Orfe (3 page)

After a while Rab just gave up; they all did. “Who wants to waste time fighting a girl,” he muttered. They groused to themselves, “Girls are crybabies anyway, they
don't fight fair, you're always never allowed to hurt them. Who cares?” they said.

Orfe raised her face at that and looked at me. I don't know what I looked like, with rage draining out of me, but Orfe's eyes shone out glad.
That's what I mean,
I could hear, as clear as if she said it. I think my eyes must have been shining too.

Even though I moved away and left Orfe behind, I didn't forget her. Even if I'd never seen her again, I would have remembered Orfe. As it was, I wasn't surprised to be the one she asked to go before them when she and Yuri walked out together to be married. I think my eyes must have been shining then too, and I know that Orfe and Yuri radiated a sense of loving that I can still warm my hands at, if I close my eyes and remember.

I don't remember why I was on that street on that day, at that time. I saw the gathering of people at the same time that I heard the singer's voice. The song floated like light. Both particle and wave, if light, the song seemed unlike anything else in the sensual world.

The singer stood with bent head, so I could see only a long mass of copper-colored curls. Then she raised her head in a remembered gesture and I recognized Orfe, across all the years.

In jeans, turtleneck, and boots, Orfe could have been taken for a scrawny young man or a slender young woman; it didn't matter which. Her hair spread around her face like a cloud. Her eyebrows were dark, and her narrow nose
almost projected into a hook. When she had finished singing, hands went into pockets and purses to find money to drop into the upturned hat at Orfe's feet.

Until the crowd had disbanded, Orfe didn't notice me. When she did, she picked up the hat without counting what was in it and came toward me.

I wasn't sure of her then. “Orfe?”

“Have I changed that much?”

I shook my head to say no. “Older.”

“It's been years. What did you expect?”

I shook my head again, to clear my thoughts, for wonder. I had never expected anything and certainly not—

Orfe opened the hat and peered into it. “I can buy you a cup of coffee.”

“More than one.” I poked my finger at a ten-dollar bill.

“Unh-uh,” Orfe said. “My room for the night comes out of this, and meals.”

“Stay with me,” I invited her. “It's a dormitory, but I've got a single, plenty of floor space.”

She didn't hesitate to accept any more than I had hesitated to ask. “In that case, I can buy you a sandwich. Aren't you hungry? Don't tell me anything yet, wait until we sit down and I can really pay attention—and you, you too, you can really pay
attention. Wait'll you hear what's been going on with me.”

I couldn't imagine and, imagining, was already caught up in Orfe's excitement. But first I had to answer her questions about myself as we ate, and drank glass after glass of iced tea, and talked. “Why a degree in business?” Orfe asked.

Most people thought that but didn't ask. “I want to earn a good living. I'm good at management and applied economics, statistics, fitting all the pieces together.” Most people thought that if you were a business major, you weren't their kind of person. “The workplace is so much of your life, you know? Work is so central, what you do to make your living.”

“You don't look like a business major,” Orfe said.

“What do I look like?”

“Who'd have thought you'd turn out so lovely?”

“Not me,” I admitted. “But I'm glad I did. I enjoy it.”

“Good for you.” She studied me. “Not beautiful but—almost as if you are. People must look at you a second time and be disappointed.”

I had forgotten Orfe's way of saying exactly what she thought, rather than what
she thought you wanted to hear. I had forgotten what it felt like to have something nobody seemed to understand understood. “Yeah,” I said, and felt the smile on my face. I couldn't stop smiling. “It's enough to make a person insecure, if she's banking on her looks. But you too, you've turned out—” I stopped, because she wasn't pretty, wasn't even fine-looking, was only just barely not unattractive; except of course that there was something about Orfe that made you want to look at her and keep on looking. Arresting.

“I wear myself naked,” Orfe said. “That makes it hard for people to figure out what it is about me. My friends get used to it. Are we still friends?”

“I'd like that.”

“Me too.” Orfe drank at her glass of tea. “I missed you.”

