Rainey Royal (26 page)

“I know,” says Rainey. “I’ll miss it the rest of my life.”

Tina closes her fingers around the watch and inhales deeply, involuntarily, sighing on the exhale—almost a shudder, as if she had shot up from the bottom of a pool.

She feels Rainey watching her closely.

Rainey says softly, “Teen? I think you should get out of my father’s room.”

“Absolutely,” Tina says.

T
HE CLARINET HAD KEYS
that looked like sterling but weren’t and bits of cork inside where the parts met. It didn’t seem to Tina there should be cork in a musical instrument any more than there should be Styrofoam in a human body.

“Listen.” Howard had been lying on the bed with his head on her thigh, and after she struggled with the fingering for a while—irritated by the tiny vibrations the clarinet sent through her lower teeth—he sat up and took the instrument from her. He played something that was like a scale but short, fewer than eight notes. She thought it might be sharps on the way up, the music climbing a crooked ladder, and then flats on the way down, a kind of sad skidding. Howard could have handed her a tuba, and she would have followed his instructions if it meant sitting on his bed like this, looking at his upside-down face.

“You’re bored,” he said. “Don’t be bored. A scale isn’t always major notes. It can be minor, melodic minor, harmonic minor, chromatic—what you just heard.”

“I don’t know what I heard,” said Tina. “I don’t have an ear.”

“You’re right, you don’t,” said Howard, beaming at her. “If I told you the difference between this”—he put the clarinet to his mouth again and played a note— “and this”—he played virtually the same note—“was of the utmost urgency, would you believe me?”

“I guess,” said Tina guardedly. “I don’t know. They sound the same.”

He set the clarinet between them on his rumpled sheet and took her hand. Her nails were jagged and had peeling pink polish on them, and his were large and clean and shapely. Rainey kept them filed. “If I told you,” he said, rubbing her
forefinger and then her middle finger, “that the difference between this knucklebone and that knucklebone was of the utmost urgency, would you believe me?”

“Yes,” she said. “If you’re going to be a doctor, right?”

“It’s the same thing,” he said. “Notes and knucklebones.”

“I’ll still never be any good.”

“Then be disciplined.”

There was weather in his eyes, and in his beard. “I am disciplined,” she said. “I’m very disciplined. Can we go to bed now?”

“Ten more times,” said Howard. “Show me the fingering ten more times.”

He gave her that clarinet, a good one.
A gift should hurt
, he said. She lied and told Rainey it was a loaner. Rainey didn’t care what it was—she hurled it into a Dumpster.

Tina told Howard she’d been mugged. “I live in Spanish Harlem,” she said, and hated herself for it. Sick with herself, not with him—with the way, after she said
Spanish Harlem
, she let him kiss her again.

She remembers these things the day of Howard’s burial. The cemetery is in Queens: damp air clinging to their faces, tamped-down snow crunching underfoot. Today is just family: Flynn, Leah, Gordy, a brother of Howard’s and a cluster of older cousins, shivering in dark coats after the minister leaves. Tina pretends she is just at the interment of her best friend’s father.
None of this is for me
.

The big jazz funeral, the real thing, is in three weeks
at Saint John the Divine’s. Tina can’t take off twice. It’s killing her.

In her pocket she has a prayer card—one of her grandmother’s—to drop into Howard’s grave.

Rainey wears a vintage hat with a half veil across her face, and a thrift-store Victorian black blouse that Tina buttoned up the back for her that morning. She wears a floor-length black moiré skirt, another thrift-store find, that trails below her peacoat in the snow. Her hands are bare. “Here, babe,” says Tina. She takes off her own purple gloves.

“You look like an Edith Wharton novel,” says Leah, touching the high lacy collar of the blouse.

“I wasn’t in English that day.” Rainey leans into Flynn.

Tina watches Gordy look down at the head of the casket like a man who might jump in. The casket is black, so shiny she could almost lick it. She watches the relatives glancing toward their cars. She fingers the bent edge of her Saint Anthony card, and her head floats, as if the lining of her brain has been suctioned out. She is losing Howard to the ground, and she might be losing Rainey to Flynn. She doesn’t know what comfort to offer that Flynn isn’t already providing, his arm drawing Rainey in close.

“Why won’t you admit that I killed him?” Rainey says in a low voice.

Leah’s hand flutters to her mouth. Flynn pulls Rainey in tighter. Tina doesn’t flicker. She says, “Because you didn’t.” She has been telling this half-truth all week. She reaches out
and recalibrates Rainey’s veil. “Because he had a bad heart; because it was going to happen anyway.” She may never get to the next part—Listen, you ought to get tested. Something could set you off, too.

Leah peels her hand off her mouth, staring. After a moment she walks to the mound of dirt, pulls back the tarp, and turns to them holding a shovel. How did she know it was there, Tina thinks, and then, she’s going to bury him herself. Leah says, “Rainey?”

“You’ve lost it,” says Tina. “Put that away.”

“Sweetie?” says Rainey, peering at the shovel.

“I want—” says Leah. She seems to get stuck there. Everyone is looking at her now, this red-haired girl standing in a cemetery like she plans to move that whole pile of dirt wearing cute boots and a corduroy miniskirt. Gordy’s now inches from the edge of the grave. “I want—”

Tina’s tempted to wrestle her for the shovel.

“I want to buy a tapestry.” It comes out as one polysyllabic word. “Remember? You said my walls were too bare? I want one now.”

Gravestones rise in every direction away from them regular as the Green Stamps Tina’s grandmother used to paste into those books. Not far off a stone angel guards a crypt, and his plumage curves and dips in their direction.

