When the applause died down, an odd sort of hush fell over the club. Amy unbuckled her pipes and looked over to see that Matt had already left the stage. She hadn’t even seen him go. She tugged her chanter mike up to mouth level.
“We’re, uh, going to take a short break, folks,” she said into the mike. Her voice seemed to boom in the quiet. “Then,” she added, “we’ll be right back with some more music, so don’t go away.”
The patter bookending the tunes and songs was Matt’s usual job. Since Amy didn’t feel she had his natural stage charm, she just kept it simple.
There was another smatter of applause that she acknowledged with a smile. The house system came on, playing a Jackson Browne tune, and she turned to Nicky, who was putting his fiddle in its case.
“Where’d Matt go?” she asked.
He gave her a “who cares?” shrug. “Probably chasing that bird who was shaking her tush at him all through the last piece.”
“I don’t envy her,” Johnny added.
Amy knew exactly what he meant. Over the past few months they’d all seen the fallout of casualties who gathered like moths around the bright flame of Matt’s stage presence, only to have their wings burnt with his indifference. He’d charm them in a club, sometimes sleep with them, but in the end, the only lover he kept was the music.
Amy knew all too well. There was a time…
She pushed the past away with a shake of her head. Putting a hand above her eyes to shade them from the lights, she scanned the crowd as the other two went to get themselves a beer, but she couldn’t spot either Matt or the girl. Her gaze settled on a black-haired Chinese woman sitting alone at a small table near the door and she smiled as the woman raised her hand in a wave. She’d forgotten that Lucia had arrived halfway through their first set—fashionably late, as always—and now that she thought about it, hadn’t she seen the dancer come in about the same time? They might even have come in together.
Lucia Han was a performance artist based in Upper Foxville, and an old friend of Amy’s. When they’d first met, Amy had been told by too many people to be careful because Lucia was gay and would probably make a pass at her. Amy just ignored them. She had nothing against gays to begin with and she soon learned that the gossips’ reasoning for their false assumption was just that Lucia only liked to work with other women. But as Lucia had explained to Amy once, “There’s just not enough women involved in the arts and I want to support those who do make the plunge—at least if they’re any good.”
Amy understood perfectly. She often wished there were more women players in traditional music. She was sick to death of going to a music session where she wasn’t known. All too often she’d be the only woman in a gathering of men and have to play rings around them on her pipes just to prove that she was as good as them. Irish men weren’t exactly noted for their liberated standards.
Which didn’t mean that either she or Lucia weren’t fond of the right sort of a man. “Au contraire,” as Lucia would say in the phony Parisian accent she liked to affect, “I am liking them too much.”
Amy made her way to the bar, where she ordered a beer on her tab, then took the brimming draught glass through the crowd to Lucia’s table, trying to slosh as little of the foam as she could on her new jeans.
“Bet you thought I wouldn’t come,” Lucia said as Amy sat down with her stein relatively full. The only spillage had joined the stickiness of other people’s spills that lay underfoot.
Lucia was older than Amy by at least six or seven years, putting her in her mid-thirties. She had her hair in a wild spiky do tonight—to match the torn white T-shirt and leather jeans, no doubt. The punk movement had barely begun to trickle across the Atlantic as yet, but it was obvious that Lucia was already an eager proponent. A strand of safety pins dangled from one earlobe; others held the tears of her T-shirt closed in strategic places.
“I don’t even remember telling you about the gig,” Amy said.
Lucia waved a negligent hand toward the small poster on the wall behind her that advertised the band’s appearance at Feeney’s Kitchen this weekend. “But you are famous now, ma chérie,” she said. “How could I not know?” She dropped the accent to add, “You guys sound great.”
“Thanks.”
Amy looked at the tabletop. She set her stein down beside a glass of white wine, Lucia’s cigarettes and matches and a half-filled ashtray. There was also an empty teacup with a small bright steel teapot on one side of it and a used tea bag on the lip of its saucer.
