Orfe (7 page)

“But, honey, the point is, he wasn't looking for much of anything. He could of had himself a whole lot, but he didn't even know.”

“What whole lot?”

“Why, me.”

Orfe never said much, just sat listening. Her fingers fiddled around on the guitar. Her face was pale, her movements slower, clumsier; I thought she was burning herself out somehow, maybe in bed with Yuri, maybe she had some part-time job she hadn't told the rest of us about.

I was wrong about Orfe, though. She was writing music, writing songs. She wasn't burning herself out or burning herself up—she was on fire.

There were two kinds of music she was
writing, both of them for the group but only one for immediate performance. She called the performance songs her fossil-fuel numbers, because they were the band's economic underpinnings. The band played them at the dances they were hired for by various organizations—fraternities, sororities, local clubs—or at private parties. Some of those songs had words, and after a while some of the dance-goers had come back frequently enough to sing along, but it was mostly foot-lifting, hip-hinging, arm-pulling music, for dancing. As long as the music played, all you wanted to do was dance, and you danced better than you ever had. Not everyone, of course; there is always someone to complain. Boys who hoped to get laid, after the music stopped but before it left the bloodstream, complained that it went on too long; faculty advisors complained that it went on too loud; girls who hoped to fall in love behind the seductive veil of music complained that it took too much of everyone's attention.

The other music Orfe was working on . . . That, she finally allowed the band to try out. It was songs, songs for concert performance. Orfe gave the Graces the music and they all worked out the arrangements. One
day, at one dance, when they played the first of these songs—

—the dancers stopped and turned to the stage, caught. The dancers crowded up as close to the stage as they could get. The dancers swayed to the music, swayed toward the stage.
Yuri's Dreams,
Orfe called the new songs.

After that, dances the group played were also concerts. And concerts were also dances. There was no either/or, no playing either a concert or a dance, there was only playing. Orfe and the Graces moved out of a world of either/or. Orfe and the Graces played music.

They played in a hall of some kind, as a rule, an open hall or gymnasium, somewhere roomy enough for an elevated stage to be put up, with space for dancing. Job offers came in almost daily, until I was turning down work without a second thought—if the space wasn't right, the time wasn't right, the money wasn't right, or if any one of us for some reason took against the way the job was offered or the persons who offered it. The band was performing four or five times a week and could have performed seven nights and two afternoons, regularly. After one gymnasium gig a man in a gray silk suit approached me, his
hand held out not for me to shake but to give me his business card.

I put down the amplifier I was carrying. “They told me—you're the manager?”

He had a shifty look. His eyes didn't rest on any object or person. His eyes were busy looking for the main chance. “I'm wondering if you've cut a record? Or made a tape? Because I'd be happy to hustle it for you. I think your friends have got a future, and you must think the same. So what do you say, sweets? Do we cut the deal or what?”

Because I knew as soon as I saw his eyes that I would say no to whatever he asked, it was as if I had already spoken the word out loud. I was distracted by thinking about what his offer meant. My hesitation gave him hope. Seeing him have hope made me feel bad about leading him on. I cut short his smile. “No. No, thanks.”

“You're making a big mistake,” he warned me. I didn't want to talk to him. I was wondering how many of Orfe's songs she would think had gotten to final form, how many she would say were ready to be recorded. “Ummnnnmm,” I said.

“So you'll think about it?” he asked, thinking he'd been successful after all.

I shook my head.

“Big mistake, sweets. Really big mistake. Don't say I didn't warn you. People in this business, they eat little girls like you for breakfast. For between-meal snacks. Good bands miss out on all their chances, if the manager doesn't know—I could tell you some stories that would make you weep.”

I shook my head. I picked up the amplifier, and he didn't offer a hand. “Keep the card. You'll be calling, begging for help.”

Later that night I asked Orfe about it. “There was this guy, some promoter, after the show. He asked me if you'd cut a record, if he could get in on the action. What about a record, Orfe, what do you think?”

