“I thought you liked DiFranco.”
“I do,” Miki said. “Stop being so literal.”
“You’re right. And I’m sorry.”
“But I know what you’re going through,” she went on. “When the bad times come rolling in, it doesn’t seem like anyone else could possibly understand. Or that they’ll ever go away.”
Hunter nodded. “That’s exactly how I’m feeling.”
“See? And I’m only twenty-two.”
Hunter had to smile. It was hard not to be cheered up by one of Miki’s pep talks. As her brother Donal had said to him once, she could make a stone laugh. But there was too much wearing him down these days and he couldn’t hold onto that smile for more than a moment.
“It’s not just Ria,” he said, “though that’s a big part of it.”
“C’mon,” Miki told him, immediately figuring out what else was bothering him. “It’s still early in the year. Sales never start to pick up until the turistas hit town.” She waved her hand around the store. “Besides, what’s to buy? New product’s not exactly flying in the door these days.”
“And it wasn’t exactly flying out over Christmas either, and those are the bills I’m still trying to pay.”
“This is true. But everybody was down.”
“Not this down,” Hunter told her.
That gave her pause.
“How bad is it?” she asked.
Hunter shrugged. “I won’t know till the end of the month. But I’m going to have to cut some hours.”
“Is this your way of saying, maybe I should be considering a secondary career?”
“Not your hours,” he told her. “It’s just… nothing seems to be going right lately. Between Ria, the store, the weather …”
They both looked up as the front door opened and Titus Mealy came in, stamping the snow from his boots. A dour, mousy-haired man with the body shape of a stork, he was the store’s shipper/receiver, an occupation that suited him well since it allowed him to spend the greater proportion of his time in the back room, packing and unboxing shipments, instead of out on the floor where he’d have to deal with customers. It wasn’t that he was deliberately unfriendly—he could be quite charming on occasion—but for him to open up to you, first you had to pass some indecipherable Titus Mealy respect-meter test.
Most people didn’t. But he had a regular contingent of pale-faced and soft-bodied misfits that came in to see him, usually buying up to a half-dozen CDs per visit, and he was a hard worker, so Hunter tended to leave him to his own devices.
“Now that’s what I call perfect timing,” Miki said.
Titus looked puzzled. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“We were just talking about things that bum us out.”
“Ha, ha.” He turned his attention to Hunter. “Any new shipments?”
Hunter shook his head.
“Then I guess I’ll keep working on the returns.”
He headed off towards the back room with the awkward gait of someone not entirely comfortable in his own body.
“See,” Miki said. “Now that’s grumpy. And probably depressed, too, though with him I’d say it was clinical.”
“Are you ever going to stop ragging on him?” Hunter asked.
“I don’t know. Do you think he’ll ever learn any social graces?”
The phone rang before Hunter could reply. He picked up the receiver. “Hello. Gypsy Records.”
“Do you have any Who bootlegs?” a high, nasally voice asked.
Hunter sighed and hung up the phone without replying.
“Who-boy?” Miki asked.
He nodded.
There were two daily occurrences they’d come to count on—if not look forward to. One was that the anonymous caller with what had to be a put-on voice would phone asking for Who bootlegs. He called at least once a day and had been doing it for years—not only to Gypsy Records, but to record stores all over town. The first time Who-boy phoned after the store got call display, they’d all crowded around the telephone to finally see who he was, or at least where he was calling from, but the liquid display had only read “Caller unknown.”
The second thing was Donnie Dobson, a large, pink version of the Pills-bury dough boy in a polyester suit who came in and/or called the store on a daily basis looking for new country and easy-listening releases by female artists. But he at least bought music. Like Who-boy, Gypsy Records wasn’t the only recipient of Donnie’s interest, but since they went out of their way to bring in whatever album he was desperately looking for that particular week, he tended to give them most of his business.
For the longest time Hunter had no idea what Donnie did with everything he purchased—he couldn’t possibly listen to it all, there was simply too much of it. Donnie had been doing this for years—long before Hunter got into the business, and Hunter had been working in music stores for almost twenty years now. But then one day Titus made an offhand remark about having been over to Donnie’s house and how weird it was that he was still living with his mother. It was Titus who explained that Donnie listened to each new purchase once, then carefully put it away in one of the boxes that literally filled his mother’s basement.
“But what were you doing over there?” Miki had wanted to know.
“I was looking for a Brenda Lee cut for this tape I was making,” Titus had replied in a tone of voice that left one with the sense that it explained everything.
In a way, it did. He and Adam Snipe, Hunter’s other full-time employee, were forever making compilation tapes, arranging and rearranging the order of the cuts with a single-minded focus that went far beyond obsession. They often seemed willing to go to almost any length to get exactly the right version of a song. “See,” one of them would explain in the middle of yet another obscure song search, “I need something to put before this cut by Roger Miller and I figure it’s got to be by Stealers Wheel because Gerry Rafferty went on to produce that version of ‘Letter from America’ by the Proclaimers and they covered ‘King of the Road.’ You see how it all connects?”
