Screaming Divas Page 7

  He paid her under the table for playing records at the club a few nights a week. That and the monthly checks from her grandmother were enough to live on. Or would have been if she spent her money wisely. She was crazy with cash. She bought records and music magazines and clothes. She spent way too much money on pot.

  “Okay if I watch from up here?” Sometimes it was nice to groove in her own little world, to fall into the music without someone slamming her across the floor.

  Jan shrugged. “Yeah, whatever.”

  He climbed down the ladder and, staying close to the wall, made his way back behind the bar.

  Trudy sank back into the music, spellbound by Peter Murphy’s voice.

  Tonight’s band was new. They’d performed a couple of times already—at parties and at a larger twenty-one-and-over club across town. Rumor had it that they were good enough for Atlanta, good enough even to attract sniffs from big city talent scouts. Columbia could be the next big scene.

  The song ended. Trudy turned away from the dance floor, took the record off the turntable, and slid it into its sleeve. Down below, the dancers cleared the floor and the band fiddled around onstage with speakers and wires and instruments.

  The club had become Trudy’s life. She arrived almost as soon as it opened and stayed till it closed. She knew all the regulars like Johnny Fad, who pretended to be in love with Cassie, even though he was gay, and Jeff, the David Bowie lookalike who was a fry cook by day, but a mysterious object of allure by night as he sat at the bar in a black hat like a South American cowboy might wear. Trudy loved talking to him. Their conversations were peppered with allusions to Marguerite Duras films, Baudelaire, and Jim Carroll. Jeff was going to be a writer and Trudy felt sure she’d be a character in one of his books.

  Then there was Keith, who always wore a black leather motorcycle jacket, and spoke in a whisper. He was an artist. He painted icons like James Dean and Jackie O, which Trudy thought was cool, but she was pretty sure her heart couldn’t take another tortured artist. She wanted a musician.

  The band was onstage now—three guys and a young woman with long straw-colored hair. She had a guitar slung across her body. Trudy could see that she was barefoot. A granny dress swept against her ankles.

  Trudy felt a flash of envy whenever she saw a girl in a group. Girls stood out because they were so rarely in local bands. Everyone noticed them. Up in the DJ loft, Trudy was like a phantom. She wanted to be onstage, sucking up the energy of the crowd. And she would be, as soon as she and Cassie found a couple more members to round out their band.

  “Hey.” The lead singer stepped up to the mic. His red hair blazed in the lights. Round tinted glasses hid his eyes. He was tall and thin and androgynous. Trudy leaned over the side of the loft to be closer to him. “I’m Noel,” he said. “This is Wendy, John, Alan. We’re Ligeia.”

  Ligeia. That was something from Edgar Allan Poe. Trudy had read the poem, had even been to the coast to see the island he’d written about in “The Gold-Bug.” She liked the band already.

  Their sound made Trudy think of a funeral in a Gothic cathedral, or the spooky look of the Low Country at dusk, Spanish moss hanging like cobwebs, bats flitting around. Noel’s voice was low and menacing. He stood at the center of the stage, his hands cupped around the mic. From time to time he pressed his palms to his temples as if he were trying to quell demon voices. Although he barely moved, his body was tensed. Trudy expected him to pounce into the crowd like a panther. She kept her eyes on him for the entire show.

  Afterwards, she climbed over the side of the loft and descended the stairs. She found Noel lounging against the wall in the Pink Room, smoking a cigarette.

  “Hey, why don’t you move around a little more onstage?” she said. “You looked like an old man hunched over the microphone.”

  He reached up slowly and pushed his glasses down his nose far enough so that she could see the contempt in his eyes. “What’s it to you, little girl?”

  She wondered if she would see all that pent-up energy let loose then. But no. He looked at her for a long moment, repositioned his glasses, and flicked the ash of his cigarette on her. Then he turned on his heel and walked away.

  Trudy had felt something crackle between them and she couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was like a live wire, flailing around, spewing electricity into the universe. A force that could be guided and harnessed and used for something spectacular.

  She had to have him.

