Chapter 1 #2
Marcus knew the tune by the third bar — an old one, I'll Be Seeing You, the kind of standard that had been played into the ground by every hotel-bar hack from here to Poughkeepsie, a song that should have had nothing left to give.
And the kid played it like he'd found it that morning.
Like nobody had ever played it before and it was the saddest, most hopeful thing in the world and he could not believe his luck at getting to be the one to tell you about it.
There was no cool in it. That was what took the legs out from under Marcus, standing there with one hand still half-raised to stop a thing he was no longer stopping.
The whole jazz world ran on cool, on distance, on the studied ease of a man who wanted you to know the music cost him nothing.
This kid played like it cost him everything and he'd pay it again gladly.
He played joy — open, unguarded, unembarrassed joy — and Marcus stood in his own club in the honest afternoon light and felt something he had spent ten years and a lot of effort not feeling.
He wanted to hear more.
That was all. That was the whole of it, and it was too much.
He wanted to hear the next eight bars and the eight after that.
He wanted to know what the kid would do with the bridge.
His hands wanted to be on the keys beside him, and his hands hadn't wanted that in front of another living soul in longer than he let himself count, and the wanting was so sudden and so total it felt less like an emotion than a door blowing open in a house he'd nailed shut.
Nail it back.
Josh landed the last chord soft, let it ring, lifted his hands. The room went quiet in the particular way a room goes quiet after a thing that mattered. Even Monk had woken up.
Nes, from the shadows, said only: "Mm-hm." From Nes, that was a standing ovation.
Josh looked up at Marcus and the smile that came now was different — smaller, uncertain, the real one, and Marcus saw the chipped front tooth it showed that the practiced one at the door had kept hidden.
He looked, for one unguarded second, like a man waiting to be told the thing he most wanted couldn't be his.
"I know I wasn't supposed to," Josh said. "The piano. Sorry. I'll—"
"Thursdays," Marcus said. "Early set. Seven to nine. Trial."
The words were out before he'd decided to say them, which was not how Marcus Fontenot did anything, and he heard Retta's glass stop moving at the bar.
***
Josh blinked. "Wait. Really?"
"Two hundred a night, cash. You break, you drink for free, you don't get stupid about it.
" Marcus was already retreating into the language of the deal, into terms and numbers, the safe cold country of running a room.
His fingers had come out of nowhere and started moving against his thigh and he shoved his hand in his pocket.
"You show up on time. You don't play over the horns.
And the front-of-house cut isn't yours, so don't count the tip jar as your money. "
"Yeah. Yes. Absolutely." Josh stood up from the piano too fast, banged his knee on the underside, didn't care. The whole banked-down thing had come off him and what was under it was bright enough to power the block. "Mr. Fontenot, I swear to God you will not regret—"
"Marcus."
"Marcus." He said it like he was trying it on. "You will not regret this."
Marcus already did, a little, in the specific way you regret standing too close to an open flame — not because it burns you yet, but because you can feel exactly how it would. He crossed back to the bar to have something to stand behind.
"One more thing." He turned. "The piano's still not yours. You're on the keyboard for the set. That one" — he tipped his head at the baby grand, its lid still up, still ringing faintly in his memory — "doesn't get played."
Josh looked at the baby grand. Then at Marcus. Something crossed his face, quick, that Marcus couldn't read and didn't like not being able to read — a man doing arithmetic behind his eyes.
"Sure," Josh said. And then, because apparently he could no more stop himself than the tide could: "For now."
"Excuse me?"
"Nothing." The smile again — but the real one this time, chipped tooth and all, and worse for it.
He slung the useless empty gig bag back over his shoulder and started for the door, walking backward the last few steps so he didn't have to stop looking at the room like it might vanish. "Thursday. Seven. I'll be here at six."
"Be here at seven. I don't need you underfoot."
"You're gonna love me," Josh said, and pushed out the door into the white afternoon before Marcus could tell him not to.
The door swung shut. The room came back to itself — the tired velvet, the honest light, the ring of that one chord finally fading out of the air where the kid had left it hanging.
Retta went back to her glass. "Two hundred a night," she said, to no one, pleasantly. "For a trial. From the man who made me itemize the napkins."
"Don't."
"I didn't say a word."
Nes came up to the bar at his own speed and set the house bass in its stand.
He didn't reach for the drink Retta poured him without being asked.
He looked at the baby grand, lid still up, and then at Marcus, with nothing in his face Marcus could use as an excuse to be annoyed — which was the most annoying thing about him.
"He plays like somebody I used to know," Nes said.
"Every kid plays like somebody."
"No." Nes picked up the drink. Considered it. "That one plays like it's the only thing keeping the lights on inside him. Only ever knew one other man played like that." A pause, mild as weather. "Used to own the place."
Marcus said nothing.
"You put him on the keyboard and roped off that piano like it'd bite him," Nes went on. "Boy's gonna want to know why. Sooner or later they all do."
"Then he can wonder."
Nes finished the drink in one unhurried swallow and set the glass down with the care of a man who'd been setting glasses down in this room since before it was this room. "Sooner or later," he said, and ambled off toward the back to put his hands somewhere.
At the bar, alone now, Marcus took his hand out of his pocket and let it lie flat on the wood.
It wanted to move. It had wanted to move since the third bar of a song he'd heard a thousand times, played by a broke kid from Dayton who smiled like it was a job and played like it was the only true thing he had.
Marcus flattened his palm and held it still.
You're gonna love me.
That, he thought, was precisely the problem.