“No, I’ve got it. Look, though. The little bugger’s stuck on you, lady. So am I.”
“Hush. That’s embarrassing.” She spoke in an undertone and looked around Everybody’s at everybody looking at us.
“Knocking over his cup? Nah. Happens all the time with kids. Not embarrassing. People make allowances.”
“I’m not talking about that, and you know it.” She retreated a step or two. “I won’t mind if you call, though—not at all.” Before I could reply, she’d gone.
A young man with bushy hair and a long apron helped me finish cleaning up, and I sat back down. During her fifteen- or twenty-minute stint at our table, Caroline Hanna had affected me in the powerful, nonrational way teenagers sometimes collide with each other. A pulse in my throat was working, and a film of sweat on my palms endangered my grip on my beer mug. How ungrown-up. How immature. In a few years I would be fifty, and here I was actively encouraging the kind of hormonal rush that sends callow high-school aspirants to ecstasy screaming to the showers. Nobody since RuthClaire had made me feel that way, not even Molly Kingsbury.
Later, our bill duly paid, T. P. and I returned to the hospital.
Back in Adam’s recovery room, RuthClaire told me that David Blau had invited us to go with him and his wife Evelyn to a nightclub near the Georgia Tech campus. The club—Sinusoid Disturbances—was on a narrow alley perpendicular to Spring Street. Its main attraction was live music, but it also featured (although only on Fire Sine Fridays) the work of avant-garde “performance artists.” These artists used music, projected visual images, props, the spoken word, and a lot of strange choreographies to make statements about art and life. David ranked high among the performance artists who had given Sinusoid Disturbances its reputation as Atlanta’s leader on the New Wave nightclub scene. His group, consisting entirely of people from Abraxas, would headline at tonight’s Fire Sine Friday. And so Blau wanted RuthClaire and me to attend.
“What about Adam?” I asked.
The habiline typed: I BE FINE. TOMORROW, I AM UNWRAPPED. ME FOR REST AND READING.
“May I bring a date?”
This request startled RuthClaire. “A date?”
“That’s right. A woman.”
“I never assumed you meant a two-legged raisin. I just didn’t know you knew anybody up here to ask.”
“I’ve been shinnying down a knotted sheet every night at your house, Ruthie Cee. Meet a lot of folks that way.”
“It’s amazing Bilker hasn’t shot you. What’s her name?”
“Caroline Hanna.”
As I had done, RuthClaire struggled to locate this name in her mental ledger of friends and acquaintances. I let her struggle. In fact, I left Adam’s room in search of a telephone, found the number of the sociology department, dialed it, and asked to be put through to Dr. Hanna’s office. Although startled to hear from me so soon, she accepted my invitation, offering to meet me at the Montaraz house at seven-thirty, if that would simplify our rendezvous. Right now, though, no time for chitchat—she’d promised the students in her next class she’d have a test graded for them today.
RuthClaire and I left the hospital at five-thirty, T. P. dead to the world in my lap. On Hurt Street, Bilker emerged from the garage like a troll forsaking the shadow of its footbridge to terrorize a wayfarer. Hands on hips, he bulked in the sunlight, malevolently squinting.
“We’re going out on the town, Bilker,” RuthClaire said. “Set the security alarms, lock everything up, and don’t sweat the traffic around here. I’ll ask the Fulton County police to make extra tours of the neighborhood. I need an escort, Bilker. Mr. Loyd, my ex, already has a date.”
Even in the garage, Bilker squinted. “To where, ma’am?”
“Sinusoid Disturbances. Wear some struttin’ duds, okay?”
“For a trip to the doctor. Whose sinus trouble is it, anyway, yours or—” He jerked a thumb at me, unable to speak my name aloud.
“Informal clothes, Bilker. Don’t worry about a thing tonight. Tonight’s for fun.”
The Blaus arrived at a quarter past seven. David had dressed like a painter, not the beret-and-palette, but the extension-ladder-and-gallon-bucket, kind. His wife, Evelyn, although at least forty, wore a little girl’s party gown and patent-leather shoes with buckles. The Blaus liked costumes, obviously.
Caroline Hanna, as good as her word, pulled up in front of the house at seven-thirty, in a blue Volkswagen Beetle. I helped her out, and the small boy in me responded approvingly to her neat, fairly conservative clothes. Her skirt, a beige wraparound belted with a chain similar to the hinged necklace still at her throat. Her jersey had stylized chevrons on its three-quarter-length sleeves, giving her the look of a drill sergeant in the Scandinavian Fashion Force. I walked her to the porch to meet the others.
T. P., who was going with us, was natty in white shorts and a T-shirt with a polka-dot bow tie printed on the material. He reached for Caroline. She took him from Bilker and jogged him in her arms. Bilker looked relieved. After a bit more small talk, we split up for the drive to Sinusoid Disturbances, the Blaus taking their car and Bilker assuming my Mercedes’s wheel to chauffeur the rest of us.
The sidewalk in front of Sinusoid Disturbances angled by at a daunting grade. As we drove past looking for a parking spot, I wondered if the bistro’s patrons had to walk around inside the club like sheep on a hillside, struggling not to topple. No one would ever mistake the crumbling, two-story building for Caesar’s Palace.
“Uh, what kind of crowd do they get here?” Caroline asked.
“A pretty weird mix, David says,” RuthClaire replied, her arms on the seat back. “Tech students, punk rockers, Atlanta College of Art attendees. It’s mostly the last group that gets off on Fire Sine Fridays. Some of the punks’ll go along with it, too, but the Tech students—the men, anyway—have a tendency to disrupt things.”
“That’s too bad.”
“Oh, it’s not so terrible. David sees the disruptions as part of the spectacle.”
Bilker, stymied in his efforts to find a parking space, let us all out in front of the nightclub. A boy with an oversized safety pin through his cheek opened the front door for Caroline, who was carrying T. P. for RuthClaire. This door was a slab of stained oak with a window of amber glass featuring a sine-curve pattern etched into it in spooky crimson. I thanked the boy for his courtesy, and he replied, almost as if he were human, “You’re welcome.” Then the door shut behind us, and darkness settled upon our gingerly stepping group like a coffin lid. Criminy, I thought.
But RuthClaire, who had my arm, directed Caroline and me to a teller’s cage from which a reddish glow emanated. We were in a foyer of some kind, and at the cage I bought four admissions from a woman in cutoff jeans and a short-sleeved sweatshirt—after the punk at the door, a paragon of Middle American normality.
A few more steps put us on a concrete landing just beyond the foyer. Concrete steps descended from the landing to the floor, twelve feet down, or you could squeeze along the outside wall of the ticket cage to a mezzanine that projected from the bistro wall paralleling the interstate highway outside. Chairs and circular tables crowded both the mezzanine and the main floor below, and almost all of this furniture had the look of radioactive wrought iron.
Higher than the mezzanine level on the club’s uphill side was a control booth for Sinusoid Disturbances’s lead disc jockey. It had champagne-tinted Plexiglas windows, and a big, acorn-shaped flasher that whipped strobes of blue and white light around the interior. Loud music played, and below us, flailing away in the noise storm, jitterbugged a host of damned-looking human wraiths. T. P. was as awe-stricken, or as horrified, as I. He clung to Caroline as if she might toss him over the rail into the cobalt chaos of the pit. RuthClaire pointed out a table on the club’s far side, next to the projecting runway of the stage on which live entertainers would perform, and said David had reserved it for us.