Jet tries a smile, but it fails. The strain in her face is telling. She doesn’t believe she will ever get custody of her son.
I gently kiss her forehead, as she did mine this afternoon. “Come on,” I say softly. “You’re tougher than this. You’ve spent your life tilting at windmills. If anybody can nail those bastards, you can. We’ll talk tomorrow on the burner phones.”
She reaches up to wipe mascara from her eyes but succeeds only in smearing it.
“Wait, let me do that. Crouch down.”
Jet kneels on the carpet. Pulling out my shirttail, I carefully wipe the mascara from the orbits of her eyes. “There. That’s the best I can do. Now, get back up to that roof. I’ll be five minutes behind you.”
She closes her eyes for a moment, resetting her nerves. “I love you,” she whispers. “I’m sorry I lost my shit.”
“You’re allowed. I love you, too. Now go.”
This time her smile has life in it. She turns and walks swiftly back to the service elevator that leads to the penthouse. As I watch her disappear into it, I hear something shift in the lobby below. Whirling to the rail, I look back over the great dark room. I see no one. If there was anyone down there, I missed them.
When I step back onto the Aurora’s roof, I half expect to find Paul Matheson waiting for me. All I see is drunk revelers thrashing like penitents on the floor of a Pentecostal church while Jerry Lee Lewis bashes his grand piano into joyous submission on the little rooftop stage. Lewis may be over eighty, but he’s in constant motion, his slicked-back, dyed-black hair glinting under a makeshift spotlight while women who saw him when he was a wild-haired blond of twenty heave and gasp before the stage. As “Mean Woman Blues” rings out into the night over Bienville, I scan the churning bodies for Nadine. I see no sign of her.
“Looking for somebody?” Lauren Bacall asks in my ear.
I turn to find Nadine looking quite pleased with herself at having fooled me for even a second. “You promised you’d be quick,” she scolds. “That was not quick.”
“Jet’s drunk.”
“I noticed. Did she get what she wanted from you?”
“She just wanted to tell me some things.”
“I see that.” Nadine is looking down at my waist, where a fold of my shirttail hangs over my belt. The black stains on it are obviously mascara. “That must have been an interesting conversation.”
“That’s not what you think. I’ll explain later. Let’s dance.”
Nadine hesitates a moment, but then she takes my proffered arm and twirls us both into the whirl of flesh and flying jewelry. Around us people are jitterbugging or doing what my mother always called the “dirty bop.” Just as we find sufficient space to dance, however, “Mean Woman Blues” crashes to an end, and Lewis starts into “That Lucky Old Sun,” an elegiac number about nature being oblivious to the travails of the workingman.
“Are you up for a slow song?” I ask.
Nadine looks uncertain once more, but there’s a defiant glint in her eye. Just as I think she’s about to lead me off the dance floor, she slips into my arms like she’s done it a thousand times before. Most nearby couples are gently swaying to the piano, while a few move gracefully through the rest of us, doing dance steps I can’t name, with a fluidity that suggests they’ve either been together for many decades or have the genes of mating serpents. A few feet behind us, maybe twenty couples turn slowly in the empty swimming pool. The joined bodies silhouetted against the bright blue walls have the look of a surrealist art exhibit. Thanks to my height, I can see Jerry Lee a lot better than Nadine can. The old legend looks utterly absorbed in his performance and sings every word with conviction. As I watch him, I realize Jet is dancing with Paul only three feet from the stage. She’s looking right at me.
Her eyes are those of a trapped animal.
Breaking eye contact, I murmur, “He does that song better than anybody ever did. Even Ray Charles. There’s a lot of suffering in that voice.”
Nadine nods against my shoulder. “Did you read Rick Bragg’s biography of him?”
“I haven’t.”
“Lewis lost a two-year-old son, exactly the way you did. The boy drowned in a swimming pool near Ferriday, just downriver from here.”
A strange numbness comes over me, and I pull back, looking into Nadine’s eyes. “Really?”
She looks worried that she might have crossed a line. Seeing that she didn’t, she says, “He also lost a brother when he was young.”
This coincidence stops my feet altogether. “The brother didn’t drown, too?”
She shakes her head. “Run over by a drunk in broad daylight.”
“I had no idea.”
“But you recognized the suffering in his voice.”
As I look back at Jerry Lee’s head bowed over the microphone, Nadine lays her right cheek against my chest, and we gently turn in the warmth of the swaying crowd. Holding her like this feels surprisingly natural, with none of the awkwardness I usually feel dancing with someone for the first time. In the midst of my dark reverie, a sudden cacophony cuts through a flamboyant piano solo.
By the time I look up, a wide circle has opened on the dance floor, as though someone emptied a bag of rattlesnakes there. Sally Matheson and her husband stand in the center of that circle, facing each other as though about to engage in mortal combat. Max looks more flustered than angry, and I can see why. His wife, who all her life has been a model of Southern gentility, looks like a spitting cat with its tail in the air. As the crowd gapes, Max looks around at the ring of faces, then moves cautiously toward his wife, who empties a full drink in his face with stinging force.
Everyone gasps, and Nadine clenches my left arm hard enough to hurt. Max wipes his face on his jacket sleeve, then leans forward and says something in a low tone to Sally, who takes the opportunity to slap him like a drunken sailor. Half the crowd cries out, so alien is this behavior to the image they have of the Mathesons.
Suddenly Paul enters the circle and goes to his mother. He takes her by the shoulders, speaking softly to her. Max tries to join them, but Paul shoves him away. Then Sally yells, “Get away from me! Bastard! I’ve taken all I’m going to take. You said never again!”
“All right now!” Jerry Lee shouts from the stage. “I’m the headliner tonight! Let’s get this show back between the ditches!”
And with that he breaks into “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On.” The crowd stands paralyzed, unable to recover. The confrontation between Max and his wife was like a lightning strike at the center of the roof, leaving scorched tar and the stink of ozone in its aftermath. But after eight bars of Jerry Lee pumping that grand piano, couples at the edge of the crowd begin jitterbugging again. This trips some psychic switch, and suddenly the circle closes, the crowd begins writhing, and Paul leads his mother toward the exit while Max stands looking like a man who just got sucker-punched at his own wedding.
“What the hell just happened?” Nadine asks.
“I’ve got no idea.”
Some drunks in the empty swimming pool start swinging yellow pool noodles around like light sabers, and it hits me how smart the hosts were not to fill that pool with water tonight.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard Sally Matheson cuss in public,” Nadine says, still flabbergasted. “Much less smack somebody. Max must have really messed up.”
“Max has messed up his whole life. When it comes to chasing women, anyway. This must be something worse. Wow.”
While couples spin around us, Nadine and I come back together and begin a sort of hybrid version of the Shag. As we spin through the crowd, I catch sight of Jet standing where Max and Sally argued. Max is gone now, but Jet is still staring at the spot where Sally slapped him. She looks nothing like she did three minutes ago. I only see her in quick flashes, but she’s not moving. She’s replaying the scene in her mind, trying to figure out what just happened in plain sight.
“Hang on,” Nadine says, stopping in my arms. “Just a second.”