The Lola Quartet (13 page)

T
h e  d r i v e  from Sebastian to Holloway College took him a little more than ten hours. Jack drove slowly, in no particular rush, stopping every so often to stretch his legs. A part of him wanted to remain suspended between school and home forever. He hadn't played piano at all over the break, and the thought of the hours he needed to spend in the practice rooms made him tired.

   The sense of limbo was increased by the landscape he traveled through. He pulled off the interstate into towns that all looked the same to him. He tried to find things to differentiate them, some kind of proof that he was passing through parts of three different states, but there was almost nothing. Only the names of the towns varied, and the towns were like envelopes with all the contents the same. The same gas stations, the same restaurants, the same chain stores with the same logos shining out into the deepening twilight. It was a relief to him at the end of the day to make the last exit off the interstate, to drive along the narrow roads that led up to the college, to turn the corner on the sweeping drive and see the white buildings and lights of Holloway rising up at the top of the hill. At least, he thought, this wasn't a place that could easily be mistaken for somewhere else.

   He parked the car and walked up the long pathway to the hall where he lived. The security guard nodded at him when he flashed his identity card. He saw no one else. It was still only the day after Christmas, the building deserted, almost everyone home with their families.

   There was a baby crying when Jack stepped off the elevator on the fourth floor. He stood still in the hall for a moment, listening. The presence of a baby in Lewins Hall seemed so impossible that he wondered fleetingly if he might be listening to a ghost: could a baby have died here? Maybe a hundred years ago? The idea of a baby ghost was interesting. The building seemed like the kind of place that would lend itself to hauntings. The crying subsided. Silence descended over the halls. The corridor was so quiet now that it was possible to entertain notions of being the last man on earth as he walked past closed doors, but when he opened the door to their room Deval was there, sitting on Jack's bed with a baby in his arms. He'd forgotten that Deval was staying at school through the holidays. The child, who had a wisp of dark hair and a face red from screaming, was drifting off into a fitful sleep.

"Congratulations?" Jack said.

" Thank you. It's a girl."

" Whose is it?"

"A friend of yours came by," Deval said. "She brought a baby."

"I don't think I have any friends with babies."

   "Oh," Deval said, "I think you do. Unless she's some kind of con artist and she's just using us for our shower facilities."

   Jack dropped his bag on the floor and sank into an armchair they'd rescued from a dumpster together a month or two earlier. "What's my friend's name?"

   "Anna. She's in the shower."

   "Anna?" The only Anna he knew was Gavin's lost girlfriend. He was having a hard time imagining the chain of events that would result in her appearing in his dorm room in South Carolina with a baby. "Anna Montgomery?"

   "I think so," Deval said. "I can't remember her last name, but it was something like that." He was smiling at the sleeping baby. "I got the baby to stop crying," he said. "I think I should get a medal or something."

   "She just came today?"

   "An hour ago. You mind if she spends the night? I already told her it was okay."

   "I don't mind," Jack said. The door opened just then. It was Anna, but an Anna greatly changed. She looked older, far more tired, and she'd cut off all her hair; it was dark with water but he could see that she'd dyed it blond.

   "Jack," she said. She still sounded the same.

   "Anna. What are you doing here?"

   She smiled instead of answering him. "Is it okay if I stay the night?"

   "It's fine with me," he said. Anna reached for the baby. Jack didn't

know much about babies, but it seemed to him that this one was very small. "How old is it?" he asked.

   "She," Anna said softly. "Not 'it.' " She was gazing at the baby's closed eyes. "Her name's Chloe. She's three weeks old."

   "That's young," Jack said. " Where are you going with it? I mean her. Sorry. I didn't know you had a baby."

   "I'm on my way to Virginia," she said. "My sister has a friend there who I can stay with for a while."

   "But I just saw your sister over the break," Jack said. "She didn't say anything about . . . weren't you with an aunt? I heard you'd gone to live with your aunt in Georgia." He'd also heard a crazy rumor that she'd had a baby and it had been stillborn, but he decided not to bring this up.

