“I should have asked for it in singles,” she said, and rolled her eyes.
“How about quarters?” Sil said. “Wheelbarrow full of quarters.”
“This won’t bounce, will it?” she asked.
“Better not,” he said, and raised his wineglass.
She put the check in her handbag and snapped the bag shut before she lifted her glass.
“Here’s to the first Spit Shine performance of ‘Sister Woman’ this Saturday,” he said.
“Here’s to it,” she said, and they both drank.
“Will you come hear us?” he asked. “I’ll get you a laminate, you can sit right on the stage with us.”
“What’s a laminate?”
“A pass. Get you through security.”
“What time Saturday?” she asked.
“We’re opening the whole thing,” he said. “Only better spot would be the closing one. Usually, your headliner’s the last act on stage. But Grass thinks next to closing would be better for a Sunday. The thing’s running two full days, you know. Starts at one o’clock Saturday, ends midnight Sunday.”
“Who’s Grass?” Chloe asked.
“Girl in the crew.”
The way he said it, so offhandedly like that, she figured there was something going on between them. Looked away, too, something going on there for sure.
“There’ll be ten groups altogether, five on Saturday, another five on Sunday. Figure an hour onstage for each of us, maybe even an hour and a half, depending on how it’s going. Then, when you figure in your dead time…”
“Dead time?”
“Yeah, the next act placing they instruments and setting up they own mikes and amps, that all takes time. Sometimes your dead time can be an hour between each act, depending how fussy the group wants t’be. What I’m saying is it’ll be a full day, if you want to go the whole route. I’d be happy t’stay with you, you want to stick around after we’re through performing. Or we can go someplace else, if you like, spend the day together. If you like,” he said.
“I haven’t yet said I was coming,” she said.
“Well,if you come. I thought you might like to hear us do ‘Sister Woman,’ is all. We’ve been rehearsing it, I think it’ll go down real fine.”
“It’s a good song.”
“Oh yeah.”
“When will you be doing it? I mean, where in the act?”
“We’re opening with it. Usually, you open with something familiar, give ’em time to settle down while they listen to one of your hits. This time, we’re jumpin right in with both feet, givin ’em a new one.Then we’ll do one of our hits…you familiar with ‘Hate’?”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“You got a date with hate, at the Devil’s gate,” he rapped, beating out the rhythm on the tabletop, “you gotta hate the ofay…you don’t know it, huh? Big hit. Anyway, we do that after ‘Sister Woman’ and then we’ve got a big surprise planned for later on, I was hoping you’d stay for it. Something unusual for us. Chloe, I’d…be very disappointed if you didn’t come Saturday. I was looking forward to your coming. It’d be very special for me if you was to come.”
She had promised Tony she’d work all day Saturday—which was supposed to be her day off—to make up for tonight. Now that she had the check, she could tell Tony things had changed. Tell him she didn’t need the job anymore. Though she knew people who’d won more than twenty on the lottery, blew it all in a month. She couldn’t let that happen. Maybe she should hang on to the job till she figured what to do next. Put the money in the bank, keep dancing at Eden’s till she explored the opportunities open to her. Go in this Saturday, like she said she would. Still, she did want to hear them do “Sister Woman.” Then again, that tune was the past, man, that tune was George Chadderton, long dead and gone and scarcely missed at all. The future was Chloe Chadderton. But maybe the future was Sil, too.
“One o’clock, you say?”
“Get you a laminate the minute you say the word. All access, you can roam around wherever you like before the concert starts. I’ll set you up on the stage where you can hear and see everything we do. Take you around later, introduce you to the other groups.” He lowered his eyes again. “That’d make me very proud,” he said.
“I’ll see,” she said.
She wasn’t playing it cute, she wasn’t that kind of woman, never had been. She was still thinking it might be better to hang on to the job, go in Saturday like she’d promised Tony. Maybe Sil was the future, though she wasn’t too sure about that, either. Men were men, and too damn many of them were alike. But future or not, the job at the Eden was the present. She didn’t want to start living on that twenty. That twenty was her stake.
“Well, you think it over,” he said, and took another sip of the wine. “I don’t know too much about Italian food,” he said, “except pizza on the road. There’s some great pizza joints in Pennsylvania and Ohio. But I asked Mort…Mort Ackerman…what he thought the best…”
“Who’s Mort Ackerman?”
“Promoter doing the concert. Windows Entertainment, you ever hear of them?”
“No.”
“They’re gigantic. Mort’s the CEO. We were yellin at him about the ads, and he called today to say there’d be full-page ads in all the papers tomorrow, and Spit Shine’s featured real prominent, big as any other headliner.”
“I’ll look for them,” she said.
“Mort says this is his favorite restaurant in all the city,” Sil said, and hesitated, and then said, “Romantic, too. Mort said.”
“It is romantic,” she said. “Don’t you think it’s romantic?”
“Oh yes, I do, yes,” he said. “All these flags. Would you care for some more wine?”
“Please,” she said.
He signaled to the waiter. The waiter poured.
“And whenever you’re ready, sir,” he said, “I’ll be happy to take your order.”
“In just a bit,” Sil said.
He lifted his glass, looked over it into her eyes.
“Chloe,” he said, “please say you’ll come Saturday.”
“Yes, I think I will,” she said.
“Good,” he said, and grinned.
She returned the smile.
She was thinking he was very cute. She was hoping he would turn out to be the future.
They clinked glasses.
They drank.
“I can’t wait to see your face,” he said.
“When you do George’s song, you mean?”
“Well, that, too,” he said mysteriously.
“Well, what do you mean?”
“You’ll see.”
“No, tell me.”
“You’ll see,” he said.
Looking like the cat that swallowed the canary.
So damn cute she could eat him alive.
“I’m starving to death,” he said. “Let’s order.”
IN MAJESTA that Wednesday night…
Majesta had without question been named by the British; the cognomen rang with all the authority, grandeur, greatness, and dignity of sovereignty, its roots being in the Middle English word maieste , from the Old French majesté , from the Latin mãjestãs. Even the section called Port Royal had long ago been British, though by the early nineteen-hundreds it had already become an exclusively Italian community. In the forties, the Puerto Ricans started coming in. Now there were Dominicans and Chinese as well.