American Music (4 page)

Either way, she supposed it didn’t really matter. She felt the sadness in him and it hung around her shoulders and when she left he was resting and calm again and she very quietly closed the door.

At the nurses’ station they were talking about recipes and global warming. The lights were low and on a desk there were cups of soda and a sandwich. Honor recognized most of the nurses by now, some of them she had come to know a little. She looked over at them while she waited for the elevator. Then one of them said, What is it? You don’t look so good. Honor came over and sat down.

She took off her bag. Her long hair swung. Her coat grazed the linoleum floor.

He seems like he’s getting worse, she said.

They all get worse, one of them said. Then sometimes they get better. She put her cup down and turned a page of the newspaper.

I’m not sure I’m helping him.

Can’t be sure, another one said. Even if you think you are helping, it could just be God’s work.

Three of the four of them nodded.

But sometimes I think I’m even hurting him, that the work I do causes him pain.

That can happen. Nothing so bad about pain.

Honor’s eyes widened a tiny amount at this remark as she took it in. The nurse who said it glanced back down at her newspaper, with a shadow of a smile that showed that she was pleased to share some of her wisdom.

Do any of you ever see things when you take care of patients? Or hear things?

Everyone has stories.

He seems to have a lot of stories, Honor said.

She was leaning forward now, searching for help.

He’s been through a lot, one of the nurses said.

Honor leaned forward more.

Do you know what? she asked them, scanning their faces. I mean, do you know what he’s been through?

They were quiet for a moment and then one of them said:

You look like you’ve seen something.

I have.

She sat there in her coat and scarf, looking at them. She had the distant benevolent gaze of an angel in a painting. But her skin was ashen and it looked like it had been stretched across her skull. Her hair was unwashed. Her hands were bones.

Try not to let it frighten you.

Okay, she said.

You should get home and get some rest.

Okay.

One of them walked her back to the elevator and pressed the button. Honor looked at the oily smears of fingerprints on the metal plate around the buttons and thought that she might be sick. Inside while she was making the short descent, she had to sit down on the floor of the elevator so that she wouldn’t fall down.

CHAPTER FOUR

T
hey met on the steps of the Museum of Natural History. Vivian had never been there and Joe was stunned when she told him because he knew that she had grown up in New York City. I like looking at art not at animals, she had said. He had told her that these animals were works of art, or interesting specimens anyway, and it was a good place to meet. He waited in the wind. He sat down on a step. He thought she might not come. He wouldn’t blame her for not coming. He shouldn’t be there himself. He should be studying in the library. People walked up and down the steps with intention and meaning. Children ran. It was late October and the sky was darkening over the park, quickly, like a bright face turning away to show only a head of falling tresses. The orange and yellow leaves on the trees were shadowed and what had looked golden in the sun now seemed thinner and more tissue-like, papery, not as real although actually more so. He had the newspaper with him but he didn’t read it. It stuck straight up out of his jacket pocket. He decided to stand. He stretched his legs. He walked to the top of the stairs. He gazed north.

She surprised him from the other direction. She came up behind him and said his name. It sounded different when she said his name because now she knew him and he could hear it in her voice.

In the Akeley Hall of African Mammals, which had just recently opened, people stood rapt in front of the dioramas of bongos and mandrills and impalas. They peered into the meticulously reconstructed alternate worlds and seemed to be transported through space. They were still wearing their hats and gloves. Children pressed their hot faces against the glass and the guards kindly told them to step back but it was hard for the children to understand why they could not walk inside, in the wild. Joe identified with the children; he wished he could enter other worlds. Vivian stopped and dutifully admired the taxidermy and detail but she could not pretend that she felt anything. Joe looked at her while she looked at the rain forests and savannahs and he thought that it would be beautiful to see her in those locations under a real moon, a living sun. He could sense that she didn’t really care for any of it, but she was not unkind and said that he was right, it was interesting. They walked around and around the elephants.

I can picture you in any of these places, he said. India, Burma, Siam.

I’d love to go, she said. But I can’t say I feel like I’ve been there from coming here.

I can tell.

I’m sorry.

Don’t be sorry. I thought you would like it but I was wrong. I’m wrong about a lot of things.

He dug his hands into his pockets and looked down at the shiny marble floor.

Like what? she asked.

Hmm, he thought. He lifted his head and gazed up at the ceiling. When he had come up with an answer he brought his head down, quickly glanced at her with a brief smile, and then looked straight ahead.

