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

  “You can’t pull a dog from a dog,” he offers.

  “I know that,” the officer says. “Don’t you think I know that?” He fires a nervous shot into the sky. Someone near Lorca screams. The Rottweiler drops the puppy, which takes a few foggy steps before being collected by its owner.

  The officer replaces his gun in the holster. “Yes,” he says to the puppy being tended by its owner. “Yes,” he says to the Rottweiler being recollared. “Yes,” he says to the sky where he deposited the bullet. He bats at perspiration on his neck. He is coming to terms. “I wasn’t sure for a second, guys,” he says. “But that will just about do it.”

  3:05 P.M.

  Alex Lorca uses his key to let himself into his father’s apartment. The oniony smell of old drapes and carpet. The mail heaped against the door. In the bedroom’s honeyed light, Louisa folds clothes into suitcases. “You scared me,” she says, not looking scared. “I forgot you have a lesson.”

  Alex perches in the doorway. “You colored your hair.”

  “It’s too much.” She swats at it. “Do you think so?”

  “It’s beautiful.” His voice is flat, unbiased. “You’re leaving.”

  “What happened to my geranium?” She points to a weary plant on the sill. “It was healthy and strong three days ago. I told your father, don’t forget to water her. The one thing I asked. There’s no talking to that man.” She crosses to Alex and takes his chin in her hand. The immediacy of her never fails to please him. He can tell she’s been crying, but Louisa’s expression is always that of someone looking at some meaningful, tragic thing. Even when she’s chewing out a distributor for overcharging them. Even when she’s looking at him. “I’m leaving,” she says.

  “That fat jag made you leave.”

  “Don’t call your father names. One day he’ll be dead.”

  “One day we’ll all be dead,” Alex says.

  “Him first, though, because he eats like a farm animal.”

  Alex doesn’t smile. He feels his life fast-forwarding, thwip-thwipping quicker than he can handle. “Where are you going?” he says.

  “My brother’s for now. When I find a place, I’ll have a key made for you so you can crash when you come in from your mother’s house, instead of here. This place isn’t healthy. Nothing can grow.” She zips the suitcases. “Least of all future famous guitarists.”

  Alex fidgets in the doorway. He doesn’t know what to do when she speaks like this. She is always telling him to watch his hands, or bringing home brochures from the city’s best music schools. But how would he ever get his father to approve? Lorca’s rule is no guitar. No matter how much Alex or Louisa pleads. From age six, however, Sonny and the guys had sneaked lessons whenever Lorca was at the club. Sometimes it was Sonny, sometimes Max, depending on who could get away. The last place Lorca would ever suspect, his own apartment.

  Alex carries the suitcases. Louisa scoops up the plant and follows him into the main room.

  “You and I,” she says, “are always going to be family.”

  “Family,” he spits.

  “Kid.” She only uses this word when she wants to remind him that she is older and, at least for another year, taller. “We’ll still talk every day. I’m still coming to hear you play tonight.”

  “He won’t let me,” Alex says. “He said things changed.”

  “That fat jag.” She slumps into a chair. “He’s blaming you for me. I’ll talk to him.”

  “There’s no talking to that man,” he says.

  A sound at the door startles them. Sonny enters the kitchen, holding the Snakehead guitar. “Louisa,” he says. “What a fun surprise. Haven’t seen you around.”

  “I’m not here to disrupt your lesson,” she says. “Good to see you, Sonny.”

  Sonny registers the suitcases. “Anything you want to talk about?”

  She halts in the doorway. “I’d like to talk about why Lorca isn’t letting Alex play tonight.”

  A bead of perspiration wends down Sonny’s forehead. “Things changed.”

  “What changed?”

  “Is that a geranium?” Sonny says. “They need indirect sunlight. Otherwise they get ashy.”

  “Sonny.”

  “I’m not at liberty to discuss club business, Louisa. He’ll kill me.”

  “On second thought”—Louisa releases the suitcases with two sharp slaps against the linoleum—“maybe I’ll stay. You guys want eggs? Sonny? You love omelets.”

  “I could go for some eggs,” Alex says.

  “You guys will practice,” Louisa says. “And I will make eggs. And then, we’ll have a nice chat.”

