A Little Night Music (4 page)

The dude-girl’s painted brows pitched high.

                      “Trumpet,” Jon added quickly, lifting the case as evidence. “My trumpet. There’s something…”
Oh, Jesus
.

       
              Dr. Frank N. Furter blinked two glittery pink eyelids in consideration. “Fifty bucks.”

       
              “Thirty and you wash your hands.”

       
              “Deal.”

       
              With a flourishing removal of leather bands and boas, he-she-it dipped into a side door. Jon heard a faucet running and a paper towel ripped from its housing. He fished out his wallet. Thirty bucks for some bullshit story . At least here Jon was the sanest person in the room.

       
              “I’m Echo.” Jon spotted the tensile veins in Echo’s forearm as he reached for the cast - definitely a dude.

       
              Jon handed Echo three ten-dollar bills. He was infinitely more reluctant with the trumpet.

       
              “I’m not going to blow it,” said Echo.

       
              Jon’s solar plexus felt tampered with. He would kill Gabe for sending him here. Switchblade in a dark alley kind of kill.

       
              Echo took the case and led Jon to two high-back velvet wing chairs separated by a table covered with what could have been a sultan's robe with its jewels and intricately stitched open and closed eyes.  Already Echo’s guttural note of disapproval upon possession of the instrument made Jon’s nerves scramble inward for protection.

       
              Jon settled in the chair. Echo hovered over his as if fully committing to the task at hand was something he had reconsidered. He lowered himself and opened the case as if expecting the gruesome remains of a homicide victim or a Bible.

       
              In the blue-speckled teardrop lamp over the table, the trumpet took on a foreign hue, a dark cast not apparent in daylight or the yellows and reds of the stage lamps. In Echo’s hands, it trembled.

       
              Jon stared, transfixed.

Echo exhaled, long and deep. His tar breath hit Jon in a foul wave. The whites of his eyes transitioned to glittery pink and spider web lashes as he closed them. His black fingernails trembled.

                      “You feel it too,” said Echo, all pretense, all theatrics absent from his voice. It wasn’t a question, it was knowledge.

In this new, genuine tone, Jon found absolute conviction. He tried to remind himself of the thirty bucks for a bullshit story, but this person before him who had given himself over to the task in such a genuine way made Jon forgot the voodoo dolls and dragon statues and pentagrams. Everything in the room slipped away but the trumpet and the falsetto of Echo’s voice.

“Yes.”

“Someone has placed something on this.”

“A curse?”

“Nothing like that. At least not what you might think.” Echo hesitated, stroking the bell’s curve. He treated the instrument with such reverence, Jon’s fierce protectiveness of the trumpet all but died.

“Powerful enchantment to be sure, but it’s not dark. It’s almost…” Echo hesitated, searching the overhead lamp for the precise word—a hesitancy so unmistakable, Jon thought it absurd that Echo should worry about an insanity judgment past his green tights and peacock-feather tail. Jon expected him to say
light
or
positive
or
inspirational.
He did not expect him to say what came next.

“Love.”

“Excuse me?”

Echo came back to planet Earth with a firmer declaration. “Love. No question.”

“But not a curse?”

“Think of it as good fortune for anyone who plays it.”

“Love is not good fortune.”

“Love is
always
good fortune. That tie, however?” Echo made a whooshing sound, followed by a
tsk
and a stink-face. Moment of  bonding passed.
This coming from a guy who thinks a dog collar with a moon pendant passes for bling? Thirty dollars of bullshit
.

“Well, thanks.” Jon packed the trumpet away in its velvet-sculpted lining as if his pants had caught a spark from the goblin-shaped lighter on the shelf beside him. He fled Madame Troussaint’s All-Seeing Lounge with as much swagger and testosterone as he could muster, a balancing of
his
natural law of things—though he questioned his track record after marrying an in the closet lesbian.

Only one person knew the trumpet’s real story. He hadn’t become CEO of the nation’s fastest rising financial services corporation by settling for half-baked, moon-pendant answers. Elli knew something. Why else would she want it back after putting it up for sale? Jon intended to find out what that something was, even if he had to apologize for a kiss he didn’t regret.

Three

Elli was waist-deep in RSVPs from city dignitaries, two borrowed Valentino gowns courtesy of a college friend who married more for a trust account than trust, and enough pink phone message slips to wallpaper the Legacy Foundation for the Advancement of Children in Music office and instrument storeroom. With the year’s most important fundraiser in less than a week, Elli had forsaken eating, sleeping and her usual cheery mood to tackle the last-minute details of putting on a gala that could fund her father’s dream of opening a music school in Honduras.

Her assistant and friend Macy, attributed Elli’s sour disposition to the night she had returned to The Lotus, expecting to have the trumpet back by midnight. The only thing Elli had by midnight were swollen lips from a hungry kiss and cramps in her hamstrings from hoofing it ten city blocks in heels. When she wasn’t thinking about how expensive to go on the formal’s wine selection, her thoughts invariably returned to the enigma of a man who could be warm and expressive in music and thoroughly boorish when his lips weren’t plastered in a brass cup. 

