Worlds (23 page)

It was a good time to visit New Orleans. The week before had been the annual sustained riot of Mardi Gras, and things were getting back to normal—a sustained wild party, that is to say.

Gambling and prostitution are legal in the old French Quarter; the gambling confined to one large casino but the prostitution is everywhere. It was handled better than on Broadway. To keep his or her license, a whore had to submit to a daily medical inspection. Prices were fixed by law, and any crime against a customer was cause for automatic and permanent revocation (a “ticket to Nevada,” I found out they called it). Most of the whores wore conspicuous costumes—a “slave girl” in rags and chains gave me a shiver—but some wore regular clothes, with license prominently displayed. Many transvestites and people whose orientation was ambiguous or, more likely, flexible. Some gorgeous chunks of male meat that gave me unwifely urgings.

But mainly it was music. It wasn’t pure Dixieland everywhere—in fact, there were even a few places with that mindless Ajimbo noise—and even where there was Dixie-land, it was usually not the classical raucous polyphony, but smoother modern variations. But Preservation Hall had the real stuff, and Jeff dutifully sat with me for hour after hour there. He claimed to enjoy it, but I’ve seen his music collection, and it runs to urban ballads with a little light opera, no jazz.

In a spirit of evening things up, I went to the Casino with him, and watched him play for a couple of hours. He went in with five hundred dollars and said he’d play until he’d doubled it or lost it. He lost it, mainly on blackjack, though he dropped about a hundred on I-Ching, the rules for which I never did figure out.

We made love often and with some desperation, and walked the quaint streets saying obvious and important things. We ducked out of the rain into an antique store on Decatur Street, where my foolish mudball cop bought me a ring that must have cost several weeks’ salary, a fire opal surrounded with diamond chips. Later, when he was sleeping, I slipped out and went back to the same place, and traded an ounce of my gold for a man’s ring, a small gold nugget set in black onyx, and slipped it on his finger without waking him. Saying goodbye was very hard. Afterwards I sat in our room, my room now, for a long afternoon of staring and thinking.

Finally I had to get out, and I walked through the mist rain to a place on Bourbon Street, Fat Charlie’s, where we’d heard some real Dixieland. It was a small place and not clean, sawdust on the floor, mismatched hard chairs tucked under random tables. But the music was loud and beautiful.

What changed my life was this: after one fine set I gave the waiter a ten and asked him to buy a drink for Fat Charlie, who was the group’s clarinet player, and a good one. Fat Charlie brought the drink over and sat with me, and he was rather fascinated to find a Dixieland lover who was a woman, a white woman, a white woman from another World. When I admitted I played the clarinet, he was even more fascinated, and brought over his machine. He gave me a fresh reed to suck and asked me to “show my stuff.”

I amazed myself. His clarinet was a century-old LeBlanc, bored out for jazz. The sound was hard and bright and sexy. I did a few scales and intervals and then part of the wailing introduction to “Rhapsody in Blue.”

I looked at the clarinet. “Incredible machine.”

“How long you been playing, girl?”

“Thirteen years now.”

“Be damned.” He touched my elbow. “Come on up here.” He led me to the platform, where the other band members were lounging, nursing drinks.

“I’ve never played jazz with a live group before.”

“No problem. These fuckers won’t be alive till the sun goes down.” He gave a sideways signal with his head and the men picked up their instruments and did the reflex things with the spit valves and slides and tuning pegs. The
pianist did a sarcastic arpeggio. “Saints in B-flat?” he said to me.

“Sure.” He was giving me the easy one.

Fat Charlie snapped his fingers like four sharp pistol shots and the drummer banged out a two-bar street beat introduction. We started clean and I went through the first verse and chorus almost automatically, not trying anything fancy. In this kind of pure Dixieland the cornet carries the melody and the clarinet rides an obbligato over him, subordinate but with more improvisational freedom than any of the others. After the first time around, each chorus is given to a different instrument, to improvise over a muted background of chords and rhythm. Fat Charlie gave me a nod for the second chorus; I closed my eyes and tried to forget there was an audience and waded right in.

