Rhode Island Red (7 page)

That was the day I caught him.

I arrived at the corner at an off time, about an hour later than usual. The flowers came right away. And across the street I saw a man watching the delivery. He was standing in the recessed doorway of a run-down apartment building, looking highly furtive. He had a Mediterranean aura—maybe he was Greek, or Lebanese … Israeli? No. Whatever he was, he looked pretty unhappy in his expensive black overcoat and silk scarf. He was smoking furiously.

I watched him for a few minutes, waiting for him to make a move. But he stood his ground, lighting one cigarette after another. Well, maybe I was mistaken. Maybe he wasn't my secret admirer. I set up and started to play.

I saluted the new born season, starting with
Autumn in New York
. Then
Autumn Nocturne
, during which my old friend, the one-armed gambler, strolled by, tossing a few coins in the hat with an apologetic shrug. Then
Autumn Serenade
. I was just about to play
Lullaby of the Leaves
when the rose man crossed the street.

He took a few steps toward me, but then immediately backed away. I raised the sax to my lips and once again he stepped forward, this time muttering to himself. What the hell was the matter with this guy? When he was quite close, I pointed down at the bouquet and smiled at him. It was a question.

He nodded, reluctantly at first, and then more vigorously.

“Who are you?”

“My name is Henry Valokus,” he said with a half bow. “And I am embarrassed at what I have done.” He didn't have an accent, exactly, but he spoke English in this queer, slow way—with a kind of all-purpose, assimilated European lilt.

“What have you done, Henry?”

“The flowers.”

“But they're exquisite. They don't embarrass me.”

“I have listened to you since you first came here. Listened to your playing. You are charming.”

Now I was a bit embarrassed.

“You've sent so many roses. I've run out of vases, you know.”

“Ah,” he said, “then I have done too much. I always do too much. It is my nature.”

He stood there smiling shyly at me while I memorized his face. Every crag and culvert of it. And especially those black mourning eyes.

“I would consider it a great honor if you would lunch with me.”

I hesitated.

“For instance,” he went on, “we might go to one of the nearby Indian restaurants here on Lexington.”

Mr. Henry Valokus had pushed the right button. I love Indian food desperately. There was a time there, twelve or thirteen pounds ago, when I was eating it for breakfast.

“You have finished?”

I wondered if he was being sarcastic. I wasn't just finished, I was bursting. “Oh, believe me,” I said, “I am finished.”

He signalled the waiter and removed a silver cigarette case from his breast pocket in a single, fluid motion.

“It must be difficult to make a living as you do,” he said sympathetically. “I wanted to make things nice for you.”

I laughed and took one of the proffered cigarettes without even looking at the brand. “What a
gallant
you are, Henry. Do you make a practice of rescuing penurious lady musicians? Or am I special?”

“You are special,” he answered immediately.

I let that one lay there for a few minutes. I blew across the top of my spiced tea to help it cool.

I hadn't even noticed him order the drinks, but a few minutes later two outsized snifters were placed before us.

“You appreciate cognac,” Henry stated. “I am certain I have not guessed wrong about that.”

“Henry, you have yet to hit a wrong note. But listen …”

He leaned in close.

“… What, exactly, are you after?”

Mr. Valokus's face went a little red. After a minute, he said, “I will be totally honest with you.”

“Okay. Honest is good.”

“What I would like from you is … is … to … well, to understand.”

“Understand what?”

“Music. Well, not all music. One particular thing, I mean. Something—someone—that is with me like a ghost, like a memory. Except that I don't understand where it came from.”

“Henry, you've lost me.”

“Let me say it this way: if you were to come with me to my apartment at this moment—”

I burst into a guffaw, but when I saw the hurt on his face I stopped laughing. With a nod of my head. I signalled that he should continue.

“If you were to come to my apartment, what you would find is a kind of shrine I have created. Hundreds of recordings. Hundreds, I tell you. And books. And photographs. Posters. Posters everywhere. And all concerning a single musician. The one who obsesses me. And until I have a complete understanding of him and his music, until I have comprehended his heart and his soul, he will obsess me. As long as I live. Do you see, Nanette, what I am saying?”

“Not at all,” I said. “But who's the musician?”

“Bird.”

“Beg pardon?”

“Parker.”

“As in Charlie?”

“Yes. Of course.”

“You're telling me you're obsessed with Charlie Parker?”

“Yes. It is true.”

“And you want me to help you
understand
?”

He nodded.

This time I couldn't hold it back. Before long, I was doubled over with laughter. Racism is a stitch, ain't it? White people think you're either a half wit, genetically determined criminal or an extraterrestrial with some kind of pipeline to
the spirit
.

Oh well. There didn't seem to be much point in going out on this weird guy, Valokus, whose face had again clouded over with pain and incomprehension. Besides, what was he asking of me, essentially? To talk to him about music. What was so bad about that? It wasn't as though he was asking me to clean his place or suck his dick.

So I pulled myself together and took another sip of my cognac. Charlie Parker wasn't no goddamn mystic, he was a musical genius—for some,
the
musical genius—fucked up behind heroin and being an American Negro—so what else is new? But instead of saying that to Henry, I reached over and patted his hand a little.

