Diary Of A Blues Goddess

resides in south Florida, where she enjoys spending her free time with her extended “family” of friends and relatives, as well as several unruly pets. She confesses to being virtually tone-deaf, but does adore jazz music and the blues, particularly the music of Django Reinhardt.

Erica is also the author of Spanish Disco, as well as the upcoming Divas Don’t Fake It. She can be reached at her Web site, www.ericaorloff.com.

Diary of a Blues Goddess

Erica Orloff

www.millsandboon.co.uk

Dedicated to my father, Walter Orloff,

who taught me about jazz

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I’d like to, first and foremost, thank my father, Walter Orloff, who provided advice, ideas and historical background about jazz and the blues. As far as I am concerned, he is the world’s greatest jazz expert, and his extensive—some would say exhaustive—record and book collection helped greatly, as did our e-mails and conversations. I’d especially like to thank him for reluctantly giving up several of his Django Reinhardt albums.

I must, as always, acknowledge my wonderful agent, Jay Poynor, who remains my greatest supporter. We talk daily, and it truly helps to know he is in my corner at all times. “Darlin’, you’re my Luv.”

Thank you to Margaret Marbury, the best editor I could imagine. When I decided to take the tone of this novel in a different direction, she was not only supportive but excited. Thank you. I look forward to our collaboration for many years to come.

What would I do without Writer’s Cramp? Pam, Gina and Jon. Thank you for giving me discipline as a writer—and wine. Let’s not forget the wine.

Thanks to my friends Pam, Nancy, Cleo and Kathy for being such totally cool women. In the immortal words of Miss Bella: “You rock.”

I acknowledge the late Viktor Frankl for giving my life philosophical meaning.

Thanks to my mother.

Whenever I felt like procrastinating on finishing this book, I called her, which was daily. And she happily obliged. But then would tell me to get back to work.

Finally, to Alexa, Nicholas and Isabella. You can’t possibly imagine what inspiration you are. To J.D., for everything. Always.

“All I know is when I sing the blues,

the notes are like tiny shards…

proclaiming how my heart is broke in a million pieces.”

—Irene “Honey” Walker

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

chapter

1

I live in a house with a dead prostitute.

More precisely, I live in a house with her spirit. At least that’s what my grandmother, Nan, thinks.

New Orleans is filled with spirits. We’re so used to them, we don’t give them a thought. Mist-filled cemeteries are tourist attractions, and houses on St. Charles have ghosts. Halloween is more important than Christmas—at least to the drag queens. Voodoo priestesses still practice their art, and superstition is interwoven through our lives as much as the bayou and crawfish.

Our house in New Orleans used to be a brothel and has been in my family since 1890. My grandmother ran the brothel briefly, until Sadie Jones was murdered over sixty years ago. A customer with an obsession for the redheaded whore with the alabaster skin and green eyes stabbed her in an upstairs bedroom. He’d been wordless, with the vacant-eyed look of a man possessed, and my grandmother has never forgiven herself for not turning him away. Another customer, a senator with a handlebar mustache, who enjoyed the brothel every Friday night, shot the murderer dead with a pistol and a single bullet as the man ran outside. My grandmother cradled Sadie’s head in her lap as the young woman took her last breath. After that, Nan closed the brothel, married my grandfather, who’d been her most faithful customer, and set about becoming one of the more colorful characters in New Orleans, a city known for colorful characters.

When I was eighteen, I came to live with my grandmother in this house with twenty bedrooms. I soon found out that the spirit of Sadie had opinions on the opposite sex. According to Nan, if she felt you were making a big mistake with a man, she would slam the door of the bedroom in which she’d been murdered. If she approved, the house was at peace.

Considering my track record over the last ten years, there’s been a whole lot of door-slamming in New Orleans.

chapter

2

“O h my God, why’d she have to die!” Dominique wailed like a Greek woman throwing herself on the casket of a loved one. “Why? Tell me why?”

“Here’s a tissue,” I said, calmly passing her one as we sat up against huge pillows, side by side on her bed. We were watching Steel Magnolias for the third time in two days, huddled beneath Dominique’s pink Laura Ashley quilt, with a bowl of popcorn swimming in a tidal pool of melted butter and a pitcher of Sex on the Beach on the nightstand—Dominique likes any drink with sex or genitals in the name.

