Augusta Played (33 page)

It was the first mistake.

On stage, with a kind of horror—she lacked the leisure to experience true horror, being called on by circumstance to continue performing rather than feeling free to let horror be done to her as at a movie, say, or around a campfire—Gus heard Tweetie-Pie take up the part he had practiced with her at home. Maybe they couldn't hear it in the audience? They might think there was a bird in the chimney. Did Town Hall have a chimney?

“Record's ready,” Jock said to Birdie, backstage. He too had taken off his raincoat, and had set up the player. The turntable spun the record around, but the needle still lay on its armrest.

Jock had also donned the upper half of his costume, a rubber bald-head mask with a rooster's comb on top. (The bottom half was a red bikini.) Jock was by nature taciturn; he tried to stay out of things—everything, life—as much as possible. Vaguely, he was aware of feeling like an idiot in this get-up, but a gig was a gig, and besides, he had long ago quit arguing with Birdie about anything.

“You want me to start it?” he asked.

“I don't know,” Birdie said, sneaking a look at the girl playing the flute out front. “I didn't realize I was going to have to share the bill. Who do you suppose she is? Is she any good?”

“Highbrow,” Jock said. “You know the type.”

Birdie set the cage down at her feet and put both hands akimbo on her waist. For a moment, she and Jock listened to the music from out front. There was no tune she could fathom, no melody; the girl was accompanied by a piano and a series of strange noises emanating from a mysterious collection of boxes stage right; a young man seemed to be turning dials on the boxes. “I told you this would be the real thing,” Birdie said. Then she added, troubled, “I thought it was set for ten o'clock. Who ever heard of starting before then?”

Jock grunted. “Crowd's right on time, anyway,” he said, and jerked his head in the direction of the auditorium.

Half a dozen regulars from The Joint burst into the auditorium. Birdie gave them the high-sign from around the side-drop. She was on the side behind Gus, and Gus didn't see her, but Gus did see the pianist half-rise from his bench, as if he were poised for takeoff at Cape Kennedy, his bench a launchpad, and then sit down again, still playing, and Gus could not imagine what might be happening behind her back that disconcerted, as it were, the pianist so, but if he could continue to play uninterruptedly, so should she, even though the rattled page-turner, a student, turned the page too soon, forcing the pianist to skip a bar, and Gus had to jump to keep up with him. She hoped nobody would know, and turned her eyes to the audience to see if anyone did. What she saw was a bunch of drunks waving beer cans.

She could not, through the spotlights and lowered house lights, see their faces clearly; but she saw their sidewinding motion
en masse
, their snakelike meander down the aisle stageward, and the glint of beer cans raised high, raised high like their voices. “Hey, Birdie, didja think we forgot?” called one of the men, as, at the same time, he flattened an usher who sought to halt his progress. The human snake snapped into half a dozen pieces, each piece grabbing a seat in the center, right, or left section. Oddly enough, separated, they sank one by one into a deep silence, perplexed, perhaps, by the girl on the stage, and what had been about to become a disaster was for the moment forestalled. Gus continued to play.

“Just how the hell long
is
that broad going to play,” Jock said. It was not a question, leading or otherwise. He wanted to get the thing over with. He leaned down to move the birdcage away from the record player, but suddenly Tweetie began to flap his wings, crazily, squawking at Jock's red comb. Tweetie-Pie seldom squawked; he was far too
bel canto
for that. There may have been, in Tweetie's little mind, some intent to protect his place in the pecking order. Be that as it was or wasn't, Jock was certainly startled. He stood up sharply, and bumped, with his knee, the corner of the record player, fatally jarring the needle from its rest position. The record began to play.

On stage, Gus heard music—other music. Not from her flute, not from the piano, not even from the Synthi, which, under Dieter's direction, was doing its electronic thing quite respectably, oscillators, filters, reverb units, and assorted gizmos working together in perfect discord. No, other music. It was Ravel's
Bolero
.

There could not be, in all of so-called classical music, a piece more precisely diametrically opposed to Gus's intelligence and talent (unless maybe it was Debussy); and it was as appropriate to what she was playing just then as a James Bond soundtrack to a movie by Ingmar Bergman.

