Orfe by Cynthia Voigt
It was like the time I was thirteen and I climbed up the ladder to the high diving board because I thought if I had climbed up, I would have to have the courage to dive off.
I didn’t know, if I went down the hall, what I would see or what might happen to me. Orfe had music and she was Yuri’s girl. I had no protection.
When I was thirteen I had turned around and climbed back down off the high diving board, and I thought less of myself ever after. So I went down the hallway.
It was a long room, with shades pulled down over the windows and a black-and-white television flickering in a corner. The floor was bare wood, scattered over with sofas, upholstered chairs, pillows, ashtrays, cans of beer and soda, bindles and sneaks, empty wine bottles with candles burning in them, lamps with scarves and sheets draped over them to ease the light. The room was filled with smoke and shadows.
At the far end of the room Orfe was playing. Smiley sat at the drum set behind her, and a couple of others played along—guitar, slide guitar, also plugged into the amplifiers. Orfe was playing and they were trying to follow her lead. She was trying to gather them into a song.
In the darkness around the musicians, some people were dancing. I could see heads, mostly, like cutout silhouettes, and arms sometimes raised up and a flowing of moving bodies. Across the front of the crowd a profile with spiked hair moved back and forth, like some kind of sentry wearing a crested helmet.
More people sprawled around on the floor, hunched over to snort a line or light a smoke, stretched out flat or twined together, in a pair, in a tumble of bodies. “ ‘It Makes Me Sick,’ ” a voice called out.
Orfe turned her pale face to the darkness where the voice came from and shook her head and played on, singing.
I saw Yuri at last, leaning back in a deep chair, closed eyes, a tangle of dark hair, and his neck exposed. One girl, bare breasted I thought, although I couldn’t be sure, curled up against his pleated wedding shirt. Another rested her head across his thighs, and her arms were wrapped around his legs as she kneeled beside him.
Person by person, Orfe gathered the whole room up into her songs, one by one. Yuri sat up, shook himself free of the girls, wrapped his hands around his knees, opened his eyes. More and more people joined the dancers, dancing. I turned and left. Went down the long hallway with my shoes still in my hands. Sat down on the steps outside to wait.
It was a long time I sat there, waiting on the steps.
Orfe came out alone, the guitar on her back. There was nobody following her. She turned around to pull the door closed behind her. I stood up to go with her.
The streets were hollow, the sky going gray with false dawn. Orfe walked with her head bent, her face hidden. At her own door she turned around and raised her face to me, and her eyes said as clearly as if she had actually spoken the words, Don’t you dare.
“I won’t, I wouldn’t,” I promised, before I had time to think.
* * * * *
Yuri was gone, and then the Graces were gone too, touring as an opening band, without Orfe, who mostly lived at the studio. I mostly lived at the apartment, occasionally returning to my dormitory to pick up books or mail or clothing. The apartment was just about my home for the final semester. I slept in the double bed, ate off the plastic plates, mopped the linoleum floor. I paid the rent and the electric bill and the phone bill. Whenever Orfe showed up for a bath or a meal or a night, I was there to open a can of soup, get out clean towels, move into a sleeping bag on the floor. I watered the plants. I packed up Yuri’s clothes and delivered them to the house. I typed out job applications sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the typewriter. I studied for my final exams, sitting on a stool at the little kitchen table.
The Graces went on the tour because the offer was just too good. They couldn’t, they said, stand on pride the way Orfe could. They understood that this wasn’t a time for her to do any performing, they didn’t expect her to go along. It was only for a few weeks, it wasn’t as if the band was breaking up or didn’t plan to get back together. Willie Grace and Raygrace weren’t even subletting their apartment, here was the key, either Orfe or I could live there, whoever.
I wasn’t sure Orfe even heard them, but I thanked them and took the keys, promised to water the plants, feed the fish, promised to visit Cass at her grandmother’s, promised to continue being manager, there was no question, I’d go on dealing with job offers and they could keep sending the checks on to me.
I don’t remember how long it was before the evening Orfe and I were eating tuna-fish sandwiches, talking about I can’t remember what, and there was the sound of a lot of footsteps and then knocking on the apartment door. The Graces had returned, much sooner than expected, carrying pizza in boxes, holding Cass by the hand.
“But—” I held the door open.
They surged past me, sat down on the floor, opened the pizza boxes, and asked for a pizza wheel, and plates, and were there any napkins.
“C’mon. You’d rather have pizza, I can tell by looking at your faces,” Raygrace urged. He was right, of course, so Orfe and I abandoned the tuna to sit down among the Graces.
“What about Tulsa?” I asked. “What about Tucumcari? What about Johnstown?”
“We’re fired,” Grace Phildon explained. She didn’t look upset. She didn’t look as if she were fresh back from a failure experience.
“How could you be fired? You’re three times as good as the headliner,” I protested.
