American Music (7 page)

Later, in the car, Joe said: I feel like with you I can do that, keep time. I feel like with you it is always now.

But you can’t keep time, Joe. Not really.

He turned the car quickly, hand over hand.

I guess that’s why I like swing.

But you’re not even a drummer, Joe. You play the saxophone.

I guess I’d always dreamt of being a drummer. But it doesn’t matter. It’s the music. The cymbals moving the music forward. I love that sound. You do too.

She was looking out the window. The rain had come back.

I’ll leave her, he said. I have to. We’ve tried to make each other happy but we don’t.

She turned back to look at him. I can’t promise I’ll make you happy either.

You already have, he said. That won’t change.

There you go again, she said, thinking that you can keep time.

They found a new way to keep time, he said. Let me try.

Honor wasn’t the kind to leave. She’d never left anyone, except Anna, and that was different because in her own way Anna had already left her many years before. But this was what she could not tell Milo, that people seemed to leave her, that one day there had been a phone call. They weren’t married or even engaged and so it wasn’t an official phone call. It was from his family, who’d found her number among his things. They’d met her twice. He was the one who had given her the book of Ralph Ellison essays. He was the one who had taught her about music. She had been walking down the street and it was the middle of the day and there was a howling all around her from traffic, trucks, the population steadily screaming through the city under siege as it was every day. The cell phone was pressed against her wet cheek and the cars screeched past and Honor was trying to wipe away tears with the back of her hand and a stranger caught her eye and looked at her with a momentary and truthful look of pity and compassion and she knew that everyone, everyone, everyone would always leave her.

CHAPTER NINE

1969

W
hen she stood up to leave the restaurant the murals on the wall tilted and it looked like the Venetian gondolas were sailing straight to hell. The head curator held his liquor better and the benefactors seemed perfectly normal but the photographer rarely drank and so now she was wobbling and a centrifugal force spun around in her head. They walked her to the corner. The curator was saying something about the press for the show and doing interviews and had she been in
Vogue
before and she was trying to walk slowly but kept falling behind and she saw the very fashionable women in midtown wearing what would be the beginnings of the Seventies look, wide pants, wide collars, but for now most of the ladies were still demure as if the Sixties had not really happened here on Fifth Avenue. Even she, a painter, could have stepped more from the late Fifties with her pocketbook and headband but when she got home she would throw on her jeans. Oh to be home. To get away from the heavy leather menus and banquettes of midtown and back to her contemplative mess, her wavy glass windows, her cameras and slides. They didn’t wait long with her at the corner. The ladies sailed into cabs and the curator turned around and headed back to the museum. She was alone again and when the bus came she felt small and clear and free.

Walking up the stairs to her apartment she sensed the head-spinning return and wished she knew about those hangover remedies her alcoholic artist friends were always fixing for themselves on mornings at beach houses or in the afternoon when she might come over to their studios. But she did not know of any and had no desire to call anyone. The pathetic let-down feeling after a business lunch left her wanting only to work. That was all that would repair her, and perhaps that alone would wipe away the drink.

She turned the key in the lock and opened the door.

The mantel and the water glass left on the mantel were still there but there was a difference in the room and she glanced around before stepping inside. There was the door to the little bedroom slightly more ajar than she would have left it. There was a different position of the bags stacked under the long table, an almost undetectable shift in the shape the bags made in relation to one another and she stood for a moment wondering if this was just the alcohol or if the light had changed so much that objects seemed to have moved and then she scanned the top of one of her desks and she saw that it was empty. This was when she rushed into the apartment and touched the top of the desk to see if she was imagining this emptiness and then spread her arms out over the desk and then laid her head down on the desk and made a low moaning sound into the tabletop as if it were a body she was crying into.

She spent the rest of the day and night looking all over the apartment for her film and slides but they were gone. These were the photographs that were going to be in the exhibition. These were photographs for her first show of color work. These were photographs she had taken over the last five years, mainly of children, children she had found and watched on the streets. She loved the children in the photographs and she loved the photographs. In the photographs she had captured the weird shapes and beautiful shadows and the anger and calm and sweet openness of the children. She had taken pictures of life. It was the only life she cared about anymore. Now it was gone. Now, she was gone.

The photographer sat for a long time looking out the big window into the quiet, darkening garden. Her apartment faced a distant brick wall. She watched the shadows on the wall and thought about the shadows in her life and in her pictures. She wondered how this had happened and why. She cried and in the morning after thinking for a long time about who might have done this, she made a decision. Then she called the police.

2005

Do you think she ever gets the pictures back?

I think so. I think she will. She seems to have some idea about who took them.

Honor could hear in her own voice that she wanted to believe what she was saying. Her words sounded transparent, like footsteps on a bridge.

What makes you say that? said Milo. I don’t think she has any idea. I don’t know if she’ll get them back. Unless maybe the police get a description of the woman from that old lady downstairs.

I hope so. It’s so sad if she never gets them back.

She was hearing the footsteps in her voice walk away.

Milo craned his neck around and then pushed himself up onto his elbow. Why are you crying?

I’m not sure.