“No, you didn't,” I told her.

“Did too.”

“But you didn't—but I didn't miss you—”

“That's who I am,” Orfe said, “and who you are.”

“I figured you would have forgotten all about me. We were kids.”

“How could I forget? We were kids,” she said. “I guess a business degree just
doesn't sound like you, Enny. Unless you've changed.”

“Of course I've changed,” I told her. “You helped.”

“Just at the beginning.”

“Once changes start, you know you can't keep them from moving along.” I smiled again. “It feels, like, every year older I get the more I own myself. I like being older.”

“Why, because kids are so helpless?”

“You were never helpless. Were you?”

She shrugged, lowered her head, raised her face to me. It had never crossed her mind to be helpless.

I wanted her to understand. “I don't see why commercial success can't be . . . virtuous or . . . honorable. Do you? There are companies that are successful and also good employers, good corporate citizens too. You don't have to be avaricious just because you're making money, do you?”

“I wouldn't know,” she said.

“Like Ben and Jerry's,” I said. “Like the Body Shop, like—” I stopped myself. “Isn't that what you wanted me to be like?”

“Depends,” Orfe said.

“Depends on what?” I was getting irritated. “Anyway, I don't care,” I said. “It's what I want for myself.”

“Well, then,” Orfe said. She stopped the waitress and asked for a cup of coffee. I asked for the same. “Are you sure it's okay if I stay with you? I don't have any bad habits, in case you're wondering—”

It hadn't crossed my mind.

“The school won't object?”

The school wouldn't care, I assured her.

“Then I'd be grateful. It would be a help, and fun too.”

“Good.” I waited, feeling talked out. It was Orfe's turn. “Aren't you going to tell me?”

“Tell you what?”

“How do I know? All I know is, you said you'd tell me while we ate.”

“Oh.” She seemed abstracted, watching her fingers pick up potato chips.

“And we've finished eating,” I said.

“It's not much, nothing much, and I was thinking about something else—running into you again because—I heard on the radio, somewhere, a while ago . . . They found a warehouse, in some city in Vietnam, and stacked up in it, in the warehouse, like . . . like boxes of stereos in a warehouse, or bags of flour, there were bodies. Skeletons. With tags tied to their big toes, with dog tag numbers on their toes. And I was thinking, each one of them was having a life, his own life. And I was
thinking, most of them were our age, probably.”

“Probably most of them were black too,” I told her, my voice thick.

“Oh, shit,” Orfe said. “I never thought of that, but you're right.”

“Or Indian,” I said, making myself keep after the truth.

I watched the top of Orfe's head after that, making myself face the picture she had put before my mind's eye. After a pretty long time, she asked, “How'd you like it?”

“Like what?”

“My performance.”

“I only heard the very end.” I tried to remember my exact impressions. “Your voice is wonderful, but you must already know that. I never heard that song before.”

“Because it's original.”

“I only heard the very end,” I apologized. “So you still want to be a musician? Can you earn enough to live on, on the streets? I don't mean that the way it sounds.”

“I can. I lived a couple of years all over Europe that way. But—I just joined up with a band. The lead singer asked me, and I said okay, so—we've played a couple of
gigs, we've got one coming up, I'm thinking about asking you if you want to see it. But—”

After a while, “But what?” I asked.

“Oh . . . It's metal, and I'm not sure how you feel about metal. We're a metal band, Jack and the Jackets—don't say it, Enny, okay?”

I didn't.

“And we're not very good. We're okay good but not nearly good enough. Not nearly as good as I am by myself.” She wasn't apologizing, she was explaining. “And your opinion—what you think matters to me.”

Orfe leaned forward to tell me about it.

“The drummer could be good, if only he'd work. I mean
work,
you know what I mean? Not just . . . Just because you have more talent than most people doesn't mean you don't have to work at it. The rest of them don't matter, they don't bother me, but Smiley could be really good if he'd just stop waiting around for whatever it is he expects will be given to him. Just given. Like some Christmas present from Santa, just given stark free. You know? Or if he'd stop looking for the high that will—be the angel he can ride where no drummer has ever gone before. Making him famous and
rich. Or something. It makes me mad,” Orfe said.