  Over the next week, she carried out her recon mission. There was nothing coy about her questions. It was clear to all she asked that she had designs on that thin, white body, those long bones.

  “Forget it, Trudy,” Johnny Fad advised. “He’s living with the bass player. I think they’re engaged.”

  The story about Wendy was that she was a witch. She was working some kind of juju on Noel. She belonged to a coven. Well, Trudy had some tricks of her own and she wasn’t above making her own gris-gris.

  She went home that first night, her shirt still smudged with ash, and wrote him a letter: “You don’t know me, but we are like meteors hurling toward each other. Meet me tomorrow night on the fire escape of the Heart of Dixie Motel and I’ll tell you your future.” She didn’t sign her name. Mystery would work in her favor.

  He was there, as she knew he would be. It was dark, the night sky clouded, not even a moon. All she saw at first was a red ember as he sucked in smoke. As she moved up the iron stairs, she imagined she was in a movie, a camera following the sway of her hips, the way her hand trailed the iron railing. And then, face to face, she felt shy. There was a force field around him—she could feel it—and she had to push her way in.

  He blew a stream of smoke into her face. “What do you want from me?”

  And she said, “Everything.”

  It wasn’t as if she wanted it for free. She was willing to barter. She reached into her pocket and took out a tape.

  “Bootleg Joy Division. Taped live in Manchester. The only copy in the world.” She waved it slowly under his nose. Her investigation had revealed that Noel worshipped the ghost of ’70s legend Ian Curtis, the band’s suicidal genius.

  He seemed unimpressed. Took another drag. But then he reached out for the cassette and examined it in the borrowed light of a street lamp. “Is the sound quality any good?”

  “You’ll have to give it a listen and find out.” Trudy knew from the way that his eyes, and then his feet, followed her down the clattery steps that he was at least intrigued.

  Back in her room, they cleared away circles of carpet and propped themselves against the wall. Trudy jammed the tape into her boom box and they sat there, deep in the music.

  “Wow. This is good stuff,” Noel said after the first song. “It almost sounds professionally recorded. Where’d you get it?”

  “From my dad. He’s got a great music collection. There’s more where this came from.” Trudy could see the points stacking up in her favor. “So what are your parents like?”

  Noel told her that he’d been disowned.

  “Yeah, me too, more or less.” Trudy said. So they had something in common. “What did you do you?”

  “They caught me with a guy.”

  Uh, oh. “You mean … you’re gay?”

  “Naw. I prefer women.” He gave her a long look, and once again she felt the air crackle. “It was just a one-time thing. I was curious, that’s all. But my mom and dad thought I was the Antichrist after that.”

  Trudy sometimes wondered what it would be like with another girl. She’d once had a dream about kissing Cassie, of all people. In the dream, Cassie had been fleshy and voluptuous like Marilyn Monroe. In real life, her type would be someone thin. Like Noel.

  “You have star quality,” Trudy told him. “I feel it here.” She pressed a hand against her belly.

  Noel snorted. “What do you know about it?”

  “My dad was in a band. He knows lots of famous musicians. They came over to our apartment and with some of them you
could feel the air changing. It was like weather. I’m telling you, you have it.”

  He stared at the ceiling. Trudy couldn’t tell if he was musing or spacing out. She decided to go on. “But I think you should get rid of Wendy. There’s something creepy about her and she’s so … retro.”

  He didn’t answer at first, but then he rolled his head to look at her and raised an eyebrow.

  “I can play the guitar,” she said.

  And she could, a little. Her father had given her a few lessons on his acoustic guitar, back when she was still living with him. She’d been practicing on her own, too. So far he hadn’t noticed his guitar was missing. He called her every now and then, and he hadn’t mentioned it yet. Jack was more into African rhythms these days. He had a set of drums handcrafted by a Yoruban tribesman.

  “You’d probably destroy the stage,” Noel said. He knew all about her.

  Trudy laughed. “Flatter me some more.”

  “You’re a walking disaster,” he drawled. “You’re the embodiment of sin.”

