Of Song and Water (20 page)

The woman laughs. “I see. God keeps a ledger, a sheet with long columns, and He keeps it balanced any way He can. Is that what you believe?”

“Why not?”

“You're trying too hard,” she says. “You're trying to explain things.”

“Maybe so. But when enough water builds up behind a dam – maybe it's a natural disaster, or man-made, if you like – the dam breaks so the water can even out.” He stops. He wonders what would happen if he reached over and lifted the veil. “Innocent people get swept away.”

“I'm tired of this,” says the woman. She turns toward the couple at the next table.

He looks over and sees a young woman with red hair. She raises her drink and throws it in the face of the older man sitting across from her. A waiter appears with a fresh cocktail and a towel. The man wipes his face. “I hope that satisfies you,” he says. She leans back in her chair and smiles. “Oh, darling,” she says. “I'll never be satisfied.” The waiter hovers over the man and dabs at his suit with the dry corner of a towel. “Bravo,” says a voice from somewhere in the room. “Well done,” says another.

Concerned about the tiff, the manager of the club comes over and says a few inaudible words to the couple. He offers an apology to those sitting nearby.

A girl carrying a tray and wearing a jacket and short skirt follows the manager. “Cigars, cigarettes, chocolate,” she says.

“Swiss chocolate?” says Coleman.

“No. Nothin' fancy,” says the girl. “Unless you want an imported cigar.”

“No thanks,” he says.

“Nice hat,” says the girl. “It's classy, with the veil and all.”

“Thank you,” says the woman. “Do you have chocolate mints?”

“Sorry,” says the girl. “Straight chocolate is all I got.”

“I'll take a rose,” he says.

“Dark or light?” says the girl.

“Dark.”

The girl lays a long-stemmed rose on the table and then takes her tray elsewhere.

“That's a sad but lovely rose,” says the woman.

“Then it's perfect,” he says.

“What are you trying to do? Are you trying to make things pretty?”

“That hardly seems possible.”

“Do you still want me?”

He gazes at her arms and shoulders. He sees the shadow between her breasts. “Yes,” he says. “That never changes.”

“You can say that?” she says. “Even after what happened?”

“Of course. What happened had nothing to do with you.”

“You're a fool. An unlucky fool.”

“You've said that.”

“I have guilt, you know. I should've said or done something.”

“There was nothing you could've done.”

“You're kind to say it.” She reaches for his hand but draws back before touching his crooked fingers.

“There was nothing,” he says.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“And you want me?”

“Yes. It's always the same.”

The woman stands. Her hand picks up the rose. She looks at the rose and then, with great care, lays it on the table. She walks off without saying good-bye. She goes to the bar, greets a steel-jawed man wearing a dark suit and tie. In the next moment, she lifts her veil and removes her hat. She dips and shakes her head and her hair falls around her shoulders.

He cranes his neck, trying to catch a glimpse of her face. But it's no use. The room is too crowded. It's filled with smoke and flickering light.

 

HE KNOCKS off early and pulls into his driveway before six. The wind is up out of the northwest. He sees the day's overcast making way for black and purple clouds. He goes in through the garage, finds the house dark and stuffy. He opens the front and back doors and the windows that aren't painted shut. Cool air rushes in with the scent of damp soil. His hand throbs. He takes a double dose of pills. He shuffles to the freezer, dumps three trays of ice into a bucket, and buries his hand in the cubes.

He walks into the living room and sees a station wagon pull up at the curb. With his hand deep in the ice, he watches as the landlord slides out of her car, lowers the tailgate, and pulls out a stack of red pails. She hurries up the walk, her breasts nearly visible beneath a thin cotton shirt, her cutoffs revealing the broad curve of her hips and the firmness of her thighs. She lets herself in.

“Big rain on the way,” she says. “Looks like I'm just in time.” She points a finger at the ceiling. “I'm worried about that old roof. If she starts to leak, you can set these pails in the attic – head off some of the damage.”

