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

  There he is five years ago, untattooed, fiddling with the knobs of the booth’s personal jukebox. It is his first date with Louisa Vicino, snake girl at The Courtland Avenue Club, and he had to bring Alex because the kid threw a tantrum. Louisa doesn’t seem to mind. It is going well. In the car ride over, she and Alex discovered they both like Ray Charles and Swiss cheese with no holes.

  “When they say vanilla shake”—Louisa studies the menu—“do they mean French or bean? I like bean but not French.”

  “Me too.” Eleven-year-old Alex readjusts himself on the plastic seat so he can sit higher. Lorca is certain his son doesn’t know the difference between the two kinds of vanilla. Alex detests Lorca because he won’t let him play guitar, but detests being without him even more. Louisa is the first woman his father has allowed him to meet, albeit by force. She is an extension of his father ungoverned by obligatory familial resentment. Alex is free to be fascinated by this full-hipped woman who carries a purse the size of a fist and who declared in the car, “Anyone who doesn’t think Ray Charles is the best is a chump.”

  They order milkshakes. Lorca wants to play Ray Charles on their personal jukebox, but it is broken. Sweat blooms in the fabric of the only button-down he owns.

  The Courtland Avenue Club is a combination strip club/bowling alley, a glowing, neon dome you can see from the highway. Louisa dances three times a night and works shifts at the bar in between. Lorca has never seen her dance, and doesn’t want to. Her mouth is still red from the outside cold. Lorca likes how her chin moves when she is emphatic. “I didn’t finish college,” she says, “but I want to take classes. In what I’m not sure.”

  The milkshakes arrive. She swallows a strawful, then turns to Alex. “How is it?”

  He thinks about it. “Good.”

  “Mine too. If you can flip a spoonful of it over and it doesn’t drip, it’s good.”

  A tray of food arrives for the family next to them. The waitress slides each plate onto the table as the family oohs and aahs.

  “I have to go to the bathroom,” Alex says.

  “Hurry up,” Lorca says. “We have to get back to the club.”

  Alex runs off. Louisa stacks a pile of creamers. “You’re rough with him.”

  “I’m real with him. He’ll grow up knowing what’s real.”

  “Or he’ll grow up hating you.”

  Lorca feels the day falling off a cliff. “So,” he says, “how does someone get into the snake lady business?”

  She allows him to change the subject but registers it with a tilt of her pretty eyebrows. “The original snake lady is a friend of mine. We were dancers together, legitimate dancers, in a burlesque show. She said it would be easy money. She was right.”

  “How do you get them to stay on you?”

  “Practice,” she says. “I hold my arms in the tank and they wind around.” She pantomimes holding her arms in a tank. “When I come onstage, the snakes’ heads are down by my hands. I shimmy around, show them to the boys.” She sways in the booth to demonstrate. “Then, I go like this.” She gyrates on the diner seat. Lorca’s neck warms. “They crawl around my belly and legs. I do splits, shimmies, the whole shebang. The snakes are pros. They’re the stars and they know it.”

  “The whole shebang.” Lorca is getting a sad feeling. “Do you mix it up every time?”

  “I do not,” she says, “mix it up.”

  “What kind of future is in snake dancing?”

  “It supported my friend for years,” she says. “She’s quitting because she has cancer and she wants to be with her kid, but if she didn’t, she could have done it indefinitely.” She reacts to his grimace. “I like it, Lorca. It’s fun.”

  “Fun,” he says. “Do the snakes have names?”

  “They have names.” She seems less willing to share their names than to talk about the dancing.

  “Give.”

  “Don’t laugh,” she says. “Hero and Leander. Like the Greek myth?”

  “I know like the Greek myth.”

  Alex returns from the bathroom and asks his father to win him a prize from the claw machine in the lobby. They slip into their coats. Every other table’s jukebox works. They walk through several eras of rock and roll, each table its own sad painting: the church crowd, a family, a couple, an old man eating alone. Lorca hears Alex call out the tunes. “ ‘Fill Me Up, Buttercup,’ ‘The Twist,’ ‘God Only Knows,’ ‘Chances Are.’ ” Louisa sings along, her voice Marlboro and terrible.

