A Little Night Music (6 page)

An hour passed, their drinks long empty. His thirst for her stories replaced anything a parched tongue could touch. Stories of childhood summers and music festivals and a first and rather persistent admirer her father had strong and humorous opinions about. Jon envied the park’s statues. He never wanted to leave this spot, this moment, but he sensed Elli had grown weary of talking.

Maybe it was the fact that she didn’t dismiss what he said about the trumpet as crazy. Maybe it was the stone angels or the caffeinated sweetness in his veins or the way she tilted her head when she wasn’t pissed off at him, but he searched for an excuse to extend their time, if only for a few minutes.

“I have someone I want you to meet,” said Jon.

“Now?” She glanced at her wrist—where she must have usually worn a watch because he spotted its pale outline in her skin tone—then glanced up to study the sun’s position. “I really should get back. I have a million things to do to get ready for the fundraiser.”

He used the one card Elli couldn’t refuse.

“She’s a little girl who loves music. The right instrument could make all the difference.”

Elli breathed in deeply. The tantalizing outline this created under wrinkled cotton and simple wood buttons snagged Jon’s imagination, so much that he almost didn’t hear her say yes.

“Half hour, tops. Any longer and Macy will have us ordering Mardi Gras beads to toss at the rich, topless wives of upper-crust New Orleans.”

Another New Orleans reference flew over Jon’s head but he picked up on the them-versus-us tone when Elli bumped up against the subject of money. As a musician’s family, the Lerouxs couldn’t have had a lot but if the visions were what he thought they were they didn’t need much.

For joy like that, Jon would gladly surrender his Madison-Avenue life.

Too bad happiness like that only happened in the tall tales of a southern family.              

“She comes every day about this time. Best smile on the planet.”

Jon ushered Elli into his apartment first then followed behind to gather up the litter trail of notes his landlord had begun sliding under his door—all messages of increasing agitation to call James. The most recent read:
I’m not your secretary. Get a fucking phone!
Jon wanted to wipe his ass with them, but in polite company decided to drop them discretely into the wastebasket.

“This is a great old building,” said Elli, surveying the high industrial ceilings and brick walls on the street and alley side.

“Not much for air, though,” Jon apologized. He beat the window unit a few times for show then opened the adjacent window to the fire escape. Never had he felt so uncomfortable in the space. “It’s better out here.”

Jon crawled out first to help Elli through. His peripheral vision caught a wave of green. In the alley, in a green dress, he saw Elephant staring up at him, the same white flower in her hair she gave him every afternoon. He waved her up.

Elephant shook her head, her expression pinched.

“Someone I want you to meet,” Jon called down to her.

Still, she shook her head.

Elli had slipped off her sandals, those red toenails against the red iron of the fire escape setting off a four-alarm blaze beneath his collar. When her head had safely cleared the window sash and there was no further need to have her hand, Jon found it hard to let go. It felt as natural there as the middle G in a harmonic series.

Jon glanced down three stories. The green fabric disappeared around the building’s corner.

“That’s strange.”

“She must be shy.”

“
Least
shy kid. Ever.” Jon stared after her, hoping she’d reappear. “Maybe she had to be somewhere.”

“Maybe she wants you all to herself.” Elli sat on the window ledge, legs kicked out, relaxed.

“Without a trumpet, I’m nothing. Girl can dance.”

Jon settled on the fire escape, back to the alley, wrists hung casually off his knees. The slight breeze teased the cotton hem of Elli’s dress, a fortunate perk of his vantage point.

“I didn’t see much in there but a suitcase,” she said.

“Didn’t bring much.”

“Not in the way of something you can touch.”

“What does that mean?”

“Oh, you came with lots of baggage. None of it the kind with leather handles.”

He should have known bringing her here would drum up questions he didn’t want to answer. It should have bothered him that there was no way out of the conversation but thirty feet of sliding red ladders, but it didn’t. For once, he didn’t try to swallow the past back into some hardened
I-don’t-give-a-shit
veneer of half-truths and delusions.

“I don’t have a plan. I wake up like I’m supposed to be somewhere, my heart’s pounding as if I’m late for the most important meeting of my life, and it never quite stops when I remember I’m not. It feels like my other life continued on without me, and I drifted here. The Lotus gives me somewhere to be, something in my control, something that doesn’t make me feel like a shell of my other life.”

“What’s your other life doing right now?”

A bubble of distaste surfaced. Jon let it go in a wry laugh. “Meetings. Mergers. Financial specs. Helping others plan their future—some empty, ideal life to come, but there are no guarantees.”

“If there were, what would be the point? We’d know every turn already. No surprises.” Elli settled into her perch, face lifted , eyelids closed every-so-often to take in the afternoon sun. “My father had the chance to play for Benny Goodman in Moscow. Dream come true for a poor sap from New Orleans.”

“What happened?”

“Night he was set to leave, my mother walked into the train station headed to nursing school. To hear him tell it, she was an angel—white uniform, white hat, a white aura that lit the waiting room like a comet. Neither of them boarded a train that day. He told me once that was the smartest fool move he ever made.”

Jon forgot himself. He had fallen into Elli’s story as he had before, her cadence and soft, southern voice a place of magic and light.

“’Course, it wasn’t easy. Mama’s family disowned her for giving up her future to marry a black man. Nothing worthwhile is ever easy, and you’re not meant to figure it all out in one afternoon. Or two weeks.”

“And if nothing ever fills the shell again?”

“Even a rain barrel in the desert doesn’t stay empty forever.”

