Byrd Read online

  And what must Roland think? Does she seem as lonely and desperate and pathetic to him as the professor now seems to her?

  “I’m going to California to spend New Year’s with an old friend,” she tells John Dunn when she asks for time off. She says it casually. California. A word luscious as a piece of fruit.

  John Dunn doesn’t ask questions, or point out that this trip isn’t the sort of thing Addie does. “I’ll give you a ride to the airport,” he says.

  She’s braced for the obvious—the long flight, the strange city. But the flight is just a droning bus ride in the air. Los Angeles, too, is easy: a big, lazy, sprawled-out sunbather of a city where you can never be entirely lost because every street and neighborhood, every building, no matter how ordinary, is a place you’ve heard of.

  She’s less prepared for smaller things. The smell of diesel in the LAX terminal, making her afraid to breathe. The crush of people headed there, there, there. People with other people waiting for them. She claims her bag and finds a place to sit. She checks her watch, freshens her makeup, tugs at her dress and tries to convince herself she looks like someone a man would want to drive to the airport and pick up. Twice she calls Roland’s apartment but there’s no answer and no machine. She waits forty-five minutes. The crowd thins. She starts to panic. People actually stop for her. “Is there some problem, miss?” “Can I call someone for you? A cab?”

  God deliver me, she thinks, from the kindness of strangers.

  Then she sees him. She knows him first by his walk, lean and smooth, his feet gliding along as if they don’t quite touch the ground. He’s wearing a denim jacket and a black T-shirt that says “Déjà Voodoo.” He has a mustache and his hair is cut in a mullet, short in front, layered on the sides, long in back. He looks like he just walked off an album cover.

  “Baby,” he says, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t find a place to park.” He smiles the lopsided, apologetic smile she remembers, and opens his arms, and she, too relieved to be angry, falls in.

  She can tell from his apartment that there’s a woman. Air freshener plugged into an electrical socket. An open box of baking soda in the refrigerator. A blouse in the closet.

  There’s only one closet; the apartment is an efficiency, no bigger than a motel room, with painted cinderblock walls and a filmy picture window. Roland takes her suitcase to the closet and pushes his clothes to one side, and there, crumpled on the floor in back, is a faded pink blouse with brown underarm stains. She pretends not to notice, but it gives her a quick, sharp pain, that blouse.

  Roland invites his friends Pete and Golita over to meet her. “Un-fucking-believable,” he tells them. “We haven’t seen each other in, like, ten thousand years, and then out of the blue she calls me up, and now here she is.”

  “Nice.” Pete nods. He has wild orange hair like the singer in Simply Red. He’s sitting at Roland’s counter tapping a small pile of white powder onto a mirror, chopping it with a razor blade, carving it into thin lines. He passes Addie a rolled-up dollar bill. “Company first.”

  “I don’t know how.”

  “Breathe in. Don’t breathe out.”

  She holds the dollar straw to one nostril, closes the other with her finger, and leans down. The powder burns her nose. Her eyes water. The back of her throat tastes bitter. Her ears start to buzz.

  Roland touches her. “Okay?”

  “Yeah, I’m good.” She smiles at his feathered hair. She smiles at his apartment, so tiny, so—efficient. The sofa unfolds into a bed; the dinette table holds his phone, stereo, and portable TV; the floor lamp doubles—triples—as a table and magazine rack.

  “So, Addie,” says Golita. She has blue saucer eyes and a Carly Simon mouth. She is bosomy like Carly, dark blond, a singer herself. She sings nights and works days at Ready Set with Pete and Roland. “How come Roll never told us about you?”

  On the boardwalk, which is not boards but pavement, everything moves fast and smooth and so do they, graceful as wild animals. Addie can’t tell if she’s walking or running or gliding or flying or dreaming. They serpentine through a strange circus of weightlifters, street skaters, men swallowing fire, guitar players on unicycles, women telling fortunes.

  “The bar’s around the corner,” Golita says.