  “Trudy Sin,” she said, trying it on for size. She was sick of all her other names, fed up with stepfathers and their counterfeit legacies. Sick of her father. Sick of Sarah.

  “Speaking of sin,” Trudy said. She scooted over to him and started to pull her shirt off.

  He grabbed her by the shoulders. “Listen, Trudy. I like you. But I’m engaged to Wendy.”

  “Things can change,” Trudy said.

  12

  “Hey, Gil?” Harumi dragged a wet cloth over the top of the bar. “Can I leave a couple of hours early tonight?”

  Gil, the manager of Goatfeathers, turned away from the cappuccino maker and stroked one of his sideburns with a finger. “We’ll see. If we’re not too busy.”

  At the moment, only three tables were occupied. There was also one guy sitting at the big table in the center of the coffee bar, leafing through the glossy foreign magazines. Harumi knew him. Chip. Her favorite customer. He was just about the nicest and cutest guy she’d ever met. He was a stockbroker, a regular, and he tipped well. Even if he just had a bottle of Red Stripe, he’d leave two dollars. Harumi wasn’t sure about the others. One table had ordered cheesecake. The others were just having coffee. So far this wasn’t looking like a big money night.

  Things could change, though. It was six P.M. on a Friday night. College kids would go out drinking at the bars around Five Points and come in to sober up with French Roast and espresso later on. Yuppie couples who’d managed to snag babysitters usually crowded in around ten. Places like Rockafellas and The Cave were too young and loud for the young professional types, but at Goatfeathers, where there was abstract art on the walls, Jamaican beer on the menu, and Josephine Baker on the stereo, they could feel artsy and sophisticated. The yuppies left good tips.

  Harumi had been working there for two months now. She knew she hadn’t been hired because of her extensive waitressing experience; she had none. This was her first job.

  Gil hired staff for their looks. He liked dyed hair (obvious, but not outrageous; he wouldn’t go for pink), men with pierced ears and makeup, and ethnicity. He was also concerned with clothes. There was no uniform at Goatfeathers, but Gil wouldn’t employ someone who didn’t have a cool wardrobe.

  Harumi had shown up for her interview wearing a little black silk sheath and huge earrings of wavery copper that almost touched her shoulders. She’d bought them in a little art gallery down the street. For her meeting with Gil, she’d swept her hair into a fountain and made up her eyes with gold and purple eye shadow. She’d barely had to say a word. He hadn’t even asked if she was of legal age.

  Harumi had just turned eighteen. In less than a year, she’d be finished with high school. And then? She didn’t know yet.

  She’d sent for college application forms just to make her parents stop whimpering, but she hadn’t filled them out yet. She needed time to figure out what she wanted to do. For the first time in her life, she could choose.

  After she’d destroyed her violin, Harumi had spent months in therapy. Her parents believed that the music had made her crazy. They refused to consider the possibility that her outburst had had anything to do with them.

  “The doctor said not to push you,” Mrs. Yokoyama wailed. “But, Harumi, what is it you want to do?”

  The day she’d presented Harumi with a new sheaf of college applications she’d said, “You don’t have to be concert violinist. You can be music teacher. Not so much pressure.”

  Harumi hadn’t touched a violin in almost a year. Sometimes she dreamed that she held Sadie. She dreamed of auditoriums crashing with applause, roses strewn across the stage, and she’d woken feeling sad.

  Not anymore. These days she had Zelda—her red secondhand Rickenbacker, which she played every day. She practiced in the basement with an amp. When she emerged from the musty gloom, from the boxes of Christmas ornaments and the mousetraps and Koji’s high chair, her mother always looked worried.

  Harumi could tell by the lines on her forehead and the hound dog droop of her eyes that she hated the bass, that she didn’t understand her daughter’s strange compulsion, but that she couldn’t say a word. Doctor’s orders. So she kept her mouth shut until she could spill her thoughts to her lunch group.

  Harumi had once overheard them as they sat in the Yokoyama kitchen with their egg salad sandwiches. They all thought that she was in her room doing homework, but she was spying from the hallway.

  “It’s not normal for a girl like that to play the guitar,” her mother said.

