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  The music quieted for a moment, but given the circumstances, her voice could only be remote.

  “I never said I wanted to meet them,” she said. “As if I’d have anything to say.”

  He looked hard into the dark and made out Renna’s face in the fringes of lamplight at a table three from his. Her chair was pulled back from it, and her words were for a figure, a woman, he thought, by the silhouette of hair, standing even further from the penumbra.

  The music stopped. A wave of applause rose and fell as the players cleared the stage, all but Larent. The cellists came down the three or four steps on the left of the stage and sat at a table near Renna, nodding at her as they sat. The contrabassists joined them while the violist, a squat man in a woolly blue sweater, headed toward the door, lighter and cigarette in hand.

  “You’ve been here,” Stagg said, standing above her now

  “Yes and where were you!” She got up and kissed him, grabbed his hands, wrapped up his fingers and squeezed. He brought his hands together, hers in them, and extended his forearms to keep her where she was. The nausea, the buzzing head, the discarded afternoon, all for naught. At least he’d salvaged what he could, writing through the hangover, after he’d woken as night was falling.

  “You said you weren’t coming.”

  “Why didn’t you answer? It was just drinks in the end, no dinner. But you weren’t even here!”

  “I was.” He pointed over his shoulder vaguely.

  Her eyes rolled but she was smiling. “You didn’t check your phone.”

  “I left my phone at my apartment last night. You remember this?”

  “Oh!” she said, angry with herself, or him, he couldn’t tell.

  She hugged him. “Can’t you just be glad I’m here?” She put her cheek flat against his chest. “And how much have you had, my love? I can smell it through your shirt.”

  “Some.” He grinned to no one, without choice or pleasure.

  “Did you write today?”

  “Yeah. Just before I came.”

  “The Dutch stuff?”

  He nodded. By her face, he couldn’t tell if she believed he’d done anything but drink. Anyway, if she didn’t, she would never say so, even if nothing could help him more than to be called out. That would mean tension. Nothing was worth that.

  Larent set his bow down against the amplifier and started in on a delicate pizzicato line, his right hand snaking over the fingerboard as his left pinched the strings. For a moment it took Stagg away from her, put him in mind of Bartók’s strings. It was a mutual respite.

  He and Renna sat at the table. “Another sherry?” he asked without raising his eyes from the empty copita in front of her.

  “Sure, yes,” she said.

  He lifted his hand in the light of the hanging brass lamp, signaling for the waitress. “And the writer, how was he?” he asked.

  “He was good.”

  Stagg waited for more but she was absorbed with Larent’s hands now. “Very nice.” He felt his mouth tightening into a smile but conquered the urge.

  The waitress, dressed crisply in black, crossed into the yellow cone of light.

  “Another sherry for her,” he said, leaning close to her ear. “And I’ll have, what, an Ardbeg? If that’s something you’ve got.” She gave a sharp nod, all surface, and withdrew.

  The room clouded over in the harmonics Larent drew from his bass. The music’s complexion had changed. It seemed beyond comparison now. Perhaps that only underlined Stagg’s ignorance.

  As the piece wound down in intricate double-stopped glissandi, he took in Larent’s face: the long jaw, the very short, very brown hair, the eyes of the same color, and the delicately freighted expression—with what exactly Stagg couldn’t tell—on which applause, twice now, had no effect.

  Renna and Larent had been great friends in prep school, then something more afterward, though at a distance. He was in a conservatory in New Hampshire, and she was in grad school abroad.

  Now they were something less, though exactly what Stagg felt it hard to know, given how little she volunteered. The two kept up, that much was clear. There were his performances and her readings and panels. Renna’s silence about Larent annoyed Stagg, but prying was just the sort of indignity he wouldn’t bear. Perhaps she thought she was saving him from more mulling. Of course it could only have the opposite effect.

  Larent’s manner was a challenge. The literary set might be nauseating, yes, but it was possible to feel that way only because reading them—“marking the axes of their being,” another phrase he’d run into that Renna had seized on—was not very difficult. It was a nausea born mostly of boredom.

