Orfe (6 page)

Willie Grace shrugged. “What've I got to lose,” she said, eyeing Orfe, eyeing Grace Phildon, ignoring me. “I can read music,” she said, plugged in and ready, her hand out and waiting.

They played a song, once, then again, then a third perfect time, then again, and again, and again, each time more perfect than the perfect time before. When they stopped, Willie Grace wheeled around on the other two—all of them had forgotten me; I sat on the floor drowning five fathoms deep in song—“You try to get rid of me and I'll . . . I'll bust up your appearances. I can do it. I'm not embarrassed to be a spectacle.”

“Why would I want to get rid of you? I don't, Grace, do you?” Grace Phildon didn't. And I didn't. I didn't even remember how it felt to not want Willie Grace in the band.

“She's got the right name,” Orfe pointed out.

“It must be fate,” I agreed.

“What name? Willie?” Willie Grace asked.

“Grace,” I told her.

“What?” Grace Phildon asked.

“And I hope the three of you have a lot of free time the next four days,” I announced, this seeming an appropriate time to take the ace out of my pocket and lay it down in front of them all, “because you've been hired to play a dance.”

“Hired, as in: Money will change hands?” Willie Grace asked.

I told them how much. How little, actually.

“Divided three ways?” Willie Grace asked.

“Four,” I said.

“You get a quarter?”

“We all get equal.”

“Yeah? What do you do that's so important?”

“Whatever needs doing.”

We stared at each other. Her eyes glittered. I don't know what she saw other than that I wasn't about to bend over and let her kick me, the way she wanted to. I held her eyes long enough and then broke the connection. I couldn't stay there all day. I had work to do, readings to complete, case studies to analyze so that I could argue my conclusions and solutions before a class. I turned to leave.

“A dance?” Orfe protested. “How come a dance, Enny?”

“It's a job,” I said.

“But—I thought we were—a concert.”

“I've been trying.”

She didn't doubt me. “Or performance or—”

“I can't do that for you. Orfe, you don't have to keep me on, there are lots of people who might be able—” She was shaking her head. We were talking sort of quietly, just the two of us. “If I could just get someone to come and listen, I think that would do it—or another tape. I want to do another tape, if that's okay, now that you've got a band.”

“I'm thinking of three instruments, a three-piece band. With the Graces, we've already got two; I was thinking another woman.”

“Somebody named Grace, right?”

“That would be too much of a coincidence. But—what if someone did, it would seriously start to feel—wouldn't it?”

“Seriously? It would seriously make me feel crazy. But how do all-women bands do? Has there ever—?”

Orfe had no idea, and the odds made no difference to her; she wanted to get back to the rehearsal. Playing. Singing. The music. “I knew you'd like Willie,” Orfe said, then shut the door behind me.

*  *  *  *  *

They played the dance, and out of that came another job offer. Another dance, but as it turned out, Orfe didn't mind playing dances. As it turned out, she liked seeing people dance to her music. “Sorry about giving you lip,” she said to me. “I honestly didn't know, I honestly thought—”

“Thought what?”

“Thought—I didn't know this until right now, I give you my word, if I had known—I thought, when I pictured it, I had to be at the spotlight, at the microphone, at the center. The Lead Singer, you know? I must have caught it from Jack.”

“Him and the rest of the world.”

“Because it's really about music.”

“Because it's easier to think that you know what's going on,” I realized, “when you put one person in the spotlight and make them the star. If you do that, you feel like someone knows what's going on, someone is in control—instead of the way it is—”

“It's really about whatever makes the music. Including the part of music you can't ever figure out,” Orfe explained to me.

“—with some people doing some things well, understanding some things,
but nobody knowing everything. If you try to make it into one person who does and understands everything best, then you're just asking to be let down, aren't you? And you're forcing them to fail, because nobody can—” I didn't know what kind of a friend I was to Orfe, expecting as much as I did. “I know what you mean,” I said to her.

“There never will be only one center stage,” Orfe said. “I know what you mean.”

