The drums petered out with the guitar, leaving the keyboard and bass to negotiate a few more chords, then a few fifths, then a few unisons, on their way to Bb, the tonic, a traditional resolution to a maundering piece.
A crescendo of claps was the last of the percussion, though it lacked the tentativeness that might have saved it from vulgarity. The unconstructed response, he thought, for anyone outside the vanguard of composition, was a ruffled silence. And the too-large eyewear, the too-small clothing all around him, did nothing to convince him the audience was any better placed than he was to grasp the night’s singularity, seeing how far this was removed from the references they could plausibly have. MBV, maybe, or Earth.
He rose. He’d sweated through his socks and his feet felt bloated and wet in his sneakers. His head buzzed, not from trains or guitars now, but the day’s drinking. He jostled his way through oncoming traffic to the back, the overlit blue room. A pink blanket with looping knits, along with a small armchair pillow, poked out of the sound hole of the bass drum, which someone was taking the toms off of. Two patinated crashes and a ride lay off to the side, halfway settled into brown vinyl sheaths.
Larent was at the edge of the stage, his face turned down toward his feet. And though there was nothing to talk over, or shouldn’t have been, not as far as Stagg was concerned, Renna had her mouth to his ear.
“Carl.”
His dark hair shining with water or sweat, and a joint hanging from his lips, Ravan approached him, looking in all other respects an overgrown English public schoolboy.
Larent approached and his face appeared over Ravan’s shoulder. Renna came past them both and wrapped herself around Stagg.
“We played pool once,” Ravan said, preempting the question on at least a couple of their minds: how did he know Stagg? Renna craned her neck back toward Ravan but soon dropped his gaze for Stagg’s. “You won by three balls, yeah?” He extended the joint to Stagg, who took it without hesitation and pulled on it with his head bowed. “Took the table off me,” Ravan said, “then lost it straight away to a Russian. This must have been, what, six weeks back? The place has shut since, did you know that, Carl? Renovations.”
“Rundown place,” Stagg said, exhaling.
“Who’d you go with?” Renna asked him.
“And how would you know these two?” Stagg said to Ravan, ignoring her.
“I was going to tell you,” Renna said. “This is their first gig together, with their new guitarist. Ravan. I thought you might like to see it.”
“Li and I — have you met him? He’s the one taking the drums down — Li and I saw him playing this unfretted guitar in a gallery,” Larent said. “It looks like it would be a nightmare to play, and it is, it turns out. He pulled the frets out with pliers and just sanded the wood down.”
“Filled the cracks with wood putty, actually,” Ravan said.
“Really unbelievable things came out of that guitar, I remember,” Larent said. “There isn’t anyone I know of, Li either, working that way. We played some of his stuff tonight. Sorry you weren’t here for it,” he said to Stagg.
“No, he heard it — from the bar,” she said with a trace of contempt, or pity, Stagg thought.
“Oh. Good. We were more of a rhythm section tonight anyway, backing him up. We can go a lot further,” Larent said.
“My head is still buzzing,” Stagg said.
“Mine too,” Larent said.
“She says you’re a writer, Carl,” Ravan said. “I did think I caught a whiff of that. You had to do something besides.”
“Just some lectures,” Stagg said.
“Besides what?” Larent said.
“Well, we’re both rubbish at pool,” Ravan said. “You don’t disagree, do you?” Stagg hit the joint again. “Not stories, then?”
Stagg shook his head while holding in the smoke. “Histories,” he said through a cloud.
“Colonial ones. Is that right?” Ravan said, looking to Renna.
“Imperial ones. South Asia, in the seventeenth century,” Stagg said.
“South Asia,” Ravan said with a smile Stagg thought might possibly be vicious, though the marijuana might have already started to encourage paranoia in him, as it sometimes did. “And your family, I understand, in the middle of it all. A serious man, you are. And there’s a fellowship, she tells me?” He took the smoldering joint back from Stagg.
“No,” Stagg said. “No idea. We’ll see I guess.”
“Oh, how can you not win it,” Renna said.
He let go of her hands. Larent and Ravan collected their instruments and the four of them headed for the exit together.
They sat on the black canvas couch in Larent’s living room, all but Li, who’d gone on to a party with the opening act. While the three of them passed another joint, Larent played bass in his bedroom with the door cracked open. He never smoked marijuana or anything else, and he drank only wine, as now. Renna had once mentioned his habit of getting drunk after gigs and playing like this, away from the rest. He’d been doing it since prep school. Bach’s Cello Suite No. 5—he couldn’t resist the clichés when drunk either, it seemed — wafted out of the bedroom, transposed to the bass.
“So this is what you do,” Stagg said, gesturing at the air, the music that filled it. “Besides.”
“Haven’t seen a penny,” Ravan said. “Think we will, Edward?” he said above the bass notes.
Larent stopped the bow mid-passage. “It was full tonight,” he called out from the bedroom.
“But think of how small the place was,” Ravan said. “And I suspect the opening act was actually headlining. How did you manage that?”
Larent released the bow and said something. A single word. Perhaps “charity.”
“Yes, pity. Anyway, no, this won’t do for money,” Ravan said to Stagg, lowering his voice. “Not yet. I don’t know how he gets by.”
“His father,” Renna said. She was curled up on the couch with her head in Stagg’s lap.
“I’ve just got a fellowship of sorts myself, actually,” Ravan said.
“A writer too, I guess,” Stagg said.
“Nothing so noble. Meteorology.”
“Channel four,” Renna whispered before pulling on the joint. These sorts of comments, two in a row now, innocently undermining, they made him feel close to her. He raked her dirty blond hair with his fingertips and smiled as she let the smoke rise from her mouth.
“Oh I don’t think they’d have me for a weatherman,” Ravan said as he took the joint from her. “I’m taking up a provisional spot at NOAA, starting next week. Out of Princeton. Atmospheric research. With some fieldwork, from time to time, in Vegas, if you can believe it. Like you, Carl, I’ve got a doctorate. Not in philosophy, though. Something less sexy, that’s the difference.”
“Physics?” Stagg asked.
“Of aerosols.”
“Cloud physics.”
Ravan laid the joint on the oxidized copper table, green like the statue in the port.
“You know much about it?” he asked.
“No. Not really. But it doesn’t sound so dull.”
“It’s sort of the family business. I don’t much care for it anymore, but it is how I got on to what does interest me. The physics of sound, psychoacoustics, alternative tunings… Tell me, though, did you like what you heard tonight? Or not ‘like’—what did you make of it?” Ravan picked up the joint by its waist and passed it to Stagg, who pinched it between index and middle fingers like a cigarette.