2 a.m. at the Cat's Pajamas Read online

  Sonny tells the cold to screw itself. He and Lorca walk to his mustard-colored Buick he thinks can fit into every parking spot in Fishtown. It is crammed between two trucks, its enormous front sticking out into traffic.

  Lorca slides into the front seat. “You use a shoehorn?”

  Sonny reverses, spins the wheel, accelerates, spins, reverses. Lorca adjusts knobs on the console so heat sighs through the vents. Finally the car is free. Sonny smooths his hair in the rearview mirror and beams.

  They ride in silence. Streetlights scan them. What Louisa said about Alex turns in Lorca’s mind but doesn’t allow him to pinpoint its exact shape or form. “Louisa said Alex is going down a bad road. You know anything about that?”

  Sonny’s eyes dart from Lorca to the road. He checks his rear view and changes lanes. Light slants in, making him glow. “He’s looking skinny,” he admits.

  “What does that mean?”

  The streetlight abandons them, throwing the car into darkness. Sonny sighs. “Come on, Lorc.”

  “What does that mean? I’m asking.”

  “I don’t know why Louisa has trouble talking to you,” Sonny says. “You’re such a goddamned peach.”

  The car clamors over a pothole and part of the ceiling fabric comes undone, making a veil over Lorca’s head.

  “You got a fix for this?” he says.

  Sonny reaches over Lorca and punches the glove compartment open to reveal a staple gun.

  “You’re a world-class musician,” Lorca says. “And your car is held together by string.” He shoots staples into the ceiling.

  “Do it nice,” Sonny says. “Make a line.”

  The Courtland Avenue Club shimmers like a false sunset off the highway. They still have a snake girl. She is featured prominently on a banner that hangs over the entrance. Lorca hasn’t been inside in five years. Other than a new coat of paint, not much has changed.

  In one of the lanes a group of Main Line girls prepares to bowl, trying out shoes and form-perfect throws. One of them, a rotund, displeased-looking girl, wears a crown with tulle bursting out of it.

  “In and out,” Lorca says. “Find Max and let’s go.”

  Sonny nods. “You got it.”

  The door to the strip club is behind the bar. Sonny exchanges words with the bouncer. He tells a joke that only he laughs at, but the bouncer lets him in. Lorca orders a whiskey at the bowling alley’s bar. Five years earlier he had stopped in on the way home from scouting a saxophonist in Jersey. Then, it had been Louisa getting his drink and not this girl in the new uniform: a bikini top and shorts.

  Lorca swivels to watch the action in the lanes. The place has gained a following among bachelorette parties and hipsters. The yawking group of girls is still testing out grips and throws. One screams, are they ready? The others raise their arms and cheer. They nominate one girl to go to the bar for drinks. She waits for the bartender next to Lorca, so close he can hear her nails tap on the bar. “Are we making complete fools out of ourselves or what?”

  “You girls are just right,” he says.

  She points to the sour-faced girl. “That one is getting married so we drove down from the suburbs.”

  He raises his glass. “Here’s to her.”

  The girl orders, unfolds several bills from a change purse. Lorca throws a bill to the bartender. The girl attempts to hand it back.

  “Please,” he says. “Tell your friend I’m happy for her.” Even he thinks he sounds desperate.

  “I will.” She delivers the drinks and comes back. “My friend says thank you.”

  “Tell her my pleasure.”

  She takes the stool next to him, mouth knotted in worry. “I’ve never been to this neighborhood before,” she says. Girls were always saying things like this. Like bookmarks, to hold their place until they think of something real to say.

  Lorca says, “Where do you live?”

  “Princeton. Yardley, actually, but no one’s ever heard of Yardley. You ever hear of Yardley?”

  “No.” He signals the bartender that he wants another, bigger whiskey.

  “See?” She fiddles with her scarf and recrosses her legs, revealing the top of one thigh.

  The bartender brings his whiskey. He asks the girl what she would like.

  This time, she doesn’t refuse. “A vodka cranberry.”

  “Barbara,” one of her friends calls. “It’s your turn!”

  “I’ll come back,” Barbara says.

