Young Man With a Horn (17 page)

‘There used to be an act that went on just before us, when we were on tour,’ Rick said. ‘This fellow got people to come up out of the audience and then he’d make them do all kinds of things. I got to know him on the train; he’d been to school in Austria and studied psychology, but something went wrong and he ended up with this act. He took morphine; he was sick once and he had me get some for him. He didn’t want anybody to find it out; but he just took a chance on me.’

‘And so you sit here and tell everybody,’ Amy North said. ‘Nice fellow.’

‘It’s all right now,’ Rick said. ‘He’s been dead for a year and a half.’

‘That’s a strange thing, too,’ Amy North said. ‘To worm confidences out of people and wait around until they die, and
then
tell.’ She was looking into her glass all the time, and whenever she spoke she got an oracular quality into her voice. ‘Very strange,’ she said.

She was good-looking, like the line drawings of girls in advertisements for too-expensive sweaters. She was wearing one of those very sweaters, in fact, a gray-blue one that looked as if it would feel like suds under the hand. It made her look as if she’d got into the wrong room. She was twenty-four and pretty well used to being in the wrong.

She looked across at Josephine and said: ‘Now Josephine’s not that way; if she knew
I
took morphine—if she knew
anything
about me—she wouldn’t tell it either now or after I’m dead. I’m sure of that.’

She looked away. Everybody sat still. Then Rick said: ‘Hell, lady, I don’t know what I said wrong. Everybody knew this fellow took morphine anyhow; he just liked to think nobody did. See one of his legs you’d know.’

Smoke broke in to say, ‘He didn’t say what the guy’s name was, even; we were only talking about hypnotizing.’

Amy looked at Rick and said, ‘You’re slightly on the literal-minded side, aren’t you, Professor? Don’t take me seriously. I was just making talk.’ She smiled at him, a pleasant smile, direct and candid. Her teeth were white and her mouth was clean. She stretched a hand toward him across the table.

Rick took it and said: ‘I’m sorry. I really thought you meant it. I thought I gave you the idea that I went around making up lies about people and spreading them around.’

‘Oh,’ Amy said, ‘then this man really didn’t take morphine; you just made that up?’

‘No,’ Rick began, and then he pressed his lips together as if he couldn’t make up his mind whether to hit her or not. ‘Where’s this getting us?’ he said.

The girl looked at him closely again and said, ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ She gazed deep into her glass, thinking of it.

‘When you get through having your fight,’ Josephine said, ‘I wish somebody around here would be man enough to order a drink.’

Jeff Williams was man enough to order one around and then go home. And then Smoke dropped out and Amy and Josephine and Rick were in a taxi, and then it was just Amy and Rick in a taxi and the rain was smashing in tubfuls against the glass trying to get at them.

But they were unassailable. The earth was turning well off center, so that time was forever and not made of minutes. The real world (the street lights, the flask, Rick’s trumpet case) was as vague as the sound of tires whirling through water beneath them, but even then it seemed that the mind could slice like a knife through all the knots of syntax to make anything probable and everything communicable. And while this extraordinary lucidity held up, Amy North had things to communicate.

She sat holding Rick’s silver flask in one hand and her hat in the other. When a light flashed up, Rick could see her head, disengaged from the rest of her and set in the bowl of her upturned coat collar. A strange girl with things on her mind. She was telling him now that thought is what matters, or thinking; the mind, in any event, is what matters. The world is in men’s minds, and whoever can find the spring and discover the process, the method, the workings, will know everything. Who finds this out will have the world in a jug, Richard, do you know that? Who picks this out of the crannies will know what God and man is.

She stopped to think that one over, and Rick said quietly, ‘Go on,’ and she went on, spinning the three-thread twist of her thoughts and fallacies and counter-rationalizations out and out, her clear voice making smooth alcoholic periods.