“I don’t understand how you can just sit there, stone-faced like that, Georgia Ray Miller. It’s unnatural,” she sniffled at me.

“Dominique, you know Shelby dies in the end. You’ve known this since the first time we watched this video together in high school, and through every single solitary fucking time we’ve watched it since then. I just can’t cry anymore. I cried myself out five years ago.”

“But the cemetery scene…” She hiccuped, and with that, she started blowing her nose.

Drag queens are rarely subtle. Give Dominique a feather boa, platform shoes and a new platinum-colored wig, and watch her strut her stuff. But believe me, a drag queen with a nightclub act—and Dominique has a sellout one—doesn’t begin to hold a candle to the sight of a drag queen with a broken heart.

Dominique was actually our only lonely heart at the moment. Good thing, since she was practically a full-time job. One of the benefits of having a house with twenty bedrooms is providing refuge for the lost and lonely. Nan rarely turns anyone away. She has two rules: no weapons and no drugs. Beyond that, if someone’s a friend of mine, he or she is welcome to stay as long as necessary. Rent is minimal. And everyone contributes to meals and kitchen cleanup. We’ve had as many as six lonely hearts at one time following Mardi Gras two years ago when it seemed as if nearly everyone I knew, including myself, walked in on his or her lover in the arms of someone else. That’s Mardi Gras. Getting blind drunk, flashing your tits in the street and fucking up your life.

Dominique sighed, flinging her head against her pillow like Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. I stared at her cocoa-skin and her long jet-black lashes curled slightly and framing eyes such a dark brown you couldn’t see the pupils in the irises, just coal black. She was beautiful, her cheekbones so high they seemed to carve out cavernous hollows beneath them, like a runway model’s, her chin a dainty point with a tiny dimple in its center. She was stunning, even without her usual Velvet Mac lipstick and eyes made up like two wings of a butterfly. “I’m swearing off closeted men, Georgia. I am.” She looked at me. “And closeted white men are the worst.”

“No, married men are the worst. What am I saying? They’re all bad, Dominique. It’s men. Straight, gay… Of course, I don’t include you in that category, Dominique. You’re a woman even if…parts of you aren’t.”

“Thanks…I think.” She clutched her tissue, then dabbed her eyes. “Is my mascara running?”

“Running? Honey, you cried it off a half hour ago during the kidney transplant scene. Look, two days in bed is enough, Dominique. Come on…you’ve left Terrence before.”

“But this time there’s no going back, Georgia.”

“Don’t say that.”

She lifted her head from the pillow and shook it vigorously. “I am saying it.”

“But this moping, this…” I waved my hand at the television. “Endless watching of Julia Roberts on her deathbed…isn’t helping, Dominique. You’ve got to get back out there. You don’t see me moping around in my nightie, do you?”

She stared at me. I was wearing a Victoria’s Secret black peignoir set. “As a matter of fact, I do see you in a nightie.”

“This is sympathy nightgown wear. For movie watching. I meant that as a figure of speech. I mean, you don’t see me moaning and groaning over my love life. In a nightgown or otherwise.”

“Uh-huh.” She rolled her eyes at me. “Georgie, you are the original magnet for bad men. Might as well hang a sign on the front door. Married men and mama’s boys apply here.”

“Yes, but that was the old me. Now I have a system.”

She snorted. “System? You call what you have a system?”

She was referring to Sadie’s ghost.

“Yes, it’s a system.”

“A door slams, and you take that as a sign. Baby Girl, that’s no system. That’s plain crazy-talk.”

“Yeah, well, you just moved in. You’ll see. She’ll be slamming doors for you, too. Anyway, at least I have a system. I’m not the one who went through two boxes of tissues this afternoon.” I stared at the wastepaper basket overflowing with crumpled tissues.

“That’s the point. What don’t you understand here? This is Heartbreak 101. Steel Magnolias is our four-hankie movie. I was supposed to have a good cry. We both were. But you didn’t so much as shed a tear. You are one cold-blooded woman, Georgia Ray. Cold.” She pretended to shiver. “I might have to call you the b word.”

