Rainey Royal

by Dylan Landis

  After school they maneuver around the little crowd listening outside the townhouse and enter the foyer, where jazz blares from the parlor. Howard is on the Steinway, his body rocking, hair falling in his face, and Rainey, watching his hands pump, wonders not for the first time if he is pushing music into the massive piano or somehow pulling it out. Gemma, the English acolyte whom Howard found playing in the Times Square subway, whipsaws her bow across the electric violin, which Rainey thinks is the prettiest sound in the world. Her eyelids flutter when she plays. Radmila is on electric flute, and Flynn is there, waiting to play and staring at Rainey. He has a paperback crammed into his back pocket. She has never seen another acolyte with a book.

  “Ignore them,” says Rainey, because lately Tina has been lingering in the parlor doorway like a climbing vine, dribbling away precious ticks of her already diminished one hundred twenty minutes.

  But the brass is glinting, the piano is brilliant, and Tina snags on the doorframe. Rainey doubles back to tug at her and sees Howard wave cut.

  “The delectable Miss Dial,” says Howard, and Rainey watches Tina respond as if she were being tuned. Her shoulders pull back, a hip curves out, and she looks down with a shy smile.

  “Come on, Teen.”

  “Do you like what you hear, Tina?” Howard asks, as if the fates of his young musicians, who wait patient as horses, are in her hands, or as if, perhaps, he is talking about something else entirely.

  Tina glances at Rainey. Then, almost imperceptibly, she nods to Howard. Rainey shakes her head and goes back to eye-flirting with Flynn. Howard’s daughter may be off-limits to the male acolytes, but she and Flynn have been trying without words to arrange a meeting. Every time Rainey looks up, meaning roof, he frowns at the ceiling, perhaps meaning, Where the chandelier used to be? or else, In your bedroom, are you out of your mind? She is not out of her mind. She is fifteen and on the pill. A girl your age is a fully opened flower, her father says.

  “It’s still in composition,” says Howard. “But if you respond to the finished piece, let us name it in your honor. ‘The Tina Temptation.’ What think you, Gordy?”

  “Tell him it sucks, Teen,” says Rainey. Howard is stealing everything: her two hours, her best friend, the light he normally shines on her.

  Or maybe Tina is the thief.

  “It’s not about you, Tina,” says Rainey. “He might as well call it ‘The Howard Ego.’ ”

  Howard laughs deeply. Gemma raises her bow and produces a ribbon of sound, but Howard raises his hand. “One more thing,” he says, and Rainey feels his interest sweep across her like a searchlight before it returns to Tina. “How’s the clarinet coming?”

  Tina inhales sharply.

  “Did you forget to tell her, Miss Temptation?”

  “How’s your clarinet?” demands Rainey. Mistemptation sounds to her like a yearning gone wrong. “Tina doesn’t take clarinet. She doesn’t take anything.”

  “I do,” says Tina quietly. “At school. It’s coming fine.”

  “You don’t have a clarinet.” Rainey swallows; this is not what she means. Howard smiles. All the acolytes are looking at them.

  “I showed her the fingering,” says Howard. “She might have a nascent talent.”

  He showed her the fingering—and where was Rainey? Upstairs, thinking Tina had gone home? She can see it, how he stood behind Tina Dial, placed his hands over hers, inhaled her hair, his attention like the light from a star that has wheeled in close. Closer. Oh, Tina. No wonder she didn’t tell: she fell.

  “Nascent, that’s great,” says Rainey. “Are you coming or not?”

  “Five minutes.”

  Howard pounds out two notes, both flat. The bass and violin start up. Rainey takes the two flights of stairs alone to her pink room with the light tread of someone whose fury is as weightless as the air she breathes and gets through an entire side of Ziggy Stardust before Tina, looking smug and, at least, embarrassed, appears with a clarinet case.

  “Loaner,” she says. She looks helplessly around the room, cradling the case in her arms. “Where should I put this?”

  WHAT RAINEY’S DOING IN art is developing her métier. Mr. Knecht says every artist has one, and every student must seek one, and Rainey’s is making tapestries. She uses everything: cloth, photographs, lists, snippets of lace, buttons, earrings, ribbon, even bits of flat scrap metal. Mr. K lets her go her own way while the rest of Studio Art II makes linocuts.

