Young Man With a Horn (13 page)

‘I’ll say,’ Eddie said. ‘I’ve been this way all my life. I had to quit dancing because I was always in an awful shape after just one dance.’

Rick was wiping off his trumpet and putting it away. ‘They say,’ he said, ‘it’s a sign you’re healthy if you can sweat a lot. When you get so you can’t sweat, you die.’

He was measuring out his words one after the other, as if the only way he could manage the breath to talk was to take it slowly, one step at a time. ‘I hardly sweat at all, anytime. I get so hot I could blow my top but I just don’t sweat,’ he said.

Phelps was pulling his shirt away from his ribs. ‘I sure do,’ he said. ‘It might be a good idea to go swimming now; cool off.’

It was about half-past three then, that unclassified and unadaptable time of night which traditionally is no proper time to retire, and yet no time to start the day. It looked like a good time to go swimming, and the three who survived the rehearsal walked to the bay. Placid water, they felt, would suit their purpose better than the smashing surf.

They undressed on the boathouse float. There was no moon and the water at the edge of the float was black. Phelps went off with a splash and made a sound of surprise. Then Tommy Long got in and said Jesus. Rick stood naked and apprehensive and called out with fake heartiness, ‘How is it?’ And Phelps’s voice came back carrying a phrase frightful in implication: ‘It’s wonderful once you get in. Come on.’

Rick sat down on the edge of the float and immersed his legs up to the knees. ‘Oh, God,’ he whispered with the beginning of a sob. Then he recalled with coward’s pleasure that this water would be deep, twenty times as deep as he was, God knows, eighty maybe, and he with a bare knowledge of how to tread water. Get yourself drowned. Only fools rock the boat. Bad business. He pulled his legs up, found his own shoes and socks, and put them on and felt himself a man once more—a man with his shoes on.

He stood there single and whole, a little man on a wooden float that lay on the surface of a great ocean beneath a night that was as big as all outdoors. His arms were folded across his bare chest, his feet were farther apart than need was to brace him against the gentle rocking of the float, and he looked upward at the stars that were stuck into the night. But not humbly, not like Pascal. The eternal silence of those infinite spaces did not move him to fear. Lunks of stars—no brains, no ability, no senses—just nothing but simple chunks of matter kicking around in space. He was as steadfast as they were, and he could think and talk and know who he was besides. What, after all, has a star got?

Pretty, though. Stand there and look at them and they get prettier and prettier, almost pretty enough to persuade you. Rick kept his face turned upward and shifted his feet farther apart to brace himself against an inward rocking that was a personal matter and had nothing to do with the float. The breeze was soft, and it had just enough movement to bring him constantly a new touch and a reminder that it was there with him. Funny thing about stars on a black night, they put you in mind of other things, things like the stars only so much more complicated. Where, for instance, is there a girl who will have this same cool brilliance? What would her name be? How do you inquire for her?

After an endless time of standing, he went down, lay back and let the night fall over him, and he was cured, then, of inward rocking. He lay still on his back, looking up, aspiring, and without any fanfare about it he knew everything at once. He thought it out without words, the way music thinks—in depths and currents that have nothing to do with linguistics. In these gracious terms he knew that there was good in the world, and tenderness, and sadness; and when it can be said of you that you know anything at all, you will know what these things are.

The float lurched, and Eddie Phelps pulled himself up and spattered water all over when he stumbled against one of Rick’s feet. There were questions, then, and answers, and all sorts of talk; and then Tommy Long pulled himself aboard too, and there was dressing and huffing and puffing, but none of it mattered, and Rick Martin walked back to the house, troubled slightly, as if he’d missed something big by a very little.

It turned out precisely the way the man at the soda fountain had said it would. Schools began to close down at the end of the first week in June and then Balboa was a hive, but not of industry. The beach was a solid half-mile of striped canvas umbrellas, and each umbrella functioned as base for a group of boys or girls or boys and girls held together by some tie or other, friendship, love, fraternity, chance, or plain sodality. The wonderful thing was that a man could leave his base and go down to the sea to swim and cool off, and find his way back, apparently, to the same umbrella and the same people he had left. You wouldn’t believe, just to look at all those striped umbrellas and all those bare legs stretched out like spokes in the sand below them, that there could be differentiations, that it would matter much whether a man found his way back to one or to another.