Hunter did, where most people wouldn’t, but while he loved music, he liked to think he wasn’t that obsessed by it. And neither were his other employees. Fiona Hale, the store’s part-timer and resident Goth, all tall and pale, with lanky black hair and a chiaroscuro wardrobe, might love her Dead Can Dance and Cocteau Twins CDs, but she had a life beyond them. And as for Miki, well, she was Miki, and who could figure her out. She looked like a punk, played button accordion in a local Celtic band, and when it was her turn to choose what they’d play on the store’s sound system, inevitably picked something by an old horn player like Bird, Coltrane, or Cannonball Adderly. Her musical enthusiasms were great, but then she had the same broad enthusiasm for anything that interested her. Sometimes it seemed that everything did.
“So Adam said you’re going to let his band play in the store some Saturday,” Miki said.
Hunter nodded. “Have you heard them? I’ve got this awful feeling I’m going to regret this.”
“They’re okay—kind of lounge music set to a reggae beat. Imagine ‘The Girl from Ipanema’ sung by Peter Tosh.”
Hunter winced.
“No, really,” Miki assured him. “It’s fun. Except their horns are all sampled and that sucks.” She cocked her head to look at him. “How come you’ve never had my band in to play?”
“You never asked.”
“Adam says you offered them the gig.”
“Adam’s just trying to get a rise out of you.”
Miki nodded slowly. “And wouldn’t you know … it worked.”
They fell silent, listening to the CD. Casey was singing now about a hare hunt in the low country of Creggan.
“So do you want to play here some Saturday?” Hunter asked when the song ended with a fade-out of a flute playing against the lilting rhythm of a bodhran.
“Nah. I wouldn’t want to mix my store and band groupies. That’d be just too weird.”
Hu
nter had to laugh. Both Miki and Fiona acquired small clusters of teenage boys and young businessmen on a regular basis, earnestly hovering around them in the store, buying their recommendations while working up the nerve to ask for a date. Fiona’s were rather predictably Goth, but with Miki, anything seemed to go, from skateboarders and headbangers to lawyers in three-piece suits.
“There, you see?” Miki said. “If you can still find something to smile about, your life’s not over yet.”
“What do you do when you’re depressed?” he asked.
Miki took a sip from her coffee. “Well,” she drawled, “sometimes I do like in that Pam Tillis song and ask myself, ‘What would Elvis do?’ “
“And the rest of the time?”
“I imagine what it’s like to be somebody else who doesn’t have my problems. ‘Course the downside of that is I have too good an imagination and end up obsessing over what I think could be depressing them. So we’re talking way moody and not really a solution that works or anything.”
“I never think of you as moody.”
“I’m not—except when I’m in that kind of mood.” She grinned. “Mostly I just play some tunes on my box and have a drink with a friend—at the same time, if I can arrange it. Works wonders.”
“I think I’d need a whole orchestra and brewery, and even then I’m not so sure it would help.”
Miki shook her head. “It’s not the volume or quantity—it’s the quality. And it’s the being with a friend that helps the most.”
“That makes sense.”
“So instead of going home and brooding over Ria and store invoices after work, why don’t you come out with me and have a little fun? There’s a session at The Harp tonight, Caffrey’s on tap, a lovely bottle of Jameson’s behind the bar, bangers and mash on the grill.”
Hunter started to shake his head. The last thing he needed right now was a pity date. But then he realized that wasn’t what Miki was offering. She was just being there as a friend.
“Sure,” he said. “Why not?”
Who knows? Maybe he’d actually feel better.
“Cool.”
On the CD player, Casey was now singing a Yeats poem that someone had set to music. The front door opened and three customers came in, brushing snow off their coats and stamping their feet. The mat at the door was going to be soaked before the end of the day.
“Must be noon,” Miki said.
She slid off her stool and walked out from behind the counter to see if she could give anyone a hand and all three men aimed themselves in her direction. Shaking his head, Hunter started to clear off the counter. When two more customers came in, one of them asking what was playing, he took the Casey CD off, made a mental note to order more copies, and put on something that they actually had in stock—a reissue of recordings Stan Getz had made for Verve back in the fifties.
Miki looked up from the worldbeat bins where she was talking up a recording by Violaine Corradi and gave him a thumbs-up.
3
Ellie made herself wait until she was well and truly awake before going over to the part of her loft that served as her studio. She sat at her kitchen table with a mug of coffee and had a bowl of granola while flipping through an old issue of Utne Reader that someone had passed along to her.
This issue’s cover story was “Wild at Heart: How Pets Make Us Human.” It made her wish, and not for the first time, that she had the sort of lifestyle that could accommodate a pet. The trouble was, she wasn’t a cat person, and a dog needed way more attention than she would be able to give it at this point in her life. Between her work with Angel, private commissions, and the part-time graphic design work she did for the weekly arts paper In the City, she was already scrambling to find time for her own art, never mind take care of anything as dependent as a pup as well.
But one day …
She closed the magazine. Sometimes it felt as though her whole life revolved around things that might come into it one day instead of what was in it now.