  Larent was different, opaque, and even that without making a show of it. Translucent. It wasn’t just that he was a musician, although that wasn’t irrelevant. Notes could give away less than words. It was that he didn’t flaunt who or what he knew, or what he was or thought he was, or what he thought you ought to think he was. Maybe he didn’t have strong ideas about any of this, though there was plenty to have ideas about. He was interesting. That was just a fact about him, like height or weight. Partly this was because he seemed less interested in himself than in whatever he found himself doing. If only Stagg’s own engagement with his work might be so natural.

  There was none of the theater, then, the performance of character, that could give away the shape of your soul—a shape, incidentally, almost always distinct from the one you were trying to project.

  In one sense you could say he was without charm, but in a way that had an abiding pull on Renna, it seemed, and, grudgingly, on Stagg too. It’s what set him apart from the people in her world. Charm, after all, was always a bit of a racket. And he wasn’t a racket, though he wasn’t exactly earnest in the ordinary sense of the word. He didn’t appear earnest, not consistently. But that might be what it was to be earnest, in the same way that the truest gentlemen have no truck with etiquette. Only imposters do. Gentility was in the bones—there was nothing to be done about it—and not being regulated by a concern for appearances, it could surface in ways that looked distinctly ungentlemanly to those who didn’t know better. It wasn’t merely sprezzatura either. There was nothing studied about it. It was the thing itself. Larent’s artlessness might be of the same order.

  There was silence. Larent leaned the bass against the speaker cabinet and joined the table of musicians. Five minutes later he saw them off.

  “So?” he said, looking at Stagg and tapping Renna’s shoulder. He was brighter now.

  “That was weird!” she said.

  “This is your group?” Stagg asked.

  “No, no, just people I know from school,” Larent said. “Sick of their orchestra gigs, for the night, anyway. It’s the only time I can get them to play my stuff.”

  “They don’t like what you write?”

  “Well, they like me. The music, well, they’d play it either way. Do you like it?”

  “I think I do.”

  “Interesting,” he said. “It’s not Bach, though—any of the Bachs—is it?” he said to Renna, the tiniest smile cresting on his lips. “Or Brahms.”

  “No, I liked it!”

  “The distorted parts too?”

  “Yes… but the last thing was more me.”

  “I know,” Larent said. He turned to Stagg. “I think the straighter pieces reassure them I haven’t lost my mind. But actually I want to send that one through the effects board—infinite delays, chorusing, pink noise—just to see. Make it unbelievably loud too.”

  “You’d see them in pain,” Stagg said, gesturing at the tables around them.

  “Well, as long as they clap.”

  “Why shouldn’t they.”

  Larent shifted in his chair. He set his hands on the edge of the table, his long fingers arched as if at a keyboard. “So what, drinks?” He caught the waitress’s eye and ordered the house red.

  Stagg woke Renna’s phone, which lay on the table, and checked the time. In truth it was a pant
omime. He already knew he had to go. He lifted the tumbler to his lips and claimed the last briny drops. “I should go,” he said as he put the glass down.

  “Work,” Renna said without looking at him.

  “Sure,” he said.

  Larent seemed puzzled but before he could say anything Stagg got to his feet and bent over the table toward him. “I’ve thought about it. I did like it. Good luck.”

  “Thanks,” Larent said, almost to himself.

  Stagg took Renna’s arm brusquely in his hand. “So I’ll see you around, I’m sure.” She gave him a look of exasperation, real or faux, and was about to speak, but before she got anything out, he was away from the table and through the smudged glass doors into the bracing night.

  ■■■

  Larent’s bass lingered in his ears as he cut across two narrow lanes, down the sloping avenue leading to Halsley’s longest canal. The moon had turned the water a viscous black. A stiff breeze rippled its surface, drawing shallow crests toward the banks. The flow was always slight, and in the summertime the canal spawned great swarms of vermin. Now, though, entering fall, the waters were colder, the winds were brisker, and the canal was clear of rot.

