The Lola Quartet

by Emily St. John Mandel

  De v a l w a s still gone when Jack woke in the morning. He ate alone in the cafeteria again and wandered the campus without finding anyone to talk to, but Bernadette called him in the late afternoon. "It's me," she said, as if they'd ever spoken on the phone before, and then added, "Bernadette."

  "The Summertime girl," he said, and caught himself wondering how she'd obtained his number.

  She giggled. "You must think I'm incredibly morbid," she said. "But listen, I'm having a party tonight."

  "A party? Seriously? Is there anyone left on campus?"

  "That's why I'm having it," she said. "We should all stick together. It's cold."

  It was nice to think of not being alone for another long evening, so when night fell he put on a clean shirt and left the dorm. It was an unusually cold night, the coldest he'd ever seen. There was a light frost and the grass sparkled underfoot. Jack wasn't sure that he'd encountered frost outside a freezer before. He knew what it was but couldn't stop staring at it, stooped down once to touch it. The sparkling turned to cold water on his fingertips. Jack stood for a moment in the middle of the Commons, looking up at the stars. He'd meant to practice today but hadn't. It had been two weeks since he'd played the piano and nothing about the thought of sitting down at a keyboard was appealing to him. He closed his eyes for a moment. He had a feeling of slippage, of pieces coming apart around him. He opened his eyes quickly and he was still on the Commons, the air cold on his face. There was movement around one of the girls' dormitory buildings at the far end of campus, an impression of voices, he hurried on and in a few minutes he was safely among other people, fifteen or twenty students in the suite where Bernadette and her roommates lived. He hadn't thought there were this many people on campus.

  "You came!" Bernadette said. She was flushed and lovely, already a little drunk, wearing a miniskirt that he couldn't help but notice was short even by miniskirt standards. "I'm so glad you're here."

  "I'm glad I'm here too," he said. "What's this we're listening to?" She was pressing a plastic cup of beer into his hands.

  "The Klezmatics," she said. "I don't love them, except this one song. Can you hear it? It's klezmer, but it's also jazz."

  "I don't know that much about klezmer," he said. It was nice to be in a conversation with someone instead of alone in the dorm room, and he didn't want the moment to end. She had hair that caught the light, dark curls falling over her shoulders.

  "Then stay a while and keep listening," Bernadette said. "Another drink?"

  She floated away from him. He didn't know anyone else here but they all seemed to know each other. Jack stayed as long as possible in the warmth and the brightness, trying to find a conversation, until sometime near midnight he glanced across the room and Bernadette was kissing someone else, a cellist whose name he could never remember. He drifted outside and over the sparkling grass to Lewins Hall, drunk, the stars wheeling. He hoped Deval might be back from wherever he'd gone, but the room was dark and still. He slept with his bedside lamp on, a t-shirt thrown over it to blunt the light, and woke hungover to the smell of scorched fabric.

  F o u r d a y s later Deval came into the room one morning while Jack was getting dressed, waved instead of saying hello, lay down on top of his bed, and closed his eyes.

  " Where were you?"

  "I drove her to Virginia," Deval said. "Then I hung around for a few days."

  " Where in Virginia?"

  "Somewhere in the middle. Place called Carrollsburg." He kicked off his shoes. "Have you ever seen her tattoo?" He gestured vaguely at his shoulder without sitting up.

  "I could've taken her."

  "It was a spur-of-the-moment thing. You were asleep."

  "So you saw where she's living?"

  "It's an okay place," Deval said. " Quiet little house in a small town. Nowhere anyone would look for her. She's got the whole basement to herself. I think it'll be okay."

  "You know what's weird? The last time I saw her, she had all this long dark hair, and now it's short and blond. It's like she was in disguise."

  "Yeah, about that." Deval sat up. "She's got a complicated life," he said. "She asked me to tell you— well, to ask you, I guess— look, she doesn't want you to tell anyone you saw her. Seriously, no one. It's really important, okay?"

  "Okay."

  "When I say important, I mean this is like the most important thing anyone's ever going to ask of you."

  "Okay, I get it. I won't tell anyone."

  "Thanks." Deval lay back down on his bed.

  Dj a n g o R e i n h a r d t was a prodigy at thirteen playing the cafés of Paris. A burn victim at eighteen when he came home from a gig and knocked over a candle in the caravan where he lived with his young wife. The materials for the celluloid-and-paper flowers she made to supplement their income were highly flammable, and the caravan flashed quickly into flame. A small miracle at twenty, when he emerged from a long convalescence after the fire that ruined half his left hand and revealed an improbable new technique: he worked the frets with two fingers and made his own substitutions for the standard major and minor chords. The miracle was that he played better after the fire than before. He carried the fire with him through all the days of his life, in his two curled fingers and in the way he used a match to hold the bridge of his battered guitar up to the proper height.

  "A match," Deval said. "Of all the things he could have used."

  Deval's mother had given him a biography of Django Reinhardt as a high school graduation present, and he liked to read his favorite sections aloud in the dorm room at night. Jack appreciated the distraction.

