Grave Refrain: A Love/Ghost Story (5 page)

“It’s you.”

For the next several nights Emily went to listen to the homeless man with the red scarf play his guitar. He had shown up like clockwork, each evening from five till seven, and Emily sat close enough to hear him but far enough away to allow the crowd of people that invariably formed around him to block her from view. Sometimes he played nothing but classical music, other times nothing but jazz, and one night he spent an hour jamming out with a shopping cart guy who wailed away on the harmonica to their mutual delight.

On the eighth night Emily made the decision that she would leave a dollar in his case, or a sandwich, something, anything, to allow her to speak to him, to thank him. She had been too daunted to approach him before and hadn’t wanted him to know she came every day. She feared he might think she was crazy, stalking him as she was. That, or desperate. Either way, she didn’t want the surreal situation to change, but she knew she had to say something to him, and she fretted the whole afternoon, even wearing her favorite Chanel jacket and scarf. Lipstick, too.

He did not show.

He did not show the next night, or the one after that. Emily tried to act as if it didn’t bother her, and gathered her famous air of detachment about her, but it didn’t work. She found herself walking through the park between classes, hoping to spot the red scarf. Her roommates thought her distracted behavior was due either to the fact that they hadn’t found a new rental yet, or that Dr. Vandin was continuing to give her an exceptionally difficult time in class or at work. In response, they’d arranged for more and more apartment viewings.

By the following Friday night, Emily stood in front of the Skellar as she had promised Myra. She didn’t want to be there; she wanted to be back at the park searching for the guitarist, though at this late hour he would certainly be long gone. With one last look toward the park, she shoved her way through the scrum of students into the club.

“Emmmiiiiieeee!” she heard her one roommate, Zoey, shout like Stanley Kowalski. “Emmmiiieee!” A pair of sturdy arms parted the crowd and grabbed Emily in a fierce hug. She surrendered to its warmth and heft. Clearly straight from her latest tiling job in Pacific Heights, Zoey had coupled her grout covered overalls with gargantuan chandelier earrings and so many silver African fertility bracelets Emily feared her muscular wrists might just snap off under the strain. Despite her recent degree, she wore the moniker of “itinerant laborer and starving artist” proudly like one of the many tattoos blazing up from the collar of her T-shirt. “You came, you actually came. Good for you!” she said and dragged her to their table in the murky back corner that stunk from its proximity to the bathrooms.

Margot, her other roommate, uncurled herself from her seat and gave Emily a peck on the cheek. A waiter materialized from out of nowhere, and Margot placed a firm hand on his arm. Her blunt black hair guillotined the collar of her blouse as she turned to look up into his eyes, her leather skirt inching its way along the unending length of her legs. “Another margarita, please. With a sigh, and I mean a sigh of salt. Don’t slather it on this time—dip it lightly. A sigh, you understand, just coat the rim like you were kissing it. And please, for all that is holy, keep them coming. It’s been an abysmal day.”

“Midterms?” Emily ventured. This was Margot’s first year working as an assistant professor at the same college Emily attended, and by the looks of her two drained glasses, things hadn’t gone well.

“I hate all undergraduates,” Margot replied. “Both classes retained nothing. Mouth breathers all.”

“So where the hell were you today?”

Emily’s mind raced, trying to decipher the look of consternation on Zoey’s face. “Oh God, I’m so sorry. I totally forgot you had the appointments to look at those listings. I was in Vandin’s office till the afternoon, and then I went to look—well…you know how it is.” Unable to tell them she had wandered the pathways around the Academy of Science most of the afternoon searching for a homeless musician she had never spoken to, Emily felt her roommates’ stress radiating off their bodies like sweat.

“No, I don’t know how it is,” Zoey said. “Do you know how many cultures enslave their women with that kind of bullshit? That man’s a troglodyte.”

“Did you find an apartment?”

“We saw five places, and the best one had a drunk asleep in his own vomit in the lobby.”

“Evidently, that is what was meant by ‘doorman,’” Margot qualified.

“What about the other four?”

“One had been recently vacated by an old man with ferrets, and the other one was over a medical marijuana shop, which wouldn’t have been so bad, but there was a LaRouche headquarters next to it, and even I have standards. The last two didn’t have nearly enough natural light, and I can’t paint without good light. Ain’t gonna happen,” Zoey declared.

Emily looked to Margot since she provided the only reliable income of the three.

“Personally, I don’t give a rat’s ass,” Margot offered while she scanned the bar for their errant waiter. “Although I do have a fundamental problem with residual ferret shit. But resistance is futile, Emily, you have to know that. Once Zoey sets what she wants in her mind…” She held up her hands as though offering them up to God.

Before Emily could respond, the lights dimmed and an excessively pierced girl came onto the stage to announce the evening’s act. Zoey shoved her fingers in her mouth to whistle, and then started spitting on the table, which earned her a questionable glance from Margot.

“Grout.” Zoey gagged. “The Andersens’ bathroom on Waller. My plastic gloves broke.”

The metal-enhanced girl exited the stage and nodded at two men as they strode past her. One stopped to pick up his bass off of a stand, and the other slung his guitar across his chest. The sight of it tightened Emily’s throat.

It isn’t him
. Her breathing returned to normal.
It isn’t him
, she repeated to herself.
Stop this now. This is bordering on delusional. First, he is probably sleeping in the park right now; second, you will probably never see him again. Learn to live with it. Move on.

