2 a.m. at the Cat's Pajamas

by Marie-Helene Bertino

  9:00 A.M.

  Jack Francis Lorca, owner of The Cat’s Pajamas and what are considered two of the finest ears in jazz, sits hunched on the side of a cot, staring into the uncurious dark. So dark he cannot tell if his eyes are open.

  Someone is knocking on the front door, or it is a residual dream sound. Or a stray stone shaken loose from the rock of tinnitus. If it wants to be answered, Lorca thinks, it will have to come again.

  In the club’s heyday this room had been a kitchen, but now it is his office and makeshift sleeping quarters for his house musicians. Max Cubanista, bandleader, and Gray Gus Stein, drummer, slumber on the floor by his feet. Sonny Vega, rhythm guitarist and know-it-all, mumbles on his cot in the walk-in freezer. “Christian Street. Faster.” Even in dreams, correcting someone’s route across town.

  Lorca has been sleeping here, nubby peacoat rolled for a pillow, because his apartment without Louisa seems dead. He does not remember particulars but is certain the constellation of shot glasses arranged around the bodies of his friends played a role in the headache blooming at the base of his skull. He is a man of average height. Not an attractive man but striking. The three names tattooed on his right arm are Francis, Alexander, and Louisa. The guitar tattooed on his left arm is a D’Angelico Snakehead, the same one that hangs over the bar like a prized swordfish. Lorca wears the same clothes from the previous day: black jeans and T-shirt, a narrow belt of fatigued leather. He bats at the wall for the switch that controls the overhead lamp and braces against the light.

  The nucleus of the room is a round, battered table. Lorca’s father, Francis, the bar’s original owner, had bought it, still new, for what he called “family dinners,” and around it many jazz greats had eaten, played cards, out-fish-taled each other. Now the table is covered with parts from the model plane Gray Gus has been negotiating with for weeks, its inner workings propped on empty spools to dry.

  The oven is stuffed with old set lists. A glass vase filled with picks. Working and nonworking amps. A trash bag, marked, threateningly: Christmas. A woman’s pearl-colored coat hangs over the back of a chair, too nice for the room.

  It is almost a home.

  The knocking on the front door returns, insists.

  Lorca trudges shoeless through the darkened club. The rapping becomes more insistent. I hear you, he tells it. He hopes it is his son, Alex, who left without saying good-bye the night before. But instead a man in an unfortunate suit holds out a badge like an apology toward the peephole. His voice is close shaven. “Mr. Lorca?”

  “We don’t serve until noon,” Lorca says.

  The man shifts from foot to foot. “Hello?”

  Lorca releases the chain and jolts the door open, revealing the cop and a scene of flurries.

  “Is it snowing?” Lorca says to no one.

  The cop consults the sky. “Since dawn.”

  Lorca pulls a pack of cigarettes from his back pocket and shakes one out. “In here it’s always midnight. I guess you want to come in.” He motions for the man to pass him, then follows him into the club.

  The club has a carved-out quality like the caboose of a train. A knee-high step separates the room from the stage, where, amid an argument of cables, Gray Gus’s drum set sits, charred. The stools lining the long oak bar are draped in unlit twinkle lights. Lorca recalls a boozy, predawn idea of hanging them. He had overturned chairs on only half of the tables before quitting, he recalls, to get sick in the men’s bathroom. The Snakehead, a 1932 archtop with Waverly individual tuners, is the club’s beating heart. Lorca’s father said he won it in an arm-wrestling match but this was one of his fish tales. He had saved for years to buy it. Next to his picture a sign reads: All musicians are liars except you and me and I’m not so sure about you.

  The back of the cop’s collar is not fully folded over his tie. “I don’t want to take up much of your time,” he says.

  “Then don’t.” Lorca plugs the lights in. “Ta-da.” They go green then red then blue. “When’s the last time we had a white Christmas?”

  “It’s not likely to last.” The cop extends his hand and they shake. “Len Thomas.” He shows his badge again.

  Lorca nods toward it. “Jack Francis Lorca.”

  The cop pulls a notebook from his blazer pocket. “I’m afraid we’ve gotten several calls about your club. Over capacity, use of pyrotechnics, excessive smoke …”

  “Where’s Renaldo? Normally they send him.”