  There is still no sign of Sonny or Max. Lorca says, “I’ll probably be here.”

  Barbara jogs back to her friends and hurls the ball down the lane. It brings down a few pins. As she waits for her ball to return, one of her friends collects her into a huddle. They giggle, and separate. She throws the ball again with a sound of effort. It brings down the rest of the pins. Her group cheers. In the middle of their hugs she leaps and twirls.

  She marks her score and returns to Lorca, hitting a pose. “Was that something or what?”

  “That was something.”

  “My friends are getting jealous.” Her breath is sweet with cranberry. “I have to stay with them, or people will say we’re in love.” She’s young, and thinks she has to say pretty things to seem interesting.

  “You go with your friends,” he says.

  “I wish I could stay and talk to you. I sounded ungrateful before. I don’t like to feel indebted.” At the crux of her collarbone, perspiration grows. She loosens her scarf.

  “You were perfect,” Lorca says. “Really.”

  The bartender yells, “Night bowling!” and the lanes are plunged into black light, revealing iridescent cartoon rabbits high-fiving on the walls. Everything white Barbara wears is glowing. Lorca wears all black. He checks his watch. Val will be into her second set already. They need to get back to the club.

  He enters the back room and the door behind him closes, sealing out the noise of the lanes. Topless women wag themselves around a sparkling dance floor. A girl undulates over an elated coed, her expression fuzzed out. In a corner booth, a dancer works on Sonny, his hands clamped on her ass. A pop song belches out of the speakers. Lorca doesn’t see Max.

  “Where is he?” Lorca mouths.

  Sonny points to a farther booth and signals that everything is okay.

  Hurry up, Lorca mouths, and leaves. In the bathroom behind the lanes, he pats water onto his forehead. In the hall he collides with Barbara. “Goody,” she says. She clasps his wrist and leads him into the ladies’ room, where everything is the color of salmon.

  She presses her mouth into his neck, feeling for his arms and hair.

  “This is much nicer than the men’s room,” he says. She slides her hands underneath the waistband of his jeans. “Whoa,” he says, as if he is bringing a horse to a halt.

  She tilts her head. “You don’t want to?”

  “Do I want to?” he says.

  He tries to undo her shirt, but the buttons are too small. She does it for him. She hitches up her skirt and spins so he can see her ass. He unclasps her bra. The bathroom’s lamp casts dirty blond light onto her bare skin. She wrenches his belt off, his pants down. She holds the top of the stall with delicate hands and he pushes into her.

  A nagging sound from the fluorescent bulbs and the hard thrum of the club’s music.

  “How are you soft everywhere?” he says.

  “I know a guy.” She wants him to move into her hard. Her lips fill with blood. “Wait,” she says.

  They are pressed against the stall but sliding toward the ground. Something inside him waits, but something else continues. It gathers and advances.

  “Good things come to those who wait,” she says, in the pretty way that suddenly seems cruel. His shoulders tremble with effort. Then the quaking recedes and becomes one limitless thing. His thoughts jump off a cliff.

  She says, “Go.”

  It’s too late. He is slack.

  “No,” she says. “Really?”

  He tries to force his body to co
operate. He reminds himself of her neck, her nipples. It’s no use. They stay together for another moment, making a wishbone on the hard floor. Then she breaks away and he slumps in the corner near the toilet.

  “It’s no biggie,” she says, before he has time to apologize. She pulls up her underwear and skirt and reapplies lipstick in the mirror.

  “Where do you live again?” he says.

  “A town near Princeton.”

  “Lucky town near Princeton.”

  “Yeah.” Her voice is filed down, bored. Shame heats him. Someone pounds on the door. Lorca and the girl fix themselves.

  Sonny stands in the catastrophe of the hallway. “We need to get Max out of here now.”

  10:05 P.M.

  Madeleine is dreaming. Her apartment is a funeral parlor/​nightclub/​coffee shop, and also the waiting room at her doctor’s office. Her mother lies in a casket filled with apples. Onstage, Billie Holiday sings into a microphone. Her head is a caramel apple.

