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

Another suited jerk stops in front of her table. “Sarina?” it says.

It’s Michael Lawrence, the scrawny guy who sings in the school’s musicals. He takes several steps as if forced back by her beauty. “You are stunning. Jean Seberg, if she was a brunette.”

“I’ve never heard of that actress,” she says.

“Jean Seberg. From Breathless ?”

How nice to have another boy treat her like a worthless thing, this time for not knowing a movie. Then he is wrenching her from her chair, does she not want to dance? Sarina doesn’t want to dance, no she can’t explain why, well then, let’s dance, you and me, oh Michael, oh, fine. Sarina rests her hands on his shoulders. They take one stiff step to the right, one stiff step to the left.

Across the room, Ben watches his date dance with Michael Lawrence, the human equivalent of not playing it cool. The song is about not understanding the person you’re with even after all these years and even after being given every opportunity. It lasts for three minutes and fifty-three seconds. Over the course of it, Sarina and Michael cover one square foot of gym floor.

Ben, however, travels to hell and back.

The song finishes and Sarina thanks Michael for what will be her only dance. Next to her, someone clears his throat and for the first time that night, Sarina turns to find her date by her side.

“I’ll take it from here,” Ben says.

The smile Sarina extended to Michael dies. “You can take me home.”

Ben goes numb. Any thought she might be joking fades as he trails her through the parking lot to the Mustang. She gets in and shuts the door. He gets in and shuts his, sealing out noise from the outside. On another day that would be considered another killer feature of this car, but now the silence makes Ben’s suit feel a size too small. He suggests waffles at the diner.

“No,” she says.

The shape of his error grows and sharpens, causing his throat to close, his stomach to leaden. He cannot let her go home. He must rebound. Rally to overturn the momentum. He puts his mouth on her earlobe, sliding his hand under the strap of her dress. She forces him away. “Home.”

The Mustang rumbles to life. Ben is too upset to appreciate it.

Driving out of the parking lot, they pass the open doors of the gym, where a couple necks underneath wilting balloons. The boy bites the girl’s shoulder while she stares at the ceiling. The balloons are black and gray, in coordination with the prom theme: Goth Night. Ben glances over to see if Sarina is watching too, but she is staring at the soccer field that in the fall is dotted with the banners of rival schools. Ben eases around each corner, so as not to further upset her. Her neck glows like the mussel shells his family collects on shore vacations. When they reach her street, it is quiet and carless. The Mustang shudders to a halt in front of her house.

Through the bay window, Sarina can see her mother napping on the recliner. The creak of the front door will awaken her and she will want to know everything: how the dress went over, what the other girls were wearing, how it was to dance with him, whether summer picnics will include him. Her mother will want to know whether in a world of unreliable fathers this boy is going to stick. How will Sarina tell her no?

Sarina’s hand pauses on the car door. She needs to gather herself into a girl who can lie, It was great! This terrible boy would not understand. After ignoring her all night he can at least allow her this time, unexplained. Around her the chirruping bugs, the dilations of stars, the smell of the rosebushes, even the arrogant moon seem to pause.

How would she have said good-bye to her father, even if he had stayed to hear it?

Sarina will move to college and tell this story at parties, her mouth spiced with alcohol. What was the name of that guy who did that thing? her girlfriends will say. At your prom? She will take a bong hit and yell: Ben Allen! in smoke. She will meet and marry a gorgeous man whose first language is Spanish. Finally — restitution from the universe. They will have sex on unpronounceable beaches. They will move to Connecticut where nothing has edges. One day, her sister will call and say come back, Mom’s dying, and Sarina will drag what’s left of this home to this curb in boxes they bought at the Shop and Save. In that moment, she will have gone far enough to measure how little progress she has made.

In this moment, through the bay windows and over the wide sills, Sarina watches the woman in forty-watt light readjust her chin in sleep. Ben Allen watches, too.

She says, “That’s my mother.”

Alex is outfitted in the uniform of a former Cubanista twice his size: lapel-less band jacket and pants the color of whole wheat, accented with pink sequins. The excess waistband sags below his hips. He has finessed his curls away from his face with Max’s hair grease, but they refuse to stay. They fall into his eyes as he huddles with Max onstage.

“Check out Tito Puente,” Sonny says. He and Lorca stand behind the bar, arms crossed.

Lorca trains his eye on the front door where, he worries, a fleet of cops led by Len Thomas will burst through any moment. “Probably a bad idea letting him play.”

“Everything is a bad idea,” Sonny says.

Max swills water at the bar. “No hazing,” Lorca tells him. “Don’t make him scuffle for chord changes.”

“That’s how you learn, buddy.” Max cha-cha-chas for the ladies and goes back onstage.

Alex likes to be close to the percussion when he plays. He takes the chair next to Gus and vaults his brunette guitar onto his knee. He noodles, alert as a puppy, as Max rains more love on the girl in yellow heels. Max explains in his thick baritone what she should listen for as he plays, why each note is important.

“Got it,” she says, irritated.

“Let’s go, Max.” Sonny yells through his cupped hands. Then he says to Lorca, “They look like a loaf of bread.”

Max cannot see Sonny through the stage’s glare when he purrs into the microphone, “Suck it, Vega, we go when we’re ready,” accenting the insult with a low kick. A cymbal hit by Gus. Max croons, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are the Cubanistas and we have come all the way from Cuba to play for you tonight.”

Cassidy snorts, pouring a pint.

“We would like to start with a classique de la Cubanista . It is called ‘Candela.’ We do hope you enjoy it.”

The Main Line kid hisses some important distraction into Aruna’s ear, but she swats him away. Her gaze is trained on Alex, who pats his wet forehead with the back of his wrist.

Max hits the first chord and bays to the ceiling, silencing the people who enter, shaking off the cold. The other musicians join. At first, they keep pace with each other, laying their rhythms over Gus’s timbales. Max rolls his shoulders in time. He calls out to the tin roof. In the space of one note, he sings three. He warbles up the ascending line. Hearing him sing is observing someone in great pain. He’s not reliable or even predictable. He’ll lead a song off a cliff if it means checking out a sound lurking in the valley. Lorca has heard him drift so far he forgets what song he’s playing, but he can make even venerable horn players turn.

Max howls, gargles tri-notes, making everyone in the audience feel they are in on something. Windmills, thrusts, beads of sweat on the crab apples of his cheeks. He chugs almost offstage, then stalks back to keen Spanish into the mic. Max could reason with the archangel on Judgment Day, or just a university girl out of her dress. He stays drunk, scared of the part of himself that is able to blow his mind so far out. If he ever got sober, he’d be chatty and nervous, no better than the bums in the square playing chess with the pigeons, telling them he used to be a jazz great, and the pigeons would say, The hell you were, Max. Checkmate . Lorca knows so much of Max is bullshit. But when it comes to playing, he is the genuine article and has spent his life in service. For Alex to keep pace, he will have to adjust to quick-shifting harmonies and note patterns.