  Len scribbles into his notebook. “Renaldo got promoted.”

  “Good for him. Deserves it. Excessive smoke?” Lorca says. “The crème brûlée torch?”

  The cop points to Gus’s drums. The warped cymbals hang on blackened stands. A singed, licorice smell emanates from them.

  “He wanted to see if he every time he hit the cymbals, flames would explode,” Lorca says.

  “Did it work?”

  “Not like we thought it would,” Lorca admits.

  The cop reads from his notebook. “… Consistent refusal to abide by the city’s law of no smoking inside the premises.”

  Lorca stubs out his cigarette in one of the bar’s ashtrays. “I can’t get used to that law.”

  “It was passed in 2007.”

  “Has it been that long? We’re all getting so old.”

  “… Consistent refusal to stop serving alcohol at two A.M. I stopped in last night around three and saw fifty or so people cheering on a drummer dousing his drum set in lighter fluid.”

  “If you think about it,” Lorca says, “it’s funny.” The cop’s expression doesn’t budge. “I’ll tell Gus no more fires.”

  “That’s not all, Mr. Lorca. This property”—he points to the garbage bags, the stage—“is licensed as a bar, and a bar only. No one is legally allowed to use this property as a residence. How many people stay here every night, Mr. Lorca?”

  The shape of the cop’s visit and the potential price tag form in Lorca’s mind. For years Renaldo let them go on all of it. Being exposed as a residence would be thousands of dollars. As long as the boys stay sleeping in the back, he can bargain this cop down. He raises his hands as if guilty. “I’ve been crashing here,” he says. “My girlfriend and I have hit upon hard times.”

  The cop raises one eyebrow. “No one else?”

  Sonny emerges from the back room. His hastily tied robe reveals his pale, hairless chest. A lit cigarette hangs from his lips. His slippers make hard scuffling sounds. He mutely acknowledges Len as he passes. “We got any eggs? We’re out in the back.” He checks the bar’s fridge and straightens up, holding a carton of orange juice.

  Lorca says, “This is Len Thomas. He’s here because he’s gotten several calls about our club.” He turns to the cop. “This is Sonny Vega; he’s here because he has nowhere else to go.”

  “You look familiar,” Sonny says. “Who do we know?”

  “I doubt we have mutual friends.” The cop affects a cool lean but misses the bar with his elbow. He tries again while Sonny smokes and watches.

  “There’re only two kinds of people in this city,” Sonny says. “Those who know each other and those who haven’t figured out yet how they know each other.”

  “I’m from Boston,” the cop says.

  “Well, hell.” Sonny gives a look to Lorca: I tried.

  “Let’s talk this out,” Lorca says. “I’ll make eggs.”

  “Mr. Lorca, you’ve received seven visits from Officer Renaldo. The time for talking is over.” The cop flips the notebook shut and hands Lorca a citation the color of emergency cones. Lorca scans it to locate the total. “You’re kidding.”

  Sonny reads over his shoulder. “Holy shit.”

  “You have thirty days to pay,” the cop says, looking satisfied. “I’ll be coming every night to check that the city’s ordinances are being respected. Another infraction and it’s your bar.”

  Lorca follows as the cop strides through the vestibule, jolts open the front door, and turns. The flurries have lost their ambition, but the visit
seems to have emboldened him. “Play by the rules, Mr. Lorca, or it’s your bar.”

  Something about this man’s plumped-up face, the thought of pulling another T-shirt out of his duffel bag, the impending holiday, calcifies in Lorca. “Do you think this is fair?” he says. “Coming into a club with a list of infractions and a fee that, let’s be honest, there is very little chance I can come up with.”

  “It’s not my choice,” Len says.

  “It’s not your choice.”

  “Well, it’s not.”

  “I’m not asking that. I’m asking if you think it’s fair.”

  A truck karangs by. The cop waits for it to pass. “Mr. Lorca,” he stammers.

  “Call me Jack,” Lorca says. “Only my friends call me Lorca.”

