Death Before Facebook

course that was over the line. It meant you couldn’t trust her. But then trust was the last thing on my mind when I saw her there, smoke swirling blue around her head, the glare of the lights cruel as napalm; and yet even whited out as she was—a lesser beauty would have been a caricature of harsh lines and tiny sags—she exuded a tropical lushness; smelt, practically, of ylang-ylang or plumeria.
    A rubber band held her hair at the nape, but loosely, so that it fell in wings to her chin, and when she bent her head—so serious, so moody—over her guitar, a shadow fell across her chest. She wore bell-bottoms and a white peasant blouse. A ropy sort of belt that she had woven and then decorated with some flowered thing was tied round her waist, the ends allowed to flow at her right side. The same trim, a strip of pink flowers embroidered on a yellow background, had been sewn to the hems of her jeans.
    But the thing you noticed most was the way she clutched that guitar—like a lover; like a baby; like the thing she held dearest in the world. She was singing an Appalachian folk song, a ballad about a faithless husband and the unfortunate way he’d disappeared one day, after seeing something odd in the woods—
     
    Pearce stared at the screen. He could recall every detail of her clothing, her expression, he even knew how long her nails were (clipped short), but he couldn’t remember the words of the song. What had the husband seen in the woods? An elf or something? A dead animal? This was why it was so hard to finish things. They had to be right. He knew he couldn’t finish this piece until he had the song. He’d have to go to the library and research it. He put an asterisk on the page; it was going to take up the rest of tomorrow.
    The mood didn’t end. He didn’t have the song, but he couldn’t shake the rest of the memory. To his amazement, it was coming out against all odds.
     
    When her set was over, I found my mouth dry, my tongue stuck on the roof of my mouth, my feet paralyzed. What if she didn’t come back? What if I never saw her again?
    She came back! She did “Wildwood Flower” for an encore, and it was oddly appropriate, somehow described her. It evoked a mossy smell, a springlike scent, a mysterious waft from something ephemeral and delicate, like the thing the faithless husband had seen in the woods. Something magical, something that would escape if you blinked.
    Like her.
    I saw now that this was who she was; despite her lush appearance, her bold tropical beauty, in her soul she was a wraith; she was Rima from Green Mansions, or maybe some tiny winged creature from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. It was her voice that gave her away—so high, so clear, and pure as the heart of a nun. I knew that now she would disappear for good, and she did. A being like that does not drink in a bar.
    And yet, the next time I saw her, it was in a bar—the Dream Palace on Frenchmen Street, the kind of place you went in 1967 for an interracial kind of experience, a bohemian thrill in a safe (though often noisy) kind of way. It was a dark, ramshackle old cavern of a place, with tiny tiles on the floor and a celestial mural on the ceiling.
    She was with friends, a man and a woman, all three of them wearing jeans, the man looking like the pictures of Jesus in my Bible story books. Thinking they must need another man to join them—wishing that, actually, not thinking anything at all—I marched over as if I had all the confidence of a person on drugs (which, at that moment, I wasn’t).
    “Aren’t you Marguerite Kavanagh?” I said, for the first time thinking it odd that so exotic a being should be Irish.
    “Yes.” And she gave me a smile that said she knew what was going to come next.
    “I heard you sing. I just wanted to say…” I was losing my nerve “…I thought you were…”
    “Yes?” This time it had a teasing quality.
    I am not given to hyperbole, and, if the truth be told, I find it hard to compliment people; I’d rather not. And yet, I’d never in my life so desperately wanted to be liked.
    “You were wonderful,” I said, hoping my Adam’s apple wasn’t bobbing like a rube’s.
    “That’s very kind of you.”
    The man she was with, the Jesus impersonator, waved casually at a vacant chair. “Sit down. Join us, why don’t you?” and I glanced for a moment at Marguerite to see if she approved. I thought I saw something in her eyes, something that said she didn’t, but it looked more