“Is there a problem?” he says. His eyes do a once-over of the ceiling and then settle on her. “Looks fine to me.”

“Can't be careful enough,” says the landlord. “Once I went to Sacramento to visit a friend and got caught in a three-day blow. The windows rattled and the roof leaked like a sieve. The whole place looked to be made of cardboard. My friend kept apologizing. He said, ‘Everything in California is built like a shoe box.' He thought the paper walls were on account of the weather. But I knew better. There's no fear of God in California. If they had any respect, they'd put up stuff strong enough to take a beating. You gotta be prepared, I say. So I'll leave you these, just in case.”

She puts the stack of pails on the floor. “If you need a few more, let me know.” She turns and looks up through the dirty screen. “Seems like God's a little pissed off today.” Then the screen door slams and she's gone.

He hears thunder groaning in the distance. The sound strikes him now like the murmur of troubled voices, a kind of warning, though this time the storm approaches, as opposed to an earlier time, a different night, when a woman in a sleeveless shirt with a low neckline stood in the parking lot, almost empty, puddles like small mirrors catching her in fragments, while the thunder moved away, the flashes of light over her bare shoulder growing dim. He can't see her face. It's as if she'd arrived wearing a gray veil and then never took it off.

He takes a handful of ice and drops it in a glass. He fills the glass with vodka. He picks up the drink and wraps his arm around the bucket and walks into the living room. Through the window he sees the trees in the front yard bending. He hears the sound of rushing water. He sits on the couch and rests his hand on the ice. He sips his drink. The room is darker now than when he came home. Better to leave it dark, he thinks. He likes the cool wind and the scent of damp soil.

He closes his eyes and hears the thunder as if it were a fading sound. He thinks of the woman without a name or face and the rain-washed parking lot glistening under the streetlights. He wonders if the pills will let him sleep. Should he take more? How many does he need? He feels uneasy, despite the
distance and the years, knowing that the parking lot in question is still in Chicago behind the Green Mill. He'd been playing there for two weeks, sitting in as a guest or a substitute with different groups, trying to keep himself on the road, putting off his inevitable return to Michigan, Maureen, and his four-year-old daughter.

He sits on the couch drinking vodka. The living room flickers, a flash of lightning, and then thunder rolls from the west, growing louder as it comes, cracking and rumbling beyond the line of bowing trees. He wants to keep his mind occupied, pack his brain in the bucket of ice. But the sounds and smells of the storm, the vodka and the pills, and his hand, almost numb, make him unsteady and vulnerable, open like an upturned palm, unable to shut out his final days – his final minutes – at the Green Mill, that old and familiar club where, in the end, not a single friend or acquaintance came to hear him play.

 

IT IS 1992, the year that is perpetually with him, the year that will not let him rest.

An older woman with dark hair sits near the edge of the stage. He sees her for the first time over the tip of his shoe. Formal for the Mill, she wears a tight blue dress with spaghetti straps. He savors her arms and shoulders. He likes the look of her skin, the uneven shadings of experience. From where he stands, the lines and symmetry of her body achieve a stunning perfection.

Sitting with her is a serious man in a dark suit and a stylish red tie. This man goes unseen the first night and for several nights thereafter. The only thing visible is the woman: her blue dress or, later, her blouse with the plunging neckline; her green skirt, amazingly short; her boots and her leather pants.

He barely thinks of what he's playing. He stays focused on the woman, holding her gaze through the rising and falling of old ballads. A voice in his ear admonishes him, tells him to use his talent for its own sake. Don't make it a job. Don't use it for this. But it's been twelve years since he performed with the trio,
with Brian James, four or more since he played with anyone who mattered. He's turned music into a reason, an excuse for staying away from home, from Maureen and his daughter. He plays with uninspired precision. The woman leans on the edge of the stage. Making a request, she extends her arm and hands him a paper napkin.