  Len Thomas opens his mouth to speak, but Lorca shuts the door. Pain pauses him in the vestibule by the stack of phone books. Though he is only forty, some unkind rod is normally clanging against his wrists and knees. A woman in his inner ear canal holds a relentless, intimate C and he is always shaking his head to clear her.

  Lorca has never been a player but can tell even in recordings whether a guitarist is well rested or angry, where the piano is located in the studio. When he was a little boy, his father would choose a piano key at random, and Lorca would call out the note; correctly, every time. Charged by this special rite, his ears are virtuoso in shape. Well-formed lobes make lowercase j’s against his sideburns. Pert, stubborn tragus. When Lorca is engaged in listening, and he is always listening, his eyes and mouth harden and conspire toward his sharp nose, making him appear cruel.

  Sonny sits at the bar, staring at the citation. “Are we screwed?”

  Lorca’s hand fumbles on a lighter. It takes him three tries to get his cigarette lit. “I’ll call Uncle Ray for the money.”

  “You realize that’s illegal,” Sonny says, about the cigarette.

  “Everything is illegal.”

  “Where’s Renaldo when you need him?”

  Lorca holds the citation up to the light, as if it might be counterfeit. The impossible total. “Renaldo got promoted,” he says.

  “Good for him,” Sonny says. “Deserves it.”

  Lorca shakes his head. “Len Thomas from Boston.”

  “You know what they say.” Sonny pulls mournfully from the carton of orange juice. “Never trust a man with two first names.”

  10:00 A.M.

  Principal Randles halts, startling the height-ordered line that follows her.

  “Children,” she says. “You should want to do right by the Lord. When you pray you should feel overcome by a sense of purity and rightness. The equivalent of lighting a white candle in a white room.” She lights an invisible candle with an invisible match. “Except …” She blows out the invisible match. “You are the white room and what’s inside you is the white candle.”

  It is the same speech she made before Madeleine’s class received the sacrament of Reconciliation, unburdening themselves of every goddamn, and Confirmation, when the Holy Spirit said, Oh there you are, I see you. Madeleine did not feel like a white room during either of those sacraments but assumes she will when it’s time for the next one, Matrimony. Madeleine is double-bolt positive that every married couple is happy.

  Principal Randles throws open the door to the church and ushers the children into pews to practice being white rooms. Madeleine flattens her back against the hard wood and waits to be overcome by light. Here it comes, she thinks. But it is a yawn. She smells the pine scent of mahogany cleaner. Her thoughts return to singing. Hit, hold, vibrato. She forgets to want to be a white room.

  Sunshine swells into the church. How the stained-glass windows screw with it, cutting the light into shapes and hurling them around! An orange triangle on the donations box. Lavender octagons on an altar boy’s vestments. Madeleine doesn’t understand decimals but she knows red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple make a rainbow.

  Around her, a group Amen. She has missed a prayer. Everyone crosses themselves. Everyone glances around for what now. “And now,” Father Gary announces, “Clare Kelly will lead us in the responsorial song.”

  Miss Greene pads onto the altar’s carpet and whispers into Father Gary’s ear. He forgets the microphone. “Is she dead?” Frantic explaining. “Madeleine Altimari?” He pronounces her last name as if somewhere there is another, more innocuous Madeleine.

  The fifth grade’s morning mass daze is punctured by this development. They turn shocked faces to Madeleine, who unceremoniously climbs over them to reach the aisle.

  Principal Randles goose-steps onto the altar. She and Miss Greene hold a muted, brief debate. Madeleine freezes in the aisle. The children squirm in their pews. The microphone catches a few words. “Assembly … unpleasant.”

  The knot of teacher/​principal/​priest untangles, leaving Father Gary to announce the call into the microphone: Madeleine Altimari.

  In her relief, Madeleine forgets to go slow, kneel, genuflect, bow at the cross, or acknowledge the priest. She races to the microphone, narrowly avoiding Miss Greene, who attempts to give her a good-luck pat. The organist plays a plucky intro. Madeleine makes it to the podium. Here I go, Mama. She plants her child size twelves into the altar’s plush. Every child in every pew leans forward. The organist winds down the intro. Madeline opens her mouth to sing.