  At the register, Lorca waits to pay while Louisa and Alex examine the pie cases. “Coconut custard,” she says. “You ever have that?”

  Alex wrinkles his nose. “Bleh.”

  “That’s how I feel about it, too. What about that one, Black Forest? I’m a chocolate girl.”

  Alex’s voice is sober. “I’m a chocolate girl, too.”

  She tousles his thick curls. Alex tries to hide how happy this makes him.

  A gleaming bank of machines in the lobby promises prizes in exchange for skill. Alex points to what he wants: a stuffed owl. Lorca feeds a quarter into the machine and nothing happens.

  “Two quarters, Dad.”

  He feeds another quarter. “This only took one when I was a kid.”

  Louisa says, “Tell it to your plants, old man.”

  The claw, activated, lurches over the pile of toys. Before Lorca can figure out the buttons, it takes a directionless swipe and misses. The machine shudders to a halt. Lorca feeds it two more quarters.

  The claw jerks to life again. This time he is able to position it over the owl. He lowers the claw; its metal hooks close over the animal but drops it when it ascends.

  “You suck at this,” Louisa says.

  Again he feeds the machine two quarters. Again the claw holds the owl for a moment, then drops it. “Is this fixed?” he says. Alex avoids his eyes.

  Lorca has one quarter left. He asks Alex for another one. The boy digs through his pockets. “Well?”

  “Jesus.” Louisa tosses him a quarter from her purse. Lorca tries again. Another failure. He shoves a dollar bill into Alex’s hands and tells him to get it changed behind the counter. “Do you want the toy or not?” he says, when the boy hesitates. He turns back to the machine. “They want you to lose all of your money in this thing.”

  “It’s not a big deal,” Louisa says, shifting in her heels.

  Alex returns with the change. Lorca loses the dollar in less than a minute. On the second attempt, the claw snatches the owl by its wing but at the last second, releases it.

  Lorca elbows through the crowd that waits for available tables in thick coats and stockings. The pies in the case shine. He reaches the cashier. “Can someone talk to me about the machine in the lobby? How can I get my son the owl he wants?”

  “One minute,” says the cashier.

  “I’ll pay you for one,” Lorca says. “I can’t spend all day playing a game.”

  The cashier’s smile is thin with aggravation. “It doesn’t work that way.”

  “How about it works that way today?”

  The manager is there, asking how he can help. “Why is everything in this place broken?” Lorca says. He leads the man to the lobby, where Louisa and Alex stand by the machine. Alex holds up the stuffed owl. “Louisa got it.”

  “Lucky, I guess,” she says.

  Louisa Maya Vicino. Louisa from her Italian grandmother, Maya from her Spanish mother, and Vicino which means “near,” because her distant ancestors lived in the vicinity of something important, like an olive grove.

  Two weeks later, Lorca’s father, Francis, pauses in the middle of a story to readjust his grip on the pilsner he fills. When his head hits the ground, it makes a metallic sound Lorca can hear from the other end of the bar. His father is already dead by the time Lorca reaches him, beer unspooling around him, eyes fixed on some fascination under the bar. Lorca gathers him in his arms.

  Gathers him in his name—Jack Francis Lorca.

  We carry our ancestors in
our names and sometimes we carry our ancestors through the sliding doors of emergency rooms and either way they are heavy, either way we can’t escape.

  5:00 P.M.

  Sarina tries a barrette on her dark hair. She tries the expression she will use when she sees Ben Allen for the first time in four years. Surprise tippling the sides of her mouth. She runs perfume along her collarbone. Getting ready is a series of negotiations with herself and her meager set of prettying items. She settles on a black skirt, champagne blouse, no barrette. She won’t do much walking tonight so she makes one final bargain with herself: heels in exchange for a cab ride there.

