Chapter 2 #2
"You played over the top of the bridge to get them clapping," Marcus said. Low, level, just for Josh, under the room noise. "You had them already. You didn't need to beg."
The word landed somewhere under Josh's ribs and stuck. Beg.
"It's a Thursday crowd," Josh said, the grin still up but working harder now, holding weight it wasn't built for. "They liked it."
"They'd have liked it more if you'd trusted them.
You went out to get the applause. Come the finish, you should be so far inside the tune you forget the room is there, and then they come to you.
" Marcus's eyes went to the stage, to the house keyboard, and back.
"You don't have to sell this hard. You already had it.
Selling it that hard—" He stopped. Recalibrated to something shorter.
"It's the one thing I'll ask you to lose. "
And then he was gone, back down the bar, leaving Josh standing there with a compliment and an insult so tightly wound around each other he couldn't have separated them with a knife.
You already had it. You don't have to sell this hard.
Nobody had ever said that to him in his life.
People said give them a show, Josh, they love you, Josh.
Nobody had ever looked at the show and seen the selling.
Nobody had ever looked at Josh going out to get the applause and known, cold, precise, exactly what the reaching was made of.
He played the second set quieter. Took a ballad — I'll Be Seeing You, because apparently he was a masochist, because it was the tune that had gotten him hired and the tune Marcus had stood there and let unmake him — and he played it for real this time.
No reaching. No finish built to yank a hand out of a lap.
He got so far down inside it that for a stretch he honestly forgot the room, forgot the arithmetic, forgot the man at the end of the bar, and when he surfaced on the last chord the room went dead silent for one whole second before it came apart — and the silence was better than the whooping had been.
It wasn't close. He hated that. He'd have to sit with that.
He trusted them and they gave him back something the begging never had, and the person who'd told him that would happen was currently down the bar looking like he'd rather chew glass than admit he'd been right.
***
By last call the room had emptied out to the dregs and the candles were guttering and Retta was flipping chairs onto tables.
Josh should've gone home. His feet knew the way to the streetcar and his three hundred and twelve dollars was now five hundred and twelve dollars and that was a reason to sleep well for once.
Instead he was at the end of the bar, nursing the one free beer he'd let himself have, watching Marcus count the register — and the counting was the thing, actually, the thing that kept him on the stool.
Because Marcus's hands, going through the bills, moved like they were doing something else entirely.
Little runs. A rhythm in the thumb. And then, every so often, he'd notice, and the hands would go flat and still on the bar, dead still, deliberate, like a man stepping on his own shadow.
Josh had been watching people's hands his whole life. You didn't grow up the way he grew up without learning to read a room off its hands.
Retta pulled her jacket on and knocked twice on the bar on her way past, a little goodnight rap of the knuckles.
"Lock up behind you, old man," she told Marcus.
"Feed the cat, don't feed the cat, I don't care, I'm not doing it.
" To Josh, softer, on her way to the door: "You did good, Ohio.
Come back Thursday." And then it was just the two of them and Monk and the guttering candles, and the room felt about four sizes smaller than it had with people in it, and Josh knew he should go and did not go.
"Can I ask you something," Josh said, "and you don't fire me for it."
Marcus didn't look up. "That's not a great opener."
"Why'd you hire me?"
Now Marcus looked up. Slow. The rag came off his shoulder and got folded, once, in half, the way a man folds a thing to have somewhere to put his hands that isn't moving.
"You clearly can't stand me," Josh said, and the grin was gone now, he'd let it go, too tired to hold it and too tired to care that he'd let Marcus see him not holding it.
"Which — fine, I've been not-liked by professionals, I can take it.
But you watched me the whole night like I stole something.
You correct me like it personally costs you.
And you're paying me two hundred bucks I can promise you this place doesn't have lying around, to play a set you clearly think I'm playing wrong. So I gotta know. What am I doing here?"
For a long moment Marcus said nothing, and the neon buzzed out on the street, and the cat walked the length of the bar and sat down between them like a referee.
"Tuesday," Marcus said finally. "When you sat down at that piano and played that tired old song like you'd never heard anybody ruin it.
" He turned a glass upright on the bar, set it down.
"Nes hasn't played like he played this week in about a year.
Whole street's tired. Everybody up on this block plays like they're doing you a favor by not being bored.
And then you come in from Ohio and play a blues in F like it's the best news anybody's had all day.
" His eyes came up, flat and honest and, for one second, unguarded, and it was worse than any of the corrections.
"I didn't hire you because I like you. I don't know you.
I hired you because you've got the thing everybody up here traded in for cool ten years ago, and I'd forgotten what it sounded like, and I wanted to hear it in my room. "
He picked the rag back up. Put it over his shoulder. The door in his face closed as neatly as it had opened.
"Now go home. You did good on the second set. Don't tell anybody I said so."
Josh gathered his stuff. At the door he stopped under the neon — PERDID_, PERDIDO, PERDID_ — buzzing its broken little stutter over his head, and the itch came back into his hands, stronger now, the one skill his dad had left him that hadn't come with a warning label.
Twenty minutes and a ladder. He looked back into the room, at the man counting money by candlelight with hands that wanted to be doing something other than counting money, and thought better of offering.
Trial. Don't be weird. He let the door swing shut on the both of them — the buzzing sign and the buzzing man.
Josh went home. He rode the streetcar with the windows down and the warm dark going by and his own dumb reflection grinning back at him from the black glass, and he thought: I'd forgotten what it sounded like.
Whatever was going on with Marcus Fontenot, whatever was locked up behind all that granite — Josh had just heard it move.
He was in so much trouble.