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.”
The girl leans into Max. “You’re an asshole.”
Max’s eyes are closed. “You’re a dear to say so.”
Lorca and Sonny hang Max between them and make slow progress through the room. The topless girl follows them, still yelling, stopping when they reach the door to the lanes, as if cordoned off by an unseen fence. Her friend tosses her a shirt. Cape May, it reads, the most haunted town in America!
They carry Max past Barbara, who waves the fingers of one hand as they go by, and through the doors to the parking lot. When they reach the car, Lorca realizes they are being followed by a girl in yellow heels.
“I’m Daphne.” She points to Max. “He promised me a ride.”
“A ride to where?” Sonny says.
“The Cat’s Pajamas.”
“What a coincidence,” Lorca positions Max unkindly in the backseat. “That’s exactly where we’re going.”
During the ride, Max outlines his thoughts: He wants a sandwich, he is getting the Christ scratched out of him by the seat belt, he doesn’t see what the big deal is.
Lorca smells Barbara on his hands. Desk chair and heavy cream. He went limp on her, so he will go back to his club and get drunk before Mongoose arrives. A flute begins in his gut. Every light on the street turns green.
The tables are filled when they return and Valentine is halfway through her second set. She lifts her eyes from the violin strings to watch them haul Max through the club. They deposit him onto a cot in the back room and Sonny gallops down the hall to join Valentine onstage. Lorca removes a flask from his top drawer. Max pulls a joint out from an unseen place under the cot.
“You go on in twenty minutes,” Lorca reminds him.
Max exhales. “I might be a little late.”
“We close at two tonight. Not one second later. If I have to turn off the electricity and pull you from that stage, I will.”
Max leaps from the cot and growls into a hanging mirror. “You’re scared, brother. But we’ll figure out a way to pay that citation.”
“Sonny told you?”
“I guessed.” He slaps his face and yowls. “Is anybody ready to rock and roll?”
Lorca leaves Max yowling in the back room to catch Val’s last song. She is an old-timer violinist and had been one of his father’s closest friends. Her hair is arranged in its familiar braid. Her considerable hands and arms make the violin appear dainty. She plays Stéphane Grappelli while Sonny chugs underneath her. “I’ll Never Be the Same.” There are enough people in the club so that not everyone has a seat but not enough that you can’t see the stage. This is Lorca’s favorite part of the night.
Valentine’s pianist rolls octaves at the top of the piano. Her gaze lifts to meet Sonny’s, but he’s not a smiler. Here and there he gives her a civilized tremolo. There is no better technical guitarist than Sonny. Tight, chaste solos. Reasonable quotations. City musicians regularly call on him for studio sessions because he is reliable and even. If he promises something at the beginning of a riff, he delivers. However with age his hold on the pitch has slackened. It started with a note or phrase, occasional enough to seem like a fluke. Now it happens regularly. Lorca can jibe Sonny for his retreating hairline, his bullshit parking, his emphatic, misguided directions, but never this: that when his old friend plays he holds his breath, anticipating an errant sound, the way he does when newbies try the stage.
Cassidy swings a bottle of rum to meet a glass.
“Swing one around for me,” Lorca says.
Alex sulks on one of the stools with Aruna Sha, in another mutinous dress. The ash on her cigarette grows and menaces over the clean floor. Their occasional Main Line hanger-on is with them, a friend whose name Lorca always forgets. The kid yearns to be Alex, this is clear in the way he orbits him, undercutting anything he says. He jaws on about jazz, the one time he saw a famous musician.
“You can’t smoke in here, honey,” Lorca says.
Aruna drops her cigarette into Alex’s beer. She searches her bag, then she and the Main Line kid disappear into the back. After a moment, Alex follows.
Val swings her bow up for the final, shivering G. She holds it for several seconds as Sonny picks out the final chords. The audience applauds and makes demands but Val ignores them, so many of them go outside to smoke in the lull between acts.
The Cubanistas set up: Max on vocals and lead guitar, Gus on timbales, Sonny on keyboards, and Emo Sonofabitch Gladden on trumpet. Two of Emo’s friends sit in on percussion, congas and cajón. The Cubanistas have a following, mostly professors from the university having affairs, university kids studying South American culture, or women bowled over by the pidgin Spanish of a Cubanista brother.
Max has donned the Cubanista uniform: beige riding pants slashed indiscriminately with pink sequins, faded button-down, beige band jacket. He skips sound check to snow the girl in yellow heels. Owner of the Club is his favorite put-on. It seems to require sweating and pelvic thrusts. Perspiration pumps down his cheeks from his orderly Afro. As long as he brings in a crowd, Lorca doesn’t care who he lies to.
“I do sets on Friday nights, they’d have me play eeev-ery night if I could, Lorca’s a madman, but I tell heem, sometimes I have to do paperwork and filing, there’s a lot that goes into ronning a club.”
“Of course you can’t play every night when you run a club,” she says, elongating the last word into a concerned three syllables. “What’s a Lorca?”
“That’s a Lorca.” Max gestures to Lorca as if he is leftovers. “My right-hand man. He’s bean with me since the beginning. Together we turned this pile of cheese into the best jazz club in the world.”
She swivels to Lorca as if he is a mirror to check her hair. “I thought the best jazz club in the world was Mongoose’s.”
Max pouts. “Dar-leeng, no. Mongoose’s is a trash castle. You hear about the band he has playing for him now? What are they called? The traveling … something … The Triangles.”
“The Troubadours,” Lorca says. “It’s the same house band with a different name. Rico and the boys.”