He took a corner of the sheet that had been draped over him and wiped her tears.

Thanks, she said.

Then the sheet slipped away and he was wiping her tears with his hands. Then she was sitting beside him, and he was holding her while she cried.

I’m sorry, she said, lifting her head from his shoulder. I don’t know why this is making me so sad.

Don’t be sorry, he said. It’s okay.

She looked at him and her eyes were wet and shining and the lids were reddened and her long lashes fanned around them like feathers around an egg. She had the unusually present look of a figure in a painting, someone to whom a great message is about to be revealed. She looked like she was about to receive something.

I think I need to know who stole those pictures, she said. I can’t explain why, but I feel like it matters to me in some way that is impossible to explain.

Now the footsteps were gone entirely. Not even an echo. She was saying what she meant.

All right. We’ll find out. He was stroking her hair.

Milo, I’m sorry, this isn’t supposed to be about me.

It isn’t supposed to be anything. It’s just a story.

She laughed a little. You’re right. So why do I care?

You care because you’re a caring person.

That’s when she put her hand on his neck and it brushed his collarbone and he flinched and pulled away. There was a look on his face that pierced her.

I’m so sorry, she said. Let’s forget about this.

I can’t forget about it, he said.

Then he took her hand and put it back on the same part of his collarbone and a flash burst in her brain as if she herself were made of light and she saw the reflection of a woman’s hand curved and distorted in the brass of a saxophone and then a shimmering sound swept through her and she was dancing in a crowded room.

She pulled her hand off. It’s too much, she said.

What about here, he said. He put her hand on his shoulder and she saw the perspiration blooming on the back of the woman’s dress in the courtroom in New Orleans. She saw the man standing in uniform with his back to her. She felt the woman tremble when the verdict was called out.

And here, he said. He put her hand on his back and she saw Pearl warming coffee on the stove and the odd lavender light that came at sunset into the little apartment coloring the white stove and the yellowing cabinets and the stained porcelain sink.

Here, he said, and now her hand was lower on his back and she saw Joe and Vivian in Greenwich Village, sitting by the river, driving to Massachusetts, talking in a car with the rain hitting the windows.

Then he moved her hand to his neck and she saw a woman swaying underwater, her black hair floating weightlessly like ink. Then the woman became one of many women, hundreds of bodies swaying like underwater tombstones.

I can’t do this, she said.

She closed her eyes.

Why not? he said.

She opened her eyes and looked at him. Then she looked down.

I can’t do this to you. It’s too much.

He dipped his head as if to look into her downcast eyes. He smiled. He lifted his chin as though he could lift her up with a simple gesture.

I can take it, he said. He was still smiling. I’ve taken worse. He whispered: We’ll figure it out.

She allowed herself to look at him.

Don’t you see? he said. It’s all inside me.

She was scared now and he was the one who seemed unafraid.

I’m the one who can help you now, he said.

So I wasn’t even able to do my job. She looked away again, her eyes tearing.

No, this is your job. This isn’t pitying me. This is giving me some way to fight for you. This is what I do best.

His face was lit up and there wasn’t the usual anger around his mouth. He looked younger and older at the same time.

She wiped her eyes and gave him a pained smile that he thought was inhumanly pretty.

Always a soldier, Honor said.

Your soldier, he said.

CHAPTER TEN

Vivian

S
he saw him at night in her dreams a dark figure shadowing her along a riverbank and catching up with her the boats in the river sliding past ghostly passengers watching her in her final moments on shore because he was coming for her that much was certain and he would bring her back with him and he was coming closer she could feel him he was a mystery in the blackness that she kept trying to deny but their reflections in the dark water were even darker and as his approached hers there was the reflection of the saxophone case too like some mad sea animal searching for her, hunting her down and now they were right beside her and she would have to give over to this wrong love or she would lose him or she could fall over into the water and it would all be over she would just let herself fall into the river and then she was falling and the water grabbed her hungrily and she sped down a dark channel and in the dark water weeds and debris wound around her as she was pulled quickly by the current and then it stopped the dream stopped and she woke up screaming and he wasn’t there how could he be he was not supposed to be she had told him to go home he was supposed to be home she was not his home.

She had not wanted to go with Pearl to meet him at the dock. She had not found Pearl interesting and so assumed he would not interest her either. He had wiped his palm on his shirt. He had seemed ordinary. But then the way he had looked at her in the kitchen had moved something inside her and she had felt seen although she had hidden that from him. She was still very young. Younger than either Pearl or Joe and they had struck her at first as old and sad and only later as experienced. She had traveled. She had been educated. But they had experience. They had sorrow. Maybe it was his sorrow that was looking at her in the kitchen and found hers. A sorrow that lifted when it felt his and soared like a note of music soars. A note of music soars, she thought, because it is trying to find its way back.

She would forget him. Vivian had decided that for the first time on the way home from Joe and Pearl’s apartment. She had a dying father to care for, a distraught mother, a life to begin. She had friends from college, mostly rich girls, not scholarship girls like herself, girls whose families didn’t seem to know there was a Depression, girls who invited her to parties, girls who didn’t know about the latest music and who used her to find out about things that seemed slightly dangerous. She had those friends but she was false with them because they could not understand her life and because she could never have told them about Joe. Years later, when their husbands had died and they had started careers of their own and raised many children and found new husbands or not, years later they would have been sympathetic to her stories about Joe. But for now she avoided most of the girls she knew from school.

