Wicked Stepmother

by Michael McDowell

  Cassandra gently pried her arm free. She found the dressing room, which the performers shared with the furnace for the entire building, but hearing several male voices raised in heated discussion behind its closed door, she went out to the bar. She took a stool next to a mirrored wall, and ordered a white wine.

  “They’re fabulous!” shouted the man sitting next to her, referring to the group then playing on the stage at the opposite end of the room.

  “Who are they?” Cassandra shouted back.

  “The Instant Spellers!”

  The Instant Spellers were in fact terrible, but Cassandra nursed her wine through the remainder of their set, and waited impatiently for the appearance of People Buying Things. During the break, Cassandra ordered her second glass of wine, and began sipping that.

  “Did you catch the first show?” asked a female voice behind her.

  Cassandra turned. Miriam Apple stood there, looking softer than she had appeared on the stage of Betsy’s Pit.

  “I just got here,” said Cassandra. “I . . . I had a hard day. A long day. I wanted to hear some music and relax.”

  Apple smiled wryly, and slid onto the recently vacated stool next to Cassandra. “This place isn’t for relaxation,” she pointed out. “And you shouldn’t have come.”

  “Why not?” asked Cassandra, surprised.

  “Because,” said Apple, “Rocco missed two cues the other night.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “Staring at you staring at him.”

  Cassandra blushed and smiled. “I didn’t think performers ever really saw who was in the audience.”

  “Cassandra,” said Apple, “I won’t go so far as to say that your tongue was draped over the edge of the stage, but . . .”

  “Maybe I’m becoming a fan.”

  “Not exactly. You may admire our work, but you’re not a fan.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “A fan shows up every time we play.” Apple nodded thanks to the bartender who had brought her a glass of Scotch and ice. She took a swallow and sighed. “I just wish fans paid a little more than the rent. I’d love to quit my job.” She waved a hand toward the stage, and then extended the motion to take in the bar as well. “My job downtown, I mean. This is my work. This is my life. The publishing job—that’s support, and that’s all it is.”

  Cassandra looked toward the stage where the guitarist and keyboard man were setting up the instruments. “What kind of jobs do Bert and Ian have?” she asked.

  “They both work in a record store, the one down on Boylston Street across from the library, and Rocco’s in the men’s department at Filene’s, third floor. You think he looks good in a leather vest and no shirt—you should see him in a gray wool suit. One night we’re going to come here straight from work. I’ll wear my little tailored pinstripe, and Rocco will be in gray wool with everything buttoned down, and we’ll do twenty-one verses of ‘Fuck Until You Faint.’ That’ll get ’em!”

  Cassandra was taken aback. “Is that one of your songs?”

  “No, that’s a song by Eva and the Perons. Heard of them?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t bother. They’re low-class druggies and they’re not serious about music. They just want to be musicians because they heard that musicians get a lot of free drugs. Once our agent booked us on a double bill with them. I was livid, and Rocco wanted to walk out, but unfortunately we needed the money. Five minutes before they came on, they decided to change their name. You know what they changed their name to? Surgical Penis Clinic. Then they came out and the lead guitarist got into a fistfight with a man sitting at the front table. She hit him with a mike base. He had to have three stitches. And we had to come on after all that.”

  “You lead an interesting life,” Cassandra remarked. “Jonathan never told me those kinds of things.”

  Apple shrugged. “Our lives are all work. We work at our nine-to-fives and then we play music all night. If we’re not in a club, we’re practicing. If we’re not in a club or practicing, then Rocco and I work on new material. I don’t know why Jonathan puts up with it. But he does. Our real problem is Lenny.”

  “Lenny?”

  “Our agent,” Apple explained with a frown. “He’s an idiot. He gets us play dates, but always on the same round: here, the Pits, Jack’s in Cambridge, and then some godawful place out in Saugus where nobody in the audience weighs less than three hundred pounds. Lenny has never understood the concept of upgrading. We take turns fighting with him. Tonight it was Ian and Bert’s turn.”

