A Little Night Music (2 page)

Jon leveled Gabe with a look that could have unseated every glass from the overhang. Clearly Gabe had stumbled into the mums-speak zone of brotherhood. Gabe squirmed.

Elli’s stomach fluttered—one lonely wing-beat of sympathy—before she squashed it like a mosquito. She steered the conversation back to critical territory. “I want to buy it back.”

“Not a chance,” said Jon.

“I’ll double what you paid for it.”

Jon leaned close. Gold flecks in his pupils reminded her of the brassy hue of Mardi Gras beads. She felt his gaze memorize every part of her face, sizing her up, his ice-cold breath skimming her cheek before he lingered on her eyes. She wasn’t sure if he wanted to kiss her or clock her with his bar glass.

“I don’t care how adorable you are, I’m not interested.”

He walked away, absorbed by the living organism that was a jazz crowd on a Friday night, leaving Elli wondering if they were still speaking about a trumpet. She glanced at Gabe, who supplied a what-the-hell pitch of his apologetic brows before he turned to another customer.

At the stage, Jon lifted the trumpet. He licked his lips and positioned them for embouchure, all while staring directly at Elli. Her insides shook, from the starting notes of a high-octane
In the Mood
or the undeniable thread of tension that rendered The Lotus all but invisible between them. Jon attacked the song with an aggressive reverence that had toes tapping, men leading their dates to the tiny dance floor near the band and moisture stinging Elli’s eyes. For Jon Desmarais was no fifth-grade band player. With every authoritative note, he wrapped the revelers in a string of movements that were pure genius. Exactly as Daddy would have wanted to extend his legacy.

Too bad that legacy came in such an unfortunate and unworthy package.

                                                     * * * *            

Elli ran her fingertip along the bay window to Mama Dee’s where her father’s instrument had taken up residence for the previous eight weeks. That is, until a misogynistic, Windy-City blowhard bought it. A cathedral radio, circa 1920, occupied the display now. Though gorgeous with its stained-glass detailing, Elli mourned not being able to detour her way into work and catch a glimpse of the trumpet.

Issa shuffled beyond the display and caught a glimpse of Elli. His stallion-handled cane tapped out a less-than-speedy rhythm to the shop’s entrance, his boisterous “Heeeeeey!” a muffled cry until she opened the door. Issa’s greeting carried at least two city blocks.

Passing tourists stopped abruptly and turned.

“Hoo, Elli, get yourself on in here,” Issa’s
here
more like
he-yah
. “Give Issa some love.”

Elli gathered the frail man into her arms as he had once when her first boyfriend broke her heart. Her father had been gone only a few months at the time and Issa’s barrel-chested, low-rumbling words of wisdom might as well have been the voice of the Almighty himself proclaiming a new commandment that all boys were idiots.

“Lawd, girl, you always smells so good. What brings ya’ll over here?”

“I have a bone to pick with an old man.” Elli raised her voice to overcome the hearing loss Issa had suffered as a tank gunner in Vietnam.

Issa’s lips pressed into a stern line as if he was preparing to kiss the Devil. “Issa done better sit down fah dis. Hoo.”

Elli helped him into his favorite leather chair behind the counter and crouched beside him, his arthritic hand in hers. She smiled though the hurt that had wrapped her heart in barbed wire.

“Daddy’s trumpet,” she began. “I was very clear on my instructions, Issa.”

“And I done followed dem. To da letter.”

“You were supposed to sell only to someone who would love and cherish it as Daddy did. That…that…
man
,” she nearly spat, “is a horrible individual. None of Daddy’s spirit.”

“Issa been around, Little Girl. Dat Jon, he perfect fit.”

“How can you say that? He wouldn’t shake my hand. He looked at me like I was a cockroach, unfit to scuttle across his musical boots.”

“Handsome, no? For a skinny, white boy.” Issa’s smoky chuckle dissolved into a coughing spell.