   "I've been in Utah," Anna said.

   "Utah? Why Utah?"

   "Long story," Anna said, in a tone that made it clear she didn't want to tell it.

   She slept that night in Jack's bed. Jack slept on the floor. The baby slept on the floor too, lying on her back on the seat cushion from the armchair. The baby kept waking up crying. Toward morning Jack drifted off to the sounds of Anna singing the baby to sleep, a lullaby about a night bus out of Salt Lake City, and when he woke he was alone and the room was filled with sunlight. It was almost noon. He showered and set off in search of breakfast. In the dining hall he sat alone with a sandwich in a sea of plastic chairs and then wandered the campus looking for someone to talk to, anyone, but the only people he saw were security guards and the maintenance crew and they all seemed busy. Later he ran into three other students whom he knew— two violinists and a singer, from places too far away or from families too poor to travel home for the winter break— and he sat with them for a while in the cafeteria. The singer, Bernadette, was talking about George Gershwin's "Summertime." She thought it was about death. Her argument seemed solid to him and the conversation was interesting but all his thoughts were of Anna. Sixteen or seventeen years old with her impossibly young infant, traveling by means unknown up the coast to Virginia. The dorm room was still empty when he returned there in the late afternoon. Could Deval have gone with her to Virginia? It was the only explanation he could think of.

D
e v a l  w a s  still gone when Jack woke in the morning. He ate alone in the cafeteria again and wandered the campus without finding anyone to talk to, but Bernadette called him in the late afternoon. "It's me," she said, as if they'd ever spoken on the phone before, and then added, "Bernadette."

   "The Summertime girl," he said, and caught himself wondering how she'd obtained his number.

   She giggled. "You must think I'm incredibly morbid," she said. "But listen, I'm having a party tonight."

   "A party? Seriously? Is there anyone left on campus?"

   "That's why I'm having it," she said. "We should all stick together. It's cold."

   It was nice to think of not being alone for another long evening, so when night fell he put on a clean shirt and left the dorm. It was an unusually cold night, the coldest he'd ever seen. There was a light frost and the grass sparkled underfoot. Jack wasn't sure that he'd encountered frost outside a freezer before. He knew what it was but couldn't stop staring at it, stooped down once to touch it. The sparkling turned to cold water on his fingertips. Jack stood for a moment in the middle of the Commons, looking up at the stars. He'd meant to practice today but hadn't. It had been two weeks since he'd played the piano and nothing about the thought of sitting down at a keyboard was appealing to him. He closed his eyes for a moment. He had a feeling of slippage, of pieces coming apart around him. He opened his eyes quickly and he was still on the Commons, the air cold on his face. There was movement around one of the girls' dormitory buildings at the far end of campus, an impression of voices, he hurried on and in a few minutes he was safely among other people, fifteen or twenty students in the suite where Bernadette and her roommates lived. He hadn't thought there were this many people on campus.

   "You came!" Bernadette said. She was flushed and lovely, already a little drunk, wearing a miniskirt that he couldn't help but notice was short even by miniskirt standards. "I'm so glad you're here."

   "I'm glad I'm here too," he said. "What's this we're listening to?" She was pressing a plastic cup of beer into his hands.

   "The Klezmatics," she said. "I don't love them, except this one song. Can you hear it? It's klezmer, but it's also jazz."

   "I don't know that much about klezmer," he said. It was nice to be in a conversation with someone instead of alone in the dorm room, and he didn't want the moment to end. She had hair that caught the light, dark curls falling over her shoulders.

   "Then stay a while and keep listening," Bernadette said. "Another drink?"

   She floated away from him. He didn't know anyone else here but they all seemed to know each other. Jack stayed as long as possible in the warmth and the brightness, trying to find a conversation, until sometime near midnight he glanced across the room and Bernadette was kissing someone else, a cellist whose name he could never remember. He drifted outside and over the sparkling grass to Lewins Hall, drunk, the stars wheeling. He hoped Deval might be back from wherever he'd gone, but the room was dark and still. He slept with his bedside lamp on, a t-shirt thrown over it to blunt the light, and woke hungover to the smell of scorched fabric.