  “I think I heard them earlier,” said Cassandra, “when I went by the dressing room. Why don’t you change agents?”

  “Easier said than done. I’ve told you how busy we are—there’s not much time to go out looking. And do you have any idea how many bands there are in this town? Outside of New York, Boston probably has the best new music scene in the country. But there aren’t that many agents. And the ones there are, aren’t that good. The good ones all go to New York.”

  “I don’t understand why you don’t manage yourselves. What is Lenny doing that you and Rocco couldn’t do better?”

  Apple shook her head. “I could do it if I quit work, and Rocco could do it if he quit work—but it would take time to get established, to get things going. And who’d support us in the meantime? Lenny’s terrible, but at least he keeps us employed. The fact is, we’re in a bind.” She raised her finger for another drink, and while it was being poured, looked around the bar.

  “I don’t mean to pry or to give advice when it’s not wanted, but . . .”

  “Give it,” said Apple.

  “Why don’t you listen to what you’re saying?” said Cassandra earnestly. “You’re in a bind, but you also know what will get you out of that bind. If Lenny isn’t doing his job, then you ought to get rid of him. If you want another agent badly enough, you’ll find him and you’ll get him. And if you don’t, then you’ll manage it yourself. Right now you’re stagnating. You’re playing three dates a week—”

  “Sometimes four.”

  “—four dates a week, but it’s going in a circle. You said it yourself—no upgrading. You make your own luck, you know.”

  “I had no idea that working at a classy little magazine like Iphigenia could teach you so much about the real world.”

  Cassandra laughed. “You should hear me on the subject of unsolicited manuscripts!”

  “You’re right, though,” said Apple, nodding ruefully, “about all of this.”

  “I know I am,” said Cassandra. “Lately I’ve been thinking about becoming an agent myself—a literary agent, I mean. I’m not a good writer—I have the craft, but not the talent. I am a very good editor, but I don’t find editing all that exciting—you’re too hemmed in by authors. What I really love is contracts, terms, fighting for percentages and publication dates and all that sort of thing.”

  “You do all that at Iphigenia?”

  “I do a little of it. Enough to whet my appetite for more.”

  “ ‘Knowledge and Logic and a Heart of Ice,’ ” quoted Apple.

  “What’s that?”

  “A good agent,” replied Apple. “You know, we really should get rid of Lenny. Rocco and I get up in the morning, and we harp on Lenny. We meet for lunch and all we talk about is Lenny.”

  “That’s a lot of wasted energy,” said Cassandra.

  Apple finished her second drink, and put her glass down. “Time for me to go.” She looked around the bar. “I don’t know where Rocco is. He wanted to meet you the other night, but I told him there had been a death in the family, and that you were distracted and another night would be better.”

  “I wasn’t distracted.”

  “I know,” said Apple thoughtfully. “Neither was Jonathan. I don’t understand your family.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I understand Jonathan, of course, but by himself, not in combination with the rest of you. Oh, of course, I like all of you, but . . .”r />
  “But what?” asked Cassandra curiously.

  “I don’t know—I guess I was just brought up differently. We didn’t have money.”

  Cassandra laughed. “What difference does that make?”

  “All the difference in the world.” The voice came from behind them. Cassandra and Apple turned on their stools. Rocco stood between them. He wore a pale blue tuxedo shirt beneath a pair of tailored white farmer’s overalls, his hands pushed deep into the back pockets.

  “You’re late,” said Apple, sliding off the stool. “You’ve made this nice young woman wait. She had to talk to me for twenty minutes, and she hated every minute of it.” Apple introduced them quickly. She said, as she started to walk away, “We’re on in ten.” Then she stopped, looking at the stage. “Where are Bert and Ian?”

  “Screaming at Lenny,” replied Rocco.

  Above the noise of conversation, above the jukebox, above the rattle of glasses behind the bar, came the sound of a harsh male voice shouting: “Fuck you both!” A short wiry man with close-cropped hair, wearing denim pants and a stiff new denim jacket with an open-collared patterned shirt and some small quantity of gold around his neck, flew out of the dressing room. He shoved his way through the crowd and out the back door exit, briefly setting off a fire alarm.

