American Music (10 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

J
oe knocked on the door. He walked in and Pearl was standing in front of the dresser facing the speckled mirror. She was looking down and so her face was absent from the reflection. She was fiddling with the clasp on her bracelet and she still hadn’t put on her makeup. She was half dressed in her slip that was already wrinkled and her filmy stockings.

Can I help you? he said.

I’m having so much trouble with this, she said, not looking up.

He came up and put his arms around her from behind and closed the clasp so quickly it seemed a kind of magic.

Thank you, she said, still not looking up.

Is everything all right?

Now she looked at him. Her eyes seemed tired and small.

I don’t know, she said. But she did know. Then she said: I’m not feeling well.

She walked over to the bed and sat down.

You seemed okay a little while ago.

I know. But I’m not now. My head hurts. Maybe it’s the flu. I’m so sorry. I know how much you were looking forward to this.

I’m sorry you’re not feeling well. He was ready. He had on a suit and his best black shoes.

Then she stood up and ran to the bathroom. He held her hair out of her face. He offered to stay home.

No, Joe, you should go. Why don’t you see if Bud will go with you? He’s on his own tonight.

It was Christmas Eve. Outside there was a deep stillness and the neighborhood felt empty. Random noises shot through the darkness up to the window from time to time, a car honk, a child’s voice, suddenly piercing the blanket of quiet.

I can’t leave you home like this.

You can’t stay with me either. You’ll be miserable. You’ll make me miserable, she said, smiling. She was still in her slip with her bracelet still on and it rattled against the kettle when she poured water to make tea.

Go, she said. I wouldn’t feel right if you stayed. And when you come back you can tell me all about it.

When he called Vivian’s house her mother answered and she sounded weary and then surprised and delighted as if this would be the most exciting event of her evening. He was after all a distant relative by marriage and she was always happy to hear from family. He heard her call Vivian and he could imagine the dim rooms with dark rugs and the carved old-world furniture. He could see Vivian reading next to a lamp. She would be surprised to hear from him. She would think he had gone out for the holiday evening with Pearl. She had known about the plan and she had also asked him not to call so often. They had tried to stay away. She had said she didn’t want to see him if he couldn’t tell Pearl and so far he hadn’t. He couldn’t. He had tried once or twice but the words were trapped in his head like dice in a cup and the hand wouldn’t come off the top. But tonight he felt sure Vivian loved him. He could see her look up from her reading and hear his name and without thinking her body would bring her to him. He pictured her as she contained her pleasure. He saw her mother handing her the telephone. He pictured her mother walking off down a dim hall. He pictured the old man lying under heavy sheets in the bedroom, his vibrancy turned in on itself and his stillness a kind of ancient unwavering judgment. For a moment Joe felt afraid. And then it passed.

On Broadway a row of buildings that sat low and drab during the day were lit up like demented birthday cakes at night. The signs on the roofs blared with red and white and the words in gigantic black letters or scripted in flowing light spelled out the names of bandleaders or movie stars and biggest of all were the names of the places themselves like billboards for imaginary worlds. Loew’s Mayfair, Lindy’s restaurant, the Paradise, the Strand, the Winter Garden, the Rivoli, Casa Manana. The Cotton Club, the Brass Rail, the Roxy, the Capitol, the Continental, and Roseland. Just a few blocks up at Fifty-sixth Street stood the Broadway Tabernacle. It had been a theater but was now a church. Vivian was waiting for Joe on the sidewalk. The specks of metal in the pavement lifted up and seemed to glitter in midair. Everything glittered.

It was more beautiful than he had expected. A universe with the rules suspended, made for dancing, the music blowing through the crowded lobby. He helped her with her coat and handed it over the little table to the hat-check girl and took the small piece of painted wood with the black numbers on it that she handed to him. He felt the smooth wood between his fingers and pushed it in his pocket. He fumbled in his jacket for the tickets. He was holding the two tickets in his slightly trembling hand pressing forward with the crowd to get inside when he thought he saw someone he knew from law school who would know Pearl and he turned his head suddenly very close to Vivian’s and told her she looked beautiful and handed the tickets to the ticket taker whose foot was tapping a beat against the floor.