  “This is entrapment,” Sonny says. “I’m being entrapped.”

  “If you feel trapped, Sonny,” Louisa gives Alex a barely perceptible wink, “it’s probably because you are.”

  3:30 P.M.

  Madeleine careens through the Ninth Street Market, pulse tremoring.

  Her city has a jazz club and it is called The Cat’s Pajamas and why hasn’t she ever heard of it and how can she get there? It is as if everyone in her life has conspired to hide this from her. Now the only thing that matters is that Madeleine finds it, soon.

  This is what Madeleine does not notice because she is distracted: the spice shop’s jars of marzipan, kookaburra, Chinese five-spice, mace and coriander, the punching bags of provolone hanging at the cheese shop, the extended yowls of the dried stock fish, hanging in bunches of dead. Normally Madeleine would yowl back at them but she is replaying exactly what they said about The Cat’s Pajamas, so she is too busy to notice the crates of pecans pinned by brass shovels, two pounds for five dollars, the curling snakes of apple sausages, dollar-a-bag candy, gossiping vendors, so and so, and so and so. Madeleine passes the barrels of fire, the grocer weighing spinach on a tipsy scale. She accelerates at the store with the ducks, meadow green avocados, a bluster of brooms, a fire hydrant, the pears, more ducks, she is running, statues, soda, birds, nuts, she turns into Santiago’s alley, upsetting a cart of Virgin Mary statuettes. She keeps running, toward the blue carousel horse to whom she forgets to say a proper hello. Madeleine wrests open the café’s door to come face to Harlequin romance with Sandra Frankford who has been, for the previous hour, blocking the entrance with the enormous brass flanks of her wheelchair. She grabs hold of Madeleine’s wrist.

  “Slow it down.”

  Mrs. Santiago sets the table for lunch. “Look who’s back.” By the counter, tied to a wine barrel, Pedro sulks. “Jack Lorca found him in Fishtown. Fishtown! That’s half a city away. Until he can control his wandering, it’s a leash for him.”

  “I need to use the phone!” Madeleine says.

  “Eat your lunch, then you can do whatever you want,” Mrs. Santiago says. Then, to Pedro: “No more people food. No more wandering.”

  Madeleine sits. Sandra can’t do anything but sit. Mrs. Santiago sets out plates and silverware and a platter of meats and cheeses. She sits.

  “What is The Cat’s Pajamas?” Madeleine says.

  Sandra bows her head. “Let us pray.”

  “Amen.” Mrs. Santiago hands a basket of bread to Madeleine.

  “What is The Cat’s Pajamas?” Madeleine says.

  Mrs. Santiago stirs sugar into an espresso and watches Pedro, who sniffs the canine food in his bowl. “The Cat’s what?”

  “Pajamas.”

  “It’s the club Jack Lorca owns. Pedro was eating from the trash like a criminal!”

  “I heard a report yesterday”—Sandra butters a piece of bread—“about a man in London who made a three-bedroom house out of trash.”

  Pedro gives the food a suspicious lick. Mrs. Santiago bites her thumbnail. “He doesn’t like it.”

  “Where is it? Can anyone go?” Madeleine says.

  “It’s near Ireland,” says Sandra. “Of course anyone can go.”

  “You’re not going to London,” Mrs. Santiago says. “Yummy, Pedro.” She rubs her stomach. “Good food.”

  “Not
London,” Madeleine says. “The Cat’s Pajamas.”

  “A jazz club is no place for a little girl,” Mrs. Santiago says. “Stop swinging your legs.”

  Madeleine stops swinging. “I want to go.”

  Mrs. Santiago waves her hand as if shooing a fly. “I want to ride in a hot-air balloon. Hover over the city like a bird would.”

  “I don’t know how that relates to me,” Madeleine says.

  “Like this: Me is to hot-air balloon as you is to The Cat’s Pajamas. Neither is going to happen!”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  Mrs. Santiago raises herself up to her full height: five foot two in kitchen clogs. She wipes each hand on her calico apron and regards Madeleine with a patient gaze.

