American Music (2 page)

You dropped this, he said.

Oh thank you, she said. That was careless of me.

She took the scarf.

Pearl walked slowly toward them in the heat.

I hope I didn’t spoil your homecoming, Vivian said. Pearl insisted that I join her.

It’s nice to have a welcoming committee, he said.

Not always, she said.

She was looking right at him. He could not see through her glasses.

Yes it is, he said. Always.

They drove uptown. The air blew in the windows hot as smoke. They drove up the West Side Highway, alongside the Hudson River which shimmered white in the heat, past ferry and ship terminals and some warehouses and then out into the open where they could see New Jersey across the water green like the countryside. They passed low buildings on their right, seedy hotels and bars for sailors, cheap restaurants with a chair and table out front. Then Joe said he was sick of the water and missed the city so they turned off the highway and headed across midtown where the buildings shadowed their little vehicle like the bodies of prehistoric beasts. Up Eighth Avenue the stores were to the trade only and then he sped up Sixth where the people’s clothes got fancier and the store signs were written in elegant cursive or clean bold print. Joe drove and Pearl sat next to him and Vivian sat in the backseat with her profile cutting into the rearview mirror, a precise cameo. She answered his questions about how she was related to Pearl, on her mother’s side, where she’d grown up, in Brooklyn, where she’d been lately, to Europe. She had gone to college, on scholarship, which explained a little bit about her demeanor, so different from Pearl’s. She’d been studying art, in Italy, on a fellowship, until recently, when she’d come back. Her father was sick. For now she was living at home.

Then he realized that she barely knew Pearl. Pearl had grown up on the West Coast and had never been east until she’d met and married Joe. Vivian must have been encouraged by her parents to call Pearl. He had a vague memory of his wife mentioning family in Brooklyn, maybe they’d even visited once.

So you’re the East Coast branch of Pearl’s family, he said. The intellectuals.

And you’re the musician.

The law student. He looked at Pearl.

Yes, Pearl told me, she said. It’s nice that your music can pay for school. How often do you do that, play on ships?

A few times a year. I know a band or two that will take me when they go overseas. The money is good. But I get homesick. He reached over and took Pearl’s hand.

Of course, Vivian said.

They were driving up Central Park West now, along the park. The trees swayed and rustled like enormous skirts.

Vivian dances, Pearl said.

Not really, Vivian said. Not anymore.

Well you used to. Your mother told me that you were a wonderful dancer. She said you went to all kinds of places, jazz places, way uptown, the Savoy.

Really? Joe said.

I like that kind of music, she said quietly, still looking out the window.

So does Joe, Pearl said. He plays it beautifully.

Does he, Vivian said.

In the rearview mirror he could see the park receding, the green light of the trees, their colors, pulling away.

We should all go hear some music together, he said. Hear some music and dance.

Milo

He sat in his wheelchair in his room staring out the window. He always did that after she left. His thoughts spun around in his head, images that she had unleashed just by touching him, a string of memories, some of which were his own but most of which were not, could not be, from his life. He thought he was finally going crazy. He was surprised it had taken this long. He watched visions stream past like the radically changing scenery out the window of a swift train. He saw the green trees pulling away from him in the mirror of an old car and a profile cut like a cameo. A voice asked him when he had started to play music and he could not remember that he had ever picked up an instrument. Maybe in elementary school he had been taught the recorder, or in high school plucked a guitar for a few months. He could see that ahead of him a streetlight was changing from red to green and the sun was slicing between the buildings on his left side, where there appeared to be a river, just out of sight. He was heading up a wide street and saw the store signs jauntily bouncing past, vendors on the sidewalks, rounded cars like giant toys rolling beside him and parked at the curb but he could not remember having driven in such a city and all the places he had driven were now jumbled together in a crazy highway of his past. The street he’d grown up on, leafy and almost always empty, turned into the rolling road to Blue Hill where he’d gone to high school which became a cobbled street in Germany which merged into the dusty desert under the convoy, his mother driving him home …

Everything flew by, a freeway of memories that were his but then as quickly as they ribboned past they would change into places such as this broad city street of another era and he was saying, as clearly as he had ever said anything, that he had first picked up a trumpet when he was five. He had done no such thing. But he was saying it, saying it with the warm wind on his neck, saying it to a woman in a backseat. He had witnessed this, no, inhabited it, while lying on the table in the little room. And now it would not leave his mind.