  The other thing she’s doing in art, on this bright blue afternoon, is harassing Leah. The girl is carving a face on her linoleum block with a stiff anxiety that dulls her work. Mr. Knecht, oblivious to the hazards of placing two lionesses with a giraffe, has seated her with Rainey and Tina. Tina can’t draw well either, but she has the advantage of not giving a fuck. Also, she has the advantage of Rainey, who leans over when Mr. Knecht isn’t looking and lightly chisels Tina’s linoleum, adding gesture and grace.

  Every time Rainey starts to ask Tina to come over, she hesitates; she envisions Howard giving her breathing lessons from behind, breathing being a big deal for musicians. Breathe from here, she imagines him saying, his hands over Tina’s lower abdomen where—as she conceives the body—clothes tumble round in a hot dryer, and then, sliding one hand up to her breastbone, not from here, he would say, and it would be pure Howard to do this, and it makes Rainey sick.

  She wonders if she can tell Tina to leave the goddamn clarinet at home. She is afraid that Tina might bring the loaner, swing it insouciantly, like a purse.

  “You know what your problem is?” Rainey tells Leah.

  Tina looks up from the worktable, interested. She is carving a deer under falling leaves. The deer stands on legs of exquisite delicacy, courtesy of Rainey.

  Tina leans across the worktable, threatening Leah’s linocut with a sharp instrument. “Yeah, let’s discuss your problem,” she tells Leah. “I bet I can fix it.” Leah raises an arm to keep Tina’s gouge off her work but doesn’t look up, eye contact being a flammable act.

  Rainey puts a restraining hand on Tina’s wrist. “Don’t,” she says. She likes how both Leah and her linocut-girl are desperately in need of style. She thinks of Gemma, who arrived at West Tenth Street skittish and grateful, and who slid into a sensuous indolence encouraged and shaped by Howard. “Seriously,” Rainey tells Leah, not sure whether she’s talking about art or life or both, “your problem is you’re afraid to make a mistake.”

  “You’re helping her?” says Tina, gouge still poised for damage.

  Why not, Rainey wants to say, what have you learned about loyalty, hanging out at my house? She grabs a pencil and draws directly on the worktable between her and Leah: linocut-girl’s oval face, the swirling hair. “For Chrissake, would you look? We have fifteen minutes.” Leah, after a wide-eyed moment, watches the pencil move. “This is shading.” Rainey makes rapid straight lines to delineate cheekbones and chin.

  “Next you’ll be teaching her jazz flute,” says Tina.

  “Would you relax?” says Rainey. “We’re going to give her a makeover. We’re going to French-braid her hair. Look,” she tells Leah, “mistakes are okay. Look what I did. I hacked it off.” She leans forward and lifts a thick, chopped-off hank of her own hair. “If you’re afraid of something, do it,” she says. That’s what Howard tells her, anyway.

  “All right,” says Leah suddenly. She starts carving cheekbone lines. Rainey thinks, I’m getting good at this acolyte business.

  “We could pluck her eyebrows,” says Tina darkly. “It only hurts the first time.”

  “Just braids,” says Rainey. “You’re both coming to my house Saturday.”

  “I have to be with my grandmother,” says Tina.

  “Sunday?”

  “Grandmother.” Tina chisels a leaf with intense concentration.

  “Then Friday after school,” says Rainey. “Two hours. Come on.”

  Leah looks up from a place deep inside her work and says, “Am I doing this right?” It is the first sen
tence she has uttered to Rainey Royal on an equal footing, and Rainey, with pleasure and surprise, realizes that her powers sharpen when she opens the cage door, not when she locks Leah in. She wonders if this is what her father felt when he first put a fiddle with a piezoelectric body pickup in Gemma’s arms. Piezoelectric body pickup, she loves saying that, the way it sounds half high-voltage and half slut.

  “Try some crosshatching. But yeah.” To Tina she says, “Friday, right? And listen—don’t bring the clarinet.”

  Tina looks at her sharply. Leah drops her head low over her linoleum block, a tumble of red hair concealing her face. Rainey touches her arm and says, “We promise not to be bitches.”

  “Speak for yourself,” says Tina. “Howard told me to bring it every time.”

  LEAH SITS FROZEN ON the dressing-table stool in Rainey’s pink room while Rainey and Tina cross and recross the lengths of hair they’re braiding flat against her head. If she’s breathing, Rainey can’t tell.

