An old man named Roscoe reminisces, tilting his chair back as the sun sets. “She musta been from somewhere ’round here. Kansas City ain’t that big a town. But no one ever seen her ’cept at jam sessions and gigs. Sittin by, listenin in. Never liftin her voice above what was ladylike to speak let alone tryin to sing. She was always pretty much a mystery to everyone.”

Darktown pops and sizzles like a bonfire, but daytimes the flame’s invisible. Charcoal and ash flicker to the strobe, faces grimace and turn to it, scarves snap to it, newspapers crackle to the nameless music of the streets.

This is a frantic song, a sixty-cycle-a-second scuffle. Not till evening does the light mellow. Then, golden horns fill certain cellars with a smooth hush, a yellow melody rising from below linked shadows. The soft sounds spill upwards, pooling at the feet of passers-by.

Laura seems a little nervous, standing there on the sidewalk, tugging at her hat, her clothes, her hair. Yet she is perfect: lipstick even, stocking seams straight, beige- and brown-dotted hem swirling just so, brown pumps clicking just right down the cement steps.

She opens the door on a room full of men and instruments; already the dampness is warming with body heat. They have traded axes, goofing themselves loose. Winks and nods greet her entry and she smiles in return, working her way to the sofa at the far end of the room. A skinny, coal-colored youth sits there restlessly, waiting for the games to end.

It isn’t long. First a slow blues. Then “Just You, Just Me” and they’re really cooking. Smells good. Laura weaves her head in time to the fumes, delicate nostrils wide with pleasure. The next tune, a rhythm-and-blues, starts out at a medium tempo, but the drummer winds it up midway to a fast burn. At different times different musicians glance at Laura to see the music made visible. Her black eyes are afire with secrets.

During their break, the cellar darkens with smoke and brightens with talk, most of it about the foregoing jams. Laura doesn’t say too much; once in a while “Yes, I liked that,” or “Uh-huh, it was real nice.” Her voice is quiet, her words proper. Occasionally a man will throw his arm over her shoulders, give her a friendly squeeze, and her slight smile slightens.

Everyone knows when it’s time to go back to work and play. Springs sigh, sheet music shuffles, places are resumed. Laura listens feverishly, her small, pointed chin cupped in one hand, elbow balanced on one knee. She can only stay for two more songs. Her mouth looks unsatisfied as she leaves. “Later, boys.”

“In a minute, Laura.”

She doesn’t walk far. Scared of the dark, even the brilliant darkness of the black folks’ wide-grinning night. She hails the first cab she sees, gives a fancy uptown address. The cabbie drives her right to the servants’ entrance. She shorts him fifty cents on the fare. “Iffen you wants to wait, I’ll get de res’ fum Miss Anne,” she says. He snorts, but what can he do, drive her back?

She goes upstairs to the empty boudoir next to the master bedroom. The decor is severely pink, scented and stiffly starched. She sits at a marble-topped vanity, its surface a mirrored intricacy of shiny vials and pots. She opens a large, alabaster box, smooths a transparent cream on her already creamy skin. A man calls through the door without opening it. “Hey, honey, that you?”

“Yes, it’s me.” She pulls a pink tissue from a shell-covered box.

“You’ve been at that meeting this entire time?”

She wipes quickly, cleaning half her face. “Yes, I have.” She looks long at her reflection. She is half full. She takes another tissue to her face. She is waxing. “We had a lot of work to do. Bazaar’s coming up. You know those poor people depend on us organizing it.”

“How you women can talk all night about a miserable bunch of niggers is beyond me.”

She was always pretty much a mystery to everyone.

“Okey-doke, Smoke.” The cabbie slipped the worn dollar bill into his shirt pocket. He had his full fare now and a fifty cent tip.

“That ain’t my name.” The skinny, coal-colored youth turned away from the cab he had followed all the way from Darktown.

“Who said it was?” Backing down the drive, the cabbie kept his eyes on the street end. He missed seeing how the coal-colored youth melted into the shadows. Went around the corner of the house. Walked up the steps. Seeking something that he sometimes got a taste of at jam sessions. Immortality. A pause, while he did something to the lock without using a key. Then through the door.

