Orfe (11 page)

“I'm sorry,” I said to Michael. “I wasn't listening. Dance with me, do you want do dance? Let's be guests for a while. Let's celebrate.” I wanted to put my hands on Michael's shoulders and I wanted to feel his warm hands on my back. I wanted to touch Michael's reality.

Later, when most of the guests had gone home, Orfe asked me if I knew where Yuri was. I didn't. I hadn't seen him for a while, I wasn't sure how long. Had he gone to the apartment to go to the bathroom? I suggested.

A while after that, as Michael and I were filling yet another plastic bag with crushed paper cups and empty frozen fruit juice containers, Orfe asked us again. “He isn't at the apartment,” she said.

“I haven't seen him since—,” Michael started. He stopped to think before he said any more. You could see him, behind round glasses, following the ideas to their logical conclusions, before he would say any more.

“Since he was with that group of—looked
like street people, you remember,” he said to me.

“What street people? What group?” Orfe asked.

“They brought a cake and Yuri had a piece,” Michael said. “Then they all came by the table. He dropped the cake. It was ruined, it was underfoot, stepped on—the cake they'd brought.”

“He dropped it on purpose,” I said.

“That's what I thought,” Michael said.

The Graces were behind Orfe, listening.

“He was sorry,” I told Orfe.

“He was dosed,” Willie Grace guessed, her voice sharp, harsh.

“You think on purpose?” Raygrace asked her. He held her hand, it looked like tight. Michael gripped my hand and I gripped his. Grace Phildon's fingers were fitted close around Cass's little shoulders.

“Sons of a bitch,” Willie Grace said. “Sons of bitches.”

“I wouldn't think on purpose,” Grace Phildon said. “Or I'd think, not so much on purpose as carelessly, as if it were a joke.”

“It can't be a joke for Yuri, for someone like Yuri,” Raygrace said, puzzled.

“It's never a joke,” Michael announced. “It's chemical, it's a measurable and re-creatable reaction, like a laboratory
experiment, it's—putting things into the cells of a body changes the cells. That's no joke.”

“Fucking sons of fucking bitches. Sandbagged him.”

Orfe stood with her arms hanging down at her sides and her hands empty.

“They don't think, though,” Grace Phildon said. “I don't think they can, anymore. So they don't really
do
it. Whatever it is they do, it's not as if they really did it.”

I was the one who was weeping. Orfe stood absolutely still.

“And the victim?” Willie Grace demanded. “What about the victim? The victim is still real. He's still there, what's left of him. It's just, there's nobody responsible.”

“All that's real is a victim?” Raygrace said. “Because that means there's no way to prevent it happening again. That means all you can do is try to help the victim out, after. After it's too late.”

“As if people were an act of God,” Willie Grace said. “Like tornadoes or tidal waves.”

“What are we going to do?” Grace Phildon asked.

Orfe shook her head, as if to clear it. “I'm going to go get him.”

“It's dark,” we told her. “Wait until morning, it's not safe around there. You can't tell how—wait until the stuff has worn off a little,” we asked her. “We'll all go,” we said.

“No. He won't—you can't,” she said. “If you do, he'll never come with me, he'll be too ashamed.”

“They'll try to keep you out,” Raygrace said.

“He was really sorry,” I said to Orfe. She knew what I meant.

“I'm the only one who has a chance,” she explained to everybody else. “My only chance is alone, if I'm alone. They won't be afraid of me. Yuri won't be afraid.”

“Yeah, but what about getting there?” Michael asked. “What about being there, and also what about getting back?”

Orfe bent her head.

“You can't tell what the shits will do,” Willie Grace said. “Be real, you know that's true.”

“Irrational behavior is characteristic, Michael agreed. “Unpredictable behavior.”

“Even if what they do isn't what they want to do, still, if they
do
it,” Raygrace said.

Orfe stood with her head bent.

“Except it is what they do, and if it was
Cass there now—,” Grace Phildon said.

