Chapter 4
Changes
"No. Not like that. Move your thumb off the root."
Josh moved his thumb off the root. "It sounds empty."
"It sounds open. There's a difference." Marcus was leaning over his shoulder at the house keyboard, close enough that Josh could smell the good bourbon and the clean-sweat warmth of him, one arm braced on the top of the piano and the other reaching past Josh's ear to point — not touch, never touch, the man arranged like a bomb tech.
"You've got the whole band playing the melody in six different octaves.
Nobody's holding the door open underneath.
Give me the third in the left hand, way down, and then get out of the way and let the horn say the thing. "
Josh gave him the third in the left hand, way down, and got out of the way.
And there it was. The tune cracked open like a window in a stuffy room, the exact space Marcus had heard in his head appearing under Josh's fingers, and Josh sat there feeling the difference land in his own chest and thought, not for the first time this week: you absolute fraud. You don't play. Sure.
Because this was the thing nobody on the street knew, the thing Josh had stumbled into by accident and now got to witness three nights a week like a private show: Marcus Fontenot couldn't stop arranging music any more than he could stop breathing.
He wouldn't sit down at the piano. He wouldn't play a note in front of a living soul.
But he'd stand behind Josh for two hours after close and rebuild a tired old standard from the foundation up, hearing things nobody else in this city heard, voicings and counter-lines and a place three bars in where the whole thing should drop to nothing and wait — and he'd do it all without laying a single finger on a key, conducting the ghost of a band with the point of one finger and the low rasp of his own voice humming a line he'd never let his hands play.
The gift didn't die when he quit. It just went looking for somewhere else to live.
And for reasons Josh had decided to stop examining, it had picked Josh's two hands to live in.
"Again," Marcus said. "From the top of the bridge. And this time mean the rest."
They'd started this the Thursday after the almost — the almost that neither of them had said one word about, the almost that lived in the room now like a piece of furniture they both walked around.
Marcus had framed it as work. Your sets are lazy in the middle.
We're going to fix the book. Fine. Josh could take a hint the size of a piano.
If the man needed to call it fixing the book so that his hands could hover an inch off Josh's shoulders for two hours a night, Josh would call it fixing the book too. He'd call it whatever got him this.
He played the bridge and meant the rest.
By midnight they were deep in "Someone to Watch Over Me," which Josh had played maybe nine hundred times at nine hundred weddings and figured he understood.
Marcus disabused him of that in about four minutes.
He had Josh strip the whole thing down to almost nothing — just the melody up top and one moving voice underneath — and then he hummed the moving voice himself, low, under his breath, a line that walked down where every instinct said it should walk up and did something on the word watch that put an actual lump in Josh's throat halfway through the chord.
Josh stopped. "What is that. Where did that come from — do it again."
"It's a passing tone."
"That is not just a passing tone, man, that's the whole song. Play it. Show me."
Silence. The old wall came down over Marcus's face, smooth and automatic.
"Left hand. B-flat down to A, under the melody.
You've got the hands. I've just got the ears.
" Which was a lie, a bald one, and they both knew it was a lie, and he said it anyway and pointed at the keys instead of touching them, the way he always pointed, the bomb tech and his wire.
Josh reached for it and got it wrong — put the B-flat up an octave, thin, nothing — and something in Marcus finally ran out. Ran out of patience or ran out of the thing that kept his hands to himself, Josh never did figure out which.
He reached over Josh's shoulder and put his hands on Josh's hands.
Just to move them. Just to set the fingers where they lived — two big warm hands folding down over Josh's on the keys, walking his thumb to the right B-flat and pressing it down with him so the note actually spoke, low and dark and aching, the exact thing Marcus had been humming into the back of his neck.
It lasted a second and a half. And in the second and a half Josh forgot the note, forgot the tune, forgot the entire reason he'd gotten on a bus in Ohio, because Marcus was warm all down his back with his hands over Josh's hands and his mouth maybe four inches off Josh's ear, and neither of them was breathing, and the note just hung there in the empty room going on and on because lifting a hand would end it and neither one of them would be the one to do it.
Then Marcus took his hands back like the keys had gone to stove coils.
"That's the voicing," he said, and his voice had gravel in it that hadn't been there a minute ago. He'd gone somewhere behind his own eyes. "Keep it. Don't lose it."
"Marcus—"
"From the top."
They took it from the top. Because that was the deal, that was the furniture they walked around, and Josh played the man's aching little line back to him perfect on the first try and neither of them said one word about the thing that had just happened in the second and a half.
***
The problem came, the way problems come, halfway through a run he was actually proud of.
"Stop." Marcus straightened off the piano.
His phone was buzzing against the bar top, walking itself in a little circle, and the name on it turned him to stone in a way Josh had never seen — not the granite Josh had gotten used to, but something underneath the granite, something braced.
He crossed to the bar and took it into the back office and shut the door.
Josh kept his hands on the keys and did not play. The office door was cheap and the room was empty and Marcus's voice came through it in pieces.
"— told you people in June, the number doesn't work, not on a room this size —"
A silence.
"— ten years I've been in this space. Ten. And now that the block's worth something you want to —"
Another silence, longer.
"No. I'll have it for the renewal. I said I'll have it.
" A pause, and then, quieter, in a tone Josh had absolutely never heard out of him, a tone with the bottom sanded off it: "The anniversary.
Give me the anniversary night. If the room's full and the press shows, that's my case, that's — just give me till then. "
The call ended. The door didn't open for a full minute. When Marcus came back out his face had gone smooth and managerial and completely closed, the drawer shut all the way, and he picked up right where they'd left off — "From the bridge" — like Josh hadn't heard a word.
"Everything all right?" Josh asked. Light as he could make it. The smallest test, the door cracked an inch.
Marcus's hands, resettling on the top of the piano, went dead still — that specific stillness Josh knew now, the hands catching themselves before they could give anything away. "From the bridge," he said again. That was the answer. That was the whole answer, and it wasn't a sentence, it was a door.
Josh let him. He'd learned that much: you didn't chase Marcus into a thing, you left the door open and waited to see if he'd walk out on his own.
But he'd heard enough to do the math, and the math was ugly.
Some company that owned the walls wanted more money than a hundred-seat jazz room on Frenchmen could make, and the lease was up at the end of the year, and the anniversary night in October wasn't just a party.
It was Marcus making his case for the whole life he'd built.
It was the man betting the only thing he had left on one full room.
And he's paying me two hundred a night out of that, Josh thought, and something in him that had been floating pleasantly for three weeks put its feet on the ground.
He didn't say anything. He played the bridge.
But he'd stopped, somewhere in that minute at the closed door, thinking of this as the best thing that had ever happened to him and started thinking of it as something that could be taken away — from Marcus, from him, from Nes and Retta and the cat and the whole warm impossible room — and the switch flipped in him that his father had never once managed to flip, the one that said do something, fix something, don't just stand at the window and watch it go.
***
He came in early the next Thursday with a borrowed ladder and a multimeter and a replacement transformer he'd bought for eleven dollars off a guy in the Marigny who fixed neon for the strip clubs.
Retta was alone in the room when he got there, doing the float, and she watched him haul the ladder past the bar for a second too long.
"That for the sign?"
"The D's been driving me insane."
"Mm." She counted a stack of fives without looking down. "He know you're doing that?"
"It's a surprise."
"Everything's a surprise with that man. That's his whole problem." But she was almost smiling. Then she set the fives down, and looked at Josh straight on, and the smile went somewhere more careful. "Can I say a thing to you, Ohio, and you don't get cute about it."
"I love when conversations open like that."