Inside, the large kitchen lay mostly dark. Light from a far-off street lamp filtered through white net curtains over a counter on one side. Straight ahead a glow silhouetted a door and leaked out over blue and green linoleum tiles. The skinny youth pushed the door and it swung open on a passageway with oyster white walls, tastefully carpeted in beige.

The same carpet ran up the staircase. So did he, quietly. The stairs doubled back on themselves and left him on the landing where they ended, facing the front of the house. Two doors. He closed his eyes and followed his nose through the one on his left.

She was in there, seated at the vanity. She swiveled on the pink bench as he entered, giving him the look of a wild thing surprised in its natural habitat but still sure of escape. A silk robe embroidered with rose and coral chrysanthemums clung to the new ivory of her shoulders.

“Laura,” he whispered.

“That ain’t my name.”

He shook his head. Didn’t matter what she called herself here, or how much paler her face. Whatever tricks she played, he would know her anywhere. She was it — inspiration. The breath of air that fed the fire. He took a step closer, drawn by her scent, a mixture of fine cologne and fresh, faint sweat.

“My husband’s in the next room. I can call him.”

“But you won’t.”

“Be a shame if anybody found you in a white woman’s boudoir.”

“Who said you was white?”

She swung her legs around and planted them firmly before her, placed one hand between her knees and pressed them tight together. Touched the other to her loose, lustrous hair, silken as the robe she wore. “I did.”

He shook his head once more. “I ain’t come to cause no trouble.”

The bare skin above her breasts rose and fell sharply as she let out a silent, humorless laugh. “Why, then? You followed me home from that jam session, somehow. You broke in—”

“No, I didn’t. Didn’t have to. Door was left open.”

“I locked it.”

“Musta been someone else come in after you. Maid.”

“Annie would never neglect a thing like that.”

“And your husband wouldn’t never enter this here room less you asked him in. I know. You tooken care a him good as your servants. Wouldn’t never believe he married no colored gal, neither, less you told him so.

“Or would he?”

She rose slowly, her hands swinging naturally at her sides. The right one held a gun now, but not as if she planned on doing anything immediate with it. “Why don’t you stop making these threatening remarks and tell me what it is you want?”

“Honey? Are you coming to bed now?”

“I’ll be in soon, Chester,” she called back, her voice loose and flowing as her hair.

“Who’s that I hear talking to you?” The man on the other side of the open door sounded nearer now.

“It’s only Annie. She’s helping me practice my part for the church play.” She used the gun like a traffic cop’s baton, waving the youth toward another door opposite the one her husband stood behind. It was shut. He opened it on a tiny bathroom, obeyed her gestures and went inside.

“I thought you gave her the evening off.”

“I guess she didn’t have anywhere to go. We’re as good as done, so I’ll be right in, after I use the necessary.” She stepped into the small room and closed the door behind her with a soft click. An overhead light came on as her hand fell from a wall switch.

The gun’s muzzle pointed at him, almost, it seemed, of its own will. The opening glittered like an animal’s eye. “I asked you before,” she said. “What—?”

“What I want?” The stories he had heard agreed on one thing: this was no one to trifle with. He hesitated before the truth surged out of him, a wave desperate to reach an unknown shore: “I want to play.”

“Play what?”

All the music, the sweetness, sharpness, rolls and riffs and changes he’d ever heard swept through his mind. All the instruments. Choose one. She was waiting. “Piano.”

She looked at the mirror over the white washstand, smiled at a joke shared with her reflection. “And what present did you bring me?” The gun still pointed in his direction.

“It — in my coat pocket — I’ll—” He moved to ease open the satin-hemmed slit above his breast, and her eyes were on him again.

“Hands,” she said. Reluctantly, he started to raise them. “No!” The gun waved impatiently. “Hold them out here, where I can see them!” Barely a tremor showed as he stretched his forearms level with the floor: his fingers, long and thin, black as twigs burnt bare by autumn, nails ridged and trimmed to neat ovals.

“Turn ’em over.”

His palms, rose creased with brown, oblongs seeming small in contrast to the fingers’ spidery length.

“All right. In the tub. Take your shoes off.”

He hesitated.

“Take them off first, then get in.”

He wore black lace-up Oxfords, ancient but well-polished. He left them on the white tiles, climbed over the tub’s curled porcelain lip, slipping awkwardly in his socks.