It was good. It’s been a long time since I had any difficulty with the mechanics of improvisation, anticipating the march of chords and choosing appropriate notes, but this was better than I had ever done—feeding off the other players, trying to get out in music something about losing Benny and Jeff leaving, and about going home, and all the wonderful and terrifying things that had happened over the last half-year. All in sixteen bars, sure.

The eight or nine people in the audience applauded my solo, and Fat Charlie smiled and nodded. While the drummer was doing his sixteen, Fat Charlie came over and whispered, “Last chorus all together, in E-flat, okay?” It’s not my favorite key, but I managed to get through without too much pain.

Afterwards Fat Charlie held up two stubby fingers to the bartender and steered me back to the table. “Will you be in New Orleans awhile?” He said the name of the town as one three-syllable word.

“Only two days.” I explained about Cape Town and waiting for the shuttle.

“How ’bout sitting in here a couple of times? The novelty’d bring in business and you know you’d enjoy it.”

“I’d love to, if my lip holds out” You lose embouchure fast if you don’t practice every day. “We can switch off.” The bartender brought over two drinks in tall frosted glasses. “You tried a julep yet?”

“No, I usually drink beer or wine.” The cold sweet taste of it brought a double memory shock: mint tea in Marrakesh, with Jeff; bourbon in coffee at Perkins’s rough table.

“You don’t like it?” Fat Charlie looked at me with a worried expression. I guess I’d paled.

“No, I do. It—it just reminded me of something.” I could almost remember something Benny had said about the force behind art.

He found a rumpled piece of paper and a pencil stub. “We don’t have enough violins for ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’ You got other favorites?”

I could fake anything from “Basin Street” to “Willy the Weeper.” But I gave him a list of nine or ten I was most familiar with.

“I’ll call and have some handouts printed up. What’s your name?”

“Marianne… Mary Hawkings.” I hadn’t taken Jeff’s name, but it didn’t seem smart to put my own on handbills.

“You have a picture we can use?”

“Please, I’d rather you didn’t.” I couldn’t think of a lie fast enough. “Don’t ask me why.”

“Sure, that’s all right. Mystery woman from outer space. Give you five hundred a night?”

I would have paid him twice that, for the experience. “Fine. What time?”

“Eight or nine. Well be playing till ’round three.” He left to have the handouts made. I finished the drink and went out to walk off the nervousness. The rain had gone away.

So I had to come to Earth to be a soloist. There was a certain boy from school, a first clarinet, I wished could have been in the audience.

I went up on the levee to watch the sun set over the Mississippi and then went to a place Jeff and I had enjoyed, an old brick building by the levee that served only coffee and
beignets
, a kind of sweet fried bread dusted with powdered sugar, the coffee rich with chicory and heavy real cream. I felt so alive, so sad-and-happy, so full of expectation. I walked all of the Quarter, up and down and across, humming and whistling the songs I’d be playing, straightening out the melodies in my mind. In a Bourbon Street sitdown place, I felt like having a fish dinner, so I ordered crayfish, crawdads, and was nonplussed when the waitress brought out a large tray with a mountain of red-black insectoid creatures heaped on it. She showed me how to dissect them, a tiny pinch of meat in each one. Delicate taste.

For another hour I wandered up and down Bourbon
Street, loitering in the doors of places that had music, stealing tricks. Then I went on to Fat Charlie’s. I passed dozens of handbills with my “name” on them.

There wasn’t an empty seat in the place. The bar was shoulder-to-shoulder and there were customers nursing drinks, leaning against the walls. Fat Charlie came out of nowhere and put his arm around my shoulders.

“This is a big crowd, girl,” he said quietly. “They came to see you.”

“I can’t believe that—what, two hours? Three?”

“It’s a small town. These’re not too many tourists … like I say, you’re something different. They come by to see.” He handed me five crisp bills. “Here’s some confidence. You go back in the kitchen and warm up a bit Machine’s behind the piano.”

“What will I be playing, what order?”

“You just name it We prob’ly know it.”

Well, that was an interesting challenge. I picked up his clarinet and went into the kitchen, trying to think of the most obscure piece I knew. The kitchen was barely big enough for me and the cook, since the only prepared food they sold was fried potatoes with lots of salt. The cook was a little fat white man who never looked up from the potato slicer, but said, “Bottle’s in the refrigerator.”

