The Best of Lucius Shepard (113 page)

“I’ll keep
that in mind,” she said, sorting through some new orders. “You go have fun.”

Andrea had
staked out one of the high-backed booths at the rear of McGuigan’s and was
drinking a martini. She usually ran late, liked sitting at the front, and drank
red wine. She had hung her jacket on the hook at the side of the booth and
looked fetching in a cream-colored blouse. I nudged the martini glass and asked
what was up with the booze.

“Bad day in
court. I had to ask for a continuance. So....” She hoisted the martini. “I’m boozing
it up.”

“Is this
that pollution thing?”

“No, it’s a
pro bono case.”

“Thought you
weren’t going to do any pro bono work for a while.”

She
shrugged, drank. “What can I say?”

“All that
class guilt. It must be tough.” I signaled a waitress, pointed to Andrea’s
martini and held up two fingers. “I suppose I should be grateful. If you
weren’t carrying around that guilt, you would have married Snuffy Huffington
the Third or somebody.”

“Let’s not
banter,” Andrea said. “We always banter. Let’s just talk. Tell me what’s going
on with you.”

I was good
at reading Andrea, but it was strange how well I read her at that moment.
Stress showed in her face. Nervousness. Both predictable components. But mainly
I saw a profound loneliness and that startled me. I’d never thought of her as
being lonely. I told her about Stanky, the good parts, his writing, his
musicianship.

“The guy
plays everything,” I said. “Guitar, flute, sax, trumpet. Little piano, little
drums. He’s like some kind of mutant they produced in a secret high school band
lab. And his voice. It’s the Jim Nabors effect. You know, the guy who played
Gomer Pyle? Nobody expected a guy looked that goofy could sing, so when he did,
they thought he was great, even though he sounded like he had sinus trouble.
It’s the same with Stanky, except his voice really is great.”

“You’re
always picking up these curious strays,” she said. “Remember the high school
kid who played bass, the one who fainted every time he was under pressure?
Brian Something. You’d come upstairs and say, ‘You should see what Brian did,’
and tell me he laid a bass on its side and played Mozart riffs on it. And I’d
go....”

“Bach,” I
said.

“And I’d go,
‘Yeah, but he faints!’” She laughed. “You always think you can fix them.”

“You’re
coming dangerously close to banter,” I said.

“You owe me
one.” She wiggled her forefinger and grinned. “I’m right, aren’t I? There’s a
downside to this guy.”

I told her
about Stanky’s downside and, when I reached the part about Mia leaving, Andrea
said, “The circus must be in town.”

“Now you owe
me one.”

“You can’t
expect me to be reasonable about Mia.” She half-sang the name, did a little
shimmy, made a moue.

“That’s two
you owe me,” I said.

“Sorry.” She
straightened her smile. “You know she’ll come back. She always does.”

I liked that
she was acting flirty and, though I had no resolution in mind, I didn’t want
her to stop.

“You don’t
have to worry about me,” she said. “Honest.”

“Huh?”

“So how
talented is this Stanky? Give me an example.”

“What do you
mean, I don’t have to worry about you?”

“Never mind.
Now come on! Give me some Stanky.”

“You want me
to sing?”

“You were a
singer, weren’t you? A pretty good one, as I recall.”

“Yeah, but I
can’t do what he does.”

She sat
expectantly, hands folded on the tabletop.

“All right,”
I said. I did a verse of “Devil’s Blues,” beginning with the lines:

“There’s a
grapevine in heaven,
There’s a peavine in hell,
One don’t grow grapes,
The other don’t grow peas as well....”

I sailed on
through to the chorus, getting into the vocal:

“Devil’s
Blues!
God owes him....”

A bald guy
popped his head over the top of an adjacent booth and looked at me, then ducked
back down. I heard laughter.

“That’s
enough,” I said to Andrea.

“Interesting,”
she said. “Not my cup of tea, but I wouldn’t mind hearing him.”

“He’s
playing the Crucible next weekend.”

“Is that an
invitation?”

“Sure. If
you’ll come.”

“I have to
see how things develop at the office. Is a tentative yes okay?”

“Way better
than a firm no,” I said.

We ordered
from the grill and, after we had eaten, Andrea called her office and told them
she was taking the rest of the day. We switched from martinis to red wine, and
we talked, we laughed, we got silly, we got drunk. The sounds of the bar folded
around us and I started to remember how it felt to be in love with her. We
wobbled out of McGuigan’s around four o’clock. The sun was lowering behind the
Bittersmiths, but shed a rich golden light; it was still warm enough for people
to be sitting in sweaters and shirts on park benches under the orange leaves.

Andrea lived
around the corner from the bar, so I walked her home. She was weaving a little
and kept bumping into me. “You better take a cab home,” she said, and I said,
“I’m not the one who’s walking funny,” which earned me a punch in the arm. When
we came to her door, she turned to me, gripping her briefcase with both hands
and said, “I’ll see you next weekend, maybe.”

“That’d be
great.”

She hovered
there a second longer and then she kissed me. Flung her arms about my neck,
clocking me with the briefcase, and gave me a one-hundred-percent all-Andrea
kiss that, if I were a cartoon character, would have rolled my socks up and down
and levitated my hat. She buried her face in my neck and said, “Sorry. I’m
sorry.” I was going to say, For what?, but she pulled away in a hurry,
appearing panicked, and fled up the stairs.

