Chapter 8
No Chaser
The nine days had been bad. This was worse, and it took Josh two of them to understand why: the nine days, Marcus had been fighting himself. This time he'd already lost.
He'd gone somewhere. That was the only way Josh could think of it.
The body was still behind the bar every night, still running the room, still correcting the horns and counting the drawer — but the man had packed up and left, and what was working the club was a very good impression of Marcus done by somebody with none of his blood in it.
The eyes were the tell. Josh had spent two months learning to read this man off the smallest things, the hands, the half-inch of shoulder, the exact quality of a silence, and now he'd look up from the keys and find Marcus watching him with an expression Josh had never once seen aimed at him and had seen aimed at plenty of other people: the polite, final, faraway look you give a thing you've already decided to lose.
Once, on the second day, Josh had tried the old way back in.
Stayed after, flipped the chairs, dried the glasses with the right towels, put on the whole after-hours ritual like a key he was sure still fit the lock.
Said something dumb and warm about Monk, angling for the laugh he'd earned on that piano bench a lifetime ago.
And Marcus had looked at him — kindly, that was the obscene part, kindly — and said, "You don't have to do that anymore," and turned back to the drawer.
Like the ritual had been a chore Josh was finally free of.
Like the whole warm month had been a shift Josh could clock out of now.
Josh had gone home and lain awake turning you don't have to do that anymore over and over until he understood the grammar of it: Marcus had already moved him into the past tense.
He knew it was about Vaughn. He wasn't an idiot.
He'd watched the temperature drop the second the man in the expensive jacket walked out the door, watched Marcus go from his to this over the space of one Wednesday, and he'd spent two nights turning it over and coming up with nothing, because Josh still didn't know who Vaughn Deveraux was.
Nobody had told him. He knew the guy was somebody — the way Retta's face had closed, the way Nes had turned into a wall — but nobody had told him the name meant anything to Marcus, and Marcus had said not one word about it, just gone away behind his own eyes and left the impression running the room.
And the card was still in Josh's pocket.
Two weeks now. Warm from being carried. He hadn't called.
He wasn't going to call. He'd decided that somewhere around the third day of the good stretch, decided it lying in Marcus's bed with the rain going and a plant on the windowsill and a man who'd looked at the worst of him and stayed — decided no, decided here, decided this is the thing, the landed thing, I'm not trading it for a con in a linen jacket.
He just hadn't said it out loud yet. And now the not-saying had grown into a whole silent country between them, and Josh understood, on the third cold night, that he was going to have to be the brave one, because Marcus had stopped being able to.
So after close, with the room empty and the drawer counted and Marcus reaching for his keys, Josh said, "We need to talk about the other night."
Marcus didn't look up. "There's nothing to talk about."
"There's a lot to talk about, actually. Starting with the fact that you've been a ghost for three days and I think I deserve to know—"
"Take the job."
***
It landed so flat and so fast that Josh actually laughed, once, a stunned little sound, sure he'd misheard.
"What?"
"The tour. Vaughn's tour." Marcus set the keys down on the bar, precise, a man laying out instruments.
His voice had nothing in it at all, and that was the worst part, that was the part that would take Josh weeks to stop hearing: not anger.
Nothing. "It's the real thing. Blue Note, a spring tour, a piano chair with a name that opens every door in this business.
It's what you came here for. It's what you got on the bus for.
" He finally looked up, and the faraway look was all the way in now, polished and kind and final.
"So take it. Call his guy. Don't — " a small pause, the only crack, sealed over before it opened " — don't build your whole life around a bar that's closing and a broke old man who runs it.
You're thirty. You've got the thing. Go use it while somebody's offering. "
"Marcus." Josh's voice had gone strange. "I came over here to tell you I'm not—"
"I know what you came to tell me." Gentle.
God, the gentleness was obscene. "I've watched you not-tell me for two weeks.
