Marie-Helene Bertino - 2 A.M. at The Cat's Pajamas

“Something I’m taking care of.”

“I’m not here to lecture you. I’m here to get my check and leave.”

“It’s good to see you, Louisa. I’ve left a few messages for you. You get any of them?”

“Is my hair different from the last time you saw me?”

Lorca’s throat goes dry.

“I cut it,” she says. “And dyed it.”

“I’m not perceptive, Lou. We know this.”

“I’m a minor character in my own life.” Her eyes fill. Lorca thinks he will go to her, put his arm around her, but he doesn’t move. She waits for his reaction and gets none. Her gaze sharpens. “Alex told me you won’t let him play.”

“I’ll lose my club if he plays.”

“He’s going down a bad road,” she says. “You’re choosing not to see it.”

The desk phone rings.

Louisa selects her paycheck from the stack and slams the folder shut. “Good-bye!” She disappears into the hallway. “Best of luck!”

“Lou. Wait.” He picks up the phone. “Hello.”

Someone on the other end clears his throat. “Lorca, it’s Mongoose.”

“Hang on.” Lorca covers the receiver. “Louisa!” He hears her wish Sonny a merry Christmas. “Come on!” The heavy thud of the front door closing. He leaves the phone on the desk. The hallway is dark and long and empty. “Louisa?” His voice echoes against the walls as if he is asking himself her name.

Madeleine unlayers by the door to her apartment. The day’s dressing and undressing has exhausted her. She unleashes Pedro, who conducts a cursory study of every bookshelf base and table leg.

In the bathroom the toilet wails: Clare! Claaaarrrrrre!

Madeleine has learned to pre-announce her arrival in rooms to give the roaches time to scatter. “I am in the family room!” she cries. “I am walking from the family room to the bathroom!”

She switches on the bathroom light and closes her eyes for three beats. She lifts the back lid off the toilet, uses the watering can to fill the basin, then replaces the lid. The toilet quiets.

“I am walking from the bathroom to the kitchen!”

In the kitchen, she fills a bowl of water for Pedro and turns the kettle on.

The voice of Nina Simone drifts in from her father’s bedroom, remorseless as cigarette smoke. It grows louder. Madeleine’s father will adjust the volume ten to fifteen times during a song, sitting in arm’s distance of the player, surrounded by his library of vinyl and books. There are three record players in the apartment and no milk. One of her father’s jazz books would have an entry on The Cat’s Pajamas. Why hadn’t she thought of this? She could sneak in there, but she must be quiet, like cancer. Madeleine’s father insists on silence. Except for bringing his meals, she doesn’t disturb him.

She opens his door and breathes in: pecorino, Havarti. His mussed bed near the window. He dozes on one of two camel-colored chairs in the center of the room, clasping each arm as if in sleep he might take off. His chin rests on the collar of his satiny sweater. By his elbow, a tube of pills. It is possible he changed the record in a dream. Every day the line between his reality and sleep blurs more. Every day more roaches.

Madeleine sees the book she needs: History of Jazz, Volume Two . She tiptoes across the room and coaxes it from its place on the bookshelf. Nina Simone goes on singing, unaffected.

Black is the color of my true love’s hair .

The record skips.

Black is the color

Black is the color

Madeleine lunges toward the record to move the needle but miscalculates the distance. Nina Simone yelps. Her father stirs, issuing a blubbery command.

The color

The color

Madeleine fixes the needle too late. Her father’s eyes launch open.

Who is this girl, Mark Altimari wonders, flapping big eyes at him? He bats at the coffee table for his glasses and secures them over his ears with shaky hands. His daughter comes into focus.

“Madeleine.” His expression sweetens. “Where have you been?”

“In the other room.”

He invites her to sit in the other chair. The song changes to a faster one. Nina Simone says there’s a lot of trouble with a brown-eyed handsome man. “Have you heard this one before?”

Madeleine nods.

“Can you hear it? Should I raise the volume?”

“I can hear it.”

“You’d like this recording. It has your singers and your stand-up bass. Wonderful stand-up bass player … I don’t remember his name.”

Music fills the space between them. Mark wants to take the pill that keeps him awake, but not in front of his daughter. Instead, he flirts. “There’s a lot of trouble with a brown-eyed handsome man. In your travels have you found this to be true?”

This is Madeleine’s favorite game. His role is to ask silly questions and hers is to answer as if he is serious, neither one acknowledging the other conversation that goes on wordlessly around them, in which some other, better version of themselves say: Isn’t it nice to be father and daughter?

“Oh yes,” Madeleine says. “Once I lost both my arms in a wrestling match to meet a brown-eyed handsome man.”

“That is a lot of trouble!” He folds his hands, pleased. “Are you enjoying school?”

“Yes,” she fibs.

“Good. It’s in your blood, you know.”

“What’s in my blood, Dad?” Madeleine speaks carefully, not wishing to disturb the tenuous crochet between them. She does not swing her legs.

“All of it, dear.”

The teapot’s whistle barges in from the other room.

Madeleine hops off the chair. “It’s my tea. I’ll take it off the stove.” She opens the door and Pedro pounces in.

Her father’s eyebrows jolt toward the ceiling. “What is that?”

Madeleine calls Pedro back into the other room but he ignores her, sniffing the legs of her father’s chair. Pedro has had a rough day that involved, among other things, incarceration via leash. He wants to bound and spring and hope and the time is now. He leaps onto a bookcase shelf but finds no solid ground. He pedals against a stack of comic books. Dog and shelf crash unceremoniously down, narrowly missing Madeleine’s father. A journal catapults, tizzying the record needle.

There’s a lot of trouble with a brown-eyed handsome man

Brown-eyed handsome man

Madeleine’s father shrieks, atonal with fear. She debates whether to go after the record or Pedro or the teapot. Her father picks up an alarm clock and throws. It hits Pedro on his side. The dog squeaks in pain and leaps through the open window.

“Pedro! No!” Madeleine runs to the window in time to see the dog bound past the Dumpsters toward the twinkling of Ninth Street.

Her father is standing. He palms the swell of her neck and pins her against a bookshelf. His cheeks tremble. His eyes, shot through with blue, are focused on some unseen slight. Madeleine can smell his hand lotion, anisette and vetiver. His thumb presses into her windpipe and she begins to choke. She clasps onto his elbow, as if to help him.

“Dad,” she says, to remind him that she is his daughter.

He blinks, clearing whatever spell has him. He releases her and sits on the chair, in shock. He begins to cry. Madeleine darts to the kitchen and slaps off the burner underneath the teapot, which pitches and empties its water onto the stove. It takes her years to wrench the front door open. Her father’s bellowing gains velocity and chases her down the hallway. She runs behind the building, but the dog is gone.

Back in the apartment, the sound has ceased. Her father has retreated into his bedroom and locked the door. Madeleine pours a cup of tea and calls Mrs. Santiago, who immediately becomes overwrought and hangs up. Two roaches charge down the kitchen wall in a race they abandon halfway through. They idle.