“Now strip.”

He did nothing, as if unsure he’d heard her right.

“Off with your clothes. Unless you brought a spare set.”

He shrugged out of his jacket. A good jacket, dark grey with a faint crosshatching of light blue. Folded it carefully, then looked around to see what to do with it. Balanced it on the tub’s edge, at one tightly curving end. Loosened his tie and slipped it off from under the collar of his pale grey shirt. Unbuttoned that. Stopped. The thin cotton tee he wore beneath it barely veiled the darkness of his chest. “What—”

“Lie down.” She swept the gun’s muzzle sideways, describing a horizontal line for him to imitate. “You want to keep your clothes on, that’s fine by me. I don’t care about them if you don’t.

“Me, I like what I’m wearing.” As she said this, she unbelted the kimono and let it slide off her shoulders. Beneath, she was naked. She held herself the way she now held the gun: purposefully. The parchment of her skin glowed like a lampshade, color breaking out where the candle’s flame came too close to it, burning it pink and red and brown and black. Her fingernails, the taut tips of her breasts, her hair—

“Lie down.”

Limbs weak, he did as she said. It was easiest that way. He curled up on his right side, the drain gaping at the upper edge of his peripheral vision. He heard a cool, ceramic whisper as she stepped into the tub and slid down beside him. Facing him, lying on her left, looking directly into his eyes. It was a tight fit.

He regretted every stitch he wore.

Laughing, she lifted the gun above both their heads, rotating it as if displaying a rare device for his edification. Nickel glinted in the fixture’s light. It seemed to be a perfectly ordinary gun.

“Where do you want me to put them?” she asked.

At first he could only gape at her, head empty as the tub’s drain. “You gonna put — Put what?”

“The bullets. The magic.” She frowned as if trying to remember the answer to a tough question. “You want me to shoot you, right?”

“No! No! I ain’t said nothin like that—” Sweat slicked his skin, robbing him of traction as he scrabbled at the tub’s sides, trying to get out. He opened his mouth wide, wider, sucking in air for a scream. She filled it with the gun’s muzzle.

“You want to sing? All right.” The knuckles stood out sharply on her gun hand. The frown deepened, cutting two deep verticals in her low forehead.

“Wait—”

The world did as she commanded.

“My present. I haven’t even seen it, yet; maybe it’s not enough. Not worth what you want. A hero’s death. A musician’s life. Let me have a look first.”

He lay motionless.

“Go on, get it out for me.” She pulled the gun’s barrel from his mouth and swung it in a short arc, indicating the youth’s jacket resting on the bathtub’s rim. Then aimed it back at him.

Cold with drying perspiration, the youth raised one arm and dragged the coat down on top of him. From its inner pocket he removed a posy of pink and yellow rosebuds, their stems arranged in a crystal vial capped with a gold screen. The flowers were in not-quite-pristine condition, a few barely-opened petals crushed and darkened.

“Oh,” she said. “Well, it is the thought that counts ... under these circumstances... And at least you brought something...” She took the posy with her left hand, inhaling deeply.

“You — you mean you ain’t gonna shoot me?” He levered himself up on one elbow, shivering slightly.

“Shhh! Hold still now. I don’t know if I should. Let me think. Lie back down.” Through all this she’d kept gun trained on him, unwavering.

He lowered himself to the tub’s floor.

“I like you,” she said, smiling. “Even if you did lie to me about the door being open—”

“Might as wella been—”

“All right. Tell you what.” She cocked the pistol’s hammer, pointed it at the ceiling. The light. “Best I can do—”

An explosion. Brightness. Blackness.

Combustion combines opposites: Earth and air. Chemical secrets release the energies held inside dull matter.

Some fires are fast. Some slow as rust. Consumption. Greed. Fever. Lust.

As if he can look through himself. As if the flame has licked away what no longer matters. Left only that loud sound, blowing through him. Lines of incandescence leading to and from his heart.

He’s still in the tub. With her. She still holds the gun. A whiff of powder, the curled question mark of smoke static in the air above them. And how can he tell that? In the dark?