  They follow her out of the crowd and into a small yellow building. Inside it’s all dark wood paneling with a Maple Leaf flag over the bar, a jukebox on the far wall, and a single pool table in the middle of the room. Pete buys beer, Golita puts quarters in the jukebox and Roland puts quarters in the table. He hands Addie a cue stick and shows her how to hold it, standing behind her with his arms on hers.

  “I’m a slow learner,” she says.

  “I’ve got all night,” he says.

  She loses every game. She doesn’t care. “Buy me another round,” she says. “Rack ’em.”

  They monopolize the table until closing time. They walk home a different way, past giant murals and cafés (they haven’t eaten but no one mentions food; no one is hungry), under swishing palm fronds. The night sky has faded to purple—an incandescent, glowy purple. Out here, it never gets completely dark.

  When Roland opens the sofa bed there is a smell like salted cashews. The smell of sex.

  He offers to sleep on the floor but she tells him no, she doesn’t mind sharing. She turns out the lights and gets in bed without taking off her dress. She rolls onto her side, facing the wall, her back to Roland, and listens to the muffled sounds of traffic from the street and the distant moan and hiss of the ocean. She listens to Roland, unzipping his pants.

  He lies down behind her, slides his hand under her dress.

  She touches his hand, guides it.

  He doesn’t hurry. He takes a long time this time. She doesn’t think he’ll ever finish.

  In the morning, they shower together and towel off in the tiny bathroom. Roland opens a canister of mousse, sprays a little in his hand, lets it swell to the size of a golf ball, and works it into his wet hair. He hangs his head upside down between his legs and aims the blow dryer straight up—“for volume,” he says, a trick he learned in show business.

  “I want to know all your secrets,” she says.

  She falls in love with the sound of the ocean, a constant whoosh behind all the other sounds.

  She falls in love with the sun, which is different here, expansive and white, bleaching everything, making even the ugliest buildings gleam like laundry on a line.

  She falls in love with the unreality of the place. On Hollywood Boulevard they have to stop for a man in chaps crossing the street with his bull. On the Santa Monica pier, a man at the bar offers to buy her a drink.

  “I’m Kin,” he says.

  “No, you’re not,” she says. “I know you. You’re Scotty from General Hospital.”

  She falls in love with Roland’s friends. One night they all go to dinner in a French café Pete knows, Maison Gerard (“the House of Jerry,” Roland translates), with red walls and posters advertising French soap and cigarettes, and a French lounge singer, Serge Gainsbourg, on the sound system. Their waiter is an actor studying to play a French waiter. His face is flat and round as an omelet pan. While they wait for their meal, Pete spreads potted cheese onto rounds of French bread and deals the bread like cards. “So,” he says to Addie, “wasn’t the Lost Colony in North Carolina?”

  “That’s right. The first English settlement in America. By the time the new governor got there, the whole colony was gone.”

  Roland says, “Remember how in school they used to tell us, ‘And no one ever knew what became of the settlers’? It was never any fucking mystery to me.” He tomahawk-chops the table with his hand.

  “That’s just what they wanted you to think,” Pete says. “Always blame the Indians.”

  “What’s that Opie Taylor movie,” Golita says, “where all the old people get in a boat and go to another planet and live forever?”

  “That’s what happened,” Pete says. “They’re probably on Mars r
ight now, kicking up red dust.”

  “With silver buckles on their shoes,” Addie says.

  “Wearing top hats,” Pete says. “Trying to grow maize, but it won’t grow. ‘We put fish in the ground the way the Indians showed us and still it won’t grow.’”

  Driving is her favorite drug. She becomes addicted to the motion, the forever-changing view. She loves watching Roland drive, how he stretches out his arm and drapes his hand over the steering wheel, every part of him long and loose. Whenever they come to a 7-Eleven he stops for pink wine and lottery tickets.

  Late one night they drive up the coast to Zuma Beach with the windows rolled down. Salt air eddies in around them. Nina Simone purrs on the tape deck, “Since I Fell for You.” Strings of Christmas lights glitter on wooden fences along the road. Beyond is the big dark ocean.

