Blow-Up (27 page)

I was back climbing the hotel stairs—and there have been a lot of them during my friendship with Johnny—to find Tica drinking tea, Dédée soaking a towel, and Art, Delaunay, and Pepe Ramírez talking in low voices about the latest news of Lester Young, Johnny very quiet on the bed, a towel on his forehead, and wearing a perfectly tranquil and almost disdainful air. I immediately put my sympathetic face back into my pocket, restricting myself to squeezing Johnny’s hand very hard, lighting a cigarette, and waiting.

“Bruno, I hurt here,” Johnny said after a while, touching his chest in the conventional location. “Bruno, she was
like a small white stone in my hand. I’m nothing but a pale horse with granulated eyelids whose eyes’ll run forever.”

All of this said solemnly, almost recited off, and Tica looking at Art, and both of them making gestures of tender forbearance, taking advantage of the fact that Johnny has his face covered with the towel and can’t see them. Personally, I dislike cheap sentimentality and its whole vocabulary, but everything that Johnny had just said, aside from the impression that I’d read it somewhere, felt to me like a mask that he’d put on to speak through, that empty, that useless. Dédée had come over with another towel to replace the one plastered on there, and in the interval I caught a glimpse of Johnny’s face uncovered and I saw an ashy greyness, the mouth twisted, and the eyes shut so tight they made wrinkles on his forehead. As always with Johnny, things had happened in a way other than what one had expected, and Pepe Ramírez who doesn’t know him very well is still flipped out and I think from the scandal, because after a time Johnny sat up in bed and started slowly, chewing every word, and then blew it out like a trumpet solo, insulting everyone connected with recording
Amorous
, without looking at anyone but nailing us all down like bugs in a box with just the incredible obscenity of his words, and so for two full minutes he continued cursing everyone on
Amorous
, starting with Art and Delaunay, passing over me (but I …) and ending with Dédée, Christ omnipotent and the whore who without exception gave birth to us all. And this was profoundly, this and the small white stone, the funeral oration for Bee, dead from pneumonia in Chicago.

Two empty weeks will pass; piles of work, journalism, magazine articles, visits here and there—a good résumé of a critic’s life, a man who only lives on borrowed time,
borrowed everything, on novelties for the news-hungry and decisions not of one’s making. I’m talking about what happened one night Tica, Baby Lennox and I were together in the Café de Flore humming
Out of Nowhere
very contentedly and talking about a piano solo of Bud Powell’s which sounded particularly good to all three of us, especially to Baby Lennox who, on top of being otherwise spectacular, had done herself up à la Saint-Germain-des-Prés, and you should have seen how great it looked on her. Baby will see Johnny show up with the rapturous admiration of her twenty years, and Johnny look at her without seeing her and continue wide of us and sit alone at another table, dead drunk or asleep. I’ll feel Tica’s hand on my knee.

“You see, he started shoving needles in his arm again last night. Or this afternoon. Damn that woman …”

I answered grudgingly that Dédée was as guilty as anyone else, starting with her, she’d turned on with Johnny dozens of times and would continue to do so whenever she goddamn well felt like it. I’d feel an overwhelming impulse to go out and be by myself, as always when it’s impossible to get close to Johnny, to be with him and beside him. I’ll watch him making designs on the table with his finger, sit staring at the waiter who’s asking him what he would like to drink, and finally Johnny’ll draw a sort of arrow in the air and hold it up with both hands as though it weighed a ton, and people at other tables would begin to be discreetly amused, which is the normal reaction in the Flore. Then Tica will say, “Shit,” and go over to Johnny’s table, and after placing an order with the waiter, she’ll begin to talk into Johnny’s ear. Not to mention that Baby will hasten to confide in me her dearest hopes, but then I’ll tell her vaguely that she has to leave Johnny alone and that nice girls are supposed to be in bed early, and if possible with a jazz critic. Baby will laugh amiably, her hand
stroking my hair, and then we’ll sit quietly and watch the chick go by who wears the white-leaded cape up over her face and who has green eyeshadow and green lipstick even. Baby will say it really doesn’t look so bad on her, and I’ll ask her to sing me very quietly one of those blues that have already made her famous in London and Stockholm. And then we’ll go back to
Out of Nowhere
, which is following us around tonight like a dog which would also be the chick in the cape and green eyes.

