Sing for Me (14 page)

I tell her my name, and we’re out the door.

Dolores and I make our way through the dancers. I don’t look at Theo as we pass in front of the stage. I keep my eyes on Rob and Zane, who are sitting at our table again. Zane holds his head in his hands as if it’s a heavy weight. As Dolores and I approach, Rob pats the empty seat beside him. I sit down. Rob smiles blearily at me. Dolores sits next to Zane, who doesn’t look up.

Dolores jerks her thumb at Zane. “What’s up?”

Rob shrugs. “Not him, that’s for sure. Something come over you that last dance, Zane?”

“My leg hurts. That’s all.”

Zane says this to the table. His pant leg is hiked up to reveal the metal brace that sheathes his thin, pale shin. I’ve only seen his brace once or twice before. Usually he’s careful to keep it covered.

Dolores clucks her tongue. “Maybe you should rest up a bit?” She grabs a nearby empty chair and drags it over to Zane. “Why don’t you put your foot up? Take the weight off. It might help.”

“I can take care of myself.” Zane looks embarrassed. For the
first time, I realize that he has something in common with Sophy. He wants his condition to be accepted, not coddled. “I think I’m calling it a night,” he mutters.

“I can see why, what with the way Buckley’s singing now!” Rob leans into me. “Oh, I wish it was you up there, Rose. You wouldn’t put me through this, would you?”

Dolores says, “I heard your cousin singing in the bathroom. That voice of hers is something else.”

“Sure is. And this is jibberish.” Rob glares in the direction of the stage.

Lilah Buckley is singing skat. I’ve only heard one other person sing this way, Louis Armstrong, and I only know it’s called skat because the radio announcer said so. Once, during a recording session, the announcer said, Armstrong dropped his lyrics on the floor. The record producer encouraged Louis to keep on singing without the lyrics, so he sang the chorus in nonsense syllables. He improvised the sounds with perfect timing, using his voice like an instrument. “Scat gives a song
flavor
,” the announcer said. “When it’s good, it releases emotions so deep, so real, they’re unspeakable.”

I think that’s exactly what Lilah Buckley is doing right now. Accompanied by the Chess Men, her nonsense sounds make perfect sense to me.

“Bleet, blat, bloop.” Mimicking Lilah, Dolores leans across the table to give Rob’s wrist a reprimanding tap. “You still owe me a drink for that dance, buddy. And here I thought you were a gentleman, true to your word.”

“Jiminy. Where are my good manners?” Rob stands unsteadily and heads to the bar. Zane lifts his head from his hands, gives Dolores and me a curt nod, and limps to the bar, too.

Dolores frowns after him. “He’s hurting.”

“He usually doesn’t complain. It must be bad.”

Then the thought flashes through my mind: if Zane is leaving, maybe I could go with him. I’m more than ready to go to bed. I’m more than ready to sing to Sophy. I stand, crane my neck, search the place. No sign of Zane. I drop back into my chair. Never mind. It would be out of his way to take me home. And with him feeling so awful, it wouldn’t be fair of me to ask him for a ride.

Rob returns to the table and clinks his fresh drink against Dolores’s. Lilah Buckley has shifted from rapid skat to a slow ballad, yet another song I don’t know. I listen to her voice, strong and powerful, fragile and broken, all at the same time. Theo’s playing responds to her, encourages her, lifts her up, as do the rest of the Chess Men.

Beneath all this courses the ongoing current of Rob and Dolores’s slurred exchange. Rob is speaking of his dreams, his new job, law school, a practice of his own someday, and the money that goes along with it. Dolores is speaking of her dreams, her new job—against all odds, she’s just finished school and gotten her first full-time nursing position at Mount Sinai Hospital. A family—they’d both like to settle down and have one of those, one day. Rob wants a single, perfect child. Dolores wants many. She doesn’t care if they’re perfect or not.

What do I want? I can’t think for the music, which is winding down now. Which is ending, it appears. Theo is at the microphone again, bidding us all good night. Lilah Buckley has already left the stage.

“Good riddance,” Rob says drunkenly. He lifts his glass to his
lips. Before I can stop myself, my hand shoots out. I snatch the glass and dump the liquor on the floor.

“Hey!” Rob blinks, astonished.

“You’ve had more than enough.”

Rob glowers. “If you’re so sure about that, guess you’ll need to find another way home.”

“I’ll do that.”

I stand, grab my coat from the back of a chair, and move through the crowd. I am going to put one foot in front of the other until I come to an El stop that will take me where I need to go.

At the door, I glance back at the stage. This time, Theo’s the one watching me walk away. I gasp as he waves. “Wait!” he calls into the microphone. And then he whistles the opening measures to “Blow the Man Down.”

I clench my jaw, suddenly, inexplicably furious. I turn toward the door.
That was between us. That was not his to share.
One foot in front of the other, I walk right out of Calliope’s. It’s the darkest hour of an early February morning, and a cold sleet is falling. I can hear the distant rattle of the El. I will head in that direction and find some sheltered place to wait until it is safe to ride.

“I guess you turn into a pumpkin at the stroke of midnight?”

