Tiger Rag (10 page)

Cornish and four members of the old Bolden Band joined the Eagle Orchestra. Bunk Johnson’s band. A solid band. They were making good money and getting offered more engagements than they could take. Bunk drank, but not like Bolden. Bunk wanted to be king now that Bolden was gone, but everyone agreed the new king was Freddie Keppard, who could blow hard and sweet and draw the big crowds. He and Bunk were playing the “new” music Bolden had created. Every time they performed, Cornish saw Bunk try to duplicate Bolden’s sound. He couldn’t. Not the slow blues and not the improvisations—Cornish called them “inspirations”—that came out of nowhere and kept on going. Bunk did attract the best musicians, picking them off from the Imperial Band, the Olympia Orchestra, the Peerless Band
.

A couple of months earlier, an ace clarinetist had joined the Eagle Orchestra. He came from a Creole family, the son of a onetime cornetist who had become a shoe manufacturer. He was only eleven years old, a prodigy. He called himself a musicianer. His name was Sidney Bechet
.

Though Ruby wanted to drive straight through to New York, Devon put up a fight and they stopped for the night in D.C. Not on the outskirts, in a motel in Maryland or Virginia; if Ruby was going to stop, it had to be in the city proper, and nothing less than a five-star hotel would do. They had driven into a blizzard in North Carolina, and by the time they reached Newport News, the visibility was two hundred feet. In the capital, the streets were deserted. The Washington Monument was invisible through the swirl of snow.

Checking in to the Hay-Adams, Ruby was distracted by a man who looked out of place: a salesman, down-at-heels, with a battered suitcase and a rumpled coat. He had been stranded in the neighborhood by the storm, and rather than brave the cold to find a cheaper hotel, he was trying to bargain with the desk clerk for a lower rate. It took Devon a moment to regain Ruby’s attention.

“Come on, Mom,” she said, leading her to the elevators.

Their suite was spacious and silent. Pine logs were burning in the fireplace. There was a vase of white roses and a basket of fruit. They were one floor down from the presidential suite, in which the Portuguese ambassador currently resided after a fire in his embassy.

“Ever been to Lisbon?” Ruby asked Devon, as she picked up the phone for room service. “I went with your father when we were in medical school. We sailed on the Tagus River. We drove into the mountains and drank the wine. I thought I was happy then. I didn’t know anything.”

The Hay-Adams had a 1988 Chateau Latour on its wine list. Ruby ordered a bottle along with another steak, whipped potatoes, and a double order of lemon Jell-O. She ate only the Jell-O and drank the wine while Devon had an omelette and orange juice.

“This wine is delicious,” Ruby said. “Like some dessert?”

“I’m going to shower and turn in, Mom. We were on the road for fourteen hours.”

When Devon came out of the bathroom twenty minutes later, wrapped in a terrycloth robe, Ruby was sprawled out on the couch, still fully dressed, channel surfing, alternating between a Japanese sitcom and a jai alai match in Brazil, with two announcers shouting in Portuguese.

“I wonder if the ambassador is watching this,” Ruby said.

Devon shut the door to her room and put in a pair of earplugs. The sheets were cool. She had been prepared to answer questions about her tattoo, but Ruby had apparently lost interest. Which was fine with Devon. On her back, four inches in diameter, there was a tattoo of Saturn with fiery rings, the outermost ring a serpent with turquoise eyes.

This was a symbol she had salvaged from a peyote trip and preserved in a sketchpad. It was inked on her by a tattooist in Miami Beach named Ahmed. She had been introduced to Ahmed by her former boyfriend, Josef. Ahmed was from Kashmir. Posters of the Himalayas covered the walls of his parlor. He had a white beard and a ponytail. He wore brightly colored caftans and yellow horn-rimmed glasses. While he applied his needles, his soft voice lulled her to sleep.

“In the
Rig Veda
,” he said, “the goddess Night is a tattoo artist, painting stars on her own body as she travels through space. That is why I work at night.”