“You haven't changed much.”

“Neither have you, really. Have you?”

I laughed. “Not if you don't think so.”

“I don't. Other than growing up, of course,” Orfe said. “Other than growing. I do want you to come hear us. Hear me, I mean. Would you? You want to? Do you mind pretty hard-core music?”

I decided not to lie. “That doesn't matter.”

“I hope,” Orfe said.

*  *  *  *  *

Mushroom clouds in a row lined the walls of the room, shining in the dim light, fluorescent green mushroom clouds, fluorescent orange, fluorescent yellow. Small tables crowded back against the wall, across the room from the narrow wooden platform that made itself a stage by being elevated on wooden crates. Black amplifiers gleamed at the sides of the stage against a brick wall; silver microphones stood guard over the arrangement of drums and cymbals and pedals; wiring lay coiled black and shiny. I was taken to the girlfriends' table by the door. The room was so crowded and noisy that even if I had felt any inclination to talk, it wouldn't have been
possible. Four spotlights burned overhead.

When a group of people, Orfe among them, worked their way through the crowd and mounted the stage, they were greeted with hoots and whistles. They wore black leather boots and black leather jackets; they wore belts, bracelets, and anklets of silvery studs fixed into black leather. The lead singer wore black leather trousers and a strip of white, like a skunk's stripe, in his long, dark hair. He stood in a spotlight, stage center. He raised his arm straight overhead, pointing, then lowered his stiff arm to point at the drummer, who flourished his sticks and played a roll, concluding with a thwack on the cymbals. The band played.

It felt as if the room were a moving vehicle and had just crashed up against a wall of sound. It felt as if a wall of sound had fallen into the room. Sound pulsed up, trapped in the small space, the drum pounding along beside the electric bass. The lead's voice slipped between drum and bass, riding the guitars—the voices of the audience rose in competition.

I couldn't listen because I couldn't hear. The room was too small, the amplifiers too powerful, the audience too
inattentive. I wished myself elsewhere.

But I was there to see Orfe. She had her hair jammed into a black knit hat, and she was placed to one side of the platform. She attended only to the guitar under her hands, the left hand motionless on the neck, the fingers of the right moving on the strings in an unvarying pattern. The lead singer—Jack, I assumed—dominated the stage because he moved on it, hips fluid, long hair thrown from one side to the other, back and forth, his eyes most often closed as he screamed out the anger of his song.

The standing crowd swayed and chanted, “Not me, you won't get me.” Some groups danced, sometimes slamming into one another. “Black man, red man, Chinaman's chance.” Jack's face twisted into grimaces, his eyes squeezed shut, and his free hand reached desperately for the zipper of his jacket, which in the extreme of his emotion he pulled down and up, down and up. Number followed number. Every song seemed unwilling to end.

Finally, Jack pointed to Orfe. She took off the hat and shook her head. Her hair shone coppery red. She lay down the guitar and brought only the microphone forward
with her. The audience quieted, anticipating.

“It's too soon,” one voice from the crowd said. “I couldn't 've waited anymore,” another spoke. “Maybe she won't—,” a third asked. I looked but couldn't distinguish who was speaking. It was hot by then and close, sweaty, the air dense with the acrid gray smell of tobacco and the muskier, greener odor of pot. The band's instruments were muted, even the drum; this number seemed to be a duet, a lamentation for two voices, a dialogue between the two voices, almost merely a list of words Jack chanted, to which Orfe responded in chorus. It sounded like Jack was chanting newspaper headlines. “It makes me sick,” Orfe sang in response, never looking away from his face, “It makes me sick.” He leaned toward her, microphone touching his lips, as if he loved his words.

More and more Orfe accompanied her line of choric song with an odd hunching gesture of her shoulders. Then she stumbled, almost doubled over. When she started to vomit I rose in my chair—