I taped a couple of their rehearsals, and my boyfriend of the time, still Zach, edited the tapes into ten minutes of uninterrupted music. I made myself do the rounds again—between classes and schoolwork and listening in on rehearsals. On those rounds I saw some of the same people and some I hadn't seen before. Some of my previous contacts I didn't want ever to be in the same room with again, and some of them had folded up their tents and gotten into something else, somewhere else. The only real difference was that now some of the people knew who Orfe was, either because they remembered me or because they had heard of us.

Nobody listened to the tape all the way through, however, and nobody asked
where he or she could see the band live. “You need a regular place to play,” they advised me. “Regular appearances. See, if a band is good enough to draw a regular crowd, then it's worth my going to hear. See what I mean?”

“But you told me—”

I tried again: “If they do, and I let you know where and when, will you come hear them?”

“Hey, sugar, bet your boobies,” or some such phrase, and some of them meant it. “See, a tape can get itself doctored. How do I know from a tape what the band really sounds like? These days you can't believe what you hear or see.”

I stood mute-faced, communicating nothing.

“So get yourself a club, get that band of yours a club. That's my advice. For free, for once.”

*  *  *  *  *

The second dance brought in two job offers and suddenly we were in business. Once it had happened, it seemed as if it were inevitable, as if there were no way it couldn't have happened. We found a studio we could rent by the week, a small, almost windowless room, with lots of electric plugs and true acoustics.
Practically the first day the band was rehearsing there—I was present to adjust amplifiers, to pick up sheets of music that fell at inconvenient times, to bring in food and drink, to listen—the door opened on us in the middle of a song.

*  *  *  *  *

The music dribbled away to a questioning silence.

It was a guy, a little round guy with reddish cheeks and yellowish hair and a green-striped shirt on with his jeans, a little apple of a guy with eyes that looked around glad. He had a guitar case and he looked at Orfe and the two Graces as if he expected them to be pleased to see him. “I heard you play,” he said, to all of them but mostly Orfe. “I want to play with you.”

There was a laying down of instruments (them) and a rising to feet (me). He unsnapped his case and took out his guitar, an electrified twelve-string.

“Sonny,” Willie Grace said. “We're not jamming here. We're working. Rehearsing. Beat it, okay?”

“Name's not Sonny,” he answered with no anger in his voice. “It's Ray.”

“How did you find us?” Grace Phildon wondered.

“I asked around. I tracked you down. It's not such a big world.”

“Your last name isn't Grace, by any chance . . . is it?” Orfe asked.

“Why?” he asked.

She didn't tell him. “We're not looking for—”

He stood eye level with Orfe, round and unperturbed as an apple. “Tell me what you're looking for and I could be it. I'm pretty resilient.”

“You're too deaf to hear the word
no?”
Willie Grace asked. “The word is
no,
Ray. Ray what, what's your name?”

“Grace,” Ray said.

“Liar,” Willie Grace said. “Out.”

“First, I play. You'd do the same.”

It wasn't a question. Willie Grace shrugged and faded from the argument.

“I'm sorry,” Orfe said to him.

He plugged his guitar in and put on metal finger picks.

“I mean it,” Orfe said.

“We could let him just play, don't you think?” I asked, wanting, for some reason I couldn't define, things to go well for him. “Is there any reason he can't audition?”

He didn't wait for more encouragement. He started playing a piece I remembered from piano lessons, “In a Country Garden,” about the first piece anyone learns. He played the melody line first,
then added a harmony line, then switched to a folk-style arpeggio backup, a country-and-western four-beat, and a blues rendering that meandered over a walking bass, then a twanging rock, the strings vibrating over a pulsing bass line that had my hips and shoulders moving in rhythm. You couldn't help but smile. All four of us were smiling, glad-hearted at listening to him make his joke. At the end he grinned around at us, hands still, guitar silent. “Also, I do ‘Greensleeves.' ”

“That was fun,” Orfe said. “But now, if you'll excuse us—?”

