YEARS BEFORE, WHEN Rosa moved from Chicago to Austin, her boyfriend, David, had followed her. At the time, it seemed like a good fit. She’d take journalism classes and work for the university paper, he’d play in bands, do his music writing. David was obsessed with early-twentieth-century blues and jazz, the musicians from that era who seemed to have disappeared without a trace. Ciphers, he called them. He’d talk excitedly about how these anonymous people had invented modern music out of thin air. How they’d made a place for themselves in the future while their own time passed them by. “Sort of like you,” she’d said to him once over breakfast, and he smiled in a funny way that made her think for some reason of the surf sucking sand from beneath her feet.
David played guitar, trumpet, and clarinet in a band that sounded like a drunken carnival. The band’s songs were filled with dark longings and melodrama. People went crazy from rejection and loneliness. They leaped out of church choir balconies or came too close to a space heater in their gauzy nightgowns. The innocent died while the guilty went on. The band’s lead singer maniacally beat a big bass drum at the front of the stage. The audience sang along drunkenly. For months, Rosa had a crush on the singer, particularly his mouth, then briefly on the singer’s pale girlfriend, who dressed like Fay Wray. For the first eight months she spent Friday and Saturday nights at Liberty Lunch or the Hole in the Wall. She would sometimes have to drive to Melody Mart for new clarinet reeds or to retrieve a pickup amp for David. A gofer. She didn’t mind.
By that first spring, Rosa had her own opinion column in the university paper and a reputation as a first-rate editor. She won a prize for a five-part series she’d written on sexual violence for which she’d interviewed dozens of people—professors, students, janitors, librarians, police, administrators. She stayed late at the paper, smoked more than ever, drank after deadlines with her coworkers, and either came late or didn’t make it to David’s shows. David became sullen and paranoid. He complained about the heat. His prospects. Fire ants. Her fluctuating weight—her quitting cigarettes for a time didn’t help. He lost interest in his 78 record collection, which she’d helped haul down from Chicago, records he used to transcribe old song lyrics for archivists. He seemed to resent her recent success, resented that his gigs had dried up in the early nineties recession and that the bands he played in weren’t serious enough or authentic enough. He threatened to legally change his name to Jelly Roll Morton until she told him it would invalidate the apartment lease. A little later, he threatened the drunken carnival band’s lead singer with his drum mallet, as if imitating one of their songs. He got voted out of one band, then another. He and Rosa fought over rent money and utilities. And, of course, they had less and less sex. The last few times they did, he’d insisted on entering her from behind, which she’d always liked but now found unsettling. Something about his breathing had changed, she thought. He had the dry, metallic smell of their old radiator in Chicago. So she began putting him off, finding reasons to stay away until he was asleep. Planning a way out.
One night, she came home late and the lights were off and David was sitting in the living room listening to gypsy jazz. Beer bottles cluttered the glass coffee table. He’d asked her absently about the newspaper and she told him about recent goings-on. Gossip. Told him a funny story about Graham, the managing editor.
They sat there in the near dark and she took off her shoes, rubbed her feet.
He smiled at her in a way that said he’d been into the medicine cabinet. He made a strange little chuckle in his throat. “Are you fucking him? That Greg or whoever?”
“Do you think that’s funny?”
“No. Not very.” He looked out the window with a stricken face, as if he saw this Greg slinking along the fence line. “You just seem to talk about him a lot.”
“Graham has chronic psoriasis.” She stared at him.
David downed his beer, opened another. Lit a cigarette.
“Can we turn on some lights in here?” she said.
Django Reinhardt’s “Summertime” came on. David told her that Django Reinhardt started out a decent guitarist but not a great one. The best and worst thing that ever happened to him, David said, was that one night after a show, on the way to bed, he knocked a candle over in his gypsy caravan home that he and his wife, Florine, shared. Florine had beautiful long dark hair. Turned out, David said, the candle set fire to piles of little celluloid flowers Florine made to supplement their measly income.
“Ah, a musician’s life,” Rosa said.
David looked at her. Smiled his medicine-cabinet smile.