I nearly hit
a parked car on the drive home, not because I was drunk, but because thinking
about the kiss and her reaction afterward impaired my concentration. What was
she sorry about? The kiss? Flirting? The divorce? I couldn’t work it out, and I
couldn’t work out, either, what I was feeling. Lust, certainly. Having her body
pressed against mine had fully engaged my senses. But there was more.
Considerably more. I decided it stood a chance of becoming a mental health
issue and did my best to put it from mind.

Kiwanda was
busy in the office. She had the computers networking and was going through
prehistoric paper files on the floor. I asked what was up and she told me she
had devised a more efficient filing system. She had never been much of an
innovator, so this unnerved me, but I let it pass and asked if she’d had any
problems with my boy Stanky.

“Not so
you’d notice,” she said tersely.

From this, I
deduced that there
had
been a problem, but I let that pass as well and
went upstairs to the apartment. Walls papered with flyers and band photographs;
a grouping of newish, ultra-functional Swedish furniture—I realized I had liked
the apartment better when Andrea did the decorating, this despite the fact that
interior design had been one of our bones of contention. The walls, in
particular, annoyed me. I was being stared at by young men with shaved heads
and flowing locks in arrogant poses, stupid with tattoos, by five or six bands
that had tried to stiff me, by a few hundred bad-to-indifferent memories and a
dozen good ones. Maybe a dozen. I sat on a leather and chrome couch (it was a
showy piece, but uncomfortable) and watched the early news. George Bush, Iraq,
the price of gasoline ... Fuck! Restless, I went down to the basement.

Stanky was
watching Comedy Central.
Mad TV
. Another of his passions. He was slumped
on the couch, remote in hand, and had a Coke and a cigarette working, an ice
pack clamped to his cheek. I had the idea the ice pack was for my benefit, so I
didn’t ask about it, but knew it must be connected to Kiwanda’s attitude. He barely
acknowledged my presence, just sat there and pouted. I took a chair and watched
with him. At last he said, “I need a rhythm guitar player.”

“I’m not
going to hire another musician this late in the game.”

He set down
the ice pack. His cheek was red, but that might have been from the ice pack
itself ... although I thought I detected a slight puffiness. “I seriously need
him,” he said.

“Don’t push
me on this.”

“It’s
important, man! For this one song, anyway.”

“What song?”

“A new one.”

I waited and
then said, “That’s all you’re going to tell me?”

“It needs a
rhythm guitar.”

This tubby
little madman recumbent on my couch was making demands—it felt good to reject
him, but he persisted.

“It’s just
one song, man,” he said in full-on wheedle. “Please! It’s a surprise.”

“I don’t
like surprises.”

“Come on!
You’ll like this one, I promise.”

I told him
I’d see what I could do, had a talk with him about Jerry, and the atmosphere
lightened. He sat up straight, chortling at
Mad TV
, now and then saying,
“Decent!,” his ultimate accolade. The skits were funny and I laughed, too.

“I did my
horoscope today,” he said as the show went to commercial.

“Let me
guess,” I said. “You’re a Cancer.”

He didn’t
like that, but maintained an upbeat air. “I don’t mean astrology, man. I use
the
Guide.
” He slid the
TV Guide
across the coffee table,
pointing out an entry with a grimy finger, a black-rimmed nail. I snatched it
up and read:

“
King
Creole
: *** Based on a Harold Robbins novel. A young man (Elvis Presley)
with a gang background rises from the streets to become a rock-and-roll star.
Vic Morrow. 1:30.”

“Decent,
huh!” said Stanky. “You try it. Close your eyes and stick your finger in on a
random page and see what you get. I use the movie section in back, but some
people use the whole programming section.”

“Other
people do this? Not just you?”

“Go ahead.”

I did as
instructed and landed on another movie:

“
A Man
and a Woman
: **** A widow and a widower meet on holiday and are attracted
to one another, but the woman backs off because memories of her dead husband
are still too strong. Jean-Louis Trintignant, Anouk Aimée. 1:40.”

Half-believing,
I tried to understand what the entry portended for me and Andrea.

“What did
you get?” asked Stanky.

I tossed the
Guide
back to him and said, “It didn’t work for me.”

I thought
about calling Andrea, but business got in the way—I suppose I allowed it to get
in the way, due to certain anxieties relating to our divorce. There was
publicity to do, Kiwanda’s new filing system to master (she kept on tweaking
it), recording (we laid down two tracks for Stanky’s first EP), and a variety
of other duties. And so the days went quickly. Stanky began going to the
library after every practice, walking without a limp; he said he was doing
research. He didn’t have enough money to get into trouble and I had too much
else on my plate to stress over it. The night before he played the Crucible, I
was in the office, going over everything in my mind, wondering what I had
overlooked, thinking I had accomplished an impossible amount of work that week,
when the doorbell rang. I opened the door and there on the stoop was Andrea,
dressed in jeans and a bulky sweater, cheeks rosy from the night air. An
overnight bag rested at her feet. “Hi,” she said, and gave a chipper smile,
like a tired Girl Scout determined to keep pimping her cookies.