She felt up to saying that she herself might be the one to find it if she worked as hard and with as much imagination as she intended to work. She’d go through with an M.D. simply in order to be in a position to tell them all to go to hell, in general, and her father in particular. That would be one reason, but another would be that brain surgery might be a way of getting to the bottom of things. She’d get all the psychiatrical training there was in the world, had most of it already, as far as that went, and back it up with an M.D. just in case; then she’d wrap it all up in a sheepskin and toss it out the window and rely wholly on her own imagination. That’s the only guide. You can’t know anything unless you’ve got the kind of hands that can feel it, unless you’ve got the kind of eyes that never see the outside of anything, just cut straight down under. The surface is forever a hoax, a commonplace, uninteresting thing for kids to waste time on. ‘But,’ she said, ‘I digress. After all, this is your flask I’m holding, and this is your gin in it, and it’s strictly within the law for you to have a turn, unless I wanted to be unkind and tell you that alcoholic beverage is prohibitive, pardon, prohibited, in this land, and more than that, that possession is nine points of the law even if it
is
illegal. There’s an interesting point in law, or, if you wish, an interesting case in point.’

Rick took the flask and drank and handed it to her. ‘Go on,’ he said. There was a rough spot in her voice, and he liked to listen to it.

In college, she said, she wanted to be a writer—you know how kids always want to grow up and
be
something—fireman, engineer, interior decorator, aviator, actress? She wrote white-hot lyrics heavily inspired from Baudelaire, but always going his Pièces Condamnées one or two better. Wrong approach, I guess. But the college literary magazine wouldn’t print any except the ones that were so symbolic that nobody could see through them, and the mood passed when
The Dial
gave her a blanket rejection on fifty-nine poems. Good thing, too, a very most fortunate thing to have happened, because you don’t find out anything about what’s true by lolling around in a girls’ school writing what you think might be. You find it by going to disordered minds, looking deep into them. Disorders that result in claustrophobia in that musician or in morphinomania in the vaudeville fellow. Start with that and work back from effects to causes. Master the disorders and you’re practically there. Dear God, so many things to learn, and the rain tearing down all the time.

She tilted the flask all the way up and said, ‘It’s empty.’

Rick set about to master the system of his overcoat, and when he had it beat he found another flask, a leather one, in a hip pocket. There you are. Be prepared, and you’ll never be caught unprepared.

‘There’s a lot to that, you know,’ she said. ‘It was my guiding principle all through school, but I lost it in college some place, and now I’m never prepared.’

And while she was threading it out, letting the words weave a senseless pattern all their own, she let go the whole way and showed cause why she should hate her father;—no, not hate, you can’t hate pure stupidity; yes, you can, if it’s done up in a leather case of pompous, pretentious, pedantic, what-all—too bad that went down on me, she said; I really had it going there for a minute.—Hate was the word, after all. She’d hated her father in a nice neat way ever since her mother did away with herself. He was, her father was, a doctor in Cleveland, one of those stupid country doctors that doesn’t know a speculum from a stethoscope, but he had a tremendous practice and he was well thought of in the profession, as thoughts go in the profession. Her mother, as she remembered her, was something else again, something pretty wonderful. ‘—I used to go completely to pieces when she told me my handwriting was improving, I thought so highly of that lady.—Funny, when I think about her now all I can get is that she smelled like something I’ve never been able to find since. I’ve sniffed perfume stoppers until I was blue in the face, but I’ve never found it.’ And when Amy was twelve, this lovely lady, Amy said, started having headaches that nearly drove her mad, and that fool doctor, her husband, probably gave her aspirin if anything. At last, when he knew it was serious, he bethought himself and diagnosed the thing as a brain tumor, which it might well have been, and nobody knew but that he might have tried to cure it with a poultice. He never got anybody on the case that knew anything, and one night his wife didn’t want any more of it and she jumped from the window and dropped to the forecourt of the hospital.

‘Only four stories,’ Amy said, ‘but it did the trick.’

‘Too bad.’

‘You never know, I suppose,’ Amy said. ‘All I know is that I’ve been in one school or another ever since, memorizing the wrong answers. He pays the bills, but I just don’t like to see him any oftener than I have to. He’s married again, and what he got serves him right.’

‘Good idea to put a slit in a flask,’ she said almost immediately. She held it up, trying to get some light into it. ‘It gives you something to go by. Your turn, Richard; drink according to your need.’

He tilted the flask up sharply, and while he drank she watched him, saying: ‘Men are so much less mussy than women. There’s nothing, I suppose, so really classic as a wing collar and a white tie.’

