She didn’t wait for me at the end of that set. But she showed up the following night, so tentative and apologetic, I wanted to die. I went back with her to her apartment, although we had just a few hours before she needed to leave for work. We lay with each other again, but the song was stillborn between us. When I looked over the record collection after she left the next morning, the Calloway was gone.
We fell into a tradition. Every night she came to the bar, I’d get her up to sing for at least one song. At first, it made Mr. Silber crazy. “You don’t think I have money to pay for two performers in the same evening?” I assured him he was getting the thing all my father’s colleagues swore was impossible in our little neck of the universe: something for nothing. When Mr. Silber saw how much this thrill-nervous girl’s clear old torch songs pleased the audience, he spun doughnuts. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he took to announcing, “please welcome the Glimmer Room Musical Duet!”
We never rehearsed. She knew all her songs by heart, and I knew all her songs from her. I could anticipate what she was going to do, and on those rare occasions when her nervous enthusiasm tipped us over, our craft was easily righted. We weren’t talking Scriabin, after all. But Teresa tapped into a musical ecstasy Scriabin only hinted at. Her whole body took up the pulse. With my chords solid beneath her, she let go — sexy, sultry, loose on a first-time spree. She had a lower register, a growl almost androgynous. The audience ate her up, and each night that she sang, at least a couple men in the darkened house would have given years for one taste more.
She was on the floor one night, singing Smokey Robinson’s “You Really Got a Hold on Me” as if it were a controlled substance. We’d found the groove, sailing along in the full soul of the thing, when our hull scraped on some reef, forcing me to look up. Teresa was back on the beat almost instantly; no one had heard her bobble but her accompanist. She stiffened through the rest of the song. I traced her weird vibe to an older man who’d entered in midstanza and sat down in the back of the room, a man whose rifle-bore gaze Teresa studiously avoided.
He wasn’t the mallet-headed escort I’d first seen her with. But he was another white man, one whose massive claim on her was obvious, even to the piano player. Teresa sang, “I don’t like you, but I love you.” I tagged along underneath, resolving stray dissonances, wondering whether her bridling was meant for me or this other fellow, a man I’d never seen before and felt no need to see again. “You really got a hold on me.” Every demon music was supposed to banish, all the things that held her took hold in the melody. She limped through to the end, almost whispering the last phrase, afraid to look up. When she did, the man was standing. He seemed to lean over and spit, though nothing come out of his mouth. Then he made for the door.
Teresa turned to me and called out. I couldn’t hear her, over her panic and the applause. She called again: “‘Ain’t Misbehavin’.’” The only time she ever spoke to me in command. I started up the tune, my fingers in a forced march. But it was too late. The man was gone. Teresa, having ordered the melody, gagged it down. She sang her way through to the end. But the innocence in the song came out of her mouth twisted.
She waited for me afterward, as if nothing had happened. I suppose nothing had. But it ate at me, and when she asked in her shy, frightened way whether I wanted to go home with her, I answered, “I don’t think you want me to.”
She looked as if I’d just blackened her eye. “Why are you saying that?”
“I think you’d rather be by yourself.”
She didn’t ask for a reason, but went away in silence. That only enraged me. She came back to the club a few nights later, but I avoided her during breaks and never asked her up to sing. She stayed away for a week. I dug in and waited for her to call. When she didn’t, I told myself that that was that. We never know. Nobody knows the first thing about anyone else.
She was waiting for me outside the club when I went to work the next week. She was in her candy-factory clothes. I saw her from a block away, time enough to prepare for the downbeat. “Aren’t you supposed to be working?”
“Joseph. We have to talk.”
“Do we?”
Suddenly, I was that thug who’d assaulted us on the freezing beach the winter before. She narrowed herself to the smallest slit and threw her words at me. “You smug little son of a bitch.” She grabbed and pushed me. Then she buckled against the front wall of the club, sobbing.
I refused to touch her. It pretty much killed me, but I held to myself. I’d have given her anything, and still, she refused to tell me. Righteousness had me by the throat. I waited for her to catch her breath. “Is there something you want to say to me?”
This started her gasping again. “About what, Joseph? About what?”
“I’ve never asked anything from you, Teresa. You have unfinished business in your life? The least you can do is have the decency to tell me about it.”
“‘Unfinished…’”
She wouldn’t own up. I felt betrayed — by her, by the rules of decency, by her pretty singing, by that bending rainbow landscape of her body. “Want to tell me about the guy?”
“Guy?” Her confusion was complete. Then her face broke and rose. “Joseph! Oh, my Joe. I thought you knew. I thought…”
“What? Thought what? Why didn’t you at least say something? Or is that part of the great unspeakable secret?”
“I thought… I didn’t want to make it…” She hung her head in shame. For all of us, I suppose. “That was my father.”
I looped back. “Your father came to hear you?”
“Us,” she croaked. “Hear us.” And he’d left in disgust before she could lure him back with his favorite song. I worked through the recap in silence. Her father, who made her listen every Sunday to a music he now hated her for falling in love with. Her lover, whom she mistook for a native speaker. My own Sunday music, which would only have thickened the man’s invisible spit. Spit meant for me, but hitting his daughter.
I fell against the brick of the Glimmer Club, next to her. “Did you — have you talked to him since?”
She couldn’t even shake her head. “Mom won’t put him on when I call. She’ll barely talk to me herself. I went by the house, and they — he came to the door and put on the burglar chain.”
She broke down. I led her inside the empty club, where I could take her into a back room and put my arm around her without being arrested. Mr. Silber heard his prize nightingale crying, and he rushed about trying to make her a cup of weak tea.
“You can’t let this happen.” I stroked her hair, without conviction. “Family’s bigger than…this. You have to patch things up. Nothing’s worth a split this big.”
She looked at me through the red, raw wet of her face. Horror spread there, spilled wine. She clamped a tourniquet around my upper arm and buried herself in my chest. I felt I’d just killed a child while driving and would spend the rest of my life with memory as my penance.
Teresa never used it against me, but I was all she had. Me and the saltwater taffy factory. My visits to her apartment now had a tinge of volunteer work. We ran out of things to say to each other, but Teresa never noticed. She could smile and say nothing for longer than I knew how to reply.
I grew obsessed with her father. I slipped little questions about him into our dinner conversations. It irritated her, but I couldn’t keep from fishing. Where did he work? He was an appliance repairman in town. Where had he grown up? Saddle Brook and Newark. What did he vote? Lifelong straight Democratic, just like my parents. I could never get to what I needed to know before she clammed up.
We ran out of things to do together, even in the few hours when we were both off work. I suggested we practice a little. I could give her some pointers. She leapt at the idea. She couldn’t get enough. She wanted to hear everything I knew about breath support, open throat, covering — all the scraps I’d picked up from Jonah over the years. “Real singing. Famous singing.” She had the same appetite for these professional secrets as her girlfriends at the factory had for Princes Charles and Rainier.