Okay, ten minutes.
“At least they’ll have nice bathrooms,” Brenda offers, squinting up at the glare, but nobody takes much solace from this.
They gulp down the rest of their coffee in silence and put the mugs away. Travis takes Jenny’s hand to help her down from the running board. “Let’s go blow ’em away,” he says, winking at her. Brenda loads Jenny down with her dress and shoes and gear, and hugs her neck for luck. Travis checks his back pocket for the demo cassette and their business card, hoists the old black guitar case and the shaving kit, and they’re off. Just before they turn the corner the van’s horn honks, and when they look around Brenda blows them one last kiss through the window and then, with the bedspread around her shoulders, does a pantomime of a deep-sea diver going under as she sinks down into sleep.
The security guard in the lobby looks like Captain Kangaroo on Valium. He pushes the clipboard wordlessly toward Travis and Jenny to sign, his sad eyes half shut, not even looking them up and down once, seeming long ago to have quit passing judgment on who comes and goes from the seventeenth floor.
“Are there restrooms on this level?” Jenny asks him. Still without words, he points with two hands at forty-five degree angles to indicate the far corners of the lobby beyond the elevators. While Travis is picking up his case he catches a glimpse of the Captain’s eyes, no longer at half staff, watching reverently as Jenny’s small backside retreats across the marble floor. Travis smiles to himself, feeling better about the state of the old man’s health.
In the men’s room he washes his face and brushes his teeth and gargles the scorched coffee taste out of his throat, and has just finished up lathering to shave when somebody starts banging hard on the door, though it’s not locked.
When he opens the door it’s Jenny, her hair partly curled and one of her eyes made up like a nightclub singer, the unmade eye still belonging to a freckled country girl who could be fifteen or forty in the proper kinds of light.
“Look, you’re right,” she says, her face tight like it hurts her to admit this. She has the short purple dress on, but is still barefoot. An unopened package of gray pantyhose is in her hand.
“Right about what?” Travis asks.
“You know. On the bridge of ‘Trusting’? Where you said for me to come in two beats early an octave high and slide down into the note and I said it sounded stupid? Well, it don’t. It kind of grows on me.”
As long as Travis has known her, he never hears her say this many things in a row without thinking of the crazy disparity between her talking voice and her singing one—the former like a little girl in a cartoon show, people stifling a grin and nudging each other the first time they hear it; and the other, the singing, as rough and low as the last sip of whiskey in a glass. Echoes of Patsy and Kitty and Lacy J. and Maybelle and Lord knows who-all else, a woman who has loved and hurt for a thousand years and can make you feel every scar.
“So, do you want to do it that way?” Travis asks, the lather drying on his cheeks.
She nods with both halves of her face and then runs back toward the ladies’ room in her tight dress, opening her pantyhose as she goes. The sight stabs Travis under his right breastbone with a feeling that a faceful of cold water can only partly quench, and as he shaves he makes himself think of the Agreement.
The one they reached two years ago, maybe three now, the night the band played a Shriners’ convention in Indianapolis and the crowd flat ate them up, standing ovations and rebel-yelling and refusing to let them go until they’d done three—no, four—encores. Then to top it off, paying them the five hundred in cold hard cash and standing them to free drinks at the bar. It was better than Christmas.
Travis going easy on the drinks because it was his turn to drive and also because he was so high already from doing the show. So that Jenny and the drummer—Carl—both ended up drinking his share too, and by the time they were ready to head home Carl climbed in the back and immediately conked out and Jenny in the front drowsed on Travis’s shoulder down the interstate until he found WSM on the radio and it was playing Bill Monroe doing “Uncle Pen” and Jenny sang the high tenor harmony with it and he joined in on the baritone part and wondered if life ever got any better than this.
They were both so damned giddy that afterward he could never remember for sure whose lips had found whose in the dark, but he did remember that when it dawned on them what they were doing they separated at the same instant, like getting an electric shock.
Jenny panting to get her breath back regular and him saying to the taillights of the cars up ahead, “We can’t do this, can we?”
She shook her head violently. “Unh-uh. It’d be . . . it’d be like insects, or something.”
He thought on that a minute. “Like what?”
“Like . . . incest. What did I say?”
He got to laughing so hard he cried and couldn’t see to drive, and when he pulled off onto the shoulder to wipe his eyes her arms were suddenly around him with more strength than he thought she had. They sat holding each other that way for a long time.
“I love you, Travis.”
“I love you, Jen.”
The Agreement was fairly straightforward. He wouldn’t start anything if she wouldn’t, and in that way she would go on being like one of the family to them, Brenda’s best friend and the sister he had never had, and even when he was dead certain that a guy she was going out with was a shithead Travis would not volunteer his opinion to that effect unless she asked for it.
With a wet comb and the least touch of spray he gets his hair mostly presentable in the bathroom mirror and wishes he could so something about his face. Is it just the lighting in these places, or are there really such dark canyons under his eyes? True, between his day job and their five-night gig at The Trap this week he hasn’t been getting a lot of sleep, but damn. It’s all right to have a face like Haggard or Jones or Willie once you’ve made it. But when you’re just breaking in, it behooves you to look a little less hard-ridden than that. He heard one of the girls in the shop office talking about a new tinted cream they had out especially for that, the bags, but he hasn’t got up his nerve to go looking for it. Too late for now, anyhow. Showtime. Crack them knuckles, boy. Whistle a happy tune.
Jenny is standing by the elevators on her high black heels, her head down like a girl waiting to be asked to dance. He presses the button for Up.
“Do I look all right?” she asks. That little-bitty voice.
Does she look all right. The stab under his breastbone again.
He pokes her gently in the stomach with his index finger. “Buzzz,” he says.
She swings her travel bag, trying to hit his butt, but he jumps away. “Ain’t you never gonna let me forget that ‘insect’ shit?”
“You look like a million bucks,” he says, as the elevator doors bong open.
On Seventeen, the number they’re looking for is at the far end of the long hall. Maroon carpet and gray wallcloth and soft lights recessed inside the wood trim near the floor. At the distant dead end a polished door of dark wood says WinSong on it in gold letters, and because there’s not a knocker or a buzzer they go on in.
There’s no receptionist at the big curved desk, so they have a seat and wait for her to come back. Gold and platinum