  Thinking about him requires so little effort that she can do it while performing mindless activities. Soaping the dishes, replaiting Clare Kelly’s hair, drying the dishes. The part of her brain that plays his ongoing reel is unconnected to the neurons and synapses that control things like conscious thought and logic. Ben turning to her at a party. Ben turning to her. Ben turning. What human being deserves to be the nucleus of such high esteem? Certainly not Benjamin, middle name Hal, last name Allen. Five-nine in boots. Who has a car that doesn’t start on cold mornings, an unfinished screenplay, a law degree he doesn’t use, a romantic’s tendency to save movie stubs, and a mannered, unsmiling wife.

  5:15 P.M.

  “Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

  The trash bags are gone, the bar wiped clean. The lights have been hung; they line the stage and loop around the Snakehead, making the old axe glow. Stalled in the doorway, Lorca experiences a stomachache he can only call Christmas.

  Sonny leans against the bar, arms crossed. “The good news,” he says, “is that Christmas has come to The Cat’s Pajamas. It’s like a holiday card in here. Cassidy hung them. The mouth on that one. I sent her to get dinner before we open.”

  “The bad news?”

  “We’ve lost track of Max. He was here, now he’s not. He’s not at his place and he’s not answering his phone.”

  “Do you understand that he is the bandleader of the Cubanistas?”

  “Do I? I do.”

  “Does he understand that we can’t have the Cubanistas play when the lead Cubanista is not here?”

  “Like I said, he won’t answer his phone but when he does, I will certainly ask him. Did you call your uncle?”

  “I did.”

  “And?”

  “No. But I thought of another option.”

  “I’m all ears.”

  “We could sell the Snakehead.”

  Sonny’s hand instinctively moves to protect the guitar hanging over the bar. “Not an option.”

  “If we want to keep the bar, we have to make sacrifices.”

  “Your father would roll in his grave,” Sonny says.

  Lorca pulls on the beer and stares at the guitar. The S-holes, dashing mustaches. The neck and body the color of syrup.

  “Who would even buy it, Lorc? Who has that kind of money, or loves guitars that much?”

  Lorca doesn’t answer.

  “There is one more update,” Sonny says. “And I don’t know if this is good news or bad news. I say it’s good news, with bad aspects. Louisa’s in the back.”

  “Why would that be bad news?” Lorca halts in the doorway. “You didn’t tell her.”

  “She guessed!”

  In the back room, Louisa sorts through a box of paperwork. She is always more petite than he remembers. For a moment, he lets himself believe he is still her boyfriend and they are having one of their Sunday night disagreements.

  “Is he ever going to clean that up?” she says, gesturing to Gus’s half-constructed plane.

  “He’s making progress,” Lorca says.

  “What’s this?” She holds up the citation, the color of prison jumpsuits.

  “Something I’m taking care of.”

  “I’m not here to lecture you. I’m here to get my check and leave.”

  “It’s good to see you, Louisa. I’ve left a few messages for you. You get any of them?”

  “Is my hair different from the last time you saw me?”

  Lorca’s throat goes dry.

  “I cut it,” she says. “And dyed it.”

  “I’m not perceptive, Lou. We know this.”

  “I’m a minor character in my own life.” Her eyes fill. Lorca thinks he will go to her, put his arm around her, but he doesn’t move. She waits for his reaction and gets none. Her gaze sharpens. “Alex told me you won’t let him play.”

  “I’ll lose my club if he plays.”

  “He’s going down a bad road,” she says. “You’re choosing not to see it.”

  The desk phone rings.

  Louisa selects her paycheck from the stack and slams the folder shut. “Good-bye!” She disappears into the hallway. “Best of luck!”

  “Lou. Wait.” He picks up the phone. “Hello.”

  Someone on the other end clears his throat. “Lorca, it’s Mongoose.”

  “Hang on.” Lorca covers the receiver. “Louisa!” He hears her wish Sonny a merry Christmas. “Come on!” The heavy thud of the front door closing. He leaves the phone on the desk. The hallway is dark and long and empty. “Louisa?” His voice echoes against the walls as if he is asking himself her name.

  6:00 P.M.

  Madeleine unlayers by the door to her apartment. The day’s dressing and undressing has exhausted her. She unleashes Pedro, who conducts a cursory study of every bookshelf base and table leg.

  In the bathroom the toilet wails: Clare! Claaaarrrrrre!