  “Madeleine,” she says. “There are roaches at The Cat’s Pajamas. Mean, fist-sized roaches that drink alcohol and latch onto the necks of little girls. They turn all the lights out because no one there is afraid of the dark and they laugh at people who are. The Cat’s Pajamas is a meeting place for gypsies who eat roaches. Gypsies, roaches, and ice cream men.”

  At nine, Madeleine is only approaching the summit of understanding that sometimes adults lie to get what they want. “Ice cream men?” she tests.

  “Like the ice cream man with the cleft lip who scares you so much when he rings his bell down Ninth Street.”

  “Why would anyone go there if it was so horrible?” she says.

  “People are strange.” Mrs. Santiago sips her espresso. “But I do have a surprise for you.” She reveals a box from underneath the table. Inside pose several shiny hats. She places one on her head and adjusts its rubber tie around her chin. It is blue with streamers exploding from the top.

  “Won’t your friends love these when they come to your party?”

  Madeleine excuses herself and escapes into the back room, where everything is bleached senseless. In the yellow pages she locates the listing for The Cat’s Pajamas. Even the name on the page excites her. She runs her fingers over it. It is a place that exists and has a listing in the phone book and it is not in a distant city, it is here, in hers. She dials.

  On the first ring, an accented voice croons, “You have reached The Cat’s Pajamas. I am the owner. How may I be of service?”

  Behind him, intoxicating, electric nothing.

  “Hello?” the man says. Then, in a lower, more intimate tone. “Is this a ghost?”

  Madeleine hears several throaty guffaws and hangs up. Richmond Street, Fishtown. If she walks north she will hit South Street, which belts the city. If she takes South all the way to the river, the numbers will recede. If she turns up Second she will eventually get to Fishtown. She’s never been that far. If she wears sneakers and walks fast, she can get there in—

  “Madeleine!” Sandra raps against the arm of her wheelchair. “Time to read!”

  Madeleine returns to the front room, where Sandra holds a slim volume titled The Edge of Beyond. On the cover, a woman in a safari hat glares into the beyond. Behind her, a man in sunglasses leers.

  Sandra ahems, removes her sunset-colored bifocals, and closes her eyes—her prereading ritual. “Page thirty-five.”

  Madeleine reads. When she encounters a thorn in pronunciation, normally a vowel-consonant blend, she holds out the book to Sandra, who replaces her glasses, then announces it in her rude baritone.

  “… Every time she thought of the way he had kissed her, she shook in—”

  “Inwardly!” shouts Sandra, summoning Pedro from a nap.

  “… Of course she hadn’t wanted it; she had done her very best to free herself from his—”

  “Restraining embrace!”

  “She tried to think of something else, anything else, so she didn’t have to admit the …”

  “Humiliating truth!”

  “… Humiliating truth to herself that in the end she hadn’t resisted him at all. She had clung to him like a drowning man seeking the breath of life.”

  Sandra clucks. “Poor, misguided Rosalind.”

  They trudge through chapters six and seven. Madeleine yearns to get outside. Pedro saunters by, inquiring about her ankle.

  A word about Pedro.

  Who keeps his salt-and-pepper hair in a state of managed chaos, jutting out from four nimble legs and hindquarters, muscular from distance walking. Whose brown eyes hold the world-weariness characteristic of a bon vivant. Who is enough Yorkshire terrier to exhibit daffy wonderment, and enough Welsh Scottie to accomplish a goal with focus. Pedro hops up on his hind legs in an effort to secure the candy Mrs. Santiago is currently figure-eighting over his snout. She takes too long to relent so when she does, Pedro respectfully declines. He is a gentleman wanderer who yearns to explore. Madeleine yearns for an exit. Rosalind yearns for a lover.

  A blond head with pigtails approaches the store. Jill McCormick enters, in a clatter of bells. Seeing Madeleine, she narrows her eyes. “Did you get your hair cut? You missed lab.”

  Madeleine checks to see if Mrs. Santiago is listening. “I was there but you didn’t see me.”

  “My eye doctor said these glasses give me better than twenty-twenty vision.” Jill is a practical literalist. On hot days when Saint Anthony’s is too broke to turn on the air-conditioning, the kids fold paper into fans. Jill likes to point out: you expend more energy fanning yourself than you do just sitting there.

  “Can you see this?” Madeleine says.

  “You’re sticking up your middle finger.”

