course we'll talk to him. Your name was at the door, wasn't it? He didn't forget, did he?" A waitress squeezes by. "I'll have a gin and tonic," Madeline says to her.
"Diet Coke for me." I scan the room with a fake smile on my face, my elbows on the table. By the stairs, a skinny guy sells Glass Half Empty's one and only CD, which both Madeline and I already own. The skinny guy is always around, always selling CDs. If our eyes meet at shows, I turn away in embarrassment. I feel caught; I feel like a groupie. I hate that feeling, because while it denotes repetition and belonging, it also suggests patheticness and nowhere-else-to-go-ness. I'm thankful that he hardly pays attention to me. Tonight I try looking warm, comfortable, and sophisticated, but it's hard, because I think I'm supposed to do something special with my hands. "What should I do? Should I be doing something? Am I supposed to go backstage and look for him?"
"Go up to that guy over there." Madeline tosses her head back quickly in the direction of the bouncer standing by the stage. He's bald, tough, and tattooed; he looks like a pirate. "Say, I'm with the band. Ask him if you can go backstage. See what he says."
I try it out. "I'm with the band."
"Try again," she says. "Deeper, more confidence."
"I'm with the band," I repeat an octave lower. When I see a blank expression from Madeline, I add, "Damn it."
In that secret, sudden way that men have when they approach girls in bars, Rob joins us, sitting down at my side. "You made it!" He smiles hugely. We're like long-lost friends. I have this inexplicable desire to embrace him passionately and plant a wet one on his lips.
He thrusts his hand out toward Madeline. "You must be Madeline."
She doesn't shake, but rather places her fingertips into his palm as if this were a Merchant Ivory film. "Charmed, I'm sure."
Yikes! Is Madeline trying to put on the sex appeal with Rob Shachtley, whose wife died only seven years ago?
"Likewise." He kisses her where the Fedora girl left a glow-in-the-dark stamp.
Sexual tension?
He turns to me. "I have to go, but do you two want to hook up after the show? Coffee? A drink? Truth or Dare?"
"Yeah, let's," I say as Madeline lights a cigarette.
"It'll take me a while to get out of here, so I'll meet you." He stands. "I'll sing you a song. What do you want me to sing for you, Sybil Weatherfield?"
I know there's something I should be doing with my hands. " 'Sister Golden Hair'? 'Rhinestone Cowboy'?" I hesitate, staring at the ceiling. "I got it. 'Rhiannon.' "
"Let me think." He puts his index finger to his lips and closes his eyes. He opens them. "Uh, no. When I sing a Beatles song, it's for you." When he smiles, I blush. Second time he's made me blush.
Madeline drags on her cigarette while we agree, over loud music, to meet at Café Michelangelo on Bleecker.
"Listen for the Beatles," he tells me, leaving. "That'll be for you."
Before he gets out of earshot, I call after him, "Hey, Rob?"
"Yeah?" He turns his body around. The girls nearby watch him walk. The music seems to blare.
The girls stare at him. He doesn't seem to notice. He must notice. "Who's the skinny guy who always sells CDs at the shows?" I ask, pointing to the stairs. It's just an excuse to talk to him. Realizing this, I feel silly and self-conscious. I tell myself I have a boyfriend. I tell myself Madeline doesn't detect anything out of the ordinary. I tell myself I'm really interested in the mysterious identity of the skinny guy by the stairs.
Rob, looking past the audience, checks out the skinny guy. "Oh, Greg. Sound engineer/manager/record producer extraordinaire." He lowers his eyes to mine. "Dave's wife's little brother. He comes in from Boston a couple times a month." He pauses. "He does the flyers."
"They're great flyers," I say.
The machinations of rock 'n' roll. When he turns away and I find myself looking at him like the other girls, I blush again. I check out Madeline.
She watches him too. "He's fatter up close."
"You think? I don't think so. Maybe a little." Now I'm so red that I probably look like I'm about to die from a rash.
Glass Half Empty takes the stage: Rob Shachtley in a pink suit with a guitar and Dave Stomps in a black suit at drums. They look like an overturned box of Good & Plenty.
Listening to rock 'n' roll is like scratching a bug bite till it bleeds. Just when Madeline and I master blasé, he breaks into "Love Me Do." I remember in the Laundromat how he said I didn't want to be his love slave. That's what he said.
Am I being pursued? What does he want from me? I don't want to be just another groupie, just another girl.
I listen, trying to look unmoved. My cheeks can't redden. No standing on my chair. It's a rock 'n' roll moment, and anyone who's ever had one knows it's precious: a flash, a split second, like a Korean launderer, a nonfat berry muffin. It's like a memory of picking apples in an orchard or putting your cat in a stroller when you're three. A rock 'n' roll moment is about being there and not somewhere else, missing it.
The show ends when Rob summons up images of a wraith-like woman sipping from the Fountain of Youth at gunpoint.
The lights come on, Madeline places money under a glass, and we walk through the Fedora to exit. People press in and smile at someone visible just over our shoulders. It's easy to be claustrophobic now. I've lost whatever it was I had, and now there's an odd sensation that, in the midst of my efforts to get out of the Fedora with Madeline Blue— who will always be cooler than I, even in pajama bottoms— I'm somehow off.
"Good set," Madeline says on the street.
Fedoraphobic, I draw my jacket tightly around me. "It's freezing."
We walk west. "What do you know about Dave?" she asks.
"Nothing. Only what you know."
As we pass Washington Square Park, about ten homeless guys create a gauntlet for us to walk through. "Smoke? Smoke? Smoke?" We keep going.
Café Michelangelo is muted and dim, the colors of peacock feathers and the Italian Renaissance. Furnished in antiques, it's a torrent of curled iron chair legs, round marble tables, and stained wooden fixtures spread beneath mirrors, long and thin, short and stout, beveled, opaque, and crystal-clear. A veritable house of mirrors on Mona Lisa muted-color walls, Sistine Chapel ceilings. The dessert case is bright with cheesecakes lit up like a lost ark, chocolate layer cakes unsliced behind translucence. Just sitting on a hard-backed chair with a red velvet cushion makes me want to sip espresso and talk about Plato.
Rob arrives twenty minutes after us. "Dave's doing the dirty work." He hangs his coat on the back of his chair. "Kissing girls, speaking to Entertainment Tonight. John Tesh is full of questions this evening."
Our waiter has an Italian accent. Madeline haggles with him over the ingredients of a caffé Americano, which isn't on the menu. "I'm desperate for one," she whines. "It's only espresso and water." When he leaves, having agreed to try his best to make one, she
