2 a.m. at the Cat's Pajamas

by Marie-Helene Bertino

  Finally, everything is still. They gape at Madeleine, who bounces and claps in Mark’s arms. “Order a pizza?” Mark says finally.

  Corrine laughs. “What I wanted to begin with.”

  When Madeleine sings, everyone gets what they want.

  Almost everyone.

  Every morning Mark wakes up thinking Corrine is still alive. Every morning he finds her side of the bed empty and suffers the loss again.

  Madeleine has her mother’s formidable nose, the brown eyes that always seem on the verge of tears. Mark wants to love his daughter, but being around her makes him miss his wife more. Madeleine is only what is left. Mark glides a book underneath his sleeping daughter’s hand. History of Jazz, Volume Two. When she wakes, at least there will be something good waiting.

  11:05 P.M.

  Lorca palms his son’s shoulder. “Come outside with me and smoke a cigarette.”

  Alex blanches at his father’s touch. Laughter shivers through his friends. “I’m fine, Pop.”

  “Alex,” Lorca says.

  Aruna says she’ll come too, but Lorca stops her. “You will stay here in this bar while I go outside to speak with my son.” He leads Alex through the vestibule where well-dressed people fight their coats off. He rattles his pack, but Alex doesn’t want one. The Second Street Bridge is lit in green and red. Alex is taller than him but would be no match for a gust of wind.

  Lorca remembers what it’s like to be sixteen and feel bigger than the city. “You coming by on Christmas?”

  Alex doesn’t meet his father’s eyes. “Of course, Pop.”

  He has practiced this aloofness, but Lorca knows he cries at movies if an animal is injured. “I’ll cook. Roast chicken.”

  “Since when do you cook?” Alex says.

  “Since never.”

  “Will Louisa be there?”

  Lorca kicks at the grass snarling out of the sidewalk. “Louisa left me.”

  “She told me,” Alex says.

  In the doorway, one girl asks another if there’s a cover. “Beats me,” her friend says.

  “There’s no cover,” Lorca calls out.

  They stop, blondes in tweed coats, and glare at him.

  “I know you don’t like her,” Alex says. “But can I bring Aruna?”

  “It’s Christmas. Everyone’s invited.”

  “I keep forgetting it’s Christmas.”

  “You and me both.” Lorca smells the brine of the river. The swipe of his son’s cheap cologne. “A cop came by this morning and told us that unless we pay thousands of dollars the club will be closed.”

  “Sonny told me,” Alex says.

  Lorca sighs. “I guess he told everyone.”

  Alex stiffens at the word everyone. “All the same to me,” he says. “Not like I can play here anyway.”

  Lorca has again said the wrong thing, forcing up the wall between them. A pummeled feeling leans against him. In every apartment on every street in this city there are better fathers, but not one of them has a more gifted son. “How old are you?” he says.

  “Sixteen.”

  “How old?”

  Alex spits. “Sixteen, Pop. I get it. I’m too young.”

  “Alex.” Lorca’s gaze is even. “Someone might ask how old you are tonight and if they do, what do you say?”

  Alex swallows hard. “Twenty-four.” If he celebrates, his father will change his mind. He innately knows his father’s moods and tendencies the way you know on a flight, even with your eyes closed, that a plane is banking. So he races to the door. His hand slips on the handle because his body won’t let him go as fast as he wants.

  His father calls his name.

  Alex turns back to the man smoking on the sidewalk. Please don’t take this away from me. People jostle by while he hangs in the doorway, waiting for his father to speak.

  “Don’t get cocky,” Lorca says. “I’d go with twenty-one.”

  Alex vanishes into the club, leaving his father alone on the street.

  11:10 P.M.

  Ben orders two whiskeys and two Churchills and pats his legs dry with bar napkins. Sarina makes flimsy promises to herself in the ladies’ room mirror. She will have one drink, total. Two. She will have two drinks and the third will be water. She will ask about Annie. She will not mention Annie. She will not cross her legs for effect. She will absolutely cross her legs every five seconds. She will not, under any circumstances, call anything “transcendent.” She will keep her ever-loving shit together. Even if he touches her cheek. Which he has already done three times. Why does he touch her cheek so much? Is he someone who touches people’s cheeks or is it her cheek specifically? She touches her cheek. Not bad.

