2 a.m. at the Cat's Pajamas (16 page)

Greg feels the bodies of his friends on either side of him. He has been through school and mud with these boys. There is no town better than his college town, so he never strayed. He has eaten breakfast at all of their kitchen counters. He has watched countless games on countless televisions. He has not always been kind. He didn’t show up for Ollie’s dad’s funeral and he ignored Rodriguez’s phone calls after he was laid off. He hasn’t exactly comforted Allison when she’s griped about her weight. He would like her to lose the handful of flesh that
hangs over her underwear’s waistband. A flash. The girl takes the picture and Greg Michaelman is certain about one thing: he is going to make Allison Cady happy for the rest of her life.

Sarina hands the camera back to the one with the open shirt, ignores his requests for her number as she walks away. One of them grabs her waist with a rough grip. “Take another one,” he commands. “In case that one’s not good.”

“It’s fine,” she says. “I checked.”

“Don’t be a bitch,” the groom says.

Sarina takes the camera back. Obediently, they cozy next to each other on the leather couch. “Smile.” They oblige. “That’s all?” She frowns. “You don’t want to get closer? Get closer,” she barks. They titter. One of them grabs another’s breast, joking. “That’s it,” she says. “This guy has it.”

More tittering. The groom puts his arm around the guys flanking him.

“That’s nice,” Sarina says, “but why don’t you make out? You’re so close, you may as well. Tongue looks great in pictures. Take your shirts off.”

Their grins fade. They exchange glances.

Sarina keeps snapping pictures. “You cowards. Grab each other’s cocks and let’s go. Jerk each other off so this is worth my while. What I’m looking at is a bunch of worthless pussies and I wanna see cock.”

Ben stands behind her. “You all right?” he says.

The groomsmen jockey away from one another. “Aw, is that all you’ve got?” Sarina chucks the camera into the group. “Show’s over, I guess.” She says to Ben, “Shall we go?”

“Sure,” Ben stammers.

They confirm the buttons and zippers of their coats, replace their hats and gloves, and leave the bar. Cabs clog the street. A sharp honk. Sarina walks ahead.

“You want to talk about that?” Ben says, trailing her.

She blinks. “Talk about what?”

M
adeleine wakes, palms and armpits damp. For a moment she does not remember the events of the day. When she does she rolls over to burrow deeper into the blankets. Her forehead flattens against the spine of a book.

History of Jazz, Volume Two
.

Madeleine clutches it to her chest. Her father! She touches each picture on the cover. A phalanx of saxes. Louis Armstrong, cheeks blazing. Billie Holiday, in the ecstasy before singing. Madeleine flips each page with the care of a scientist. Toward the back she finds the write-up on The Cat’s Pajamas with two (two!) pictures. She forces herself to read the entry before allowing herself a look at the pictures.

In a black-and-white photograph a man holds up a guitar like a prized marlin.
Francis Lorca owned one of the only known D’Angelico Snakeheads
, the caption reads. In the other photo, a woman sits at a piano, a silky black braid hanging down her back.
Every night in the 1990s Valentine Morris, a girl from the neighborhood, led a raucous hang until the wee hours of dawn
.

Madeleine covers and uncovers the woman’s face with her fingertip. Valentine grins, gums showing over perfect teeth, stomping on the pedals. Madeleine can hear the jangle of this woman’s laugh. She feels the faultless ivory keys, the pat of her feet on the pedals.

“A local girl,” Madeleine recites. “… named Valentine Morris.” She presses her cheek against the book’s centerfold, a boozy picture of the New York skyline.

She hears scratching at the front door. She opens it and Pedro saunters in, looking bored, unaffected by the panic he has caused. He circles around himself and falls asleep on the rug.

T
hrough the cavities of a demolished house, Ben and Sarina can see the first few trees of Fairmount Park. A mutter of bushes.

“Does that park make you sad?” Ben says. “It makes me sad.”

“It’s just a park,” says Sarina.

“Ornery,” Ben says, “is what I would call it. Better-him-than-me kind of park. I’d bet even the animals who live in it are defensive and mean. Grumpy foxes. Depressive robins.”