You've had something in your pocket you couldn't say and I let it go because I'm a coward and I wanted the — I wanted what we had a little longer.
But I saw your face when he made the offer.
I've had your face. I know what it means.
You want to go. You should go. I'm not going to be the thing you stayed for and resented. "
"Will you — stop. For one second. And let me—" Josh dug in his pocket and put the card down on the bar between them, face up, Reggie's name, the thing he'd been hauling around for two weeks.
"This. This is the thing in my pocket you keep talking about.
His guy handed it to me two weeks ago, and you know what I did with it?
Nothing. Carried it around and never called, because every time I thought about calling I was already at your place, with your stupid plant, and I couldn't—" His voice was climbing and he let it.
"I wasn't hiding a decision, Marcus. I was hiding that there wasn't one.
I already picked. I picked weeks ago. I came here tonight to throw it out in front of you so you'd know. "
Marcus looked at the card. For a second Josh thought he had him — thought the truth had gotten under the faraway thing and touched the actual man.
Then Marcus said, "Keep it," and slid the card two inches back across the zinc toward Josh with one finger.
And Josh went cold all over. Because he'd heard that gesture described.
That unhurried two-inch slide, one finger, the card offered like a favor — that was Reggie's move, the exact move the man in the linen jacket had made two weeks ago, and Marcus didn't know he was doing it, didn't know that for one second he'd become the very machine that had ground him into powder.
But Josh saw it. He watched the man he loved reach, blind, for the one weapon that had been used to destroy him, and turn it on the person who was trying to stay.
And something in Josh that had been hanging on with both hands let go with one.
And there it was — the thing Josh had spent his whole life running from, laid out on the bar as neat as the keys, in the calmest voice in the world.
I'm not going to be the thing you stayed for.
As if wanting Josh gone was generosity. As if Josh's leaving were already a fact and the only question was who got to be noble about it.
Something in Josh went very quiet. It was the thing that happened maybe twice a decade, the thing nobody who only knew the shine ever got to see: Josh Keller getting angry.
"That's a hell of a thing," he said, "deciding what I want and then handing it to me like a gift.
You know who else does that?" He watched it land and didn't care.
"You don't even know what I came to say.
You've got me halfway to New York in your head and I haven't said one word, and you'd rather — you'd genuinely rather throw me out the clean way than risk hearing me say I wanted to stay.
Because if I say it, then it's real, and then you could lose it, and you'd rather lose it now, on purpose, where you're driving.
God, Marcus." His voice cracked, and he hated it, and he let it crack.
"You built a whole club so nobody could do this to you and you're doing it to yourself. "
For one second — one — something moved behind Marcus's eyes, the real man surfacing, reaching.
Then it went back down, and Marcus picked his keys back up, and said, "Lock up when you leave," and walked out of his own club, and left Josh standing in it alone.
Josh stood in the empty room a long time.
Here was the thing his father had known and Josh had spent thirty years outrunning: you show somebody the real one — the unlit one, the scared, broke, needy truth under the shine — and this is what you get for it.
The shine, people kept. The shine got you hired and liked and two hundred a night and a room full of strangers on their feet.
But the real one, the one that needed things, the one that wasn't easy — that one got handed a bus ticket in a kind voice.
He'd let exactly one person all the way in, and that person had taken one clear look at the bottom of him and decided the bottom of him was something to get free of.
Told you, said his father, gentle as anything, from wherever bitter dead men go.
You're worth the light you throw and not one cent more. Nobody keeps the rest.
***
Josh went back to the sublet.
He hadn't slept there in three weeks and it showed — the air stale, the window unit dead, the patched mattress on the floor gone half-flat again where the seam was giving out, so that when he lay down on it at four in the morning he was, sure enough, a little closer to the floor than he'd been the last time.
The metaphor he'd been too tired to finish weeks ago finished itself.
He lay in the dark in a room he could barely afford and did the math of his whole life, and every column came up the same.