  The girl has a Renaissance face, half beautiful and half plain. “You look like a Botticelli,” Rainey says.

  “Andy Sak might like her when we’re done with her,” says Tina.

  Leah winces, though it might be from how Tina combs out each new section with a yank. “Botticelli,” she murmurs. “He did Venus on that shell.”

  “Goddamn,” says Rainey. “I should have talked to you sooner. We should go to the museum. Tina won’t come with me.”

  Tina looks over at her. “Yes, I will,” she says. “I will, Rain.”

  Rainey ignores this. Miss Delectable Dial will have to earn her trips to the museum. “Reach over and get her something cute out of my drawer, Teen.”

  “I don’t need to change,” says Leah. “Just the makeover.”

  “This is the makeover,” says Rainey. “We’re hanging out tonight.”

  “I’m not allowed,” says Tina, but she hands over a white blouse that Rainey has altered so it’s mostly lace below the bust. She looks at Leah with her hair completely off her face and says, almost to herself, “I don’t recognize you.”

  “I know,” says Rainey. “Gorgeous, huh.”

  Male footsteps make the stairs creak. Tina tends to a new section of braid as if studying an algebra equation in very small print. Rainey listens to the second flight of creaking and waits for the doorway to fill with Howard. On the stairs, he is humming bebop. Hum job, thinks Rainey. It sounds half musical and half obscene, a phrase she has heard before, probably in this house.

  When Howard appears he is all door. His hair falls to his shoulders in a way that makes women tuck it behind the Kool over his left ear.

  “Hi, Howard.” Tina’s voice is slow and musical, as if everything in the room is under water. Rainey watches her closely. Stolen earrings gleam from under Tina’s hair, and on her wrist is Paul’s watch, which seems to Rainey like a terrible risk: walking down the street with plunder flashing like traffic lights.

  “Miss Temptation.” Howard bows his head formally.

  “Hi, Mr. Royal,” says Leah, and to Rainey, “It’s beautiful, but I can’t wear it. You can see everything—”

  “I wear this to school,” Rainey says.

  “It’s Howard,” says Howard, “and somebody in this room should definitely wear that.”

  “Can I try it?” says Tina.

  “Not you,” says Howard, studying Leah. “Her.”

  Leah says, “I decline.”

  Rainey watches Tina’s fingernail slip into her mouth. She marvels that Leah thinks everything is about the shirt, when in fact Tina is waiting to be tuned again by her best friend’s father’s attention, and Howard is flirting with the school giraffe.

  “What, do I not get a vote?” says Howard. He uncocks the Kool from behind his ear. Tina rises with a pink plastic lighter, and he grips her entire hand while he inhales.

  Then he kisses her knuckles.

  Rainey, fierce, says, “Howard, would you get out? You got the clarinet vote, that’s it. Put it on, Leah.”

  “Where’s the bathroom?”

  “Leah, will you just turn around and put on the top before I undo this whole damn makeover? I swear I’ll take out every braid.”

  “Why are you doing this?” says Leah softly, fingering the lace. “I can’t change here.”

  “But you can,” says Howard. “I won’t look.” He turns sideways in the doorway, extends one arm to the opposite doorpost, and tucks his head down behind it, smoking.

  “He won’t cheat,” says Rainey, because she knows this one thing about her father. He likes to win what he gets.

  Leah looks at Howard with his head under his wing. Then she scoots around on the dressing-table stool. Her spine is as long and pale as a yardstick, bisected by a white bra strap. When I’m done with her, thinks Rainey, she’ll be wearing black. Leah turns back in the mostly lace blouse, and Rainey says through her fingers, “You’re beautiful. I bet you had no idea.”

  Howard turns, too. He presses his fingertips to his lips, then opens his hands wide. The gesture is packed with irony, but Rainey wonders if Leah can tell. Leah is the tottering lamb who cannot see the altar. “Daughter, you have said it. She has no idea. It is the source of her beauty.”

  Tina doesn’t wait for Leah to even blush. “I can’t go out tonight,” she says, as if she has spent the past five minutes submerged. “You should wait for me.”

  Rainey looks at the clarinet case. It is a pebbly black box that hunkers by her dressing table. With sugary innocence she says, “We won’t go anywhere exciting. Maybe we’ll hang out here.” She gets a hooded look from Tina.