  Here stands Sarina in the mirror of a cigar bar, reminding herself that there is no color skirt she can wear that would make Ben single. There is no way she can fix her hair, no perfume on earth, no story amusing enough. Even if she wishes in this mirror for an hour, this night will end with a good-bye and a bowl of ice cream with cherries. She is obvious and see-through and a joke. She will never leave this bathroom. He’ll be confused initially but then will return to his life. She will live here, teach via telephone, knit in the evenings. They will say, Remember that night Georgie had a dinner party and Sarina decided to live in the bathroom? She will die here, next to this decorative toilet paper decanter and that vintage cat poster. People will say, they will say, people will say.

  A jiggling sound. A stranger tries the door.

  Sarina checks her watch.

  11:11 P.M.

  Madeleine sings into a pale silver microphone, her favorite instrument the stand-up bass running like a low-grade fever in and out of the rooms of her dreams.

  In the back room of The Cat’s Pajamas, Alex suits up. He wants his father to hear him and know he can play. Not only hear him, but hear him.

  “No.” John McCormick halts his little sister, who was going for the door again.

  Jill returns to her chair. She stabs at her wooden duck with a paintbrush filled with Winter Grain Green. It is impossible to concentrate on her mallard when her parents are fighting. Her other brother, Norman, paints the belly of his Northern Pintail with Stone Cottage Gray. John paints his duck with John-like caution. He pauses between applications to consider the ruckus in the other room, or to give a gentle no to his sister, who wants to go in and soothe. But then they’d get in trouble for not being in bed, or worse.

  On the other side of the door, their parents use words like whore and dickhead.

  “Do you think my duck is sad?” Jill says.

  “North American mallards,” John pretends to read, “are among the world’s happiest ducks. When winter comes, they fly in happy families to Latin America.”

  Jill readjusts her glasses. She considers her duck with this new information. Steve, she’s named him. “Steve?” she tests.

  The unmistakable sound of a slap makes even John place his brush down on the palette. “Don’t go in there,” he says, before Jill even leaves her chair.

  In the back bedroom of her family’s row home, Clare Kelly dozes on her chaise lounge, busted leg propped on a pillow, dreaming of GLORY and THIGH GAPS.

  Louisa Vicino heats popcorn on her brother’s stovetop. She catches sight of herself in the kitchen window, so serious, shaking kernels in the pan. She gives herself a shimmy. Laughs. Gives herself another shimmy. Unfurls one arm, then the other. She can feel the snakes’ smooth, pearlized skins, their buttery breaths on her neck, the pleasant squeeze as they wind around her belly.

  Her brother calls from the other room. “How’s that popcorn coming?”

  Louisa goes into a split on the kitchen’s unforgiving floor. Hand flourishes. One last shimmy. Big finish.

  Principal Randles wants a nightcap with the tax attorney. Dinner concludes over two modest pieces of mochi. He slips a credit card into the bill. “Would you like to …”

  “I would love to,” she says.

  He is noticeably relieved. “I know just the place.”


  In the deep moss of cigar smoke, Sarina reglosses her lips and wishes for strength. She switches off the light and closes the door. Ben is where she left him, only now a man in a gray suit is pumping his hand like an oil rig, a man who, Sarina realizes with pain when he pivots to greet her, is her ex-husband, Marcos.

  Midnight

  Marcos is a man whose cologne precedes him. He runs a successful hedge fund in Connecticut and owns homes on two different beaches in two different countries. Ben had been reading the Sunshine book when Marcos descended upon him. Ben hasn’t seen Sarina’s overly enthusiastic ex-husband in years and has spent exactly no time weeping over it.

  “What luck running into you,” Marcos says. “I’m on my way to a truly special place.”

  Because he knows Marcos can’t, Ben says, “Stay for a drink.”

  Sarina approaches and does not reclaim her stool. Ben has asked her ex-husband to join them which means he does not want to be alone with her. Perhaps he has been hoping for an interruption or planning a demure exit. She hates the moody figure of this night.

