Rough Mix

My name is Karla Hammond, I am forty-four years old, and for the first time in eighteen years I have nobody to answer to on a Saturday night. Well, almost nobody. Allison Carstairs is meeting me at The Drop at ten, and Allison does not tolerate tardiness.

I got divorced two years ago after eighteen years of marriage. My son left for college about a year and a half before that, which meant the house went quiet long before the marriage did. Those are two separate silences and I do not recommend stacking them. But here I was, forty-four, healthy, bored out of my mind in a quiet house, and my friend Allison had decided that what I needed was a basement club with bad parking.

"You're dressing like you're going to a parent-teacher conference," she told me over the phone that afternoon.

"I'm dressing like a grown woman," I said.

"Exactly my point."

So I changed. Not into anything wild, just something that fit better and wasn't gray. Baby steps.

* * *

The Drop sits down a short flight of stairs off a side street, which is why I walked past it twice. Inside it's all exposed brick and low light, with a small stage nobody was using and a narrow bar along the far wall. The DJ booth sits up on a riser near the dance floor, and a woman stood behind it with headphones on one ear, adjusting things with her fingers. That was Neha Phlox, though I didn't know her name yet. All I knew was that she looked serious about what she was doing, and the music was very, very good.

Allison found me before I found her. She's forty-one, divorced like me, no kids, and she has been into dance music since before I knew dance music was a thing adults were allowed to like. We met at a parenting workshop eight years ago, back when I still needed parenting advice and she just went for the coffee.

"There she is!" she yelled, which nobody could hear, and hugged me anyway.

We got drinks at the narrow bar. The bartender was fast and didn't chat, which I appreciated. Allison pulled me toward the floor and we danced for a while, and I will admit something here: I laughed. A lot. Loudly. Eighteen years of marriage to a man who shushed me in restaurants leaves a mark, and I was apparently done with that mark.

At some point we drifted over near the DJ booth, because Allison wanted to tell me things about the track. She knows things about tracks. I leaned in to hear her and I was laughing at something she said, some joke about a synthesizer that I only half understood, when I looked up and the DJ was staring at me.

Not glancing. Staring. She had pulled one headphone off her ear and everything.

I felt my face go warm. I tapped Allison's arm. "She's looking at me."

"Who, Neha? She's always looking at people."

"Not like that."

It was true. This was a look with a message in it, and the message was not friendly.

I did what any mature adult does. I moved away from the booth and stopped laughing so loud. For about ten minutes.

* * *

Neha's set ended a little after eleven. I know because I checked my phone, feeling guilty, the way a student feels in class. The room gave a general round of clapping and then the energy shifted, people heading for the bar and the bathrooms. I was standing at the bar with a fresh drink when someone came up beside me, close enough that I turned.

It was her. Up close she was shorter than she looked on the riser, dark hair pulled back, somewhere in her late thirties. Her expression was polite the way a paper cut is polite.

"Hey," she said. "Can I ask you something?"

"Sure."

"Are you the one who was laughing right next to my booth for an hour?"

There it was. I took a breath. "That would be me."

"Okay. It's just, I've spent six years building sets for this room, and what I hear from two feet away is somebody shouting over the mix. It kind of kills the point."

"I wasn't shouting over the mix," I said, which was a lie, or at least a stretch. "I was talking to my friend. It's a club. People talk in clubs."

"They dance in clubs," she said. "That's the part I care about."

"Well, forgive me for enjoying myself."

"That's not what I said and you know it." She had a slight accent I couldn't place and a way of standing very still while she argued, which was somehow more annoying than if she'd been waving her arms. "I said the laughing was loud. Right at my elbow. During the part of the set I spent the most time on."

I should have apologized. I want to be fair to myself here and say I knew that even then. Instead I heard my own voice go up a register.

"You know, if the crowd is such an inconvenience, maybe play in your living room."

Her eyebrows went up. "Okay, wow!"

"Some of us are just here to have a good time. Not everybody's a professional."

"No," she said, "you're just someone who thinks the music is furniture."

"Allison," I said, over her shoulder, "we're getting a table."

Allison appeared at my elbow with the speed of a woman who has been eavesdropping on purpose. "We are? Great. What's happening?"

"Nothing," I said. "The DJ and I were just discussing volume."

Neha looked at Allison, then back at me, and something in her jaw tightened like she was swallowing a whole additional argument. "Enjoy your table," she said, and walked off toward the booth stairs.

Allison watched her go, then turned to me with the face she makes when she has already decided something. "Karla. What did you do."

"Nothing. She started it."

"Sure she did." Allison sipped her drink. "That's Neha. She's been DJing here six years. She's kind of a big deal to about twelve people in this room."

"Wonderful. I've insulted a local treasure."