Next he was heading past the park entirely, up a hill where the apartment houses gave way to brownstones lining the streets like gentle dogs sitting side by side and beside him in the passenger seat a woman, evidently his wife, was singing softly but he couldn’t hear the song. He was making some kind of progress toward a destination, but in this unfamiliar memory everything seemed slowed down, moving through water. It was as though the woman next to him singing, the warm wind, the profile in the rearview mirror, the houses rolling by, the wide sky turning gently silver-gray, it was as though it was all happening in real life while he himself sitting in this hospital room was only a dream, imagined by a man driving a car through Harlem on a September afternoon.

He stared out the window and it was not September. It was some other month, some other world. The room was dark now, and the lights were turning on in the hallways and soon he would not be able to see anything but his reflection. He did not look forward to that. His face was a mess. His face was a reminder. Not of ships docking or of dancing at the Savoy but of dust and sun and fire. There were no fires left in him, he thought, only the memory of fire. This was his life now: cold and unlit and lived in a small room. All that remained after the fire had burned out was this ineffective body, this savaged face. But then he remembered the stories she stirred up in him and for a moment he sensed a living heat like an ember in his chest.

He wheeled away from the window. He could not get into his bed without assistance so he sat there looking at it. It had been his bed for a while now and he had developed a fierce attachment to it that he recognized was both understandable and absurd. He had slept in many beds over the years but this was the only one for which he had ever felt an affection. It was not a nice bed. The white sheets smelled sour from detergent and the thin pillow looked up at him forlornly but he took comfort in its simplicity. He needed it. He had no stillness inside.

For example he could feel a kind of music playing quietly, endlessly, inside of him. It was the shimmering sound of cymbals. He could barely hear it but whenever he strained to listen it would fade away almost completely and only return when he wasn’t paying attention. He tried to ignore it, to trick it into turning up the volume. He used to play music in his room so loud, he remembered, stupid teenage radio music that seemed idiotic and very beautiful to him now, so loud that the windows shook.

Eventually a nurse came in and helped him into bed. He heard the distant reverberation of cymbals. He saw his bedroom from childhood, the window which looked out at the tree, his shelf of trophies with their figures suspended in action, his clothes pooled on the floor. The cymbals continued, glistening beneath his thoughts. Then he saw what he had seen just this morning with her, the wide thoroughfare, the patterned scarf, a ship. He closed his eyes and remembered what had come to him like a memory but which was not his and yet by now had truly become a part of him. He was stunned by the vividness of the sensation of driving a car and feeling the wind. He knew what it was like to lose sensation and so he appreciated and savored these feelings. That this sensitivity was all in his mind was something for which he felt deeply grateful, an astonishing accomplishment of the human brain, and for a moment it seemed as if it was all that really mattered. But then he thought about his legs and he decided that real life actually mattered very much. He remembered this and the pain in his mind was as piercing and as deep as always.

1936

They drove farther uptown. They drove through Harlem, where Vivian pointed out some of the places she knew, then up to Inwood and into the Bronx. In University Heights the apartment houses shaded the sidewalks and left the streets lurking in a blue haze at this hour. Joe suggested that they stop at one of their favorite neighborhood restaurants to celebrate his return but Pearl insisted that they go home because she’d already bought groceries for dinner. Vivian had left her bag in the apartment, having stayed over the night before, which was why she had come home with them. She said she would just run upstairs to get it and be gone. Joe and Pearl implored her to stay for dinner. She did not want to intrude. They must want some time alone, she said. She agreed to stay for a cup of coffee.

Upstairs she collected her belongings. She had stayed over because Pearl had heard from her aunt that there was no room in their house with Vivian’s father sick and the nurse and so many visitors. Pearl had offered to have Vivian stay even longer. Vivian said it was wonderful to get to know each other a little after all these years but that she really wanted to be closer to Brooklyn to be able to help her family. In the kitchen Pearl was warming coffee on the stove and setting out some cookies on a plate. There was a small table in the kitchen and four chairs. From a little window facing the Hudson the setting sun sent a lavender and yellow cast over the table, the chairs, the plate of cookies. It was a soft yet acidic light. Joe sat down at the table and took a cookie. Pearl put a thick white cup filled with coffee in front of him. He took a sip. When he looked up Vivian was standing in the doorway.

