The band plays “I Feel a Sin Comin’ On.” Roland is stranded in the shadows.
“So what’s going on with you and Roll?” Pete asks Addie. “You like him?”
“Sure. We’re old friends.” Addie takes a swig of beer, sets down her mug. “When’s somebody going to tell me about the woman?”
Pete and Golita look at each other.
“I’ve seen her things in Roland’s apartment.”
“Elle,” Golita says.
“Don’t worry about Elle,” Pete says. “She’s just some chick who followed Roll home one night. You know Roll. What’s he gonna do.”
“He needed help with rent,” Golita says.
“Where is she now?”
“Gone,” Pete says. “Moved out. Don’t worry. It’s a good thing. Tell her, babe. You ever seen Roll this good?”
Golita shrugs.
“Look,” Pete says and touches Addie’s arm, “you want to step outside? Get some air?”
She gets up with him. They leave Golita to save the table.
The sand parking lot behind the bar backs onto a canal. Moonlight shivers on the water. “Like the real Venice,” Addie says, though she has never been to Italy. There’s a mattress on the bank, and a tire, and a broken shopping cart. Pete takes a brown bottle out of his pocket, unscrews the cap, which is also a tiny spoon, and offers it to Addie. He opens his jacket to shelter her as she lifts the spoon to each nostril.
“My doll’s tea set had spoons like this,” she says.
“You have a tea set?”
“My doll did. When I was young. I don’t know what happened to it.”
Behind the dull thudding of the band she can hear the faint sound of water lapping. This is what she loves about coke, how you notice everything. The cool, perfect air. How close Pete is standing. The fine red stubble on his cheeks, how it catches the light. She cups her hands around his face. He leans closer, until they are head to head. He puts his mouth on hers. She tastes salt, and pulls away.
“Sorry, I wasn’t—”
“Sorry.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“Me either.”
She wonders which of them is sorrier. Which of them loves Roland more.
When they go back in, he’s plugged in and standing with the band. “You missed him on ‘Dark End of the Street,’” Golita says. Now the band’s playing “After Midnight,” a slowed-down version, more JJ Cale than Clapton. Two verses in, the singer nods at Roland, and Roland steps up. His shirtsleeves are rolled back. This is his moment, and Addie wonders if he’ll break out, burn it up, play some scorching lead, something truly incendiary, even though incendiary isn’t what the song calls for. The song is about what’s going to happen after midnight. In the song, midnight isn’t here yet.
Roland knows. He holds back, plays it spare. Long, slow notes with plenty of space in between. It sounds like the front end of a thunderstorm, when the first rain begins to hit the pavement: those slow, fat, hard drops just before the whole sky comes crashing down.
Dear Byrd,
I would like to tell you your father and I loved each other. Maybe we did; maybe love is the right word, though it’s not one we ever used. What I can tell you is, he trusted me. He let me see the purest part of him, the music part.
Trust is a sweet thing, and fragile. I was not always as careful with your father’s as I should have been.
Sandalwood
A cold, bright Saturday morning in Greensboro. Warren Finch is brewing a pot of chamomile tea for his favorite client, who is seated at the kitchen table with her hands folded in front of her. Her long red hair is pulled back. Her face is golden in the sunlight through the Indian-print curtain. A calendar of Hindu deities hangs on the wall behind her. February is Shiva, god of creation and destruction.
“What do I smell?” she asks.
“Incense,” Warren says. “Sandalwood.”
The smell reminds him of India, where everywhere, always, there was the smell of burning. Burning sandalwood, burning hashish, burning opium, burning bodies on the ghats at Benares.
“It smells like burnt toast,” Addie says.
“I burned my toast, but that was yesterday.” He pours their tea into china cups — his mother’s wedding pattern, white with yellow roses. He sets the cups on a tray, carries the tray to the table and sets it down stiffly. Getting started is always awkward, a little like striking up a love affair, Warren imagines. The trick is to be both casual and purposeful. He has found with clients that chamomile helps, gentles things.
He serves Addie her tea and offers her half a candy bar. “For this kind of reading, I usually like to have both parties present.”
“The other party is in California,” she says.
“I know. I’m just saying.” He wishes his voice weren’t so nasal. People always think he’s complaining when in fact it is his practice, in readings and in all things, to remain neutral. To live his life without attachments, to be as a still pond (an empty pond, the Buddha would have said, but that’s not so picturesque), brilliant as glass, without a ripple. No emotion, no desire — except the one wish, for a different voice, one that could express him perfectly. A deep, resonant, comforting voice that he could wrap around his clients like a coat.
“What’s this candy?” Addie says. “It tastes like coconut.”
“Bean curd. It’s the Indian version of a Mounds bar. Believe it or not, it’s called a Barfy.”
Addie laughs. Warren laughs. Laughter is good, an auspicious beginning.
“So,” he says, “what can I tell you? Which aspects of the relationship are unclear?”
“All aspects. I don’t even know what to call the relationship, much less what to do about it.”
“What to do, what to do,” Warren says, trying to sound lighthearted. “That’s the Leo in you, wanting to do, never content simply to be.” As a rule, he isn’t attracted to Leos — too outward-manifesting. But Addie is an unusual Leo, with three planets in Virgo. She is powerful but doesn’t feel her power. She’s capable without knowing it.
“He needs to be in L.A. for his music,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about going back. Maybe staying awhile. You keep saying I should travel.”
“You don’t mean move? Give up your place here? Your job?”
Warren has long been in the habit of stopping in the Readery on his nightly walks. The store is only two blocks away, in a once-fine Victorian house. A calm, welcoming place, full of lamplight and the tapioca smell of old books. Warren doesn’t much care for reading himself; his mind is too full already. But he likes to be around other people reading. He likes sitting on a lumpy sofa, drinking tea, listening to pages turn. He likes watching Addie at her square oak desk, an old teacher’s desk, wrapping books in clear plastic jackets. She works slowly, meditatively, laying the books open to measure them, folding the jackets down to size. Sometimes, for the smaller books, cutting the jackets. She handles the books tenderly, a glow of utter devotion on her face.
She lives in an apartment on the top floor. Her window has a yellow lace curtain, always a vase of flowers on the sill.
“Travel doesn’t necessarily mean move,” he tells her. “It can, but it doesn’t have to.”
He himself is recently home from India. He went traveling as a sort of purification ritual, a way of renouncing his dependence on material comforts, of escaping the numbing day-in-day-outness of life in Greensboro. He wanted a spiritual adventure. He wanted to be able to hear the voice of God if God should speak to him. It’s when you’re between places, he has always believed, on your way from somewhere to somewhere else, that you’re most likely to hear God, because that’s when you’re most alert. Take Moses. When Moses came upon God in the burning bush he was on his way out of Egypt — fleeing, in fact, after killing a man. God said to Moses, “Go home. Go back to Egypt and take care of your people.”