Lush Life (43 page)

"My brother invited me to come down here and hang out with him and see his new place two weeks ago," Nina murmured into the mike. "I said OK . . . But then I really didn't feel like going, so I called him back on the day and said I had a team practice."

Again the room waited for her.

"I'm so sorry . . ." she blurted. Racewalking to the wings, she was back in her seat and staring straight ahead before Boulware could even reclaim the mike.

"Happy?" Wiping her eyes.

Minette just squeezed her daughter's hand, her face, the slice of her face that Matty could see, wet and atremble.

"I have to make a call," he said to Yolonda.

Absorbed in dialing his ex-wife on his way to the front door, Matty almost crashed into Billy, the guy standing with one hand straight-armed against the curved half-wall that separated the rear of the main floor from the vestibule, his head bowed, like he had been listening to the speeches as if they were coming over a staticky tuner.

"Hey," Matty said.

"Hey!" Billy quickly straightening up as if he had been caught at something. "Why didn't you tell me you were going to be here?"

His eyes were flabby with sleeplessness and he looked like he hadn't been near running water all day.

"I didn't know I was supposed to," Matty said.

"That guy ever come in?" Billy said. "What's it, Eric Cash?"

"No."

"No. Why doesn't that surprise me?"

"What did I tell you about that?"

"No, I know."

"You let me worry about that."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"I'm just saying . . ." Matty softened his tone, then jumped as he heard his ex-wife's voice in his hand. He shut off his cell. "You know, I have to say, from everything they've been talking about in there? Your son sounds like a terrific kid."

"Didn't I tell you?" Billy beamed.

"So how are you holding up."

The question seemed to hit Billy like sunshine, provoke in him a rush of euphoria. "Amazingly well actually." And then just as quickly as it came, Matty saw it leave, Billy's features shriveling to the center of his face. "Real good."

"Good," Matty said, staring at the phone in his hand. He wasn't going to call home. He didn't want to know.

"Are you going back in?"

"No," Billy said, then gestured vaguely to the street. "I'm just, you know, waiting on the car." Then, "Could you tell . . ." "Tell . . ."

"Tell, Nina, tell her what she said . . ."

"Go in and tell her yourself."

"I will," waving Matty on.

On his way back down the aisle Matty bumped into Mayer Beck, sitting on the aisle in the back row, his skullcap finally in harmony with his surroundings.

"Sad, huh?" Beck said.

"Not now."

"Maybe I should have said, the perils of speaking next to last," Boulware started over.

"Jeremy, what was it Ike said to you? 'Anybody'd write a poem would suck a dick'?"

There was a wave of soft laughter in the hall.

"Well, as much as I loved Ike, as much as he was my soul brother, my roomie, my spiritual Siamese twin, I just have got to bust him here. He didn't make that up. He got it from my dad. That's what my dad said to me when I told him I wanted to be an actor: 'Anybody'd write a poem'd suck a dick.' Ike always thought that was a riot, but in my family it was no joke. In my neck of the woods, unless you could play for Joe Pa, throw like Willy Joe, you worked in coal. The first person in the family ever to graduate college goes to his parents and tells them he wants to be an actor? 'Are you mocking us, Steve? Are you spitting in our faces?' It was no joke, Ike . . .

"But I hung in, I hung in.

"Then I gave up.

"Ike came home one day to find me packing. 'Steve, what's up?' I said I was quitting. That I was tired of it. Four years of speech and voice and movement and script analysis and performance technique and improv and Shakespeare and Ibsen and Pinter and Brecht and Chekhov. Four years of workshops and studios and agents and auditions. Four years of rejection. Four years of hearing my dad in my head every time I failed: 'Anybody who'd write a poem . . .' Ike, it's time. I quit.

"And then I braced myself for one of his world-famous pep talks.

"But do you know what he said to me? He said, 'Good. Because you weren't a real actor to begin with.'

"Baiting me, you know? But no. He said a real actor, any kind of real artist, is constitutionally incapable of uttering those two words: I. Quit. 'Real artists don't pack,' he said to me, 'real artists are stuck and all they can do is pray that they get good enough to make it work for them. So, it's good you found out now, Steve. You need any help with your luggage?' "

Boulware took a beat to share a laugh with himself and a few others.

"So pissed off . . .

"Well, I had one last audition the next day. For the second lead in some small movie. The character was supposed to be a drop-dead ladies' man," looking down at himself, waiting for the laughs. "I go in there, read, the casting director says, "You're all wrong.' "Duh.

"I'm halfway out the door, she says, 'Hold on.'

"Then she hands me fresh sides, says, 'But his best friend is a fat guy

"My first callback . . .

"I go in the next day, I am that fat guy. She says, 'Come back next week and read for the director.' "My second callback . . ."

He put his hands in his pockets and pondered his shoes for a long beat.

"That's what we were out celebrating that night . . . That's what all the barhopping was about. My re-birthday

"I don't know if I'll get that part or not, but in the end it doesn't make all that much of a difference. Because, Ike?" addressing the ceiling. "I now know this. I am an artist. I will not pack, and I will not quit. I'm still here, Ike, and I am staying.

"I would say you'll always be in my memory, buddy, but it's more than that. You will always be at my side."

Eric, unable to believe his own ears, decided he simply misheard the whole thing and so, in the immediate silence that followed Boulware s eulogy, felt nothing.

