Ursula Pflug - Seeds and Other Stories

It had all seemed easy that morning: being funny, giving him Carlos’s card.

She’d just wanted to play with him. Was honoured by the thought. Didn’t know his peers stayed away from him as if he had the plague. She hadn’t even thought he’d show up, especially in light of that risky eighty-dollar loan. After all, she was just a girl who couldn’t play, and he was a small legend, a firefly.

Did she want him, she wondered? Did Phoebe? They’d discussed it and both agreed that while he grew more attractive with each day that he cheered up, he was too good a friend to risk losing as a lover. And really, his heart was still Sally’s. One day she’d have to ask about Sally. Some people just never got over a person.

She pulled on her boots and her coat, closed the door softly behind her, heard the lock click into place, walked towards her river.

In the street everything was dawn grey, the pigeons and the newspapers, even the sky, now. When she reached the water it was grey also. She knew it was dangerous, walking alone to the East River at dawn, past burned out tenements, but she never felt threatened. She loved it. It was her most church-like moment.

When she got back they were already gone. Rickie set up the mike stand in the middle of the floor. She plugged it in and turned on the tape deck, playing back her previous attempt from what was, after all, only three days before. She listened carefully, and could name the place where her voice lost its resonance, where her gut drew back and hesitated. When the song was finished she fast-forwarded to Joey’s new instrumental track, the cries of his saxophone, Carlos’s punctuating drums. She switched over to the voice track and touched the record button; the familiar little red light went on. She listened to the music, feeling for an opening, hoping for her bird to flutter from her throat—a strange bird she’d seen, alone, three times. She’d been afraid to tell, even Joey. What if it didn’t stay? Its moods were still too unpredictable. Perhaps if she made her bird feel welcome it would visit more often. Her voice grew and filled the confines of the small room, as her song rose and fell, then something larger grew from behind, pressing her voice outward, expanding it even more. It was that something she could never explain nor define, that fleeting spirit of her music. Her voice would always, she knew, be her first and best instrument. The guitar was just so the guys wouldn’t make fun of her, call her just a singer.

The bird sang into the room, and with its appearance Rickie suddenly knew what the other two were thinking, food shopping at Phoebe’s favourite Little Italy stores, far across town. Joey was trying to shrink his monster as usual, and his shame made her feel a brief sudden hatred, a flare of it. What was the point of trying to make his creature small if it was still so ugly?

Gryphons were supposed to be large, proud, beautiful. She knew then that his monster was her bird transformed. He’d drowned his gryphon so long it had died, been reborn earthbound, ugly. His muse transformed, darkened, grown teeth and hair and misshapen.

That was when he’d become a drunk, when he’d given up the needle. It hit her like a truck. How could she not have seen it? It wasn’t like he hadn’t hinted enough times. She hung around with musicians half her waking hours and thought they spent their time eating pie. So focused on the music she never even noticed all the attendant lifestyle pitfalls. Carlos could murder his mother under her nose and she’d say, “Good solo, dude.” A fresh faced kid from Ithaca, that’s what she was. Unspeakably naive.

Her bird, she knew, was so shy because it was terrified of his monster, terrified it would be drowned by proximity: stained, destroyed. “But what if you can heal?” she asked. “What if?”

And the bird said, “I’m not strong enough.”

And Rickie said, “Oh, but birdie, you might have to be.”

It was about Sally. Six years they’d been married, Joey promising he’d quit. And finally when he gave it up she’d left anyway, too tired. And he’d reached for the bottle, replacing one comfort with another. It only happened when Rickie sang, that she could know like this, so richly and full of detail, and she was as always both afraid and full of wonder.

And birdie said, “Sing more.”

Rickie, in homage to the first summer heat was wearing a white strapless dress. She removed the huge white flower from the tiny cut glass vase on the club table to tuck behind her ear.

“Very Billie,” Joey said admiringly, wishing he remembered what kind of flower she’d worn.

“Who’s Billie?” Rickie asked, and Joey groaned. What was the world coming to? Rickie was mixed race but she was a small town girl whose parents probably listened to Belafonte. Or Zep. But what had it been? A camellia? A gardenia? One of the facts he’d once known, dissolved by heroin, by alcohol. Or just aging, if he was kinder to himself. Or even, if he was kinder still, simply for lack of use. Use it or lose it. Our lady of the flowers, he thought, our lady of sorrows. Suddenly he knew what this girl needed, what to offer her next, in his unofficial role as her musical educator.

Yet how long was it since he himself had thought much about the blues, his first love, the one that had compelled him, at seventeen, to pick up a saxophone unlike his white friends who, listening to Zep, had saved up their pennies for Strats? And Rickie had more range then she knew. Range she’d yearn for if she listened to the greats.

A midtown west side bar. It was an open mike night they’d gone to, promising friends. The bar was still almost empty so Joey got up on stage and did Strange Fruit, just on his sax.

“What is that?” Rickie asked when he came back. The usual wannabes were shuffling in, complete with their built in audience of girlfriends, boyfriends, roadies, and partners in crime. But Joey went up first, before the manager had even had time to write down a lineup. Joey could do that; he knew the guy forever. Sometimes having been around the block a few times was still an advantage.

And Rickie came up this time too. He began the haunting song again, she reached for words that didn’t come; she didn’t know them. But the music called for song and so she let her voice out; a vocal improvisation made not of words but of sound. Her voice was a bird let loose in the room, and they could all see it then, a bird golden and black.

“What’s with this eagle?” Phoebe asked herself, softly so it wasn’t heard above the music, all alone at their table under the stage. There were no other creatures in the room, except Joey’s, snivelling and drooling. Phoebe winced, couldn’t help but compare. Rickie’s eagle was golden, shining so bright it hurt their eyes, swinging under the lighting before it headed out to the darkness of the barn-like room. Wanting room to soar. As though it could, here. And Phoebe knew at that moment what Rickie would become, felt exquisitely pained by it.

His monster’s gotten smaller the last few months, she thought, and he drinks a little less; somehow we’ve been a good influence on him. It curled at his feet, seemingly warming him, almost kindly. Phoebe knew from having shared the sofa bed that Joey’s feet could use a little warming, were ice cold even in summer. And clearly Joey was good for Rickie too. If his gift to Rickie had been her voice, could he extract a like miracle from her? As if there might be a genius worth a creature hidden within; it was too good and too hopeless a dream to consider. She looked at Joey’s monster again to remind herself what little use talent was, but at that moment it was beautiful, its yellow eyes blinking. It was being fed, was already a little larger. She’d have sworn it was purring, as if she could hear it above their music.