  Tall streetlamps fluorescing blue unevenly lighted the asphalt path along the water. Stagg paused in a long unlighted stretch and watched. On the other side of the canal, their bikes laid in a pile, several boys passed a pipe. One moved off to the side and seemed to do an impression. He paced with an exaggerated pigeon toe and swung his arms in eccentric ways that had no meaning to Stagg. But as the smoke swirled, and heaving coughs drifted across the water, long laughs did too, showing it meant something to them. He could see the impressionist’s lips moving, hear a softly articulated garble coming from them. But his words never made it across, not as words, and the scene remained unreadable. At least in its details. The larger picture was clear enough. There was no larger picture. Knowledge lost any further purpose here.

  He turned away and carried on to Fenton, a broad street running perpendicular to the canal that was lined with squat one-and two-story buildings, mainly bars and strip clubs, as well as a couple of taller buildings—well-trafficked hotels. The street’s name was built on the backs of its escorts and its traders in pharmaceuticals.

  Tonight it seemed empty. But even the impression of emptiness was more vivid, and equally, more confused, than it might have been. It was fresh. Without much explanation, Penerin, his supervisor, had altered his route again. Its newness was undermining the light trance Stagg usually did his rounds in, where perceptual reflex would suffice and his mind would be left free to work over other matters, like the knots in his drafts, or his relationships. That was watch-work’s appeal. After a time of tracing a fixed route, you hardly watched, not in any active sense. Though you were paid all the same, you might as well not be working at all, just daydreaming, and with the peculiar agility of mind only an ongoing closeness to violence can grant.

  Everyone, in fact, was on better terms with violence now. But watches more than most. He couldn’t remember a stretch of more than a few days in which he hadn’t come upon a car smoldering or a building collapsed. Less than two months before general elections, the country was wobbling in a way it would have been hard to imagine just a decade ago. Stagg had to admit, though, the infirmity was nourishing him, intellectually and financially. His job wouldn’t exist if there weren’t a desperation for eyes now.

  He had no feelings about this. After all, he’d never had any special faith in democratic processes, not of the usual liberal sort anyway. He wasn’t even totally sure he was an egalitarian. If anything, he was surprised the pieties of his age hadn’t frayed sooner. Wasn’t that the norm, certainties succumbing to doubts succumbing to new certainties, ad infinitum? Whatever it was, life now felt as though it was being lived on the cusp of fresh certainties, just when the doubts were deepest. Their nature, though, had not yet emerged.

  One thing that could be safely assumed: if it was going to steady belief in its authority, the current government needed a landslide. First past the post wouldn’t do. Turnout too would have to be far stronger than usual for the results to carry conviction, if not in the eyes of all—that was an unrealistic target at this point—then at least in those of most. The ruling party, and the president, would settle for that—so long as they won, of course. Whether their democratic commitment might fray if they managed to lose, no one knew. That just wasn’t the sort of thing that could be known anymore.

  The spate of attacks against the city’s infrastructure and its public spaces was putting in doubt the government’s claims to control, and especially its capacity to stage elections. Among the targets—schools, government offices, convention halls—were many prospective polling stations. This threatened turnout, of course, which must have been the point.

  Stagg was the tiniest element of the effort to counteract this, though it was often far from his mind as he did his rounds. He took a more immediate interest in the novelties each new route introduced him to. Today it was The Lioness, the largest club in the area, and the best of its kind: two stories, four stages, and a tangle of VIP rooms. Nationally regarded dancers, their reputations spread by skin flicks, frequently headlined. The club was anomalous, though. If not for zoning laws consigning it to Fenton, The Lioness would have been built closer to its mostly upscale patrons. As things were, these men were forced to experience first-hand the grit that lay behind their entertainment.

  Its sign was formed by narrow tubing shaped in diminutive lower case: “the lioness.” The phrase shone a dark gold. Stagg pulled a soft pack of Parliaments and a convenience store lighter from his shirt pocket and drew a weak flame through a cigarette, watched the tobacco wilt in the heat. He shot the first pull of smoke from his nostrils and regarded the sign. There were four more drags, hard and quick. He dropped the half-cigarette into the rain gutter and went through the club’s wide black doors.

