Orfe Read online

  “It’s really about whatever makes the music. Including the part of music you can’t ever figure out,” Orfe explained to me.

  “—with some people doing some things well, understanding some things, but nobody knowing everything. If you try to make it into one person who does and understands everything best, then you’re just asking to be let down, aren’t you? And you’re forcing them to fail, because nobody can—” I didn’t know what kind of a friend I was to Orfe, expecting as much as I did. “I know what you mean,” I said to her.

  “There never will be only one center stage,” Orfe said. “I know what you mean.”

  I taped a couple of their rehearsals, and my boyfriend of the time, still Zach, edited the tapes into ten minutes of uninterrupted music. I made myself do the rounds again—between classes and schoolwork and listening in on rehearsals. On those rounds I saw some of the same people and some I hadn’t seen before. Some of my previous contacts I didn’t want ever to be in the same room with again, and some of them had folded up their tents and gotten into something else, somewhere else. The only real difference was that now some of the people knew who Orfe was, either because they remembered me or because they had heard of us.

  Nobody listened to the tape all the way through, however, and nobody asked where he or she could see the band live. “You need a regular place to play,” they advised me. “Regular appearances. See, if a band is good enough to draw a regular crowd, then it’s worth my going to hear. See what I mean?”

  “But you told me—”

  I tried again: “If they do, and I let you know where and when, will you come hear them?”

  “Hey, sugar, bet your boobies,” or some such phrase, and some of them meant it. “See, a tape can get itself doctored. How do I know from a tape what the band really sounds like? These days you can’t believe what you hear or see.”

  I stood mute-faced, communicating nothing.

  “So get yourself a club, get that band of yours a club. That’s my advice. For free, for once.”

  * * * * *

  The second dance brought in two job offers and suddenly we were in business. Once it had happened, it seemed as if it were inevitable, as if there were no way it couldn’t have happened. We found a studio we could rent by the week, a small, almost windowless room, with lots of electric plugs and true acoustics. Practically the first day the band was rehearsing there—I was present to adjust amplifiers, to pick up sheets of music that fell at inconvenient times, to bring in food and drink, to listen—the door opened on us in the middle of a song.

  * * * * *

  The music dribbled away to a questioning silence.

  It was a guy, a little round guy with reddish cheeks and yellowish hair and a green-striped shirt on with his jeans, a little apple of a guy with eyes that looked around glad. He had a guitar case and he looked at Orfe and the two Graces as if he expected them to be pleased to see him. “I heard you play,” he said, to all of them but mostly Orfe. “I want to play with you.”

  There was a laying down of instruments (them) and a rising to feet (me). He unsnapped his case and took out his guitar, an electrified twelve-string.

  “Sonny,” Willie Grace said. “We’re not jamming here. We’re working. Rehearsing. Beat it, okay?”

  “Name’s not Sonny,” he answered with no anger in his voice. “It’s Ray.”

  “How did you find us?” Grace Phildon wondered.

  “I asked around. I tracked you down. It’s not such a big world.”

  “Your last name isn’t Grace, by any chance . . . is it?” Orfe asked.

  “Why?” he asked.

  She didn’t tell him. “We’re not looking for—”

  He stood eye level with Orfe, round and unperturbed as an apple. “Tell me what you’re looking for and I could be it. I’m pretty resilient.”

  “You’re too deaf to hear the word no?” Willie Grace asked. “The word is no, Ray. Ray what, what’s your name?”

  “Grace,” Ray said.

  “Liar,” Willie Grace said. “Out.”

  “First, I play. You’d do the same.”

  It wasn’t a question. Willie Grace shrugged and faded from the argument.

  “I’m sorry,” Orfe said to him.

  He plugged his guitar in and put on metal finger picks.

  “I mean it,” Orfe said.

  “We could let him just play, don’t you think?” I asked, wanting, for some reason I couldn’t define, things to go well for him. “Is there any reason he can’t audition?”