  Django Reinhardt was always good, but he was at his best with Stéphane Grappelli. They met as members of a fourteen-piece orchestra that played uninspired music for tea dances, Grappelli on violin and Reinhardt on guitar, until one day Grappelli broke a string. He played a few notes of a jazz melody, trying to get his violin in tune, and Reinhardt echoed him on guitar. A bass player and a rhythm guitarist jumped in, and this was the beginning of the Quintette du Hot Club de France. They played together with enormous success. Reinhardt hadn't spent much time in school as a child; Grappelli taught him how to read. Reinhardt went on a shaky American tour without him, dabbling in electric, traveling unsteadily with unfamiliar guitars, but only when he returned to Grappelli did he sound like himself again.

  "Why are you telling me so much about Grappelli?" Jack asked. "I thought you wanted to be Reinhardt."

  "Because this is what I keep wondering." Deval was sitting up on his bed, bright-eyed in the lamplight. The Quintette du Hot Club de France playing on his stereo, the underwater sound of old recordings. "I can play the guitar and maybe I'll be really good someday, Jack, but who will be there with me? Who will be my Grappelli?"

  De c e m b e r s h i f t e d into a colorless January. Jack didn't want to be at music school, he knew he was taking too many pills, he knew the little baby with the wisp of dark hair was probably Gavin's and he couldn't imagine why he wasn't supposed to tell anyone about it, but Deval had repeated three or four times that Jack should tell no one he'd seen Anna or the child. He hinted that Anna was in some kind of trouble. He made it sound as though lives were at stake, but still he managed to appear perfectly serene as he moved through his days. Skipping half his classes, spending hours in the practice rooms, reading about gypsy jazz and listening to scratchy recordings of the Quintette du Hot Club de France in the evenings. He was making long phone calls to Virginia at night.

  "I can't tell you how much I envy you," Jack told him once, near the end, when they'd walked down the hill into town to get drunk. It was almost two a.m. Anna had been gone for three or four weeks. Jack and Liam were slumped in a booth in the back corner of a half-deserted Irish bar they'd discovered where the beer was cheap and no one cared what they put on the jukebox, and Jack had been happy earlier but now he was sinking into the morose kind of drunk that lends itself to regrettable statements.

  "Yeah, I can see why," Deval said. "I'm in love
with an underage girl who lives in hiding in a different state with a fucking baby, school bores me half to death but my mother will kill me if I don't get a degree, and I've got a class in six hours. What's not to envy?"

  "You've got the music," Jack said. The idea of having the music or not having the music was something he'd never had an easy time explaining but Deval smiled, Deval seemed to understand, and Jack felt such gratitude at being understood in that moment that he let Deval choose the next three songs on the jukebox.

  At t h e beginning of February, Jack left Lewins Hall en route to the practice rooms and a man he didn't recognize fell into step beside him.

  "Jack, right?"

  "Yes?"

  The man was in his twenties, blond, with pale eyes and a ring through his eyebrow. He was dressed in a way that seemed calculatedly forgettable— a gray sweatshirt, black shoes, jeans— but any chance of anonymity was ruined by his tattoo: an extravagantly detailed goldfish on the side of his neck, brilliant orange. Jack found it hard to look away. He hated needles. Tattoos made him queasy. His hand drifted to his own neck in sympathy.

  "You seen Anna around?"

  Jack stopped walking, so the man stopped walking too. "Anna . . . ?"

  "Anna Montgomery, Jack. Anna from Florida. The girl with the baby." He was standing a little too close. Jack could smell his aftershave. There was nothing friendly in the man's blue-eyed stare. "The girl who visited you last month," he said.

  "I heard she was in Utah."

  "Oh, she was," the man said brightly. "She was in Utah, Jack, but that was before she came here. Do you mind telling me where she is? I really need to talk to her about something important."

  "How do you know my name?"

  "Where's Anna?"

  "Look, I haven't seen her in almost a year. I knew her back in high school," Jack said.

  "Right," the man said. "Back in Florida. You're both from Sebastian, aren't you?"

  "Yes."

  "And your family still lives there, right?"

  Jack felt as if he'd brushed up against the edge of something cold, or as if a curtain had been pulled back for an instant and he'd glimpsed a flash of darkness and moving gears. He'd never been threatened before. He didn't know what to do. He stood blinking in the sunlight with the life of the campus continuing all around him, voices and laughter, the man's calm gaze, and his voice was unsteady when he could finally bring himself to speak. "What do you want?"

  "I want Anna Montgomery," the man said. "But if you don't know where she is, I could go ask your family. You've got a little sister still in high school in Florida, right?"

  "What? I . . ." There was no way to finish this sentence, so Jack didn't.

  "Bridget," he said. "That's your little sister's name, isn't it?"

  Jack was frozen.

  " Maybe I'll go down there and talk to her," the man said. "I mean, who knows, maybe she'd know where Anna is. You know how these high school girls all talk about each other."