She was not wearing her sunglasses. She had pinned up her hair. In the weird lavender light she looked like a luminous marble statue. Her eyes were a shade of green that he had never seen before. She stood still in the doorway as if on the threshold of an unknown body of water. She glanced at him for an instant with a questioning look, an expression that so far he had never seen on her face. It was as though she were asking him if it was okay to come in, should she brave the water, would she be safe? He held her gaze. A strand of dark hair fell in front of the outside corner of her eye and down her cheek. Suddenly he was not afraid of anything. He looked at her for what seemed like a long time and she came over and sat down at the table.

Sipping her coffee in the now more orange-tinted light she no longer had that look on her face. She seemed indifferent: to the humble apartment, the plain kitchen, the happy couple. She sat very calmly with her delicate fingers wrapped around the cup, her thin wrist sticking out of her sleeve. But Joe felt that he had been allowed to glimpse something private and that now he understood her a little bit. She was not so composed. A pleasurable weakness swept through him. It made him feel strong. He felt as though a secret had been revealed to him and he was certain that his life would go on this way, a series of revelations. He was beginning to understand things. He felt light and clear and in control of his destiny. He thought he was becoming a man. He did not think that the green eyes and the lavender light could account for such a feeling. That was not possible.

2005

At night she reads his bones. Honor watches them as they fly toward her in the darkness, spinning, burning, aflame. They arrange themselves into letters, then words. They spell out secrets that she doesn’t want to know. As each word is extinguished, it leaves a pile of white ashes. The last word flickers, glowing, for a long time. It is Fate.

CHAPTER TWO

Milo

S
ome lives were pieced back together. Sometimes this happened in the hospital. There were veterans who played piano. There were those who watched movies. Some read books. Some told jokes. Not all of them told jokes. In the Bronx VA hospital some of those suffering from mental and nervous disorders told jokes incessantly, and some never spoke. Many of them had sustained major physical injuries as well as psychological illnesses. Milo Hatch had sustained a spinal cord injury. At the moment, he could not walk. The prognosis was not good. He exhibited symptoms of acute post-traumatic stress disorder. He had nightmares. He woke up screaming. During the day, he rarely spoke, and then only if it was a necessity. As time went by the doctors and nurses and other hospital staff members came to accept Milo’s silence and he came to know his predictable environment well enough to get along without much language. Then one day as part of his physical therapy and rehabilitation he was introduced to a person who was going to be giving him what the nurse referred to as therapeutic bodywork. A young woman walked up to him and held out her hand. He looked at her hand and it appeared to burst into flames. He looked at the hand and it was again a hand. He pushed the button on his wheelchair and speeding past her he rolled out the door and down the corridor and back to his room. The young woman with her long hair and heavy boots stood looking out the open door. The nurse in her modest uniform stared at her. In these white scrubbed rooms and clean empty hallways the nurses did not like to see outside practitioners. The woman understood the territorial expression on the nurse’s face and picked up her messenger bag and put on her long coat and said that she would try again next time.

A crisis came when the doctors told Milo that he would be required to submit to therapeutic bodywork. This meant that he would have to be alone with the woman with the fiery hands. Helplessly, he argued with the doctors. He used more words than he had since his arrival and, privately, his doctors were pleased by his sudden progress. He was escorted to the dim room with the drawn shades. A frantic desire to hide roamed his body. He didn’t know how to escape. He could never find a position on the table that was comfortable. While he fled into his fantasies the woman, whose name was Honor, stood by his body with her bottles of oils and kneaded his resistant flesh. Her hair was long and wavy and when she worked she pulled it back into a loose bun. When she was working like this she sometimes sang quietly to herself in a voice that was slightly but pleasingly off-key. Her songs were just tunes with no lyrics that she remembered from some long-ago time and faraway place.

One afternoon she began to work on the man’s hands for the first time. He kept them clenched into fists. She looked at them and asked him if he could unclench his fingers. He said nothing, but turned his head to one side in a gesture that seemed to indicate that he was trying to open them but he could not. She took a liberty and pried open the fingers of his left hand. He allowed it. When all five fingers were released she began to rub the center of his palm. There were no visions this time but a shattering pain rushed up her arm and stopped in the back of her eye. She pulled her hands off of his palm, shaking. With his right hand the same thing happened. She pulled her hands off again. She told him that they were done for the day. That was the beginning.

I can’t go.

You’ll feel better, said the nurse.