"You've insulted the resident DJ, which is worse. Amanda will hear about it."

She was right. Amanda heard about everything.

* * *

Amanda Lund owns The Drop. She was a dancer for years, toured with actual bands, and opened this place when she was forty, six years ago. She's forty-six now, built like she could still do it, and she runs the narrow bar like a captain runs a small ship. She came over while I was staring into my drink and regretting my tone.

"So," she said. "You met Neha."

"Is it that obvious?"

"Honey, the whole west wall heard you." She set a glass of water down in front of me without being asked. "For what it's worth, she's not wrong that you were loud. And you're not wrong that it's a club. Both things are true. This is why I keep the booth on a riser, to reduce diplomacy."

"I'll keep my laughing to a reasonable volume," I said. "I didn't come here to make enemies."

"Mm." Amanda looked over at the booth, where Neha was packing cables with more force than cables require. "You know what, wait here."

I did not like the sound of that. But I waited, because I was forty-four years old and had recently learned that storming off is a young person's luxury.

Amanda crossed the floor, said something to Neha I couldn't catch, and came back with Neha trailing her, arms crossed, wearing the expression of someone who has been volunteered for something.

"Okay," Amanda said, looking between us like a mother handing back a stolen toy. "Neha says her next set starts in twenty minutes. Neha, tell her what you told me."

Neha exhaled through her nose. "I said, if she's going to be in my room, she could actually listen to one set. All the way through. No talking over the quiet parts. Then she can go back to laughing."

"That's a challenge," Allison said, delighted.

"That's an insult with a schedule," I said.

"It's a compliment with a schedule," Amanda said. "Nobody makes this offer. She once asked me to eject a city councilman."

"I asked you to consider it," Neha said.

"So," Amanda said to me. "Twenty minutes. What do you say?"

I looked at Neha. She looked back, arms still crossed, chin up, absolutely certain I would fail. There was something in that certainty that got under my skin in a way I decided not to examine.

"Fine," I said. "One set. Fully listened to. And afterward, if it's good, you owe me an apology for the elbow comment."

"And if you talk through the quiet part?"

"Then I'll buy you a drink and never come back."

"Deal," she said, and stuck out her hand, and I shook it, and her grip was firm and her hand was warm, and I filed that last detail under things I would think about later.

Allison steered me to a spot near the front of the floor. "This is the best thing that's happened all month," she said.

"Drink your drink," I told her.

The lights came down a little, and Neha put her headphones back on.

I had expected to be bored. That was part of my plan, honestly. Sit through the set, nod on my way out, collect an apology, and file the whole evening under things Allison made me do. That was not what happened.

The first twenty minutes were fine. Good, even, in the way that club music is fine when you are standing still and trying to prove a point. I counted songs. I checked my phone once, around eleven forty, and then put it away because it felt like cheating. Allison danced next to me the whole time, occasionally leaning over to shout things I chose not to hear, because I had a deal to honor.

Then, around the forty-minute mark, Neha changed something.

The track she had been building slowed down. Not stopped. Slowed. The beat dropped from something bouncy into something that moved like water under ice, low and steady, and it kept pushing forward the way a long drive pushes forward. The whole floor seemed to settle into it. People who had been jumping started swaying. I felt it in my chest before I heard it with my ears, which sounds like nonsense unless it has happened to you.

And Neha changed with it. I had been half watching her the way you watch any DJ, a person at a laptop with headphones. But now I actually watched. She stood a little straighter at the booth, and her hands moved between the decks with this economy, no wasted motion, and her head bobbed slightly like she was listening to two songs at once and holding a door open between them. When the second track came in underneath the first, she faded it so slowly that I could not find the seam. I tried. I honestly stood there trying to find the place where one song ended and the other began, and I never did.

The thing is, I know what that track was about. I do not know the name and I never learned it, but I know what it was about, because it was about exactly what I had been doing for two years, which is moving without going anywhere. It had that quality. Steady, driving, going forward, and underneath it something patient and a little sad that said the road was longer than you think.

I had been divorced two years. Eighteen years married before that. My son had left for college a year and a half before the paperwork, so the house had gone quiet twice, once gradually and once all at once. I had spent the months since then doing what I was supposed to do, which was work and walk and date badly and go out with Allison and try to feel alive in places that felt like waiting rooms. And here was this woman up on a riser who had apparently taken my last two years, cut them into a loop, and put a bass line under them.

I did not talk over the quiet part. I want that stated, because I kept the deal. But I stopped counting songs. I just stood there with my drink getting warm and watched her work, and somewhere in there my hips started moving without consulting me, and Allison noticed and grinned and did not say anything, which was her single greatest act of friendship that night.

The set ended around half past midnight. The lights came up partway, the room