Elli heard Macy say something about strippers. Her attention snapped back to the cramped and dilapidated leasing space they had been forced to move into after Katrina. “I’m sorry, what?”

       
              “I said…” Macy exaggerated the
said
until it wrung of desperation from trying to keep Elli on-task. Macy hopped up on a nearby table—always the exhibitionist—and ground out a burlesque number. “I thought we’d hire male strippers, rub our guests in a champagne roux and bathe in Modesta Garden’s seven fountains.”

       
              Elli’s patience meandered through Macy’s usual sarcasm and snagged on two words that made her heart skip a beat. “Did you say ‘Modesta Gardens’?”

       
              “
That
’s what you gleaned from that? Girl, you gotta get out of this rat-hole.”

       
              “Ma
cy
.” Elli dragged out the last syllable in fake torture.

       
              The blond, five-foot-nothing-but-curves graduate student giggled and climbed down from the table. “At least I got your attention. And yes, looks like your Cedric came through for us.”

       
              The first real breath Elli had taken since she found out the Aviator Museum double-booked a wedding for the same night clipped short at the innuendo in Macy’s tone.

       
              “He’s not
my
Cedric. I wish you’d stop calling him that.”

       
              “For bailing your pretty little bottom out five days before the big event? I’d wrap myself in lightning bolts and call him Zeus.”

       
              “It
is
the crème de la Garden District,” Elli hedged.

       
              “Owned by some big-wig in Cedric’s law firm. On European holiday this week.”

       
              “What about the Swing band? It’ll be all wrong for a formal French garden.”

       
              “Already taken care of. A small slice of a chamber orchestra from nine to eleven.”

       
              “Let me guess—Cedric?”

       
              “Superhero, that man.”

       
              Elli flipped to the budget spreadsheet for the event. Her nerves squirmed at the bottom figure in red. “Green Lantern with an asthmatic wheeze and a nose bleed more like”

       
              “He was seven. And I heard you had a wicked-tight rainbow afro for Halloween that year. Don’t go there.”

       
              Elli preened an invisible ‘fro that would make Erykah Badu weep, picked up the first message skewered on the holder—the florist—and dialed.

       
              “Speaking of superhero…” Macy gravitated to the front window. Her work ethic was erratic at the best of times, Elli could have replaced her six times over, but no one had a bigger heart than Macy. Or the tolerance for near-squalor.

       
              Mid-confirmation of delivery time for the seventeen lily centerpieces, Elli zeroed in on what had caught Macy’s eye. A guy in tight jeans and a black and yellow leather jacket unseated himself from a dazzling red sportsbike parked out front.

       
              Elli wondered how long it would stay parked in this neighborhood.

       
              Macy made a Weight-Watchers-versus-jelly-donut moan.

       
              The florist said, “Hello? Are you there?” in Elli’s ear.

       
              The biker removed his black helmet.

       
              The cell phone slid from Elli’s grasp.

       
             
Jon
.

       
              Elli scrambled for the phone, its rubber case bouncing along the scratched wood floor. She stammered something close to “Sorry, I dropped the phone,” while trying to remember how her hands functioned.

       
              Macy mumbled, “That’s not all you dropped, Sister. Swallow a fly with that mouth.”

       
              “Gotta run. Thanks. I’ll bring the check on Thursday,” though Elli couldn’t say what millionaire Macy would need to prime to pay the balance. Elli ended the call. She felt naked, exposed. With the front room visible from the street, she couldn’t pretend she wasn’t here—anymore than she could pretend the man entering her foundation office hadn’t given her the first kiss in her life that had made her toes curl.

       
              Bastard.

                      As Jon entered the Foundation office, Elli stood. In bare feet and a peasant dress. A far cry from Valentino. A far cry from the only upscale shorts-suit she owned.

       
              Jon’s gaze dropped from her scarf-wrapped hair to her red toenails.

       
              Elli curled her toes then straightened them.

       
              The planets aligned. Meteors showered in a rare millennial display. Then Hell froze.

       
              Jon smiled.

       
              The rare and visually-stunning display caught Elli so off-guard, she found she was at an even rarer loss for words.

       
              Bastard.

       
              “Hi, Elli.”

       
              Macy, ever-present in Elli’s moments of extreme awkwardness, charged forward, her hand extended. “You must be Jon.”

       
              Jon shook her hand, blinking back a measure of surprise. His gaze immediately slid to Elli, and his lips stretched to a full-on grin. He knew Elli had spoken about him.

       
              Bastard.

       
              Elli shot a stealth nice-going look at Macy and marched around the only table in the room, piled with dangerously high stacks of applications for donated instrument’s.

       
              “What are you doing here?”

       
              Jon’s expression turned serious. He visibly swallowed and glanced at the floor as if the real reason for his visit was etched in the oak planks between his boots. When he looked at her again, he was Jon the trumpet-master, not the Jon that had saddled his knee between her thighs on a street corner and tempted her sixteen different ways, none of them ladylike.

       
              “I came to apologize.”