The small brown creature shook with silent tears. Lachrimae mundi, my foot, Mary thought, blinking through the pot-haze, the fan-dance drift of mameluke musk, janissary jasmine. The creature was being fussed over by X, the sound engineer who owned the studio at the corner of Chenevert and Vine. Mary focused until the creature settled into view: an old-fashioned reel-to-reel, brown and boxy but with pleasing art-deco curves that gave it a look both quaint and powerful. She could imagine it nestled between a tea tray and a stack of cryptographic manuals on a card table in a barracks at Bletchley Park, rare sunshine dazzling through slatted blinds. Or in the basement of Vercors’s hideaway, Paris 1944, humming out banal sentences from London Circus, the russian roulette of domestic images: le chapeau de Mademoiselle Dumont est rouge … je repetes … le chapeau de Mademoiselle Dumont est rouge …
-Turn the bass up, X said to L, whose band, Penthouse, had just spent ten hours mixing two songs and still wasn’t satisfied.
-Turn the bass way fucking up, agreed Shiva, the Penthouse guitarist and L’s wayward girlfriend, before looking at Mary and smiling, just now noticing that they were wearing the same blouse.
Shiva seemed to lose interest as a gathering roar emerged from the squat brown machine.
-We were trying to get that chopper sound, L said over his shoulder and through a cloud of exhaled Lebanese.
Mary wished he hadn’t said anything because now she would perversely hear everything but the intended heavy whirl of helicopter blades. If she closed her eyes she’d look like she was into it, that ecstatic look of approval she rarely granted when there were others around to see. If she maintained her catlike slump the risk of eye contact grew perilous. And so she squirmed to the edge of the cushion, rested her elbows on her thighs, touched parted fingertips to her cheekbones and slid into a shoegazing hunch. L should be pleased but wouldn’t be, the chopper effect coming through as intended. Mary heard something else as well and if she focused she saw a large man running on a wet surface, flat feet slapping time as the tom-toms veered to rising left and rising right, the guitars and bass growling down the center on a fat riff that was just a bit faster than the one in the Bellbottoms’ tune it was lifted from. Eight bars in with the full band, the groove catching four bars later and so far all was cool on the Houston Front. Thirteenth bar and the audience (Mary, anyone else in the room who hadn’t listened it to death already) was ready and vulnerable, and then the first oops. A high confident squeal from Shiva’s guitar and yes, the note was the right one (or one of the many possible right ones), bent from the fifteenth fret of the B-string, and whammied to a near harmonic. But the note was too prominent, too obviously an overdub bounding separate and free of the roar, and followed thus closely by L’s vocals (adequate, breathy), sounded too intimate, too forced. Mary tried hard not to look up but Shiva, leaning forward, cocked her head sideways.
-I know, Shiva said, and then looked up to where L was swaying, sucking still the fat rewarded joint, holding his breath but singing along with himself in his head.
-Mary heard it too, Shiva said.
Mary shrugged.
-I didn’t say anything.
-You didn’t have to, Shiva said, as L frowned, his hand moving to pause the music but reluctantly so, as if hoping someone would contradict these bitches.
-It’s cool, Mary said, it’s good, I want to hear the rest of it.
Shiva hammered her point some more.
-The intro lead lick is mixed too high, it throws it all off balance.
Mary of course agreed but couldn’t stand the sight of L standing there stoned and so tired he might begin to cry.
-You think so? he asked, and he was asking Mary, while Shiva sing-songed relentlessly on in a way that Mary never did with the B-Douxs.
X, whose rep might or might not be on the line, decided to join in.
-What would you do? he asked Mary, but the very slight smirk of his mouth cued her that this was pure show for Shiva, whose role in the band seemed to include gadfly as well as guitarslinger, and who rose in Mary’s estimation by this revelation.
-It’s a killer riff, Mary began.
-the lead might be a distraction this early.
-No lead then?
It’s L or X who asked this, Mary was momentarily unsure, having become fascinated by Shiva’s unlacing of her boots. She answered anyway.
-Let a couple of verses go past first. Unleash the lead per the usual formula.
-Kind of a cliché, X said.
-It’s a cliché that works. But what do I know? I’m just a guitar player.
X might have been prepared to be pissed off, L was merely suspicious, but Shiva liked Mary’s answer, probably used it herself for days on end.
-Yeah, she’s just a guitar player, she echoed to everybody, showing her teeth for a hostile second a miming a crazy air-guitar run down the free length of canary boot-lace.
They listed through to the end and into silence.
-So, X said.
Shiva, who seemed to feel she had nothing to lose, overdid it.
-It sucks donkeys.
-Yeah, well, I think we all know how you feel, X said, and the tone of disgust might have been more than just fatigue.
L was too stoned to say anything anyone cared to listen to and by now the second song had begun. This one was a Robert Smith sort of throwaway, dirgy and pretty, with one-and-a-half hooks that would sound better on a cheap-shit car stereo at three or four in the morning. Final verdict: haunting and six minutes too long.
-Demo quality? X asked.
Mary redeemed the moment.
-Perfect for booking gigs. Maybe for the S and M Show? My band would kill for it. You guys are better so …
-Try again? X asked.
-Try again, Shiva said.
-Get some sleep, relax, remix, Mary said.
Twenty minutes later, when Mary came out onto the loading dock two stories down from the lion’s den, Shiva was waiting for her.
-Hey.
-Hey.
Shiva broke first.
-L just screamed at me. Sounded really weird in that ratcage elevator.
-What did you do? Accidentally step on his tail?
-He doesn’t trust you. He thinks you’re going to ask me to jam. Lure me away with offers of artistic freedom, sororal solidarity, ninety-minute guitar solos.
-Sounds good to me. You guys are a different, different uh flavor though. Your outfit’s got it more together, more polished than us.
-Well, maybe, maybe not. He’s also pissed because he thinks I want to fuck you.
-Guys are weird, Mary said and left the bait dangling, unlicked.
-You want to get a margarita over at The Last Concert? We can walk there from here.
-I left my secret knock at home.
Shiva laughed, made a fist and lightly rapped Mary’s forehead.
-Then you can borrow mine.
Out from under the eaves of the building across the lot a bird spun, then wheeled with a bat’s odd stutter, announcing twilight’s official end. Mary lit a cigarette, followed Shiva down the last steps and let her doubts be clothed in the familiar white rags of surrender.