Gus was not alone in realizing this. By now, Birdie understood, to her shame and sorrow, that she had gotten something badly wrong. Frantically, she lunged for the phonograph—and tripped over Tweetie-Pie's cage. The cage door swung open and Tweetie-Pie flew out. The record kept on playing. Tweetie-Pie sang, exalted.

Still singing, as if he knew this was the high point of his career too, Tweetie-Pie fluttered onto the stage, circling once around Gus, and perched on the half-raised piano lid. Someone in the audience clapped.

Gus had, she thought—thinking at what seemed to her to be top speed, reaching a conclusion so quickly that the very velocity of it surely was an act of daughterly disloyalty, an act in direct defiance of the reserve and deliberation which had characterized her mother's upbringing of her—a choice: she could play or not play. She kept on playing. What hope would ever again attend her world if she did
not
play? It was not as though she and Tweetie had never played together, and his voice blended into Dieter's piece not unmelodi-ously.

Worse things had happened on stage. Actresses lost their half-slips on opening night. Actors flubbed their lines. Prompters fell asleep in the cue box. A canary might be an idiosyncratic touch;
Bolero
might go unheard, or be unrecognizable, in the audience… It was Gus's last attempt to carry things off the way they were meant to go. She was playing steadily, even now unflustered, when a strange apparition in four-inch plastic heels, Marie Antoinette coiffure, and tail-feathers pitched forward from behind her, teetered, arms outstretched as if reaching for Tweetie, and tipped headfirst into the piano. There was a thud. Immediately the piano's music stopped, as Birdie's sprawl damped the strings.

And then Gus saw something else. Norman.

Just prior to Birdie's appearance onstage, Norman had risen to his feet, thinking desperately that there must be some way he could entice Tweetie-Pie offstage, but now he remained standing, in dazed disbelief.

Sit
, Gus thought, doing her best to telepath her desire to Norman. Once upon a time, he had been so attuned to her consciousness that he could hear her words before she spoke them.

It didn't work now. Instead of Norman's sitting, Richard arose.

Richard was behind Norman in the center section; when Birdie went down, he went up, seesawing instinctively as they had done in other surroundings, and Norman turned around to see what was happening, and he and Richard found themselves facing each other for the first time. The crowd from The Joint was applauding. “Down in front,” somebody yelled. “What an entrance! Hey, Birdie, what an entrance!” somebody else shouted. Birdie was stuck in the piano.

Elaine was tugging at Richard's sleeve, looking all around her wildly. “Will you for God's sake sit down?” she hissed.

Indeed, the pianist, in an attempt to cover up this inexplicable event, had gotten up from his bench and leaned under the lid, as if the composer's score had noted: play inside here.

The usher who had been hit reappeared with the guard. The guard took in the scene, listened to the flute, the canary, the synthesizer, the hollering and stomping, and the resonant aftermath of Birdie's mighty plunge into the piano, the pianist playing inside the piano, and said, “Hippies.” He was a Johnny Cash fan.

The page-turner fled.

Augusta played.

Birdie's plumage quivered.

Dieter tried not to cry.

Elaine continued to tug at her husband's shirt.

“You must be Gussie's husband,” Richard said to Norman.

“I take it you're Hacking.”

Just then Norman became aware of a mini-commotion somewhere around his waist. He glanced down and saw Tom, grave Tom, pulling at his belt. “It's too late,” Norman said, dismayed to find, the moment he said this, the merest taste of gratification on his quick tongue; but more, he felt sad for Gus, painfully sad. It made him angry. “A doctor couldn't save this show.”

“An actor might,” Tom said quietly, and headed for the stage steps.

“Oh dear,” Cyril was saying, “oh dear.”

Norman turned his attention back to Richard. “Did anyone ever tell you, Hacking,” Norman said, “that you are put together very loosely?”

“Why are you always insulting me?” Richard asked. “What did I ever do to you?”

“How dare you insult my husband,” Elaine said, looking up at Norman.

“It doesn't take much courage,” Norman said.

“Oh dear,” Cyril said, wringing his hands, “oh dear, oh dear.”