  “Thirty tonight,” said a scrawny man in a cheap printed tee behind the glass panel. “Violet Skye is featuring.” Stagg swept his phone across the face of the scanner mounted on the glass. “And it’s a drink every hour,” the man said.

  “I get one?”

  “You get to buy one.”

  Stagg turned into the darkened corridor past the window. Two giants, one white and broad, one black and tall, stood in front of the entrance to the club’s main lounge. He waved his receipt at the blue-black African, who must have cleared seven feet, and paused before them both. Neither deigned to look. Stagg squeezed between the two into the room.

  The stage seemed to recede indefinitely. It was as wide as the room itself, with an irregular, wavy lip like a designer pool. Three poles were aligned diagonally across it, front to back, and large screens ran across the back wall. All showed an ample-breasted Japanese dancer collecting the last of her tips from the men lining the stage.

  Several hallways led out of the room, presumably to the smaller stages and private rooms Penerin had told him about. Stagg walked along the perimeter and sat far from the stage, at a table of lacquered wood. Most were empty. By strip-club standards, it was early.

  Still in a glittering purple thong, the woman left the stage as glam metal resounded through the space. A waitress, beautiful only in her past, offered Stagg a wanton smile dull from use.

  “And how are you?” The steel locket between her collarbones dangled as she bent down toward him.

  “Yeah, fine.”

  “We have a drinks special on—”

  “How about tomato juice.”

  “Sure? Everything’s fifteen, even Coke, so—”

  “That’s fine.”

  She looked at him with an expectation that briefly eluded him.

  “Pay first? Right.” He pulled a loose twenty from his pocket.

  “Or you can get it yourself from the bar.”

  “No.”

  She left with a more natural smile. Stagg slid his elbows onto the table. He cupped his mouth in his hand, pinched hi
s nose lightly, and closed his eyes as the music played. “18 and Life.” Skid Row. This was hair metal’s afterworld, places like this. He’d never heard it anywhere else, except on Internet radio, when he used to listen to it sometimes for ironized laughs. (He was mostly done with that kind of laughter.) The frontman, Sebastian Bach. He probably shits in a pan in some Burbank nursing home by now, he thought. Still—not a bad song, at bottom.

  The room began to fill. Suited men in their thirties and forties, twenty-somethings in exquisite sneakers and cashmere hoodies, they flowed into the room through the various arteries linking the club’s lounges. The undulating edge of the stage disappeared from view as the men gathered next to it, some sitting, most standing. Without waiting for his drink, Stagg got up and took his place among them.

  As he approached he surveyed them, as he was meant to, but without knowing what to note exactly, except to note everything, which was impossible. He was there to detect change but lacked the baseline to do it. Tonight, and probably the next weeks, would be about establishing one, bit by bit.

  Some of the men held wads of twenties; others, of fifties, though slightly thinner. Star money. A voice came from the speakers, interrupting Bach and introducing the dancer. The MC closed with a flourish, drawing out her name as a ring announcer would a fighter’s.

  The room went dark, then silent. In seconds the faders came up: “The Ballad of Jayne,” another ghost of a song that had died decades ago. But again, not a bad one, if one had the stomach for the gratuitous. Still, it was an unlikely pick. It was wistful, or an attempt at it at least. Was it possible to strip wistfully? And even if, under the right circumstances, it was, can one really begin to strip that way, cold? Perhaps it was an eccentric challenge Skye, quickly becoming as porn-star famous as anyone, had set herself, to stave off the boredom of routine.

  It was still dark, and it stayed that way for an uncomfortably long time, so long one couldn’t tell if it was the indulgent whim of the dancer or a technical failing. Finally heavy white light fell on a girl, just post-teen, inverted a yard off the stage. Her tanned, stockinged legs clasped the center pole; her dark curls dangled nearly to the floor. She loosened the lock and airily descended, her azure skirt falling upward. With splaying legs she carved half a circle in the air, gripped the pole tightly and brought her patent leather heels, an explosive black under now-strobing light, to the glossed floor. She sprung up and pranced to the front of the stage, her flowing proportions now appreciable. She was just feet from Stagg, burnishing appetites with an opaque hazel gaze.