It is a long time before the cheering dies down, and a long time after that before the next band begins carrying their drum kit and amps onto the stage, shoulders hunched as though they are embarrassed. The band launches into its first song and the chords jangle harsh and wrong. They falter and stop, start over again. I’ve seen them before and they were good, better than good, but there’s no way anyone mortal can follow Jack. The singer, a girl with long dark hair and a baby face, seems near tears. Aurora is drinking one clear drink after another. “Let’s go,” I say to her, and she shakes her head.
“I’m having fun.”
“This stopped being fun.”
“You don’t even try to have fun.” She pouts at me. I know Aurora drunk by heart. I don’t even need to see the flush in her cheeks or hear the challenge in her voice. Minos lurks behind her, bone-thin but somehow taking up too much space. I don’t like him, don’t want to talk to him, don’t want to watch Aurora flirt with him, giggling, like a rabbit teasing a wolf. He could eat her whole. He looks at me over her shoulder and smiles again. It’s not friendly.
“I’m going to find Jack.” I push past them before she can say anything else. I cut my way through the crowd to the door that leads backstage, wait until no one is looking and duck through it into the dingy and badly lit corridor.
Jack is in the green room, alone, sitting on a decrepit velour couch that looks like it’s been abused by musicians for longer than I’ve been alive. His guitar is next to him and his head is in his hands. I feel suddenly foolish, duck my head in embarrassment. But he looks up at me with such naked joy that I have to look away. I cross the room and before I even reach the couch he’s on his feet, leaning toward me, his mouth meeting mine.
“They want so much,” he says into my hair. “Every time I play for more people, they want more of me, and I feel so empty when I’m done. But it’s the only thing I know how to do. It’s the only thing I’m good at.”
“You can learn other things.”
“It’s the only thing that makes me feel alive.” He is holding my wrists now, so tightly it hurts. “Do you want to get out of here?”
“Let’s go.”
He lives in a one-story cottage caught between two larger buildings. A jungle of front garden hides it from the street: huge, glorious dahlias luminous in the moonlight; heady-scented wild roses; broad-leaved and tall green plants I do not recognize. Cass would know their names. The ground is carpeted with mint, and a riot of jasmine obscures the front porch. I stop to look at the flowers. “I’ve never seen dahlias this big.”
“I play for them,” he says. “I think they like it.” He unlocks the door and I follow him inside.
The house is a single open room, with a small kitchen in one corner and big windows that look out on another, even junglier garden in back. There’s a mattress under one of the windows with a book-stuffed shelf beside it, a cheap card table and two chairs, a soft rich rug, a dresser, a single lamp in one corner. A record player sits beside a wooden crate full of records. There’s nothing on the walls except for a print of Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy tacked up over the bed. I’ve always loved that painting: the reclining figure stretched out on desert sand underneath a night-blued sky. Multicolored coat, striped blanket, lute. The moon is full, edging a range of mountains in silver. A lion stands over the sleeping figure, one yellow eye staring. Not at the sleeper, but at me. No one in the world knows where I am except Jack. I cross the room and squat next to the bookshelf. Mostly classics: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Odyssey, Keats, Shakespeare. A copy of The Inferno illustrated by Gustave Doré. Art books: Lucian Freud, Kiki Smith. “Schiele,” I say, “you like him?”
“I love him.”
“So do I. You like Rousseau, too?”
He touches the picture. “Did you know he never left France in his entire life? He was a tax collector who painted taxidermied animals and invented a jungle out of the exhibits at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. He painted people like me without ever having met a black person.” He stops and I wait for him to say something else. “It’s a reminder,” he says. “For me. Of what people see.”
“Oh. I never thought about it that way before.”
“Well,” he says. “You’re white.”
“Oh,” I say again.
He puts on a Nina Simone record, sits on the bed. “Come here,” he says gently, and I move up from the floor so that I’m sitting next to him on the mattress. My heart is beating so hard I think he must be able to hear it. Nina Simone’s low rich voice seals us in. “What do you paint?” he asks. “Surely not lions.” He puts a hand on my back, his thumb gently rubbing the knot of bone where my neck meets my spine.
“People, mostly. Sometimes places. Sometimes things that aren’t real.”
“Would you paint me?”
“I can’t.”
“Try.”
I hook my bag toward me with my foot, get out the jar of India ink and the soft brushes I carry with me everywhere. I get up, drag over one of his chairs, sit in it facing him, prop my sketchbook on my knees. I look at him for a long time, trying to see him as a series of lines, trying to see the shape underneath his skin, a language of his bones and his body that I can translate into marks on paper. The white page leers at me, mocking. I fidget, chew my brush. Then I have an idea.
“Take off your shirt,” I say, “and lie down. He raises an eyebrow. “Not like that.” I can feel heat rising to my cheeks, and I turn my head away. “Just do it.” I hear the rustle of him moving around and don’t look again until he is still. The lamplight gilds the smooth muscles of his back and arms, his long and beautifully shaped hands. He’s turned his face away from me, and his hair coils across the pillow. I set down the sketchbook, put my brush between my teeth, and uncap the bottle of ink. “Keep still,” I say into his ear, and then I go to work.
I draw a flight of shorebirds winging their way up his spine and a cluster of sea urchins spiking across his shoulder. I draw an osprey, stalled in midair with its wings crooked, in that still moment before it begins its dive. I draw waves rising between his ribs. I draw fish winking silver through the depths, kelp winding around them in thick glossy coils. I thought I knew my own desire, until the wind changed and a storm blew in and remade the sky, dredged mystery from the deep. I put a spell on you, Nina Simone croons. His back rises and falls as he breathes, and it is all I can do to keep myself from dipping my head and licking his skin. When the record ends I get up and turn it over. Nina Simone sings about sorrow and love, and the gold of her voice fills the air around us. When I am done I set the brush aside and put one hand over what I’ve drawn, fingers spread, not touching. Rousseau’s lion watches over us, wide-eyed, solemn. Desire rises in me, humming like a song. The room is very still. I blow on his skin to dry the last of the ink and he shivers, catches my wrist. “Is it good?”
“It’s beautiful,” I say.
“Show me,” he says.
“Do you have a mirror?”
“Not like that,” he says. “With your hands.”
You think that the world we live in is ordinary. We make noise and static to fill the empty spaces where ghosts live. We let other people grow our food, bleach our clothes. We seal ourselves in, clean the dirt from our skins, eat of animals whose blood does not stain our hands. We long ago left the ways of our ancestors, oracles and blood sacrifice, traffic with the spirit world, listening for the voices out of stones and trees. But maybe sometimes you have felt the uncanny, alone at night in a dark wood, or waiting by the edge of the ocean for the tide to come in. We have paved over the ancient world, but that does not mean we have erased it.