Broken Beat

She put down her leather suitcase and picked up the square blue box that lay on her doorstep. Her head hurt from the night before, thumping like a rhythm section. All she wanted to do was go inside, where everything was quiet and calm. If she’d had the energy or patience to look for a note she would have found that there was none. She brought the box inside and opened it up.

Inside was her good luck charm: a 1946 shellac pressing of the track that changed her life and inspired her whole career. It sat atop its photocopied and autographed sleeve, old and rare and shiny. And broken. It was old and rare and shiny and broken into pieces as sharp as the pain that ran through her heart.

He’d given it to her on the same night he’d asked her to marry him. She’d been singing with the band, his band, for a few months and it was all going well. Her delicate vocals cut through his bass like a mermaid diving through the strong waves of the ocean. It was only on the night he proposed that she told him how scared she was.

“Do you think I’m good enough?”
“Of course you are. You don’t need me to tell you that.”
She lay her head on his shoulder and waved her ringed finger around proudly. “And now we’ll be together forever.” She laughed. “Unless you run off with those women I see making sweet eyes at you in the club. You won’t run off and leave me will you?”

He wanted to ask her the same but he knew his voice would break.

When he gave her the record she cried. He didn’t have to tell her that he’d gone to the ends of the earth to find it, and he’d go there and back a thousand times over just to re-live this moment in love for eternity.

She called the record her four leaf clover. She said that playing it in her dressing room before a performance made it all go well, made her voice soar above the dense clouds of smoke. At parties, he’d hear her telling people that the night she played it three times in succession was the night that they were offered the record deal. Of course, it was him that initiated, negotiated and secured the deal, but he let her hold on to her fantasy. It didn’t hurt anybody.

Two nights before their biggest performance, she came into the lounge where he was playing some old 78s.

“Baby, I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “But, well…it’s just that I want to try out new sounds and, well… I heard about this new bass player…I mean, he’s only nineteen, but when I heard him play…he’s just wonderful! He’ll stand in for you for a couple of nights but that’s it…”

He wasn’t shocked. He didn’t need to tell her that he already knew about the boy, but he smiled and said it was fine, hoping she still had room in her heart for him.

On the last night of every one of her tours after she hit the big time, he’d wait up endlessly for her return, with nothing but Charlie Parker and Jack Daniels for company.
Sometimes he wouldn’t hear the key in the lock until two or three days after the plane had landed.

“Had fun then?”
“Fun? I wouldn’t say that exactly. It’s work…same old, same old”
“Well you certainly looked like you were having fun in the pictures.”
“What pictures?”
He looked her dead in the eye and smiled sadly. “You haven’t seen the papers then.”

After the arguments started, he’d said to her “You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.” She thought he was talking about her voice. But now that she thought about it, standing in that cold, empty house holding her box of blues, he had said that to her more than once. In fact, he’d said it over and over and over again. Like a broken record.