BITCH
Mindless graffiti, she assures herself, backhanding a stray tear from her cheek.
6:45 P.M
Lorca sits at his desk, stabbing Mrs. Santiago’s sausage out of its container with a plastic fork. Mongoose will come in later to buy the Snakehead. The club will be saved, Sonny will roil, spring will come, and maybe by then Lorca will shake the feeling of sliding down a hill of ice that gets steeper as he falls, reaching out for anything substantial but finding ice, and ice, and ice.
Mongoose, the traitor. The desk phone rings. It is Gray Gus, five years earlier, calling to tell Lorca about a girl he’s just met.
He, Mongoose, and Sonny had chased a promoter’s late-night oath to Chicago. Charlie Roads went with them, a childhood friend of Gus’s who was a bookie and a drug dealer.
The promoter sets the boys up with a gig playing The C Note three times a week. Gus meets a girl from the South Side named Alessandra. She writes her name and number on a piece of paper and it takes up the whole page in A’s and S’s. Everything is that name Alessandra. He rides the El. Alessandra. He buys the paper to check the box scores. Alessandra. The street kids slap playing cards into the spokes of their bike wheels. Al-es-san-dra. He carries her number around for a week before he calls her.
Alessandra has ten brothers and sisters. She is a neighborhood girl, a gem. Gus decides she can follow him out of those slums like a star. He calls Lorca late at night from pay phones all around Chicago to say words like alabaster and resplendent, the relief of her perfect face.
“Are you having a stroke?” Lorca says.
Charlie convinces Gus to take bets on horses. Charlie has a wife and little boy, so Gus gives him the lion’s share when they win. Gus doesn’t care about money, as long as he has enough for his fix and a pack of cigars to smoke during his gigs at The C Note. But instead of taking care of his family, Charlie places bigger bets with more seasoned dealers. “Reinvesting,” he calls it. He loses, and begins to dodge a bookie named Leland.
Gus was born with a Hollywood chin, a butter touch, and an ear that can hear rhythms tapped out from Neptune. In another life he would have been drumming in Johnny Carson’s band, drinking water out of a mug. But in this one he has a disease and he can’t say no to shysters like Charlie, who uses his wife and kid to cheat on Gus’s lousy, glowing heart.
Lorca warns him over the phone, “They’re going to break your hands, Gus, and you’ll never play again.”
In love, Gus is a mess. “They can take my hands,” he snorts. “I don’t need them.”
Alessandra sews a warm lining into his old coat, salves his arms with cotton balls soaked in crèmes from her sister’s salon. She cooks big meals. Gus sends Lorca a picture: him grinning loonily at one end of a table, and her at the other, holding a noodle salad. Between them in dozens of chairs are her brothers and sisters, variations on Alessandra. After dinner, he ties up and they sit on her roof. They put the best views of a city in its worst neighborhoods. She holds him while he pukes.
He says she sings like Patsy Cline. She calls him lupo grigio, Gray Wolf.
“When you’re not around,” she says, “my days are gray.”
Leland and his buddies find Gus at The C Note, looking for Charlie. It is late, and Gus isn’t feeling any pain. He won’t tell them where Charlie is, so they beat him up and take his coat.
They find Mongoose in a corner store. He doesn’t run, or take it for his friend. The next morning, a janitor stumbles over Charlie on a train platform, so brained in Gus has to identify him by his sleeve of tattoos at the morgue. Then he goes on a bender, a weeklong disaster. Charlie’s debt falls to him, so one night he lets himself into Alessandra’s house and creeps into one of the empty upstairs bedrooms. One of the sisters catches him going through her purse and calls for Alessandra. Alessandra isn’t mad. She gives him what she has. There’s no fight to be had, but Gus fights, anyway. He tells her she is only good for one thing. They scream at each other on the front staircase: Alessandra in tears and Gus so high he won’t remember the names he keeps spitting at her until they drag him away.
He stumbles to The C Note and passes out behind the bar. When he wakes up a penny postcard has arrived with news from Lorca.
Francis Lorca is dead. Jack Lorca has inherited The Cat’s Pajamas. He is calling everyone home. Bring your guitars, your Alessandras. Come home.
To Gus, clothes papery with dirt, Lorca is offering a place to get quiet. It is as if his future is revealed to him like the archangel coming down to Mary, only this is a crappy postcard, a soft pretzel with arms and legs, dancing on a word spelled out in cartoon letters.
Gus and Sonny move back and join the Cubanistas. Sam Mongoose moves back too and opens his own club in Center City. Lorca ignores his phone calls until he stops calling. Gus goes clean and quiet, and never ties up again. The last time Gus sees Alessandra is through the elbows and arms of her brothers and sisters who force themselves in between them.
That’s a drummer’s love story. If you want a prettier one, you’ll be waiting forever. If you could separate your body into four distinct rhythms, you’d be cracked too.
7:00 P.M
It is dark, dark seven P.M. on Christmas Eve Eve.
The city gathers its black-skirted taxis around the ankles of Rittenhouse Square. A vendor rolls his cart into the park. Pinwheels hem and sigh in flowerpots stuffed with foam. Every audience in every theater on Broad Street leans forward into the hyphen of silence between the overture and Act One. A couple necks in the backseat of a Honda parked at Thirteenth and Spruce.
Ted Stempel leaves for his shift at the store. His battered pit bull puppy, Malcolm, gazes at him. “On second thought,” he says to his wife, “I’ll take him with me.”
Once in a while a gust of evergreen settles over the man selling Christmas trees on Walnut. It really is nice, he thinks, that smell. In Olde City a girl follows her breath down the street, drifting away from her friends. “Look.” She claps her mittened hands. “Look!”
Madeleine is sleeping.
On her building’s rooftop, Mrs. Santiago unclips a shirt and yanks the laundry line toward her, unclips a bra then yanks, and so forth, until the line has been yanked empty, its contents folded into a wicker basket. She watches the Market-Frankford El slice across the horizon. She’s never been on a plane. She wants to take a trip, but she has to fold the laundry. Find the dog. Freeze the gravy. Take care of the child who lately has seemed troubled and distracted.
Mrs. Santiago once cooked for three days in preparation for Christmas, then spent the entire meal running back to the kitchen for a cheese grater, a certain pepper, a record someone mentioned. Borne back ceaselessly into the kitchen.
A faraway ambulance screams through the city.
Mrs. Santiago prays: Little Flower, show your power at this hour.
In Georgina McGlynn’s kitchen, Sarina uses wooden tongs to refresh a salad. She was the first guest to arrive and now suffers through the aneurysm of the doorbell, heralding another guest, Bella and Claudia and Michael, so far. So far, things are not going well. Her presence has caused glances of confusion (Bella), raised eyebrows (Michael), and one pointed “Who are you, though?” (Claudia). This has made Sarina nervous, resulting in several earnest exclamations regarding the salad. Breathtaking, she called it. More confused glances caused her to call the baked potatoes badass.