Orfe raised her face and, just for a second, I could see in her eyes a catch-me-if-you-can expression. I'd seen it before, in games of red rover. It was there for just a second before she had it hidden behind a hand that brushed hair out of her eyes. When she lowered her hand, her eyes were full of resolution and good sense. If you looked at her, if the glance of her eyes fell over you, you would know that she had resolved on sensible action, which was what we'd advised. The Graces relaxed, and Michael relaxed.

I knew better.

I knew better and I didn't blame her: If there is someone like Yuri in your life, the only sensible line of action is to do everything you can to keep him or get him back. Anything else is nonsense. Is cowardice or a failure of love. If you can climb Annapurna, then there is no other mountain you want to set your feet on, no matter how much good sense people talk to you, about habitable. Knots of people stood around cars under the yellow streetlights, stood around in doorways, stood around on corners. They watched us without curiosity, without interest—flat eyes in expressionless faces. By then I had
taken off my shoes and went barefoot. Shoes in your hands might be weapons, with their sharp, narrow heels.

The house was one of a row of houses, each with its six-step stoop, each with its broken windows, some of them patched with tape, some boarded over, some bare sharp glass. Orfe went up the steps and I followed her. She pushed the door open.

There was a hallway with closed doors. At the far end there was a little blue light and the sound of voices and the sound of music and moving shadows. Orfe went down the hallway without hesitating. I hesitated.

I heard them greeting her. The music—drums and guitars—broke off, unevenly, then stopped. I heard clapping, whistles, feet stamping. “ ‘Sick,' ‘It Makes Me Sick,' ” I heard that requested, and “Satisfaction.” “Where's the rest of you?” someone asked, “Are you alone?” “ ‘Black and Blue.' ” “Yeah, that's a good one, do that too.” I couldn't see into the room from where I stood, just the long dim hallway and a tall rectangle of light. I pressed myself into the cracked plaster of the wall. I inhaled the smells of the house.

It was like the time I was thirteen and I climbed up the ladder to the high diving
board because I thought if I had climbed up, I would have to have the courage to dive off.

I didn't know, if I went down the hall, what I would see or what might happen to me. Orfe had music and she was Yuri's girl. I had no protection.

When I was thirteen I had turned around and climbed back down off the high diving board, and I thought less of myself ever after. So I went down the hallway.

It was a long room, with shades pulled down over the windows and a black-and-white television flickering in a corner. The floor was bare wood, scattered over with sofas, upholstered chairs, pillows, ashtrays, cans of beer and soda, bindles and sneaks, empty wine bottles with candles burning in them, lamps with scarves and sheets draped over them to ease the light. The room was filled with smoke and shadows.

At the far end of the room Orfe was playing. Smiley sat at the drum set behind her, and a couple of others played along—guitar, slide guitar, also plugged into the amplifiers. Orfe was playing and they were trying to follow her lead. She was trying to gather them into a song.

In the darkness around the musicians, some people were dancing. I could see heads, mostly, like cutout silhouettes, and arms sometimes raised up and a flowing of moving bodies. Across the front of the crowd a profile with spiked hair moved back and forth, like some kind of sentry wearing a crested helmet.

More people sprawled around on the floor, hunched over to snort a line or light a smoke, stretched out flat or twined together, in a pair, in a tumble of bodies. “ ‘It Makes Me Sick,' ” a voice called out.

Orfe turned her pale face to the darkness where the voice came from and shook her head and played on, singing.

I saw Yuri at last, leaning back in a deep chair, closed eyes, a tangle of dark hair, and his neck exposed. One girl, bare breasted I thought, although I couldn't be sure, curled up against his pleated wedding shirt. Another rested her head across his thighs, and her arms were wrapped around his legs as she kneeled beside him.

Person by person, Orfe gathered the whole room up into her songs, one by one. Yuri sat up, shook himself free of the girls, wrapped his hands around his knees, opened his eyes. More and more
people joined the dancers, dancing. I turned and left. Went down the long hallway with my shoes still in my hands. Sat down on the steps outside to wait.

It was a long time I sat there, waiting on the steps.

Orfe came out alone, the guitar on her back. There was nobody following her. She turned around to pull the door closed behind her. I stood up to go with her.

