A Little Night Music by Kathy Hitchens

Author:Kathy Hitchens [Hitchens, Kathy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2013-07-27T05:00:00+00:00

The Lotus was packed for a Wednesday night. The last week of summer brought tourists en masse to Bourbon Street and the adjacent avenue clubs for a last gasp of recklessness before their lives settled into the business part of the year. Jon had called James once to pacify him and learned there were rumblings of replacing Jon at the last board meeting. Three of their highest investors had pulled out, citing uncertainty in the company. James had been unusually calm on the phone, a show of sympathy or indifference, Jon couldn’t be sure.

Four days had passed since Elli tried to kiss him. Four days of passable but lackluster technique on Jon’s part, four days of Mongo asking after the woman responsible for stealing the thunder from Jon’s fingers, four days of bad-fish-smell stares from Dezi and more than a few overt suggestions from drunk women. But as quickly as he entertained offers to erase the memory of Elli wrapped around his body on the bike or the at-home feel of her fingers laced through his, he found he had left that New Orleans temptation behind. Elli, it seemed, had spoiled him for something real.

A realization that led to moody ballads on the fire escape that kept even Elephant away.

Hadn’t he told Elli he wanted nothing to do with women? Wasn’t he a miserable human being—her words? Every time he tried to connect the dots between getting clocked on the street and dodging those tempting lips, his head pounded like a bass drum in a sound booth.

He had learned to play into the visions, which came on more frequent and intense than before, street parades, a boy with a crew cut attempting his first scale, a bar fight breaking out as the music played on - probably over a woman, a rawhide mallet the craftsman used to press the pipe’s seams. The visions were more than the instrument’s history. They were messages of beginnings and endings, of trials and false starts. Universal and specific, Jon played them in his mind as he might a new chord in a familiar song.

But Jon had yet to see the one person who could take away the heavy, expectant pull the visions left behind.

Mongo signaled a key change and slipped into one of Jon’s favorite Davis numbers, Blue in Green. Jon had settled into the first few bars when The Lotus disappeared. He was at a grand home —white columns, shiny black 1955 Coupe DeVille parked in the circular drive. People dressed in all black walked the grounds in slow motion, gathering in clusters of whispered talk and subdued gestures of affection, everyone with food, few eating. But Jon was none of those. He was a man who had walked so far his feet hurt, trumpet solid in his hand. He was a man who marched up the groomed lawn and stopped in full view of a second story window. He was a man who raised his instrument and said farewell to a dead

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