  Mrs. Santiago calls hello from behind the counter.

  “Hello,” Jill says. “I’ve come for a pound of coffee for my mom. The Sumatran. She wants to branch out.”

  Mrs. Santiago winks at the portrait of her late husband. “Daniel’s favorite!”

  “Who’s Daniel?” says Jill. “Oh. Your dead husband.”

  A plan forms in Madeleine’s mind. “What are you doing today?” she says.

  Jill stiffens. “I’m organizing my stuffed animals into color order and then I’m reorganizing them into size order, why?”

  “Can I come over?”

  Jill peers at her through her thick glasses. “Are you good at organizing?”

  “Who will read to me?” Sandra says.

  “I’ll read to you, dear.” Mrs. Santiago hands Jill a brown bag of coffee stamped with Daniel’s likeness. As Madeleine expected, she is delighted that she wants to play with another little girl. She comes out from behind the counter holding a leash, on the end of which is a miserable Pedro. “Take him with you. At least he can see some of the outside.”

  “Pedro seems blue,” Jill says.

  Mrs. Santiago nods. “His heart is broken.”

  Pedro backpedals and about-faces, snapping at the leash. Mrs. Santiago asks Pedro what he thinks of a nice walk through the market, a nice walker-oo, wouldn’t he like that, a walkeroni roo?

  Sandra says, “Why don’t you marry that dog?”

  Madeleine giggles, in spite of herself. Sandra laughs, too. It takes them several minutes to get themselves under control as Mrs. Santiago waits, unsmiling. Sandra dabs tears from her eyes with a napkin.

  “Are you finished?” Mrs. Santiago says.

  Madeleine says, “Let’s go, Jill.”

  “Don’t forget to ask Jill to come to your birthday par—”

  Madeleine slams the door.

  “You know who should go to London,” Sandra says. “You. You’ve never been anywhere.”

  “With all of my spare time.” Mrs. Santiago hoots. “Now that’s funny.”

  Outside, Jill asks Madeleine why she will hang out with her all of a sudden. “Did you want to get away from that crazy lady? One of my aunts forces me to read the Bible to her while I comb her hair.”

  “That’s weird,” says Madeleine.

  “Do you live at Santiago’s?”

  “I live on Ninth Street in the market with my father.”

  “Where’s your mother?” Jill slaps her forehead. “Oh right! She’s dead.”

  “This is wher
e I leave you,” Madeleine says.

  Jill blinks several times. “I thought you were coming over.”

  Madeleine is already legging down the street. “Later skater,” she calls over her shoulder.

  “You’re just mean!” Jill calls to her retreating figure.

  Madeleine extends her middle finger above her as she and Pedro gallop toward home.

  4:00 P.M.

  Outside the Red Lion Diner, a girl wearing an expedition coat and pajama bottoms yells into her cell phone that he’d better be coming to pick her up, not whenever he feels like it, but right the hell now.

  The lobby no longer has arcade games, but it does have a pay phone. Lorca punches in the number. He holds a plastic container of sausage Mrs. Santiago gave him in thanks for returning her dog. The pajama-ed girl paces outside the window where Lorca stands, listening to the line ring. She wants the person on the other end to explain exactly what kind of asshole he thinks she is. She speaks with the matter-of-fact cruelty of a Northeast girl. They’re making young people younger. Or else Lorca is older than he’s ever been.

  Fiinally, a woman picks up. “Mongoose’s.”

  “I’d like to speak with Mongoose.”

  “He’s not here. May I ask who’s calling?”

  “When will he be back?”

  “He went up the street for sandwiches.” The voice inhales sharply. “Lorca? Is that you?”

  “Yeah.” Lorca closes his eyes. “It’s me.”

  Her tone changes to repentant. “Lorca? How are you?”

  “I’ve been better.”

  “He’ll be happy you called,” she says. “I’ll tell him as soon as he’s back. Take care of yourself, Lorca.”

  He hangs up. The sudden, quiet lobby. The walls are blue with deep yellow flecks. Lorca smells syrup and weak coffee. Inside the glass doors, families sit at plastic booths eating eggs. A waitress borrows a ketchup bottle from one table to give to a family whose food has just arrived.