Dolores. She’s followed me. Rob stands swaying behind her. Others are stumbling out of Calliope’s, too. Dolores wraps her arms around a lamppost and sways back and forth as people surge around her.

“She turns into worse than a pumpkin. She turns into a prune. I mean, a prude.” Rob fumbles in his pocket. He draws out the valet ticket, looks dazedly around. “Who gets this?”

I point at the valet, huddled in a nearby alley. Rob waves the ticket, and the valet dashes over, takes it, then dashes off.

Rob grins. “This is living. My ladies, your coach approacheth.”

Dolores laughs, swinging around the lamppost again. “Our coacheth, you mean.”

Rob joins in laughing, his breath a puff of smoke in the cold air. He gives me a quick look and explains. “Dolores needs a ride home.”

“I’m not riding with you, Rob.” I look at Dolores. It takes her a moment, but finally she registers me. “And you shouldn’t, either,” I tell her.

Dolores swings around the lamppost again, laughing.

I shake my head. “Listen, though, Dolores, if he starts driving crazy, you ask him to pull over, you hear?”

She doesn’t seem to hear. She swings and swings and swings.

I am walking toward the distant rattle of the El when someone catches hold of my arm. I turn sharply, ready to tell Rob or Dolores to let me be. I’ll be fine.

But it’s Theo, standing there.

“Rose.”

My name on Theo’s lips doesn’t sound like my name on the lips of anyone else.

People are watching us. Dolores and Rob are watching us. A black man and a white woman. A black man gently holding a white woman by her arm.
Us.

The look Theo gives me is tender and sad. And something else. His dark eyes flicker with something like desperation.

“Where are you going?” he asks.

Cautiously, carefully, like one of us might break, I remove my arm from his hand.

“Home.”

“How will you get there?”

“I’m working on that.”

“Hey!” Rob stares at Theo with something like awe, but there’s fear is in his eyes, too. “You’re coming with me, Rose.”

Theo glances at Rob. His brow furrows. To me, he says, “I have a car. Let me take you home. We can leave right now.”

“Whoa there.” Rob is still slurring his words, but there’s a sharpness to his tone now. “That’s my cousin you’re talking to. You may be a great musician, sir, but I’ll be the one driving her home.”

Dolores gives one last, big swing. “Oureth carriageth awaiteth!”

The DeSoto idles at the curb. The valet dashes over and hands the keys to Rob. Rob tips him a shiny silver quarter, then jingles the keys at me. “I’ll let you do the driving if that’s what it takes, Rose.”

I remind Rob that I don’t know how to drive. “And right now, you don’t, either,” I say.

“I’m a great driver. Great a driver as that one is a great musician.” Rob lurches toward his car. “Fine. Take care of yourself, then, Rose!”

Rob gets behind the wheel, and Dolores slouches into the seat beside him. Theo and I watch as the car tears away from the curb and careens down the street and around the corner.

I want to get home to Sophy. I want to get home to her now. I turn to Theo. Quietly, so no one else can hear, I say, “I’ll take that ride.”

Theo’s eyes widen, but then he nods. “Best you meet me around back.”

He turns on his heel and goes quickly into Calliope’s, ignoring the women and men who tug at his jacket, ask him for a drink, ask him for an autograph, ask him for more.

I hesitate only a minute. Then I walk past the valet and down the dark alley around to the back of the club, where Theo already stands waiting by his car.

NINE

I
focus on the cold. The sharp wind gusts and propels me toward Theo’s car; it keeps me from hesitating. This man helped me clean an empty apartment, I tell myself. This man makes music I’m struggling to live without. This man is a gentleman. A gentle man. I trust him to drive me home.

I open the passenger’s side door. I am about to get in when Theo holds up his hand.
Stop
, his hand says.

I stop.

“Backseat, Rose. Better safe than sorry.”

I shut the door and get into the backseat. Theo slips in behind the steering wheel. He closes his door and turns to look at me.

“I’m the chauffeur. You’re the passenger. Got it?”

“Are you sure about this? I can find another way—”

“I’m sure. I’m not foolish, though.” He claps a newsboy’s cap on his head, tugs it low over his eyes. “The wrong people see us at this time of the morning in what they think is a compromising situation, your life could be ruined and I could be dead. We can talk, but only when we’re driving. Not when we’re stopped at an
intersection, not when we get to your place, wherever that is. Where is it, by the way?”

I tell him my address.

“Near Garfield Park?”

I nod. He faces forward again and we’re on our way.

We don’t say a word, even as we turn onto Lake Shore Drive. Rob has never taken this way—at least not when I’ve been with him. There are no stop signs or streetlights, I can’t help but notice. Maybe that’s why Theo picked it. Driving along like this, we can talk freely. Now if only one of us would think of something to say.

The slope of his shoulders is more noticeable than on most men, but of course I’m not going to say that. I suppose it’s from all those hours of bending over, leaning into the piano keys. His hands on the steering wheel—the quick touch of his fingers, tendons rippling as he steers us into the slow lane—his elegant hands are strong and agile from all those hours of playing, too.

At this rate I’ll never be able to say anything without embarrassing myself. I look out the window at the dark expanse of Lake Michigan.