  He didn’t wait for more encouragement. He started playing a piece I remembered from piano lessons, “In a Country Garden,” about the first piece anyone learns. He played the melody line first, then added a harmony line, then switched to a folk-style arpeggio backup, a country-and-western four-beat, and a blues rendering that meandered over a walking bass, then a twanging rock, the strings vibrating over a pulsing bass line that had my hips and shoulders moving in rhythm. You couldn’t help but smile. All four of us were smiling, glad-hearted at listening to him make his joke. At the end he grinned around at us, hands still, guitar silent. “Also, I do ‘Greensleeves.’ ”

  “That was fun,” Orfe said. “But now, if you’ll excuse us—?”

  He unplugged and turned away, accepting her decision.

  “But, Orfe, why not?” I asked. “Why not at least play a song all together, to hear how it goes? Why not just try? Because he’s not female? Or black? I don’t understand. His name’s Grace,” I pointed out.

  “I don’t exactly believe that,” she said.

  “It’s not exactly true,” he said at the same time. “It just—seemed to matter, so I figured, if I wanted a chance to try out.”

  Orfe nodded to him, eye to eye.

  “Stop me if I’m wrong,” he said, “but I think I’d sound good with you, I think my playing and my voice would mix well with the rest of you.”

  Orfe said, “That’s for me to decide.”

  “I’m not saying I know better than you,” Ray not-Grace said. “But I’m not going to let you say you know better than me either.”

  Orfe hesitated. “We’ll try it—but with conditions,” she said.

  “Like what?” he asked.

  “We do my songs,” she said.

  “Am I supposed to mind that?”

  “No drugs. Do you do drugs?”

  “Why should I?”

  “Money is split equally between all band members and manager.”

  “Sounds fair.”

  “It’s only on trial,” Orfe said.

  “Listen, I can change my name,” he said. “It’s easy, I just did it, added a middle name—no, I want one of those Southern two-gun names. Raygrace. Abracadabra—be Raygrace,” he said, throwing his hands up, as if he were releasing twin doves. “And it’s done,” he said. Willie Grace had already plugged him back in, and they got down to work.

  * * * * *

  A band has to have a name, so between practice sessions—learning music, learning one another—they worried the question of a name. It was a way of winding down. They sat around the studio, sweaty, instruments closed away safely into cases, and quarreled about a name. Orfe and the Graces, that was my first suggestion the first time the question was raised.

  “Boy, does that not grab me,” Raygrace said. “What about Good Graces?”

  “Good Gracious?”

  “Amazing Graces?” Raygrace offered.

  “That leaves me out,” Orfe objected.

  “Amazing Graces and Orfe?”

  Groans greeted that idea.

  “Goodness Gracious. Goodness and Gracious? You can be goodness, see, and we’ll be gracious.”

  “Grace, Gracious, Graceless, and Ungrateful?”

  “I’m not ungrateful,” Orfe protested.

  Orfe and the Graces was the name they adopted, until they could come up with something better. Just until. “It’s only true,” Raygrace said. “That’s not nearly good enough.”

  �
��It’ll do for starters,” Grace Phildon said.

  “I’d settle for ending up there too,” Willie Grace said.

  “Orfe and the Graces is not exactly catchy,” Raygrace said. “How about Gracious Me?”

  “You’re not some fucking solo act,” Willie Grace said. “And don’t say what you’re thinking, college kid,” she said to me.

  “Hey, I go to college too,” Raygrace said.

  * * * * *

  Orfe and the Graces played one or two gigs a week, regularly, during that time, enough work to take a monthly lease of the studio, which gave us the space at a lower rate. Orfe kept a bedroll there, for nights when she didn’t want to leave what she was working on. The studio came with a tiny bathroom—toilet and sink and cracked mirror. You could bring food in with you. The whole building was locked at midnight and each studio had its own locked door, so even though there was no watchman, it was reasonably safe. If Orfe wanted a shower, she came to my dorm or spent some time with Yuri at the halfway house. They were looking for an apartment of their own by then. Orfe and the Graces were doing well enough so that Orfe and Yuri could afford a place of their own. In fact, Raygrace and Willie Grace already shared an apartment by then. “Not the bed, though. This isn’t a relationship,” Willie Grace told us.