Putting her dirty bowl in the sink, she poured herself another cup of coffee and walked across the room to where her current work-in-progress stood under a damp cloth. The sculpture was far enough under way that she could see a hint of the bust’s features under the cloth—brow, cheekbones, nose, the rest lost in the drapes of the fabric. Viewing it like this, a vague, ghostly shape of a face under cloth, supported only by the length of broomstick she was using as an armature pole, it was hard, sometimes, to remember the weight of one of these busts. She could almost imagine it was floating there above the modeling stand, that it would take no more than a slight breeze to start it drifting away across the room.
The illusion only lasted until she removed the cloth and laid it aside. Now the still roughly sculpted head of gray clay was all density and weight, embracing gravity, and the wonder was that the armature pole could support it at all.
It was barely noon, though you wouldn’t know it from how dark it was in the loft. The storm outside made it feel more like late afternoon and she had to put on a couple of lights to see properly. She pulled up a stool to the modeling stand, but before she could begin to work, the sound of the wind rattling a loose strip of metal on her fire escape distracted her, drawing her gaze to the window. She shook her head as she looked outside. The thaw over Christmas had lulled everyone into thinking that they were in for a mild winter for a change, but true to form, it had only been a joke. At least it wasn’t freezing rain.
The fall of the snow was mesmerizing. She’d always wanted to find a way to capture its delicacy in clay, the drift and spin of the individual flakes as they fell, the random patterns they made, their flickering dance and the ever-changing contrast between light and dark, all conveniently framed by the window. But it was something she had to leave to the painters. The closest she’d ever come was an installation she’d done for a group show once where the viewer peered into a large, black box she’d constructed to see confetti being blown about by a strategic placement of a couple of small, battery-driven fans.
She’d painted tenements and alleys on the back and side walls of the box and placed a small sculpture of a homeless man, huddled under a rough blanket of newspapers, up against the painted buildings. Moody interior lighting completed the installation, and it had all worked out rather well—for what it said, as well as how it said it—only it wasn’t clay. It wasn’t a sculpture, but some odd hybrid, and the dancing confetti didn’t come close to capturing the snow the way she’d wanted it to. Snow, such as was falling outside her window today, had both delicate presence and weight, a wonderful tension between the two that played them against each other.
She watched the storm a while longer, then finally turned back to her sculpture, thinking that at least the latest cold snap had broken. The street people would still have drifts of wet snow to deal with, but they would be spared the bitter cold of the past few nights for now.
The businessman whose commission she was working on wasn’t available today, so she was stuck working from her sketches and the photographs she’d taken during earlier sittings. She collected them from the long worktable set against the back wall with its peanut gallery of drying busts, all looking at her. One, a self-portrait, her long hair pulled back into a loose bun at the nape of the neck, was almost dry enough to make its trip to the kiln. The others had all been hollowed out, but weren’t nearly dry enough yet. Three were commissions of rather stodgy businessmen like the one she planned to work on today, the sort of portrait work that helped pay the bills. The last few were of friends—hopefully to be part of a show if she could ever get the money together to have them cast.
Returning to the modeling stand, she spread out her reference material and gave the bust a spray of water from a plastic plant mister. Then she began to work on the detailing, constantly referring to her sketches and photographs as she shaped the clay with her fingers and modeling tools.
When her doorbell rang, she sat up, startled to realize that three hours had simply slipp
ed away unnoticed while she’d been working. She rolled her shoulder muscles and stretched her hands over her head before standing up. It didn’t help much. Her back and shoulder muscles still felt far too tight. The doorbell rang again. Giving the bust another spray of water, she draped the damp cloth back over it. She wiped her hands on her jeans as she crossed the loft, adding new streaks of wet clay to the build-up of dried clay already there, stiffening the denim.
Opening the door, she found her friend Donal Greer standing in the hallway, the shoulders of his wool pea jacket white with snow. He was a little shorter than her five-ten—the discrepancy evened out by the heels of his boots—and a few years older. At the moment, the snow on his full beard and long dark ponytail made him seem gray-haired and far older. As the snow melted, it dripped to the floor where his boots had already started a pair of puddles. He gave her such a mournful, woe-bedraggled look that she wanted to laugh.
“It’s snowing,” Donal told her The pronouncement was uttered in an Eeyore-like voice made stranger by the slightest burr of an Irish accent.
Most people didn’t see through the moroseness he liked to affect. Ellie wasn’t one of them, though it had taken her a while to catch on. They’d met at one of Jilly Coppercorn’s parties, each of them having known Jilly for ages on their own, but never quite connecting with each other until that night. They’d talked straight through the party, all the way through the night until the dawn found them in the Dear Mouse Diner, still talking. From there it seemed inevitable that they’d become a couple, and they had for a while—even living together for a few months—but eventually they realized that they were much better suited as friends.
Donal gave a heavy sigh. “Truly snowing,” he went on. “Great bloody mounds of the stuff are being dumped from the sky.”
She smiled. “So I see. Come on in.”
“I was beginning to think you weren’t home,” Donal added as he stepped inside. He looked over to the studio area. “I’m not interrupting anything, am I?”