No I won’t. His head was pounding this morning. He didn’t want to see that woman. A scarf was lying at the foot of his bed.

What’s that doing there? Milo said.

What? the nurse said.

That silk scarf.

Your T-shirt, she said, picking it up.

She put it away and helped him out of bed. She wheeled him down the corridor. Of course he could wheel himself but they wanted to make sure that he arrived at his destination. He had been known to pretend to go for his session, only to be found later in the lounge watching television. This seemed more important, he would say. The nurses had a difficult time resisting his charms even though he wasn’t exactly charming. The one with the smile, they called him. He had a lopsided chipped-tooth unafraid smile. He used it sparingly. Usually he just grinned with his lips closed but it was a welcoming, dangerous grin. He was suffering, no one could forget that, and he was not immune to wanting others to suffer with him.

The harsh fluorescent lights were on in the little room. She was waiting for him. She stood with her back to the door and she was putting up her hair. When she turned around she had bobby pins in her mouth and with them still in her mouth she said, Hey. Her voice, her face, her eyes, her mouth, there was no danger in any of it. So why was he so afraid of her?

I thought you weren’t coming, she said. Like last week.

Sorry about that.

The nurse helped him onto the table. His upper body was very strong now, and Honor noticed for the first time the way he pulled himself up with his big arms.

He thinks he can get away with anything, the nurse said. Then she left the room.

Honor turned down the lights. I thought we’d try something different, she said. I brought some music.

She had set up an iPod with speakers. She turned it on.

The music started. He heard a plinking piano and a woman’s voice, raspy and clear at the same time.

Who is this?

It’s Billie Holiday, she said.

I don’t know who she is.

She’s a singer. Was. A jazz singer.

She pulled down the sheet and touched his back. He listened closely to the music. He heard the scrape of the recording and the piano like rain and the voice lifted above the music like a kite jerking and soaring above the trees. Then the voice sang something about having a man and the sound of it changed and all of a sudden it was lively but desperate at the same time. He listened to the voice and the feeling behind the voice, the drops of piano rain falling, falling, and then what went on next in his brain and his body was a kind of revolution. The light in the dim room went dark with a few sparks of fire punctuating the black and the darkness swallowed him in a rapid monstrous grip and he felt a shot of pain dissecting him from his ribs up between his eyes and all of a sudden he could see his sleeve against the sequined fabric of a woman’s dress and he heard the piano music speed up and swing and then the sound of trombones blew in and with the band came a car driving under streetlights along the park and the smell of coffee wafting from a pastry shop and he heard the plinking of the piano again it made him want to cry and there was the sound of the saxophone case clicking shut.

Is this okay? Do you want me to turn the music off?

He had twitched, or cried out, or said something.

Maybe I’ve heard this before. I didn’t think so, but … He couldn’t finish.

The streets were lit up at night and as he drove through them he saw the watercolor reds and greens wash over his hands through the windshield and he heard noises and felt feelings as if they were his memories, his feelings, but they were not and yet he knew this place, this night, and occasional sparks flew by in the black air which made no sense but which had to be accepted, as all of this had to be, the streetlights spilling a yellow-gold light, the line of cars shiny and bulked along the sidewalk, the excitement of the crowd outside, a woman’s neck turning as he stepped out of the car. The memory was like an explosion and he was inside it, living through it and it surrounded him and slowly he breathed into it and found that it made him feel safe. This was where he was headed. He was entering someplace. It seemed to be his life.

A woman’s hand slipped into his. The chips of mineral in the pavement glittered and seemed to float above the ground. The whole world glittered. It was cold out, a winter’s night. He felt the air in his lungs. The woman’s hand in his was warm. They joined the crowd on the sidewalk. They entered the throng. They stepped inside.

Milo reached for a hand and it was not there. He felt the wall and it was cold with a slight pattern of microscopic bumps. He was back in his room.

He did not remember coming back to his room or how he had gotten into bed. The nurse must have brought him. Honor usually said good-bye but maybe he had been too lost to the world to hear her. Or maybe his madness had shut her up. He was embarrassed by his crazy self. He knew he shouldn’t be, least of all around her, she seemed so understanding. But the more she understood him the more he wanted to hide. What was he hiding? And how much did she know?