Like how to earn a living, he said. I don’t want to be a lawyer. You know that.

But you’re being practical. That’s not wrong.

You don’t seem concerned about being practical.

That doesn’t make me right.

You seem right to me.

They had walked out of the hall and were heading down a dim corridor. She had a little bounce in her gait that he hadn’t noticed before, like a tiny dance step in between strides. It was graceful and somewhat aristocratic. Her long coat was cinched at the waist and it swayed a bit with every step.

Are you at all practical? he asked. I mean, do you worry about everyday things? You seem so calm and unconcerned.

Of course I worry. My father is at home dying.

Now it was her turn to gaze downward, at the shiny floors, the places where their feet clicked and sent out echoes.

I’m sorry. That’s very difficult. I know you worry about him. I meant little things. The details of life.

She stopped and looked at him.

There’s not much I can do about them, is there?

Her eyes were forming a question and he wanted her to ask it but she didn’t. When she started walking again she said:

You said Pearl might be joining us. Is she coming?

No, no she couldn’t.

I see.

They were entering the Hall of Asian Mammals. The hall had been open for several years and he knew it well. He had liked to come here and stroll around with Pearl. They had stopped doing it after a while because it was a place filled with children. Now he didn’t notice the children. He and Vivian stood in front of the water buffalo not looking at it.

This used to be a special place for me and Pearl.

That must be nice, to share special places.

It is. It was.

At one time he would have rattled off all of his thoughts to Pearl about the buffalo, the water, the filigreed fish he thought he could see in the stream, the pitch of the cries of the children when they stopped and laughed in front of the gorilla diorama, the tragicomic echoing sound of those cries bursting into the otherwise hushed atmosphere like sounds heard in a real forest, a real desert. But now he did not say just anything.

Is there anyone, anyone special in your life right now? He was gazing intently at the buffalo’s habitat.

That’s a hard question, she said. Yes and no.

When she said yes and no he heard yes.

Pearl and I would love to meet him, he said.

There was a stillness between them.

You know him, she said.

He understood what she meant.

In front of the Siberian tiger he took her hand. Her face was suspended in the window glass and it looked like the tiger was crying.

Honor

I’m sorry I couldn’t talk about it the other day.

Talk about what? Milo said.

Talk about this, about what happens here.

I forgive you, he said. I don’t want to talk about it either.

He clenched and unclenched his fist. Then he said: You might have heard from the people around here, I don’t really want to talk about anything.

But you talk to me.

Not much.

Sometimes in your sleep.

He twisted his head as far as he could and cocked an eyebrow at her from the table.

Is that right?

Yes, that’s right.

I thought it was all … unspoken.

Not completely.

So what do I say?

Crazy stuff. Some scary things. Some things that make no sense.

Sounds like me.

But it doesn’t sound like you. It’s your voice but it’s like you’re in character, someone else. You talk about things like you’re there. In the past.

You must think I’m a lunatic.

I don’t.

She rubbed more oil into her hands and put her fingers on his neck.

I like it, she said. I like your stories.

His head shook a little in her hands when he laughed.

Well that makes you the lunatic.

Maybe, she said.

We both are, he said.

That sounds about right.

Have you told anyone about any of this?

No, not anyone.

Don’t. They’ll either put me on a shitload more medication or they’ll say you’ve lost your mind and fire you.

You wouldn’t like that.

No, I wouldn’t like that.

Then I won’t tell anyone.

Thanks.

She had her hands on his arm.

So, no stories today? she asked.

Nope. Why don’t you tell me one? You never tell me anything about yourself.

You never ask.

That’s not true. I did once.

She thought of what she might tell him and then decided against it. They were quiet for a long time.

You know, you’re helping me, he said.

How can you tell?

Because I want to know what’s going to happen next.

I guess that’s called having something to live for, she said. I’m glad to hear it.

And she was. She was smiling.

Maybe one of these days you’ll tell me something about yourself.

Maybe, she said.

She would sit and think about whatever she had seen with him as she rode home on the subway. Sometimes she listened to her iPod while she thought. This was the time in her life when she listened to music to save herself. Her music and her soldier’s stories, they kept her from falling apart. The sounds wound around her like gauze. She’d had a friend, someone she didn’t talk to anymore, and he had given her a book by Ralph Ellison about jazz. It said: In those days, we could either live with music or die with noise, and we chose, somewhat desperately, to live.