  “Not that I’d mind,” Raygrace said.

  “I’d mind,” she told him. “It’d be one thing then another with you. I know your type, you’d start in on me about making commitments.”

  “You’re already committed,” Raygrace told her. “You just won’t admit it.”

  “The way men,” Willie Grace said, “work women over, jerk them around.”

  “Depends on how you look at it,” Grace Phildon joined in. “I got Cass out of the deal, and he didn’t get much of anything.”

  “Only just exactly what he was looking for,” Willie Grace said.

  “But, honey, the point is, he wasn’t looking for much of anything. He could of had himself a whole lot, but he didn’t even know.”

  “What whole lot?”

  “Why, me.”

  Orfe never said much, just sat listening. Her fingers fiddled around on the guitar. Her face was pale, her movements slower, clumsier; I thought she was burning herself out somehow, maybe in bed with Yuri, maybe she had some part-time job she hadn’t told the rest of us about.

  I was wrong about Orfe, though. She was writing music, writing songs. She wasn’t burning herself out or burning herself up—she was on fire.

  There were two kinds of music she was writing, both of them for the group but only one for immediate performance. She called the performance songs her fossil-fuel numbers, because they were the band’s economic underpinnings. The band played them at the dances they were hired for by various organizations—fraternities, sororities, local clubs—or at private parties. Some of those songs had words, and after a while some of the dance-goers had come back frequently enough to sing along, but it was mostly foot-lifting, hip-hinging, arm-pulling music, for dancing. As long as the music played, all you wanted to do was dance, and you danced better than you ever had. Not everyone, of course; there is always someone to complain. Boys who hoped to get laid, after the music stopped but before it left the bloodstream, complained that it went on too long; faculty advisors complained that it went on too loud; girls who hoped to fall in love behind the seductive veil of music complained that it took too much of everyone’s attention.

  The other music Orfe was working on . . . That, she finally allowed the band to try out. It was songs, songs for concert performance. Orfe gave the Graces the music and they all worked out the arrangements. One day, at one dance, when they played the first of these songs—

  —the dancers stopped and turned to the stage, caught. The dancers crowded up as close to the stage as they could get. The dancers swayed to the music, swayed toward the stage. Yuri’s Dreams, Orfe called the new songs.

  After that, dances the group played were also concerts. And concerts were also dances. There was no either/or, no playing either a concert or a dance, there was only playing. Orfe and the Graces moved out of a world of either/or. Orfe and the Graces played music.

  They played in a hall of some kind, as a rule, an open hall or gymnasium, somewhere roomy enough for an elevated stage to be put up, with space for dancing. Job offers came in almost daily, until I was turning down work without a second thought—if the space wasn’t right, the time wasn’t right, the money wasn’t right, or if any one of us for some reason took against the way the job was offered or the persons who offered it. The band was performing four or five times a week and could have performed seven nights and two afternoons, regularly. After one gymnasium gig a man in a gray silk suit approached me, his hand held out not for me to shake but to give me his business card.

  I put down the amplifier I was carrying. “They told me—you’re the manager?”

  He had a shifty look. His eyes didn’t rest on any object or person. His eyes were busy looking for the main chance. “I’m wondering if you’ve cut a record? Or made a tape? Because I’d be happy to hustle it for you. I think your friends have got a future, and you must think the same. So what do you say, sweets? Do we cut the deal or what?”

  Because I knew as soon as I saw his eyes that I would say no to whatever he asked, it was as if I had already spoken the word out loud. I was distracted by thinking about what his offer meant. My hesitation gave him hope. Seeing him have hope made me feel bad about leading him on. I cut short his smile. “No. No, thanks.”

  “You’re making a big mistake,” he warned me. I didn’t want to talk to him. I was wondering how many of Orfe’s songs she would think had gotten to final form, how many she would say were ready to be recorded. “Ummnnnmm,” I said.