The streets were hollow, the sky going gray with false dawn. Orfe walked with her head bent, her face hidden. At her own door she turned around and raised her face to me, and her eyes said as clearly as if she had actually spoken the words,
Don't you dare.

“I won't, I wouldn't,” I promised, before I had time to think.

*  *  *  *  *

Yuri was gone, and then the Graces were gone too, touring as an opening band, without Orfe, who mostly lived at the studio. I mostly lived at the apartment, occasionally returning to my dormitory to pick up books or mail or clothing. The apartment was just about my home for the final semester. I slept in the double bed, ate off the plastic plates, mopped the linoleum floor. I paid the rent and the electric
bill and the phone bill. Whenever Orfe showed up for a bath or a meal or a night, I was there to open a can of soup, get out clean towels, move into a sleeping bag on the floor. I watered the plants. I packed up Yuri's clothes and delivered them to the house. I typed out job applications sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the typewriter. I studied for my final exams, sitting on a stool at the little kitchen table.

The Graces went on the tour because the offer was just too good. They couldn't, they said, stand on pride the way Orfe could. They understood that this wasn't a time for her to do any performing, they didn't expect her to go along. It was only for a few weeks, it wasn't as if the band was breaking up or didn't plan to get back together. Willie Grace and Raygrace weren't even subletting their apartment, here was the key, either Orfe or I could live there, whoever.

I wasn't sure Orfe even heard them, but I thanked them and took the keys, promised to water the plants, feed the fish, promised to visit Cass at her grandmother's, promised to continue being manager, there was no question, I'd go on dealing with job offers and they could keep sending the checks on to me.

I don't remember how long it was before the evening Orfe and I were eating tuna-fish sandwiches, talking about I can't remember what, and there was the sound of a lot of footsteps and then knocking on the apartment door. The Graces had returned, much sooner than expected, carrying pizza in boxes, holding Cass by the hand.

“But—” I held the door open.

They surged past me, sat down on the floor, opened the pizza boxes, and asked for a pizza wheel, and plates, and were there any napkins.

“C'mon. You'd rather have pizza, I can tell by looking at your faces,” Raygrace urged. He was right, of course, so Orfe and I abandoned the tuna to sit down among the Graces.

“What about Tulsa?” I asked. “What about Tucumcari? What about Johnstown?”

“We're fired,” Grace Phildon explained. She didn't look upset. She didn't look as if she were fresh back from a failure experience.

“How could you be fired? You're three times as good as the headliner,” I protested.

“That's it in a nutshell,” Raygrace said. He chomped down on a slice of pizza with green peppers, onions, olives, and anchovies.

“They weren't bad,” Willie Grace told us. “But we were better.
Much
better. The audiences didn't want us to leave the stage, they'd call to get us back on, we were playing at the start and then at the finish too. So we were fired.”

“With full pay,” Grace Phildon said. “Also compensation for our disappointment and the loss of exposure time. It couldn't be better, if you ask me.”

“Yeah, they really stank,” Willie Grace said. “Stink,” she poked a tickling finger into Cass's left armpit. Cass giggled. “Stank.” She tickled the other armpit and Cass laughed out loud. “Stunk!” she cried and scrabbled at Cass's stomach with five fingers. Cass fell over backward, laughing, pizza held aloft. “I mean,” Willie Grace said, “there was this throb-throb-throb stuff, every song, and this pelvis stuff”—she held out her hand and rocked it forward, again and again, like a little five-fingered pelvis. “It was dumb. Rotten music. And the songs.” She turned to Orfe. “The songs made ‘It Makes Me Sick' sound like opera, like Mozart opera. Maybe three words, that's about the extent of the lyrics they knew, the S-word”—she winked at Cass—“the F-word, the H-word. Over and over, throb-throb, pelvis, pelvis. You get the picture.”

“The H-word?” I wondered.

“Hate,” Willie Grace said. “If I never hear that word again in all my born days, I'll be grateful.”

“I hate liver,” Cass volunteered.

“Well, I guess I don't have to worry about being grateful,” Willie Grace said.

“And I hate lima beans,” Cass said.