The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [97]
Nada said almost nothing, only smiled and nodded and listened, and yet she received a series of invitations—backstage, into their van, and up to a darkened Ethiopian restaurant in Edgewater that was somehow still serving, then to a hot dog stand called Weasel Pup that was practically giving away salty chips and pop in the heat. At every stop, Burning Patrick was greeted by fans celebrating in the darkness, and he answered each by reaching out with his left hand and pulling down on the fan’s right ear, sometimes gently and sometimes hard. Those who couldn’t get close enough to him tugged their own ears in salute. He didn’t speak to Nada directly, but she caught him staring at her over and over again. Every time he waited a beat and then looked away, unembarrassed.
Eventually, she accepted a ride in a van packed with musicians and instruments to the house the band shared on Ravenswood, just off Lincoln Avenue.
It was a typical North Side house, wood-shingled and one room wide, three rooms deep, and four stories tall. From the ghostly outlines of old mailboxes in the front entranceway, it had probably been built as a single-family home and then converted to apartments and then rehabbed back again, according to real estate market whims.
Jude opened windows and lit candles and went to find some red wine. The drummer and guitar player were unloading the van, leaving Nada alone with Burning Patrick for a minute or more. They stared at each other in dim, comfortable silence. Nada, who had barely spoken the entire evening, never felt like she needed to engage him.
Jude returned with a bottle and three glasses and sat down close to Nada. As he did, Burning Patrick mumbled, “Go to bed, Jude.”
The bassist tried to engineer what had happened in his absence—how he had lost his place, what had happened to his sure thing. “What are you talking about, Pat?”
“She was never … seeking you.”
Nada felt a chill as he said it, because it sounded ominous and cruel and even threatening in that otherworldly impediment of the artist’s, but also because it was true.
“Pat—”
“Retire now.”
“What are you going to do, Patrick?”
“Go to bed.”
Jude looked at Nada. “I can drive you home, if you want.”
Nada shook her head. “I’ll be okay.”
Jude disappeared up a creaking set of stairs Nada couldn’t see. Patrick let Nada pour herself a glass of wine, and then he took the bottle and curled up with it in his chair, not drinking from it, but cradling it, fondling it like a blind man afraid of misplacing his cane. After a long time he said, “Are you to call on your mother?”
“What?”
Lips moving without noise: Have you been to see your mother?
She shivered. “What are you talking about?”
He changed the subject, speaking now to her as if for the first time, like he’d forgotten the odd, inappropriate question he’d just asked. Maybe he had. Or maybe Nada had just imagined he’d asked it. “You’ve come to see me paint.”
“Yes.”
“I know who you are.”
She swallowed. “Who am I?”
“We have something in common,” he said. “Or we did. Once.”
“What’s that?” she asked.
Patrick rubbed his eyes and then smacked himself hard on the back of the head, once, twice, three times, a fourth. He sniffed the neck of the bottle but still didn’t put it to his mouth. “I followed your father closely.” Patrick said something else she couldn’t understand because his face was turned into the shadows between his coat and the wing of his chair,