Elli’s face flushed in exasperation. “That was hardly the criteria.”

“Dis da magic. Issa at work.”

“Issa crazy, that’s what he is.” She shook her head and allowed a tiny chuckle to escape, but for once, the old man wasn’t smiling.

“No one evah be good nuff. Dis ain’t about no brass. ‘S ‘bout movin’ on, Child.”

Elli closed her eyes. Grief slid in like an alligator in calm waters, its ripples nearly undetected but for the threat of a bite powerful enough to sever a part of herself. She couldn’t do this, not now. But Issa had been there when her father took his final breath into those glorious lungs, lungs that no longer produced the most beautiful music to her ears but whose final sound was the reedy, empty note of death. And she was back in that stifling room, sunlight off the Mississippi spilling in the east window like a hot toxin coming to take him, her Mama’s wails rattling the shutters. And then nothing for weeks, silence, the cruelest song of all.

“Dat man, Dat
real
man inside, he belong to no other.”

A strange notion pulled Elli back from that September Sunday. Tension that had pooled in her shoulders eased. “We’re still talking trumpet?”

Issa shrugged, his dark chocolate irises twinkling.

“Not that silly love curse again.” Elli stood and walked away more to compose herself than to browse the antique sheet music on a nearby display. “It’s a bedtime story. Nothing more.”

“Dis da magic. Issa at work.”

“Well Issa-at-work had better clear some space in that window. Trumpet’ll be back here by tonight. Guaranteed.”

Two

Jon awoke mid-afternoon—sweat-thirty it felt like. Half-past the hour anyone who wasn’t reptilian could sleep. The antique fan clattering on the desk in his sparse third-floor apartment slowed intermittently, as if it too gave up trying to do anything but stir the heat. His phone bleated—the sound that must have awoken him.

He checked the display. James.

Again.

Jon stumbled to the window that didn’t house the broken air conditioner, tugged the frame open and chucked his cell phone out the window.

It rang once more on its thirty-foot descent before smashing on the alley’s broken pavement. Now just a pile of green microchips and spider-web glass, it reminded Jon of being nine and taking apart everything in his friend’s garage to find just the right reverberations for drumming and plucking and strumming and blowing. A junk band. They’d called themselves
Playing Smack
. Jon smiled then caught himself.

That had been another lifetime ago. Someone else’s lifetime, because he couldn’t remember the name of the short kid with the horn-rimmed glasses who had a father that didn’t smack him around.

A breeze through the alley skimmed along his knuckles. Jon pulled on a t-shirt and crawled out onto the fire escape to chase more of it. He settled into the rest of the afternoon there, disassembling the trumpet to bathe and oil it, as if his near-obsessive attention to detail could all but eliminate the possibility of another freak vision.

In his dream Jon had returned to that porch. He found it was a place he didn’t have a complete aversion to—the top-down euphoria
had
been infectious—but it had marched into his head, unannounced, and stolen his connection to the notes, to the control he prided himself on. That loss of control made the vision taboo.

Without question, the instrument had been loved. Aside from a tiny ding on the first valve slide—a flaw to which Jon attributed any number of things: a club fight, a missus jealous the owner chose music over her, a tumble out of the sack on a passionate night—Jon had never seen a more exquisite trumpet. Had it really belonged to the father of the prima donna of New Orleans? A woman more pageant queen than dark alley? The old guy at the shop hadn’t said much. In fact, he might as well have spoken a hybrid of Pig Latin and Hebrew for all Jon understood him. But if there was one thing certain in the cluster-fuck of his life of late, it was that no woman—especially not one who smelled like magnolias and rainwater that could swell rivers and drown hearts—would get
his
instrument.

He reassembled the trumpet and sampled
Nature Boy
to open its lower register, thankful the Bywater neighborhood was too underbelly to care. Sun soaking his pores, heat burning his eyelids, he poured every toxic vapor from his soul—every lie his wife told to protect her secret life, every rant she summoned as an excuse to not have children, every night she covered his body with hers and pretended he was everything she wanted—into the solemn voice of his instrument. And when he was nearly finished and had sweated out more than tears ever could have, he glanced around.

