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

“Sonny told you?”

“I guessed.” He slaps his face and yowls. “Is anybody ready to rock and roll?”

Lorca leaves Max yowling in the back room to catch Val’s last song. She is an old-timer violinist and had been one of his father’s closest friends. Her hair is arranged in its familiar braid. Her considerable hands and arms make the violin appear dainty. She plays Stéphane Grappelli while Sonny chugs underneath her. “I’ll Never Be the Same.” There are enough people in the club so that not everyone has a seat but not enough that you can’t see the stage. This is Lorca’s favorite part of the night.

Valentine’s pianist rolls octaves at the top of the piano. Her gaze lifts to meet Sonny’s, but he’s not a smiler. Here and there he gives her a civilized tremolo. There is no better technical guitarist than Sonny. Tight, chaste solos. Reasonable quotations. City musicians regularly call on him for studio sessions because he is reliable and even. If he promises something at the beginning of a riff, he delivers. However with age his hold on the pitch has slackened. It started with a note or phrase, occasional enough to seem like a fluke. Now it happens regularly. Lorca can jibe Sonny for his retreating hairline, his bullshit parking, his emphatic, misguided directions, but never this: that when his old friend plays he holds his breath, anticipating an errant sound, the way he does when newbies try the stage.

Cassidy swings a bottle of rum to meet a glass.

“Swing one around for me,” Lorca says.

Alex sulks on one of the stools with Aruna Sha, in another mutinous dress. The ash on her cigarette grows and menaces over the clean floor. Their occasional Main Line hanger-on is with them, a friend whose name Lorca always forgets. The kid yearns to be Alex, this is clear in the way he orbits him, undercutting anything he says. He jaws on about jazz, the one time he saw a famous musician.

“You can’t smoke in here, honey,” Lorca says.

Aruna drops her cigarette into Alex’s beer. She searches her bag, then she and the Main Line kid disappear into the back. After a moment, Alex follows.

Val swings her bow up for the final, shivering G. She holds it for several seconds as Sonny picks out the final chords. The audience applauds and makes demands but Val ignores them, so many of them go outside to smoke in the lull between acts.

The Cubanistas set up: Max on vocals and lead guitar, Gus on timbales, Sonny on keyboards, and Emo Sonofabitch Gladden on trumpet. Two of Emo’s friends sit in on percussion, congas and cajón. The Cubanistas have a following, mostly professors from the university having affairs, university kids studying South American culture, or women bowled over by the pidgin Spanish of a Cubanista brother.

Max has donned the Cubanista uniform: beige riding pants slashed indiscriminately with pink sequins, faded button-down, beige band jacket. He skips sound check to snow the girl in yellow heels. Owner of the Club is his favorite put-on. It seems to require sweating and pelvic thrusts. Perspiration pumps down his cheeks from his orderly Afro. As long as he brings in a crowd, Lorca doesn’t care who he lies to.

“I do sets on Friday nights, they’d have me play eeev-ery night if I could, Lorca’s a madman, but I tell heem , sometimes I have to do paperwork and filing, there’s a lot that goes into ronning a club.”

“Of course you can’t play every night when you run a club,” she says, elongating the last word into a concerned three syllables. “What’s a Lorca?”

“That’s a Lorca.” Max gestures to Lorca as if he is leftovers. “My right-hand man. He’s bean with me since the beginning. Together we turned this pile of cheese into the best jazz club in the world.”

She swivels to Lorca as if he is a mirror to check her hair. “I thought the best jazz club in the world was Mongoose’s.”

Max pouts. “Dar-leeng, no. Mongoose’s is a trash castle. You hear about the band he has playing for him now? What are they called? The traveling … something … The Triangles.”

“The Troubadours,” Lorca says. “It’s the same house band with a different name. Rico and the boys.”

“Naw,” Max stretches his leg on a stool. “It’s something like the Triangles.” The girl’s attention drifts to the stage, where Gus is warming up. “In any case, darling, they’re frauds.” He nuzzles the girl’s neck. She waves him off. He continues the tour, pointing to where the Snakehead hangs. “That’s the Snakehead I won in a card game with Steve Earle.”

“What’s a Snakehead?” the girl says.

“It’s like a classic Mustang, doll, only rarer and older.”

She is unimpressed. “It does seem faded and creaky, like old things do.”

Lorca, Sonny, and Max straighten on their stools. “Are you going to warm up?” Sonny says. “Or are you going to stand here playing tour guide?”

Someone has barred the men’s bathroom door shut. A line forms in the hallway.

“It’s been, like, fifteen minutes,” one of the men notifies Lorca.

Lorca knocks. A commotion inside, a dropped plastic thing, and a curse. Lorca pounds. The door unlatches and Alex, Aruna, and the friend appear. Alex pushes past his father into the hallway. The men who have been waiting shuffle inside. Alex leans over the bar and smiles for a drink. He taps out a beat on his thighs. Gus catches a cymbal in midgasp. Aruna reaches for his hand. Lorca sees that his son is skinny, not in a lean way but in the way Sonny alluded to in the car. He cannot remember the last time he had a meal with his son. He cannot remember the last time he saw Alex eat anything. The sun-colored fingertips, the mottled bruises on his son’s forearms. Alex’s shape comes into searing focus, as if Lorca’s eyes have taken sixteen years to adjust to new light.

Near the fountain at Rittenhouse Square Park, Sarina evaluates a display of pinwheels whirling in planets of green foam. “How much for the red?” she asks the man selling them.

“Five,” he says.

“Yikes. And the yellow?”

“Six.”

She narrows her eyes. “Why is the yellow more than the red?”

“Bigger,” he says.

Ben takes a seat on the edge of the fountain. Sarina will deliberate until she ultimately opts against buying a pinwheel. He innately knows her moods and tendencies the way you know on a flight, even with your eyes closed, that a plane is banking.

Sarina blows into the yellow pinwheel. The man says, “Every year they perform A Christmas Carol here in the square. Have you ever seen it?”

“Scrooge?”

“It’s about rich people being assholes. Every year, here, where the richest people in the city live.”

“Irony,” Sarina says.

“Do you think any of them realize what they’re watching?”

“I thought the richest people lived on the Main Line.” Sarina replaces the pinwheel. “I guess they can afford a five-dollar pinwheel.”

He sniffs. “My prices are market.”

Ben hurls one leg over the side of the fountain, then the other. The cold realization of the water pauses him. He tromps toward the other side.

“What’s he doing?” the pinwheel man says.

Sarina doesn’t answer but doffs her heels and leaps the wall. Knee-deep. She pushes through the cold water to catch up.

On the other side of the fountain, a woman wearing a sequined hat calls out, “Hello! I know you!” She waves to Ben, who lifts his hand in a half salutation.

“You do?” he says.

“I know you! You were my husband’s lawyer. Bill Evans. That’s my husband’s name. You helped him when he got hurt at work. A beam fell on his head. You got us a nice settlement. Oh, bless you. I do know you. I do.”