  “Here I am!” Clare Kelly step-crutches up the aisle, her arm tucked into a sling and her parents trailing. “I can sing!” she says, reaching the front. The organist stops playing. Madeleine’s mouth, poised in an angelic O, shuts.

  “A miracle!” Principal Randles jumps from her seat, applauding. Sarina protests. The principal asks, will Miss Greene join her in the back hall near the statue and the vigil candles? There she explains that while it was remarkable, exemplary even, worthy of Student of the Week if that ribbon hadn’t already been written out to Clare, that Madeleine was willing to step in at the last minute, when they thought Clare would be an unintelligible mess for days, but Clare is here, telligible, with her parents, the same parents who last year financed the building of this back hall, that statue, and these vigil candles. “It’s the daughter of all this.” She gestures around the hall. “Versus the daughter of a prostitute.”

  Sarina removes her glasses. Two red stars appear on her cheeks. “Madeleine’s mother was not a prostitute.”

  “Dancer,” Principal Randles says.

  “Not the same,” Sarina says.

  “It’s settled!” Principal Randles throws up her hands and returns to the Kellys with bright eyes.

  Sarina scans the aisle for Madeleine, but the girl has already returned to her pew and is watching Clare step-crutch onto the altar toward the microphone.

  Sarina takes her place next to her grade partner. “Isn’t she an angel?” the woman says, meaning Clare.

  The organist restarts the intro. Clare opens her mouth to sing.

  10:30 A.M.

  The first thing Ray asks when he answers the phone is whether the roof he installed in 1985 is intact. When Lorca assures him it is, Ray delivers a sermon on The Importance of a Sturdy Roof. “… The plumbing will rot, the floors will join them, but I used the best materials money could buy on that roof.” Lorca listens, sitting amid the wreckage of Gus’s model plane. Flaps, wheels, the fuselage, emergency doors. Ray runs a construction company in Reading that employs wanderers and harmless crooks. “I loved your father a lot. Jackie?” Ray interrupts himself. “How much trouble are you in?”

  “Am I that obvious?” Lorca says.

  Lorca hears laughing, then the unmistakable sound of nose spray. “Only one reason to call Reading.”

  Lorca tells him about the citation and asks for the money.

  “Can’t do it, buddy,” Ray says. “They slaughtered me.”

  Blood evacuates Lorca’s ears and cheeks. He doesn’t know who “they” are. They could be the government, the union, the clattering aunts on Ray’s wife’s side who take dazed, hospitalizing falls twice a yea
r.

  “I always thought it’d be Max who’d run the club into the ground,” Ray says. “Always disappearing. Showing up with this girl or that.”

  “That would have been what they call a safe bet,” Lorca says.

  “At least you don’t have to spray a boatload of chemicals up your nose every second,” Ray says. “Be thankful for your health. And Alex and Louisa. You still smoking?”

  Lorca says he is.

  “Maybe quit. Do you pray?”

  “I don’t,” Lorca says.

  “Maybe start.” More coughing. This time Ray is laughing. “Why did the cop come today?” he says. “As opposed to last week, or never?”

  Lorca rolls a plane wheel over the table. “Last night,” he says. “We set fire to Gus’s drum set and someone called the cops.”

  The purgatory of his uncle’s silence follows. “Why would you do something like set fire to a drum set?”

  Lorca wants to bring his fist down in the middle of the table and send the plane’s pieces hurtling into the dirty walls. The tail is separate from the body. The cockpit arranged at an awkward angle to dry. Lorca has asked Gus several times to get rid of the plane. He gets nervous around delicate things.

  “Louisa left,” Lorca says. “I wanted to see something”—he rests his forehead against the hard wood of the table—“bright.”

  11:10 A.M.

  The twenty-four children of Miss Greene’s art class wear twenty-four Santa hats and color twenty-four pictures of Santa. Each child’s name is spelled in glitter on the cotton brim of his or her hat. The classroom smells like fish and damp lunches.

  Because the seats are arranged by height order and because when it comes to height Madeleine is nothing special, she sits in the third row, first desk, coloring and giving herself pep talks. Her mother taught her not to dwell so Madeleine cheers herself by replaying the moment in the third chorus of “Here I am, Lord,” when Clare squeaked on the word I.