Rickie and Joey were finished now, and the room filled with applause. More than Rickie had ever had. She turned to Joey and hugged him, tears in her eyes. The applause was for both of them, and she couldn’t have done it without him. How she loved this man, who could make such a thing with her. A golden bird. A healed gryphon. A room full of hands clapping. Music.
“Billie paid for your sins so you wouldn’t have to repeat them,” Joey said pointedly when he sat back down. “I’ve seen it too often. You’re too smart to waste. Not that I expect you to listen to an old man,” and Phoebe noticed a glimmer of understanding in Rickie’s eyes. But she didn’t want Rickie to know, not yet.
“How d’you like her Billie then?” Phoebe asked to change the uncomfortable subject.
“Unconventionally brilliant,” Joey remarked. “But then what could one expect from a woman like that?”
“But Mr. Joey, you’ve got big ears,” Rickie said, “always have had.”
“It’s Rickie who’s got the big ears,” Joey said. “She can hear people think, especially, she says, when she’s singing.”
“Now there’s an unusual talent,” Phoebe said mildly.
“The street eats hangers-on even faster than musicians,” Joey said, back on track and Phoebe winced again.
“Perhaps,” she said, mostly just to placate him, “I should study computers, make a new kind of instrument, never been done.”
But Joey looked more than interested, said, “Logician, magician. I want to see this instrument of yours; my fingers are getting arthritic. You know Rickie, even if you’re a rocker born and bred, you’ll only get better by having learned them. Billie, Sarah, Aretha, the rest, the best.”
“But you already told me all that on stage,” Rickie laughed, “with your saxophone and much more eloquently. Why bother with English?”
Phoebe stared at his fingers. “You never said.”
“No.”
“Did you really used to be a junkie, Joey?” Rickie asked and Phoebe thought with huge relief, it’s not me she’s guessed about at last, but him. Still she wanted to run away, to hide, to hit up in the bathroom. Anything to make the shame go away.
But Joey winked at her, comforting, promising silence all over again, said blithely, “Mojo told you that? Now you won’t like me anymore.”
Rickie asked, “What’s it like?” and Phoebe was so grateful for his foot beneath the table brushing hers.
“Better than Billie,” he whispered. “The only thing.”
“Why did you stop then?”
“Why d’you think? For just that reason. Better than Billie. At first I thought it fed my music but in not too long it was bigger; it ate my marriage, ate my music, shamed my animal, yet still seemed like the only thing. One day you wake up and realize maybe your woman, your proud creature, and your work were more important after all, that you chose the lesser thing. Seems obvious I know.”
Phoebe remembered that comfort went both ways, reaching out to pat his hand with its swollen joints. How could she not have noticed? She was so selfish; he’d noticed her secret, as careful as she thought she’d been, and kept it for her. This was a different kind of shame, these distended knuckles. Why not share a thing like that? It was the shame of growing old.
Joey reached for the last beer, and Rickie thought again how he’d replaced one comfort with another. We all drink but there’s a difference in the way he does it. Desperately. “Here’s your friend, miss,” he said, and there it was. Rickie’s voice, shrunken to pigeon size, settled on her shoulder. It cooed and billed her cheek, glittering.
“And yours, sir,” Phoebe picked up the winged mouse, proffered it in her outstretched hand. He nuzzled it briefly and tucked it in his jacket.
“I’ve never seen it so friendly,” Phoebe said. “But it should be bigger.”
“Will be,” Joey said. “If Rickie lets me go with her where she’s going. Only small now so it can ride home in my pocket.”
“Of course you’re coming,” Rickie said, still brimming with elation. “I won’t get there unless you come too. I’ll remember this night for the rest of my life.”
Management locked the door on the last club kid and came over to chat, but Joey wasn’t up to it, not tonight. “Okay ladies, let’s hit the road.”
On the street, walking towards Seventh Avenue to catch a Checker downtown, Joey linked one elbow through Rickie’s and one through Phoebe’s. And Phoebe, meaning it this time, said, “I’d give almost anything for an animal of my own. As original as Phoebe’s bird, as persevering as your gryphon mouse. It’s hard to tell what shape it’s going to settle into, Joey, now that it’s not a monster anymore.”
“I think a gryphon mouse is a monster,” he said. “There’s benevolent monsters too, you know. Benign demons. For some people nothing less than a monster will do. Something with teeth.”
“Or scissors. Perhaps a dragon,” Phoebe said, wondering.
“There’s only one way for you to find out what your creature might be, and you know what it is.”
“What?” Rickie asked and Phoebe kicked Joey in the shin and he laughed, but still she wondered what her choice would be and knew for the first time it would never be any easier, that she would always be standing on exactly this fulcrum, this moment. She might never grow a creature, be able to call its strength and beauty to her, but she had to try. What else was there? Even Rickie, who seemed so enviable, stood always at this same crossroads, choosing, choosing, again and again and again. There was no other place, ever, not in Manhattan, or on all of Earth. Only this one locus, this one choice. Whether to desecrate one’s light or shine it.
A Room of His Own
CASSIDY WAS RIVETED BY HIS HANDS. They were trying to disengage what looked like yellow gauze from the torn screen of the door to her new potting shed. He was picking at the gauze with those long fingers, at once sensual and gnarled, an expression of great intentness and some worry creasing his long handsome face. She thought perhaps it was his favourite scarf. She herself might wear just such an expression if her favourite scarf, a fine purple silk brought from Rome by her sister Mara, had caught on a protruding nail.
But how had the screen torn in the first place? It looked like he’d been trying to break into her new shed, tearing the screen to unlock the door from the inside. It served him right for catching his scarf on the snags. It had taken Cassidy so long to get the shed in the first place. She re-potted plants in it, and kept her gardening tools neatly organized. Henry had little use for trowels and spades and cultivators and wasn’t likely to pinch and then lose them.
“Could you help?” the man asked. He had a low fluty voice; it sounded a little foreign.
Cassidy began to unhook the yellow gauze from the tiny, clawed metal ends of screen. He made a face when she did that, and twisted his entire body quickly. Cassidy saw his back then, saw how the yellow gauze was attached to his shoulder blade. How the other shoulder had a matching scarf, this one draped magnificently over his arm, almost alight. Not moving but capable of movement, she was sure.
She unhooked ten or twenty tiny metal ends of torn screen from the yellow gauze. She thought he might have nerve endings there, and so she was as careful as could be, as if removing slivers from a young child’s tender feet. Not that she knew much about that.