They never spoke about it, his stories. She would ask him what hurt, everything, what felt better this time, nothing, why wouldn’t he let her work on his front, that was none of her fucking business only he didn’t say it quite that way she was too nice and pretty and kind. Why did he deserve such kindness? Because he was one of the losers, he guessed. No legs that were any good, no real heroics to speak of, just dumb bad luck and now these wild imagined memories like he had been implanted with someone else’s brain, real science fiction bullshit that he had never been interested in, not in his whole life. As a kid he had loved books, he still loved books, but stories of real people, or fake real people, not impossible, mystical things.

The bumps on the wall sharpened to his touch. He moved his hand and it was like touching sandpaper but worse, a thousand needles. This was the way the pain would conquer him, he thought. It would take over his body, then his mind, and then the outside world. When even Honor’s hands hurt him, that’s when it would all be over. Then it occurred to him that the story inside him was not actually painful. He felt free from pain when he was inside the story.

A black saxophone case came through the wall. It fell down on the end of his bed. It opened to reveal its gleaming instrument. Now it clicked shut again and he was holding it and he was walking with it swinging above a cobblestone street. A smell of coffee came wafting out of an Italian pastry shop.
She would have waited all day for him
. A woman’s scarf slid onto the ground and when he walked into the pastry shop the voice of Billie Holiday was singing from the radio.

1936

Joe ordered a coffee and drank it with a lot of sugar. He was standing at the counter, it was a very authentically Italian pastry shop, and then he saw in the clean curving glass over the perfectly rendered pastries the reflection of a familiar pattern. She was standing next to him. She didn’t see him and he thought he would drink his coffee and leave but then the words came out of his mouth anyway.

I recognize your scarf, he said.

She looked quickly at him, a little frightened. Then she recovered.

Not my face? she said.

That too, he said.

He went to law school in the neighborhood. Vivian was using the library nearby, researching graduate programs. Her father wanted her to get a certificate to teach. She wanted to paint, but her parents told her that that was only for rich girls. They sat at a little table on the sidewalk. They were in Greenwich Village. All kinds of people walked by. Women with artistic clothes, he thought, students, businessmen, foreigners. His saxophone case bounced against his leg as he nervously jiggled his foot. He was playing a gig tonight downtown and so he was not going straight home after his classes. He had some time. She would show him her favorite bookshop. He tossed some coins on the scuffed black table and they headed west.

The winding streets took them past shops where the awnings flapped a little in the October breeze and the lettering looked like it could have been written centuries ago. Old watches and silver trinkets on trays lined with velvet, men in aprons standing outside their stores with their hands on their hips, gloved bohemian ladies walking up steep stairs, entering arts clubs and shuttered parlors. Joe spent most of his time at the law school, not soaking up the atmosphere downtown, and now he looked around as if suddenly the wallpaper had come to life. In window boxes yellow flowers spilled overboard and fell to earth. A little cemetery waited secretly behind a wall. In back of the Jefferson Market was a garden whose tall dying blooms stuck out through the bars of a black gate. They passed restaurants that had to be entered by walking a few steps below sidewalk level. The tranquil streets were lined with row upon row of stoops leading up to town house after town house, worlds within private worlds. As they were drawn west the tree-lined passages surrendered glimpses of the river, light at the end of a tunnel. It was by the river that he had first come upon her.

He adored his wife and when he passed an antique shop and glanced in the window he thought of Pearl and what she would like as a gift. He saw diamond rings and hanging earrings and wanted to shower her with tokens of his deep, heartfelt, steadfast appreciation. He remembered the feeling of coming off of the ship and into her arms and the way she had held him with her smile. She was his shelter. He wanted to share life with her, to take her to hear the music he loved, especially Count Basie, a new bandleader out of Kansas City, whom he’d heard only on the radio. He’d seen an advertisement in the newspaper saying that Basie and his orchestra would be making their New York debut on Christmas Eve at the Roseland Ballroom. He wanted to tell Pearl about it, but he was afraid that she would disapprove. She would say that they did not have the money. She would be right. She was sensible and her maturity extended to everything she did. He felt it in the way she held him tightly when he came home. He loved the strong familiar feeling of her touch. When he pictured Pearl and himself in his mind he saw them like two carved figures clasped in an embrace. He had known her for over thirteen years. They had met when they were very young. The feeling of his holding her and of her holding him was never far from his thoughts. He could not imagine his life without Pearl. But when he thought of the two of them holding each other close, he could not fail to notice that they weren’t dancing.

Honor

You have hands like the hands of a shaman.