Jazz Moon (27 page)

art

C
afé Valentin's singer-less band gave Ben an idea.

During his fourth week of work, he wrote to Monsieur Rameau. He expressed gratitude at being hired for such a good position, humility at being entrusted with so much responsibility, and assurance that he loved the job. He drenched the band with praise for its understated power, its nuanced styling, which, Ben gushed, was steeped in the very fiber of the blues. But he wondered if a
singer
might add a bit of spice. He begged Monsieur Rameau's forgiveness for his presumption before requesting permission to hire a vocalist, asserting that that would distinguish the club from venues—like, say, Chez LeRoi—that did not feature one.

Rameau replied. He affirmed his satisfaction with Ben's work (the criteria being that Ben was sending him the receipts on time and the police had not raided or shut the place down) and granted permission to proceed with hiring a vocalist.

By week's end, Glo had begun her newest gig.

The band, initially perturbed by what it considered unnecessary musical intrusion, was soon won over—first by Glo's irreverent tongue and then by her talent. Word spread that a sassy, jazz-and-blues-singing colored woman had set fire to a shady hole-in-the-wall that served inexpensive drinks—and where one could, just as cheaply, purchase one's dessert of choice: crème brûlée, cocaine, reefer, or prostitutes. The nightly receipts at Monsieur Rameau's little club soared. An across-the-board win: Glo revived her career; Ben got to see her every night; Monsieur Rameau took more francs to the bank.

Just as the musically refurbished Café Valentin drew a new clientele, Ben drew Sebastien. Encouraged by the reception of his feather touch, he visited the club nearly every night. He'd loiter in the doorway, nervous and fidgety, until he spotted Ben waiting on a table or chatting up a customer. Then he'd glide to the bar and seat himself with the cheeky, upright pride of a man who's found exactly what he's looking for.

During the club's waning hours, as Glo and the moody band slow-jammed, Ben and Sebastien talked and smoked and took liberties with Monsieur Rameau's liquor. They got to know each other in those slow hours before closing, with after-midnight music drawling and only a few customers whispering in lightless corners. They talked art and music and poetry; discussed Paris, dreams, goals, hopes. But it was their hurts, their hardships, that connected them.

“I rarely had a conversation with my parents,” Ben said one evening. “My father hardly spoke. My mother shouted orders at me, like I worked for her. But sometimes I forget it wasn't always like that.”

He told Sebastien that he remembered a time—before the deaths of their offspring—when his folks were good to him. He had loved his ma's voice, its cushiony softness even when she laughed, which was often because his pa was a cutup, always ready with a joke or a story that was as funny as it was dumb. His folks had worked so hard the sweat stains on their clothes were permanently soaked onto the fabric. But they had been content with their lot. Or had accepted it, at least.

“Then their children started dying.”

Pa's jokes stopped. Ma's mellow voice hardened like a stick that she leveled, daily, hourly, at her lone surviving son (because
he
was the lone survivor, instead of some other, more favorite child?).

“And when I needed them most they couldn't summon up love, even then. All they could do was be ashamed. They sent me to that plantation because they were ashamed.”

Sebastien didn't speak. He didn't take Ben's hand or rub his cheek or say,
It's all right. I understand.
Instead, he nodded. And that solemn nod bore an empathy too mighty to live in words or touch. The nod slumped. He hung his head. His lips creased into a smile laced with both sneering and sadness.

“My family was—
is
—renowned and extremely rich,” Sebastien said. “So rich, they own estates all over Europe. So powerful, they insert themselves into politics with ease.”

The family's fortune, he confided, was built first on slaving, then the modern slavery of colonialism and, finally, shipping.

“All I wanted to do was paint. But I was required to go into the family business.”

His father sent him on an extended business trip to Abidjan in Côte d'Ivoire—Ivory Coast—the hub of the company's West African operation, to learn everything in preparation for one day running the business. He was attended to by a Monsieur de Lonval.

“De Lonval's role was both teacher and chaperone. He ran my family's operation in Ivory Coast. He saw to my every need and he despised me. He was very ambitious and he saw himself—not me—running the company one day. And now he was being ordered to train his competition.”

