Dating Gaz was pretty much the complete opposite of dating Mel—in more than just the obvious male versus female way. For someone who didn’t like having long relationship talks, it should have been a dream come true. There were no heavy conversations about where their relationship was going. They rehearsed together, and if Avery felt like it, she stayed late and messed around with Gaz on the basement couch. They both kind of knew they were together, and that was enough.
Except … that it wasn’t. She still wasn’t feeling anything particularly strong for Gaz, outside of the physical attraction. That would have been okay, except that Gaz’s easygoing manner was starting to get to her, especially when it came to the band.
Somehow since New Year’s, Angry Maxwell had acquired three new members. Avery didn’t really even know where they came from—they each just showed up one day. Two of them, Rob and Dan, were guitarists. The third was a girl named Lizzy who didn’t actually play anything. She said that she was Wiccan and that she channeled pure energy. Her talent consisted of spinning around, making shrieking noises, and falling down. She frequently fell into the keyboard. She would have been kicked out immediately if Avery had anything to say about it, but Hareth liked her, so she remained. Rehearsals, which used to be pleasant wastes of time, now turned into irritating ones. There were endless debates about what kind of sound they were shooting for.
After a few days with her new bandmates, Avery made an important discovery: It’s easy to form a band. You just get a bunch of people together and voilà: band. But the big step is to move out of the basement and into a place where people have actually paid you to play—not offered to pay you to stop. One was the golden number. Once you got one paying gig, you were professional.
Avery was going to get that paying gig. Someone had to do something useful.
On Saturday morning she went to Philadelphia Avenue. This was the central meeting place of all Saratoga musicians. It always reminded Avery of pictures of medieval European streets. It was narrow, with hanging signs and brightly colored restaurants and bars. There was a wooden notice board at the top of the street, which had all the names of the local businesses painted by hand in funky white print. Next to that, there was a notice board jammed full of flyers for gigs and guitar lessons and Pilates classes.
Checking through the ads, Avery saw that there were plenty of places to play open mike, but that didn’t pay. In fact, most open mikes required the bands to fork over some cash to get in. There was only one thing to do—she would just go from bar to bar, asking around to see if anyone was willing to hire them.
She walked through most of downtown that day, hitting about twelve bars, before she finally got someone to say more than just “no.” One pub owner, a man in his fifties with a sharp white goatee, let her talk a bit while he smoked and unloaded a crate of liquor and stocked the well.
“You guys have a tape?” he asked.
“No …” Avery said. A tape would have been useful.
“Who do you play?”
Who do you play was a way of saying, “We don’t want to hear any of your original crap. If you play here, play something we know.”
“A normal mix,” Avery said. “What do other bands play here?”
“Our customers like pretty regular stuff. U2, Van Morrison, REM, Jimmy Buffett. Stuff like that.”
Middle-aged beer music, Avery thought.
“We do a bunch of U2 and REM,” she lied. “We just did a whole set of music like that at Skidmore last week.”
“Yeah?” The guy didn’t look wildly intrigued, but at least he was still talking. “No tape, huh?” he said. “Not much I can do without a tape.”
Avery looked around, trying to figure out a way to keep the conversation going. Over in a corner of the stage was a piano. She hadn’t exactly prepared for this contingency, but …
“How about I play you something?” she asked.
“Like what?”
The only thing she could think of at that moment was “Piano Man,” by Billy Joel, which had to be number one on her list of Songs to Be Stricken from the Musical Record. It was a song she despised so much that she knew it perfectly, note for note, just so that she could hate it in detail. She knew it in her head, anyway. She’d never tried to play it. But to get this gig, she was prepared to do the unthinkable.
She pointed to the piano.
“Can I show you?” she asked.
“Sure.” The man shrugged. “Go ahead.”
Avery had a fairly well developed ear. This was still a gamble, but she thought she could pull it off. After running through the song mentally for half a minute, she started to play. Her version was dead-on. It actually creeped her out. She had talents she really didn’t want to know she had.
The man stopped her after a minute or so.
“You like Billy Joel?” he asked.
“Um … yeah.”
“I don’t,” he replied. “But that was pretty good. I’ll tell you what….”
He turned around and pulled a calendar off the wall next to the cash register. He pinched his bottom lip and pulled it out, moving it from side to side as he flipped back and forth between two pages. Avery could see that his bottom teeth were deeply yellow. She looked at the pack of Marlboro Reds that sat on the counter and wondered about the ashy taste in her own mouth.
“I can use someone to fill some time on the fifteenth of February. I’ve got a forty-five-minute slot that’s empty. You’ll get a third of the door. That would probably be about fifty bucks or so.”
“Definitely. We’ll do it.”
“What’s your band’s name?”
“Angry Maxwell.”
She felt ridiculous identifying herself as part of “Angry Maxwell,” yet she knew that all band names sounded asinine until the band got famous. At that point there was a magical transformation, and even the most ill-conceived names took on a veneer of cool.
“Angry … Maxwell …” He wrote it into a calendar square in pencil. “Contact name and number?”
Avery provided hers.
“Okay. So you’ll go on from seven until quarter of eight. Get here about an hour ahead of time to set up. And no ‘Piano Man,’ all right?”
“No ‘Piano Man,”’ she said. “Promise.”
Avery lit a cigarette and triumphantly walked back toward Broadway, already putting a song list together in her mind.
Just as she came to the Army and Navy, Nina stepped out of a store just a few doors down. It took Avery a moment to register that it was Nina because her hair, which had always either been up in the buns or pigtails, was free. Not just free—shorter. The strands were about four or five inches long, and they flew loose around her head like a lion’s mane. It was diva hair.
They both stopped and looked at each other. It was the first time they’d really come face-to-face in almost four weeks. Avery hadn’t counted the time until now. Four weeks. That was unbelievably strange, but it was right.
“Your hair,” she sputtered. Not the brightest comment, but really all that needed to be said.
“I just cut it,” Nina replied, without much enthusiasm.
“It’s incredible,” Avery said. “I wish I had hair that could do things like that.”
“Thanks.”
“How’s life?”
“Good. Busy”
“You want to get a coffee or something?” Avery asked brightly. Suddenly, seeing Nina in front of her, she realized how much she missed her. Except it wasn’t like she was realizing something new but finally naming some kind of nagging ache that had been bothering her for a long time.
“Sorry,” Nina said quickly. “I have to go.”
“Are you okay?”
“Fine,” Nina said distractedly. She clearly wasn’t okay. Her eyes were red, and she kept looking away. Avery had known that things were messed up—they hadn’t even spent Christmas or New Year’s together. Avery had been so deep in her own head that she hadn’t known what to say to Nina. But now she wanted Nina to tell her what was going on. She wanted to sit down with her, to give her a hug, to do all of the normal things.
“Neen?” she said. “What’s up?”
Nina hit a button on her key chain and turned off the alarm of her car. She hesitated for a moment, as if she was going to explain, and then she just shook her head.
“I have to go,” she said again, “I’ll see you later.”
As she watched Nina get in her car and drive off, Avery felt a terrible sinking feeling. It wiped out any happiness that getting the gig had provided. Somewhere in her head, she’d always thought that even though they’d fought, things couldn’t really be big-time bad between her and Nina. But they were big-time bad. In fact, Avery realized, they might even be over.
That was so unthinkable that she had to sit down because her legs had begun to shake.