Orfe (12 page)

“We were terrific,” Raygrace said. “Really good and getting better.”

“So what's next?” Grace Phildon asked me. “Are you working again?” she asked Orfe. “Anything new for us to try?”

“Or not,” Willie Grace said quickly.

“Whatever, we're fine with it,” Raygrace said.

Orfe raised her head and looked around at all of us. I couldn't read her eyes, but there was in her face anticipation and sorrow and acceptance and friendship. “I've got a couple of songs. I'd like you to hear them. Do we have any jobs to play?”

“We will as soon as I get on the phone tomorrow morning,” I promised them all.

“Allow rehearsal time,” Orfe asked me.

*  *  *  *  *

Orfe and the Graces practiced at the studio and I was busy: job interviews and renting the college gym for a concert; designing and having printed posters,
designing and having printed tickets, and more job interviews, some of them second and third rounds; seeing to ticket sales, seeing to lights and circuitry, renting trucks to carry equipment, starting a career-track job, considering the ways to protect the gym floor and finding someone who would—quickly and on short notice should it be necessary—refinish it. An All-Shoes-Barred Concert, that's what we called it, that's how the posters and tickets read. But there is always someone, there are always some people, convinced that the rules don't apply to them, convinced that doing what she wants takes precedence over anyone else's need or weal. To whom rules are always for other people, not for him. So I needed to have that base covered, in case the gym floor was damaged. I also went around to the few contacts I knew of that might prove useful, a couple of scouts, a couple of booking agents, a few media personnel. They might or might not come. I sent or hand delivered complimentary tickets.

I didn't send or hand deliver a ticket to Yuri.

*  *  *  *  *

The crowd filled the whole gym, milling about and waiting. Shoes piled up
against walls, as more and more people came in through the wide double doors to push the assembled crowd toward the one section of bleachers we'd left standing. That was the stage, the eight ascending bleacher benches on their scaffolded skeleton. I operated the fairly primitive lighting from a small light board on a table beside the doors. The metal box full of ticket stubs and gate money I put under the table.

*  *  *  *  *

Amplifiers were set under the bleachers, on the floor, with wires coming out like tentacles to attach to the instruments. The Graces stayed at about the first or second bleacher row, or on the floor right in front if there was a routine they were doing. Orfe moved up around three of the top four rows—the very top row she avoided, because there wasn't enough room there even to turn around, between the narrow seat and the wall. So Orfe, in her black stretch jeans and white poet's shirt, her hair blazing under the lights and her guitar gleaming, moved up and down around three of the four top rows of bleachers, while the Graces flowed back and forth below, careful to be near enough to the standing mikes, careful not to get their cords too tangled up in the
intricacies of the dance and the intricacies of the music.

For the first set, they played
Yuri's Dreams.
The music filled the air of the gym, from wall to wall and up to the high ceilings where fans rotated behind metal grids. “Gray ashes, and white bones,” they sang, “The Lament of the Lion Lady,” a frightening dream, “White bits of bones buried in gray ashes.” The audience swayed, and the Graces swayed in the bright lights, while Orfe sang. “Ashes and bones, bones in ashes.” Michael put his hand into mine: I remember that. The song not so much brought his hand into mine as it made me aware of his hand in mine. Hands as flesh over bone, long-boned fingers with their ability, in some cases, to call music out of boxes of wood or plastic, out of strands of steel.

“Soar.” Orfe sang another Dream, “Icarus,” and the Graces echoed and reechoed the word, “up, Air,” the song rising, pulling the echoing voices after it, “up, High,” like birds flying, the words, like birds flying up into the crown of the sky and breaking free through it, “Swoop.” The words were disconnected, there was no sentence, no story, just melody and music and wild words, and my heart rose with
the song as I listened. I couldn't catch my breath, almost; almost I couldn't breathe.