Orfe took a minute before she lifted her face: She looked like I'd just handed her the Nobel Peace Prize, gladness pouring out of her face. “What?” I asked her face.

“Sure. Fine,” Orfe said. “Let's.”

“What's that face about?”

“I've been waiting for you to suggest it.”

*  *  *  *  *

Rehearsals grew intensive, not a spectator sport. Yuri and I went to movies if we started to get sent crazy by work or studies or not having much else to do because of the intensive rehearsal schedule. Orfe
and the Graces played fewer appearances for a few weeks while they were rehearsing intensively. It happened that two of those were at weddings, and I wonder if that had something to do with Orfe and Yuri deciding they wanted to get married. Orfe didn't ask my advice and didn't listen when I offered it unasked.

The Graces agreed with me, each for a particular reason. Grace Phildon said a person should be clean for at least two years before you committed yourself to him; two years clean gave you a good chance. Willie Grace said she wouldn't want Yuri at her back in a fight, or at her side, or on her side, because she'd just end up trying to take care of him. Raygrace said why fuss around with something that was working just fine, why worry about marriage, it was being good for each other, being good together that mattered.

Orfe ignored all of us. Yuri ignored all of us. We were all more than a little high on ourselves, so maybe they were wise to dismiss us. When I got a phone call offering Orfe and the Graces the chance to go on tour as warm-up band, I wasn't surprised. I passed the information on to Orfe, who turned the job down without hesitation. I wasn't surprised at that
either, and I had my objections ready. The Graces weren't saying anything.

“But Orfe,” I said.

“They smash up their instruments.”

“Those aren't their real ones. You know that.”

“But that's even worse. You know I'm right.”

“No, I don't,” I said. “I know you got your start, your real start, vomiting all over the stage.” I don't know why I thought Orfe and the Graces had to go on that tour. Even at that time I knew that the group—if they became anything—would become music history. But I wanted them to do that tour, and maybe I do know why.

“You're not going to be able to talk me into it,” Orfe said.

“I told him that.”

“Did you, really?”

I hadn't. I had been breathless, excited, bamboozled. I'd been a jerk letting him snow me with his big-name band.

“Good,” Orfe said. “Now you can say all the nasty things you want to say, which if you'd refused right away you wouldn't have thought of. Isn't that right?”

“I'm sorry, Orfe,” I said, meaning sorry for not being better than I am.

“You realize what it means, this offer?” Orfe asked.

I realized. All of us realized. There was good reason to feel high on ourselves.

*  *  *  *  *

I walked before Orfe and Yuri at their wedding, and the Graces followed behind. The wedding was held in the park. Vows were exchanged and the guests celebrated the occasion with food and drink, song and dance. That was the first time I heard the Graces play without Orfe, heard Orfe's songs performed without her voice. I remember listening to the Graces doing one of
Yuri's Dreams,
and my then-new boyfriend Michael had his arm around me, keeping me gently close—the song made you want to go somewhere private and make generous love, but you didn't because you wanted to stay to hear the song. You wanted to stay for the whole wedding. That's the kind of wedding Orfe and Yuri had. Until almost the end it was everything a wedding is supposed to be. It was almost the perfect wedding.

When Yuri wandered off with the people from the house, and we figured out where he must have gone, and Orfe went off after him and came back without him, everything changed. After that, after
sorrow, there was only the last dance Orfe and the Graces played together. And after that there were only the Graces. Who, starting from their first album, for which they kept Orfe's name,
Yuri's Dreams,
have moved right into the spotlight. The Graces are music history.

While Jack and the rest of the Jackets accepted applause and admiration, Orfe sat on the edge of the platform. She wasn't sitting exactly; she was more wrapped around her own stomach, to comfort it; she was mostly waiting. For the room, and her head, to clear enough so she could get out of there.