  “That was Lenny,” said Apple with a smile, and left. Bert and Ian had come out of the dressing room, evidently quite unperturbed, and were beginning to tune up. Rocco took his drumsticks from his back pocket and held them parallel to the floor between the palms of his hands.

  “We meet at last,” he said.

  “At last?”

  “I hear Jonathan talk about you. Apple too. You’re the literary wiz, right?”

  Cassandra smiled. “So I tell myself.”

  They were silent a moment. Rocco turned his hands so that the drumsticks were perpendicular to the floor. “Listen,” he said, “Apple’s spending the night at your brother’s place. I’ve got a fireplace and a bed that sleeps two.”

  Cassandra blushed and laughed. “You work fast.” She didn’t reply to his proposition, but she didn’t look away from his eyes either.

  “We’ll be done in a little over an hour,” he said. “We can cab from here, unless you don’t mind walking down to Exeter Street.”

  Cassandra continued to look at him for a moment, then she said, “I’m parked out back.”

  6

  Cassandra rolled over in the bed, moaning in half-sleep. As she stretched across the rumpled sheet, the spread and patchwork quilt fell away from her breasts. Wondering why Cara had not yet called her—she instinctively felt it to be past her usual time for rising—she yawned, took a deep breath, and opened her eyes.

  Someone had changed her curtains.

  The last vestiges of sleep were suddenly purged from her mind, as she realized she was not in her own bedroom. For one thing, her own curtains were large-patterned, and these were solid ocher. For another, her own blanket was deeply quilted, and satin, not cotton.

  She grabbed the spread and held it against her breasts as she sat up in the bed. She looked across the room and saw her clothing draped neatly over the ladderback of a rush chair to one side of an oak bureau with black knobs. On an identical chair on the other side of the bureau was a set of men’s clothes, even more neatly folded. She examined them: white overalls and a blue formal shirt.

  She had spent the night with Rocco DiRico.

  It seemed so obvious, once she had figured it out—she wondered how she could have forgotten.

  She looked at the door, watched it for a moment to see whether it would open. It did not. She got up quickly, strode across the room, and took from a white porcelain hook on the back of the door a red velour dressing gown. The polished oak floor was cool beneath her feet. She stood before a beveled mirror over the bureau, took a brush and ran it through her thick hair until she felt presentable.

  She opened the door of the bedroom, and stepped out into the hallway.

  The apartment was quiet. Passing down the hallway, she peered first into the bathroom and then into Apple’s bedroom, which looked as if it hadn’t been slept in the night before. She went into the living room. Three high, curtainless windows fronted Exeter Street on this side of the building, and the sun shone brightly through a dozen very healthy spider plants, whose tendrils cast delicate shadows across a white shag rug. She heard music, not hard rock, but something familiar and rather cheap.

  She turned to the kitchen door. Behind it a radio played a muzaked version of “ ‘Drink to Me Only With Thine Eyes’,” and Rocco DiRico hummed along. Cassandra nudged open the door, and was overwhelmed with the odor of freshly brewed coffee.

  Rocco, seeing her, suddenly broke into the words:

  Drink to me only with thine eyes

  And I will pledge with mine,

  Or leave a kiss within the cup,

  And I’ll not look for wine.

  Rocco stood at the counter, blindingly bright where the sunlight struck the white formica, and began filling small yellow glasses with orange juice from a yellow pitcher. He was barefooted and bare-chested, wearing only a pair of jeans riding low upon his hips.

  “Good morning,” whispered Cassandra, who hadn’t found her voice yet. She made a small cry as her feet touched the cold linoleum. Rocco put down the pitcher, turned, and took her unexpectedly in his arms. She pressed her hands against his chest in an automatic gesture of defense, but then relaxed as her fingers were ground against the thick chestnut hair there. Rocco studied her face, smiling and still humming along with the song.

  “That was our lullaby,” said Cassandra.

  “Really?” asked Rocco, pausing in his humming only long enough to put the question to her. “Strange lullaby.”