“Did you come alone?” she asked.
Lucia shook her head. “I brought a foundling—fresh from who really knows where. You probably noticed her and Matt making goo-goo eyes at each other all through the last piece you did.” She brought a hand to her lips as soon as she’d made the last comment. “Sorry. I forgot about the thing you used to have going with him.”
“Old history,” Amy said. “I’ve long since dealt with it. I don’t know that Matt ever even knew anything existed between us, but I’m cool now.”
“It’s for the better.”
“Definitely,” Amy agreed.
“I should probably warn my little friend about him,” Lucia said, “but you know what they’re like at that age—it’d just egg her on.”
“Who is your little friend? She moves like all she was born to do was dance.”
“She’s something, isn’t she? I met her on Wolf Island about a week ago, just before the last ferry—all wet and bedraggled like she’d fallen off a boat and been washed to shore. She wasn’t wearing a stitch of clothing and I thought the worst, you know? Some asshole brought her out for a quick wham, bam, and then just dumped her.”
Lucia paused to light a cigarette.
“And?” Amy asked.
Lucia shrugged, blowing out a wreath of blue-grey smoke. “Seems she fell off a boat and took off her clothes so that they wouldn’t drag her down while she swam to shore. Course, I got that from her later.”
Just then the door to the club opened behind Lucia and a gust of cool air caught the smoke from Lucia’s cigarette, giving it a slow dervishing whirl. On the heels of the wind, Amy saw Matt and the girl walk in. They seemed to be in the middle of an animated discussion—or at least Matt was, so they had to be talking about music.
Amy felt the same slight twinge of jealousy watching him with the dancer as she did in the first few moments of every one of the short relationships that came about from some girl basically flinging herself at him halfway through a gig. Though perhaps “relationship” was too strong a word, since any sense of responsibility to a partner was inevitably one-sided.
The girl laughed at what he was saying—but it was a silent laugh. Her mouth was open, her eyes sparkled with appreciation, but there was no sound. She began to move her hands in an intricate pattern that, Amy realized, was the American Sign Language used by deaf-mutes.
“Her problem right then,” Lucia was saying, “was finding something to wear so that she could get into town. Luckily I was wearing my duster—you know, from when I was into my Sergio Leone phase—so she could cover herself up.”
“She took off everything while she was in the water?” Amy asked, her gaze returning to her friend. “Even her underwear?”
“I guess. Unless she wasn’t wearing any in the first place.”
“Weird.”
“I don’t see you wearing a bra.”
“You know what I meant,” Amy said with a laugh.
Lucia nodded. “So anyway, she came on the ferry with me—I paid her fare—and then I brought her back to my place because it turned out she didn’t have anywhere else to go. Doesn’t know a soul in town. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure she spoke English at first.”
Amy looked over Lucia’s shoulder to where Matt was answering whatever it was that the girl’s hands had told him. Where had he learned sign language? she wondered. He’d never said anything about it before, but then she realized that for all the years she’d known him, she really did
n’t know much about him at all, except that he was a brilliant musician and good in bed—related talents, perhaps, since she didn’t doubt that they both were something he’d regard as a performance.
Meow, she thought.
“She’s deaf-mute, isn’t she?” she added aloud.
Lucia looked surprised. “Mute, but not deaf. How you’d know?”
“I’m watching her talk to Matt with her hands right now.”
“She couldn’t even do that when I first met her,” Lucia said.
Amy returned her attention to Lucia once more. “What do you mean?”
“Well, I know sign language—I learned it when I worked at the Institute for the Deaf up on Gracie Street when I first got out of college—so when I realized she was mute, it was the first thing I tried. But she’s not deaf—she just can’t talk. She didn’t even try to communicate at first. I thought she was in shock. She just sat beside me looking out over the water, her eyes getting bigger and bigger as we approached the docks.
