Love in the Years of Lunacy Read Free Page B

paper streamers on the windows shook. The crowd parted and now she could see a glowing tenor gliding through the room like a beacon through fog, followed by a tall man who was blowing into it. He was playing so loudly that Pearl could hardly hear the pianist’s chord changes and finally gave up. The man swayed jauntily from side to side as if the instrument were his dance partner. As he walked up the stairs to the stage the dancers slowed and then stopped altogether to stand and watch.
    He was well over six feet, wearing standard American military trousers and shirt. Like all of the men at the club, he was clean-shaven, his black curly hair cropped short. His skin, however, was fairer than most; a pale walnut colour that shone with perspiration. Pearl stepped sideways in order to see him better as he gazed straight out into the coloured lights, a sad, pensive expression on his face.
    At the end of the next chorus, the crowd was cheering so enthusiastically that he went on to play another. Soon his solo was dipping and surging between registers. At one point he was making a hard staccato sound as if he were repeatedly pecking a woman on the lips, and there was something he was doing with his diaphragm—she couldn’t tell what—that allowed him to play with one long, seamless breath. Sometimes his saxophone growled, then whimpered, then soared up into a crescendo of triple-tongued high notes. Pearl had never heard anyone play like this, not even on the many American records she’d heard.
    She was in such awe of him that she forgot to come in with the band; or, rather, she was too intimidated. The sensation was like stage fright, but even worse. She edged away from the other musicians, trying to be inconspicuous, but as she stepped into the shadows she lost her footing and stumbled down the stairs of the bandstand. She heard the crowd laughing, could see the smirks on the faces of passing dancers, including Roma, who had kicked off her shoes and was now dancing with a taller man.
    Pearl dumped her sax against its open case and plunged into the crowd, mortified, willing herself to disappear. The band was wailing now, and above it all was the triumphant howl of that damn saxophone.
    Over the music, Pearl heard her brother call her name, but she ignored him, rushing through the tobacco-coloured light towards the exit.
    Outside on the covered veranda, she leaned against the wall and tried to catch her breath. She’d never felt like such an idiot—not even during her sight-reading exams at the Conservatorium, or her first professional gig with Miss Molly’s Sunshine Orchestra. Even her bandleader at the Trocadero had led her to believe that she was something of a musical prodigy, but now she suspected that he’d been humouring her because she was a girl, or that she was only what her father liked to call a big fish in a little pool.
    The band finished playing ‘Bugle Call Rag’ and she could hear a purr of applause from inside the dance hall. She shivered and rubbed her arms, feeling stupid for having left her alto behind; she couldn’t go home without walking back inside to fetch it. Perhaps Martin would bring her sax out to her, or she could ask the woman at the desk to collect it—but then the man who’d been playing the wild solo suddenly appeared beside her, holding out her case.
    Up close, he was about half a foot taller than she was, and she had to tilt her head back to look him in the face. Standing in the light pooling out from the hallway, his skin didn’t seem as light as it had in the dance hall—more like the colour of wet sand. His teeth gleamed white as he smiled and she noticed he had beautiful, unnaturally long lashes framing a pair of grey-blue eyes.
    â€˜Sunshine,’ he announced, ‘you play a mean axe!’ His accent—all melodious, curly diphthongs—was straight from the American South.
    She reached for the sax but he grabbed hold