The radiant dark. Emptiness shining. The shot’s echoes dying down, the light fixture’s glass tinkling into silence. Then the sound of the door opening. The darkness vanishes and everything he imagined seeing in it: Smoking gun. Naked woman. Tub. Walls, ceiling — he’s in another place. A bed, in another room, illuminated from outside by whatever lies beyond. Only the door remains, and the shadow standing just inside it. A woman’s silhouette.

“Laura?”

“That ain’t my name. You feelin any better, Chester?”

“Yeah. What happened—” He tries to raise his head. Like hoisting a steamroller on pulleys made from putty. Gives it up.

“Guess you must not be all the way recovered yet, you don’t remember what your wife called.”

“My — what?” The woman walks toward him and switches on a lamp sitting on a table beside the bed — his bed? His wife? The lamp’s bulb seems too dim, but it glares in his eyes anyway, obscuring her face.

The mattress tilts, slopping his stomach to one side. She’s sitting on its edge. Now he can see. Her face is — not exactly, no, but a lot like Laura’s. Same skin tone as when she showed up at jam sessions, same general shape. So what’s different? He can’t put his finger on it — brows thicker? Hairline higher? Faint imprints around the mouth and eyes...

“At least you talkin English again.” The woman presses her lips together. Are they fuller? Thinner? “You shammin? Can’t a forgot. I’m your Annie, and—” with the firmness of a doe licking a newborn fawn into shape “—we married in the eyes of God and the law. Five years now.”

Five years. He would have been, what, twelve years old? Eleven? Frantically he tries to get up, get out of bed. He has to find a mirror. Hoarse, hacking coughs convulse him, and the woman — Annie — shoves pillows under his back, props him up, holds him like a baby against her rose and coral housecoat. At last he quiets down a bit and she offers him a drink — water, he assumes, and swallows a mouthful of vodka. That sets him off again, though not so bad as before. This time, Annie only watches.

And when she most likely thinks he isn’t looking, slips something from her pocket, something small and shiny, with a nickel glint to it, and slides it inside the drawer of the table by their bed.

He gets his voice back. “How long—”

“You been out two days, Chester. I was all set to take you in the hospital.” She strokes one pajama-clad shoulder in a gesture meant to soothe him. Which is when he realizes his shirt and pants are gone, and the things he’d carried in their pockets. Wallet, keys, money. Gone. Where? His wife will know. With an effort he refocuses on what she’s trying to tell him.

“—ain’t missed one gig, that’s what you so concerned about. Rehearsals, sure, but you gonna be fine for that agent tomorrow afternoon. He ain’t interested in no one else in the band, anyway, even I figured out that much.”

The agent from New York. Tomorrow afternoon. How can he have forgotten? He knocks the covers off clumsily, attempts to swing his feet to the carpet. The sheets cling to his nightclothes, charged with electricity from rubbing up against them in the dry air of a Chicago winter. “Help me, Annie.”

“Chester, you can’t get up now! You a sick man!”

The wallpaper wobbles, its printed flowers waving in an invisible breeze. “I need to practice. Help me. Gotta get me to the piano. Then I be all right.”

Slowly, leaning on Annie’s arm, he makes his way to the living room, where the slick, black baby grand waits. It had cost a lot of money, and it takes up too much space in their little mortgaged-to-the-hilt Southside bungalow.

In its polished surface he sees himself. Hair dark, chin like a chisel. He is young yet. Yes. Still young, only twenty-five. Why has he been worried?

Sick, that’s why. Annie uncovers the keys and he lets his hands fall where they want to be. A song based on a nursery rhyme. The music rises up, baking the ache from his bones. “Lavender Blue”. A Latin beat, a rhumba, banishing the chill pouring in off the big front window, and his fingers sparkle, living sunbeams, laughing, and all the colors of the spectrum break through him like he was a prism, all the music, the sweetness, sharpness, rolls and riffs and changes, coming out of him. He is the king.

She leans on the piano’s shining lid, relaxing slowly, melting like wax against her own reflection, arms stretching out softly, head resting on one side, ear to the sounding board, eyes closed, absorbing it. Now she is queen.

When the song is over, he looks up at her, at the way her lashes flutter open on black depths too profound ever to be filled and allows himself, for the last time, to remember the way things were before. And just for that final moment, to wonder why she has struck such an uneven bargain with him.

She was always pretty much a mystery to everyone.

©2007, Nisi Shawl