“When we caught a bus back to my place, it was like she’d never been in a city before. She just sat beside me all wide-eyed and then took my hand—not like she was scared, it was more like she just wanted to share the wonder of it all with me. It wasn’t until we got back to my place that she asked for pen and paper.” Lucia mimed the action as she spoke.
“It’s all kind of mysterious, isn’t it?” Amy said.
“I’ll say. Anyway, her name’s Katrina Ludvigsen and she’s from one of those little towns on the Islands farther down the lake—the ones just past the mouth of the Dulfer River, you know?”
Amy nodded.
“Her family came over from Norway originally,” Lucia went on. “They were Lapps, as in Lapland, except she doesn’t like to be called that. Her people call themselves Sami.”
“I’ve heard about that,” Amy said. “Referring to them as Lapps is a kind of insult.”
“Exactly.” Lucia took a final drag from her cigarette and butted it out in the ashtray. “Once she introduced herself, she asked me to teach her sign language. Would you believe she picked it up in two days?”
“I don’t know,” Amy said. “Is that fast?”
“Try fantastique, ma chérie.”
“So what’s she doing here?”
Lucia shrugged. “She told me she was looking for a man—like, aren’t we all, ha ha—only she didn’t know his name, just that he lived in Newford. She just about had a fit when she spotted the picture of Matt in the poster for this gig.”
“So she knows him from before.”
“You tell me,” Lucia said.
Amy shook her head. “Only Matt knows whatever it is that Matt knows.”
“Katrina says she’s twenty-two,” Lucia went on, “but if you ask me, I think she’s a lot younger. I’ll bet she ran away from home—maybe even stowed away on some tourist’s powerboat and jumped ship just outside the harbour because they were about to catch her and maybe take her back home.”
“So what are you going to do about it?”
“Not a damn thing. She’s a nice kid and besides,” she added as Katrina and Matt walked by their table, heading for the bar, “I’ve got the feeling she’s not going to be my responsibility for much longer.”
“Don’t count on it,” Amy said. “She’ll be lucky if she lasts the night.”
Although maybe not. Katrina was pretty, and she certainly could dance, so there was the musical connection, just as there had been with her.
Amy sighed. She didn’t know why she got to feeling the way she did at times like this. She wouldn’t even want to make a go at it with Matt again.
Lucia reached across the table and put her hand on Amy’s, giving it a squeeze. “How’re you handling this, Amy? I remember you were pretty messed up about him at one point.”
“I can deal with it.”
“Well—what’s that line of yours? More power to your elbow then, if you can, though I still can’t figure out how you got past it enough to still be able to play with him.”
Amy looked over to the bar where Matt was getting the girl a cup of tea. She wished the twinge of not so much jealousy, as hurt, would go away.
Patience, she told herself. She’d seen Matt with who knew how many women over the years, all of them crazy over him. The twinge only lasted for a little while—a reminder of a bad time, not the bad time itself. She was past that now.
Well, mostly.
“You just change your way of thinking about a person,” she said after a few moments, trying to convince herself as much as Lucia. “You change what you need from them, your expectations. That’s all.”
“You make it sound easy.”
Amy turned back to her friend. “It’s not,” she said in a quiet voice.
Lucia gave her hand another squeeze.
* * *
The girl was drunk on Matt, Amy realized. There was no other explanation for the way she was carrying on.
For the rest of the night, Amy could see Katrina sitting with Lucia at the back of the club, chin cupped in her hands as she listened to Matt sing. No, not just listening. She drank in the songs, swallowed them whole. And with every dance set they played, she was up on her feet at the front of the stage, the sinuous grace of her movement, the swirl and the lift and the rapid-fire step of her small feet capturing each tune to perfection.
Matt was obviously complimented by her attention—or at least whatever it was that he’d feel that would be close to flattered—and why not? Next to Lucia, she was the best looking woman in the club, and Lucia wasn’t exactly sending out “available” signals, not dressed the way she was.
Matt and the girl talked between each set, filling up the twenty minutes or so of canned music and patron conversation with a forest of words, his spoken, hers signed, each of them oblivious to their surroundings, to everything except for each other.
