He looked down at his watch. “Almost time. If he starts on time.”

Grant leaned into him. “Did you really not want to come tonight?”

“No, it’s fine.”

Neither of them could think of what to say. So they just watched the bar as it filled up. Grant looked over at Lem and they moved closer to the stage. They were two steps away from it. A thin young man came out of the crowd and onto the stage. He had an acoustic guitar in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He sat down on a stool near the edge of the stage and started fiddling around with the tuning. A few members of the audience watched him silently, Grant and Lem too. He had the cigarette in his mouth. Music was still blasting; he seemed oblivious to everything. The spotlights hit his face and there were acne scars, creases that looked fresh and old at the same time. His hair was thick and on the long side, tucked behind his ears. He almost seemed like one of them, but more so.

“Good night,” he said, and the bar got a little quieter. He stuck the burning cigarette into the upper frets of the guitar and started to play. Grant picked out the first few notes of the song from his memory and recognized it as “Son of Sam.” As Elliott Smith strummed, the ash from the cigarette stuck into the upper frets of the guitar dropped onto the floor. After awhile Grant stopped paying attention to the bar sounds, the people who kept talking or the bottles knocking together. He listened only to him. Singing and playing all alone on the stage, not needing anyone else.

Lem was pleased that the show had started and he didn’t have the exert himself trying to make conversation for awhile. He watched the fingers moving up and down on the neck of the guitar, the other fingers moving across the strings. In contrast with the thin pale frame of the body, the fingers had a strong pronounced musculature to them. Every tendon stood out like cords of rope beneath the lights which shone down on the stage. There was something about the voice that made Lem pay attention. Something that made him slightly uncomfortable. He couldn’t quite tell what it was. Elliott Smith looked down at the floor or at his hands as he played. It was like he wasn’t playing for the audience at all. It was an honest voice, that’s what it was; it wasn’t a voice that was performing anything. It was just a voice being itself.

The song ended and everyone applauded. Grant turned and smiled at Lem. He put his hands on Lem’s shoulder and then took it away and turned back to the stage as the next song began. Lem listened and drank the last of his beer very slowly, trying to stretch it out. The final swallows were warm. With his right hand he found a ledge and put down the empty bottle. I am putting down the empty bottle, he thought, and smiled at himself.

The song ended again and everyone applauded again. Elliott Smith strummed two chords back and forth and said, “This song is for Rebecca.”

Some guy in the audience shouted, “Make her sing!”

Elliott Smith kept playing and said, “I don’t know if she wants to. If she wants to that would be cool but …” He stopped strumming and ran the pick along the lower fret. “I don’t want to pressurize her. Because, you know, you can forget some words in four years.” Then he played the song.

Grant turned back to Lem and said in a very low voice, “St. Ides Heaven.”

It was not a love song, and Grant knew it. But at the same time, without knowing why, he knew that after the show when they left the bar and stood out in the cold, waiting for the bus, he knew he would turn to Lem and say, “I love you.” It would of course be the first time he had said that to Lem. And, he deduced, probably the first time Lem had ever heard it from anyone.