“That’s it in a nutshell,” Raygrace said. He chomped down on a slice of pizza with green peppers, onions, olives, and anchovies.
“They weren’t bad,” Willie Grace told us. “But we were better. Much better. The audiences didn’t want us to leave the stage, they’d call to get us back on, we were playing at the start and then at the finish too. So we were fired.”
“With full pay,” Grace Phildon said. “Also compensation for our disappointment and the loss of exposure time. It couldn’t be better, if you ask me.”
“Yeah, they really stank,” Willie Grace said. “Stink,” she poked a tickling finger into Cass’s left armpit. Cass giggled. “Stank.” She tickled the other armpit and Cass laughed out loud. “Stunk!” she cried and scrabbled at Cass’s stomach with five fingers. Cass fell over backward, laughing, pizza held aloft. “I mean,” Willie Grace said, “there was this throb-throb-throb stuff, every song, and this pelvis stuff”—she held out her hand and rocked it forward, again and again, like a little five-fingered pelvis. “It was dumb. Rotten music. And the songs.” She turned to Orfe. “The songs made ‘It Makes Me Sick’ sound like opera, like Mozart opera. Maybe three words, that’s about the extent of the lyrics they knew, the S-word”—she winked at Cass—“the F-word, the H-word. Over and over, throb-throb, pelvis, pelvis. You get the picture.”
“The H-word?” I wondered.
“Hate,” Willie Grace said. “If I never hear that word again in all my born days, I’ll be grateful.”
“I hate liver,” Cass volunteered.
“Well, I guess I don’t have to worry about being grateful,” Willie Grace said.
“And I hate lima beans,” Cass said.
“We were terrific,” Raygrace said. “Really good and getting better.”
“So what’s next?” Grace Phildon asked me. “Are you working again?” she asked Orfe. “Anything new for us to try?”
“Or not,” Willie Grace said quickly.
“Whatever, we’re fine with it,” Raygrace said.
Orfe raised her head and looked around at all of us. I couldn’t read her eyes, but there was in her face anticipation and sorrow and acceptance and friendship. “I’ve got a couple of songs. I’d like you to hear them. Do we have any jobs to play?”
“We will as soon as I get on the phone tomorrow morning,” I promised them all.
“Allow rehearsal time,” Orfe asked me.
* * * * *
Orfe and the Graces practiced at the studio and I was busy: job interviews and renting the coll
I didn’t send or hand deliver a ticket to Yuri.
* * * * *
The crowd filled the whole gym, milling about and waiting. Shoes piled up against walls, as more and more people came in through the wide double doors to push the assembled crowd toward the one section of bleachers we’d left standing. That was the stage, the eight ascending bleacher benches on their scaffolded skeleton. I operated the fairly primitive lighting from a small light board on a table beside the doors. The metal box full of ticket stubs and gate money I put under the table.
* * * * *
Amplifiers were set under the bleachers, on the floor, with wires coming out like tentacles to attach to the instruments. The Graces stayed at about the first or second bleacher row, or on the floor right in front if there was a routine they were doing. Orfe moved up around three of the top four rows—the very top row she avoided, because there wasn’t enough room there even to turn around, between the narrow seat and the wall. So Orfe, in her black stretch jeans and white poet’s shirt, her hair blazing under the lights and her guitar gleaming, moved up and down around three of the four top rows of bleachers, while the Graces flowed back and forth below, careful to be near enough to the standing mikes, careful not to get their cords too tangled up in the intricacies of the dance and the intricacies of the music.
For the first set, they played Yuri’s Dreams. The music filled the air of the gym, from wall to wall and up to the high ceilings where fans rotated behind metal grids. “Gray ashes, and white bones,” they sang, “The Lament of the Lion Lady,” a frightening dream, “White bits of bones buried in gray ashes.” The audience swayed, and the Graces swayed in the bright lights, while Orfe sang. “Ashes and bones, bones in ashes.” Michael put his hand into mine: I remember that. The song not so much brought his hand into mine as it made me aware of his hand in mine. Hands as flesh over bone, long-boned fingers with their ability, in some cases, to call music out of boxes of wood or plastic, out of strands of steel.
“Soar.” Orfe sang another Dream, “Icarus,” and the Graces echoed and reechoed the word, “up, Air,” the song rising, pulling the echoing voices after it, “up, High,” like birds flying, the words, like birds flying up into the crown of the sky and breaking free through it, “Swoop.” The words were disconnected, there was no sentence, no story, just melody and music and wild words, and my heart rose with the song as I listened. I couldn’t catch my breath, almost; almost I couldn’t breathe.
Orfe sang, last in the first set, “The Oak Tree and the Linden,” a song that—because it entered my bloodstream and drove around and around my body until my whole being existed only in the song—I called a love song, even though, as I rode it back, riding my own blood back into the heart of music, it never had the word in it. “The sun makes golden windows of the leaves,” Orfe sang with the Graces.