The iPod sat in her lap. She realized that the music had stopped some time ago and that she had just been sitting with the earphones in and no sound. At her stop she got out and walked home down the uncrowded streets to her walk-up. She felt less and less as though she lived in her small apartment and more as if the hospital uptown were her home. The time between her visits to her soldier seemed as though it was not her real life. She saw other clients, worked some days in a doctor’s office, took classes, had her friends. But she found that she had to remind herself of who she was and sometimes riding on the train or walking down the street she would tell herself: You are Honor. You are twenty-one. You are not a dancer, anymore. You live alone.

The time she spent with Milo was now becoming something of its own secret. At first she told some friends about him, the mysterious soldier who wouldn’t lie on his back. But why not? they would ask. What’s wrong with him? What happened to him? Why didn’t she know? Why didn’t she ask him? Then they became bored and talked of other things. There were relationships, films, jobs, people moving in different directions, changing lives. But she was not concerned with any of those things anymore. Some of her friends were worried about her. She had changed. Was she doing okay? She said she was but really being okay or not okay was not important to her anymore. Being okay seemed like a state of mind from another life. Her old life was as insignificant to her now as a passing shadow she had stepped across yesterday, or a lost scrap of conversation overheard. She could not remember her old life. She could not think about the person she had been. She was thinking about her soldier.

There was a woman swaying underwater, her black hair wafting weightlessly like ink. The woman became a tree. The trees were moving in the darkness. It was evening when they left the museum and walked down the steps and saw the park.

They were not holding hands. They walked quietly west. Joe said he felt like he was forever walking her to the subway. Forever saying good-bye.

That’s really all we can say to each other, she said.

Don’t say that, he said.

I don’t want to be angry with you for the way things are, she said. Don’t be angry with me.

I couldn’t be.

You could, she said. But don’t be. I was just being honest.

The stately buildings along the street were turning purple now and their stoic faces gazed out gravely at the ornate hulk of the museum. They were a bastion of traditional values, of responsibility and discipline and order. They seemed to be broadcasting that it was time to go home. People should be inside now, having dinner, sitting with families. Joe hunched a little under the heavy shadows.

We have to say good-bye, she said. This really isn’t possible.

His face was right up next to hers. She was in his shadow now.

I know, he said. Then he whispered: I know. Let’s just keep saying good-bye.

CHAPTER FIVE

S
ummer came. She had first encountered Milo in late winter and now it was summer. In the stifling heat the city seemed to empty out and become desolate, then explode from the stagnating hotness and open itself up like some vulgar dying flower. On the sidewalks, garbage cooked in the cans and in the gutters. Fat water bugs cruised the pavement with abandon. People wore very few clothes. Honor opened the windows of her tiny walk-up apartment and brought out fans. The edges of the large piece of fabric thrown over the sofa rippled in the warm breeze. The Rolling Stones played in her kitchen, as they had played in her mother’s kitchen and possibly, if perhaps only by accident, in her grandmother’s. The music, overloaded with memories and associations and familiar melodies, sounded cheerfully timeless and not the least bit irreverent. The band played valiantly through the heat. It went banging on like some workhorse Dixieland band at a Fourth of July gathering on a town green.

It was, in fact, the Fourth of July. Honor whistled along to the tunes and felt oddly patriotic, as if these songs were her own private national anthem. When that was over she put on some Billie Holiday and felt more deeply connected to her country, and this time she didn’t whistle along because she didn’t want to miss hearing the words. For dinner she had prepared a traditional barbecue of wheat-free pasta and seaweed salad with a little bit of this morning’s leftover French toast for dessert. She was not really hungry. Her mother’s birthday had been July Fourth and she remembered year after year of celebratory cakes. Now she was not in touch with Anna, and so the day had a painful undercurrent of independence. But she would go up onto her roof later to watch the fireworks. They were the only part of the holiday that really interested her. She especially liked small-town fireworks, the kind that shot up only a little ways and gently drooped when they fell like handkerchiefs thrown in surrender. Big-city fireworks were staggering and awesome, but terrifying in their resemblance to real bombs bursting in air. The wheels of whirling fire setting the skyline aflame. Great explosions of unnatural red thunder. A simple constellation of white stars expanding into gigantic webbed galaxies of light.