Sebastien lived in Monsieur de Loval's house and was with him every day.

“I came to despise him as much as he despised me. I hated the work. My father forbade me to take my paints to Ivory Coast. He instructed de Lonval to make sure I did not paint and he demanded a report each week on my doings. I did not paint for six months. My father might as well have cut off my hands. At night I dreamed I was painting.”

But he found solace.

“Akossi. A servant in de Lonval's house. Nimble of body, keen of mind. Young and beautiful and strong. Obviously no one could know about us. When Monsieur de Lonval or the other servants were present, Akossi and I were all business: master and black servant.”

Akossi lived in the servants' quarters—a hut—behind de Lonval's house. At night, he sneaked into Sebastien's room.

“He could never spend the night. The possibility of getting caught was too great. That was our saddest regret: that we could never spend an entire night with each other.”

But one night, they accidentally fell asleep in each other's arms. The next morning, de Lonval caught them.

“I was sent home
immédiatement
. De Lonval played the righteous, disgusted Christian, but I knew he was rejoicing because now I was out of his way. I do not know what became of Akossi.”

His parents disowned him the moment he returned to France.

“I was allowed to take nothing with me. Can you imagine? Someone born rich and privileged, who has never been without means, having to fend for himself?”

He quickly learned what a young, attractive man could do to survive. And with whom. And how much to charge.

“Obviously I preferred men. But if I had to do it with women, so what? Bread costs the same regardless,
n'est pas?
”

So. They were both alone. Both orphans of a sort. Instead of an empathetic nod, Ben refilled their brandy snifters, lifted his in a toast and said, “Here's to loneliness. I didn't know it was color-blind until now.”

 

Ben studied Sebastien's paintings. Every line and every texture, every acute and nuanced shade, while Sebastien pored over each verse in the poems Ben brought him. One day Ben examined a painting of a colored boy on a rocky stretch of beach. The boy's back was to the viewer as he stared out at the ocean, nude, lazing on a rock as the sun scattered a shower of rays that created both pools of light and shadows on his lissome body.

“I could write a poem based on this painting,” Ben said.

“And I could paint a picture based upon this poem.”

Three weeks later, Sebastien had a substantial sketch of a scene of two men slow-dancing, the shorter man's head against the chest of the taller, a pianist and sax player losing themselves in their serenade, the waltzing men—one was white, the other colored—finding themselves. And Ben presented his poem.

He knew Sebastien loved him. Or was falling in love with him. Or would. All Ben had to do was let him. While a romantic may have embraced the expedience, he distrusted such effortlessness. It was too easy. He had parachuted into every relationship he'd had, without looking, without seeing, without bothering to. Like shooting yourself from a cannon without considering what thorns you might land in. He distrusted love; its sugar promises; the way it commenced with a swelter, but then dissipated, far too quickly, to a lukewarm muddle.

So, for a while, he split his time between Sebastien and the instant intimacies in the shadows. Kiss Sebastien in the morning; fuck a sailor at night. Breakfast with Sebastien; tryst with a gentleman behind a statue in Parc Monceau at lunchtime. He didn't know if Sebastien knew. The shadows were his insurance against betrayal, against Sebastien's arms closing. The arms of the shadows, the arms
in
the shadows, never would.

But things began to change.

After Glo came aboard and made Café Valentin hop, the slow times grew few, replaced with hours that kept Ben crisscrossing the club, running from table to table and from the dining room to the kitchen to the bar and back again. During those hours, Sebastien sat at the bar or occupied a table in a corner, always keeping Ben in his sights even as he ran loops around the club. When he worked behind the bar, he felt Sebastien's eyes on him. Returning to the main room after an errand to the kitchen or the cellar, Sebastien's rigid shoulders relaxed, as if Ben's absence had been turmoil, his return a blessing.