  “So you’ll think about it?” he asked, thinking he’d been successful after all.

  I shook my head.

  “Big mistake, sweets. Really big mistake. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. People in this business, they eat little girls like you for breakfast. For between-meal snacks. Good bands miss out on all their chances, if the manager doesn’t know—I could tell you some stories that would make you weep.”

  I shook my head. I picked up the amplifier, and he didn’t offer a hand. “Keep the card. You’ll be calling, begging for help.”

  Later that night I asked Orfe about it. “There was this guy, some promoter, after the show. He asked me if you’d cut a record, if he could get in on the action. What about a record, Orfe, what do you think?”

  Orfe took a minute before she lifted her face: She looked like I’d just handed her the Nobel Peace Prize, gladness pouring out of her face. “What?” I asked her face.

  “Sure. Fine,” Orfe said. “Let’s.”

  “What’s that face about?”

  “I’ve been waiting for you to suggest it.”

  * * * * *

  Rehearsals grew intensive, not a spectator sport. Yuri and I went to movies if we started to get sent crazy by work or studies or not having much else to do because of the intensive rehearsal schedule. Orfe and the Graces played fewer appearances for a few weeks while they were rehearsing intensively. It happened that two of those were at weddings, and I wonder if that had something to do with Orfe and Yuri deciding they wanted to get married. Orfe didn’t ask my advice and didn’t listen when I offered it unasked.

  The Graces agreed with me, each for a particular reason. Grace Phildon said a person should be clean for at least two years before you committed yourself to him; two years clean gave you a good chance. Willie Grace said she wouldn’t want Yuri at her back in a fight, or at her side, or on her side, because she’d just end up trying to take care of him. Raygrace said why fuss around with something that was working just fine, why worry about marriage, it was being good for each other, being good together that mattered.

  Orfe ignored all of us. Yuri ignored all of us. We were all more than a little high on ourselves, so maybe they were wise to dismiss us. When I got a phone call offering Or
fe and the Graces the chance to go on tour as warm-up band, I wasn’t surprised. I passed the information on to Orfe, who turned the job down without hesitation. I wasn’t surprised at that either, and I had my objections ready. The Graces weren’t saying anything.

  “But Orfe,” I said.

  “They smash up their instruments.”

  “Those aren’t their real ones. You know that.”

  “But that’s even worse. You know I’m right.”

  “No, I don’t,” I said. “I know you got your start, your real start, vomiting all over the stage.” I don’t know why I thought Orfe and the Graces had to go on that tour. Even at that time I knew that the group—if they became anything—would become music history. But I wanted them to do that tour, and maybe I do know why.

  “You’re not going to be able to talk me into it,” Orfe said.

  “I told him that.”

  “Did you, really?”

  I hadn’t. I had been breathless, excited, bamboozled. I’d been a jerk letting him snow me with his big-name band.

  “Good,” Orfe said. “Now you can say all the nasty things you want to say, which if you’d refused right away you wouldn’t have thought of. Isn’t that right?”

  “I’m sorry, Orfe,” I said, meaning sorry for not being better than I am.

  “You realize what it means, this offer?” Orfe asked.

  I realized. All of us realized. There was good reason to feel high on ourselves.

  * * * * *

  I walked before Orfe and Yuri at their wedding, and the Graces followed behind. The wedding was held in the park. Vows were exchanged and the guests celebrated the occasion with food and drink, song and dance. That was the first time I heard the Graces play without Orfe, heard Orfe’s songs performed without her voice. I remember listening to the Graces doing one of Yuri’s Dreams, and my then-new boyfriend Michael had his arm around me, keeping me gently close—the song made you want to go somewhere private and make generous love, but you didn’t because you wanted to stay to hear the song. You wanted to stay for the whole wedding. That’s the kind of wedding Orfe and Yuri had. Until almost the end it was everything a wedding is supposed to be. It was almost the perfect wedding.