  "I don't—"

  "I can't say I'll be in a great mood when I get down there," the man said. "Do you know, I was just there? Trying to track down Anna's dropout sister, for almost a week. And it's not like it's all that easy for me to leave town for long periods, in my line of work."

  Jack was afraid to ask what this line of work might be.

  "So I think by the time I find Bridget," the man said, "I'll probably already be angry. Just for having to go back to Florida again."

  "Anna went to Virginia." Jack heard his own voice and wanted to pull the words back through the air.

  " Where in Virginia?"

  "I don't know," Jack said, "she just said she was going to Virginia and that was it. I heard it was a small town but I don't know which one. That's all I know."

  "The problem is, Jack," the man said, "Virginia's such a big place. Last thing I want to do is drive back down to Florida but it'd almost be worth my time to go back down there, talk to your sister, see if maybe she knows more than you do. Who knows, Jack, maybe Anna and Bridget talk to each other sometimes."

  "They don't talk to each other. They don't know each other at all."

  "I'll ask Bridget myself. Thanks anyway, Jack, I'll be seeing you."

  "Carrollsburg," Jack said.

  "Carrollsburg?" The man was smiling. "Now we're getting somewhere, Jack. You have an address for me?"

  "I don't. I really don't. That's all I know."

  "You sure, now? You don't think maybe I should ask Bridget, just in case?"

  "I don't know more than that. Bridget doesn't know anything. She doesn't know anything."

  "Well, thank you very much, Jack," the man said pleasantly. "You just saved me another trip to Florida."

  He turned away. Jack's heart was pounding and he wanted to throw up on the grass. On his way to the building with the practice rooms it occurred to him that he should alert campus security, but when he looked back the man was nowhere to be seen, and what would he say anyway? A few weeks ago my roommate and I snuck a girl into our room and let her stay overnight in violation of the rules, and, oh yeah, she also had a baby with her, and now some guy wants to know . . . He needed to talk to Deval. He stepped through the doors into the cool shadows of Armstrong Hall and scanned the last few pages of the practice room sign-in book. L. Deval, room 17. He glanced over his shoulder, but through the glass doors behind him he saw only green grass and benignly milling students. The blond man was long gone.

  Deval didn't look up when Jack opened the door to 17. He was playing in a style that he'd begun to adopt recently. It was jazz, but glissando shivers of gypsy melodies kept coming through. The effect was uneven.

  "Deval," Jack said.

  "There's no piano in this one," Deval said, without looking up.

  "Please," Jack said. Deval stopped playing. "Some guy just asked me where Anna is."

  "What?" Deval set his guitar on the chair beside him, which left nowhere for Jack to sit, so he stood uncomfortably by the door like a kid in the principal's office.

  "He came up to me while I was walking, said he knew she'd been here. He knew she'd gone to Virginia—"

  "Did you tell him she'd gone to Virginia?"

  "Of course not," Jack said. "I told him to get lost." He was shivering. "He was menacing, Liam. He threatened my sister. He had this look about him, this—"

  "Yeah, some people aren't nice," Deval said. "Don't get hysterical. What exactly did he say?"

  "He said he knew she'd been here after she was in Utah. He asked me where she was. What did she do in Utah, Liam?"

  "She stole money from a meth dealer," Deval said. He was putting his guitar back in its case. "Listen, I'm going to go get her."

  "You're leaving now? In the middle of the semester?"

  "She doesn't drive. I'll call the dean's office from the road and tell them I've got a family emergency or something. Don't tell anything to anyone."

  Deval didn't go back to the residence hall. He left the practice room and walked quickly to his car, threw his guitar in the backseat and drove away.

  J a c k w a s thinking about a movie he'd seen once. He couldn't remember what it had been called, but it was set in the eighteenth century and there was a boat, and a sailor who'd been a disappointment to everyone had jumped overboard with a cannonball in his arms. When he closed his eyes Jack saw the sailor descending, pale in dark water with a cloud of bubbles rising silver around him, the weight of the cannonball carrying him down to some other place. "The truth is," the captain had said at the sailor's funeral, "we don't all turn into the men we had hoped to become." Or words to that effect. Jack wasn't sure he was remembering it exactly.

  "It's true," Jack said to his reflection in a darkened window, in reply to the captain of the movie ship. "It's just the way it is." He had taken too many pills. It was four a.m. and Deval had been gone for a week. With every passing day he became more certain that Deval and Anna and the baby were dead. He knew he should call the police, but every day and every hour made the ca
ll less possible. The first question would be Why didn't you call sooner? and with each passing hour the question would be more pointed, and then what would he say? The truth is, Officer, I'm not the man I wanted to be. The truth is, I gave up a girl at the slightest threat and now everyone's in trouble and I think both Deval and the girl are probably dead by now and the fault's entirely mine and I've been thinking it might be better for everyone if I take this cannonball in my arms and leap into the ocean.

  Jack waited a week, then two, but Deval didn't return. At the beginning of the third week a postcard arrived.