  After announcing her intention to do so, Madeleine walks from the dream kitchen to the dream bedroom to find a roach the size of a fist smoking one of her menthols at a café table on her bureau.

  She runs for a can of bug spray, but the cabinet is empty.

  “I’ve already taken it,” the roach says. “Along with your paper towels, napkins, and shoes.” A yawn scrabbles his multiple sets of legs. “It appears we are on equal footing.”

  The hair on Madeleine’s arms rises. “Are you the roach I killed today?”

  “I’m the roach you thought you killed today. I’m Clarence and I’d like to have a chat.” His legs reflect in the mirror behind him, making it seem like there are two of him, one carrying on a conversation with her, and one carrying on a conversation with her reflection. “You are one friendless Susie Q.”

  Madeleine says she has plenty of friends and Clarence pshaws. “Like who?”

  “Like Pedro.”

  “Pedro!” Puffs of angry smoke. “Who you put on a leash!” A shiver runs through his antennae. “Toots, it’s sadsville around here. You’ve been crying all night with that thing on your nose. What is there to be so miserable about?”

  Madeleine’s hand covers her clothespin. “I got yelled at by everyone today,” she says. “I want to sing and no one will let me.”

  A sound like a clarinet reverberates from what she assumes to be his head, a jeering, mocking sound. “Where do you think I would be if I listened to every ‘Get out of here’ or ‘Call the Realtor, we’re moving.’ You’re just a human being. Pathetic, stiff. Not one of you is worth even the tiniest grain of rice. It’s time to grow a set of balls. Learn how to say, ‘fuck it.’ Otherwise, you’re never going to leave the house, like Old Mr. So and So …” He hitches a foot toward her father’s room. “You don’t want that, do you?”

  Madeleine says no.

  He glowers. “It used to be fun here. Music all the time and singing.”

  “My mother died.”

  Clarence sighs. “Just because your mother is dead doesn’t give you the right to suck.”

  “How do you know Pedro?” she says.

  He shrugs several shoulders. Madeleine shrugs, too.

  “Everyone knows Pedro.” He extinguishes his cigarette on the top of Madeleine’s bureau and, with a sound like a paper tearing, dives into a crack in the wall.

  10:06 P.M.

  Certainly, however (an older couple asks, is this Spruce Street?), Sarina thinks, he didn’t have to (Sarina says yes) say my name. He could have called out an unaddressed (Spruce Street, they ask, not Spruce Road?) salutation in the night. Every night (Sarina says yes, there is no such thing as Spruce Road) hundreds of people call out good night to no one. (Thank you, the couple says, have a good night!) Good morning! Good afternoon! The word Sarina was a choice. Good night, Sarina. Good night.

  Sarina walks to the station. She will process the party only when she has secured a seat on the train. In the relief of her home, she will throw her keys into a bowl, gather her hair into an elastic, and eat ice cream and cherries while watching the news. His lucky scarf. How his neck bears a freckle the shape of Florida that specifies his neck as his. The years had clarified his handsomeness, hadn’t they? When he said good night he sounded regretful, didn’t he?

  Outside the store, bucketed roses grin under heat lamps. The man behind the counter tosses her the cigarettes without looking up from his newspaper.

  Two teenagers shuffle up and down the aisles. “It’s my mom’s boyfriend,” one of them says, “and I work for him. But I said, ‘You tell me what to do on-site, you can’t tell me what to do at home.’ ”

  “Matches?” says the man behind the counter.

  “Please,” Sarina says.

  “It’s cold out,” he says. “Do you enjoy the winter?”

  “I prefer the hot.” She organizes the coins in her coin purse, the bills in the billfold.

  “I did too when I was young.” He goes back to his paper.

  “I wish I’d hit him with that pipe,” says the teenager whose mother dates his boss. “But then I’d be in jail, I guess.” They sidle up behind her and their talk ceases. This means they are sizing up her ass. She turns to catch them, but they are engrossed in a comic book. No one is admiring her ass.

  Outside, Sarina considers buying a sleeve of roses. She evaluates each bunch then walks to the station.

