One day when she was leaving he asked, “Where are you going?”
“To the racetrack.”
“Isn’t that a euphemism for your dealer?”
She smiled, seemingly not taking offense. He’d never seen her smile. “Actually not.”
“Yeah, right.”
“Come see for yourself then, if you’re so sure.”
He had nothing else to do, so he put on his coat and accompanied her on the subway, all the way to Queens. They drank ice cold beer and chatted. Phoebe read the racing forms with a determined focus that startled Joey, and moreover won sixty dollars, which wasn’t bad considering. Perennially broke, her original stake had only been ten.
“I’m impressed,” he said, meaning it.
“You can’t go to off track,” she explained earnestly. “It’s not the same thing. You have to see the horses, the jockeys; if you look at them carefully you can see whether it’s a good day for them or not. But mostly you have to be very analyticaclass="underline" judging, weighing, measuring everything.”
“Analytical,” he said on the ride home. “What a concept.”
He was careful not to sound snide, but she only said, “Thanks for coming with me, Joey. It’s more fun when you’re not alone.”
“Isn’t everything?”
It seemed she liked it that he was impressed. She went more often, dragging him along when he wasn’t busy. She took to bringing the racing form home and studying it for hours, pointedly, in front of him. So much for thinking she didn’t care whether he lived or died. She stopped cleaning up after them, stopped doing their laundry. At least her incredible Italian sandwiches didn’t stop.
There were fewer needles in the bathroom suddenly, the needles that he always hid before Rickie came home, the ones Phoebe had been too gone to hide.
“One junkie always knows another,” she said. “You stopped; I’ll stop. Just let me do it my way; please don’t tell Rickie. Remember when no one could tell you anything?”
She didn’t say, “not even Sally.” Rickie would have said that, but Joey was grateful Phoebe didn’t, thought it showed a remarkable discernment, a finely discriminating tact. He even forgot to think it was more game. And so he conspired in her secret with her, and prayed no harm would come to any of them because of it. It went against his better instincts, but it was all he could do. Her big shadowy eyes: give me this one chance. And Rickie had given him that chance, and so he couldn’t say no.
He remembered what Rickie had said, that first morning, when he’d asked why she was bothering with him. To get to heaven, you have to save one life. It’s the entry fee. He’d thought she was being facetious, but now it gave him pause. Phoebe’s sandwiches were delicious, but food for thought is the best kind. He took the trash out often, and went so far as buying Phoebe needles so she’d use new, and clean. He didn’t think that was what it would take, to save her life, but it was all he could come up with. Buying time.
But now there were horses in Phoebe’s life, and fewer syringes in the trash. She emerged a little from the shadows. He thought it was the winning, which she did often, in small amounts, but she laughed when he called her a gambling junkie. “I like winning,” she said. “It’s a reward, but it’s the figuring I really like.”
He remembered again when she’d shyly admitted that in high school she’d loved math, as though, in their musicians’ crowd, it was something to be ashamed of. And it was true; it was so foreign to him it was as if he hadn’t heard her. And now, some nights when she got that slippery look again, as though she was going to disappear, make phone calls in alleyways, he’d get off stage, apologize to Carlos, take her by the arm and say, “Let’s go. We’re going to the races.”
Mojo asked him to lay sax tracks for his new CD, said it would be an honour.
Joey was astounded, and Rickie laughed at him. “You really haven’t a clue, have you?”
“A clue?”
“We all think it’s an honour. You’re one of the best.”
“People my age don’t think that,” he said, grateful for her all over again.
“Fuck ’em,” she said. “We need you.”
“Maybe you just haven’t seen me screw up real bad.”
“Oh,” she said charmingly, “but you’re reborn now. You’re over all that, whatever it was.”
He’d never told her. She didn’t know. He was amazed at her faith in him. She didn’t know how tempted he was. Phoebe. A door that swung two ways. What if he only threw out Phoebe’s needles so he could handle them again, a tiny illicit thrill? It would be so easy to fall, such a comfort.
Then he realized if he fell, he might fall alone, for Phoebe was changing, or just showing him more of her hidden good side. They all went to the recording studio together, and Mojo, who loved to play but had only learned MIDI because you had to, was struggling with the code, grinding his teeth in frustration. And Phoebe leaned over his shoulder, took the pencil from his hand and scribbled down a new version.
Mojo stared from under his dreadlocks, blinked.
“That’s it, Phoebe. How’d you do that?”
“I don’t know, really. I went out with a guy who understood MIDI, and I paid attention, a bit.”
Mojo looked at Joey, dumbstruck. “So much for Phoebe as the junkie groupie,” he said later, when the girls were out getting food.
“So much for. Not that she ever slept with me; isn’t that part of that particular package?”
“Me either,” Mojo said a little wistfully, and Joey had to suppress a laugh. He’d cut off his own dreads around the same time white kids like Mojo started growing them, but he liked him in spite of himself.
“She should go to school, stop wasting her brains.”
“And her veins.”
“That too.”
So Mojo knew. But he was pretty sure Rickie still didn’t.
Sometimes, coming home from an ecstasy-stained midnight tour of Carlos’s club, they’d fall asleep, all three, fully clothed on the pull-out. As had just happened. But Rickie woke again, got up alone. The peace of it. She looked at Phoebe and Joey, curled around one another, her hand sheltering his cheek. Joey’s rough years vanished when he slept. And Phoebe wasn’t old enough for hers to show, not that Rickie knew much about them, had always loved her friend too much to see the shadows that were drawn to her, collecting at her feet like black puddles. She rearranged the duvet, pulling them down where Joey’s long feet emerged like curious platypi. Spring had come, and with it the heat prematurely turned down as always. The dawn chill had set in.
She re-boxed the coloured felt pens that Phoebe used, with a complicated system of colour coding that neither she nor Joey understood, to annotate her racing sheet. She replaced Joey’s sax into its case. She liked that Joey played with her, thought she was good enough now, on her guitar. And the few older musicians in the city’s club circuit who occasionally dropped in at The Bridge no longer treated her like a flighty wannabe. She knew, too, that the session guys gave her points for trying to pull Joey together, when they’d turned away, frightened or angry, contemptuous or apathetic. So many lose everything in this town.
It had all seemed easy that morning: being funny, giving him Carlos’s card.
She’d just wanted to play with him. Was honoured by the thought. Didn’t know his peers stayed away from him as if he had the plague. She hadn’t even thought he’d show up, especially in light of that risky eighty-dollar loan. After all, she was just a girl who couldn’t play, and he was a small legend, a firefly.