He remembers that she arrived early each night and chose the table that stood in his direct line of vision. He saw her willingness and her cool determination, her gutsy and provocative confidence – an exhibitionist at the top of her form. But all this drove him to distraction. She obscured everyone around her, including her companion, a well-built man, entirely ageless, wearing a midnight jacket, a vibrant but elegant tie, and a face of black steel – smooth, cold, unchanging.

He should've seen the man's expression, the black skin drawn tight around the eyes and mouth. The threat should've been clear. But he gave himself to the excitement, the obsession, squandering songs and solos, spending everything he had, an offering to destiny that he might not remember the thing most worth remembering: the Mill with Jennifer in it, her head tilted to one side as she listened with unabashed joy.

Outside, the mounting storm offers its own excitement: a lightning flash, a clap of thunder, the wind buffeting the house. But now nothing will let him forget, not even the sound of white water or the black and purple sky. The back door slams. He jerks like a man touching a live wire, feels his hand throbbing as if he'd somehow smashed it again.

He cannot quiet his brain. He replays the moment when he opened the napkin. He sees the title of a song and a short list of directions, a summons. He plays the tune but pays no attention to the quality of his performance, and he packs up in a hurry after the last set, anxious for his meeting, for a room in a downtown hotel, a view of Lake Michigan – the dark water of her face.

He kisses the curve of her neck, traces the slope of her shoulder with his
tongue. He loosens his grip. His fingers are keenly alive, sensing the nuances of her skin, the lean definition of her arms.

She comes to the Green Mill on the following Wednesday, and again on Thursday and Friday. But on Saturday she arrives with an entourage, a group of black men, handsome and serious, more than can fit at her table. When he catches her eye, she hides her face.

Someone in the audience calls out a request and a voice from the bar says, “You need a different band for that one.”

He glances at the woman. She turns to the man she's with, a shadow – his tie like a red vein. It doesn't matter, he thinks. Tonight's the end of it. I'm flying out tomorrow.

In the last set, he plays “Black Orpheus,” and for a moment his phrasing and tone cast a mesmerizing spell, something fragile and almost forgotten. Gradually, the room falls into a churchlike silence. Each player, bathed in blue light, listens. The old man at the piano looks up.

When it's over, he puts his guitar in its case, collects his money, and goes out the front door. He checks the traffic on Broadway; a few cars make a sizzling sound on the wet pavement. A storm has passed. He hears distant thunder, sees a soft flash of light. He walks to the corner and turns.

His body convulses, folding over a fist that robs him of his breath. He feels like a drowning man. He gasps. The street and the buildings begin tumbling with stars. His arms are pinned to his sides. His legs buckle and give out. He can't lift his feet; they drag behind him like stone blocks.

Everywhere is the scent of well-barbered men. In an instant, the ground is no longer a sidewalk. Beneath him is darkness like the night sky, a field of asphalt made slick by the rain. Just ahead is the glint of a polished door.

He breathes and the world stops spinning. He finds himself in the parking lot behind the Green Mill. He's wedged between the shoulders of giant men. He's close to a sleek limousine, its engine running. Into his line of vision steps
the man with the face of black steel, and then he sees her, standing off to the side, the woman whose name he's forgotten, wearing what she's worn all night, a tight, thin, and sleeveless shirt with a low neckline. He looks again at her arms and shoulders. Her nipples press against the shirt.

“So, what to do with an entertainer?” says the man.

Without answering this question, the giants crank up the pressure like a vice. He feels his stomach rising to his throat, his head ready to burst.

The man adjusts his red tie. “You want him to perform?” he says, turning to the woman. “Is there something you'd like to hear?”

She doesn't move or speak.

He'd watched her from the stage, her moves and her expressions, but now there's a gray shadow covering her face. What color were her eyes? What shape were her lips? He wants to lift his hands and rest them on her breasts, but he can't move. He regards the limousine, the long body like a panther stretching toward the street.