Two of the guys from Johnny’s new quintet will also show up, and I’ll take advantage of the moment to ask how the gig went tonight; that way I’ll find out that Johnny was barely able to play anything, but that what he had been able to play was worth the collected ideas and works of a John Lewis, assuming that the last-named could manage any idea whatsoever, like one of the boys said, the only one he having always close at hand being to push in enough notes to plug the hole, which is not the same thing. Meanwhile I’ll wonder how much of this is Johnny going to be able to put up with, not to mention the audience that believes in Johnny. The boys will not sit down and have a beer, Baby and I’ll be sitting there alone again, and I’ll end up by answering her questions and explain to Baby, who is really worthy of her nickname, why Johnny is so sick and washed up, why the guys in the quintet are getting more fed up every day, why one day the whole shebang is going to blow up, in one of those scenes that had already blown up San Francisco, Baltimore and New York half-a-dozen times.

Other musicians who work in the quarter’ll come in, and some’ll go to Johnny’s table to say hello to him, but he’ll look at them from far off like some idiot with wet mild eyes, his mouth unable to keep back the saliva glistening off his lips. It will be interesting to watch the double maneuvers of Tica and Baby, Tica having recourse to
her domination of men to keep them away from Johnny, turning them off with a quick explanation and a smile, Baby whispering her admiration of Johnny in my ear and how good it would be to get him off to a sanitorium for a cure, and all because she’s jealous and would like to sleep with Johnny tonight even, something impossible furthermore as anyone can see and which pleases me considerably. For ever since I’ve known her, I’ve been thinking of how nice it would be to caress, to run my hand over Baby’s thighs, and I’ll be a step away from suggesting that we leave and have a drink someplace quieter (she won’t care to, and at bottom, neither will I, because that other table will hold us there, attached and unhappy) until suddenly, no notice of what’s coming, we’ll see Johnny get up slowly, looking at us, recognizing us, coming toward us—I should say towards me, Baby doesn’t count—and reaching the table he’ll bend over a little naturally as if he were about to take a fried potato off the plate, and we’ll see him go to his knees just in front of me, with all naturalness he’ll get down on his knees in front of me and look me in the eye, and I’ll see that he’s crying and’ll know without any say-so that Johnny is crying for little Bee.

My reaction is that human, I wanted to get Johnny up, keep him from making an ass of himself, and finally I make myself the ass, because there’s absolutely nothing more ridiculous than a man trying to move another who is very well off where he is and comfortable and feels perfectly natural in that position, he likes it down there, so that the customers at the Flore, who never get upset over trifles, looked at me in a rather unfriendly fashion, none of them knowing, however, that the Negro on his knees there is Johnny Carter, they all look at me as if they were looking at someone climbing up on the altar to tug Christ down from his cross. Johnny was the first to reproach me, just weeping silently he raised his eyes and looked at me,
and between that and the evident disapproval of the customers I was left with the sole option of sitting down again in front of Johnny, feeling worse than he did, wanting to be anywhere else in the world but in that chair face to face with Johnny on his knees.

The rest hadn’t been so bad, though it’s hard to tell how many centuries passed with no one moving, with the tears coursing down Johnny’s face, with his eyes fixed on mine continuously, meanwhile I was trying to offer him a cigarette, to light one for myself, to make an understanding gesture toward Baby who, it seemed to me, was on the point of racing out or of breaking into tears herself. As usual, it was Tica who settled the problem, sitting herself down at our table in all her tranquillity, drawing a chair over next to Johnny and putting a hand on his shoulder, not pushing it, until finally Johnny rose a little and changed from that horror into the conventional attitude of a friend sitting down with us, it was a matter only of raising his knees a few centimeters and allowing the honorable comfort of a chair to be edged between his buttocks and the floor (I almost said “and the cross,” really this is getting contagious). People had gotten tired of looking at Johnny, he’d gotten tired of crying, and we of sitting around like dogs. I suddenly understood the loving attitude some painters have for chairs, any one of the chairs in the Flore suddenly seemed to me a miraculous object, a flower, a perfume, the perfect instrument of order and uprightness for men in their city.

