The Lola Quartet

by Emily St. John Mandel

“Don’t stop,” Gavin said. So Jack continued, eased back into another long loop of melody. George Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Music for a place where it was almost always summer. He knew an arrangement that kept the song looping around and around and he improvised inside it, leaving the melody and wandering away and then coming back to the tune again, and the living is easy, long and slow and meandering, soft and low under the orange tree. Jack always imagined a singer’s voice when he played this song, a woman soothing a child to sleep on a porch in the southern lands that lay north of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, a summer afternoon with the air heavy around them, a breeze through tall grass. He stopped all at once because the daydream and backyard had converged and he was momentarily disoriented, caught between the two. There was a soft wind moving through the grass around him, and the lawn hadn’t been mowed in so long that the grass rippled. Gavin was watching him with that look he always had since he’d come back from New York. Anxious, something desperate about the eyes. “That was beautiful,” Gavin said.

Again, how Mandel flits forth and back between reality and imagination...