THE FIRST WEEKEND in her new place Cassie found she’d lost a shift at the Chelsea Hotel—there was a private party, the people were bringing their own catering service. She asked Curtis, her new housemate, what was happening in the apartment that night. “We’re having kind of a big party,” he said. “There’s a band playing.” Cassie considered just holing up in her new room and reading the Jeanette Winterson she’d found earlier that week at Housing Works, but she couldn’t concentrate. By ten there must have been fifty people in the apartment. She heard someone picking a banjo. She came out into the main space. She didn’t recognize one face. Where for the past seven years at every party she went to there were, like cairns appearing on a long hike, the faces of Natalia and Svetlana and all the friends who’d come to every Pollys show, now she was on a barren granite rock with no sign to confirm she was headed any direction but lost. She needed something to drink.
She was about to return to her room when she looked up and there, standing by the refrigerator with a Pabst Blue Ribbon trucker’s cap and a Miller High Life bottle in his hand, was Mark. The mandolin player from the Pussy Willows. The Willow Gardens.
“What on earth are you doing?” he said when she walked up.
“I live here,” she said. “What the fuck are you doing here?”
“My buddies from Colgate are your roommates, I guess,” he said. “And the Willow Gardens are playing here tonight.” So Cassie settled in and listened while Mark’s band played. They were better than last time. Without a radio mic to huddle around—the room was small enough they needed no amplification, they sang loud and played their instruments as loud as they could be played—they were far more natural. The three-part harmonies they sang were balanced, sharp, like one big chord projecting out into the room on each chorus. Cassie had always liked the idea of a chord, three notes struck together to make a single sound. Mark’s mandolin playing was far more refined than the last time she saw them, tight and loud and precise, jumping the one like Bill Monroe.
As the Willow Gardens came to the end of their set, Mark said, yelling as loud as he sang, “We’re gonna get a special friend to come up and play one with us here tonight.” He let his mandolin fall by his side. He grabbed the fiddle and bow out of his fiddler’s hand. “The killer bassist from one of my favorite new bands, the Pollys, is here tonight.” Mark was looking right at Cassie. It felt as if he’d just asked her to marry him in front of the whole party. “Well, come on up, friend!” he said, in an Appalachian accent he’d never before used. Cassie tried not to, but now everyone around her had taken a step back, and it was as if a whole bucket of pig’s blood might be dropped on her head if she didn’t move from where she was standing. Or it was weirdly like being called out by her father—knowing she didn’t want to do what he said, but knowing she would have to. By the time she got to the front of the room, the guitarist was capoing his guitar to the second fret.
“What the fuck,” she said as quietly as she could.
“Nothing the fuck,” Mark said. “You said you could play. So let’s get you playing. ‘Pretty Polly’ work for you? Like the way David Grisman does it, straightforward in A.”
Before she could pick up the bow, the guitarist had started the song, and the bass was thumping, and the truth was that Cassie had gone with her father—her conservative father, who lectured her on how sex was an act with a purpose God intended to take place between a man and a woman for the express intent of procreation, any pleasure was an ancillary—to the Mohican Bluegrass Festival in central Ohio every summer since she was three. She couldn’t not play the melody to that song when a band was playing. All at once it was as if she’d changed her name back, as if she was Claire Stankowitcz again, her name less rock and roll but her hands far more adept at their instrument. And here was the thing for Claire/Cassie: it was the freest she’d felt in years. Ever. Though she felt timid for the first bar or two, soon she tore into each fiddle break the band gave her, and the small crowd in the teeming apartment roared. She stayed up there for five more songs, then finished playing and shotgunned six Pabst Blue Ribbons with Mark in the kitchen of her new apartment, just a block and a half from the Eagle Street place, and at a little past five in the morning, as the thin Greenpoint sun was starting to wriggle its wretched bony fingers into her new apartment, she took a man back with her to bed for the first time since her sophomore year of college. His hands were just what she’d hoped they might be when she saw them in CBGB—the soft hands of a man who’d not worked with them, but not too soft, rough and hard at the fingertips from his calluses. Her and Mark’s expressed intent was not procreation—Jesus, she hoped it wasn’t and wouldn’t ever be, and for certain little was expressed other than the need for a condom—but for the first time in years, whatever anxiety she felt, thinking of her father’s imperious face, was gone. Cassie fell into a drunken state that passed for sleep with a strange jittery calm. For now.