  “You’re shaking,” Roland says. He pulls over and takes off his jacket, wraps it around her.

  “Dance with me,” she says, turning up the volume.

  They get out and he pulls her close and they slow-dance to Nina Simone right there on the edge of Pacific Coast Highway, a twinkling fence and an ocean on one side of them and the threat of traffic on the other.

  When the song is over, they get back in the van and drive some more.

  “I’m sure he’s a sweet piece of ass,” Golita says to Addie. “He’s also a total fuckup. You know that, right?” The two of them are in Golita’s kitchen. Pete and Roland are in the living room with the new Michael Jackson album turned up. “I mean, I love the man, and Pete’s fucking in love with him. But he’s a mess.”

  “How?”

  “Oh, you know. He’s always late. When it’s his turn to drive we always get docked at work. He’s the only person I know that ever runs out of gas. He’s always running out of something. Money, coke. He loses stuff. Burns stuff. See my floor? I mean the landlord’s floor that me and Pete will have to pay for.” She points out a patch of brown blisters at the foot of the stove. “One night we left him alone to make popcorn and he plugged in the popper and set it on the stove and turned the stove on high.”

  “When he was young,” Addie says, “he hit his head.”

  “In the swimming pool,” Golita says. “Everybody’s heard that story.”

  Pete knows a drummer in a bar band and arranges for Roland to sit in so that Addie can see him play before she leaves town. It’s a nicer-than-average Venice bar, with tables and chairs and a tile dance floor. The band opens its first set with love songs: “Cold Love,” “Part Time Love,” “Hoodoo Love,” “I Stole Some Love.” Roland sits at the back of the stage, cradling his unplugged guitar, tapping his foot, fingering silent chords.

  “Why isn’t he playing?” Addie says.

  “This isn’t his gig,” Golita says.

  “He will,” Pete says.

  The band plays “I Feel a Sin Comin’ On.” Roland is stranded in the shadows.

  “So what’s going on with you and Roll?” Pete asks Addie. “You like him?”

  “Sure. We’re old friends.” Addie takes a swig of beer, sets down her mug. “When’s somebody going to tell me about the woman?”

  Pete and Golita look at each other.

  “I’ve seen her things in Roland’s apartment.”

  “Elle,” Golita says.

  “Don’t worry about Elle,” Pete says. “She’s just some chick who followed Roll home one night. You know Roll. What’s he gonna do.”

  “He needed help with rent,” Golita says.

  “Where is she now?”

  “Gone,” Pete says. “Moved out. Don’t worry. It’s a good thing. Tell her, babe. You ever seen Roll this good?”

  Golita shrugs.

  “Look,” Pete says and touches Addie’s arm, “you want to step outside? Get some air?”

  She gets up with him. They leave Golita to save the table.

  The sand parking lot behind the bar backs onto a canal. Moonlight shivers on the water. “Like the real Venice,” Addie says, though she has never been to Italy. There’s a mattress on the bank, and a tire, and a broken shopping cart. Pete takes a brown bottle out of his pocket, unscrews the cap, which is also a tiny spoon, and offers it to Addie. He opens his jacket to shelter her as she lifts the spoon to each nostril.

  “My doll’s tea set had spoons like this,” she says.

  “You have a tea set?”

  “My doll did. When I was young. I don’t know what happened to it.”

  Behind the dull thudding of the band she can hear the faint sound of water lapping. This is what she loves about coke, how you notice everything. The cool, perfect air. How close Pete is standing. The fine red stubble on his cheeks, how it catches the light. She cups her hands around his face. He leans closer, until they are head to head. He puts his mouth on hers. She tastes salt, and pulls away.

  “Sorry, I wasn’t—”

  “Sorry.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Me either.”

  She wonders which of them is sorrier. Which of them loves Roland more.

  When they go back in, he’s plugged in and standing with the band. “You missed him on ‘Dark End of the Street,’” Golita says. Now the band’s playing “After Midnight,” a slowed-down version, more JJ Cale than Clapton. Two verses in, the singer nods at Roland, and Roland steps up. His shirtsleeves are rolled back. This is his moment, and Addie wonders if he’ll break out, burn it up, play some scorching lead, something truly incendiary, even though incendiary isn’t what the song calls for. The song is about what’s going to happen after midnight. In the song, midnight isn’t here yet.

