American Music (3 page)

What does that mean? Some kind of healer?

Something like that. I heard about it from a guy who was in Vietnam. He comes to talk to some of us. His plane went down in Laos. He lived with the Hmong. He met a shaman.

Honor was putting on her coat. He didn’t usually speak to her this much. He was still on the table. The nurse hadn’t come yet.

He told us that shamans go on journeys and speak to the dead. They meet the people, the spirits who haunt the sick. This guy said that to become shamans they usually had suffered an illness, or a traumatic injury.

She was winding her scarf around her neck.

Anything like that ever happen to you? he asked.

She kept winding her scarf.

No, she lied.

She stood there for a moment. She could still see the saxophone case. It was black leather and beat-up, with a metal lock that was slightly rusted from the ocean air. The handle was squarish with rounded corners and it fit snugly in a man’s hand. Honor lifted her messenger bag and swung it over her shoulder. She could practically feel the weight of the heavy horn in its leather case.

An autumn sunset, the boats on the river. Joe was standing next to Vivian looking out at the water. They seemed to be drawn together to the water. Her hair blew around in the wind and it looked like someone kept lifting it up and putting it back down. Her eyes squinted into the colors. She was not wearing her sunglasses. Boats rolled by. She told him about Italy and seeing the paintings there that she had always admired in books. He had been to Italy too, once, for a couple of days before his ship had sailed home, but he had not looked much at the paintings. He remembered the sound of the language. The music in the mornings of people talking in the quiet streets. The cups and plates and voices and silver clattering in the cafes.

Joe felt the thrill of talking to someone who had also traveled, who liked music, who felt deeply about places. He could tell that Vivian knew the excitement of waking up in an unknown room, of taking in the emptiness and freedom of a wind-ripped sky at sea. She also loved cities: the stink and beauty and business and nighttime of the city. And she loved music. He broached the subject of music gently, because he was afraid that they might disagree too much about it and he would be crestfallen, but he was wrong, or right to care, because they shared that too. They both loved the wild sound coming east from the Midwest, and the sultry energy of the music uptown. She did not seem like someone who would understand it; she was elegant and intellectual and intimidating. But he didn’t really seem like he would understand it either. He might have appeared too conventional, too tame. As it turned out she was not too intellectual to feel it and he was not too conventional to understand. They loved the same music in the same way: like they would die without it. Like they could die from it.

She told him about a man, a distant relation on her father’s side, whose family had made cymbals in Turkey. They were an Armenian family and now they made cymbals for the jazz drummers in New York. They had a secret formula for making cymbals that had come from their ancestor, an alchemist in Istanbul in the seventeenth century. Joe laughed and said that he didn’t believe her. She said it was true. She would take him to meet them.

Do you know the secret formula? he asked her.

Yes, she said, but I’ll never tell.

When it was time to go he walked close to her and the backs of their hands brushed. At the subway he offered to ride back to Brooklyn with her, he still had hours before he was going to play, but she said that it wasn’t necessary.

When it was time to say good-bye she looked away.

You never showed me the bookstore, he said.

No, she said. I guess I didn’t.

CHAPTER THREE

M
ilo came wheeling in wearing bloodstained boots. She wouldn’t have known it was blood but he told her.
Whose boots are they? Honor asked.

A dead man’s, he said. Actually, two dead men. Me, and the guy who saved my life.

Pearl

They were smiling in the picture in the picture frame. It sat on a little table by the sofa. Pearl looked at the smiles and saw herself years younger, her happiness captured like a butterfly pinned and resurrected under glass. Joe was smiling too and his warm eyes stared out at the simple room, the doorway to the kitchen, and her. She felt the warmth of his presence even when he was not home. Just knowing he was around and not sailing across the ocean gave her peace of mind.

She was cleaning the living room although it was not dirty. She had already shopped for groceries and washed his clothes and taken the lamp that had broken in to be fixed and gone to the butcher who was her friend, it was important to make friends with the butcher. She had carried the heavy bags up their street, Featherbed Lane. It was called Featherbed Lane because during the Revolutionary War it had been lined with featherbeds to muffle the sound of marching soldiers. She didn’t know anything about the battle, who had been fighting whom, or what they had been fighting for, but the anecdote gave a sense of history and romance to the otherwise dreary six-story building. It validated her feeling that important things would happen, were happening, for them in this apartment. Her cleaning was a kind of constant readying for this coming event. Her cleaning possessed a nearly spiritual anticipation. She had straightened up the desk in the living room where he studied for his law classes. She had stacked his books. She had put everything in its place.

The picture kept smiling. It had been taken on their wedding day, almost thirteen years ago, in the backyard of her parents’ stucco house in Los Angeles. She had met Joe in the desert. She had met him as the result of an accident. It turned out to have been, for them, a happy accident. And now that she thought about it, her whole life since seemed like a happy accident, a random occurrence. How could she have met her husband, her soul mate, in such an unexpected way if it had not been Fate? It was only a matter of time before the meaning of that fateful event would be revealed to her. She had not always felt certain about things, but she had developed over the years, perhaps out of necessity, a fierce unwavering faith in her marriage and its rightness in the world. The picture kept smiling.