One busy evening, Sebastien occupied himself by sketching at a corner table. At two a.m., Ben looked up to find him gone. He went to clear the table and found a rendering of himself. Sebastien had captured Ben in one of those harried moments when he rushed about fulfilling ten tasks at once. The penciled lines—some light and wispy, others durable as carving—streaked and shimmered on the paper. The effect endowed Ben with an authority, a worth, he wasn't sure he deserved. A worth he never felt from even the most inviting arms in the shadows.

E
verything was as it should be at Café Valentin. The house was packed. Glo and company jammed a blues about tortuous, unrequited love.

Ben went to the cellar for champagne and supplies. On his way back up, he heard the trombone firing out notes. But the sound was too piercing, not the muffled bleat of a trombone. He listened hard.

It was a trumpet firing out notes like shooting stars.

Ben rushed up the stairs. When he saw Baby Back onstage in his iconic performance mode—eyes shut, knees sinking—he hoped it was a mirage. Baby Back played with a beastliness that Ben had never heard from him. It enslaved the audience. Mesmerized eyes stuck to the trumpeter who filled the stage like it had been built for him.

Glo wasn't in sight. Ben snapped out of his trance and went to her “dressing room,” a former storage closet haphazardly converted to accommodate Café Valentin's new singer.

“Glo?”

“I ain't coming out till that big-headed fool gets the fuck off my stage!”

He did two more numbers, kept the musicians on their toes with his twisting and turning of rhythm, the liberties he took with melody. Baby Back led, they followed. When he was done, the band paid him homage like new disciples. He shook hands and signed autographs as the audience hollered for more.

“What'd you think?” He plopped himself on a barstool.

“I think it takes a hell of a lot of nerve to waltz in here and take over,” Ben said.

“Ain't my fault. I came in, folks recognized me—you know, from my picture on all those posters and record covers—and insisted I play. When fans insist . . .” He threw his hands up in faux innocence. “Gimme a drink. Brandy. And not no cheap shit either, Ben Charles. I got a image to keep up.”

The man's egomaniacal charm still moved him. He fetched the drink.

“So. You're with a white guy now,” Baby Back said.

“How'd you know?”

“When you're Baby Back Johnston, you know everything.”

“I keep forgetting that. Yeah. He's white. You don't approve?”

“Frankly, no.”

“
You're
with a white guy,” Ben said.

“
Half
-white.”

“Yeah. In the States, he'd only
half
ride them Jim Crow smokers. He'd
half
sit in the balcony at a Broadway play. He'd only get
half
lynched.”

Baby Back's eyes fixed onto Ben's. The shade of Uncle Roland's mutilated body hovered between them.

“I shouldn't have said that,” Ben said.

The trumpeter waved it off, sipped his brandy.

He looked good. Another fantastic suit. Diamond-studded cuff links. Rakish hat. The women didn't bother hiding their attraction. A few male customers wrestled their glances away from him, but their rogue eyes kept crawling back.

Baby Back downed some brandy, then hung his head. When he looked up, tears wet his face. “Got a letter today. My mama died. She got sick. Then sicker. They couldn't do nothing for her.”

He laid his head on the bar and cried. The men sneaking looks and the women whose eyes had been plastered to him quickly looked away. Ben touched the big man's head, fought his instinct to climb over the bar and take him in his arms.

“I'm so damn sorry,” Ben said. “But I know she didn't want for nothing in her last days.”

Baby Back whisked the three-cornered silk handkerchief from his front suit pocket, wiped his face, and slung back a jolt of brandy. “You got that right. I did every thing I could for my folks since I made it big. New house. Money. Would've sent a doctor all the way from Paris to South Carolina if I'd known in time. Hey? Ben? You ever write your folks?”

“No.”

“No? Not since you left Dogwood?”

“Excuse me. Gotta work my tables.”

When he returned, the trumpeter was getting ready to depart.

“Thank you, Mr. Poet.”

He headed for the door. Ben wanted to stop him, or at least delay his going. Wanted to have him for the tiniest moment longer.

“Baby Back. Why me? Why didn't you go to Clifford?”

Baby Back's lips parted. He seemed confused. His mouth hung open a while before he said, “That never even crossed my mind.”