“Hell to the yeah!” Ted said yet again. “That was bitchin’!”
“Agreed,” said Kingsley.
“That was the barest beginning of band cohesion,” Celia told Laura. “Do you get it now?”
“I get it,” Laura said. “I really do, but I still don’t know if that’s going to help me phrase on your original pieces.”
“Then we’ll keep doing this until you start to feel them,” Celia told her. “What else can we do? What else do all of us know?”
“Probably not much,” Kingsley said sourly. He turned to Laura. “Are there any rock or pop songs that you know? Some Beatles maybe? Some Elton John? Some Journey perhaps?”
Laura shook her head. “No, none of that. How about you all? Do you know any jazz? Any Charlie Parker? Any Louis Armstrong?”
Kingsley raised his eyebrows a bit. “Not much,” he said, “but there is this one...” He fiddled with the pedals on the floor before him and then flipped a switch on his guitar. He gave a quick strum and the music came out clean instead of distorted. He played a few open chords and then gripped his fretboard and began to strum out a melody in F major. She recognized it immediately.
“You know What a Wonderful World,” she said, surprised.
“Since I was a kid,” he confirmed. “It was always a good, mellow piece to play around the old campfire.” He chuckled. “Especially when there were ladies present.”
“I see,” she said doubtfully.
“I’ll play the chords,” he told her. “You play the vocal parts on the sax. Let’s see if we can make some music together.”
“Jesus Christ,” Ted said. “You’re talking elevator music here, Jake.”
“Anything for the cause,” Jake said, continuing to strum. “Jump in any time here, Laura.”
“Right,” she said, surprised to find that she was actually impressed with Kingsley’s guitar playing. It was soft and sweet, exactly at the right tempo and phrasing for the piece. And that from a guitar that had been hammering out distorted notes just a few moments before. Who would’ve thought?
The melody came around to the beginning again and she jumped in, playing a soft, mournful expression of where the vocals would be if someone were singing. The weird drummer guy was right. It was elevator music, but good elevator music, the kind that made you happy when you heard it, that made you hum along.
“Nice,” Cynthia said, smiling.
“It is, isn’t it?” said Mary.
They worked their way through the entire song, through three verses, the bridge, and three repetitions of the one-line chorus. On the final rendition of the chorus section, Kingsley sang out the words in harmony with her sax—about how he speculated in his own mind how nice the planet he lived on actually was. His tenor voice expressed the line with perfect tone, perfect expression, and she found herself actually feeling a little shiver going down her spine.
He really can sing, she thought. Amazing! Why in God’s name is he wasting that talent singing the trash he puts out?
“Bring it home, Laura,” he told her after repeating the chorus twice. “Close us out.”
She did it, going through one more, slower tempo version of the final chorus and then improvising out a drawn-out outro to end it.
She was surprised when everyone applauded. She blushed nervously.
“What do you know?” Kingsley said, giving her a smile—the first one she’d seen him display. “We really can make music together.”
“I guess so,” she said, feeling the barest beginnings of a smile touching her mouth as well.
Real life is not a situation comedy or a weekly drama, where problems are encountered and solved to the happiness and prosperity of all in thirty minutes. Laura’s opinion of Jake Kingsley did not magically change at that moment in time, nor did Jake Kingsley’s opinion of Laura Best. She continued to think of him—and, by association and example, Celia Valdez—as a sellout who was in the business of making tripe compositions for the unsophisticated masses. She continued to dislike and, though she would not ever admit it to herself, fear Kingsley. And Jake did not magically warm to Laura in the moment either. He continued to think of her as an unjustifiably arrogant cold fish, and one who was probably not going to work out ultimately.
What that moment in time did accomplish, however, was to plant the initial seeds in everyone involved of how things could be, if only they worked at them a little. Laura saw that both Jake and Celia actually did possess some significant musical and vocal talents—a considerable amount actually, if those first flashes of insight she was witnessing were correct. And Jake and Celia both saw that Laura had the potential to not just fill in the missing pieces of Celia’s compositions, but to enhance and compliment them, perhaps brilliantly, if she could only learn to put her heart into them.
For her to learn to put her heart into them took a little longer.
They spent the rest of that first full day just trying to find a little more common ground. It wasn’t easy, but they dug up a little. There was When Johnny Comes Marching Home, which Ted pounded out brilliantly on the drums while Jake and Laura took turns playing the melody on their respective instruments. They played around a little with A Mad Russian’s Christmas, only because it was familiar to all of them, but abandoned that effort after only fifteen minutes or so because the complexities of it would have taken too long to learn properly (Jake would remember that effort in astonishment and envy five years in the future, when just such a rendition helped propel the band Trans-Siberian Orchestra to international fame). And then, to the embarrassment of Jake and Laura both, they found that they all knew Sweet Caroline, by Neil Diamond and, at the insistence of Mary and Cynthia, they laid it down, with Cynthia playing primary melody, and Jake strumming the chords out on his acoustic-electric and singing the lyrics while Laura and Celia added fill with the sax and the drop-D tuned strat, respectively.
“If anyone tells anyone what I sang here today,” Jake threatened after they put Sweet Caroline to bed, “I swear to God, I will kill you all in a painful manner.”
Ted, Ben, and even Laura all agreed to keep mum. None of them wanted it to be known they enjoyed themselves a little Sweet Caroline either.
The next time they got together to work on Celia’s tunes, it was a Saturday. Things started off pretty much the same as their first session together. They worked on The Struggle and then Done With You for the first part of the morning. Laura’s notes came out sounding listless and flat, just as they had before.
In frustration, Jake suggested that maybe they should give Laura a little break and work on something that did not include the sax in it until lunch. Everyone agreed except for Laura, who wanted to keep pushing on.
“Just kick back, relax a little, and watch us work,” Jake insisted to her. “We need to work on these other things anyway. After lunch, we’ll try again.”
She agreed. What else was there to do? She sat in her chair, her sax idle, while they worked on a tune called Why?, yet another sappy bad relationship tune from the woman who seemed to make them her signature.
As they played it out, however, Laura got another one of those flashes of insight into the talents of who she was working with.
It was a soft, mellow, melancholy piece, with no percussion at all and minimal bass. Celia strummed out the primary rhythm on her acoustic and her playing was sweet indeed. Mary played the melody with her violin while Cynthia added the occasional fill with the piano. The tune took great advantage of Celia’s voice. She sung of hopeless love that was unreturned, that was being utilized for the purpose of taking advantage of another, of the self-destructive impulse for the person being taken advantage of to continue on anyway.