“Is that…saliva?!” Taylor is pointing rudely at the stage, his face contorted into a mask of disgust that reminds Elaine of the first time she made him dinner.

***

Taylor had always been one step ahead of Elaine. When she took him to the hip new bar she’d read about, he was already on a first-name basis with the bartender. He had “moved on” from the oh-so-contemporary novelist whose latest book she had painstakingly chosen from the London Times Book Review. When she learned how to cook foie gras, he immediately found a piece of vein she’d missed. Her new angora sweater? He was allergic to it. The premier of the “intellectual and moody foreign film” she got them into? It was actually more like the Japanese version of Single White Female, complete with a psycho woman who kills her roommate’s boyfriend with a stiletto heel (and a good inch taller than the heel in the original). He was not impressed.

Of course, the score only exists in Elaine’s head, and even though he hasn’t started avoiding her calls or discreetly removing all of his favorite t-shirts from her apartment, she has decided that tonight is it. Her last chance.

She knew Taylor wasn’t the type of guy who would stick around long if she had nothing to bring to the table. She remembered the way he had stared at her at the embassy’s holiday party, with that irresistible Irish twinkle in his eye. He came with a woman who looked twice his age, and left with Elaine after a quick make-out session in the garden (quick because it was freezing outside and she only had a tiny slip of a dress on; back then he was a real gentleman, indeed). She also briefly remembered what her life was like without constantly trying to live up to his expectations. And she vowed that tonight things would change. She would win him over for good.

The Club was her territory, and jazz, her passion. When she’d heard Jack’s message on her answer phone saying he was in town with his new band, she practically danced around the house. Jack was an old friend of her father’s from Chicago, and had gotten her a job at the Club back when she had no legal working papers. Elaine remembers always being broke and never getting a decent night’s sleep, but those were the happiest times of her early years living abroad. Shortly after she secured a “real job” at the embassy, Jack moved back to the States, and she rarely had enough energy after work to hang out at the Club anymore.

Now there’s a French girl, Hélène, working in Elaine’s place. The similar-sounding names gave her old boss, Jean-Philippe (“Jeepé” for short) a good laugh when he introduced them. Hélène was wearing a micro-mini skirt and seemed to make an effort of bending over while serving drinks at the bar. She seemed particularly pleased to meet Taylor, and the two chatted about his native Ireland while Jeepé overenthusiastically whispered the names of all of the musicians she’d already slept with in the three months since he’d hired her. Elaine’s eyes widened and she sort of nodded for lack of a better response. He saw her discomfort and diplomatically added that the girl had actually been causing a few problems, particularly when the musicians’ wives were also the bands’ managers. Elaine took Taylor by the arm and led him over to her old booth, in front of the stage right next to the drum set.

“Isn’t this a bit close?” asked Taylor eyeing the speakers.

“Those are for the musicians, not for us. And considering how high you turn up the car stereo, you’ll be fine.” They settled in and she began explaining to Taylor all of the different percussion accessories. He, of course, couldn’t see why drummers needed more than two sticks, and one cymbal. She leaned over and tapped on the sizzle cymbal—her favorite—and pointed out the little vibrating pins. When Jack came in to warm up, Elaine stood and gave him an enthusiastically American bear hug (the kind that tend to make Europeans uncomfortable). Introductions went as well as could be expected between an overprotective friend and a suspicious boyfriend.

As the band continued setting up, Elaine relaxed into the booth, enjoying the atmosphere of the place. Taylor smoked his cigarette and surveyed the room. No doubt “checking out the talent”, she thought to herself. But she wasn’t worried. She knew she looked good, and she was in a fantastic mood. She had loved her job at the club, selling tickets at the door, making drinks at the bar, and even the cleaning up part at the end. Actually, that was her favorite part of the evening. The musicians and their friends would sometimes stay for hours after everyone else left, playing around on their instruments (“making noise” as Jeepé used to say) and finishing off the club’s last bottles of decent whisky. Most of them came from the US or the UK, and liked having her around as a sort of informal translator. Especially if they wanted help picking up women. But mostly she just hung back and listened.

She couldn’t get enough of the music, but kept a respectful distance, never getting involved with the musicians. They were so polite around her, she figured Jack had given the word for everyone to behave themselves, although he denied it when she brought it up years later.

“You were one of them, not a groupie,” he’d said, convincingly enough for her.
One late evening, Elaine was dozing off in the booth where she now sat with Taylor, listening to a saxophonist practice a particularly beautiful solo. A steely rattle coming from the drum set was ruining the sound, so she reached over and flipped the lever to relax the snare, and it fell blissfully silent. The saxophonist gave her a nod, and she settled contentedly back into her booth. Later, as she was trying to get everyone out the door so she could mop up, the saxophonist hung back and said to her in a conspiratorial tone, “So, you must’ve been working here a long time to know how to turn off a snare.” She knew he was heading into that slippery territory where bad-jokes blur into pick-up lines, and headed off his “But can you turn it on?” with “Actually, I used to be a drummer myself.”

