Love Me by Rachel Shukert

that’s not how you play.”
    It was a good opening line, one she’d thought of beforehand, and the twinkle in Eddie’s eyes told her he knew it. “Only if you sing flat,” he said.
    He was holding in his hand a rubber ball with a kind of funnel-like spout sticking out the top. This he suddenly thrust up his nostril and squeezed, inhaling deeply.
    “Amphetamine spray. You want some?”
    “No, thank you.”
    “You sure? It opens the lungs and sinuses. Very good for singers.”
    “I’ll pass.”
    “Suit yourself.” Still squeezing the rubber ball, Eddie raked his shrewd black eyes over her, lingering, Gabby was pleased to note, on her décolletage. “Say, you look older than in your pictures.”
    “Funny,” Gabby said smartly. “I don’t remember ever seeing a picture of you at all.”
    Eddie laughed. “All right, kid. I got your number. Now, whaddya say we run through this sucker a time or two before they throw us to the lions?”
    “Oh. So now you want to rehearse.”
    “I had somewhere else I needed to be that afternoon,” Eddie retorted. “Someplace important. I don’t need to be there to run through a simple song with a girl singer.”
    “Well, this girl singer doesn’t run through so much as ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ without the bandleader.”
    Eddie gave his nose spray a thoughtful squeeze. “You know Ella Fitzgerald?”
    Gabby smiled witheringly. “Rings a bell.”
    “Well, I just played a week with her up at the Savoy in Harlem.” He smiled wistfully. “She was practicing all the time. Never joked around, never sat around with a flask drinking with the boys. You needed her, you had to go find her in a corner somewhere where she was running through scat, trying out changes, making up harmonies. Finally, I said to her, ‘Ella,’ I said, ‘you’re great. Better than great. You’re a genius and you’re going to be a big star. What do you need to practice so muchfor?’ She said to me, ‘Eddie, it doesn’t matter if I’m better than everybody else. I have to be better than
me
.’ ”
    He looked at Gabby expectantly, as though he’d just said something deeply profound. Well, she wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
    “It means if you want to be great, you
never
give up a chance to rehearse. Even if it is only with the arranger. Who happens to be the best in the business, by the way.”
    “What arranger?”
    “Dexter.” Eddie nodded toward the scarred rehearsal piano, where the man in question was softly thumping out a vamp.
    “He’s the
arranger
?” Gabby gasped, looking at the tall figure hunched over the keyboard, a pencil clamped in his mouth. His eyes were half shut, and for the tiniest moment, Gabby noticed how his long eyelashes cast little shadows on the curve of his cheek. “I thought he was a side man.”
    Eddie shrugged. “He’s both.”
    Gabby leaned forward, whispering. “And you think … you think the Biltmore is honestly going to let him play?”
    Eddie gave her a challenging look. “Only if they want the rest of us to. Now, are we going to stand here all night or are we going to run through ‘Ballin’ the Jack’?”
    Here we go
. “Oh, we can run through it if you want,” she said airily. “But we’re not going to perform it.”
    “Really.” Eddie’s tone was carefully amused, but his face was not. “Don’t tell me, you don’t deign to learn music sent over by arrangers.”
    “Please,” Gabby sneered. “I didn’t have to learn it. I knew it, just like everyone else and their mother.”
And I do mean mother
, she thought. That song had to be at least twenty yearsold. Viola knew it, for God’s sake. “But I looked at your arrangement, and I’m telling you, it’s not going to work.”
    “Is that right?” Eddie sneered right back. “Hey, Dex! C’mere for a second.”
    Reluctantly, the piano player tore himself away from the keyboard. “What is it?”
    “Little Miss Maestro here