  Madeleine has learned to pre-announce her arrival in rooms to give the roaches time to scatter. “I am in the family room!” she cries. “I am walking from the family room to the bathroom!”

  She switches on the bathroom light and closes her eyes for three beats. She lifts the back lid off the toilet, uses the watering can to fill the basin, then replaces the lid. The toilet quiets.

  “I am walking from the bathroom to the kitchen!”

  In the kitchen, she fills a bowl of water for Pedro and turns the kettle on.

  The voice of Nina Simone drifts in from her father’s bedroom, remorseless as cigarette smoke. It grows louder. Madeleine’s father will adjust the volume ten to fifteen times during a song, sitting in arm’s distance of the player, surrounded by his library of vinyl and books. There are three record players in the apartment and no milk. One of her father’s jazz books would have an entry on The Cat’s Pajamas. Why hadn’t she thought of this? She could sneak in there, but she must be quiet, like cancer. Madeleine’s father insists on silence. Except for bringing his meals, she doesn’t disturb him.

  She opens his door and breathes in: pecorino, Havarti. His mussed bed near the window. He dozes on one of two camel-colored chairs in the center of the room, clasping each arm as if in sleep he might take off. His chin rests on the collar of his satiny sweater. By his elbow, a tube of pills. It is possible he changed the record in a dream. Every day the line between his reality and sleep blurs more. Every day more roaches.

  Madeleine sees the book she needs: History of Jazz, Volume Two. She tiptoes across the room and coaxes it from its place on the bookshelf. Nina Simone goes on singing, unaffected.

  Black is the color of my true love’s hair.

  The record skips.

  Black is the color

  Black is the color

  Madeleine lunges toward the record to move the needle but miscalculates the distance. Nina Simone yelps. Her father stirs, issuing a blubbery command.

  The color

  The color

  Madeleine fixes the needle too late. Her father’s eyes launch open.

  Who is this girl, Mark Altimari wonders, flapping big eyes at him? He bats at the coffee table for his glasses and secures them over his ears with shaky hands. His daughter comes into focus.

  “Madeleine.” His expression sweetens. “Where have you been?”

  “In the other room.”

  He invites her to sit in the other chair. The song changes
to a faster one. Nina Simone says there’s a lot of trouble with a brown-eyed handsome man. “Have you heard this one before?”

  Madeleine nods.

  “Can you hear it? Should I raise the volume?”

  “I can hear it.”

  “You’d like this recording. It has your singers and your stand-up bass. Wonderful stand-up bass player … I don’t remember his name.”

  Music fills the space between them. Mark wants to take the pill that keeps him awake, but not in front of his daughter. Instead, he flirts. “There’s a lot of trouble with a brown-eyed handsome man. In your travels have you found this to be true?”

  This is Madeleine’s favorite game. His role is to ask silly questions and hers is to answer as if he is serious, neither one acknowledging the other conversation that goes on wordlessly around them, in which some other, better version of themselves say: Isn’t it nice to be father and daughter?

  “Oh yes,” Madeleine says. “Once I lost both my arms in a wrestling match to meet a brown-eyed handsome man.”

  “That is a lot of trouble!” He folds his hands, pleased. “Are you enjoying school?”

  “Yes,” she fibs.

  “Good. It’s in your blood, you know.”

  “What’s in my blood, Dad?” Madeleine speaks carefully, not wishing to disturb the tenuous crochet between them. She does not swing her legs.

  “All of it, dear.”

  The teapot’s whistle barges in from the other room.

  Madeleine hops off the chair. “It’s my tea. I’ll take it off the stove.” She opens the door and Pedro pounces in.

  Her father’s eyebrows jolt toward the ceiling. “What is that?”

  Madeleine calls Pedro back into the other room but he ignores her, sniffing the legs of her father’s chair. Pedro has had a rough day that involved, among other things, incarceration via leash. He wants to bound and spring and hope and the time is now. He leaps onto a bookcase shelf but finds no solid ground. He pedals against a stack of comic books. Dog and shelf crash unceremoniously down, narrowly missing Madeleine’s father. A journal catapults, tizzying the record needle.