‘It’s almost the only kind of clothes I wear,’ Rick said; ‘I sleep in the day time.’ He looked at her and said, ‘Your turn, Doctor.’

Her eyes were wide open and clear. ‘Don’t call me Doctor, Richard. I’ve got my reasons for hating it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I won’t, then.’

‘It’s true, though,’ she said, when she had drunk from the flask; ‘there’s nothing in the world so beautiful and so astonishing as the spectacle of a really disordered mind. Unless,’ she said after a minute, ‘unless it’s Josephine. Where do you suppose she is? She was here a moment ago.’

‘We took her home,’ Rick said. ‘How do you happen to know her?’

‘How does anyone happen to do anything?’ Amy said. ‘As far as I know, you happen to do what you happen to want to do. It’s called freedom of the will, or determinism, depending on where you stand. It’s simply a question of making up your mind to do what you have to do. Nothing to it. So I saw Josephine the opening night of Big Trouble, and I met her that night too. You get what you bid for.’

A car came out of a side street going fast. The taxi stopped short and the trumpet case fell off the seat. Rick laid the girl back, then, and kissed her. Her mouth was cool and firm. It was a change, something he didn’t know.

‘You’re tired, aren’t you?’ he said.

She sat up and looked at him, very close to him.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I’m not tired.’

‘It’s entirely up to you,’ Rick said, very quietly, not touching her. ‘I believe I love you.’

Before the entrance of Amy North, Rick’s life went along almost by appointment. He worked hard and liked it; after hours he sought out birds of his feather, and then it wasn’t work and he liked it even better. He sat in with one band after another, played two pianos with Jeff Williams, played behind Josephine Jordan on recordings, and made records with who knows how many pick-up bands. He could do one thing, and that almost filled his time. For the rest, he gave himself five or six hours of deep sleep sometime during the day, he had a mild interest in the horses, a child’s faith in inside straights, and the girls he knew could all be called babe. Good, straightforward life, and shaped toward the single purpose of playing a trumpet that nothing could touch.

But after the night when Amy came into Galba’s with Josephine, nothing was ever the same. She shouldn’t have come in; she knew too much and never understood any of it. She knew by instinct that Rick was one of the marked men, one of the odd-numbered ones. She wanted to find out what it was and why it was in him, and she must have forgotten what it was she was trying to find out about Josephine when she saw Rick, or else she must have decided that it didn’t interest her any longer.

Rick didn’t have a chance to know what was happening to him. It was just there, very suddenly, and nothing to do about it. He’d never known a really complicated woman, the kind who knows how to strip the nerves and kick the will around, the kind whose voice can say anything. Such a one was Amy North, the terribly good-looking one who wore too-expensive sweaters and scarcely ever got to her classes.

When she came into a room, Rick felt it and his knees went cold. When she bent her head to light a cigarette from the match he held, he was lost until the flame burned his finger. When she stood in her long white robe in front of the fireplace, propping an elbow against the mantel and crossing her feet in the classic attitude of insouciance, he couldn’t let himself look at her; the sight of her twisted him.

It would have been much simpler all around if they hadn’t got married. The thing would have died down, as these things do, and no harm done. But it didn’t go that way. It went the hard way; ordeal by marriage.

Rick was spell-bound and reverential. He spent the night before the wedding in a Turkish bath, in the state of mind of a squire about to receive knighthood. He didn’t know how it had happened, but he knew it was true, that Amy North would marry him. Most fortunate of musicians.

It’s much more difficult to understand Amy’s side of it than Rick’s. It wasn’t Amy’s nature to sign her name to anything. She could talk the night out, do anything she wanted to with a word spoken, but she never put anything in writing. She was born cagey. And yet she signed the marriage license legibly and with a steady hand, and when, under oath, she said ‘I do,’ almost anyone would have thought she did.

Rick moved in with her. She had an apartment and she owned the andirons, the sofa, the phonograph, the pictures, and the books that were in it. All Rick had to do was to hang his clothes in a closet, give away his phonograph, and stack his records with hers. It was never Rick’s house; it couldn’t have been. It would have been called a studio apartment. There was a skylight across one wall of the living-room, but there the studio aspect ended, and the rest was a matter of comfort for the other half to live in.