“A tapestry,” says Rainey. She nods at the shovel. “What about
that
?”

Leah looks down at what she’s holding. “Right.” Tina sees her trembling, or shuddering, she isn’t sure which. “At a Jewish funeral, you’d take one shovel of dirt and …” She lifts her chin toward the grave. “For closure,” she says.

Rainey wraps her arms around herself. “That sounds unbearable.”

But Tina likes it. She thinks of her grandmother’s funeral, of Rainey hesitating and then bending to kiss the granite forehead.

“I think it sounds like you,” says Flynn. Tina stares at his gloved hand on Rainey’s shoulder and feels the pressure through her own coat. And it’s not just Flynn, she realizes. It’s every man who belongs to Rainey. She will always feel their hands on her.

“I can’t drop earth on my father,” says Rainey. Which surprises Tina. Because it does sound like Rainey to do the hard thing.
The heart thing
.

“I’ll go first,” says Tina.
He was mine, too
.

Rainey sniffs hard. “The hell you will,” she says. She takes the shovel from Leah, plunges it into the pile of dirt, and fights it out again. Standing above the grave, she shakes off Flynn’s protective hand and weaves slightly. She can’t seem to release the earth.

“I don’t think you’re allowed to do that,” says one of the Howard cousins, eyeing the shovel. She has a narrow chin with a kerchief tied under it, which satisfies Tina immensely.

“It’s our grave.” Tina bends back a corner of the card in
her pocket. Saint Anthony, patron saint of lost things, of lost clarinets. Tina’s head keeps floating as she works a fingernail along the edge of the prayer card. She wants to send something of herself into the grave. Howard took her teenage years, but he gave her so much. Do your scales, Howard had said. Music will teach you how to live.
Zelosamente
, zealously.
Appassionato
—she knew that one.
Acceso
, on fire.

Howard was an adult. That made it wrong. Tina knows that now. But things were different in the early seventies. Howard was menacingly cool. Tina could get high with him in his room, and he would unbutton her top so slowly that the floor tipped on its axis, and what they were doing would be almost normal, and soon it
was
normal.

Tina telegraphs to Rainey mentally.
I am standing beside you. Heart with you
. Rainey flashes her a look, tilts the shovel, and drops the earth into the grave. Hitting the casket, it rumbles. A sheen breaks out on Rainey’s forehead. She looks stricken, Tina thinks.

Tina closes her hands around the shovel. She’s not being solicitous. She wants a turn. Rainey pulls it away. She teeters to the mound of earth on her high heels, fills the blade, turns back, and drops more earth into the grave.

Intervals, Howard had called them: distances between the notes. Some intervals, he said, are so small the human ear cannot detect them. What is the interval, Tina wants to know, between staying silent and telling the truth?

“Rain,” says Tina, as Rainey goes back for thirds, like she
has a hunger for it. Rainey ignores her and fills the shovel a fourth time, a fifth, making a fight of it. She breaks into a sweat. Her eyes fill. This might be bad for you, Tina thinks, exertion and despair. What is her obligation? She wants to protect Rainey, and she wants to let Rainey bury her father, and she wants her own turn at the grave. She wants to tell Rainey: Take it easy, babe—you might have your father’s heart. Howard’s beautiful, crazy, fucked-up heart.

In a slow-motion vision that comes to her, Rainey stops stabbing at the earth, turns, culls the long, stray strands of hair from her face and says, looking straight at Tina:
I know everything I need to know about my heart
.

The vision ends. Rainey hands Flynn her peacoat. Again and again she goes back to the dirt, and Tina shadows her, partly to offer some bodily comfort, partly to find the right moment to drop in her card so that Rainey will not spot it. Pebbles and clumps hit the casket like a drumbeat of rain. There’s rhythm, almost.

More like arrhythmia.

Words reverberating in her head:
I need to know about my heart
.

Tina palms the Saint Anthony card, readies it against her coat. “Gentlest of saints,” the prayer calls him. There was nothing gentle about Howard. Still. It’s the right card, and she is ready to let it drop.

She has every right.

Yet it is true that if Rainey sees it fluttering from her hand,
or glinting in the grave, it will be as if Tina stepped back into Howard’s room.

Tina follows Rainey as she circles the grave, laboring, creating an even tapestry of soil that slowly drapes the casket. She ignores Leah, who paces, watching. She ignores Gordy, standing apart as if he were an island with his grief; at home, his room is full of half-packed boxes. She hears distantly the cousins calling their farewells. After a while, the gleam of the casket is no longer visible.

Listen to every part of the music, Howard had said. Jazz has an inner voice, a melodic line between the melody and the bass.

First, define harm
.

Tina slips the Saint Anthony card back in her pocket. Howard’s watch is warm against her wrist.

She remembers Rainey saying in a moment of crisis,
I’m great—I have every single thing that I need
. And she wonders what, if anything, she will tell her closest friend.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My gratitude to the National Endowment for the Arts for the Fellowship that supported this work.

To Joy Harris and Rob Spillman: guardian angels.

To Jim Krusoe, for reading first. To Dean Baquet, for reading last. To Tara Ison and Claire Whitcomb for reading with rare generosity and skill. To Natalie Baszile, Michelle Brafman, Susan Coll, Pia Ehrhardt, David Groff, Anne Horowitz, Mary Otis and Janice Shapiro: extraordinary, gifted readers.

To Heather Sellers, who read multiple drafts of everything with love and wisdom. “Arrhythmia” is dedicated to her.