1923

At night, in her tent, Pearl switched on a small electric lamp and opened a letter that she had found in her pocket earlier that evening. She lay on an army cot, not her usual bed, and stretched out her legs. There were a few bugs circling around in the glare of the light and their shadows cast enormous winged demons on the canvas sides of the tent. Pearl was not easily frightened but she would have turned off the lamp to get rid of the insects if it had not been for the letter.

Go away, she said, to the bugs, to the shadows, to the empty tent.

The letter was addressed to “The Wardrobe Girl.” There was no postmark—it had been slipped into her pocket like a reverse theft—and the handwriting was firm and clear, with a slight leftward slant. It was dated June 5, 1923.

Dear Miss Wardrobe Girl
,

    You probably have no notion of my existence, but I see you every day. And you see me. I am one of the Israelites
.

I believe you took some notice of me yesterday when
you handed me my loincloth. I have green eyes. Forgive me if I am mistaken. And please forgive my forwardness
.

I long to speak to you. Will you meet me outside the gates of the city tomorrow morning at sunrise? I know you must wake up early, as we all do
.

With Anticipation and Respect,
Solomon Eckstein

Pearl was eighteen years old and had never been in love. She’d had a sweetheart, a young man from the neighborhood who had an instinctive gift for the piano, but he didn’t support her desire to have a career, and so they had parted ways amicably when he left for college and she went on to finish high school and follow her dream. She felt some sadness about the boy from time to time, when she sat alone in her parents’ yellow kitchen late at night or when she saw a mother and child holding hands and felt a strange shiver of disappointment pressing against her ribs.

Mostly, however, she was too busy with work to think about men, and if she’d really thought about it she would have said that anyway she adored her job. This was accurate, but what she later came to realize was that she had gravitated to the line of work she was in, in large part because it continually held forth the promise of true love.

She walked to the gates at dawn. She passed rows of tents, storerooms, two huge mess tents, and an emergency hospital. Children were heading toward the large school tent. To the north, under a still twinkling sky, trainers and herders were starting their day of tending to more than two thousand animals. The entire city was waking up, and Pearl felt the military purposefulness of people gathered for a common goal. As the last shreds of night were brushed away and a pink light lifted over the desert in waves, she breathed in deeply and stepped under the three-hundred-foot-high gate of the temple of Ramses II.

When she emerged, it occurred to her that she had no idea who she was waiting for. She had tried to remember a face with green eyes, but she had no memory of one. She stood in front of the exterior of the massive gate, which was sculpted with seated Egyptians and large horses and faintly anachronistic-looking wheels. Ahead of her stretched an enormous avenue of sand lined with twenty-four sphinxes. She looked tiny standing before the gate, like a plastic figurine from an aquarium or a dollhouse tossed onto a piece of human-sized furniture. It was cold. The sand began to blow around, covering her shoelaces and collecting in the folds of her socks and skirt and wool coat. She wore a pale blue scarf around her neck and now she took it off and tied it around her head. She felt ridiculous, but after a while she lost herself in the majesty of the double row of sphinxes, and beyond them, the distant unfixable line of the sea.

A man approached her. She didn’t recognize him, but she was not disappointed. He was tall and wide-shouldered, with dark wavy hair. He was squinting against the blowing sand.

Mr. Eckstein? Pearl said.

No, no, he said quickly. I’m his friend. I met him on the train out here. My name is Joe. He held out his hand and they shook hands.

I don’t understand, she said.

Solomon couldn’t come. He’s been injured. He was helping overnight with the animals and something happened. Something with a horse. He was thrown.

Will he be all right? Pearl asked, finding herself deeply concerned about this man she didn’t remember.

I don’t know.

Pearl followed the stranger, without thinking about it, she later realized, to the emergency hospital. On the way, Joe explained that Solomon had told him at dinner the night before about the letter and the plan to meet in front of the gate, and that when Joe had heard of the accident he thought it was only decent to find her, The Wardrobe Girl, and tell her what had happened. He said all this while rushing through the men’s half of the camp, nervously pulling her by the hand. The men’s and women’s camps were strictly separated because Mr. DeMille wanted absolutely no hanky-panky. There was even what was referred to as a Sex Squad on the location to scour the moonlit beaches at night. Mr. DeMille had seen affairs on set cause too many problems and he could not afford to have anything go wrong. Even the extras knew how far over budget this ambitious and difficult project was going, and rumors flew through the mess tent every night at dinner. It was said that just yesterday Mr. DeMille had been heard screaming into the telephone at one of the producers: “What do you think I’m making? ‘The Five Commandments’?”

