—You must know the guy. I was in here with him. Old guy. He said you mix a good pi?a colada.
The bartender looks at me balefully and pours a shot of rum over ice, topping it off with something yellow out of a can. Around me are people from the Reagan era, warehoused in sweat pants and sneakers, wreathed in cigarette smoke, drinking themselves to death. I peer into the darkness. The TV is showing a fight. Hagler’s now shaking those right hands off, Al. He was stunned a little earlier and he’s normally a slow starter. I can’t see the collector anywhere. I decide to wait. It’s what everyone else is doing.
What will I do if he comes? How can I confront him? What would I even say? I sit through the afternoon, but nothing gets clearer. I keep ordering Lyuba’s pi?a coladas. After the first couple, they aren’t bad.
He doesn’t come.
Back outside on the street it’s dark, but the heat hasn’t gone out of the air. I wait to cross, a little unsteady, staring down at the black lesions baked into the concrete skin.
MY MIND WAS A JUMBLE. Something bitter and mucoid lay at the back of my throat. The next thing I really remember was being in bed, trying to sleep. My phone was buzzing next to my pillow.
Leonie sounded jumpy, wired. I’m outside, she said. In a cab. Can I come up?
I pulled on shorts and a shirt, buzzed her in. I watched in a sort of trance as she threw down her bag and flopped on the sofa. It was—I checked—two in the morning, and Leonie Wallace was in my living room.
—What have you got to drink?
—Is vodka OK? I don’t think we have wine or anything.
—Vodka is perfect. Sorry to get you out of bed.
—Has something happened?
—No. No, nothing like that. The surgeon says we just have to wait. I just, you know. I could have taken a pill, but I didn’t feel like taking a pill. Not right now.
I went to get ice and soda water and we sat, listening to the tiny clink of the cubes in our glasses. She was wearing the same clothes. Though the air-conditioning was making little impact on the humid air in the room, she kept the shawl wrapped tightly around her shoulders. My head felt terrible. I noticed that she was spattered with dark gray paint, tiny flecks on her clothes, her face, her bare legs.
—What have you been painting?
—The studio floor.
She saw the look I was giving her.
—Why not? You have a better fucking idea?
She lit a cigarette and breathed deeply, her tension producing a perceptible body tremor as she exhaled. Still and in continuous agitated motion.
—Did you see Carter?
She didn’t know how to answer that question.
—Yes.
—How is he?
—Not so good.
I waited for more. She lit another cigarette, topped up her drink. She fished about in her bag for gum, leaving the cigarette burning on the edge of the coffee table. Then she began to cry, wedged into a corner of the sofa, hugging her knees. After a while her strength gave out and she slumped sideways against me. I transferred the cigarette to an ashtray, and awkwardly held her, smelling the smoke in her hair, feeling her back quiver as she cried, uncomfortably aware of her bra strap under my palm.
After a while she sat up.
—Can I see his room?
So we went in to Carter’s room and climbed up onto his bed, leaning our backs against the big iron frame. Sitting like that we could see ourselves in an old full-length mirror Carter had propped against the wall. The silvering had flaked off, and we were hazy, flecked with gray, a daguerreotype of two people on a bed. Leonie Wallace and an orc. What’s all this, she said, indicating Carter’s steampunk music setup, the brass and vacuum tubes, the polished walnut box.
—He collects blues records. 78’s. You didn’t know?
—Like fifties, sixties stuff?
—They were generally releasing 45’s by then. I suppose you could say his focus is on the late twenties and early thirties. More or less stopping at 1934. A few things later than that. You could say 1941, to be definitive. Or perhaps 1942. Pearl Harbor.
She looked at me as if I’d spoken to her in binary code. I understand that my precision amuses people. I just don’t know how to mitigate it. It takes effort to be vague, to fuzz up your answer so as not to appear threatening or self-absorbed. I was half-asleep. Sometimes you just have to talk how you talk.
For my pains, another difficult silence. She lay down for a while with her face buried in her brother’s pillow. I wondered if she was crying again, and debated whether it would be appropriate to touch her, perhaps to stroke her back. At last she rolled over and fumbled in her bag for something or other which she couldn’t find. She stared defeatedly at the ceiling.
—OK, I’ll bite. Why 1934?
—You don’t need to ask me questions. I won’t be offended.
—Don’t be like that.
—If you actually want to know, it’s when the best material was recorded. They introduced electrical recording in the mid-twenties, which made it easier to reproduce quieter sounds. Fingerpicking guitar and so forth. You couldn’t record that very well before, when you had to play into a horn. Then most of the companies doing it got wiped out by the Depression. So there was only a small window, really.
—A small window.
—Of time.
—A small window of time. In that case, I suppose you ought to play me something.
I chose Carter’s pride and joy, Victor 38535, Tommy Johnson’s “Canned Heat Blues,” recorded in Memphis in August 1928. I slid it out of its sleeve, feeling the heft of the shellac as I placed it on the turntable and lowered the needle on its counterweighted tone arm. Then I sat down beside Leonie. Johnson’s guitar rose up out of the crackle, followed by his strange, lamenting voice.
Crying mama mama mama
you know canned heat killing me
It flipped up into an uncanny falsetto:
canned heat don’t— crying babe I’ll never die