Johnny pulled out a handkerchief, made his apologies without undue stress, and Tica had a large coffee brought and gave it to him to drink. Baby was marvelous, all at once dropping her stupidity when it came to Johnny, she began to hum
Mamie’s Blues
without giving the impression that she was doing it on purpose, and Johnny looked at her and smiled, and it felt to me that Tica and I at the
same time thought that Bee’s image was fading slowly at the back of Johnny’s eyes, and that once again Johnny was willing to return to us for a spell, keep us company until the next flight. As usual, the moment of feeling like a dog had hardly passed, when my superiority to Johnny allowed me to be indulgent, talking a little with everyone without getting into areas rather too personal (it would have been horrible to see Johnny slip off the chair back onto his …), and luckily Tica and Baby were both acting like angels and the people at the Flore had been going and coming for at least the length of an hour, being replaced, until the customers at one in the morning didn’t even realize that something had just happened, although really it hadn’t been a big scene if you think of it rightly. Baby was the first to leave (Baby is a chick full of application, she’ll be rehearsing with Fred Callender at nine in the morning for a recording session in the afternoon) and Tica had downed her third cognac and offered to take us home. When Johnny said no, he’d rather stay and bat the breeze with me, Tica thought that was fine and left, not without paying the rounds for us all, as befits a marquesa. And Johnny and I ordered a glass of chartreuse apiece, among friends such weaknesses are forgiven, and we began to walk down Saint-Germain-des-Prés because Johnny had insisted that he could walk fine and I’m not the kind of guy to let a friend drop under such circumstances.

We go down the rue de l’Abbaye as far as the place Furstenberg, which reminds Johnny dangerously of a play-theater which his godfather seems to have given him when he was eight years old. I try to head for the rue Jacob afraid that his memories will get him back onto Bee, but you could say that Johnny had closed that chapter for what was left of the night. He’s walking along peacefully, not staggering (at other times I’ve seen him
stumble in the street, and not from being drunk; something in his reflexes that doesn’t function) and the night’s heat and the silence of the streets makes us both feel good. We’re smoking Gauloises, we drift down toward the river, and opposite one of those galvanized iron coffins the book-sellers use as stands along the quai de Conti, some memory or another or maybe a student whistling reminds us of a Vivaldi theme, humming it, then the two of us begin to sing it with a great deal of feeling and enthusiasm, and Johnny says that if he had the horn there he’d spend the night playing Vivaldi, I find the suggestion exaggerated.

“Well, okay, I’d also play a little Bach and Charles Ives,” Johnny says condescendingly. “I don’t know why the French are not interested in Charles Ives. Do you know his songs? The one about the leopard, you have to know the one about the leopard. ‘A leopard …’ ”

And in his weak tenor voice he goes on at great length about the leopard, needless to say, many of the phrases he’s singing are not absolutely Ives, something Johnny’s not very careful about while he’s sure that what he’s singing is something good. Finally we sit down on the rail opposite the rue Gît-le-Coeur and smoke another cigarette because the night is magnificent and shortly thereafter the taste of the cigarette is forcing us to think of having a beer at a café, just thinking of the taste of it is a pleasure for Johnny and me. I pay almost no attention when he mentions my book the first time, because right away he goes back to talking about Charles Ives and how numerous times he’d enjoyed working Ives’s themes into his records, with nobody even noticing (not even Ives, I suppose), but after a bit I get to thinking about the business of the book and try to get him back onto the subject.

“Oh, I’ve read a few pages,” Johnny says. “At Tica’s they talk a lot about your book, but I didn’t even understand the title. Art brought me the English edition yesterday and
then I found out about some things. It’s very good, your book.”

I adopt the attitude natural in such a situation, an air of displeased modesty mixed with a certain amount of interest, as if his opinion were about to reveal to me—the author—the truth about my book.

“It’s like in a mirror,” Johnny says. “At first I thought that to read something that’d been written about you would be more or less like looking at yourself and not into a mirror. I admire writers very much, it’s incredible the things they say. That whole section about the origins of bebop …”