Maybe Katrina will be the one, Amy thought.
Once she got past her own feelings, that was what she usually found herself hoping. Although Matt could be insensitive once he stepped off the stage, she still believed that all he really needed was someone to care about to turn him around. Nobody who put such heart into his music could be completely empty inside. She was sure that he just needed someone—the right someone. It hadn’t been her, fine. But somewhere there had to be a woman for him, a catalyst to take down the walls though which only his music dared forth to touch the world.
The way he’d been so attentive toward Katrina all night, Amy was sure he was going to take her home with him, but all he did was ask her out tomorrow.
Okay, she thought, standing beside Lucia while Matt and Katrina “talked.” That’s a start and maybe a good one.
Katrina’s hands moved in response to Matt’s question.
“What’s she saying?” Amy asked, leaning close to whisper to Lucia.
“Yes,” Lucia translated. “Now she’s asking him if they can ride the ferry.”
“The one to Wolf Island?” Amy said. “That’s where you found her.”
“Whisht,” Lucia told her.
“We’ll do whatever you want,” Matt was saying.
And then Katrina was gone, trailing after Lucia with a last lingering wave before the world outside the club swallowed her and the door closed behind the pair of them.
Matt and Amy returned to the stage to pack up their instruments.
“I was thinking of heading up to The Harp to see if there’s a session on,” Matt said. He looked around at the other three. “Anyone feel like coming?”
If there were enough musicians up for the music, Joe Breen, the proprietor of The Harp, would lock the doors to the public after closing hours and just let the music flow until the last musician packed it in, acting no different on this side of the Atlantic than he had with the pub he’d run back home in Ireland.
Johnny shook his head. “I’m beat. It’s straight to bed for me tonight.”
“It’s been a long night,” Nicky agreed.
&nbs
p; Nicky looked a little sullen, but Amy doubted that Matt even noticed. He just shrugged, then looked to her.
Well, and why not? she thought.
“I’ll give it a go,” she told him.
Saying their goodbyes to the other two outside the club, she and Matt walked north to the Rosses where The Harp stood in the shadow of the Kelly Street Bridge.
“Katrina seemed nice,” Amy said after a few blocks.
“I suppose,” he said. “A little intense, maybe.”
“I think she’s a little taken with you.”
Matt nodded unselfconsciously. “Maybe too much. But she sure can dance, can’t she?”
“Like an angel,” Amy agreed.
Conversation fell flat then, just as it always did.
“I got a new tune from Geordie this afternoon,” Amy said finally. “He doesn’t remember where he picked it up, but it fits onto the end of ‘The Kilavel Jig’ like it was born to it.”
Matt’s eyes brightened with interest. “What’s it called?”
“He didn’t know. It had some Gaelic title that he’d forgotten, but it’s a lovely piece. In G-major, but the first part has a kind of a modal flavour so that it almost feels as though it’s being played out of C. It’d be just lovely on the bouzouki.”
The talk stayed on tunes the rest of the way to The Harp—safe ground. At one point Amy found herself remembering a gig they’d played a few months ago and the story that Matt had used to introduce a song called “Sure, All He Did Was Go” that they’d played that night.
“He couldn’t help himself,” Matt had said, speaking of the fiddler in the song who gave up everything he had to follow a tune. “Music can be a severe mistress, demanding and jealous, and don’t you doubt it. Do her bidding and isn’t it just like royalty that she’ll be treating you, but turn your back on her and she can take back her gift as easily as it was given. Your man could find himself holding only the tattered ribbons of a tune and song ashes, and that’s the God’s own truth. I’ve seen it happen.”
And then he’d laughed as though he’d been having the audience on, and they’d launched into the song, but Amy had seen more than laughter in Matt’s eyes as he started to sing. She wondered then, as she wondered now, if he didn’t half believe that little bit of superstition, picked up somewhere on his travels, God knew where.