The moment suspended, an indefinite pause of infinite turns. Thoughts of white comets and desert rain and dreams filled the void he knew would never leave. Nearby a bird pined for the fallen breeze. Traffic sounds filtered through the brick buildings, a steady hum of movement that brought him back to fire escapes and dirty alleys and the remembered sting of reporters shouting, “Is it true your wife’s infidelity with Ms. Jenkins had been going on for three years?” and “What was the nature of your wife’s visit to the Englewood clinic? Was she carrying your child?”

“I should get back,” said Elli.

“Right.” Jon stood and helped her through the window. Clouds had slipped in and blanketed the city’s heat island in merciful shadow casting his temporary home into a darkness that mimicked a crude shed in a rare downpour, a forced intimacy that sharpened his defenses.

“I’m sorry I didn’t meet your friend.”

Jon rummaged for his keys in the jacket he had tossed to the bed. When he turned, Elli was close—too close.

“Yeah. I’m sorry, too.”

“Maybe another time.”

“Maybe.”

Elli’s spirit and energy came on like a tidal wave, a loss of control he was unprepared for with anyone, let alone a woman he only wanted to pump for information about the trumpet. He wasn’t sure what to say past hollow conversation.

She inched toward him. The heady scent of magnolias on her skin had faded to a mixture of mocha and summer air and leather from his jacket—everywhere they had been, everything they had done, together. Her eyes rounded, an open invitation. Her gaze dripped low on his face, his lips—no doubt.

His foot-thick, gut-level wall of protection overshadowed his need to touch and be touched, to find a justification and balance for the way he had damn-near taken her on the street.

                      She leaned in to kiss him.

       
              He turned his head.

       
              “Elli—” he whispered against her cheek, but she had already closed her lips, already pulled away, her eyes a fading ember of the luminescence they had when she spoke of her father’s music and New Orleans and family. How could he tell her this time kissing her would mean more, infinitely more, and he wasn’t willing to take that risk?

       
              But he didn’t have to. She scooped up her sandals and walked out of his apartment with purpose. This time, when he scrambled to catch up to her meandering path down three flights of stairs, there were regrets instead of prayers and a twenty-minute ride back to her office, the motorcycle’s engine a flimsy excuse for silence.

                                                     ****                                     

Four
                                                 

             The Lotus was packed for a Wednesday night. The last week of summer brought tourists  en masse to Bourbon Street and the adjacent avenue clubs for a last gasp of recklessness before their lives settled into the business part of the year. Jon had called James once to pacify him and learned there were rumblings of replacing Jon at the last board meeting. Three of their highest investors had pulled out, citing uncertainty in the company. James had been unusually calm on the phone, a show of sympathy or indifference, Jon couldn’t be sure.

Four days had passed since Elli tried to kiss him. Four days of passable but lackluster technique on Jon’s part, four days of Mongo asking after the woman responsible for stealing the thunder from Jon’s fingers, four days of bad-fish-smell stares from Dezi and more than a few overt suggestions from drunk women. But as quickly as he entertained offers to erase the memory of Elli wrapped around his body on the bike or the at-home feel of her fingers laced through his, he found he had left that New Orleans temptation behind. Elli, it seemed, had spoiled him for something real.

A realization that led to moody ballads on the fire escape that kept even Elephant away.

Hadn’t he told Elli he wanted nothing to do with women? Wasn’t he a miserable human being—her words? Every time he tried to connect the dots between getting clocked on the street and dodging those tempting lips, his head pounded like a bass drum in a sound booth.

He had learned to play into the visions, which came on more frequent and intense than before, street parades, a boy with a crew cut attempting his first scale, a bar fight breaking out as the music played on  - probably over a woman, a rawhide mallet the craftsman used to press the pipe’s seams. The visions were more than the instrument’s history. They were messages of beginnings and endings, of trials and false starts. Universal and specific, Jon played them in his mind as he might a new chord in a familiar song.

But Jon had yet to see the one person who could take away the heavy, expectant pull the visions left behind.

                      Mongo signaled a key change and slipped into one of Jon’s favorite Davis numbers,
Blue in Green
. Jon had settled into the first few bars when The Lotus disappeared. He was at a grand home —white columns, shiny black 1955 Coupe DeVille parked in the circular drive. People dressed in all black walked the grounds in slow motion, gathering in clusters of whispered talk and subdued gestures of affection, everyone with food, few eating. But Jon was none of those. He was a man who had walked so far his feet hurt, trumpet solid in his hand. He was a man who marched up the groomed lawn and stopped in full view of a second story window. He was a man who raised his instrument and said farewell to a dead soldier in the best way he knew how—through music, the sixth note of
Taps
cracking like a sob in his throat. And when the girl—his girl—came running from that grand house, eyes swollen with tears for the loss of her brother, the snap of her name on her father’s tongue stopped her like a whip. “Maria!” The stares, the stares were nothing next to the sight of the girl—his girl—swallowed up again by that big house.

       
              Jon stumbled back into
Blue in Green
. He blinked away the moisture that had surfaced in his eyes—from the stage lights and smoke, from the visions and Elli pressing him into places he never chose to roam. He emptied himself into his solo.

       
              No one in the club lifted a drink. No one spoke nor moved.

       
              Past the notes, he tried to remember the names on the Leroux crypt. He couldn’t save one, Elli’s father, but Jon knew. He saw the radiance of the girl and felt that comet as sure as his boot soles were planted on the sacred ground of decades of musicians who had come before him. He knew the girl was Elli’s mother and he, Jon, had gone deeper than ever before.