The night air was still sweaty when she emerged from the building staircase onto the black roof. A few people were milling around, waiting for the festivities to begin, holding cups and beer bottles. She said hello but hung off to the side. She did not really know her neighbors. Then the sky lit up and the world appeared to be taking a picture of itself. There was a lengthy flash as if from an old-fashioned camera and the population stood frozen in the moment, holding their smiles, waiting for their transformation. When it was all over there was that minute of uncertainty about whether or not it was really all over and then a general agreement as to the appropriate timing and amount of applause. The night was still hot. Nothing had changed. As people filed back down the staircase Honor walked to the edge of the roof and lifted her face to the breeze. At the edge of the roof she had a quick memory of someone sitting on the edge of a roof, and then it passed. She turned her intense gaze on the dark cityscape and thought about her soldier.

Her soldier: that was how she thought about him now. Her soldier who had begun to tell her his secrets. He spoke to her through his body and she felt as though if she could piece together his stories, she could piece together the person. The person: Milo Hatch, formerly of Penobscot, Maine. Milo Hatch, who had suffered a spinal cord injury in the desert and that was all he would say about it. Milo Hatch, a handsome young man, only in this story, the story that she was receiving from him, he was not a twenty-four-year-old war veteran struggling for his sanity in the first decade of a new century, he was a young jazz musician in New York in the 1930’s who was falling in and out of love. And he was more: he was the boats on the Hudson River at sunset, the blue light of a September dusk, a black car pulling up to a gritty curb at night, a woman with ships in her eyes. He was leading her someplace, pulling her into his memories as if he were taking her by the hand. Her hands on him. His stories moving through her. She didn’t care if none of it seemed possible. It wasn’t possible, but it was true.

Do you think he really loves her?

Who?

Joe.

I don’t know, Milo said. What do you think?

His eyes were closed. She was working on his hand. He opened his eyes and looked up at her from his most peripheral vision. They were a soft shade of slate blue with flecks of yellow. His hair, she had never really noticed his hair before, it was brown and fell over his eyes when he looked downward. She felt grateful that he had taken her question seriously. She had been afraid to ask. She had told herself that she would not be the one to talk about it first but she had gone ahead and asked him anyway. He was looking at her, waiting for her, and she could not keep silent.

Honor said: I think he loves them both.

1969

One day the story changed. It could happen that way, just like life. There was a new character, a new era, the passage of time. There was the smiling picture from Pearl’s living room but now the picture was in a different room, lying face up on top of a pile of papers and pictures and books. The frame was tarnished. The pile was too high, nearly teetering, and it sat under a desk shoved out of the way, one of those piles nobody wants to claim. On the desk were spread out contact sheets of black and white photographs and Kodachrome slides scattered like shells on a beach. Across the room a larger desk sat also covered with photographs and cameras and rolls of film in their canisters. The room turned out to be most of an entire apartment, a tiny one-bedroom in a brownstone. An ornate marble mantel at one end, two extravagant windows overlooking a city garden, a kitchenette tucked into the corner. Off the main room a small bedroom big enough for only a bed. A flowered sheet tacked up as a curtain. It felt like an office and it was a studio of a sort but you could also sense that someone lived there: the dirty dish on the table, the glass of water left on the mantel, a dress sprawled across the white foam of unmade sheets.

A door closed. You couldn’t really see the woman but she walked quickly downstairs four steep flights and opened the front door—the sun came breaking in and then she emerged into the street like an actress stepping onstage. The bustle of commerce and society traipsed past as if it had been choreographed for her this sunny morning in May. The woman was in her fifties but looked younger, attractive, independent, you could tell from her determined posture and no wedding ring. She wore a dress but you could also tell that that was because she was going someplace important not because she wore a dress every day. Her hair was dark brown nearly black and she’d had it done and it fell smoothly nearly to her shoulders and she wore a headband because people did at the time, even older women. She carried a pocketbook with a small handle. Across the street from her stood a young woman perhaps in her early thirties who appeared to be watching the woman coming out of the brownstone. The older woman did not notice the younger woman. The older woman looked at her watch and walked toward the bus stop.