“Owls that are always talking about themselves,” Sarina says. “Without ever asking about you.”

“Put a sock in it, owl,” Ben says.

Sarina’s mother calls:
Sarina!

“Should we go in?” he says. “Or, shall we continue our tour of the city’s fountains?”

“Pardon?” Sarina says.

With a sweep of his hand, Ben showcases the city. “Our tour …”

“Sarina!” her mother yells. “He’ll be here any minute!”

“I’ll be right down!” Sarina bows her head in prayer. She is twenty years younger and standing in front of her bedroom mirror. She wears her grandmother’s dress, whisper-soft and yellow.

Ben, twenty years younger, races his older brother Jeff’s ’65 Mustang up the road to Sarina’s house. He was allowed to
borrow the car only after promising to uphold several conditions spelled out while Jeff clutched his wrist so tightly the veins protruded. He will not punch the brakes, he will not throttle the gears, he will not drive over sixty-five miles per hour.

He has it up to eighty-five, gut in throat, suit jacket folded on the rumble seat beside him, underneath a yellow wrist corsage his mother picked out. Houses flash by. The meadow that borders the road is gold in grain. Perspiration coats the back of his neck. He fumbles for napkins in the glove compartment and applies them to his neck, taking each corner slowly, all windows down, so he is dry when he reaches her house.

He parks, gets out, and tucks in his shirt using the window as a mirror. He is halfway up the driveway when he realizes he forgot the corsage. He runs back to the car. He has almost reached her house again when he decides he should wear the suit jacket. Back to the car.

Sarina’s mother and sister sit on the window seat, drinking tea. They watch the boy return to his car for the second time.

“The corsage,” her mother said, on the first go-back.

“What is it now,” her sister says, on the second. “Oh, the suit jacket.”

Sarina’s mother made the teacups out of found glass. She made the window seat’s cushions from discarded fabric she found in a neighbor’s trash. Her mother sees all objects in the world in two ways simultaneously: what they are and what they could be. She never gives up on anything, simply repurposes it. She had tailored her own mother’s dress to fit Sarina’s
petite shape, happy that her daughter wanted to go to her prom and wear something other than black.

When it seems the boy plans to complete this trip to the house, her mother calls out: “Sarina!”

“I’m coming!” Sarina descends the stairs, careful not to catch her heels in the thick carpet. Her mother and sister sit with Ben Allen in the family room. How strange to see him in the room where she eats dinner, watches the news with her father, reads while her mother talks on the phone, or does homework. Her father had outfitted the windows with delicate lighting and low, wide sills, where she would sit and wish for a different family. Up until now she has hated this room; however the new fact of Ben in it, sitting in her father’s chair, makes her understand that even it is capable of beauty. Up until he asked her to the prom, Sarina had been certain high school would hold no bright spots.

Her mother stands when Sarina enters the room. The teacup clatters on the plate. “Beautiful.” Her eyes go to Ben.

“You took your piercings out,” he says.

Her mother takes a few stilted photos. They walk to the car. Ben wants to tell Sarina she looks as pretty as a yellow rose but hears Jeff say,
Play it easy, man. Don’t be the guy who trips all over himself
. Ben and his brother have spent hours analyzing the Pretty Girl, specifically this one, and have come up with a few guidelines. Never tell the Pretty Girl that she is pretty. You will be like every other fool. Compliment every other girl in front of her, but never her.

So instead Ben says, “Try not to slam the door.” Realizing it’s
the first time he’s spoken to her directly, he adds, “It’s not my car.”

They meet Georgina McGlynn, Bella Harrington, and Tom Venuto at the school’s main entrance. Tom’s date is the girl from Ben’s Advanced Lit class. Georgie and Bella are each other’s date. They wear strapless terry-cloth dresses in pink and green, respectively. Feathers clipped to their hair. Their glittered eyelids ascend when they see Sarina.

“Are you wearing makeup?” Bella says. “Where are your piercings?”

“Your dress,” Georgie says. “Vintage?”