At night it was much the same thing except that the center of things was not the beach but the Rendez-Vous ballroom. At night, instead of lying prone on their stomachs in the sand, the youths and maidens stood upright on their feet and danced to the music. Two-bits per capita admission, and five cents a dance; sailors, but no holds, barred. The Rendez-Vous had not been let out an inch too much by that real-estate man from Los Angeles; the Collegians played to a capacity crowd on Saturday nights, Sunday afternoons, and Sunday nights, and they got a good crowd on week nights too after the first of the season. They got Monday night off, and needed it.

It was a good-looking band; not a bald head in the bunch, not a paunch in the lot. They wore white flannels and blue and white blazers and black and white shoes, and they looked, individually, right in them, which is a hard thing, as a rule, for any ten men to do at the same time. Their pictures, singly and group-shot, were put up beside the entrance, retouched until you could scarcely tell Jack from Rick or Phelps from Long.

Their music was what Jack wanted it to be, smooth and expressive of collegiate emotion. Maybe it was better than that; it was good enough, in any case, to draw an occasional party from Hollywood. The rumor went that Buster Keaton came down to dance almost every week end, and with that for a lead rumor ran rife. The Rendez-Vous became, less than three weeks out, a famous place to dance. Some of the rumors may even have had a basis in fact.

It was sometime around in here that Rick began to turn out his famous solo work, and it got started in a strange way. The boys in the band, most of them, had established romantic liaisons with girls on the beach early in the season, and every night as the night’s work wore on, all of them would get unbearable inclinations to jump ship and go dance. It bothered them to sit there and play music while other men danced with their girls. So they worked out a system. Every fourth number was a waltz; the saxophones would take one out, the brass the next, tuba drums and guitar fixed it up among them, and Rick, who didn’t care about leaving the stand often, doubled on piano when Jack danced. It didn’t disrupt the band badly; they played three fox trots in a row, tutti ensemble, and the waltzes didn’t matter much. From a dancing point of view there’s no crying need of a full orchestra for a waltz. They even stopped using scores for waltzes, and took to playing ‘Sweetheart of Sigma Chi,’ ‘Roses of Picardy,’ ‘I Love You Truly,’ and others of that stripe in medleys.

But one time when Jack was off and Rick was supposed to play piano while Tommy played the violin in front of a bank of reeds, Rick let the reeds go too, and told Tommy to put away that violin and play guitar while he played trumpet. He pulled the tuba and drums in close, the four of them in a half-circle, and he told them what to do and they did it. They gave out the rhythm and he played, not in three-four time, but very slow four-four, an old tune called ‘Japanese Sandman.’ He played it straight as the crow flies, and clear, to be heard distinctly all over the hall, but there was a push behind it and a lift to it and a measured clarity that made something happen in that long, narrow Rendez-Vous ballroom. He finished three choruses and lost his nerve, jumped at the piano, handed Tommy his violin and bow, and went as if to underbrush into the opening bars of ‘I Love You Truly,’ waltz time.

But the thunderbolt he expected never came. When Jack came back and gave him a curious look, Rick gulped and made introductory vowel sounds trying to think what to say for himself, and all Jack said was: ‘Mary-Lou’s back from San Francisco already, she just came in, and now I’m going to be in a hell of a mess with Barbara. I’ve got to think of something quick.’

Rick pulled his sleeve across his mouth and didn’t have to say a thing. He just sat in his chair and made his plans. He felt like a kid that has just happened to look down and see a dollar lying in the gutter at the corner of Sixth and Main.

He sat through the next three numbers and thought it all out, and at the end of three when Jack said to him man to man, ‘What would you do?’ Rick said: ‘Go dance with her and tell her you were lonesome and here was this other babe going for you and nothing you could do. Just tell her how it was.’

‘Sure,’ Jack said. ‘Only I think Barbara’s so much cuter than Mary-Lou now.’

‘She’s cuter all right,’ Rick said. ‘Why don’t you go dance with
her
then and tell her you were stuck with Mary-Lou before you saw her and now you’ll try to fix everything up? Go on, dance with her.’

