if she did say something, and then she bites her lip and fights back a cold rush of fear at the thought of actually saying it.
The saxophone teacher is thinking about Patsy. She is thinking about Patsy in the smoky afterward bar, still with her concert program tucked in her fist, ordering glasses of wine which they will later refill, in a secret giddy way, from a screw-top bottle in Patsy’s handbag. She sees them both folding themselves into a corner, unwrapping scarves and coats and talking about the crowd and the arrangement and the soloist, and then Patsy saying, “What did you imagine?” and already half-laughing in her eagerness.
“I imagined the music was pouring out of the saxophone like water,” the saxophone teacher said, “pouring over the lip of the bell and pooling on the floor at his feet, and the water level was getting higher and higher and the tide was churning stronger and stronger and in the end he had to finish the piece just to save his life. And then we clapped and he started a new piece and I imagined that the sax was sucking his breath out of him, instead of him blowing the air in, and that the mouthpiece was pushing and pushing to get further and further in, that the sax was trying desperately to suffocate him, and he had to keep playing to save his life.”
Patsy laughed and clapped and they touched glasses and drank, and the saxophone teacher said, “What did
“I imagined that noise had the power to seriously hurt you, even kill you,” Patsy said, “depending on the quality of the musicianship. The more elegant the playing, the more total the death. The Town Hall would be like the arena where you were sent if you had done something truly terrible. You’d be marched into the auditorium, strapped down and buckled on to the red velvet seats so tight you couldn’t move. The soloist would be the executioner, playing faster and faster and watching you over the footlights with wet greedy eyes.”
The saxophone teacher laughed and clapped and they touched glasses again and drank, and Patsy said, “That concert changed me forever.”
On Saturday nights Bridget works at the local video store. She sits glumly on a high vinyl stool and watches the lonely people drift from shelf to shelf, keeping one eye on the black-and-white security television that dimly shows the curtained nook where the adult tapes are shelved. The clock says half-past nine. Bridget watches the inching revolutions of the minute hand and listens for the padded thump of a late tape through the dewy drop- slot.
“Hello, Bridget,” somebody says.
Bridget shoves her chewing gum to the side of her mouth and turns her tired head to see Mr. Saladin standing by the door, crisp in beige trousers and a woollen coat. He smiles at her in a boyish way.
“Hi, Mr. Saladin,” says Bridget, brightening and slithering forward off her stool. “I’ve never seen you here before.”
“My nephews live in the area,” says Mr. Saladin. “Two blocks over.”
“Oh,” says Bridget with genuine surprise, because she has never thought of Mr. Saladin as the type of man to have nephews. She regards him a little shyly.
“How is it that you’re allowed to work here? You’re not eighteen,” Mr. Saladin says, folding his gloved hands across his chest. “You must not be allowed to watch half the movies here.”
“I’m not watching them,” says Bridget, “I’m only selling them.”
Mr. Saladin chuckles. “And I suppose after I’ve gone you’re going to look up my record for porno,” he says.
“Probably,” says Bridget, with a rush of gratitude at being granted ownership of the joke. “And I’ll find out how old you really are.”
“Now you’ve gone too far,” Mr. Saladin says, feigning gravity. “That is privileged information. Don’t you dare.”
Bridget giggles and then stifles the sound quickly, covering her mouth with her hand. Behind her, the row of mounted television screens flashes its sequence of silent silver car-wrecks and swift untimely deaths.
“Working on a Saturday night,” Mr. Saladin says, shaking his head. “What happened to drinking and taking drugs and smoking and playing loud music? I must be out of touch.”
Again Bridget’s hand flies to her mouth to smother her laughter. Mr. Saladin smiles, his gaze sliding upward for a second as he is distracted by an image darting by.
The clock moves forward.
Until this precise moment in her life Bridget has understood flirting only as a self-promotional conversational tool, wielded with the intention of winning a short-term companion or a grope. Now as she looks at Mr. Saladin, calm and smiling and unruffled in his clean pressed clothes, his scarf knotted neatly around his throat, his elegant triple-veined leather gloves and his windswept hair, Bridget suffers a lusty rush of bewildered wanting that tightens like a fist in her groin. For the first time in sixteen years she feels impelled to flirt for the sole purpose of ruining somebody else, driven to recklessness by the dim and thrilling notion that
“What are you doing now? Do you have a new job?” she asks. “We miss you at jazz band.”
“For now I’m painting houses,” Mr. Saladin says. “I’m in between things. So the new conductor is putting you through the paces?”
“Mrs. Jean Critchley,” Bridget says. “She’s okay.”
“I know the name,” Mr. Saladin says. “I’ve seen her play live. She’s good.”
“Yeah,” Bridget says casually. Mr. Saladin smiles and looks around him, as if he means to amble off, and so Bridget says all in a hurry, “We had to go to counseling after you left, in case we were damaged. It was lame.”
Mr. Saladin raises his eyebrows. He doesn’t speak for a moment. Then he says calmly, “That doesn’t sound like much fun.”
“It was lame,” Bridget says again, and she almost feels inept, but then she remembers that
“Victoria still hasn’t come back to school,” she blurts out before Mr. Saladin can speak again, trying in her gauche and rumpled way to talk casually, like the beautiful girls at school talk casually, tossing their hair over their shoulder and turning out their feet like show ponies. “Has she left for good?”
“No, I don’t think so,” says Mr. Saladin. “I imagine she’ll be back before exams.”
“That’s good,” says Bridget. She smiles in what she hopes is an encouraging way, wanting to show that she is on Mr. Saladin’s side.
“Good to see you, Bridget. Keep on with your music,” says Mr. Saladin. He smiles at her and strolls off toward the neon wall of new releases. “I’ll go and see what you’ve got on offer.”
“It’s two for ten,” Bridget calls out after him.
She stands there for a moment before retreating back to her stool. Out of habit she checks the security screen and sees a couple furtively entering the adult nook, clutching each other and giggling as they trail their fingers along the spines. She watches as the woman selects a title and they laugh at the various postures pictured in miniature on the back. The man says something quietly, and the woman pretends to be furious and slaps at him with the end of her scarf. They laugh.
After Mr. Saladin leaves, Bridget looks up his rental history and is disappointed to find no porno. She learns that he is thirty-one.
After the applause, the three of them sit for a moment in silence. The lights come up over the audience, restoring color to the wraiths, and all around them the crowd begins to shift and laugh and chatter, reaching down for their scarves and their programs and their clutch purses as if released from a spell. The saxophone teacher is lost in a memory and doesn’t stir, her hands limp from the applause, her eyes large and vacant and turned toward the stage. Julia sits forward on her seat and turns to Isolde suddenly, and says, “Do you want a lift home? I’ve got my car here. It’d be no problem.”
Isolde hasn’t yet learned to drive and Julia’s offer makes her feel young and inexperienced and graceless, as
