American Music (11 page)

PART THREE

In the slaughterhouse of love,
Only the best are killed …
Don’t run away from this dying.

—
RUMI

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

I
t was almost funny. First Pearl told him with tears in her eyes and an optimistic yet resigned expression. Then Vivian told him the same thing, only with a terrified, stricken look on her face. He had two women depending on him more than ever and he could do nothing other than walk along the river with his hands in his pockets wondering how he could get on another liner not only to escape his predicament but more important, to make some money. He reassured himself by thinking that Pearl would probably not make it again this time and then he despised himself for having such a thought. And Vivian, she was not ready for this but perhaps it would settle the matter once and for all; he would have to be with her now. It had been weeks and he had still not spoken to Pearl about Vivian. But once Pearl saw that he and Vivian would be a family, he surmised, she would have some sympathy. Again he was disgusted with the way his mind worked. Why should Pearl care about his happiness? Why would he imagine that she wouldn’t be sickened by his betrayal and hate him for it? Of course she would not wish him and Vivian well. He was insane to hope for that. Worse, he was a terrible person for thinking of leaving her. Ever. But most of all now.

His mind swung. He was leading the beat in his head with the percussion of his heart. His head and his heart were no match for time. He had been swept up in the music and now the music had swept him aside. He was just someone in the midst of the music of history. History conducted by a bandleader. History, conducting life.

But what was so historical about his problem? It was a timeless dilemma, no specific circumstances had given rise to it, just romance and passion and stupidity. He didn’t care about seeing himself as important or unimportant, but suddenly it occurred to him that if there hadn’t been a Depression he wouldn’t have been playing on ships, if he hadn’t been playing on ships he wouldn’t have met Vivian on the dock, if he hadn’t met Vivian … But this was such shallow, faulty reasoning that he nearly laughed into the wind. No, his problem was simply his. Still, there was the music, the current of which had carried him here. And there was a moment in time that had given rise to that music, a moment and a music that had seemed so isolated from history. No one thought about the fact that swing music really started in Constantinople at a time of great cosmopolitanism and cultural exchange. No one thought that what seemed so American had come from an Armenian alchemist in seventeenth-century Turkey. Only Vivian was smart enough to think about something like that. Thinking about it now made him suspect that although his problems seemed exclusively his, perhaps they did go further back than he could imagine. What he didn’t consider was how far forward they might travel. That they might reverberate through time like the sound of cymbals across a dance hall, that he did not contemplate.

The wind stirred up the river. There were whitecaps today, streaks of white like dashes across the blue, making a moving poetry out on the water. He wondered what Vivian would have said about that. He thought about her, scared and burdened and feeling alone in the dim house with the heavy rugs. He thought about Pearl, hopeful for the sixth time. He thought about what a spectacular mess he had made. He thought that maybe finally he was going to have a child. Or two. What this kind of beginning would lead to he had no idea. What kind of person or people would thrive or wither from such an origin as this he had no idea. He couldn’t read the future. He felt ashamed at the way this unborn child’s life had begun and nevertheless proud that if his actions were going to ride on the waves of the future that they would ride in the form of life. Life, he figured, had been riding these waves for centuries and would always find some kind of rhythm. No, there was no way to hold on to time. He would just throw it up in the air like a smiling baby. He would swing it in his arms.

2005

I never liked him, Honor said.

He’s a prick, Milo said, but I feel for him. He doesn’t know any better.

He should.

She pushed some hair out of her face with the back of her hand.

This doesn’t sound like you. You’re usually so forgiving.

She had finished on his back and she was looking at nowhere. He sat up.

What is it? he said.

I don’t feel for him, she said. Something’s changed. I don’t feel like I have to forgive everyone. He should know better. He’s ruining lives, she said.

He’s not killing anyone, Milo said.

We don’t know that. And killing isn’t the only way to ruin lives.

No, but it’s a good one, he said.

He got down from the table and started to put on his shirt.

He was supposed to be moving out soon. He was walking. He was ready, they said. She was helping him find a place to live. He would need to stay nearby for a while to keep up his rehabilitation, so he could not go back yet to Maine. She was happy. He would stay close. They didn’t talk about it, but it was clear that they would stay close.

When he finished getting dressed and she was ready to go, he held the door for her and they walked down the hall together.

1969

When she was rummaging around the apartment she found the photograph. It was under the table on top of a pile of papers. Iris saw them looking up at her from a skewed angle as if they were watching her on the ceiling while they lay in bed. She knew the photograph would be there someplace because she had sent it to the photographer. She had sent it with a note that said: “Remember us?”

Now she had come to take other pictures away. She felt no qualms about taking them; she felt they were rightly hers. She thought of the pictures as a kind of shadow self, her ghostly twin. They represented an alternate life, what she might have been, not a photographer but a photograph. A subject, an object, an object of affection if there had not been the photographs. The photographs reflected her missing self, the negative that she felt herself to be. She saw them everywhere, scattered carelessly around the room. The old ones had been black and white but these were Kodachrome and infused with the melancholy yellows and reds of the era, the muted bleached-out colors of a city afternoon. A child on the subway looking up at an advertisement, her mother staring down at her, their bodies twisted both toward and away from each other. A group of children in the park, one persuading the others of something, a face gripped with determination and laced with contempt. A little boy lying down on the sidewalk looking skyward with a carefree arrogance. All children in every one of them, but none innocent, each individual. The artist had seen every one of her subjects as a person and had not shied away from the humor and terror just below the surface of their faces and lives. Iris glanced at them quickly, her ink and chemical siblings, and threw them into a shopping bag. She gathered contact sheets and rolls of film. She left the wedding photograph where it was. She left.