Once she had met him again in the pastry shop she avoided almost everything but him. His fingers around the handle of his saxophone case, his long legs on the cobblestone streets, his soulful playing, the way he looked to her for a wisdom which somehow she had but had never really wanted, his voice that had a deep mellow comfort in it, these were the things she did not avoid now. This was the tender misery that she did not avoid now.

We have to say good-bye, she said. This really isn’t possible.

I know, he said. But then he whispered: Let’s just keep saying good-bye.

The woman in the education department of the Brooklyn Children’s Museum looked more closely at her outfit than at her résumé. Vivian could tell that the woman approved of her shoes. You can start on Monday, she said. Vivian liked tying the smocks around the children’s wriggling waists, handing the big brushes into their tiny starfish hands. She sponged tables. She set out paints. She truly appreciated the work they made and hung it up on the walls of the room. Still, the streets at the end of the day stretched on and she imagined that around a corner she might find a glorious church or a wide-open piazza like the places she had visited in Europe. The sound of a wailing instrument played in her head. I am too young to feel this lonely, she thought.

She met him at night at the movies. The curtains were dark red. On the balcony ornate carvings swirled and twisted as if they were alive. The ushers smoked and bent their heads in the lobby while the movie scrolled along and the faces up on the screen were as gigantic as gods come down to earth to impart their complete and utter lack of understanding. They had no answers. They fought and cried. Their enormous velvety eyes and their white marble teeth looked at nothing real and said nothing real and yet their flickering presence made her press more closely into his arms and the feeling in those arms made her less afraid than she had ever been. She thought: This is love. I can’t really have it, but at least I know now what it is.

And then he said that they could be together. He said they would be. She said that he was trying to hold on to something that couldn’t be held, to keep time. He said: Let me try.

She woke up in the middle of the night and this time he was there. They were in Massachusetts, at an inn. All was quiet except the wind outside, which she realized she could hardly hear above the beating in his chest where she had rested her head.

In the morning he was still there, which amazed her. They drove to a pretty town where the houses were white clapboard with black shutters and some bright red and orange leaves were still left on some of the trees and the November sky turned uncharacteristically blue and people said hello. She could imagine living in a place like this. Her hand fit into his. Wind blew down the pretty streets as if they were continually being washed of any dirt or dust or anything unwanted. Air swept up into the high branches and made a soft strong blowing sound. She thought of horns. She told him and he squeezed her hand. They ate at a tiny restaurant for lunch and there were buoys on the walls and netting and they ate fish. The sea came inside here. She could feel the salt on her face. She thought it would be nice to be with Joe in the summertime at the sea. She saw his hair standing sideways and a dark blue ocean lifting up behind him. They had wine. He toasted the two of them. She saw his mouth through her wineglass while he spoke. She was used to seeing her life through a pane of glass but now when he put down his drink and she put down hers she saw things clearly with nothing between her and her life and smiled and he said, You know I’m not sure I’ve ever really seen you smile before and I can tell you that nothing has ever looked so beautiful. I’m going to make you do that again.

Back at the inn it was their last day together like this for who knew how long and every moment felt like a last moment and they enjoyed it but she said she would not give herself to him completely until he had told Pearl. It wasn’t right. And he looked in her green eyes and he knew that she meant it and so he did not try to change her mind.

There were sock cymbals and Low Boys and Hi-Hats for keeping time. There were larger cymbals for punctuation, riding, and choking. There were cymbals with names like Plop, Sizzle, Sting, Whang, and Swish. And there were the very thinnest cymbals of all. Cymbals with a sharp brilliant tone that could instantly be damped, cymbals with a silver resonance. It was the shimmering sound of cymbals that she would later think had made them fall in love. A silver sound that led the music and kept time and moved life forward. A sound of fantasy and romance that swept up the whole world. A sound that was made in America. It came by way of Istanbul but most people didn’t know that. It was a sound that people thought was the essence of America: light and swinging and free. But it was a sound that had explosions in it. “Our business is hazardous,” Avedis said. Even with his experience he was apt to have an explosion once a week. In the beginning, the factory had so many explosions that their insurance company canceled the policy and returned the premiums paid in advance. When he told Joe, Joe said, Too bad you can’t get insurance for everyday life. I could really use some of that.

At night, again, the beating of his heart under her head. She woke him up. What will she do without you? she said. He was half asleep, in love, not thinking, mostly dreaming. He said: She’ll probably be better off.

•

She couldn’t sleep. She pulled a chair up to the window and looked out at the sleeping town. Across the street, one of those perfect white clapboard houses. She looked at the shape of the house and the relationship of the windows to one another and the moonlight bathing the house in a calm but tragic yellow and blue light. She thought for the first time in a long time about painting that light. She went back to bed and instead of putting her head on his chest, she held his hand.