  Roland knows. He holds back, plays it spare. Long, slow notes with plenty of space in between. It sounds like the front end of a thunderstorm, when the first rain begins to hit the pavement: those slow, fat, hard drops just before the whole sky comes crashing down.

  Dear Byrd,

  I would like to tell you your father and I loved each other. Maybe we did; maybe love is the right word, though it’s not one we ever used. What I can tell you is, he trusted me. He let me see the purest part of him, the music part.

  Trust is a sweet thing, and fragile. I was not always as careful with your father’s as I should have been.

  Sandalwood

  A cold, bright Saturday morning in Greensboro. Warren Finch is brewing a pot of chamomile tea for his favorite client, who is seated at the kitchen table with her hands folded in front of her. Her long red hair is pulled back. Her face is golden in the sunlight through the Indian-print curtain. A calendar of Hindu deities hangs on the wall behind her. February is Shiva, god of creation and destruction.

  “What do I smell?” she asks.

  “Incense,” Warren says. “Sandalwood.”

  The smell reminds him of India, where everywhere, always, there was the smell of burning. Burning sandalwood, burning hashish, burning opium, burning bodies on the ghats at Benares.

  “It smells like burnt toast,” Addie says.

  “I burned my toast, but that was yesterday.” He pours their tea into china cups—his mother’s wedding pattern, white with yellow roses. He sets the cups on a tray, carries the tray to the table and sets it down stiffly. Getting started is always awkward, a little like striking up a love affair, Warren imagines. The trick is to be both casual and purposeful. He has found with clients that chamomile helps, gentles things.

  He serves Addie her tea and offers her half a candy bar. “For this kind of reading, I usually like to have both parties present.”

  “The other party is in California,” she says.

  “I know. I’m just saying.” He wishes his voice weren’t so nasal. People always think he’s complaining when in fact it is his practice, in readings and in all things, to remain neutral. To live his life without attachments, to be as a still pond (an empty pond, the Buddha would have said, but that’s not so picturesque), brilliant as glass, without a ripple. No emotion, no desire—except the one wish, for a different voice, one that could express him per
fectly. A deep, resonant, comforting voice that he could wrap around his clients like a coat.

  “What’s this candy?” Addie says. “It tastes like coconut.”

  “Bean curd. It’s the Indian version of a Mounds bar. Believe it or not, it’s called a Barfy.”

  Addie laughs. Warren laughs. Laughter is good, an auspicious beginning.

  “So,” he says, “what can I tell you? Which aspects of the relationship are unclear?”

  “All aspects. I don’t even know what to call the relationship, much less what to do about it.”

  “What to do, what to do,” Warren says, trying to sound lighthearted. “That’s the Leo in you, wanting to do, never content simply to be.” As a rule, he isn’t attracted to Leos—too outward-manifesting. But Addie is an unusual Leo, with three planets in Virgo. She is powerful but doesn’t feel her power. She’s capable without knowing it.

  “He needs to be in L.A. for his music,” she says. “I’ve been thinking about going back. Maybe staying awhile. You keep saying I should travel.”

  “You don’t mean move? Give up your place here? Your job?”

  Warren has long been in the habit of stopping in the Readery on his nightly walks. The store is only two blocks away, in a once-fine Victorian house. A calm, welcoming place, full of lamplight and the tapioca smell of old books. Warren doesn’t much care for reading himself; his mind is too full already. But he likes to be around other people reading. He likes sitting on a lumpy sofa, drinking tea, listening to pages turn. He likes watching Addie at her square oak desk, an old teacher’s desk, wrapping books in clear plastic jackets. She works slowly, meditatively, laying the books open to measure them, folding the jackets down to size. Sometimes, for the smaller books, cutting the jackets. She handles the books tenderly, a glow of utter devotion on her face.