Girls
, thinks Ben. Flutelike, gauze-filled, late-afternoon sunshine. Rainbow bracelets on the carpet. They use their tongues to wet their lips. Girls. They pretend to like each other. Dotting their i’s with hearts, arching their backs, manipulating their confusing hair with flat irons, curling irons, glisten, extra, ultra hold, hold my purse, hold me close, no duh, bubble gum, gym socks, tube socks, tubes of gloss, tube tops, purrs, pert collars, full hair, full tits, just the tip! Their sound, the upper notes of a xylophone. Their legs, downed in fur. Girls.

The one from Ben’s Advanced Lit class says, “That dress is vintage. You can totally tell.”

“It was my grandmother’s.” Sarina checks to see if Ben is listening to people compliment her, but he is accepting a flask from Tom and finalizing the plans for a concert they will attend later in the summer.

He leans into her, creating a sacramental space between
them.
Finally
, Sarina thinks,
he will say something sweet to me
. “Isn’t Georgie something?” he says, as if they are locker room buddies. “She is so foxy.”

A hard knot pushes against Sarina’s breastplate. The envy she feels for Georgie in this moment will evolve into a feeling of inadequacy the origin of which she will be unable to remember.

The gymnasium sparkles with the dresses and accessories of their classmates. The shots of whiskey have calmed Ben down. He feels like the president of the prom. His chest swells like when he finishes writing a poem, or runs a block at full speed. Ben doesn’t know who Sarina hangs with. She doesn’t have a group like he does. It must bother her. He has given her a ride in a classic car and a group of slick-looking cool people. He is proud of himself for helping her out and hopes her gratitude will take the form of a killer blow job. He imagines her unzipping his pants in the front seat of the Mustang. Speaking of, where is Sarina?

He finds her outside, repositioning the straps of her dress near a group of nattering lacrosse girls.

“You forgot me.”

Had he perceived her wounded tone, he could have recalibrated the alignment of his tactics. However, the insight Ben needs to fix this situation is the insight he will gain after screwing it up.

Inside the gym, the DJ plays a new indie band covering an old indie band’s song.

Georgie squeals. “We must, must dance!”

Ben says he doesn’t dance, they know that, right? He never dances, you dance, though. They leave him, sputtering on the side.

Bella performs her version of dancing: planting her right leg and cranking her arms like a wind-up doll.

Georgie performs her version of dancing: swinging her head back and forth. Periodic exclamations of glee.

Tom Venuto’s version: wagging his ass out of time, looking askance.
I might not be dancing, I might just be walking by with pep
.

The girl from Advanced Lit’s version: Hop hop hop.

Sarina’s version: knees bent, motioning outward and outward, shooing away the whole world.

If you were to judge the dance floor solely on merit, you might linger on Georgie, whose family’s attic is stuffed with boxes of feathered masks and bedazzled headbands. Pictures of Georgie in ballet or character shoes, holding batons, hula hoops, crystalline balls, or simply one flexed hand up to the camera’s flash. However, the dancer you’d watch would be Sarina Greene. She is by no one’s standards talented, but it is obvious when watching her that she loves to dance.

At the end of the song, Georgie squeals, “Wasn’t that the best? I am having so much, so much fun!”

Ben spends the night in earnest conversation with other girls he would never on other occasions be interested in. Party girls. Sports girls. He talks a theater girl through a rough patch of night after a song reminds her of her dead grandmother. Without notice, she kisses him. Her tongue is down his throat before he can extract himself.

Sarina sits near the back of the gym, her hope falling like a helicopter leaf, halting, not quite reaching the bottom, not quite reaching the bottom, not quite reaching the … She pre-worried for tornadoes, fistfights, drunk driving: scenarios for Ben’s heroicism to shine. She didn’t anticipate the dull slap of being ignored.

She spoons a melted sundae she’s too sad to eat and counts the minutes until she can ask to be taken home without sounding like a bitch. If he still planned to take her home. He canoodles with a theater girl at a table near the dance floor, where Georgie and Bella enact big scenes.