Orfe sang, last in the first set, “The Oak Tree and the Linden,” a song that—because it entered my bloodstream and drove around and around my body until my whole being existed only in the song—I called a love song, even though, as I rode it back, riding my own blood back into the heart of music, it never had the word in it. “The sun makes golden windows of the leaves,” Orfe sang with the Graces.

When the set was finished, the audience broke out in applause. Michael turned to me, his hands over his ears, dazed by the sound and displeased, amazed by the enthusiasm and amused. I brought up the lights and brought down the spots. Somebody opened the gym doors. People crowded around past us, where we stood behind the light board. I thought about Yuri.

“From the point of view of time, or history,” Michael said from close behind me, “or the stars—from the point of view of the whole universe, from the big bang on—we're nothing, us, right now, just like ants, smaller, just particles, quarks—from that point of view, we're just little minuscule moving things.”

“So none of it really matters,” I agreed.

“I find that a comforting thought,” Michael said. “When things matter too much and can't be helped. Yuri, for example.”

My eyes filled with tears, for Yuri.

“Did you ever hear of the energy of mass?” Michael asked.

I turned to look into his face. “No. Why?” He would have a reason for the question.

“Every particle has it,” he told me. “Anything that has mass, has it. It's not the same as energy of motion. Energy of mass is the energy in E = mc
²
, it's an incredible amount of energy. Because
c
in the formula is the speed of light. That's one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second, per
second
.”

I nodded, I knew that.

“That's the speed of light squared, then multiplied times mass—imagine the energy. There's enough energy of mass in a quarter to run New York City during rush hour, I read that, in a book. By a man named Goldsmith. An astrophysicist. So it's reliable data. So you can imagine the energy of mass in a human being.”

I tried to see it, envisioning the invisible and immeasurable energy of mass of
an atom, a cell, a person. I could almost see it. Seeing it, I asked, “Do you mean a soul? Do you mean a human being might have a soul?”

The second set started out with dance songs, and the shoeless audience moved along the music like waves along the surface of the water. Then Orfe did one of her new songs. The song had no words, only a voice, calling. The song was melody on a rising
oh
sound, maybe what the stars and planets call out to one another across the empty reaches of space, the voices of solitary stars and silent planets crying out. Then Orfe was singing
ah,
and the audience pressed forward, as if she were calling them forward.

I could feel the press in the darkness. I could feel the call from the figure at the top of the bleachers. I could see, in the shadowy darkness beyond the spotlight the darkness rising to her.

Orfe's head was bent as she sang. I couldn't make sense of the song, of my own feelings: joy and fear and hope; celebration, mourning, grief, despair, and farewell. The music called me into itself. There were no words and if there had been, I could not have sung them.

The crowd came closer, darker. Orfe
called out from the top row of bleachers, with her head bent, and all the dark crowd seemed to wait for what would happen next as she sang. All the dark crowd seemed unable to wait and it pressed in.

The instruments the Graces played on seemed to protest, losing their hold on the music.

The Graces and their instruments seemed to be swallowed up.

Orfe lifted her calling voice. She lifted her head and I could have sworn that she saw me.
Don't be afraid.

Chaos rose up from beneath the spotlights. The bleachers under Orfe collapsed. She fell into them, as if into an open mouth. The Graces were gone, invisible, lost in the shapeless crowd. The instruments and amplifiers and wires couldn't be seen.

I heard cracking and screaming, wood and people.

All music ceased.

It was a chaos of noise and voices, shouts for help, cries for order.

I turned up the lights but couldn't see what had happened behind the shoulders and backs, backs of heads.

I shoved, pushed, elbowed my way forward. The crowd, pulling back now, pulling
away and fleeing, tried to take me with it. I didn't know what Orfe meant:
Don't be afraid.
I only knew, trying to hold my place in the receding tide of people between me and where Orfe had sung on the bleachers, what she hadn't meant.