  “It was the only song my father knew how to sing. I think I was in college before I realized it was a love song.”

  He leaned forward and kissed her hard, one hand gently caressing her neck. She laughed deeply in her throat, a laugh that was strangled beneath his kiss. Rocco’s other hand slid up from her hip and unfastened the loosely tied sash of the robe. As the garment fell open, he pressed her closer, massaging her breasts against his own chest; she could feel the growing hardness beneath his jeans chafing against her thigh. She put her arms about his neck, twining her fingers into the thickness of his curly hair. “Now I remember last night,” said she, drawing her head back a moment.

  Rocco moved his hand from her breast, down across the flatness of her stomach and abdomen, and into the auburn hair between her legs. Cassandra lifted one leg and wrapped it around his calf. She pulled her mouth away from his and let her head loll back, eyes half-lidded, as he bit and kissed lightly at her neck and ear.

  “Are we filming God’s Little Acre with hidden cameras, or is this what all city people do before breakfast?” asked Apple, from the open doorway.

  Cassandra and Rocco separated without any apparent embarrassment. Cassandra carefully retied the sash of her robe.

  “We didn’t hear you come in,” explained Rocco.

  Apple had replaced her large hooped earrings with tiny pearl studs. Her hennaed hair wasn’t as fully combed-out as the night before at the Rat. She now wore an open-collared white blouse with tiny pearl buttons, a chocolate skirt, and matching jacket. Jonathan appeared in the doorway behind her, and smiled uncomfortably at his sister.

  For a moment, Cassandra stared silently at him. Then she said, in a completely matter-of-fact voice, “Good morning, Jonathan.”

  “Good morning,” he mumbled in return.

  They all sat down at the table near the window that looked out over Commonwealth Avenue.

  “Why did you come back here?” Cassandra asked Apple. “You’re already dressed for work.”

  “I always feel like a hooker if I go to the office from someplace other than home. Besides, I needed to make plans with Rocco for the evening.”

  While she and Rocco quickly and expeditiously talked over what they must accom
plish during that day on behalf of the band, Jonathan turned to his sister and said, “This has all the earmarks of an embarrassing situation.”

  Cassandra shook her head. “I certainly don’t intend for it to be.”

  “Okay,” said Jonathan, after a moment, “I guess it’s not. It’s just strange, Cassandra.”

  “I heard!” cried Apple.

  “Heard what?” asked Cassandra.

  “Heard you were publishing Scott-Trout’s poems in a special issue of Iphigenia.”

  “A vicious rumor,” Cassandra sighed, but eagerly took up the abrupt change of subject. “If the postal service is working, she’ll have her rejection with her morning coffee.”

  Rocco had brought heated cinnamon rolls to the table. Apple grabbed one off the plate, took a bite, and pointed the remainder of it at Rocco. “Did he show you how hot he looks in a gray three-piece?”

  “Last night?” said Rocco. “Apple, my idea of kinky sex is not walking around the bedroom in a three-piece suit.”

  “Well, then, what is your idea of kinky sex these days?” demanded Apple.

  “Apple!” said Jonathan reprovingly. His face had turned very red.

  “Sorry.”

  There was a moment of silence before Apple spoke again. “Well, Jonathan—you and I are very much in the way here. And I’m late anyway. Can you drop me off at Arlington Street?”

  “Sure,” he said, rising hastily. He appeared relieved to have found an excuse to leave.

  “Get a move on,” said Apple to Rocco, as she rose and stuffed the remainder of the cinnamon roll in her mouth. “Or you’ll be late too. Cassandra, you and I will have to get together soon and trade literary gossip.”

  “Get out of here,” said Rocco. “Jonathan, see you later.”

  “See you later, Rocco,” said Jonathan, and hustled Apple out of the kitchen. “Bye, Cassandra.”

  “Bye, Jonathan,” his sister said.

  Cassandra and Rocco sipped coffee. They heard Apple’s low heels clattering across the polished oak floors, then the slam of the apartment door.