Chapter 7
Erased
Marcus knew the walk before he knew the face.
Ten years, and the body doesn't forget a thing — he'd learned that already, the hard way, standing at a piano he wouldn't open.
It turned out it went for people too. A man came through the door of Perdido on a Wednesday in the first cool week of October, easy through the crowd, unhurried, taking the room like he'd built it, and Marcus's whole body knew who it was from across the club before his brain would agree to say the name.
Vaughn.
Older. Better dressed — the money sat on him now the way it never had when they were young and starving and splitting a po'boy three ways with the bass player.
Silver coming in at the temples in the expensive way, the way that gets a man magazine profiles instead of pity.
But the same. The same unhurried certainty, the same way of walking into a room already convinced it was glad to have him, and — Marcus watched it happen, helpless, across a decade — the same way of finding the one person in the room who mattered and turning the whole warm weight of his attention on them like a lamp.
The one person tonight was on the stage. Was Josh, mid-tune, head down, playing the thing they'd built.
No.
"Marcus Fontenot." Vaughn had reached the bar.
He said the name like a toast, like a gift he was giving, both hands coming to rest flat on the zinc.
"My God. Look at you. You look — you look good, brother, you look like the room agrees with you.
" He glanced around Perdido, the tired velvet, the good crowd, and something moved behind his eyes that Marcus recognized too, the appraisal, the pricing, the same look the scout in the linen jacket had — of course, Marcus thought distantly, of course the scout was yours — "You built something real down here.
I always knew you would. You had the taste. You always had the taste."
"What do you want, Vaughn."
"Can't a man come hear some music." He smiled.
It was a good smile, warm, it had launched a career, and it did not reach the part of him that was already counting the house.
"I'm in town for the Tremé thing this weekend, headlining, and my guy — you met Reggie, I think, sharp guy — Reggie tells me there's a piano player down at Perdido I have got to hear before somebody else does.
Doesn't say whose room. You can imagine my face when the cab pulls up.
" He spread his hands, delighted, like the coincidence was a warm bath. "Small world. Small, small world."
It wasn't small. Marcus knew exactly how not-small it was. Vaughn didn't stumble into rooms. Vaughn hadn't taken an accidental step since the day Marcus first met him.
Marcus was aware, in a removed way, of his own hands.
They'd gone flat on the bar, both of them, pressed down hard — not tapping, for once; the exact opposite of tapping, a man holding the lid on a pot.
Some animal part of him had understood before the rest of him did that the one thing he could not do, the one thing that would cost him everything he had left to lose, was let Vaughn Deveraux see he still had a soft place anywhere on him.
So Marcus did the thing he was better at than anyone alive. He put nothing on his face at all.
"Hear your music, then," he said, evenly, a man granting a small tedious favor. "He's on till nine." And he turned to build a drink nobody had ordered, so that his hands would have a lie to tell.
Behind the bar, Retta had gone very still, a bottle in her hand, watching Vaughn the way you watch a snake that's already in the house.
She knew. She'd been there for the after, all of it, the worst year of Marcus's life.
Down at the end of the bar Nes had set his drink down without a sound and turned on his stool to face the room, an old man making himself into a wall.
Retta leaned in close, under the room noise, her voice pitched for him alone. "Say the word," she said. "I will put that man on the sidewalk myself and enjoy the rest of my life doing it. You don't owe him a drink. You don't owe him a hello. You don't owe him the air. Say the word, baby."
And Marcus almost did. It was right there.
But saying it meant admitting the man could still cost him something — meant letting Retta see the size of the thing — and ten years of not letting anybody see it closed his throat around the word.
"He's a paying customer," Marcus said, which was a coward's answer, and they both knew it.
Retta's mouth went flat. She poured Vaughn's drink like she was pouring it on a grave.
And up on the stage, oblivious, glowing, Josh finished the tune and the room came apart for him, and Vaughn turned to watch, and Marcus watched Vaughn watch, and felt the bottom go out of the whole warm month he'd let himself have.