Out on the street with her vigilante shopping bag she felt watched, as if people would know what she was carrying, what she had done. Then, overeducated girl that she was, she thought how ironic that was, that she would feel herself watched, looked at, as if she herself were a picture. She had turned herself into a photograph! Perhaps that way she could get some attention! She smiled to herself and looked quickly to the side before crossing the street. It was warmer out than she had expected and her feet were swelling slightly in her shoes. She was getting blisters. But still she continued walking, afraid to stop, to lose momentum. It was a long walk home. She calculated: from Twelfth Street uptown, over seventy blocks, more than three miles. There was a manic energy to her movements, her legs scissoring exceptionally quickly, her head switching side to side to check for traffic at every crosswalk, strands of her hair flying as she propelled herself home. Home, where the baby would be, where Alex would not be, yet. Iris tried to construct a warm and welcoming feeling from the notion of home, but she had never actually experienced that. Even as a child, although home had been friendly and her parents doting in their way, home had never felt like a place where one could actually be understood. Her sense of not belonging, she later grew up to believe, was what everyone felt, and so she did not dwell on it, but of course it hurt, it confused her, and then when there was an answer, or something to pin it all on, she clung to it. The bag was getting heavier.

She stopped. She put the bag down. It was a large lavender thick paper bag from Bergdorf Goodman with an image of black silhouetted shoppers parading at an angle up the side. Iris had saved it from the purchase of a new dress. A crocheted dress, very of-the-moment, something Alex would like and yet not fully appreciate. Certainly he would not appreciate the price. She rubbed her hand. The twisted paper handles of the bag had dug into her palm, creating new lines, a new future, she thought for a moment. Then, and this was the way her mind worked, she seemed to enter that new future and for an instant the past disappeared. She was standing on a street corner with an overstuffed Bergdorf’s bag at her feet, a breeze blowing over from Madison Square Park tangling up her hair, and she had no past. She saw herself as if in a black-and-white photograph taken from the window of a building nearby, seen from slightly above, a woman on the street, lost, or so it would appear, rubbing her hand, the wind coming from behind her, blowing her hair forward, she a silhouette, yet unlike the figures on her bag not parading but standing still, held in place by the wind and the force of forgetting, a person caught in time. She was too intelligent to not see herself but not wise enough to help herself.

A photograph, she thought suddenly, is like an ink and chemical memory in the mind of the subject being photographed. I am standing here, she thought, and a picture of me would be a picture of what I can imagine, as if the image itself were lifted from the mind of the woman being photographed. I should write an essay about that idea, she thought. And then she picked up the bag and kept walking.

1937

Joe and Pearl sat in the living room after dinner with the lamp on. Outside the winter night had long ago gone dark. He was studying and had his books piled up on the low coffee table, his feet up next to them, crossed and in socks. She was knitting and her fingers moved with furious intent, whipping around each other and sliding the needles through the yarn with a machinelike choreography and precision. He asked if she was making something for the baby. She said no that the yarn she was using was too rough. She was making him a scarf.

2005

Milo lay on his bed and touched the thin sheets, the lonesome blanket, the sandpaper wall. He would miss this pathetic bed. He looked up at the ceiling and today there was no swinging house. No saxophone case coming through the plaster. They had given him a date when he could leave and suddenly life seemed very simple and earthbound. He had hoped for this and dreamt about it. He had talked about it with Honor during their visits in the yard. He had worked hard in physical and occupational therapy to be able to reach this day. Now the day felt frightening in its ordinariness. The ceiling blank and cold and white. In moments of calm he felt as though he were impersonating a normal human being, someone who wouldn’t be frightened by an empty room or made despairing by the thought of losing that room. He was just feeling an ordinary sadness, he told himself. It did not have to go any further than that.

He turned on his side. His legs felt strong but tired. He had worked them hard this morning. He looked at the wall. He saw shades of lavender and pink in the light on the wall. No yellowing kitchen. No city lights. Just the color of this day in this room. Then his hand reached out to the wall and he saw his fingers touch the wall and he saw them stroking the wall and he saw them touching the wall as if he were pressing keys. Keys on a saxophone, keys on a typewriter. He looked at his hand and it was touching nothing, a blank wall, a blank page. He tried to take it away but he knew that he wouldn’t. The pull was too strong. Reaching out to the wall was like reaching back inside to something long gone and sorely missed, something that had abandoned him the way the stars abandon the city sky because there is too much reflected light, something there if he could only see it. If the city could shatter and the stars could return, that was what he was reaching for.

A black case moved through the wall and sat on the bed. It opened to reveal a typewriter.

1969

Iris put the shopping bag in the back of the closet. She moved the typewriter case in front of it. She let Geraldine go and went to check on the baby. Soon, Alex would be coming home for dinner from the hospital. She would have to start cooking.

She changed her dress and put on different tights. It was 1969 and she wore dark tights nearly every day. Her hair was brown and straight and parted in the middle. She wore it chin length and when she had it done it curled under her pretty chin. She had green eyes and black glasses which only accentuated her prettiness. She had changed into a navy blue dress which hit her at the knee and she put on her favorite amber necklace. She put on lipstick even though she was only going to the kitchen to make dinner and she had to stand tiptoe at the small porcelain sink with its thin metal legs to see her face in the square glass medicine cabinet. The baby cried. She ran to get her.

In the kitchen the baby sat in her high chair eating pureed vegetables and wearing a bib. Iris talked to her while she prepared dinner from a book called
Never in the Kitchen When Company Arrives
. They were not having a dinner party tonight but they had many and she had become dependent on this book. They had dinner parties to help restore Alex’s reputation. He had had trouble since the trial. He was only now beginning to get referrals. Mostly he took whatever surgeries came his way at the hospital, but he was not in high repute. He had to defer to younger doctors, doctors who were less well educated, doctors he didn’t like. He came home withdrawn. He read the paper.