Jack pulled himself together and said: ‘Look here, I can’t leave you stuck all the time, just because you’re big-hearted. It’s time you took one off. Maybe I’d be better off not to see either of them.’

And Rick, keeping his voice level and managing somehow to make it sound natural, said: ‘Hell, Jack, I can’t dance. I’d just as soon play for you every time, and if I didn’t mean it I wouldn’t say it. Go on, dance with Barbara and tell her how the whole thing happened before it’s too late and she’s sore. Go ahead, or you won’t be able to find her.’

‘All right, then,’ Jack said. ‘I guess you’re right.’ He got away fast and Rick turned around and let everybody go except Tommy and Staats Tracy, the drummer. Tracy had overtime coming to him, and there was a little argument, but Rick wouldn’t back down. Tommy had some time coming, too, but he didn’t say anything about his; he had a sense that something would come of this and he’d just as soon be in on it. Rick turned to Tracy and said, ‘Beat out four bars alone; and then you,’ he said to Tommy, ‘come in with him for two more, slow fox-trot, and then I’ll come in.’ He had them listening to him as if he were giving out official, last-minute instructions for a
coup d’état
. ‘How slow?’ Tracy asked him, and Rick slapped his thigh twice, explicit answer. ‘What key?’ Tommy said, and when he saw in Rick’s face that it was no matter, he changed it and said, ‘What tune?’ and Rick said, ‘Oh, something.’ He couldn’t think what; all he could think was how.

So Tracy led them out and the first dancers came onto the floor, and Tommy came in and established a key, and Rick held his trumpet up sideways, to take a fast look at it, and then he began to play. There wasn’t anything settled in his mind yet, as far as tune went, and so he just played notes in patterns, introducing himself until something clicked into the slot and he was playing one that Smoke had liked two years before called ‘Swinging’ (I believe) ‘down the Lane.’

Rick was shot full of tact. He hadn’t known what he was going to play, but when he played it finally, it was one that Jack would have to like, it was this good flowing little tune that didn’t have a jot of meanness in it, and he could shade it off and lift it up and do right by the simplicity of it. The music flowed out over the dancers and a kind of peace held forth, for the moment, in the Rendez-Vous. Here was music that could be tender and still hold its shape, keep firm its contour, and that’s a thing that ‘I Love You Truly’ played by three saxophones and a violin can’t do. Four choruses of ‘Swinging down the Lane’ had the crowd. They didn’t listen to it, especially, but when Rick stopped playing they wouldn’t leave the floor, they wanted whatever it was to keep on. They just stood still in their places and clapped steadily. The floor boys unhooked the ropes and stood by to let the dancers leave the floor; and then they walked in toward the center of the floor in a gesture of forcing them to leave, but no. The dancers simply stood their ground and clapped their hands. It looked like a token.

It felt like so many claps on the back. Here was recommendation, commendation, applause. And Tommy Long, in official capacity as accompanist, leaned back and gave the soloist an actual clap on the back and said, ‘Nice going, boy!’

The big thing, however, was that Jack Stuart edged himself up through the crowd dragging Mary-Lou or Barbara with him, and gave him a sign to take an encore. Rick played four more choruses, and in return for the encouragement he turned out some very, very nice work. At the end of four his nerve broke a little and he got up quickly, put his trumpet on his chair, and left by the back door. As soon as he closed the door, he lighted a cigarette, blew the smoke sky high, and knew the difference between being a success and being kicked out. It left him a little fluttery in the stomach, things like that are so close. You’re thrown out for insubordination or else you aren’t, and where the actual line of demarcation stands out clear, God himself only can know. The only way to find out approximately, even, is to try something funny and see if you get away with it. And because you did once is no guarantee in writing that you will again. But Rick didn’t look long at the negative side. All he knew was that recognition, that sweet thing, had been given to him because he had been doing some good playing. It’s a simple formula: do your best and somebody might like it.

Tracy and Tommy came out and found him standing on the steps with his back to the wall. ‘What did you want to quit for?’ Tracy said. ‘They kept on clapping for a hell of a time.’ Tommy gave him another slap on the back and said, ‘Yeh, I almost decided to play them a guitar solo.’