  “Still doing pro bono work?” Marcos asks Ben. “Pro bono work is so …”

  “… noble,” Sarina finishes.

  Marcos chucks her shoulder. “Still finishing my sentences, hon.”

  Ben says, “I am still doing pro bono work.”

  “Too bad.” Marcos orders a seven and seven, hands the bartender a twenty, and tells him to keep the change.

  Ben and Sarina sip their drinks.

  “Tell me about this special place,” Sarina says.

  “Truly special,” Ben says.

  “It’s a club with a house band to beat the …”

  “Band?” Ben offers.

  “Oho!” says Marcos.

  “Now I’m finishing your sentences.” Ben downs his drink in a succinct gulp. “We should get married.”

  Marcos is regularly trailed by the feeling he is being taunted in a way he cannot articulate. He is aware of being intellectually late to every party with pissants like Ben Allen lurking in the periphery, ready to remind him. It doesn’t bother Marcos. He has five walk-in closets and a young girlfriend who thinks it’s cute to call him Daddy. He enjoys the fact that men like Ben never seem to be able to meet his gaze.

  “Where is the club?” Sarina says.

  “Fishtown.” He cradles the back of an invisible partner. “Dancing.”

  “Dancing.” Sarina looks wistful. “But I wake up early to paint.”

  “How’s it coming?” Marcos says.

  “It’s coming.”

  “What are you painting these days?” Ben says. “Still lifes?”

  “Not exactly,” Marcos says. His and Sarina’s shared smile creates a box on the outside of which Ben simpers into his Churchill.

  “What’s this?” Marcos points to the book.

  “A dragon,” Sarina says. “… Who joins the circus.” She holds up a picture of Sunshine selling cotton candy. “See?”

  Ben, grateful for the chance to flaunt his knowledge, says, “He also has a friend who is a talking peanut named Sky.”

  “This is new information!” she says.

  “I read it while you were in the bathroom.”

  Marcos looks from Sarina to Ben. Sarina to Ben. What is this excitement for children’s ephemera, this allusion to shared time?

  Sarina and Marcos had married after a brief, aggressive courtship. He was brawny, cocksure. She was elegant, kooky. He liked the shape they made at parties. As Sarina spent more and more hours in her studio, the brevity of the courting time occurred and reoccurred to Marcos. They were incompatible but he liked her, then and now, very much. Even during the divorce proceedings, she was kind. What is she doing here with this failed lawyer? Marcos recalls Ben’s pale wife, who had a propensity for poly blends. This is a dangerous situation for Sarina, but Marcos’s concern for his ex has a time limit. A nubile redhead waits for him at the other end of the city.

  “The Cat’s Pajamas,” he says. “… Is the name of the club … and I must go.” He registers Sarina’s relief. “… Miles to go before I sleep.”

  “Whitman,” Ben says.

  Marcos throws a few dollars on the bar. “Frost.”

  Ben frowns. “I think it’s Whitman.”

  “Well, it’s Frost.”

  “Don’t mess with him on American poetry,” Sarina says. Marcos beams at her and for a moment, they are still married. Then a redheaded moment takes its place.

  “Walk me out,” Marcos tells her, shaking hands with Ben. He knows she won’t want to, but she will. These are the residual obligations of having been married to someone.

  Marcos curses when they reach the street. “I hate this weather.” He whistles for a cab. “Let’s go to Mexico.”

  “Can you have me back by Christmas?” Sarina says.

  “Skip it,” he says. “What are you planning to do for it anyway?”

  “My sister’s. Her kids. Baked ziti, I guess. Dry chicken.”

  “The sister.” Marcos’s tone is playful. “She single yet?”

  A cab brakes in front of them. “Good-bye, Marcos,” she says.

  “What are you doing in there?” He jerks his chin to the bar.

  “Having a drink with a friend.”

  “Is that what you call it?” Marcos gets into the cab and closes the door. The window descends. “Be careful, girl.”

  Sarina watches the cab leave. She spent most of their two-year marriage in a bathing suit. He could spend an hour kissing her knees. He was his own kind of gentleman. When they were married he would never have been on a two-hour walk with someone else when she was at home sick.