A half hour later a horn sounded from backstage to signal that the main act would be coming soon. They had been listening to the opening band and were still waiting. Because it was Christmas Eve some revelers wore Santa hats or had brought bells to jingle and now they filled the silence between the orchestras with laughing and occasional jingling, a plaintive jubilance, a maudlin symphony. Joe and Vivian did not have bells and were not wearing hats and they stood amidst the revelers and then they snaked their way through the crowd and stood off to the side. He held her in his arms in a dark corner of the ballroom. Is this okay? he said.

She looked up at him and two streams of light seemed to rise toward him from her eyes. He reached for the wall next to her head with his hand. Above her right eye there was a lifting of the lashes and the brow that gave her a questioning, needing expression. In the left eye there was only a green spun with blue and yellow. Nothing wondering there. The calm poise of the left eye made it hard to distinguish the longing in the right eye and for a moment it made him distrust his instinct that she loved him. But it was too late to change anything. He put both his hands against the wall and began to kiss her. She kissed him back.

Suddenly, he heard the cover of the piano keys lift up across the room above the now dwindling sound of the bells and the muted brush of heels on the dance floor. He turned his head to look toward the stage and her lips grazed his cheek. There was no one there yet. Just a body gliding offstage behind the curtain, someone setting up. He turned back and kissed her again. Then the lights dimmed. His heart was beating in his head and her lips felt raw. He took her hand and pulled her back onto the dance floor.

She let him lead her back among the crowd and followed close. Outside somewhere in the streets beyond Roseland a siren wailed. A drunk cried out in the illuminated night. Joe realized that he could not have heard these things unless the ballroom had gone completely silent. He opened his hand slowly against her back and felt her shoulder blade slide beneath his touch. She leaned closer and her skin moved under his hand. Her dress was cut low in back and he felt her smoothness. He pulled her closer and gripped her dress. The lights changed again. Joe watched the spotlights turn on with his eyes ablaze. When they had turned on fully he suddenly saw the band enter from the side and take the stage. He saw the night unfold slowly before him. The gleam of the instruments shining in his eyes. The Count’s raised arm slightly tilted toward the band. The fingers slightly touching in a snap held motionless in the air and the band’s brass flung upward against the satin backdrop. The fingers snapped and from every corner the room swung.

Joe pulled her closer into an embrace and they began to dance. He thought the swinging would subside but the band would not let go of it and they whirled him with it again and again. She fell into him fending away the sounds but the music blared and he saw her truly scared for the first time her head leaning into him seeking him out like something rushing away from a fire. He held on to her and the floor seemed to be spinning underneath them. In a second of calm he brushed the hair from her eyes and took her face in his hands and he kissed her on the forehead. She seemed surprised. She was trying to hang on to him.

The next thing Joe knew he was leading her off the dance floor. She was back against the wall. He stepped forward toward her, pressing her, and although they weren’t dancing they were still spinning. They were in the dark. There was no light here. She moved her head to the side trying to get away. She gripped his forearm as if to push him off her but he held it firm. She tried again to move her head away but he was coming closer. He could smell her. She was wearing a sweet languorous foreign perfume. She closed her eyes and leaned her head finally against the wall. Joe dropped his hands on either side of her ribs and he stared through the darkness into what he could see of her eyes. She didn’t say anything. He leaned into her against the wall and ran his tongue along the corner of her mouth. He pressed against her and his legs wanted to bend crookedly to the floor and collapse but somehow he held them straight. The music had swung them here and it went on blithely swinging and it occurred to him that this happy romantic rhythm would kill them both. The lights changed again and he could see her eyes.

We should stop, Joe, she said.

We should go someplace else. I know where.

And they left Roseland.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

I
t happens every night: the sound of cymbals reminds him that it is impossible to keep time.

