Free The Fires by Alan Cheuse

beginning.) I had met a lot of musicians, because of my work, and I’d even slept with one or two (well, maybe just one, a thin blonde violinist for a visiting orchestra, with an outsized talent for oral sex—she should have played a wind instrument, and I forgive her for taking up a stringed instrument instead—whom, for a number of reasons, I’ve never forgotten). But with Billie, there was more than just a click, there was a bang, a crash, a thunderclap!
    â€œMan,” she said to me in the middle of the night after her concert, “I may be just a kid but I’ve gigged around a lot and I’ve got to tell you that I’ve never felt this great before!”
    Billie, so cool a stylist that a small industry of critics has flourished trying to get to the icy heart of her work, and in bed, at least with me back then, she was a buttercup, a reed in the wind, a lost little girl.
    How to explain her origins! Her father was a philosophy professor at the New School of Social Research in New York City
and her mother a well-known criminal defense lawyer. Billie went to the Dalton School and grew up in the whiter-than-white section of Park Avenue (except for the Jews like her own family). Maybe it was the criminal part of her mother’s work that spoke to her, because as soon as she could hum a tune she was singing, and as soon as she was singing she was scat-singing, and as soon as she was scat-singing she was transforming an expensive education in classical piano into a darting, fly-by-night, hit and fade away jazz style that took everyone by surprise. Professor Hans Epstein, and Joanna Epstein, Esq., I forgive them both. (Though they have been so formal in their communications with me since Billie’s death that I almost shouldn’t.)
    So, Erna, here we are at the ceremony, Ceely all busted up, and Charmaine pissed off, and though I understood completely Billie’s final wishes for the cremation (which consisted of some Bud Powell and then some Monk and then some Bill Evans playing over the badly maintained loudspeaker while her body was rolled into the flames) it didn’t give any of us much room for what is so fashionably these days called “closure.”
    Ceely went back to school, I returned to a project that included constructing the sound system for a major new West Coast concert hall, and Charmaine, who had never closed her doors, kept on selling to the fashion-deprived of northwest Washington.
    Things simmered down. Or seemed to.
    Until about a month later when I was standing at the window of my Seattle hotel room enjoying the silence after a day of sound, sound, and more sound, staring mindlessly at the monumental slopes of Mount Ranier as they caught the slanting rays of the departing sun, and someone knocked at my door.

    Well, not just someone. It was the blonde violinist.
    â€œWhat are you doing here?” I said, just that brusquely. Not a hello. Not a how surprised I am to see you, and pleased, after all these years.
    Just—“What are you doing here?”
    My brusqueness didn’t faze her at all.
    â€œI’m the concertmaster and I asked about the sound.”
    Well, she made sounds, I made sounds, and given what I know about the acoustics of these modern high-rise hotels, I worried that we might be doing some damage to the sleep of others. I didn’t think much about the damage I was doing to myself.
    A week later, I arrived home, my work completed, and my bags full of remorse. There was a note on the dining room table saying that the dean of Ceely’s college had called—yes, I forgive her—and asked to speak to me at once.
    â€œShe didn’t say why?” I was a bit agitated when Charmaine got home and I asked about her conversation with the dean.
    â€œI told her I was the wicked step-mother,” Charmaine said, “and that she could tell me everything. She chose not to.”
    â€œBecause you inspired such