  “Fine,” says Tina. “If they play again, I’m going down to listen.”

  “In that case,” says Howard, “why don’t we have a brief lesson.”

  Don’t, thinks Rainey.

  “Have fun at the museum.” Tina picks up her pack and the loaner clarinet.

  “Always carry your ax,” says Howard approvingly. He puts a hand on Tina’s shoulder.

  Rainey looks away. She senses that Leah, demoted now to merely the girl in the lace blouse, seems altered by what she saw in Howard’s eyes. The source of her beauty. She sits straighter. She feels, Rainey decides, shinier.

  Rainey can be a mirror, too. A better mirror. She will finish the French braids and teach Leah the Pearl Drops toothpaste move, and they’ll steal some of Howard’s pot. Maybe Leah will sleep over. She will teach her how to dance.

  “You should take off Paul’s watch,” says Rainey.

  “You should quit using Estelle’s photos in art,” says Tina coolly.

  “Who’s Estelle?” says Leah.

  Howard makes an arch in the doorway with his arm. Tina ducks under it without looking back.

  THEY ARE, IN FACT, having an actual lesson.

  From outside Howard’s closed door Rainey hears clarinet scales, clumsy, with mistakes and do-overs. She walks into the bathroom and listens through the narrowly open door. For a moment there’s silence from the bedroom, then fluid, mournful scales pour from the clarinet—that would be Howard, of course. She’s never really thought about clarinet till now, the way its private, throaty unhappiness underlies even its lighter notes. She thought oboe had sole claim to musical grief.

  Silence again, then Tina’s laughter.

  She listens through ten more sets of scales—Tina’s—punctuated by murmurings and bursts of laughter. Lessons should not be this much fun. An ache opens in her stomach and spreads to her chest. From the third floor, Leah calls, “Rainey?” and Rainey makes her own inelegant music, creaking across the floorboards and back up the stairs.

  TINA, CARRYING HER PACK and the loaner clarinet, walks to the subway at Union Square and takes it uptown, like crazy far. Rainey watches her from between the cars, swaying. Leah, still wearing the lace blouse, hangs back. Tina stays on till Ninety-Sixth, where all the white people disappear off the face of the planet. “God, let her walk downtown,” says Rainey, but she follows half a block behind as Tina heads north on
Lex. They pass Spanish people and tough-looking kids just out of school. Tina walks without apparent fear.

  “Are we safe?” says Leah. In fact people are staring at her, a girl two inches shy of six feet, hair braided tight but flaming in color, lace revealing her navel.

  “We’re cool,” says Rainey. Toughness is her métier, but she does not carry a knife like everyone knows kids do up here, so she is feeling a little freaked. She turns her mother’s ring around on her finger; now the diamond and rubies won’t flash.

  “She’ll see us,” says Leah. “She’ll kill me.” She considers. “She’ll try.”

  Rainey’s not sure who knocks her out more, this pretty shiny brave Leah, born in her pink room an hour ago, or reckless Tina who strolls toward robbery or rape or whatever awaits chicks who wander past projects in Spanish Harlem. Maybe, having held a gun, Tina lost her fears. Rainey certainly feels more capable.

  “Let’s get this over with.” Rainey grabs Leah’s wrist, bone thin, and they walk up behind Tina at the light on Ninety-Eighth.

  “Tina,” says Rainey, and when Tina whirls around, “Don’t get mad. You owe me.”

  “I knew you were there,” says Tina, “and I owe you shit. You, you’re dead.”

  “I quit being dead,” says Leah, though she looks at Rainey when she says it.

  “You’re in my neighborhood, you might already be dead.” They are standing outside a hair salon with its door open and that Ricky Ricardo music playing. In the window are pictures of women with different hairstyles, fancy ones, updos, stuff none of the Urban Day moms would be caught dead with.

  “You’re Porto Rican,” says Rainey.

  “Puerto,” says Leah automatically.

  “Tú, cállate,” says Tina. “Puerto. I ride the bus. Is that a problem?”

  Rainey scrutinizes her. “You don’t ride the bus.”

  “Say it. I ride the bus,” says Tina.

  “But you don’t,” says Rainey. Tina has dark honey hair and light skin, though Rainey can almost now perceive the faintest cast to it, maybe, she thinks, like Sophia Loren.

  “That’s your big fat mistake. You look at me, but you don’t see. I ride the bus.”