“I am the b word.” I stroked Dominique’s white Persian cat, Judy Garland. “Dominique, there’s nothing wrong with me. I sing at weddings every weekend, and before long, I’ll sing at the weddings of the second marriages of the very people who were so madly in love with someone else not a year or two before. If I stay in this business long enough, I’ll start singing at their third and fourth weddings.”

“Sugarplum, if you’re trying to cheer me up, you’re doing a pathetic job of it.”

“That’s what best friends are for.” I winked at her. “But it’s true. Just look at the conventions. Every weekend a new group descends on the city—dentists, insurance salesmen, stockbrokers, engineers, proctologists. I see these guys with gold wedding bands—or telltale tan lines where the wedding band should be—and I just know they’ve got a wife, 2.2 children, a dog named Spike, a picket fence and a minivan at home somewhere, yet they’re making a play for every woman at the convention—including the entertainment. It’s not a ringing endorsement of the power of love.”

“Well, I still believe in love,” Dominique said. “And even if you’re too damn cynical and stubborn to admit it, you do, too.”

Judy rolled over on her back and stretched, demanding, in her regal cat way, that I stroke her belly. This was Dominique’s second stay in our house, nicknamed the Heartbreak Hotel. Last time she went back to Terrence again, and I was pretty sure if he turned up at her show tonight with a dozen mauve roses—her favorite—she’d go back to him this time, too.

“I do not,” I said rather unconvincingly.

“Yeah right. How is it that I remain best friends with such a liar?”

“Look, you’ve got a show to think about. You’ve had your cry. Now it’s time to get out of this room and do what you do best, my dear.” I stood up and went to her trunk at the foot of the bed that was full of her stage accessories. I pulled out a purple feather boa and flung it around my neck, sending several feathers floating through the air. I sang the first line of Gloria Gaynor’s classic, “I Will Survive,” the headlining song of Dominique’s act.

“That’s my song, girlfriend.”

“Then belt it out yourself.” I spun around. “Or maybe you’ve lost your falsetto.”

She gasped as if I’d slapped her.

Never challenge a drag queen to a sing-off. Even without her wig, false eyelashes or makeup, Dominique leaped off the bed, grabbed her own feather boa from her trunk and started singing, transforming before my eyes into her stage persona.

“Get her off the stage,” I mock shouted. “She’s got five o’clock shadow.”

Dominique finally broke into a grin, revealing her dimples. “Thanks, Georgia Ray. Love you.” She hugged me, my head against her chest. “Girl, you are so cute, you’re lickable.”

“Well, I love you, too. Even if your chest does need waxing.”

She stepped back in panic. “God! I’m on in six hours. A girl’s got a lot of waxing and shaving to do.” She dashed out of the room toward the shower across the hall. Before she went in, she turned to me and blew me a kiss.

I smiled at her, then lifted Judy the cat and kissed her nose. I left Dominique’s room and went into mine and opened the French doors to my balcony. Stretching the length of my room, it has an intricate black wrought-iron railing and a chaise lounge for nights when I want to look at the moon and drink a glass of wine. From this vantage point, I have tossed down beads on the screaming crowds of Mardi Gras. But today I leaned over the railing and saw just a few clusters of tourists and a couple of college kids walking around the French Quarter; otherwise the street was surprisingly quiet. The day was stifling hot, and it was only May. New Orleans has an oppressive humidity. It contributes to the general insanity around here.

I shut the doors to keep the cool air in and went and flopped down on my bed, the goose-down comforter fluffing up on either side of me and letting me sink down into it. With the return of Dominique, the Heartbreak Hotel was officially open.

Heartbreaks seem to come in sets of three. That’s another bit of superstition from Nan. I looked up at my ceiling fan spinning slowly around and around. It wasn’t a question of when, around this place. It was just a question of who was next.

chapter

3

I didn’t have to wait long. The next morning, Jack, my band’s guitarist, arrived on my doorstep, suitcase in one hand, Fender guitar case in the other.

“It’s over,” he sighed, setting down his suitcase. “Is my old room still available?”

