex keeps playing, all he’ll have are these balding nights with strangers. He’ll be surrounded by people like him, Max, and Sonny. This is no life. Who does Alex think he is? Lorca is filled by a quick, cheap anger. Alex has made it impossible to father him. Then this feeling too parts and is replaced. Lorca is tired of trying to keep the club together. The keg orders, the rotting basement, the floors that cling to their stains. Lorca wants to sit in a boat with no task more urgent than finding a fish with bait. He slumps next to Sonny at the bar, weary from this rearrangement of disposition, though only a short time has passed, the time it takes Alex to reposition his guitar, bringing the neck within breath’s distance so he has easier access to its strings.

Max yells, rolls. The song builds to one repeating line that Alex solos over.

“I’m burning,” Max sings. “I’m burning, I’m burning.”

Alex’s notes go under and over and under and over.

“Look everyone,” the Cubanistas sing, “he’s burning.”

It’s up to Alex to gather the whole mess like a family: Max’s baying, Gus’s percussion, Emo’s snivelly, choppy horn. But he’s having too much fun.

“I’m burning,” Max yells.

“He’s burning,” the Cubanistas sing.

Alex lands the final chord and releases the room. The club goes blank with noise. The crowd can’t get to their feet fast enough. They yell through megaphones they construct from their hands. Max applauds himself, the band, and Alex.

“Not too shabby,” he says into the microphone, forgetting his accent.

Alex kneads sweat into the denim of his thigh. He blinks toward where his father is, though he cannot see him through the gluten of bodies.

Sonny whistles and stomps. “Good job, Dad,” he says to Lorca.

A young girl looks up. “Are you his dad?”

“He sure is, darling.” Sonny beams.

“Does he have …” Her friends close ranks around her. One of them finishes her question. “… a girlfriend?”

Three pairs of eyes lined in charcoal wait for Lorca to answer. The muscles in his back tense with pride. “Single as a bluebird,” he says.

Onstage, Alex is being tousled and hugged by the Cubanistas. Max makes a show of fending off the audience. Alex is congratulated to the bar, where the trio of girls bluff errands in their purses, fuzz on their stockings.

“Drink?” Cassidy says.

“Whiskey, please.” He turns to his father. His eyes are slick. “How’d I do, Pop?”

Lorca doesn’t answer.

“Pop?”

“You were great, kid.” Sonny pounds his shoulders. But Alex wants to hear it from his father.

“You showboated behind Emo’s solo,” Lorca says. “You should have been supporting him, letting him take the chances.”