you’ve got to have one.”
I shook my head again. “I don’t drink.”
Nina tilted an eyebrow at me. “I’ll fix you a virgin, then.”
“That’s all she lets me have,” Billy called from the living room. “They’re not bad.”
“With that kind of testimonial, how can I refuse?” I said. Nina dumped strawberries, sugar, and ice into the blender, capped the steel pitcher, and hit the button. I leaned toward Ines and spoke over the din.
“What am I chopping for?”
“Tomato and onion salad, so not too fine.” I nodded and started slicing. Nina shut down the blender and handed me a drink.
“We’re out of umbrellas,” she said. “I figured we could talk after dinner, and since you two have everything covered, I’m going to sneak into the studio for a while.” Ines nodded and Nina carried her drink away. I watched as she crossed the room and ruffled Billy’s hair as she passed. He looked up at her and smiled.
Ines and I worked side by side. She swayed gently to the music as she chopped and skewered, and she sang along softly and sipped at her daiquiri. Her knife work was fast and precise, and there was something almost hypnotic in the movements of her long, strong fingers. Even with the windows open and the fan running it was warm in the kitchen, and there was a faint sheen on Ines’s forehead. The broad, flat scar on her arm looked slick. Her perfume and the delicate aroma of her sweat mingled pleasantly with the smells of cooking food.
I was slow but managed not to make too much of a mess. I finished with the tomatoes and moved on to the onions, and when I’d hacked those up sufficiently, Ines swept them into a big glass bowl and tossed them with oil and vinegar and some basil leaves.
“What else can I do?”
“Just relax, detective.”
I took my drink to the living room and sat on the edge of the sofa. Billy was just finishing his bagging.
“New stuff?” I asked.
He nodded. “Yeah. I’ve got the complete run of House of Anxiety now- all mint- and I’m only missing five issues for the full set of Perturbed. I got something that’s up your alley, too.” Billy sorted through the pile and handed me a stack of seven comics. I looked them over. “Detective Comics, issues 437 through 443, from 1974, when DC brought back the Manhunter and brought your buddy Batman into it. All very fine or near-mint condition. Be careful with them; I got them to trade with a guy, for the first three issues of Dreadful Landscape.”
Billy watched me closely as I studied the comics, and I must have shown the right degree of reverence, as he was soon talking me through his whole stack. He expounded on the artists and writers of nearly every issue in the pile and went on at length about the fine points of quality grades- what separated a near-mint-minus, for example, from a very-fine-plus. He had a vast array of facts at his disposal, and he was pleased with his esoteric knowledge. He was as finicky and proud as any collector of stamps or fine wines, but his sense of humorsarcastic and self- deprecating- saved him from pedantry. I thought about Gregory Danes’s record collection and wondered if monomania ran in families. Whatever its source, Billy reveled in it. His thin face lost its usual dour cast, and his blue eyes were lively and sharp. Words tumbled out of him, and his hands danced around. The Motown disc ended and Billy interrupted a pronouncement on pricing to change CDs.
“Can we at least hear something close to this century?” he said. Billy went to one of the tall shelf units, to a messy heap of discs next to the CD player. He picked through it, passing cruel but amusing judgments on his mother’s taste in music, and eventually found something he liked. He loaded the disc and fell into a deep slouch at the other end of the sofa. The music was funky and jazzy, with plenty of horns, a twanging electric guitar, and beefy keyboards. It sounded familiar.
“I know this,” I said. “Who is it?” Billy looked pleased.
“Band’s called Galactic, the album is-”
“Crazyhorse Mongoose,” I interrupted. “I haven’t heard this for a while.” Billy was taken aback, and maybe a little impressed. And that got us onto a whole other topic.
Billy’s taste in music was not the typical twelve-year-old’s, and it was catholic, to say the least. It ranged from sixties and seventies soul to jazz fusion to ska to old-school punk and hip-hop, and he talked about musicians and bands with a fervor that surpassed even his comic book discourses. Many of his favorites were obscure, but I knew a few of them, which surprised Billy some more.
“Do you play anything?” I asked.
Billy shrugged. “A little bass, but I don’t spend enough time with it.” He looked at me and hesitated. “My dad’s always trying to get me going on the piano.”
“That’s what he plays, right?”
Billy nodded. “Shit, yes. He’s been playing since he was five or something, and he’s amazing. He’s into classical stuff. I told him he should listen to some jazz, but he thinks it’s bullshit. I told him to check out Monk, but he doesn’t want to know.”
He looked down and thought about something and laughed to himself.
“Check this,” he said, and he sprang off the sofa and trotted down the hall toward his room. From the kitchen, Ines watched him go. Then she looked at me and brushed a strand of damp hair away from her face. Billy was back in under two minutes, holding a glossy photograph.
“This is what my dad knows about jazz,” he said, and handed me the photo. It was a picture of three men in black tie, standing side by side. On the right was Gregory Danes, and in the center was a world-renowned bassist, an aging jazz icon and darling of the NPR set. On the left was a white-haired man with hollow cheeks whose name I didn’t know, but whose face I recognized from a similar photo I’d seen in Danes’s apartment. The famous bassist had autographed the picture in black marker: To my buddy, Bill- keep swingin’, man. Billy laughed.
“Personally, I think the guy plays elevator music,” Billy said. But I could tell he was pleased to have the photo, and proud that his father had met the great man- and too full of adolescent cool to admit to either.
“Who’s the other guy?” I asked him, but Ines called to him and interrupted any answer he might have given.
“Guillermo, set the table, will you?” Billy rolled his eyes dramatically but hoisted himself off the sofa and into the kitchen. I followed him.
“Need some help?” I asked.
“I got it,” he said. He made a stack of plates and flatware and carried it to the living room, to the green glass table near the sofa. Ines and I watched him.
“He’s in a better mood,” I said quietly.
Ines laughed softly. “For the moment. We went to visit a school in Manhattan this afternoon. It is very small and it caters solely to gifted children, and they have a very impressive maths program. The atmosphere there is very… welcoming.”
“He liked it?”
She smiled. “His exact words were, It doesn’t suck.” Her imitation of Billy’s disaffected, cracking tenor was spot-on, and I laughed and so did she.
“Will he go there?” I asked.
Ines’s face grew still. “I do not know,” she said. She turned back to the stove and the skewers of beef. “The grill is hot and these will not take long to cook. Could you call Nina please, detective?”
Nina and Ines sat on the sofa, and Billy and I sat on cushions on the floor. The food was delicious. Besides the salad and the kebabs, Ines had made a couscous, and Nina whipped up a few more batches of daiquiris- virgins for Billy and me.
Dinner conversation started with Nina’s upcoming show at a small but influential art museum in Connecticut, meandered around to the sorry state of the New York City art scene, and somehow found its way to the love lives of the half-dozen or so galleristas who were sometimes in Ines’s employ. Billy speculated freely on who was doing what to whom, but he grew silent and squirmy when a girl named Reese was mentioned. Nina teased him.
“Reese is this little blond thing from Santa Barbara,” Nina said to me. “She goes to Cooper Union, and she works for Nes on the weekends. She’s nineteen and she’s got this snaky little bod and Billy’s totally hot for her.” Billy colored deeply. “I’m telling you, Bill, she’s single again and I think she’s into younger stuff.” Billy slurped the last of his daiquiri and flipped her the bird.
Throughout, Billy was the DJ, spinning Curtis Mayfield, The Radiators, The Tom Tom Club, and more Galactic, and he and Ines slid, spun, and bumped to all the danceable tracks. Billy was wild and comic and Ines was liquid.