I rushed forward and hugged him, my hand instinctively brushing back one of his blond curls from his cheek. “You know the Heartbreak Hotel is always open,” I said, stepping aside and sweeping my arm up toward the staircase in a gesture of welcome. He hefted his suitcase again, which bulged at the seams and apparently contained everything he owned, and walked through the frosted-glass front door. Following behind him, I silently clapped my hands and shook my hips back and forth in a sort of we-hate-Sara-and-we’re-so-glad-she’s-gone dance.

“She was cheating on me,” he called over his shoulder, looking at me as he mounted the carpeted staircase. “With her cousin’s husband. And you don’t have to look so positively ecstatic that we broke up.”

“I’m not ecstatic.” I widened my brown eyes to look innocent. “Just mildly pleased,” I muttered under my breath.

He turned around as he reached the landing. “I heard that.” He faced forward and walked down the hall, continuing, “I know I was an idiot for putting up with her. I know it. But let’s leave the I-could-have-told-you-so-Jack looks alone.”

I contorted my face into my best effort at looking appropriately sad and nodded. I tried to refrain from taking the remaining stairs two at a time and skipping down the hall to his old room, two doors down from mine. He opened the door and set his suitcase and guitar on the Oriental rug one of Nan’s old lovers, the mysterious Mr. Punjab, had shipped her from India, with a letter professing his undying devotion.

I sat down on the bed, and Jack came over and sat next to me, exhaling slowly. “Just like old times. Two years ago, was it? The Mardi Gras I found Leigh in bed with her old boyfriend?”

“Yeah. That was the year we all took leave of our senses.”

“Well, I can’t say I like finding out my girlfriend was fooling around on me, but I do love this place. I was almost relieved to move out, knowing I was coming here. Knowing you were here. And Nan.”

“And Dominique.”

“She’s here? God help us all. Yes…even Dominique. Though if she comes at me with any of her mud masks or aromatherapy treatments, I’m going to lock her in the room with Sadie’s ghost.”

“She doesn’t believe in Sadie.”

“Yeah, well, wait until she’s home alone some night and hears the door slam.” Jack draped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me closer to him. “Did everyone know except me?”

“Know what?”

“Don’t play dumb with me, Georgie. About Sara.”

I shrugged. “I don’t know, Jack. You always seemed more in love with her than she was with you, but it wasn’t my place to tell you. Or any of the guys’.”

“Hey, next time…if there is a next time…I give you permission to stop me. Between you, Gary, Tony and Mike, someone in that band had better talk some sense into me. You guys are my best friends. You’re supposed to prevent me from dating women like her.”

“And what exactly is a woman like her?”

“Trouble. Two-timing trouble. I don’t know. See…I’m not even sure I can spot them when I see them. But you can. You knew. It’s that women’s intuition.”

“Women’s intuition. Bullshit. Look…she flirted with every guy in the room. But even if we had all tried to say something, it wouldn’t have mattered. People in love don’t listen—especially men. You go on autopilot. And the pilot is your penis.”

He grinned at me mischievously. “Then you better talk to Jack Junior down there and stop me from making another mistake.”

“I make it a point not to be on a first-name basis with my friends’ penises. As far as I’m concerned, Jack Junior is on his own.”

“That’s not very nice, leaving Jack Junior with no sense of direction.”

“His direction is up—and hard. Jack, you—and Jack Junior—always go for the blond-haired, blue-eyed beauty queen with ice water in her veins. Do you not see a pattern?” I shook my head. “Why is it up to me to point out your woefully bad taste in women?”

“Because I’m a man. We’re stupid. It’s a genetic failing in our chromosomes. I admit it.”

“Thank God. It’s about time.”

Jack and I have been friends ever since he joined Georgia’s Saints, our band, replacing our old guitarist, Elvis, who got into channeling “The King.” Shortly thereafter, Elvis showed up at a society wedding in a sequined polyester jumpsuit instead of the requisite tuxedo. We were sad to see Elvis head for fame and fortune in Vegas—or at least a gig singing “Love Me Tender” at this little wedding chapel. But Jack fell into a groove with us, as if he’d always been part of our group.

I flopped back on the bed. “I am sorry about Sara. I never liked her, but that doesn’t mean I’m happy that you caught the little bitch with someone else.”