  There is time before the next train, so she has a cigarette on the platform. She can see the brick homes of Olde City. The dumb scratch of moon. When the train heaves and pumps into the station, Sarina realizes she has forgotten her wallet at the store with the roses and teenagers. She runs. Her low heels thwack against the pavement.

  Ben, frowning over a pack of Camel Reds, looks at the girl who has entered, a beautiful girl who is flushed from running, she is familiar, it is Sarina: he is still frowning, so Sarina pauses in the doorway thinking he is upset with her until a smile he could not have planned opens on his face.

  He raises his hands in mock penance. “I needed a cigarette.”

  “I forgot my wallet,” she says.

  Ben pays. Sarina wants the store owner to wink or refer to their previous exchange so Ben thinks she has charming conversations throughout the night with whomever, whenever. The store owner does not participate.

  Outside, the teenagers read the comic book under a streetlight.

  Sarina nods toward them. “Those guys are trouble.”

  Ben considers them. He lights her cigarette before his own. “I’ll walk you to the train.”

  Sarina wants to walk with Ben to the train more than she wants peaceful old age. “No, thank you,” she says. “It’s only a few blocks.”

  “I can either stand here and have this cigarette or walk. It’s all the same.”

  “Then walk me,” she says.

  They walk.

  “Parrots live in this neighborhood,” he says. “I saw one a few weeks ago. Honest-to-God parrots.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Annie didn’t believe me either. But still, they’re there. Someone must be feeding them.”

  “Right there?” She points to a tree. As if on command, no parrots appear. Ben takes a drag of his cigarette.

  Sarina takes a drag of hers. “Michael’s singing is getting better.”

  “Yes, let’s talk about Michael’s singing.”

  Is he drunk or just being silly? Sarina plays along. “He reaches notes only dogs can hear.”

  “He came over last week and sang at my house,” he says. “When he left, my clocks were two hours slow.”

  “His tone sends helicopters off course.”

  “But his delivery is perfect.”

  “Flawless,” Sarina says. A limo slinks by, the shouts of a bridal party. “I have a special fondness for Michael. He was my only dance at senior prom, you realize.”

  Ben winces. “I know.”

  They reach the station and extinguish the hope of their cigarettes. Ben collects both and depo
sits them into a nearby trash can. That was a careless thing to do, she thinks, bringing up the prom. If he wants to talk more, she will talk. Even though that means she will miss the 10:30 and have to wait for the 11:00.

  Saying good-bye to Ben is Sarina’s least favorite activity. So sad the number of times she’s had to do it. Ball games, recitals, the homes of friends, rented shore houses, through car windows after dropping off some forgotten camera to Annie. Good-bye. See you later. Nice seeing you. She has mastered it: A dismissive peck on the cheek. A hug like an afterthought. Telling herself, Do not watch him walk away. Watching him walk away. Watching him drive away. Watching him descend the stairs to the subway. How many times have they said good-bye to each other? Already tonight, twice.

  He interrupts her before she can get the second good-bye out.

  “How would you feel,” he says, “about missing your train?”

  Once at the beach, Sarina watched a crane bathing in a gully at dusk. It used its wings to funnel the water over its back, then shook out the excess in a firework of droplets. After several minutes it took off, arcing out over the fretless sea. That felt like this.

  10:10 P.M.

  Max Cubanista is a liar’s liar and no matter what he tells you he did not invent the radio. He is not “Chuck Berry’s only living pupil.” He’s never waylaid an armed robbery by playing music for the thieves. He was not the inspiration for the song “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.” He does not own a bungalow in Havana. He and the Cubanistas are as Cuban as a pack of hot dogs. On most nights Max sleeps on the floor of Lorca’s back room next to a pile of his own sick.

  Now he dozes in a booth at The Courtland Avenue Club. Every so often his chin finds a resting place on his chest, bringing him back to life, hurling insults at the girls standing over him and at Sonny and Lorca, who attempt to rouse him.

  One of the dancers covers her naked breasts with her hands. “Tell your friend he’s an asshole.”

  “He’s right here.” Lorca hitches his arm under Max’s armpit. “Tell him yourself.”