35
The waiter dropped off two cloudy glasses of something the menu stubbornly insisted on calling a tropical mojito . Mine tasted like dried mint and regret, Tess’s like watered-down rum dusted with powdered sugar.
Onstage, the saxophonist kept butchering Like a Virgin with all the finesse of a butcher breaking down a carcass.
Each note stumbled after the next without ever quite catching it.
The drummer—a rail-thin kid who looked sixteen and already in debt—tried to follow along with the resigned air of someone who knew he’d never see a paycheck.
Tess was entranced, leaning forward like a fortune-teller peering into a cracked crystal ball. I, meanwhile, was still trying to figure out if the sax was out of tune—or just the man playing it.
When the piece finally staggered to an end, a timid ripple of applause followed, the kind you give a child in a school play. The saxophonist bowed, wiped his forehead with his collar, and poured half a warm beer straight down his throat.
Tess turned to me, eyes shining as if she’d just witnessed a miracle. “Bea… that’s not a man. That’s a soul.”
“A soul?” I repeated, watching him fumble with the sax mouthpiece like he was fixing a leaky faucet.
She leaned back, a sly smile tugging at her lips. “Bea, look at him. The sweaty curls, the open shirt, that poet-gone-to-seed belly… He is Lev. It’s him. Just… a little more weathered.”
I studied him. He looked like a man who’d rung in too many New Year’s in the same bar, and whose breath had never turned down a free shot. “Tess, that man is not Lev Mirov. That man is the reason Lev Mirov invented jazz—to make sure no one had to sound like that .”
She ignored me. “See how he holds the sax? That’s not technique, it’s an embrace.
He doesn’t blow into the instrument, Bea—he whispers secrets to it.
He’s a cursed artist, I can feel it. The manual says the prey has to sense the risk of losing something rare, something unrepeatable. And I’ve just found my ally.”
I stared at him. “Rare and unrepeatable, sure,” I muttered. “Like a unicorn with liver disease.”
The set ended with one last, agonized wail from the sax, as if its owner had decided to strangle the thing into silence. The moment the drummer laid down his sticks, the man waddled offstage with the gait of a sick penguin and planted himself at the bar.
Tess swept toward him with the feline stride of a nineteenth-century seductress. I followed—not out of moral support, but because there was no way I was missing the show.
“Hi,” Tess said, tilting her head just so, flashing the smile that—at least in theory—should disarm any cursed musician.
The man grunted. Not a “hi,” not even an “eh?”—just a low, mechanical rumble, like a fridge about to die.
She pressed on. “Your solo… haunting.”
Another grunt, this time paired with a slow blink.
She brushed his arm lightly. “You know, the way you hold the sax… almost sensual.”
Grunt. He sipped his gin as if her words were nothing but background noise.
Tess straightened, shot me a look—I knew she was recalibrating. She leaned across the bar, ordered him another gin, and slid it into his hand.
He downed it in one swallow. Then held his empty hand out toward the bar, like a robot signaling for fuel.
Tess ordered another. Same scene: one gulp, empty hand, vacant stare.
By the third round, she turned to me, lit up as if she’d cracked the code of the universe .
“Bea, I’ve got it.”
“What, that he’s basically a sink?”
“You pour gin into him and he’ll follow you anywhere. If you set down a glass every hundred yards, you could lead him all the way to China.”
“Like a drunken Hansel and Gretel breadcrumb trail.”
The man grunted again, this time inquisitively, as if asking whether the next gin was en route.
Tess stood, crossed to the register where a row of tired little mini-bottles glimmered like weary soldiers. She grabbed one of gin, came back, popped the cap, and held it under the saxophonist’s nose. “Come with us, Maestro.”
And just like that, he slid off the stool and followed her meekly between the tables, like a tipsy dachshund.
At the door, the bartender—a bald man in a grease-stained apron with a spoon-shaped scar on his chin—stopped us. “Hey, where you takin’ Bernie?”
“Bernie?” I echoed.
“Yeah. He lives upstairs. We give him a room in exchange for a couple sets a week—when he remembers to play.”
Tess gave him a cherubic smile. “Oh, upstairs? We were just walking him to bed.”
The bartender shrugged and dropped a key into her hand, a relic that looked like it had survived three wars.
We climbed a narrow, groaning staircase, Bernie’s heavy steps dragging behind us. The hallway reeked of damp carpet and mint-scented disinfectant.
We unlocked the door.
Bernie’s room was… let’s say… the meeting point between an abandoned college dorm and the storage unit of an alcoholic junk dealer.
The twin-and-a-half bed took up most of the space, covered with a leopard-print quilt so worn it looked like it had been printed in memory of a leopard who’d died of old age.
On the nightstand sat five empty gin bottles, one half-full, and a glass where a green olive floated—vintage unknown.
A crooked wardrobe held hostage three Hawaiian shirts, a pair of corduroy trousers, and a beige trench coat that seemed to belong to a detective fired in the ’70s. On top of it, a stack of old vinyl records, all without sleeves, as if Bernie had been using them to prop up a wobbly table leg.
On the walls, the only decoration was a crumpled poster of Lev Mirov, tacked up with two rusty pins and hanging at an angle, as though it too had gotten drunk. Beside it, a 1998 calendar of tropical beaches, frozen on June—probably the last time Bernie had checked the date.
The floor was covered by a gray carpet that had maybe once been beige, but now told the story of every spilled drink and every wet shoe that had walked across it.
The smell was a cocktail of gin, sweat, and that faintly sweet note you get in apartments where curry has been cooked… once, back in 2003.
Bernie crossed the room without a word, collapsed face-first onto the bed, and began snoring in exactly three seconds.
Tess leaned against the doorframe, looking pleased.
“Tess, it’s official,” I said. “This is the first man I’ve seen you take to bed since this whole thing started.”
“And the most romantic,” she shot back. “He didn’t even ask for my number.”