Devon met Josef at a club in Miami. Not the place where she tended bar, but a smaller, darker club across town that she frequented. He was thirty years old, compact and wiry, his curly hair prematurely gray. He was sitting at the bar wearing a black T-shirt, his laptop lit up before him. He said he was a cyberspace security expert who encrypted databases and designed firewalls. He lived in Chicago, in a loft by the old stockyards. After drinking shots of tequila, Devon took him back to her apartment. He was good in bed. He had powerful muscles for someone who sat in front of computers all day. They spent the weekend together.

When she visited him in Chicago two weeks later, she found that his loft was more like an office than a home. There was a kitchenette, a tiny bathroom, and a futon, but the room was dominated by two long tables lined with computers, monitors, and elaborate gadgetry. The small refrigerator contained a dozen cans of Red Bull and a bottle of vodka. There were three cans of soup in the cupboard. “I eat out or order in,” he explained. He took her out for an expensive Japanese dinner. He told her his parents had defected from East Germany.
“My mother worked for the Stasi, tapping the phones of Party members. That’s what got me interested in electronic security. Keeping people like her locked out.” The next morning, he asked Devon if she would shave him with a straight-edge razor.

“I’ve never used one,” she replied.

“You can do it.” He showed her how to hold the razor and angle the blade, using short, sure strokes. “I’ve never had anyone shave me before.”

She applied the lather with a soft brush, then shaved him without a nick. The next day, she asked if he would like her to do it again.

“No, I just wanted to experience it once.”

She was dubious. “You haven’t had your other girlfriends shave you?”

“Never.”

“So this was your way of making me feel special.”

“Not really.”

That was Josef. She soon discovered that, like the other guys she had been involved with in recent years—especially the fellow band members she had made the mistake of dating—Josef’s favorite place was inside his own head. For a while, he let you join him there, showed you the sights, took you down some interesting byways. Then one day he stepped back and you realized you, too, had become part of the landscape. This was her pattern—unbreakable, apparently.

In her room at the Hay-Adams Devon drifted to sleep. Two hours later, someone shook her shoulder gently. She opened her eyes, and there was Ruby, sitting on the edge of the bed. She was wearing a bathrobe now and her eyelids were heavy, her voice subdued. Her wineglass was on the bedside table.

“I need to tell you about Dad,” Ruby said.

Taking out her earplugs, Devon assumed Ruby was referring to her own father, Marvin Sheresky. Until Ruby added, “You said you wanted to know. This would be a good time.”

Maybe for you, Devon thought, trying to wake up. She reached toward the lamp.

“No, leave it off. It’s better this way.”

Devon knew some of the larger story, of course. That Camille Broussard had three childless marriages, but conceived Ruby with a guy she barely knew, a jazz musician named Valentine Owen. That Camille and Ruby became gypsies—Baton Rouge, Gulfport, Mobile were just a few of the pit stops. They lived in crummy apartments with Camille’s various husbands. The Three Stooges, Ruby called them: Number One a drunk, Number Two a letch who hit on her, Number Three a worse drunk.

Her mother had a thing for truckers and oil riggers—the sort that couldn’t hold their jobs. Valentine Owen was the most dashing man Camille Broussard ever met. She glorified him as she never could her husbands. In reality, their longest stint together was a week, but in her imagination Valentine Owen lived on for years. She constructed a private mythology around him.

“Supposedly he showed up again when I was born, to name me,” Ruby said. “This was a story my mother made up for herself. When I asked why she could count the number of his visits on one hand, she got all weepy. Instead of answering the question, she said that he burned out young, like so many great musicians. Like who, for instance? I asked, and she
couldn’t name one. In fact, he wasn’t so young. And he wasn’t great.”

Ruby only met her father twice, briefly, the first time ugly, the second unforgivable. For a while, Ruby had bought into the legend her mother had made of Owen. She wasn’t the kind of kid who cried into her pillow at night, but as a teenager she mooned over his photo, feeling sorry for herself. She carried around a shot of him in a white suit and fedora until she was fifteen. Until she met him finally for the first time, on a July night in 1975.