I didn’t usually eat or drink anything before playing, because of the saliva problem, but this wasn’t exactly Mozart, and I was nervous enough to appreciate a little liquid courage. The bottle turned out to be bourbon, of course. I poured a couple of centimeters into a rather clean glass and drank it in one gulp. Shuddered from the fire and memory.

I worked out a little opening line for “Stavin’ Change,” which they couldn’t
possibly
know. Feeling mischievous relieved some of the tension. Then I did fast and slow arpeggios, lowest note to highest, in all the keys we could possibly use.

Fat Charlie stuck his head in the door. “Warm?”

“Sweating.” He led me out onto the platform, where the other five were waiting. Most of the conversation died down and there was a little applause.

He leaned against the piano and said, “Well? What’s first?”

“You know ‘Stavin’ Change’?”

Five grins. “Tryin’ to fuck us up,” the trombone said to the banjo. To me: “What key? C-sharp minor?” The pianist
reached all the way to his right and tinkled out the first line,
I’m gonna tell you ’bout a bad man
, in a ridiculously high C-sharp. “Maybe B-flat,” he conceded. “About sixty?”

I nodded and Fat Charlie gave two heavy snaps; I just had time for a quick breath and started my intro, the piano and banjo automatically and softly behind. Then the trombone did a quiet vamp and the cornet took over the line, and I slid under him in sweet natural thirds and fifths, low register, and it was like we’d been playing together for years. They were so good.

I’ll never have another night like that. I’ve played in a lot of orchestras and bands and quartets, and against my own recorded sound, but I’d never played with professionals before. There are no professional musicians in the Worlds, except for the cabarets in Shangrila. These cobs could do anything, with the precision and synchrony of a music box. If I’d asked them for the Pythagorean Theorem they’d take four finger snaps and roll into it.

And the audience loved it. I know I wasn’t all that good, not within a light-year of Fat Charlie, but it was cute, like a bear riding a bicycle. They were “regulars,” aficionados, and when we did pieces that had coon-shout lines, they’d sing right along with us. (Which was a good thing. My singing voice is very ordinary, and an alto in with all that gravel sounded ridiculous.) They applauded and yelled and threw coins on the stage and bought us drinks. I had five mint juleps but didn’t get drunk; I was living so high and hard they just burned away. But by three o’clock I was staggering, drunk on fatigue and applause. The inside of my lips all numb pain and salt blood and my body felt like it had been squeezed through six bright hours of orgasm. Fat Charlie walked me back to the hotel and gave me a big wet kiss and a rib-cracking hug.

I slept like a dead thing. The phone woke me up at about ten.

“Hello, no vision,” I mumbled.

“Jimmy Hollis here.” The banjo player. “You know you’re in the paper?”

“What paper? What the hell are you doing up at this hour?”

“Shee-it. I’m
still
up.” I remembered he’d offered me ’phets last night. “In the
Times-Picayune
. You a star, lady, a
star!
”

I put something on and stumbled down to the lobby
and punched up “Entertainment” on the
Times-Picayune
machine. There I was, on the first page, red hair and blue denim and looking very intense. I bought another copy to send to Jeff.

I actually was, technically, a “star”—one of the 480 on the list compiled daily by
The New York Times
. I was number ten in the subcategory “Jazz, Traditional, Instrumental.”

I hadn’t even finished reading the article when somebody knocked on the door. I put my hand on the knob. “Who is it?”

“Newspaper.
Times-Picayune.”

I opened the door. “Look, I don’t—”

He was a tall man with an ugly scarred face. He raised a small pistol and shot me in the neck.

I woke up with my wrists tied to the arms of a floater seat. To my right, out the window, a desert was rolling by about a thousand meters below. To my left was the ugly man who had shot me. There was a pilot and nobody else. My bladder was about to burst.

“I have to pee,” I said to the ugly man.

“So pee,” he said.

“Winchell,” the pilot said, “don’t be such a prick. If she does, you have to clean it up.”

“Don’t count on it.” But he untied me and I rushed back to the john. There was a small welt on my neck, anesthetic dart.

Urinating, I realized the bladder pain wasn’t everything and, disgusted, found sticky evidence of recent intercourse. I cleaned up raging and went back to the man Winchell, standing in the aisle.