He unplugged and turned away, accepting her decision.

“But, Orfe, why not?” I asked. “Why not at least play a song all together, to hear how it goes? Why not just try? Because he's not female? Or black? I don't understand. His name's Grace,” I pointed out.

“I don't exactly believe that,” she said.

“It's not exactly true,” he said at the same time. “It just—seemed to matter, so I figured, if I wanted a chance to try out.”

Orfe nodded to him, eye to eye.

“Stop me if I'm wrong,” he said, “but I think I'd sound good with you, I think my playing and my voice would mix well with the rest of you.”

Orfe said, “That's for me to decide.”

“I'm not saying I know better than you,” Ray not-Grace said. “But I'm not going to let you say you know better than me either.”

Orfe hesitated. “We'll try it—but with conditions,” she said.

“Like what?” he asked.

“We do my songs,” she said.

“Am I supposed to mind that?”

“No drugs. Do you do drugs?”

“Why should I?”

“Money is split equally between all band members and manager.”

“Sounds fair.”

“It's only on trial,” Orfe said.

“Listen, I can change my name,” he said. “It's easy, I just did it, added a middle name—no, I want one of those Southern two-gun names. Raygrace. Abracadabra—be Raygrace,” he said, throwing his hands up, as if he were releasing twin doves. “And it's done,” he said. Willie Grace had already plugged him back in, and they got down to work.

*  *  *  *  *

A band has to have a name, so between practice sessions—learning music, learning one another—they worried the question of a name. It was a way of winding down.
They sat around the studio, sweaty, instruments closed away safely into cases, and quarreled about a name. Orfe and the Graces, that was my first suggestion the first time the question was raised.

“Boy, does that not grab me,” Raygrace said. “What about Good Graces?”

“Good Gracious?”

“Amazing Graces?” Raygrace offered.

“That leaves me out,” Orfe objected.

“Amazing Graces and Orfe?”

Groans greeted that idea.

“Goodness Gracious. Goodness and Gracious? You can be goodness, see, and we'll be gracious.”

“Grace, Gracious, Graceless, and Ungrateful?”

“I'm not ungrateful,” Orfe protested.

Orfe and the Graces was the name they adopted, until they could come up with something better. Just until. “It's only true,” Raygrace said. “That's not nearly good enough.”

“It'll do for starters,” Grace Phildon said.

“I'd settle for ending up there too,” Willie Grace said.

“Orfe and the Graces is not exactly catchy,” Raygrace said. “How about Gracious Me?”

“You're not some fucking solo act,” Willie
Grace said. “And don't say what you're thinking, college kid,” she said to me.

“Hey, I go to college too,” Raygrace said.

*  *  *  *  *

Orfe and the Graces played one or two gigs a week, regularly, during that time, enough work to take a monthly lease of the studio, which gave us the space at a lower rate. Orfe kept a bedroll there, for nights when she didn't want to leave what she was working on. The studio came with a tiny bathroom—toilet and sink and cracked mirror. You could bring food in with you. The whole building was locked at midnight and each studio had its own locked door, so even though there was no watchman, it was reasonably safe. If Orfe wanted a shower, she came to my dorm or spent some time with Yuri at the halfway house. They were looking for an apartment of their own by then. Orfe and the Graces were doing well enough so that Orfe and Yuri could afford a place of their own. In fact, Raygrace and Willie Grace already shared an apartment by then. “Not the bed, though. This isn't a relationship,” Willie Grace told us.

“Not that I'd mind,” Raygrace said.

“I'd mind,” she told him. “It'd be one
thing then another with you. I know your type, you'd start in on me about making commitments.”

“You're already committed,” Raygrace told her. “You just won't admit it.”

“The way men,” Willie Grace said, “work women over, jerk them around.”

“Depends on how you look at it,” Grace Phildon joined in. “I got Cass out of the deal, and he didn't get much of anything.”

“Only just exactly what he was looking for,” Willie Grace said.