Thao and Mirah

A couple days after I let the French-Algerian bass-player break up with me, Jesse asks if I want to see Thao at the Hotel Café on Monday, which I do. 

            I haven’t seen him since the night I stayed at his place before my interview with the President of Santa Monica College, but he was sometimes sending me those love texts you suspect are sent in mass. 

            Lola is in Seattle with her dad for four weeks.  I’m single and unemployed, still struck with the post-Wall Street catastrofuck realization there are no rules. 

            I drive there Monday afternoon and wait at my car for Jesse to respond to the picture I send him of the parking sign. 

            “Can I park here?”  It’s just faster if Jesse does the math. 

            “No.” 

            When he asks me about the Frenchman, we’re eating pizza-flavored pizza. 

            “He was mad at me, and I didn’t like the way he fought.” 

            “Mad about what?” 

            “I don’t know.  That I didn’t get back from Vegas with Isaac in time to go on our camping trip or something.” 

            “How can you not know?”  

            “Because he acted like it was about me doing things I didn’t want to do instead of making art.” 

            I could have said I can’t fuck to Rihanna, or I can’t miss the morning sun, or I can’t drink coffee out of a Styrofoam cup, but you can—can’t you?—if the one you do that with knows what he’s mad about. 

At the Hotel Café, we get a beer and listen to a woman with a good voice sing self-help lyrics and talk too much between songs before we go to the other room and sit at a booth lining the wall around a piano. 

            “Should we make out?” I say. 

            Jesse laughs. 

            “Is that a no?” 

            Then we kiss a little and go back in. 

During the opening act, Jesse had put his arm around me; it was the minute more romantic than utilitarian, the evening’s as yet unknown highlight.

           

I’m so happy to see Thao come out, I’m gushing.  A giant man in front of me starts to steer me in front of him so I can see better, but I don’t want to come between him and his date, so I tell him I’m okay. 

            It’s not really a Thao show.  It’s Thao and Mirah, whose perfect voice is solid, who can belt, but I want to hear Thao, not her backup vocals.  I like Mirah and I don’t mind the songs, but her voice undoes what Thao’s does. 

            In the movie in my head, sometime before or after the slow-motion desert-punching scene where men have to fight for money rather than just lay claim to it, Thao is on stage singing, her voice a model of all that we still could be. 

            I spend the rest of the show watching her easiness with the audience, their adoration for her, the cool way her shoulders kind of slouch, thinking about how I’ll be when I’m on stage in three weeks.  Only I’m not thinking how I’ll be onstage, but how I’ll get out of it, what the circumstances of my refusal will be. 

            I spend the next three weeks in the garage—excited, then nervous, then sad, like I’ve already seen it play out.  If I can’t pull this off, it will be my own fault—not the fault of the President of Santa Monica College, or the job market, or Wall Street, or the polite and cowering middle class.