But it could have been him. From the back, the height wasn’t far off, although when the man turned around his hair was shaggy. He wore tiny, round, tinted glasses, and his arms weren’t the arms she remembered. He mumbled a greeting in an Irish accent, which jump-started her heart. A handsome, dreadlocked man joined him a few feet away on stage.

“That’s him, that’s Christian!” Zoey cried and whistled again wildly, although there wasn’t a chance in hell he could hear her with the shouting around them.

“Excuse us, folks,” Christian announced to the audience. “We’re fairly new in town, this being our first time in San Francisco, so we felt that we couldn’t go wrong with a little grass.”

The crowd erupted in hoots and cheers. The shaggy, bespectacled man cracked up as he turned to Christian. “Or bluegrass, man. Though whatever makes you happy out there is completely fine with me.” He shot a shy grin to the crowd. “I’m Simon, by the way. And we are”—he pointed his finger like a gun between himself and the still grinning Christian—“anything you desire us to be. Though seriously,” Simon added, his accent more pronounced, “we’re The Lost Boys, and thanks much for coming out on this fine evening.”

Seconds later the club erupted in wild, blistering music, so raucous that even the most cynical urbanite students were lost in the clear elation of the duo on stage. Despite the music, despite their obvious rapport, despite the insane brilliance of their lyrics, something was missing. Midway through the third song, she noticed Christian glance over at the bar, his smile even more radioactive than before. He nodded his head to the side as if to say,
come on up,
which Emily thought was odd, but maybe they were into audience participation. If so, wild horses wouldn’t keep Zoey in her seat tonight, she thought.

The music toned down to background strumming, and Christian spoke into the microphone. “I love San Francisco.” The crowd cheered in return and he laughed. “But your public transportation sucks and so do your taxis.” More cheers erupted, as well as a few good natured boos. “Sorry, don’t mean to piss anybody off, but how the hell do you people get anywhere?”

Simon rolled his eyes and muttered something under his breath, like,
move on, laddie
, to which Christian chuckled.

“I don’t know if any of you have noticed, but we’ve been one short all night. And I can tell you ladies out there that I’m not used to faking it.”

More hysterical yelling and clapping ensued. Just then a bra shot onto the stage and hit Simon on the shoulder. He was caught off guard for a split second before he recognized what he was holding in his hands. He made a show of draping it around the microphone stand. Christian was nearly bent over in laughter and hooted, “Oh God, not again.”

“Hey, it’s red lace.” Simon smirked at Christian. “Last time it was black.” He returned his attention to the crowd. “I confess, I don’t like faking it either.” He fingered the lace affectionately. “Truthfully, we’ve been one short. But I don’t think we’ve been that poor. And what do you know—he’s finally here. Get your boney ass up here, Paulie boy.”

Emily swung around to the direction of the bar that Simon had been addressing, but she couldn’t see anyone. The whole audience was going crazy, shouting and clapping louder and louder. The lights dimmed a little bit more, and a man climbed up the stage, his head slightly ducked down, a tight smile on his face.

Everything disappeared at that moment: the crowded tables, the smoke, the music. Only one thing remained. His face. All of his face. His intense blue eyes, buzzing and alive. The sharp cheekbones. The determined mouth. He sidled up to the microphone as he slipped on his guitar, plugged it in, and tossed his red scarf over his shoulder. He spoke in a clipped accent—a voice she would remember anywhere.

“Hello, all. I’m Andrew. Andrew Hayes. Terribly sorry for being late.”

3

A
FTER
T
HE
S
HOW,
A
NDREW
sat on the running board of their truck, a beer in his hands and his head on fire. They were parked in a lot near the Skellar, Golden Gate Park a block away. Andrew could almost see the wall where he had busked for the past week, but he was too tired to turn his head. Late for a show—for the first time in his life he was late for a goddamn show. How had he let that happen?

“Where’s Christian?” Andrew asked Simon.

“He got lucky, the bastard. Texted, said not to wait up. I told you we should have stayed behind and signed autographs, but nooo, you were hell bent to get out of there so we could—oh, sit in some car park and get pissed,” Simon muttered from the driver’s side. He was wrapped in his army surplus jacket, his hair pulled back in the standard post-show ponytail. He had tilted the seat back and was nursing the remains of a beer. “So, are you going to share with the class as to where the hell you were, oh, for the first three bleeding songs?”

“You don’t want to know, mate, trust me.”

“Oh, trust me, I do. I can’t play guitar for shit, and you left me up there defenseless with bras being thrown at me head. You’ve never been late for a show in your pathetic excuse of a life, so I reckon this better be good. I had you dead and bleeding, or kidnapped by one of those psychotic fans of yours and stuffed in some boot with that stupid red scarf strangling your neck. All I’m saying is it’s a damn good thing Neil wasn’t there tonight, or he’d have your balls for bacon.”

“But he wasn’t there.”

They had been in San Francisco for one month and nothing had happened at all on that front. Yes, Simon and Christian were content to bask in the adulation of their newfound popularity, but they were equally content to believe the pipe dream that Neil St. John would swoop down and take them under his wing. In actuality, all he had done was arrange a handful of gigs and provide the nightmare of a house where they now lived. But Andrew didn’t want to think about Neil; he’d deal with that headache later. Now he had to figure out how to explain his whereabouts to Simon, whose sly eyes saw through the most suave serving of bullshit. He opted for the truth.

“I fell asleep in the park. On a bench…listening to a concert.”

“Are you high?”

“What do you want me to say?”