She sensed more than saw his approach and heard him begin whatever he'd planned to say, “I'm Smiley's friend—”

Her head snapped up and she was answering, before she thought, “If you're his friend, you ought to tell him he's drugging the talent out of his hands. Out of his arms. Shooting down the drummer he could be if he wasn't shooting up.”

The taste of her own vomit was still in her mouth, she told me.

Then she saw who she was talking to. Saw his dark, curly hair, the broad forehead and almost pointed chin, the dark eyes looking into hers. Saw the skin, pale under a sheen of sweat. Saw his hands jammed into his jeans, clenched. Saw what he had done to himself, was doing.

It took a couple of seconds for his response to sink in, as if his words fell into her ears and got temporarily lost in the auricular tubes so it took them a while to get to her brain. “Smiley doesn't shoot.”

“You know what I mean,” she said, still trying to take him all in, not paying much attention to what she was saying. Feeling bad enough to weep, looking at him, feeling joy.

“Yeah,” he said. “I do. I know exactly what you mean. I really hear you.” He knew, he told me, that she couldn't understand what he was hoping she had just given him, which she couldn't have given him unless he understood her perfectly, as she, he hoped, would understand him. Wanting so badly for her to understand, he repeated himself. “I hear you loud. I hear you clear.”

Orfe lowered her legs, until her feet touched the floor, and stood up. She saw that he was tall, tall and skinny. Tall and
skinny and strung out. It made her sad and sick. He saw all of that, although all he really saw, he said, was someone like a flame, and not just her hair, a flame like fire to burn you clean. He'd seen women like that before, he said, he'd seen women of all kinds in plenty, but never one that scorched him. Orfe scorched him.

He lived in the house where Smiley lived, so he could ask Smiley what her name was, where she lived.

If she had a guy. Or anything.

Smiley was pretty fried, but he remembered the street where Orfe played. Yuri got out of the house then, because he knew what would happen if he stayed, got out and walked away what was left of the night, walked the sun up into the sky, walked away the morning, until around lunchtime he was waiting for her on the street.

He was pretty sure she didn't see him.

He was wrong. Orfe saw him right away, standing in the doorway behind a moving throng of bodies, looking—if it was possible—worse than he had the night before. There was more gray in his pale skin or maybe green; his jeans and shirt looked like he hadn't taken them off to go to bed; his hair curled lank down his
neck. She didn't much notice him or think about him, however; she had work to do.

He was still there when she had finished, pocketed the money, and put the guitar away. He stepped out of the doorway and came toward her. She wasn't surprised. “You look like shit,” Orfe said.

“I feel about the same,” he said. “Are you hungry? I think I want some herbal tea—ginseng or something like that—but a place that has teas probably has food if you're hungry, if you know any place. D'you know a place?” He knew he was having trouble making sense. He couldn't braid his ideas right, as if he held all these different colors and thicknesses in clumsy fingers and he couldn't get his fingers working right. He couldn't get his mind and mouth working right. He didn't want to scare her off.

Orfe wasn't scared, although it crossed her mind. She knew a place and they walked the blocks over to it, not saying much. What's your name? they said, and Where did you grow up? and What are you doing here in the city, now?

Yuri ordered a pot of tea. He gulped down the first cup blistering hot, and that perked him up. “I don't want you to think I'm crazy,” he said.

Orfe shook her head, she didn't. “Drugged out,” she said.

“Yeah. I know. I'm—” He didn't want to make any promises to her, because they might turn out to be false. Not trustworthy, that was what drugs made you into. So no promises. “Listen,” he said, “when you—”

He saw how she swung her face away at the words, as if she knew what he was going to name and was ashamed. He reached across to hold her chin and turn her face back to him—

The softness of her skin, and the line of bone along her jaw, under the skin . . . He thought she must feel his hand shaking.

“Listen. It's as if—you do it
for
me. Get the poison out of me when you—I can't do it for myself, I can only want to and wish I could, I can only feel like it and that's the only feeling I have unless I can keep all that shit locked out. You know how I lock it out?”