All Our Pretty Songs

mess up my hair. I check myself out in the filthy bathroom mirror. I look mean, which doesn’t surprise me, and sexy, which does. Aurora leaves me to go get a drink and I watch her dance through the crowd, touching someone’s arm, kissing someone else’s cheek.

The air is hot and thick with cigarette smoke and the resinous tang of pot. Red lights are trained on the empty stage and they refract through the haze across a tangle of faces and bodies. I shift from one foot to the other, my skin itchy. Someone elbows me in the back, someone else steps on my foot, and panic surges in my chest—they’re going to crush me, I think. I can’t breathe, and the bodies around me are pressing closer and closer, and I fight the urge to punch into the crowd. “What’s the matter?” Aurora asks, coming up behind me and putting one cool hand on my cheek. “You look awful, what happened?” She hands me a drink, something clear and cold, and I gulp it down without asking what it is. Then I see who she’s with. It’s the skeleton man from her party. He’s wearing the same clothes, or some version of the same clothes. His eyes are so dark I can’t see where the pupil ends and the iris begins.

“This is Minos,” Aurora says. “You remember him? He was at my party? He owns a club in LA, and he works for a record producer.” She babbles on. Her voice has the plastic lilt it takes on when she’s being charming. The skeleton man watches me with his flat black eyes, as though he can see right through me to that afternoon on the beach with Jack, as though he knows everything I have done and every thought I have ever had. Under that ruthless stare all my feelings seem adolescent and cheap. The stage lights dim and come up again, saving me from having to say anything. Jack comes onstage and the crowd hushes instantly. I can feel the whole club go anxious and expectant around me. Aurora puts her head on my shoulder. “They love him already. Look at that.” She pokes me in the ribs. “Love him just like you.” I grimace but refuse to rise to her bait.

I thought I had been moved by Jack’s music before; that was nothing compared to what happens now. The music washes through the packed room like a flood tide. It’s the sound of spring rising out of a cracked and barren earth, gilding branches with new buds and loading vines with heavy blossoms, dusting bees with pollen. It’s spring giving way to summer, balmy air smelling of roses, hot skin meeting the cold shock of the ocean, starry nights as warm as kisses. It’s the soft touch of lips brushing the hollow of your throat, slow hands on your naked skin. It’s as elemental and necessary as the breath in my lungs, but far more beautiful than anything that is real. I open my eyes and look around me and see mouths open, cheeks wet with tears. But the hunger in their eyes terrifies me, their hands reaching for him as though they would tear him to pieces if he were among them. Devour him whole. No, I think, it’s too much. It’s too much. But I can’t stop it, can’t even stem my own desire, how much I want him, how much I want that music in me, too.

When he stops playing he stands for a moment, stilling the quivering strings with the flat of his hand, and then he walks off the stage. The room is as still as a cathedral for long seconds, and then everyone around me lets out their breath at the same time, and the madness leaves their eyes and they shake their heads as though to clear away a spell. Someone begins to clap, slow and uncertain, and then someone else joins in, and then the whole room roars, throats open wide, cheering and stomping their feet. I look over at Aurora. Minos is standing behind her, his arms around her waist, and she is leaning into him with her mouth open. He catches my look and smiles at me, a death’s-head grin with no joy in it.

It is a long time before the cheering dies down, and a long time after that before the next band begins carrying their drum kit and amps onto the stage, shoulders hunched as though they are embarrassed. The band launches into its first song and the chords jangle harsh and wrong. They falter and stop, start over again. I’ve seen them before and they were good, better than good, but there’s no way anyone mortal can follow Jack. The singer, a girl with long dark hair and a baby face, seems near tears. Aurora is drinking one clear drink after another. “Let’s go,” I say to her, and she shakes her head.

“I’m having fun.”

“This stopped being fun.”

“You don’t even try to have fun.” She pouts at me. I know Aurora drunk by heart. I don’t even need to see the flush in her cheeks or hear the challenge in her voice. Minos lurks behind her, bone-thin but somehow taking up too much space. I don’t like him, don’t want to talk to him, don’t want to watch Aurora flirt with him, giggling, like a rabbit teasing a wolf. He could eat her whole. He looks at me over her shoulder and smiles again. It’s not friendly.

“I’m going to find Jack.” I push past them before she can say anything else. I cut my way through the crowd to the door that leads backstage, wait until no one is looking and duck through it into the dingy and badly lit corridor.

Jack is in the green room, alone, sitting on a decrepit velour couch that looks like it’s been abused by musicians for longer than I’ve been alive. His guitar is next to him and his head is in his hands. I feel suddenly foolish, duck my head in embarrassment. But he looks up at me with such naked joy that I have to look away. I cross the room and before I even reach the couch he’s on his feet, leaning toward me, his mouth meeting mine.

“They want so much,” he says into my hair. “Every time I play for more people, they want more of me, and I feel so empty when I’m done. But it’s the only thing I know how to do. It’s the only thing I’m good at.”

“You can learn other things.”

“It’s the only thing that makes me feel alive.” He is holding my wrists now, so tightly it hurts. “Do you want to get out of here?”

“Let’s go.”

He lives in a one-story cottage caught between two larger buildings. A jungle of front garden hides it from the street: huge, glorious dahlias luminous in the moonlight; heady-scented wild roses; broad-leaved and tall green plants I do not recognize. Cass would know their names. The ground is carpeted with mint, and a riot of jasmine obscures the front porch. I stop to look at the flowers. “I’ve never seen dahlias this big.”

“I play for them,” he says. “I think they like it.” He unlocks the door and I follow him inside.

The house is a single open room, with a small kitchen in one corner and big windows that look out on another, even junglier garden in back. There’s a mattress under one of the windows with a book-stuffed shelf beside it, a cheap card table and two chairs, a soft rich rug, a dresser, a single lamp in one corner. A record player sits beside a wooden crate full of records. There’s nothing on the walls except for a print of Henri Rousseau’s The Sleeping Gypsy tacked up over the bed. I’ve always loved that painting: the reclining figure stretched out on desert sand underneath a night-blued sky. Multicolored coat, striped blanket, lute. The moon is full, edging a range of mountains in silver. A lion stands over the sleeping figure, one yellow eye staring. Not at the sleeper, but at me. No one in the world knows where I am except Jack. I cross the room and squat next to the bookshelf. Mostly classics: Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The Odyssey, Keats, Shakespeare. A copy of The Inferno illustrated by Gustave Dore. Art books: Lucian Freud, Kiki Smith. “Schiele,” I say, “you like him?”

“I love him.”

“So do I. You like Rousseau, too?”

He touches the picture. “Did you know he never left France in his entire life? He was a tax collector who painted taxidermied animals and invented a jungle out of the exhibits at the Jardin des Plantes in Paris. He painted people like me without ever having met a black person.” He stops and I wait for him to say something else. “It’s a reminder,” he says. “For me. Of what people see.”

“Oh. I never thought about it that way before.”

“Well,” he says. “You’re white.”

“Oh,” I say again.

He puts on a Nina Simone record, sits on the bed. “Come here,” he says gently, and I move up from the floor so that I’m sitting next to him on the mattress. My heart is beating so hard I think he must be able to hear it. Nina Simone’s low rich voice seals us in. “What do you paint?” he asks. “Surely not lions.” He puts a hand on my back, his thumb gently rubbing the knot of bone where my neck meets my spine.

“People, mostly. Sometimes places. Sometimes things that aren’t real.”

“Would you paint me?”

“I can’t.”

“Try.”

I hook my bag toward me with my foot, get out the jar of India ink and the soft brushes I carry with me