But Birdie was still stuck in the piano.

And Jock looked out at her and saw those tailfeathers quivering, and he felt such huge pity surging in him, a perfect wave of pity like an ocean wave a surfer would spend his life haunting beaches for, that he was damned if he was going to switch off the record and put an end to what Birdie had worked so hard to get, a single chance. A somersault into a piano was a misfortune, but what the fuck, the Joint crowd clearly loved it. If they knew what was good for them, Jock thought, they better love it. Stripped to comb and strap, Jock strode onto the stage. Now, originally Birdie was going to dance around him, interpretatively, while he struck various poses of an aesthetic nature, and crowed. When Jock pulled Birdie out of the piano, he noticed that her eyes were red; not all the blue eyeshadow in the world could hide that. Fiercely, on her behalf, he turned to face the audience. “Cock-a-doodle-doo!” he crowed—and crowed and crowed again. He reckoned in addition that he ought to get paid no matter what.

It seemed to Gus—oh, God, it seemed to Gus as if no nightmare she could ever have conceived was so insanely orchestrated in such ornithological detail as this. There were pockets of activity, busy on-orf flashes of noise and light scattered throughout the darkened auditorium. People were bobbing up and down everywhere, semi-shadowy shapes elongating and then shrinking back into nowhere. Norman and Richard were shouting at each other. Birdie—for plainly this was the one and only Birdie Mickle, this platinum creature blinking her painted eyes and checking out, realigning, her pasties (Gus did not know what Birdie looked like, but there couldn't be too many women named Susan who wore baby chicks on their breasts)—Birdie was leaning against the piano like a chanteuse, which Gus ardently prayed she was not. Mr. Universe was monotonously crowing, “Cock-a-doodle-doo,” as if something of importance was rising. (Gus ardently prayed it was not.) Tweetie-Pie was zipping around overhead, from stage to balcony and back again, like a miniature fighter plane, bombing all targets indiscriminately, touching down from time to time on the piano lid as if it were a carrier ship. Ravel was gaining ground on the Synthi. The kids from Juilliard were laughing hysterically—at her, Gus thought. She looked at their faces and saw shock, incredulity, delight, and that relief no one can hide completely when a rival wipes out. And now Tom had come on stage, and instead of taking all these peculiar people
off
, he had begun to declaim Shakespeare. Shakespeare?

Tom winked at her. She began to see what he was doing.

In the meantime, Birdie was right-side-up but feeling as though someone had turned the world upside-down. She felt very much as though her feathers had been ruffled. The pianist was glaring at her.

“Oh,” she said, “oh, oh,” and backed away into the piano, accidentally knocking the support stick out, and causing the piano lid to crash shut. On her tail.

“I've got to get her off,” Norman said, tearing up the side steps to the stage. Whether he meant Birdie or Gus was not immediately clear to Richard, or even to himself.

“Wait a minute,” Richard called. “There's an explanation—”

Richard followed Norman.

“What explanation?” Norman asked.

So Norman was standing there, talking with Richard, on stage, and Gus considered simply walking off stage, but what good would that do at this point? It was too late to try to pretend she didn't know what was going on: she might as well pretend she
did
know what was going on. Tweetie-Pie was singing like mad from the fly loft, where he had flown when the lid of the piano came down, a loud little ball of airborne yellow fluff; Birdie was dancing in a way that seemed to Gus very weird, with elaborate gestures and solemn expressions, to judge from what she could see out of the corner of her eye—but at least she was no chanteuse; and Tom was reciting Shakespeare nonstop. Gus took all these as cues and together they said:
Ad lib
.

She had read about a topless cellist—why not a topless flutist?

She put down her flute, took off her brooch, blouse, and brassière. Norman did not notice. She picked up her flute.

The audience whistled. Birdie was miffed.

Norman and Richard had resumed their argument.

“The explanation,” Richard was saying, “must be that Birdie must have gotten the message you left with me. I told her I was going to get her a dance engagement. Incidentally, I thought you knew that. Why else did you say that about Lully?”

“Let me get something straight. Do you mean you really never were making it with my wife?”