Solomon was asleep in the infirmary. Joe told the nurses that Pearl was Mr. Eckstein’s beloved sister and so they let her in; skeptically, however, because Pearl did not look a thing like her brother. Solomon Eckstein was one of 225 Orthodox Jews that DeMille had insisted on casting for his epic. Advertisements had appeared in the daily press and a booth was set up in a vacant lot at the edge of downtown Los Angeles. In grave opposition to his parents’ wishes, Solomon had eagerly applied for the job. He had always dreamt of being in pictures. Even if it meant becoming one of Pharaoh’s slaves. Even if it meant shivering in the windy desert wearing nothing but a loincloth. Even if it meant being sprayed daily with gallons of glycerine to make it appear as if the Israelites were sweating. Each morning he submitted to being stripped and covered from head to foot in special oils which gave him the appearance of being almost black with sunburn.

And now here he was, passed out from a concussion. Pearl sat with him for over an hour, her hand resting on his. She talked to him about the infirmary. She told him that the nurses were taking good care of him. She brushed the hair out of his face.

That night, she went to hear Joe play saxophone with the thirty-piece Palm Court Orchestra of the Ritz-Carlton in New York. The band had been brought to the desert by DeMille for the purpose of inspiring the Israelites and the charioted army of Egypt during the Exodus. When it came time for the actual chase, a span of black thoroughbreds imported from Kansas City stampeded from the rear. Riderless horses headed for the band, which went on playing in evening dress until the moment they were ambushed, leaving broken instruments and shredded tuxedos scattered across the dunes. Sand swirled in the wreckage. Joe was unscathed, but Pearl always wondered if the same horse that had thrown Solomon had led the stampede. She never did get to see those green eyes.

Honor

You’re scaring me with those boots, she said.

He was wearing them every day now.

They’re just boots, Milo said.

Bloodstained boots, you said. The boots of a dead man. Two dead men.

He paused a moment.

I don’t believe you’re scared of anything, he said.

Honor was turning off the lights. She stopped, her hand on the switch.

What makes you say that?

Because you don’t flinch.

What are you talking about?

You know what I’m talking about.

She didn’t say anything.

Are you going to make me say it?

She couldn’t say anything.

His hands were clenched now. His eyes were shut.

No, she said. No I’m not.

She turned off the light.

1923

Joe was able to visit her by night. In the evenings, the school was converted into a location for vaudeville acts and jazz and after he finished his last set, he would pack up his saxophone and walk with Pearl down the avenue of sphinxes, or along the well-patrolled but not completely policed beach. The moon was slender and shrouded in fog. They held hands in the darkness. They watched the black celluloid ripplings of the nearly invisible ocean. Joe pulled Pearl close to him to keep her warm.

In her tent, he scolded her for going to meet Solomon. What was she doing, he said, waiting at sunrise for a man she didn’t know? He might have been dangerous.

If I hadn’t gone to meet that man, she reminded him, I would never have met you.

After the parting of the Red Sea, during which Pearl had followed Mr. DeMille’s strict instructions and rushed headlong into the waves with hundreds of others in order to retrieve seaweed and spread it around on dry sand so that it would look as if the ocean had just separated, Pearl agreed to go to New York with Joe. They stopped briefly in Los Angeles to tell her parents, who were relieved at the thought of their daughter settling down and getting out of the picture business, and who arranged the wedding quickly and modestly. They had a small house in a flat part of the city. The reception was held in their minuscule yard. Pearl later remembered her wedding day as the image of a palm shadow on a tablecloth. The image was captured for eternity in the background of the picture in her living room. Their honeymoon was a ride on a comfortable train east. By the time
The Ten Commandments
opened at the George M. Cohan theater in New York that December, Pearl could navigate her new city like a native, and she and Joe were expecting their first child.

•

The doctors didn’t have any answers, he said.

What? Honor said.

Milo’s eyes were closed. He had a look on his face, even with his eyes closed, like he was trying to remain calm, as though he were keeping some great pain at bay. It reminded her of an animal working away at a wound with a perfectly composed expression.

They never figured out what was wrong, he said.

The doctors here? What are you talking about?

Every year for five years Pearl lost a baby.

Honor stopped asking questions.

I’m sorry, she said.

There was always a lot of blood.

I’m very sorry, she said.

He was still talking with his eyes closed. Now it was like a statue talking, or a ghost.

We wanted a child so much, he said. It was hard to see her sad. She was very brave.

Very brave, Honor said.

You have to understand, he said, there was a lot of blood.

Then his face twisted into a horrible mask, like one of those monstrous inflatable Halloween masks, and then as if someone had pulled a string, the face folded and slowly collapsed into itself like some airless and decomposing plant.

I understand, she said.

She couldn’t tell him that she didn’t understand. That she wanted desperately to know if his pain was for the story he was telling her or for his own hidden story, which he wouldn’t tell her.