She waited for the bus. The bus stop was in front of a cake shop called the Jon Vie Bakery and she looked in the window of the shop at the cakes. There was a cake on display that looked like a doll wearing an enormous skirt. There was a real doll at the center of the cake sticking up from it and then the skirt was baked all around her in a dome shape. From time to time little girls would be drawn to the window and would pull their mothers over and point out the cake. The woman with the pocketbook smiled at the mothers in acknowledgment of the little girls’ joy. The little girls’ shadows fanned out on the sidewalk and bent up the side of the bakery and stopped where the window began. Real life stopped where the window began. The woman tilted her head and took it all in and saw the angle at which the girls pulled on their mothers’ arms and how the shapes of the girls’ hands echoed the shapes of the cookies in the display next to the cake and how the black shadows bending up toward the shop looked like broken people trying to climb inside. She tilted her head the other way and studied the pull of the girls’ hands on the mothers’ arms as they tried to draw them into the bakery and then the gravity of the mothers’ strength as they directed the girls back down the street and into their day. The lines of the arms were interesting to the woman. They formed odd intersections and awkward angles.

Her bus came. It moved stealthily up Sixth Avenue like some slow methodical beast. She enjoyed watching the people arrive and depart and she furrowed her pretty brow and screwed up her expression as she took in everything about them: flat shoes, high boots, narrow pants that had come into fashion, thin ties that were last year’s style, but more than clothes she observed the physical interactions between the people, the way a woman leaned forward toward a man who hung back, the tilt of a head as it responded to a question. Most of all she watched the children. Their feet dangled from the bus seats like branches waving above a pond, seeming to reach downward but then kicked back and forth by an invisible wind. Their mouths grimaced when they wanted to grimace. They squirmed when sweaters were buttoned up. They knelt backwards on the seat to look out the windows. They played with cards, jacks, balls, pennies strewn on an empty seat. They stared at nothing with their pink mouths open. Sometimes, they stared at her.

She got off. She turned a corner and walked up a block toward Fifth Avenue. In the middle of the block she entered a building. It was the Museum of Modern Art. Upstairs she met with a man in his office. He told her how excited they were to be presenting her work. He held out his hands and clasped them both around her small one. He said it would be a triumphant show. He strode through galleries and showed her where her pictures would be hung. The woman held tightly to her pocketbook. She was proud but also nervous. This museum in which she had spent so many warm happy hours since childhood now seemed vast and cavernous and cold. She wondered how her photographs would feel up on its walls. Her photographs had feelings in her mind. She felt for the first time a maternal concern about exposing them to the world. She had shown her pictures before but never in such a grand setting. Still, she was very proud.

The curator and two benefactors of the museum took her out to lunch in midtown. There were murals on the walls of the restaurant. She had a glass of wine. She had another. The curator had more. He said, of course she was justly famous for her black-and-white pictures but that to be honest he preferred the new color work. Less arty. Everyone ordered. She asked for the Dover sole, a specialty of the house, and handed the thick red leather menu back to the waiter. She looked at the pattern of the silver. She had worked with famous photographers and now one of the benefactors asked her about the famous men. There had been talk that she had had an affair with one of them and it was obvious that that was what the benefactress was implying and trying to verify with her questioning. The woman had the entitled air of the wealthy and privileged without the tact or discretion and she pretended not to notice that the person she was speaking to did not want to answer. It went on this way. The rich woman’s mouth pursed before she took a sip of her drink. The rings on her fingers looked like enormous winged insects refracted through the crystal of her highball glass. Finally she said: I can see why you never married. You don’t want to reveal anything. At this point the curator noticed what was happening and deflected the conversation with a detailed description of some remarkable new acquisitions. The woman photographer stared at the murals on the walls and had another glass of wine.

While the photographer was out the younger woman who had been watching her on the street rang all the buzzers on the front entrance of the small building. One old woman answered and let her in. The young woman had dark straight pretty hair, almost black, cut to just below her chin. It swung a tiny bit as she spoke to the old woman because she was shaking slightly. Her heart was beating very fast and she realized at once that this guileless old lady would answer any question. When asked where there might be a key to the top-floor apartment, the old woman said she had a spare one in case her neighbor was locked out. The old woman was wearing a housecoat and had liner scrawled madly around her eyes. It did not occur to her that this respectable-looking person in her late twenties or so might not be telling the truth when she said that the upstairs neighbor whom she called by name was her relative and that she had said that she could use the apartment but that she had forgotten to leave the key. So the old woman gave her the key. Her hand was bony like a bird’s skeleton. The younger woman walked up to the top floor. The banister wobbled. Some of the poles along the stairway were missing. Above the top-floor landing a dirty skylight let in some dirty sun. She turned the key in the lock and the door opened and she stepped inside.

1936

On a corner not far from the Museum of Natural History Joe was holding Vivian in his arms. There was a wind in his hair and it blew forward onto her face and her hair blew around in his.