He fell back next to me. “You’re practically oozing with sentimentality, Georgia.”

“Yeah. I know. It’s one of my many shortcomings.”

“I don’t know that you have as many as you think. Anyway, I figure a night blinded by tequila, a few clubs, some R and R at the Heartbreak Hotel, and I’ll be over her in no time.”

I rolled over and kissed his decidedly stubbly cheek. “That’s the spirit…. You’re face is all scratchy. You need a shower and a shave. I’m going to go take a nap before the wedding tonight.”

“Didn’t you just get up?”

“Yeah. But that means nothing to us creatures of the night.” I feigned a Transylvanian accent.

He stretched. “Sara and I fought all night long. A little shut-eye sounds good to me, too.”

I got up and walked to the door. “Sleep tight. Watch out for Sadie.”

“I’m more afraid of the wandering drag queen and her mud masks.”

Hours later, Jack frantically knocked on my door. “You ready to go?”

“Of course not.”

He opened my door, handsome in his black tux. “Jesus Christ, you’re not even dressed?”

“You know I am genetically incapable of being on time.”

That is my stock answer. I also blame it on pantyhose. And sequins. They’re a deadly combination.

Sequins are unforgiving. If you want to wear something that screams out that you’ve indulged in a chocolate binge of epic proportions, including Junior Mints, followed by a pint of Heavenly Hash ice cream, wear sequins. If you want to remind the world—no, flaunt to the world—that you use the treadmill in your bedroom as a coatrack, wear sequins. If you want proof that God in heaven, indeed, has a fucking sense of humor, then look in my closet. In the colossal cosmic joke that is my life, I wear sequins every weekend. I live in sequins.

And so there I was, in my best bra—which simply means my two cats haven’t chewed it—and a body shaper, staring at six sequined dresses like a sparkling, spangled rainbow, and dreading putting any of them on.

“Gary’s going to kill us,” Jack said, his hair still wet from the shower.

“You shaved. Very baby-faced now. Cute.”

“Sara liked that whole slightly edgy musician look, complete with perpetual five o’clock shadow, so it’s outta here. She also hated the earring—” he pointed to the small diamond stud in his left ear “—so it’s back. Now stop talking, Georgie, and start dressing.”

“I hate these dresses. Every damn one of them,” I moaned. “Sure, you all get to wear classy black tuxedos, but I have to look like a refugee from the 1970s.”

“And you would rather wear…what? Your bra onstage?”

“No. But not this.” I held up a silver-sequined gown. Being in a wedding band is like being stuck in the disco era. Think of every song you’ve ever heard by ABBA, and imagine singing them each and every weekend while grandmas and aunties, often in sequins themselves, take to the floor, usually dancing with prepubescent nephews and grandsons who roll their eyes and wish their private-junior-high hell would end. Playing conventions is worse. Imagine two thousand dentists converged on one dance floor in the grand ballroom doing the ’gator. That’s a lot of bicuspids you’re looking at. Now picture that you have no time for a personal life because you’re singing for other people’s personal lives, and you get the idea.

Georgia’s Saints is the most popular wedding band in New Orleans. We do a set of zydeco at conventions. However, most white men can’t dance, and they sure as hell can’t dance to zydeco, no matter how generic we play it, so truthfully, what we do is pretty basic, though the guys are excellent musicians and my voice can even make a ballroom full of funeral directors get up and dance. I’ve been friends with Gary, the keyboardist, since my freshman year of college, and we formed the band seven years ago while we were still in school—first for extra money, then, as we started getting booked even a year in advance, we devoted ourselves to it full-time. Gary is stuck in another dimension. He actually likes ABBA. He also likes leading the hokey-pokey, singing to grandmas in sequins and getting a room full of computer geeks from Silicon Valley to do the electric slide. He was positively giddy when the macarena craze began. Gary is balding, and probably all of five foot four, married now with three kids born in four years—like he doesn’t know what causes that?—always short on money so he accepts any job that comes our way. He’s also a great keyboardist and gifted arranger—even if what he arranges are KC and the Sunshine Band songs. I forgive him his eccentricities, like the fact that he refuses to believe disco is dead, and the hippest he gets is listening to vintage Madonna, and he forgives me mine.