Stealing the Fire by Jane Ciabattari

Stealing the Fire by Jane Ciabattari

Author:Jane Ciabattari
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Stealing the Fire
ISBN: 9781938103735
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2002-04-15T00:00:00+00:00


ONCE IN A BLUE MOON

LIZA WAS SITTING on the steps of a townhouse on St. Denis Street in Montreal two doors down from a temporary outdoor bandstand, listening to Mack “Guitar” Andrews tease the crowd with a funky instrumental version of “Who Do You Love?” and musing about the enthusiasm with which the French Canadians greeted this second-, no, third-rate back-up band. They were the sort of musicians who usually played highway roadhouses and inner city taverns on Friday and Saturday nights while holding down nine-to-five jobs in city bureaucracies or working as short-order cooks in diners that opened at dawn. She was wondering how in hell they’d landed this gig without a vocalist. A guitar player had to be a genius like Clapton to hold an open-air audience for a two-hour set. And Andrews, a rotund ebony-colored man about five foot eight, with his sea-green polyester suit and maroon tie, didn’t have the charisma or the licks to pull it off.

Still, the old yearning was in her when the drummer built up his backbeat and the young longhaired bass guitarist laid down the solid dark rhythm behind the leader of the band. The white kid on the bass was barefoot, wearing jeans and a Montreal Jazz Festival t-shirt. He was familiar to her, at least twenty years younger than the rest, one more youngster coming up on the road, burning his fingers trying to play the blues.

Washed by sound, Liza found herself focusing on the full moon rising over the St. Lawrence River. Montreal reminded her of San Francisco. The sky seemed closer, the river’s forking banks more evident than on the island of Manhattan, which continually diminished its natural setting. Living in New York, she hadn’t seen a moonrise in months. With a sudden, novel sense of perspective, she contemplated the enormous warm yellow moon drawing to it the last rays of sun, pulling the tides back toward the land, water filling the salt flats and moistening the snarls of kelp heaped along the shores thousands of rocky miles away. This was the first of two full moons that July, an uncommon doubling event of nature—an extra chance for revelation or ruin, the way she figured it.

She felt mellow from the couscous and Moroccan wine they’d had at dinner. Stewart’s theme for the night was French colonial. They were spending the week in Montreal so he could research a book on the French separatist movement. At dinner he had reminisced about the couscous he’d eaten on the Left Bank for a dollar fifty a plate, in the sixties. Stewart was one of the few Americans ever to complete a Ph.D. at the Sorbonne. “Lawrence Ferlinghetti and I,” he liked to point out.

At the restaurant they sat on burgundy velvet cushions under an ornamental paisley tent.

“I used to wear clothes that looked like this room,” she said.

“Déjà vu,” Stewart said.

“Déjà bleu,” she said. “Another glass of wine and I’ll wax nostalgic about the original Fillmore and the free concerts in Golden Gate Park.



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