***
Here is the thing Marcus had never told Josh, the whole of it, the part under the part.
They'd been twenty-four and twenty-six. Vaughn out front, the voice, the face, the charm that could turn a Tuesday into an event.
Marcus at the piano behind him, writing every arrangement, building the whole sound from the floor up — the voicings, the counter-lines, the places where the band dropped to nothing and let Vaughn's voice hang in the dark.
Marcus made him. That wasn't ego; it was arithmetic.
Everybody on the scene knew whose hands the magic came out of.
And it hadn't mattered, because they were together, the two of them, on the stand and off it, and what was Marcus's was Vaughn's and the reverse, or so Marcus had believed, being young, being in love, being a man who thought the giving went both ways.
Then the label came. And the label wanted Vaughn — just Vaughn, the face, the voice — and there was a contract, and a night Marcus still couldn't think about straight, and when it was over Vaughn had signed alone, and taken the book with him.
The arrangements. Marcus's arrangements, the whole ten years of them, walked out the door in a leather satchel on the arm of the man Marcus had written them for.
They turned up a year later on a record with somebody else's name in the credits.
Arranged by V. Deveraux. Marcus had bought it at a shop on Magazine and stood in the aisle and read the sleeve four times and then walked out without it.
That was the professional version — the one he could almost get out loud, the sliver he'd handed Josh in the dark.
The other version was that he'd lost the man in the very same stroke as the music.
The satchel and the bed emptied the same week.
Vaughn had walked out of the arrangement and out of the apartment on the same gray afternoon and hadn't looked especially troubled doing either one.
Because Marcus had loved him — that was the part he never reached when he told the sliver — loved him completely, built his whole young life around him like a house around a fire, and Vaughn had folded him up and packed him in the satchel with the rest of the useful things and carried him out the door and never once looked back to see him standing in the window.
He never played in front of people again.
He took what money he had and he bought a shuttered po'boy shop on a street that wasn't worth anything yet and he built a room where he decided who got heard, where nobody would ever again stand behind somebody and make them shine and get erased for the trouble.
He'd built the whole rest of his life as a wall around one lesson: give a man your music and he'll put his name on it and leave.
And now the man was standing at his bar in a two-thousand-dollar jacket, looking at Josh, and saying —
"That kid is special, Marcus." Quiet now, confidential, the two of them leaning on the zinc like old friends, which was its own obscenity.
"You hear that? Course you hear it, you've got the best ears in the business, you always did.
That's why I'm here. I can do something with that.
I've got the Blue Note Records people at the Tremé show, I've got a spring tour half-booked and a piano chair I have not been able to fill because nobody's got — that.
What he's got." He shook his head, admiring, greedy, warm. "Where'd you even find him?"
"He found the room."
"He's wasted in it." Said kindly. Said like a compliment to Marcus's taste.
"You know that. A talent like that in a hundred-seat room on a street the city's about to price into daiquiri bars — that's a crime, Marcus, and you love him too much to want him stuck here.
I can see you love him. It's all over you.
" The smile again, soft, terrible. "Same as you loved me.
And look how good you got at hiding it."
"You put your name on my arrangements," Marcus said.
It came out flat. Ten years he'd never said it out loud to the one person it belonged to, and now it just sat there on the zinc between them, small and true.
He watched it reach Vaughn — and he watched Vaughn do the thing Marcus had never once been able to predict, the thing that had wrecked him at twenty-six and was, apparently, going to get to wreck him again at thirty-eight. Vaughn declined to be ashamed of it.
"I put my name on a record," Vaughn said gently.
"The label wanted one name. That's the business — it was never a — it was never personal, Marcus, that's the thing you could never hear.
" He turned his glass a slow quarter-circle on the bar.
"And I didn't take anything from you that you weren't already giving away.
You'd have handed me that book and stood in the back and clapped for the rest of your life and called it happiness, because that's who you are, brother.
You're the man in the back. I just read the room a little faster than you did.
One of us was going to sign that deal, and it was never going to be the one who wanted to live in the dark. "