Read Online Orfe by Cynthia Voigt - Free Book Online

of their own. In fact, Raygrace and Willie Grace already shared an apartment by then. “Not the bed, though. This isn’t a relationship,” Willie Grace told us.
    â€œNot that I’d mind,” Raygrace said.
    â€œI’d mind,” she told him. “It’d be onething then another with you. I know your type, you’d start in on me about making commitments.”
    â€œYou’re already committed,” Raygrace told her. “You just won’t admit it.”
    â€œThe way men,” Willie Grace said, “work women over, jerk them around.”
    â€œDepends on how you look at it,” Grace Phildon joined in. “I got Cass out of the deal, and he didn’t get much of anything.”
    â€œOnly just exactly what he was looking for,” Willie Grace said.
    â€œBut, honey, the point is, he wasn’t looking for much of anything. He could of had himself a whole lot, but he didn’t even know.”
    â€œWhat whole lot?”
    â€œWhy, me.”
    Orfe never said much, just sat listening. Her fingers fiddled around on the guitar. Her face was pale, her movements slower, clumsier; I thought she was burning herself out somehow, maybe in bed with Yuri, maybe she had some part-time job she hadn’t told the rest of us about.
    I was wrong about Orfe, though. She was writing music, writing songs. She wasn’t burning herself out or burning herself up—she was on fire.
    There were two kinds of music she waswriting, both of them for the group but only one for immediate performance. She called the performance songs her fossil-fuel numbers, because they were the band’s economic underpinnings. The band played them at the dances they were hired for by various organizations—fraternities, sororities, local clubs—or at private parties. Some of those songs had words, and after a while some of the dance-goers had come back frequently enough to sing along, but it was mostly foot-lifting, hip-hinging, arm-pulling music, for dancing. As long as the music played, all you wanted to do was dance, and you danced better than you ever had. Not everyone, of course; there is always someone to complain. Boys who hoped to get laid, after the music stopped but before it left the bloodstream, complained that it went on too long; faculty advisors complained that it went on too loud; girls who hoped to fall in love behind the seductive veil of music complained that it took too much of everyone’s attention.
    The other music Orfe was working on . . . That, she finally allowed the band to try out. It was songs, songs for concert performance. Orfe gave the Graces the music and they all worked out the arrangements. Oneday, at one dance, when they played the first of these songs—
    â€”the dancers stopped and turned to the stage, caught. The dancers crowded up as close to the stage as they could get. The dancers swayed to the music, swayed toward the stage. Yuri’s Dreams, Orfe called the new songs.
    After that, dances the group played were also concerts. And concerts were also dances. There was no either/or, no playing either a concert or a dance, there was only playing. Orfe and the Graces moved out of a world of either/or. Orfe and the Graces played music.
    They played in a hall of some kind, as a rule, an open hall or gymnasium, somewhere roomy enough for an elevated stage to be put up, with space for dancing. Job offers came in almost daily, until I was turning down work without a second thought—if the space wasn’t right, the time wasn’t right, the money wasn’t right, or if any one of us for some reason took against the way the job was offered or the persons who offered it. The band was performing four or five times a week and could have performed seven nights and two afternoons, regularly. After one gymnasium gig a man in a gray silk suit approached me, hishand held out not for me to shake but to give me his business card.
    I put down