Люциус Шепард - The Best of Lucius Shepard

“I’ll keep that in mind,” she said, sorting through some new orders. “You go have fun.”

Andrea had staked out one of the high-backed booths at the rear of McGuigan’s and was drinking a martini. She usually ran late, liked sitting at the front, and drank red wine. She had hung her jacket on the hook at the side of the booth and looked fetching in a cream-colored blouse. I nudged the martini glass and asked what was up with the booze.

“Bad day in court. I had to ask for a continuance. So…” She hoisted the martini. “I’m boozing it up.”

“Is this that pollution thing?”

“No, it’s a pro bono case.”

“Thought you weren’t going to do any pro bono work for a while.”

She shrugged, drank. “What can I say?”

“All that class guilt. It must be tough.” I signaled a waitress, pointed to Andrea’s martini and held up two fingers. “I suppose I should be grateful. If you weren’t carrying around that guilt, you would have married Snuffy Huffington the Third or somebody.”

“Let’s not banter,” Andrea said. “We always banter. Let’s just talk. Tell me what’s going on with you.”

I was good at reading Andrea, but it was strange how well I read her at that moment. Stress showed in her face. Nervousness. Both predictable components. But mainly I saw a profound loneliness and that startled me. I’d never thought of her as being lonely. I told her about Stanky, the good parts, his writing, his musicianship.

“The guy plays everything,” I said. “Guitar, flute, sax, trumpet. Little piano, little drums. He’s like some kind of mutant they produced in a secret high school band lab. And his voice. It’s the Jim Nabors effect. You know, the guy who played Gomer Pyle? Nobody expected a guy looked that goofy could sing, so when he did, they thought he was great, even though he sounded like he had sinus trouble. It’s the same with Stanky, except his voice really is great.”

“You’re always picking up these curious strays,” she said. “Remember the high school kid who played bass, the one who fainted every time he was under pressure? Brian Something. You’d come upstairs and say, ‘You should see what Brian did,’ and tell me he laid a bass on its side and played Mozart riffs on it. And I’d go…”

“Bach,” I said.

“And I’d go, ‘Yeah, but he faints!’” She laughed. “You always think you can fix them.”

“You’re coming dangerously close to banter,” I said.

“You owe me one.” She wiggled her forefinger and grinned. “I’m right, aren’t I? There’s a downside to this guy.”

I told her about Stanky’s downside and, when I reached the part about Mia leaving, Andrea said, “The circus must be in town.”

“Now you owe me one.”

“You can’t expect me to be reasonable about Mia.” She half-sang the name, did a little shimmy, made a moue.

“That’s two you owe me,” I said.

“Sorry.” She straightened her smile. “You know she’ll come back. She always does.”

I liked that she was acting flirty and, though I had no resolution in mind, I didn’t want her to stop.

“You don’t have to worry about me,” she said. “Honest.”

“Huh?”

“So how talented is this Stanky? Give me an example.”

“What do you mean, I don’t have to worry about you?”

“Never mind. Now come on! Give me some Stanky.”

“You want me to sing?”

“You were a singer, weren’t you? A pretty good one, as I recall.”

“Yeah, but I can’t do what he does.”

She sat expectantly, hands folded on the tabletop.

“All right,” I said. I did a verse of “Devil’s Blues,” beginning with the lines:

I sailed on through to the chorus, getting into the vocal:

A bald guy popped his head over the top of an adjacent booth and looked at me, then ducked back down. I heard laughter.

“That’s enough,” I said to Andrea.

“Interesting,” she said. “Not my cup of tea, but I wouldn’t mind hearing him.”

“He’s playing the Crucible next weekend.”

“Is that an invitation?”

“Sure. If you’ll come.”

“I have to see how things develop at the office. Is a tentative yes okay?”

“Way better than a firm no,” I said.

We ordered from the grill and, after we had eaten, Andrea called her office and told them she was taking the rest of the day. We switched from martinis to red wine, and we talked, we laughed, we got silly, we got drunk. The sounds of the bar folded around us and I started to remember how it felt to be in love with her. We wobbled out of McGuigan’s around four o’clock. The sun was lowering behind the Bittersmiths, but shed a rich golden light; it was still warm enough for people to be sitting in sweaters and shirts on park benches under the orange leaves.

Andrea lived around the corner from the bar, so I walked her home. She was weaving a little and kept bumping into me. “You better take a cab home,” she said, and I said, “I’m not the one who’s walking funny,” which earned me a punch in the arm. When we came to her door, she turned to me, gripping her briefcase with both hands and said, “I’ll see you next weekend, maybe.”

“That’d be great.”

She hovered there a second longer and then she kissed me. Flung her arms about my neck, clocking me with the briefcase, and gave me a one-hundred-percent all-Andrea kiss that, if I were a cartoon character, would have rolled my socks up and down and levitated my hat. She buried her face in my neck and said, “Sorry. I’m sorry.” I was going to say, For what?, but she pulled away in a hurry, appearing panicked, and fled up the stairs.

I nearly hit a parked car on the drive home, not because I was drunk, but because thinking about the kiss and her reaction afterward impaired my concentration. What was she sorry about? The kiss? Flirting? The divorce? I couldn’t work it out, and I couldn’t work out, either, what I was feeling. Lust, certainly. Having her body pressed against mine had fully engaged my senses. But there was more. Considerably more. I decided it stood a chance of becoming a mental health issue and did my best to put it from mind.

Kiwanda was busy in the office. She had the computers networking and was going through prehistoric paper files on the floor. I asked what was up and she told me she had devised a more efficient filing system. She had never been much of an innovator, so this unnerved me, but I let it pass and asked if she’d had any problems with my boy Stanky.

“Not so you’d notice,” she said tersely.

From this, I deduced that there had been a problem, but I let that pass as well and went upstairs to the apartment. Walls papered with flyers and band photographs; a grouping of newish, ultra-functional Swedish furniture—I realized I had liked the apartment better when Andrea did the decorating, this despite the fact that interior design had been one of our bones of contention. The walls, in particular, annoyed me. I was being stared at by young men with shaved heads and flowing locks in arrogant poses, stupid with tattoos, by five or six bands that had tried to stiff me, by a few hundred bad-to-indifferent memories and a dozen good ones. Maybe a dozen. I sat on a leather and chrome couch (it was a showy piece, but uncomfortable) and watched the early news. George Bush, Iraq, the price of gasoline… Fuck! Restless, I went down to the basement.

Stanky was watching Comedy Central. Mad TV . Another of his passions. He was slumped on the couch, remote in hand, and had a Coke and a cigarette working, an ice pack clamped to his cheek. I had the idea the ice pack was for my benefit, so I didn’t ask about it, but knew it must be connected to Kiwanda’s attitude. He barely acknowledged my presence, just sat there and pouted. I took a chair and watched with him. At last he said, “I need a rhythm guitar player.”