The Count and the reflections of the Count on the instruments sway slightly when he lifts his hand. He turns in time to the beat and his image dances along the line of brass, so that although he is gracefully and confidently conducting his orchestra, he appears to be imprisoned inside the music.

He nods his head. The room swings.

Usually, his band is vibrant and unafraid, but tonight they are overtired and underrehearsed. He hears the inevitable imperfection in their playing almost as soon as they take the stage. A subtle shift in tempo, an awkward note. When the illusion that his ensemble operates as a single consciousness is broken, he feels a sadness that verges on desperation, a deep disappointment with humanity. But then as quickly as the trombones swerve direction or the trumpets lunge, he forgets his philosophical troubles.

His mind itself swings. Like a screen door his mother used to say. Like long hair on a lazy girl.

He is a perfectionist in his head but a pragmatist at heart. He has them, for a moment he holds them in his spell. He feels the room lighten, as if the people on the dance floor had levitated to the height of the chandeliers, bubbles in a glass of champagne. He has them and he feels that as long as there is music playing, it is possible to forgive the world.

It is 1936. There is much to forgive. But he is lucky, he is making his New York debut on Christmas Eve at the Roseland Ballroom.

Just then, as suddenly as he recaptures the flow, the band loses it, and he is thrown back to the beginning. He knows now that they will have a rough night. There are critics here. The reviews will be mediocre.

He notices a beautiful face in the crowd. A dangerous face. There is always one of those.

But by the time the articles go to press, he won’t care about the critics. He will have ridden the crashing waves of cymbals a thousand times, and he will have lost himself over and over again, perspiring so much that it will feel as if he had literally been tossed around in the ocean. And then, finally, he will have found a kind of safety. A safety in loss, a safety in losing. Losing control and keeping it, the essential mystery of swing.

The face dissolves and resurrects itself behind a column. There is a body, too. Always one of those.

•

Years later, he will remember this night not as a fiasco of missed opportunity or an evening of more than minor humiliation, but as one of the highlights of what will become an illustrious, a shimmering career. He will close his eyes and see a man’s hand pressed flat against a woman’s shoulder, guiding her to the dance floor. He will roll his eyes backwards and recall the insinuating angle of a cigarette. A necklace splintering light like the eyes of a madman. A river of bodies, gliding noiselessly through time.

He will remember the moments when his orchestra seemed to conjure itself, when it achieved the purity of a single mind. A mind in which many different voices conversed, argued, flirted, seduced, philosophized, all within the limits of one being. He will remember the drums, he will never forget the drums, and he will remember the faces, the unconditional love he felt for those faces. He will not remember the uneasy feeling of failure, the brush with oblivion, the premonition of unrequited life. He will only remember the memory.

Later, when they ask him about that first night at Roseland, he will lean back and he will close his eyes and he will say:

You should have seen us. You should have been there.

Joe

He took her to the apartment of a drummer he knew, someone who wouldn’t be home. He remembered where he kept the key. It was in a planter in the hallway. A dying plant opposite the elevator. His friend would be traveling. The apartment was dark and empty.

She said she didn’t believe that he would ever leave Pearl. He said he would. It would be very difficult, but he would. She said that tonight she would believe him. He said that he would take care of her. He said that she could trust him.

They were lying on the floor. She wouldn’t go into the bedroom. The light of a December morning came up cold and very white and her skin looked almost silver.

Later, she said: I didn’t think that the band was all that great.

Her head was resting on his chest and he looked down at her and smiled.

You’re impossible, he said.

No really, she said. They sounded off of their game.

I don’t know. I thought they were good, he said. But I might have been distracted.

Milo

One day Honor realized that he would not always need to live in this place, that he was getting better, that she had helped him. She took comfort in the fact that even when he seemed to be guiding her through the past, she must have been doing something to help him move toward the future.

Still, although he could walk again, Milo would never lie on his back. He would not give up his secret. Stories yes, but never his secret.

Tell me what happened, she said.

It’s just another story, he said.

It’s not just a story, she said. It’s you.