Five Women Read Free Page B

Italian and French restaurants, the Korean all-night grocery stores, the Chinese takeout places, the pizza parlors, the coffee bars, the big supermarkets, the high rise apartment buildings, and the beat-up tenements that had been reconverted into too expensive little apartments was Yellowbird: a place like none of the others in the area. You could miss it if you walked past it too quickly. The sign was hard to read, and the windows were purposely kept inscrutable. Inside was a carefully created other world, a throwback to the past.
    Yellowbird was a monument to Janis Joplin. Dark and warm, the brick walls were completely unadorned except for a huge framed black and white photograph of Janis Joplin singing—passionate, drugged-out, drunk, wild-looking, unexpectedly young, and with that great blues voice that was stilled much too early. The albums of the legendary women blues singers played, sometimes scratchily, on the sound system. From time to time, at the whim of the owner, there was someone contemporary, or even new. Interesting people came in here; you could make a friend, find love of sorts, or just not be alone. The one thing you would never have to be at Yellowbird was alone, unless you chose to be.
    Billie Redmond owned this place. Forty-eight, tall, rangy, and dramatic-looking, she prowled her domain. For a few years, in the early seventies, she was a singer in the Janis Joplin style, and had a couple of hits. So for a few incandescent years she had been a rock star. You found this out quite quickly when you came here. Sometimes she had a look about her as if she were still on stage, or was remembering it—a way she moved, or tossed her head, a glance. When Billie was around you always knew who was in control, and she was always there.
    Gara had asked Billie once why the place was called Yellowbird—was it a song she had written, was it the town in Texas she came from?
    â€œNo,” Billie said, sounding bored. People had asked her that same question a lot over the years. “I just like it. It sounds hopeful, you know?”
    She had a strange, low, hoarse voice and a scar on her neck. Sometimes she covered the scar with a turtleneck or a scarf, and sometimes not. It seemed to Gara to be a kind of stigmata, a literal representation of the scars all of the others carried inside, but no one ever dared ask her about it. They were sure that in her brief glory days as a singer she hadn’t had the voice they heard now, it would have been impossible, but of course no one would ever ask her about that either. Gara found her fascinating.
    â€œI’m from Plano, Texas,” Billie said. “Ever heard of it? Probably not. You’re a New Yorker.” She still had her Texas twang. “You didn’t miss anything,” she said with a little smile. “I left real young.”
    Gara knew that Billie didn’t have a husband or any kind of permanent partner, but it was clear, if you watched carefully, that Billie was a lusty, independent woman who had an occasional lover when she wanted one. She would sit at the bar, watching over the reservation book, talking to men who were there alone, sometimes buying them a drink. Gara could see the electricity growing in their eyes, the subtle change in body language.
    She thought of Billie’s barstool as the catbird seat. They were all her guests, albeit paying guests, and there was a certain currying of favor. When Billie was bored with the bar she would wander around the room, sometimes alighting at a table or a booth, particularly later at night when she’d had a few drinks and was feeling mellow and in a mood to reminisce about interesting people she had known in the late sixties and early seventies.
    Billie had a nine-year-old son, Little Billie. You could tell he was hers—they had the same eyes—but anything more about his origin was another of her mysteries. He was a very well-behaved child, with golden curls, the face of an