People were sitting there now in a silence punctuated by scattered gulps and sighs as they pondered a blown-up photo of Ike from his college facebook, Eric Burdon's "Bring It On Home to Me" coming through the speakers. But the slide show was over, the image going nowhere, his never-changing grin up there, the immobility of his languidly curled fingers having none of the life-implying momentum of snaps on a carousel; in fact, it seemed to mock the notion of life after death. No one thought to rise, no one seemed capable until Boulware stood up and, signaling to the back, triggered the surprise entry of that ragtag Sergeant Pepper's Preservation Hall marching band, which began streaming in from all doors, coming down every aisle blasting "St. James Infirmary" like noisy angels of mercy. They made their way down to the front of the room and began to climb the side stairs to the stage from either end, regrouping up there and facing the mourners while still blasting the hell out of that tune, the volume bleaching out the lifelessness on the screen, people so grateful, everybody up, and then like the cherry on top of the sundae, a baby-faced black kid done up like Cab Calloway in a white swallow-tailed tux and white sneakers, his hair straightened and styled with a forelock as big as a horsetail, came slow-whirling down the aisle with an ivory baton in his grip, people screaming out their pleasure, their relief, cameramen scurrying like beetles all over this guy as he slip-slided up the steps to the stage, then down again, up and down those three short steps like the music had him going inside out, until he finally came front and center and arching over backwards began conducting with that elegantly slim stick, the shooters rushing the stage like bobby-soxers now, the mourners outright howling, Ike Marcus going, going, and when that kid started singing, Cab Callowailing like he was at the Cotton Club, gone.

Standing with the rest of the crowd in order not to draw attention to himself, Matty couldn't take his eyes from Minette and Nina, the girl gamely standing and clapping but without any light in her face.

Minette was trying like hell, though, clapping as if she were hit with the spirit, but he could tell she wasn't into it either, was torn between worrying about her kid in here and her husband out there; had already started to make her peace with Ike's death in order to hold her family together, as banged up and scattered and angry as they might be right now.

Because that's what you do, Matty thought, that's what you're supposed to do, you take care of them, you lay down your life for them if you have to, not spend every night of your aging gerbil on a training
-
wheel existence getting wasted and hunting for strange, or waiting on that sea of malice and mayhem out there to set your chest pocket to trembling.

"See him?" Yolonda lightly punched Matty's arm. "That kid there?" nodding to an unsmiling and goateed Hispanic teen in baggy jeans and a hoodie, the only one still seated in his row. "Does he look right to you?"

Matty turned to look, the kid not all that alarming to him but probably worth bracing outside.

"What's wrong?" Yolonda said.

"What do you mean?"

She put a hand to Matty's face, her fingertips coming back wet.

As the band shifted from "St. James Infirmary" to "Midnight in Moscow," Boulware, dragging three of the eulogizers along with him, trotted up onstage and started to dance, a surprisingly elegant minimalist waggle, a snake-hipped sand shuffle, one hand flat on his belly, the other up and palm out as if testifying. Fraunces Tavern tried to imitate him, but still burning from the disaster with Ike's sister, her heart wasn't in it. Nor were Russell and Jeremy, looking confused and sheepish as they edged as close to the wings as possible.

Calloway Junior produced a second baton from the inside pocket of his tux and presented it to Boulware, who, after co-conducting for a minute, turned to the seats, to the cameras, bawled, "Don't forget your candles!," which was the cue for the band to stream back down both sides of the stage and up the aisles to daylight, offering people a way out.

As soon as they hit the street, Yolonda was on him.

"Hey, come here for a second?" touching the elbow of the goateed kid's sweatshirt and casually steering him away from the crowd.

"What for?" as if he didn't already know. He had a gold hoop piercing the outside corner of his left eyebrow that made him rear back to keep that eye open equal to the other and gave him a look of chronically pugnacious surprise.

"What's your name?"

"Hector Maldonado. What's yours."

"Detective," she said. "And the dead guy, how about his name?"

"Why you asking me?"

"I'm just asking."

"Why you asking," crossing his arms over his chest.

Yolonda just waited.

"I don't know his got damn name. I'm here doing a homework for media study, and you know why you bracing me."

"Yeah? Why am 1 bracing you?"

" 'Cause you can't find the dude that did him, and I'm a pldtano from the PJs. And comin' from a Rican like you? Fuck that shit."

"You got your homework on you?" Yolonda asked mildly.

"Got my notes." Maldonado jerked a fistful of loose-leaf paper out of his front pants pocket and held it up for her to read the halfhearted scrawl.

don't take the law board call home believe in me ike world we just live in it

"Yeah,Ike . . . see?"

"What's your name again?"

"I said. Hector Maldonado. You should write it down."

"You got a mouth on you, you know that?"

"You got a mouth on you too!"

"How about I take you in right now, we talk about this in the squad room."

"Yeah, you do that! And I'll go right to them news-truck niggers, tell them why you really come up on me like this. That would make a motherfuck of a media study, huh?"

"Get out of here."

"Hah." Maldonado loped off in triumph, Yolonda shrugging the whole thing off.

Passing on joining the procession heading to the murder spot six blocks away, Matty lingered on the sidewalk in front of the Langenshield, waiting for Yolonda but fixed on Minette, pacing as she talked to her husband on the cell, one hand clapped over her ear to shut out the din. Nina was at her elbow and took the phone from her mother to talk to Billy too, Matty wondering if he would tell her that he had stayed after all, at least long enough to hear what she had said up there.

Well, whatever Billy was telling her seemed to be doing the trick, Matty studying Minette studying her daughter as the kid's features started to soften.

Yolonda joined the three of them a moment later and looked to Matty, that kid in the hoodie a bust.

"Oh my God, you were so brave up there," Yolonda's voice climbing with tenderness as she enfolded Nina in her arms.

"Thank you," the kid hugging herself.

"Your husband get home?" Yolonda asked Minette.

"Either there or on his way," Minette said. "He just wasn't ready for this."