When the set was finished, the audience broke out in applause. Michael turned to me, his hands over his ears, dazed by the sound and displeased, amazed by the enthusiasm and amused. I brought up the lights and brought down the spots. Somebody opened the gym doors. People crowded around past us, where we stood behind the light board. I thought about Yuri.
“From the point of view of time, or history,” Michael said from close behind me, “or the stars—from the point of view of the whole universe, from the big bang on—we’re nothing, us, right now, just like ants, smaller, just particles, quarks—from that point of view, we’re just little minuscule moving things.”
“So none of it really matters,” I agreed.
“I find that a comforting thought,” Michael said. “When things matter too much and can’t be helped. Yuri, for example.”
My eyes filled with tears, for Yuri.
“Did you ever hear of the energy of mass?” Michael asked.
I turned to look into his face. “No. Why?” He would have a reason for the question.
“Every particle has it,” he told me. “Anything that has mass, has it. It’s not the same as energy of motion. Energy of mass is the energy in E = mc2, it’s an incredible amount of energy. Because c in the formula is the speed of light. That’s one hundred eighty-six thousand miles per second, per second.”
I nodded, I knew that.
“That’s the speed of light squared, then multiplied times mass—imagine the energy. There’s enough energy of mass in a quarter to run New York City during rush hour, I read that, in a book. By a man named Goldsmith. An astrophysicist. So it’s reliable data. So you can imagine the energy of mass in a human being.”
I tried to see it, envisioning the invisible and immeasurable energy of mass of an atom, a cell, a person. I could almost see it. Seeing it, I asked, “Do you mean a soul? Do you mean a human being might have a soul?”
The second set started out with dance songs, and the shoeless audience moved along the music like waves along the surface of the water. Then Orfe did one of her new songs. The song had no words, only a voice, calling. The song was melody on a rising oh sound, maybe what the stars and planets call out to one another across the empty reaches of space, the voices of solitary stars and silent planets crying out. Then Orfe was singing ah, and the audience pressed forward, as if she were calling them forward.
I could feel the press in the darkness. I could feel the call from the figure at the top of the bleachers. I could see, in the shadowy darkness beyond the spotlight the darkness rising to her.
Orfe’s head was bent as she sang. I couldn’t make sense of the song, of my own feelings: joy and fear and hope; celebration, mourning, grief, despair, and farewell. The music called me into itself. There were no words and if there had been, I could not have sung them.
The crowd came closer, darker. Orfe called out from the top row of bleachers, with her head bent, and all the dark crowd seemed to wait for what would happen next as she sang. All the dark crowd seemed unable to wait and it pressed in.
The instruments the Graces played on seemed to protest, losing their hold on the music.
The Graces and their instruments seemed to be swallowed up.
Orfe lifted her calling voice. She lifted her head and I could have sworn that she saw me. Don’t be afraid.
Chaos rose up from beneath the spotlights. The bleachers under Orfe collapsed. She fell into them, as if into an open mouth. The Graces were gone, invisible, lost in the shapeless crowd. The instruments and amplifiers and wires couldn’t be seen.
I heard cracking and screaming, wood and people.
All music ceased.
It was a chaos of noise and voices, shouts for help, cries for order.
I turned up the lights but couldn’t see what had happened behind the shoulders and backs, backs of heads.
I shoved, pushed, elbowed my way forward. The crowd, pulling back now, pulling away and fleeing, tried to take me with it. I didn’t know what Orfe meant: Don’t be afraid. I only knew, trying to hold my place in the receding tide of people between me and where Orfe had sung on the bleachers, what she hadn’t meant.
* * * * *
What
Yuri never did, as far as I know. We called the house to tell him, but he didn’t come to the phone. I sent him a newspaper clipping about the accident. Because he is Orfe’s husband and heir, the Graces pay into his account her share of royalties for Yuri’s Dreams, which he still draws on, so I assume Yuri is still safely alive.
* * * * *
Raygrace said to me, “You know, just because it doesn’t end happily doesn’t mean it’s not a love story.”
“Yeah, well, neither does it mean it is, just because it has a happy ending,” Willie Grace snapped back at him.
This was at their wedding, a long time after. Grace Phildon raised her glass of champagne to all of us, Willie Grace and Raygrace, Cass, Michael and me.
I raised my glass in response. “Love stories aren’t about how they end,” I promised them.
FIVE
“You were with me,” Orfe said. “I saw you in the doorway. You didn’t come into the room. Or you couldn’t. Or you wouldn’t.”
This was later when she told me this.
“But you were waiting when I came out. And I never said so at the time, but I was glad. I am glad. Having you there. Because I don’t know what I would have done without you. Not just then, but especially then, because you were there, you know what it was like, walking into that house. You were great, Enny.”