Twenty-Two

I ordered a quick double bourbon from the hairy bartender and carried it to the most inconspicuous table I could find. I slid one of the two chairs over to a table for six, hoping they could seat seven and I could have privacy. Plunk your butt at a table with an empty chair, guys tend to come over to chat. It’s almost a formal invitation.

I took a gulp of whiskey. I wanted to be alone when the lights dimmed, and not entirely sober.

If he’d had plastic surgery I’d have known him. I could watch those hands on that bass, just the hands, and know them.

The startling thing was how little he’d changed. His hair was short, his beard gone. Why had he kept the mustache? I wondered irrelevantly.

Why had I assumed I’d know if he were back in town? Why had I assumed Dee would know, would tell me? “He left a long time ago,” she had said; that’s all. I’d made up the rest, embroidered my own acceptable tale: he’d walked out on tour, settled on the West Coast. Why had I placed him in California? Maybe he’d mentioned it once or twice, wanting to go to Los Angeles, play studio stuff, bask in the sunshine.

I ordered another drink from a waitress with waist-length brown hair. It took me a while to get her attention. She was scouting the band, eyeing Cal. I’d never gotten over that in the short time we’d been married, the way women would watch him, the way I was watching him now.

He wore a black short-sleeved T-shirt, tight enough to show muscle and rib. I checked his arms carefully. He never wore short sleeves near the end, not after he’d started shooting cocaine. He still held his left arm oddly, awkwardly, to give his thumb more reach, he always said, more strength on the frets. During his first solo break, the spotlight picked up the mother-of-pearl inlay work on his bass. It was the same bass he’d always had. I was surprised he hadn’t hocked it to pay for dope.

He could have been playing alone in the bedroom. That’s the way he always played, like he was the only one alive on a desert island, just him and the song. His eyes were half open, but they might as well have been blind. He didn’t see the waitress. He didn’t see me. He was just there in the music.

I sat through three long sets. The lead guitar, a guy with a kerchief headband and a reedy tenor, was too gimmicky by half, in love with his technology. He leaned on the whammy pedal, distorting all over the place, bending notes that didn’t ask to be bent. He was the kind of guitar player who wants to show off his sixty-fourth notes when sixteenths would suit the song.

Windshear didn’t impress me; they didn’t seem to have a sound yet, just four players: guitar, bass, boards, and drums. No lightning sparked. They did steady twelve-bar blues, a little classic rock and roll.

Nothing caught fire until Cal’s last solo break, and I wasn’t sure if the heat transferred to the rest of the audience or if it started and stopped with me, rising slowly from my toes to my cheeks. I’ve long since given up on Prince Charming, but if mine ever comes calling, he’s not going to tote a glass slipper or ride a white steed. He’ll play bass like Cal Therieux. Sing close harmony in a grumbly baritone, always right on key.

Trying to wrench my mind back to business, I wondered when Cal had bought Davey’s old Hummingbird.

No way to tell unless I asked.