Ruby was home with Camille, who was between husbands. Home was a three-room fourth-floor walkup in St. Louis. Camille was waitressing at a pancake house, dating a guy named Buzz, a mechanic. His standard (and apparently only) line was “Let me give you a buzz,” as he poured his personal version of his favorite drink, a whiskey fizz: Five Roses, club soda, a teaspoon of sugar, a dash of bitters, and a squeeze of lime. He was proud of his inventiveness, substituting lime for lemon and adding bitters. He always had so much alcohol in his system that two of these drinks got him drunk, and by number four he was blacking out. That particular day he had given himself one buzz too many by three o’clock and passed out at the kitchen table. Camille left him there, sleeping on his crossed arms. He was still there when she came home from work and announced to Ruby, reading a magazine by the open window, that she had a big surprise for her. She needed her to put on her best dress, the yellow one she’d bought her in Tulsa, comb her hair, and ask no questions. A half hour later, they rode a bus across town to a nightclub called Flamingo Road, a low drab building on a brown street, which tried and failed to live up to its name with
an assortment of anemic potted palms, a murky carp pool, and a wall lined with cardboard standups of flamingos.

The Flamingo Road marquee read
TONITE ONLY
—
BILL GRAY
’
S DIXIELAND BAND
.

Ruby didn’t know what to expect. She had tagged along to neighborhood bars with her mother, but never a place like this. Camille grabbed a table up close to the small stage, but off to the side. She ordered a bourbon on the rocks, lit a cigarette, and absently popped peanuts from the bowl on the table. The only time Ruby saw her that nervous was when she couldn’t get a drink. Though the club wasn’t full, there was a decent crowd.

The lights dimmed and the band came out to scattered applause. Conversations trailed off only after the musicians had launched into “Bayou Rag.” It was a brisk, upbeat tune that they managed to make dreary. The pianist was pretty good, and Bill Gray played a serviceable clarinet, but that was about it. And then Ruby took a closer look at the trumpeter.

“Surprised?” Camille said, throwing back half her bourbon.

Ruby couldn’t believe her mother was doing this to her.

After the set, Camille hurried over to the stage and called out to the trumpeter, waving her arms. If
he
was surprised, he didn’t show it. He kept a poker face. He followed Camille to their table and froze at the sight of Ruby.

“This is your daughter, Ruby,” Camille said, a little too loudly, with a self-satisfied smile.

Valentine Owen just stared at her for a moment. “Hello, Ruby,” he said, finding his voice. She nodded. Any shock he may have felt had seemingly evaporated, as if meeting his
daughter for the first time in fifteen years was the most natural thing in the world. “Pretty dress. Thanks for coming tonight.”

Ruby cringed. The fact he hadn’t laid eyes on her since she was a baby didn’t seem to inhibit him. Maybe women like her mother would fall for his glibness. But he was no longer the dashing young man in the white suit in her photo. He was middle-aged, with thinning hair, a soft gut, and a hollow look behind the languorous pose. There were smudges beneath his eyes, his lips were pursed. Maybe it was the cheap stage lights, but to Ruby his skin looked gray, almost bloodless. And he continued to study her closely, not like Husband Number Two, the letch, but not in a way she liked, either.

“Will you join us for a drink?” Camille said.

He cleared his throat and forced a smile. “I’ll do better than that. I’d like to take you both out to dinner.”

The way Ruby remembered it, she knew at that moment that he was lying, but it may be that she had forced herself to remember it that way. For after Valentine Owen left them with a smile, promising to return shortly, she and her mother waited, and waited, watching a roadie disassemble the drum set and pack up the microphones and carry off the amps. It was a good twenty minutes before Camille collared the stagehand dousing the lights and asked if she could go back to the dressing room to talk to a member of the band.

“They left on their bus five minutes ago.”