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

A church bell chimes. Ben and Sarina finish their pears. They take Second until they reach the dead yards of Fishtown. “You’re a good teacher,” he says. “I can tell by that girl’s face when she looked at you.”

“She’s been through the mill. Her mother died, and her father isn’t the best.” Sarina worries that this heavy thought will tip the ship of the night. “She has people, though,” she adds, “who help.”

“Like you had people.” His tone is suddenly charmless. “Not me, though. I wasn’t there for you.”

“You were a boy, Ben.”

“I was an asshole,” he says.

“Way to make it about you.”

“Just let me say I’m sorry, Miss Greene.”

A smattering of laughter on a rooftop settles on them. The street is filled with warehouses and crack houses, jazz clubs and people having tough conversations. “You’d be surprised by how much it hurts that he didn’t say good-bye.” They have reached the club. Sarina’s expression is a mixture of relief (she is cold) and happiness (they have made it) and pain (she has spoken about her father) when she turns to Ben.

“Do you know,” he says, “I think about you every single day?”

“How could I know that?”

“I’m telling you.”

“We’re here,” she says. “Let’s go in.”

He doesn’t move. “Do you think about me?”

Bundled skinny boys, one whistling off tune, scuffle through the door into the club.

“I’m cold,” Sarina says. “I forget the question.”

“You do not.”

“I think that you’re not free. Even if you are going to be. You’ll lose a year, at least. At the end of it, you’ll be a different person who wants different things. I’ve been through it.”

For the first time, Ben feels the chill anesthetizing his elbows and toes. In one of the warehouses, someone opens a window to clear a stinking room.

“What am I supposed to do,” she says. “Wait?” She wants him to say, Yes, wait. I will be home as soon as I run this one errand . Ben perceives disgust in her tone. Why would anyone wait for him? A boy who didn’t know how to be a prom date, a man who knows what he needs, but too late.

He releases her arm. His voice is professional with sorrow. “You certainly couldn’t do that.” He means because she is precious. Sarina hears that she is snotty and unkind. He means because he is not that lucky; she hears: he is bored.

No one says I want you to wait and no one says I’ll wait .

Ben enters the club and Sarina follows. A concussion of guitar and drums pauses them. “I’m going to …” He points to the bar. She points to the ladies’ room.

In front of the bathroom mirrors, women administer to themselves. One draws her eyebrows on. One bemoans a botched waxing. One says into her phone that she is out of here if he doesn’t show. The hoops I’ve jumped through , she says, balancing the phone and washing her hands. Another woman combs and recombs her bangs. A vase of fake flowers brightens up an old bureau. Sarina slumps against it, sees herself unglossed in the mirror. She removes her coat, her sweater. She finds a compact and tube of lipstick in her bag. She takes down her hair. She puts it back up. She takes it back down.

Do you know I think about you every single day?

“Down,” the woman who has jumped through hoops says to Sarina about her hair.

“You think?”

The woman stabs at her pucker with a shade of peach. “I know.”

Sarina locks herself in a stall and plans. She will find him at the bar. He will be angry — drinking a scotch, neat. She will say his name and pause for the amount of time it takes to unsnap a bra, so he can process her lips, her hair, before she moves into him. She will open his mouth with hers. She will lead him through the club, into the men’s room. He will lift her onto the sink’s counter and slide his hands down her thighs. She will catch glimpses of him in the mirror. Her mind will be her childhood road in early morning; the breeze in the weeping willow.

Back in the club, musicians play on a blue stage. Sarina has never heard music like this. A quick guitar and a bank of drumming. Black coats and red lipstick. The crowd at the bar is three deep. The floor beneath Sarina’s heels pulses.

When she finds him at the bar, Ben is talking to Marcos and a redheaded girl. The night has contained so many chasms it has achieved an echo. An overcologned reprise. This is fucking bullshit , Madeleine had screamed in the principal’s office, and she was right.

My God , Sarina thinks, this terrible night .

This goose-pimply, gold star of a night!

While every other girl in the fifth grade is asleep, Madeleine is finishing a hoagie in the electric air across the street from The Cat’s Pajamas, meeting place of witches and ice cream men. The club is nondescript in a row of warehouses the color of potato sacks. A gust from the river. A couple pushes through the club’s doors, choking with laughter, and bounds toward Girard. Gypsies, thinks Madeleine. She crosses the street and stands in front of the club. She places her hand against the door. Wood. Her bed is made out of wood. So is her mother’s recipe box. Wood is not scary. She uses both hands to open the heavy door, hears music, and slips inside. The vestibule smells like cinnamon gum. There is a stack of phone books and another door, this one quilted and red. She peeks through it for the length of a glimpse: a red room with tables and chairs, each of them filled with people. A woman sneezes. Madeleine says, “God bless you.” She lets the door close and is once again a secret in the vestibule.

Two men enter from outside. One of them wears a stiff-looking suit lined in sequins. They seem to want to get to the main room as fast as they can. Madeleine tells herself— go! She uses their current to enter the club unseen.

Coats bulge out from an overworked rack near the door. A bar runs along the wall on her right, lit at the top by twinkle lights. The ceiling is tin with designs punched into it. At the end of the bar the room swells into the dome of a stage where a young man with a red scarf plays a guitar pointed forward on his knee. His fingers move so quickly the sound seems delayed. If anyone notices her, she will disappear like Clarence through a crack. Hidden in the coats, Madeleine’s heart does the rumba.

The girl, introduced as Cassidy, can’t be more than eighteen, Sarina thinks. In the crook of Marcos’s elbow, she looks like a niece corralled into an affectionate hug during a family football game.

“I work here!” the girl yells. “We’re going to dance!”

It is too loud to talk. Ben avoids Sarina’s eyes as Cassidy says something into his ear. Sarina assumes it is a general bar request, a napkin or more ice; however, Ben slides off his stool. Holding her hand, he leads her into the crowd of people on the dance floor.

“She likes to make me jealous!” Marcos says, taking Ben’s place on the stool.

“How thoughtful of her!” Sarina recrosses her legs. Ben doesn’t dance, she thinks. At their prom, at every wedding they’ve suffered through at different tables, she doesn’t remember him dancing. Sarina had to live through fifteen years of friendship to dance with him in a fountain, but this girl did it with a quick message delivered to the vicinity of his collar. No matter. It will be a clumsy display. The song is Latin, demanding passion and hips. The girl will get frustrated. People will become uncomfortable. The sprinklers will turn on.