  Marcos’s knife-through-butter certainty has lifted the evening’s scrim. She can no longer act like this is a meaningless walk. She will say good-bye to Ben. It will not be a sorry thing.

  As she walks toward him at the bar, Sarina memorizes him. Lanky legs hiked up on the stool as if ready to spring.

  His rueful smile stops her. “Annie and I have separated.”

  Greg Michaelman is getting married in the morning! He and his friends have been staked at a booth in the cigar bar for hours drinking scotch! Greg has already fielded three phone calls from his fiancée, who is upset for reasons he cannot understand! One of his boys decides they need a picture immediately and produces a camera! But who will take it!

  Ask her, someone says, and points to the only girl in the bar, a short-haired stick figure sitting with some jag. They are in conversation but there is no conversation more important than taking a picture of Greg Michaelman and his boys!

  “Take my picture!” Greg Michaelman yells. “I’m getting married tomorrow.”

  The girl does not hear, so Greg yells again. She turns, pale with anger. Greg feels the scotch tingle darkly in his throat.

  “What is it?” she says.

  One of his buddies holds up a camera. “He’s getting married tomorrow. Take our picture!”

  She accepts the camera. Up close, she is cuter than Greg Michaelman thought.

  “You.” She points to Rodriguez. “Scootch in. Act like you like each other.”

  Greg feels the bodies of his friends on either side of him. He has been through school and mud with these boys. There is no town better than his college town, so he never strayed. He has eaten breakfast at all of their kitchen counters. He has watched countless games on countless televisions. He has not always been kind. He didn’t show up for Ollie’s dad’s funeral and he ignored Rodriguez’s phone calls after he was laid off. He hasn’t exactly comforted Allison when she’s griped about her weight. He would like her to lose the handful of flesh that hangs over her underwear’s waistband. A flash. The girl takes the picture and Greg Michaelman is certain about one thing: he is going to make Allison Cady happy for the rest of her life.

  Sarina hands the camera back to the one with the open shirt, ignores his requests for her number as she walks away. One of them grabs her waist with a rough grip. “Take another on
e,” he commands. “In case that one’s not good.”

  “It’s fine,” she says. “I checked.”

  “Don’t be a bitch,” the groom says.

  Sarina takes the camera back. Obediently, they cozy next to each other on the leather couch. “Smile.” They oblige. “That’s all?” She frowns. “You don’t want to get closer? Get closer,” she barks. They titter. One of them grabs another’s breast, joking. “That’s it,” she says. “This guy has it.”

  More tittering. The groom puts his arm around the guys flanking him.

  “That’s nice,” Sarina says, “but why don’t you make out? You’re so close, you may as well. Tongue looks great in pictures. Take your shirts off.”

  Their grins fade. They exchange glances.

  Sarina keeps snapping pictures. “You cowards. Grab each other’s cocks and let’s go. Jerk each other off so this is worth my while. What I’m looking at is a bunch of worthless pussies and I wanna see cock.”

  Ben stands behind her. “You all right?” he says.

  The groomsmen jockey away from one another. “Aw, is that all you’ve got?” Sarina chucks the camera into the group. “Show’s over, I guess.” She says to Ben, “Shall we go?”

  “Sure,” Ben stammers.

  They confirm the buttons and zippers of their coats, replace their hats and gloves, and leave the bar. Cabs clog the street. A sharp honk. Sarina walks ahead.

  “You want to talk about that?” Ben says, trailing her.

  She blinks. “Talk about what?”

  12:10 A.M.

  Madeleine wakes, palms and armpits damp. For a moment she does not remember the events of the day. When she does she rolls over to burrow deeper into the blankets. Her forehead flattens against the spine of a book.

  History of Jazz, Volume Two.

  Madeleine clutches it to her chest. Her father! She touches each picture on the cover. A phalanx of saxes. Louis Armstrong, cheeks blazing. Billie Holiday, in the ecstasy before singing. Madeleine flips each page with the care of a scientist. Toward the back she finds the write-up on The Cat’s Pajamas with two (two!) pictures. She forces herself to read the entry before allowing herself a look at the pictures.