F o u r  d a y s 
later Deval came into the room one morning while Jack was getting dressed, waved instead of saying hello, lay down on top of his bed, and closed his eyes.

   " Where were you?"

   "I drove her to Virginia," Deval said. "Then I hung around for a few days."

   " Where in Virginia?"

   "Somewhere in the middle. Place called Carrollsburg." He kicked off his shoes. "Have you ever seen her tattoo?" He gestured vaguely at his shoulder without sitting up.

   "I could've taken her."

   "It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. You were asleep."

   "So you saw where she's living?"

   "It's an okay place," Deval said. " Quiet little house in a small town. Nowhere anyone would look for her. She's got the whole basement to herself. I think it'll be okay."

   "You know what's weird? The last time I saw her, she had all this long dark hair, and now it's short and blond. It's like she was in disguise."

   "Yeah, about that." Deval sat up. "She's got a complicated life," he said. "She asked me to tell you— well, to ask you, I guess— look, she doesn't want you to tell anyone you saw her. Seriously, no one. It's really important, okay?"

   "Okay."

   "When I say important, I mean this is like the most important thing anyone's ever going to ask of you."

   "Okay, I get it. I won't tell anyone."

   "Thanks." Deval lay back down on his bed.

D
j a n g o  R e i n h a r d t  was a prodigy at thirteen playing the cafés of Paris. A burn victim at eighteen when he came home from a gig and knocked over a candle in the caravan where he lived with his young wife. The materials for the celluloid-and-paper flowers she made to supplement their income were highly flammable, and the caravan flashed quickly into flame. A small miracle at twenty, when he emerged from a long convalescence after the fire that ruined half his left hand and revealed an improbable new technique: he worked the frets with two fingers and made his own substitutions for the standard major and minor chords. The miracle was that he played better after the fire than before. He carried the fire with him through all the days of his life, in his two curled fingers and in the way he used a match to hold the bridge of his battered guitar up to the proper height.

   "A
match
," Deval said. "Of all the things he could have used."

   Deval's mother had given him a biography of Django Reinhardt as a high school graduation present, and he liked to read his favorite sections aloud in the dorm room at night. Jack appreciated the distraction.

   Django Reinhardt was always good, but he was at his best with Stéphane Grappelli. They met as members of a fourteen-piece orchestra that played uninspired music for tea dances, Grappelli on violin and Reinhardt on guitar, until one day Grappelli broke a string. He played a few notes of a jazz melody, trying to get his violin in tune, and Reinhardt echoed him on guitar. A bass player and a rhythm guitarist jumped in, and this was the beginning of the Quintette du Hot Club de France. They played together with enormous success. Reinhardt hadn't spent much time in school as a child; Grappelli taught him how to read. Reinhardt went on a shaky American tour without him, dabbling in electric, traveling unsteadily with unfamiliar guitars, but only when he returned to Grappelli did he sound like himself again.

   "Why are you telling me so much about Grappelli?" Jack asked. "I thought you wanted to be Reinhardt."

   "Because this is what I keep wondering." Deval was sitting up on his bed, bright-eyed in the lamplight. The Quintette du Hot Club de France playing on his stereo, the underwater sound of old recordings. "I can play the guitar and maybe I'll be really good someday, Jack, but who will be there with me? Who will be my Grappelli?"

D
e c e m b e r  s h i f t e d  into a colorless January. Jack didn't want to be at music school, he knew he was taking too many pills, he knew the little baby with the wisp of dark hair was probably Gavin's and he couldn't imagine why he wasn't supposed to tell anyone about it, but Deval had repeated three or four times that Jack should tell no one he'd seen Anna or the child. He hinted that Anna was in some kind of trouble. He made it sound as though lives were at stake, but still he managed to appear perfectly serene as he moved through his days. Skipping half his classes, spending hours in the practice rooms, reading about gypsy jazz and listening to scratchy recordings of the Quintette du Hot Club de France in the evenings. He was making long phone calls to Virginia at night.