*  *  *  *  *

What killed Orfe I don't know, and I don't really care. Whether it was the fall or the press of the audience, the lack of somebody who knew how to administer CPR, or a broken heart, makes no difference. I don't know if she was smothered, crushed, hit by falling debris, hit by a single falling board, or drowned by her own blood as it rose up into her lungs; if her spine snapped or her heart stopped or her brain cells burst. We followed the ambulance to the hospital, the Graces and I, we went to the funeral home, following the coffin as far as we were allowed. Then we went on with our lives.

Yuri never did, as far as I know. We called the house to tell him, but he didn't come to the phone. I sent him a newspaper clipping about the accident. Because he is Orfe's husband and heir, the Graces pay into his account her share of royalties for
Yuri's Dreams,
which he still draws on, so I assume Yuri is still safely alive.

*  *  *  *  *

Raygrace said to me, “You know, just because it doesn't end happily doesn't mean it's not a love story.”

“Yeah, well, neither does it mean it is, just because it has a happy ending,” Willie Grace snapped back at him.

This was at their wedding, a long time after. Grace Phildon raised her glass of champagne to all of us, Willie Grace and Raygrace, Cass, Michael and me.

I raised my glass in response. “Love stories aren't about how they end,” I promised them.

“You were with me,” Orfe said. “I saw you in the doorway. You didn't come into the room. Or you couldn't. Or you wouldn't.”

This was later when she told me this.

“But you were waiting when I came out. And I never said so at the time, but I was glad. I am glad. Having you there. Because I don't know what I would have done without you. Not just then, but especially then, because you were there, you know what it was like, walking into that house. You were great, Enny.”

I said, “I was just following you.”

“Dark, and it smelled of garbage and dope. Stale urine, stale sweat, stale sex.”

“You were the brave one,” I said.

“And their voices were all sort of low and monotonous. The way the light was dim and diffused around the whole long
room—it was like being underwater, among the drowned. It was like the house of death.

“Yuri told me,” she said. “At some point that night he told me what happened. They put dope into the frosting, when they gave him that piece of their wedding cake. By the time we got there they were all wasted, and Yuri was wasted too.

“I played every song I knew and some I hadn't even written until right then. They wanted ‘It Makes Me Sick.' You heard that, didn't you? You were there then. But I didn't. Play it or throw up. Yuri asked for it too, because he wanted me to do it because he asked. He wanted me to play it for him, but he wanted to be sure I wouldn't, not even for him. I didn't. Or I wouldn't. I played all of the
Dreams,
and they danced. Yuri danced, and girls danced with him, and everybody danced. They knew why I was there. They knew what I wanted. Finally, I could sense it, they were willing to give him up.”

“What went wrong?”

“I don't know, except they weren't willing, not to give him up. It was so dark I couldn't see anything clearly. Yuri was in a corner, with these girls all over him, but that wasn't what he wanted. I am what he
wanted, that's not it. He said he should have known they would do something to the cake, he shouldn't have taken the piece. He said he knew now he couldn't get rid of it, he would always know he might fall back into it again. He would always never be sure he wouldn't. He said he couldn't stand living that way. Without any faith in himself.

“I couldn't give him that. I could only give him my faith in him, and that wasn't enough. He had to give himself faith too.

“Because he almost did come with me. He got up, stood up, away from those girls—and they were hanging on to him, everybody was hanging on to him, sort of, or hanging off one another, like a human chain. Yuri said he'd come home with me and they were holding him back at the same time that they were telling him to go for it, he'd be fine, he'd be happy, he was one lucky guy.

“And we almost made it.

“We got about halfway down the hall, and it was hard because they couldn't let him go. It was up to Yuri. I was holding his hand. I was holding Yuri's hand,” she said, and slipped into silence, remembering.

I kept silent too.

“Somebody called from behind us, from
in the living room. Called out, ‘It hurts, man. You know how bad it hurts.'

“Yuri turned around and went back in.

“He pulled his hand free, as if I were holding him against his will, and then he stopped still. Looking at me for a minute. Before he went back down the hall, back into the living room.