"Where would I find Little Girl in Big Trouble?" she asked the young man who had taken her money, a broad-shouldered blond who was trying, without much success, to effect a bored, East Coast ennui. "The punk room?"
"I'm afraid I don't know any band by that name." She unfolded the newspaper photo for him. "Oh, our eighties band, the Breakfast Club. They're on the third floor. Pure pop for now people. Not as hot as it was a year ago, but still a good time if you're in the right mood. You know-‘I want my MTV.'"
"Money for nothing," Tess finished for him, pretending to be in on the joke. Truth was, she felt stranded between the Morgue's bipolar sensibilities of nostaglia and irony. She had been an adolescent in the eighties and the memories-Madonna, rubber bracelets and bulimia-could still chafe. It didn't help that two of the three were still going strong, and that rubber bracelets had attempted a small comeback not that long ago.
But although the eighties were twice-over over, the eighties room was enjoying a boom time on this particular night. Couples who looked to be in their late thirties were packed into the small space, dancing gleefully to music they had probably scorned when it was new. The tune was catchy and as familiar as a toothpaste jingle. Tess needed a few seconds to identify it, then hated herself for knowing it at all.
"Wham," she said to herself, her eyes adjusting to the sudden darkness of the room. Goddamn Wham. George Michael and that guy whose name no one could remember. Wake Me Up Before You Go-go. This was Big Trouble indeed, for someone who had fancied himself a cutting edge musician just six months ago.
Her eyes went to the girl first Woman, technically, but she was playing the vulnerable waif for all it was worth, skinny limbs exposed and fragile in her torn party frock. The outfit was a little anachronistic, first-generation Courtney Love, more early nineties than late eighties. No smeared lipstick, though, and no roots-this blond hair was real. Yes, Emmie "Dutch" Sterne was the real thing, all right.
She sang prettily but perfunctorily, as if her mind were somewhere else. A doll, yes, but more the windup variety than the china type. Still, she caught one's eye and held it. Emmie had that ineluctable quality called charisma. No two people remembered her the same way, but everyone remembered her.
A burst of harmony on the chorus, a man's sweet tenor. Head down, Tess let her eyes track to the right and saw the new Crow. With his long hair gone, the sharp, thin planes of his face were revealed. Yet even as his face had narrowed, his shoulders had broadened, his body thickened. He wasn't fat, far from it, but his boyish gangle was gone. He looked good-even in that ridiculous jacket and skinny tie, and with his hair moussed into a ruffled coxcomb.
She raised her head a little higher, feeling slightly voyeuristic, a peeping Tess hidden behind the bouncing dancers. She noticed she wasn't the only one watching in this way. A few partner-less women stood along one wall, eyeing the band's male members with bird-dog intensity. Wake me up before you go-go, yes indeed.
What is it about women and musicians? Over the brief course of her relationship with Crow, Tess had stood in dozens of clubs and watched little girls sigh over him and the other boys in his band as if they were Mick Jagger and John Lennon combined. To tell the truth, she had sighed herself in her time, had found herself nodding and smiling at some semi-attractive stranger just because he had a guitar, stood on a stage, and sang someone else's words. It didn't work the other way, for some reason. Men might lust for a female rock singer as they lusted for anyone, but the music, the performance, was incidental. Sure, there were men here tonight who were staring hungrily at Emmie, but not because she was singing. As Kitty had said, there were men who specialized in damaged goods, and Emmie Sterne was putting out the I-am-screwed-up vibe for all it was worth.
For women, the music was the point. You date a musician and-well, what had Tess thought? That Crow would serenade her from the alley below her Fells Point apartment, that her life would turn into some MGM production number? She still wasn't sure. All she knew was that the reality of dating a musician wasn't the same as the prospect. There was nothing like the feeling you had when you stood in a dark club and watched a man lean close to a microphone and imagined the microphone was your ear. Or your mouth. But the only way to hold on to such anticipation was not to act on it.
New song. Wham segued into Culture Club. "Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?" For a brief, paranoid moment, Tess thought Crow had seen her in the crowd. Who wants to hurt anyone? She had thought she was being so honorable last winter, breaking up with Crow when another man had filled her line of vision. She had hoped the small hurt would be better than the large-scale betrayal that seemed to loom. Now she wondered, and not for the first time, how monogamy worked. Did there ever come a time when you were impervious to stirrings for another person, or did you just learn to ignore those feelings? But if you pretended they didn't exist, weren't you a hypocrite?
In the Bible, if you felt it in your heart, you were busted. Might as well do the crime, because you were going to do the time. But in fairy tales, it was the test that mattered-one couldn't avoid temptation, but one could avoid giving in. The heart triumphed, time and again. Only how could the heart hope to make itself heard over the screeching chorus of one's hormones?
"We're going to take a break, folks. See you in fifteen." Emmie's speaking voice was huskier, rougher than her singing voice. The couples in the room didn't applaud, for that would require letting go of each other. It dawned on Tess that the real purpose of the Morgue was providing people with a series of semidark caves in which to grope each other. No wonder it was such a success with conventioneers.
Tess walked to the front, head down, as if Crow might not recognize the top of her head. His back was to her, anyway. He was crouching over a speaker, fiddling with the connection.
"Piece of crap," he said dispassionately. The two other guys in the band had already left the stage and been embraced by their ladies in waiting, the human coolie cups who had the honor of holding their beers throughout the set. Emmie stood where she was, twirling with a lock of hair, appraising Tess with the unabashed stare of a child. She didn't seem particularly surprised, or threatened. Probably lots of ladies tried to approach Crow between sets.
"Hey," Tess said to Crow's back.
"What?" he said, not turning away from the troublesome speaker, his voice irritable and impatient.
"Nice set," she said. "It's not Poe White Trash, but then, what is?"
Not one of the more immortal lines after a silence of almost six months, but it got his attention.
Chapter 9
He turned on his heel, bat still in a crouch, so he was eye-level with her knees. When he glanced up, there was an unguarded moment, and some unidentifiable emotion flitted past Whatever it was, it was quickly overtaken and vanquished by wariness, a most un-Crow-like expression.
"Tess Monaghan," he said flatly, in the tone of someone diagnosing a rash to which he was prone.
"Hi, Crow. Only I hear it's Ed these days. Sometimes Eddie."
"Eduardo in these environs." He stood up, sticking his hands in his pockets, lest she try to reach for one.
"They called you Crow back there?" This was Emmie. Tess kept expecting her to move forward, to stake her claim with an arm around Crow's waist, or a hand in the small of his back, but her interest was polite at best. She didn't even seem to expect an answer to her question, and Crow didn't give her one.
"This isn't what I do," he told Tess.