Elaine found herself saying this to Taylor, trying to shore up her authority when a hint of skepticism crept into his facial expression as she explained what brushes were for. His response was an unoriginal challenge.

“Play us a little tune, then, Elaine,” he said, leaning back into his seat with an expectant smile on his face (an I-expect-you’ll-make-a-fool-of-yourself smile, that is). It had suddenly occurred to her that Taylor would enjoy seeing her squirm. That he does enjoy seeing her squirm. That she had, indeed, been squirming through most of their eight-month relationship. Time stopped just for a moment as she imagined herself, a worm, squirming through the mud. Trying not to get squashed under Taylor’s heavy boots. But that didn’t quite work. Another image formed where she was still in the mud, but this time wearing a skimpy bikini, wrestling with….no one. Just squirming around and feeling stupid while Taylor sat in the front row of the mud wrestling spectacle, enjoying the show with a fat cigar in his mouth until a bit of brown mud splattered onto his starched white Saville Row shirt. Imagining his scowl, she smiled.

“What’s so funny?” He had been looking at her, still waiting to hear her play something. Elaine shook her head and brushed away the daydream like the cloud of his cigarette smoke hovering around her head.

“You can’t just pick up the sticks and ‘play something’ after years of not playing. I’d need to warm up. My wrists ...”

“Uh huh,” he’d replied, but kept looking at her, obviously waiting for a better answer.

“Besides, I can’t really go playing around on Jack’s kit without asking…” She didn’t bother to add that no one came to the club to hear her play, or that the sticks weren’t the right weight for her. She just didn’t feel like explaining anything to him anymore.

“Awww…c’mon, luv. I’m sure Jacky boy won’t mind, will you old man?” Jack had just been returning from the bar, and bristled a bit at Taylor’s question. But Elaine knew it was from the ‘Jacky’ and ‘Old Man’ references, not from the idea of her playing his drums. He had paused and looked at the drum set, as if considering the idea, and then saved her skin.

“Actually, I’ve got it set up the way I need it, and that won’t work for Elaine. I play with the high-hat on the right and the bass on the left, tighter pedals, and a wider reach on the cymbals. And she’d have to readjust all the heights, which takes ages.” He sat down on the stool and picked up a pair of sticks, smiling at her then. “And from what I remember, you play with those super heavy sticks, don’t you?” Elaine could have kissed him.

“Yeah, well, all those years in the high school marching band. Old habits…” They both had laughed, ignoring Taylor who by that point was pretending to be bored. He had caught Hélène’s eye and ordered a bottle of wine. She brought it over to the booth with a glass and poured it while eying him up beneath half-mast lashes, triple-coated in black mascara. Elaine had noticed she was wearing glittery eye shadow. Taylor made a horrid slurping sound, actually tasting the wine. She had rolled her eyes and reached over to pour herself a glass. And realized she had no glass.

“Wine for one?” she had asked raising her eyebrows. He didn’t take his eyes off the Frenchie.

“Another glass for the thirsty lady,” he’d said with a wink. She didn’t actually see him wink, but she knew him well enough at that point to know when he was doing it. She heard Paul, the trombone player, exhale a low whistle and say under his breath, “There’s gonna be trouble tonight. That girl…”

***

When the band finally started playing, Elaine had managed to push the distasteful thought of her boyfriend’s crappy disposition to the back of her mind. Only once, during a particularly masturbatory string bass solo that didn’t seem to be going anywhere, did it occur to her to go tell that slut behind the bar to back off. It would have been a fleeting thought, but now, considering how to react to Taylor’s ignorant condemnation of the puddles at the feet of the musicians, Elaine chooses to pretend she didn’t hear him. But everyone else did.

“I suppose synthesizers don’t create those offensive bodily functions,” replies Jack thoughtfully. Then he turns to Paul with a wide grin and declares, “but then again synthesized horns sound like shit, don’t they?” Laughing, the trombonist gives Jack an enthusiastic high-five (the kind that tend to make Europeans uncomfortable) and, with his eyes on Taylor, opens his spit-valve, making a point of noisily blowing out a few more drops onto the stage floor.
.
For some reason, it didn’t bother Elaine at all that they didn’t like Taylor. In fact, she even sort of liked the idea. Later on, when he followed Hélène outside to smoke a cigarette during a break, Elaine didn’t even bother to perform her usual role as the clingy tag-along. In the mirror above the bar she saw him in the doorway, looking back towards her until a hand with fingers nails triple-coated in sparkly purple polish reached around his waist from behind and pulled him outside

“With any luck, the two of them will be gone before the third set,” she said, to no one in particular.

Miss Autry was born and raised in the United States, and has been living in
France since 1995.