  “Maybe you could get her to take koto lessons,” Mrs. Nakano replied. She had a fresh-off-the-boat accent. “She might enjoy something a bit more genteel.”

  “It’ll pass. Don’t worry.” Harumi recognized Mrs. Kimura’s voice. “She’s just going through a phase. Our Yuki decided that she hated math when she was in junior high school and now she’s going to major in physics.”

  “A phase? You really think so?” Mrs. Yokoyama sniffled as if she’d been crying.

  “It could be worse,” Mrs. Nakano said. “She could be pregnant or on drugs. These American kids are really wild, not like the ones back in Japan.”

  Of course she wasn’t pregnant. She wasn’t even allowed to date. Until recently, she hadn’t been permitted to go out at night with friends. Ridiculous. Her parents didn’t know about the band. If they found out about it, they’d probably put her in a straitjacket. On the nights when they had a gig, her parents thought she was sleeping over at Esther Shealy’s house. Although they didn’t approve of Esther, they didn’t say anything. They were afraid to criticize or advise, afraid that she might break something else.

  Esther Shealy. Harumi thought of her now as she cleared away Chip’s empty beer bottle and pocketed the five-dollar bill he’d left for her. She’d known Esther almost all of her life, or at least she thought she had. After that scene at that party they’d gone to together she wasn’t so sure. It’s not that she disapproved. She knew that some people were gay and if Esther was attracted to women, she was probably born that way. But Harumi realized later, after the shock of seeing her kissing that woman, that Esther was a stranger. What else was she hiding?

  At the same time, she was thinking about how little she knew about love and sex in general. She knew how to tune a violin, but she didn’t know how to flirt. She was intimate with the music of Chopin, but she’d never kissed a boy—or girl, for that matter.

  Everyone thought that she was so worldly because she’d been to New York and performed onstage with adults, but all those years with Sadie had robbed her of experience of another kind. She didn’t know how to move in the world without an instrument.

  Cassie came through the door in combat boots and an oversized black dress scribbled with Technicolor graffiti just as Harumi’s shift was ending. She finished wiping the tables, punched her time card, and grabbed her bass and amp from the back room.

  “My car’s right outside,” Cassie said. “We could walk, but it�
��s dark.”

  Harumi followed her to the curb and they got in the car.

  “Ready for the big audition?”

  Harumi felt a flash of panic. Auditions had always made her feel like throwing up. But this would be different. Cassie had already told her all about Trudy, how she didn’t know how to play any instruments herself, and how eager she’d been when Cassie had offered to introduce Harumi to her. She understood that there was no competition for the position, and that Trudy was borderline desperate for a drummer. All Harumi had to do was show up.

  When they got to the house where Trudy lived, they saw her sitting on the porch, in a pool of light. She sprang up to meet them as soon as they got out of the car.

  “Perfect timing,” she said. “My roommate’s still at work, so we can be as noisy as we want.”

  The neighboring houses were dark. Did that mean that everyone was sleeping? Harumi didn’t want to wake anybody up.

  “Hey,” Trudy said to Harumi, suddenly a little shy. “I like your earrings.”

  Harumi reached up and touched the rhinestone Eiffel Towers dangling from her lobes. “Thanks.”

  Cassie had told her that appearances were important to Trudy, that she had a certain look in mind for Screaming Divas. It was a good sign that she liked her jewelry.

  They moved inside to a dimly lit living room. The faint smell of cigarettes and burnt toast lingered in the air. The worn, stained carpet had vacuum tracks, as if Trudy had just finished sweeping.

  “Can I get you a drink or something?” she asked, all puppy-like.

  “No, thanks. I’m good.” After carrying trays of beer and coffee beverages around all night, Harumi didn’t want to look at a glass. She looked around for an outlet, somewhere to set up.

  “So Cassie told me that you went to Juilliard,” Trudy said. Her eyes were shiny.

  “I, uh, tried out. I didn’t go.” Cassie must not have mentioned her breakdown, which was just as well.

  “Oh.”

  “So do you want me to play something?”