Between the fire escape’s red slats, pink fabric caught his attention. His melody faltered a bit, hesitating on what it was, when a little girl of no more than seven or eight years old twirled into view and busted out the rocking-est swing steps he had ever seen in saddle shoes.

Her energy thrilled him. His lazy stretch on the trumpet’s full range charged into an up-tempo
Sing, Sing, Sing.
He
fleshed everything he could out of the notes so she wouldn’t stop. Her kinky hair, corralled into dozens of multicolored plastic clips, clicked along to his tune with an abandon he forgot existed. She twisted and turned and busted out a God-given connection to music few possessed. He ended the song, as breathless as the girl, and set down the trumpet to applaud.

The girl bowed and saluted him on his lofty perch. When he thought she had gone, her pink dress peeked again through the red slats. She climbed three flights of fire escape steps and plunked down beside him, her café-au-lait face glistening with sweat, a cluster of white flowers wedged in her hair.

“What’s your name?” asked the girl.

Jon laughed at being ambushed by a girl no bigger than a tuba. “Jon. What’s yours?”

“Elephant.”

“Elephant?”

“Daddy plays a high C like an elephant’s roar. Makes me laugh.”

“I see. Where is your daddy? You’re a little young to be by yourself.”

“He plays The Nile sometimes. I know everyone here. Never seen you before.”

“I’m new.”

“Why were you playing so sad before, Mr. Jon?”

At her pointed question, Jon’s heart stumbled away from his all-consuming adoration. He reminded himself of her innocence, the unyielding belief of childhood that what was fair was right and what wasn’t right could be solved with popsicles and a sunshine-colored Crayola.

“I was sad.”

“But now you’re not?”

Jon squinted down the alley, surprised that the knot in his stomach had eased. “No.”

“You musta gotten it all out.”

The sun’s rays penetrated his skin. For the first time in two weeks, he welcomed the heat, as if it were thawing something too-long frozen. “Yeah. I guess I did.”

“Dad says music does that.” Elephant lowered her voice an exaggerated octave to channel a man—no doubt her father, very mid-range Louis Armstrong—for the next bit, “Puts space in life so you can breathe,” before returning to her own voice. “Whatever that means.”

Jon wanted to comment on the wisdom of such a man, but the little girl’s expression had fallen. He wondered if her sweat beads were tears, too.

With no further words, without even a loose expression of goodbye, the girl plucked the cluster of tiny white flowers from her hair, slipped it into Jon’s t-shirt pocket, and scrambled down the fire escape, out of sight.

                                                         ****              

Jon arrived at The Lotus as the sun begged forgiveness for the day behind the eclectic cluster of building fronts and balconies that lined the Jazz District. New Orleans was a hot, sticky, dirty city—never more evident than in the relaxed pre-opening moments, when most members of the
Seems Like Old Times
band took a smoke break near the kitchen dumpster. Never Mongo. He filled the red velvet stool at his piano as if the eighty-eight keys ruled the valves of his overburdened heart. When he spotted Jon, he waved him closer.

Ladder-back chair reversed, Jon settled beside him.

“Lookin’ sharp tonight, Madison Avenue.”

“I told you, Mongo. Chicago, not New York.”

“Alls the same to us here.”

“At least
you
don’t hold it against me.”

“Not unless it comes through that bell there.” Mongo indicated the trumpet case resting beside Jon’s boots.

“Dezi never said ‘don’t come back,’ so I’m here.”

“Aww, Dezi, he blowin’ steam, you know. Never heard your Madison-Avenue playin’ before. Gotsta have an appreciation for it, you know. You’ll get it, you’ll get it. Just gotsta feel the music.” Mongo stretched the word
feel
and looked up as if his advice were a kite, loosely tethered in reality.