In turn, he took mine and kissed it lingeringly. Then he called for the bottle of Remy and poured me a really big drink.

Valokus took me back to my corner and left me there with the paper container of cappuccino he had purchased at the new cafe in the neighborhood. He was going uptown now, he said, because he'd heard Colony Records had a new shipment of some live recordings of Bird club dates.

Just the tiniest bit unsteady on my feet, I watched him walk up the block and disappear around the corner.

Pity I'm not a true whore, I thought. I could take this fool for a real ride.

Henry wasn't kidding. His apartment, which I visited after our third lunch date, was a shrine to Charlie Parker.

Everywhere you looked there was a piece of Bird memorabilia: poster size blow ups of old black and white photos of Parker, “Bird Lives” calendars, back issue jazz magazines, an unpublished PhD thesis, books, postcards.

And then there was the music itself: records, cassettes, CDs.

I was speechless. This time it didn't occur to me to laugh at Henry's Birdmania Something happened on that first visit to his shrine that made me a little less high handed about his obsession. A sudden shock of recognition, I guess. I realized that my feeling for France may not have been so different from Henry's Birdaholism.

France was hardly my home. Yet I kept fleeing there. It was where I felt safe, the most alive, the most understood, the most welcome. French was not my mother tongue. Yet if I had my way every school child would start studying it at age six. I tried to write in that language. I loved the way it felt in my mouth. I was positively turned on just hearing it on the radio. But that was all romantic crap. I'm not French. And no power on earth could make it otherwise. I'm as colored and American as Charlie Parker. That moment of recognition and empathy with Henry Valokus was a turning point in my attitude toward him. His Bird thing was no longer just silly; it had become endearing.

We talked quite animatedly that afternoon about our shared disappointment with the film they'd made about Parker's life, though we both loved the actors who'd played Bird and Chan. We chose five tunes and dug through all the music in the apartment, comparing live versions of those songs to studio recorded ones; early recordings to late ones; those done in New York to those recorded in Boston to those recorded in California. Before long we were hungry again. Henry ordered in Indian food from a grand place on Fifty-sixth Street and champagne from the liquor store and the talk fest continued.

It wasn't until he'd closed the cab door after me that night and the driver pulled away from the curb that it occurred to me: Henry had not tried to make me. Not once.

So, after dinner a few days later, I seduced him.

On the elevator up to his place, I wanted him so much I thought I was going to detonate. The wanting was like a noose around my neck. But I was cool. And remained so through both sides of the Parker with Strings cassette we'd picked up from a street vendor in the Village. I was wearing the world's shortest suede skirt, absolutely sure I was sending out telegrams of sexual funk, and pretty sure he was answering the door. He put on the smokiest ballads in the house, and while I sat eating a seckle pear, he took off his tie. Then, out of the blue, he asked me to dance with him!

Which I did, for about sixty seconds, just long enough for the first extended kiss. And then I knocked him down.

His mouth on my nipple sent chain lightning through me. As he rolled down my tights and began to stroke me I gripped him, scratched him, as if I were trying to mark him for my own. I came and came back again, came and came back again. I tore him out of his pants there in the lamplight and took
him
. We fucked on top of a Nat Hentoff essay. We did it standing up under a framed photo of the Birdland marquee. I couldn't get enough of him, couldn't feel enough of him inside me—thick, strange, hungry. And when he had no more to give me, when he was lost in his own frantic shivering, I opened my mouth, mercilessly and bit into him like a cannibal.

CHAPTER 7

Trinkle tinkle

I had two lovers. Two men do not a slut make. But, still and all, two ain't one.

Aubrey thought it was funny.

Walter didn't.

No, I didn't tell him. I didn't have to. He noticed.

He had just come out of the shower that morning. I was making coffee. By the time he was dressed for work, Walter had turned sullen. He took a seat across from me in the kitchen, ignoring the plate in front of him.

“Just so you don't think you're getting away with something, Nan, I know you're fucking around.”

I didn't answer.

“Skeevy bitch.”

“Cut it out, Walter.”

“Cut what out? You're dogging around and you know it.”

“Walter, you sound like a tired housewife. I'm not your goddamn property. You never slept with anybody else while we were together?”

Things took the predictable elevator up from there, ending with his wordless, self-righteous departure for the office. He didn't slam the front door. Matter of fact, he didn't even bother to close it.

I sat alone for a while, feeling tired and torn—and guilty—until I decided I'd better hit the streets and make some money.

It was hard to shake the bad mood. After an hour of playing I repaired to a busy coffee place on Thirty-fourth Street. The jelly donuts were tops, and I needed a shot of sugar, bad. The guy sitting next to me finished his chocolate croissant (I had tried one once—too oily) and walked out. I picked up the
Daily News
he'd left behind and started flipping through it.

Page three was where I stopped flipping.

BRAVE POOCH DIES DEFENDING BLIND MISTRESS

One of the grainy photos accompanying the story showed a hulking, lifeless animal lying on its side. “Seeing eye dog and mistress both stabbed to death” was the caption. Next to that was a picture of a young woman three-quarters covered by an EMS blanket.

“Fuck,” I said aloud.

It was Inge—Mrs. Sig, the musician. And that graceless seeing eye dog of hers—Bruno.

I forced myself to read on. The young woman and her dog, the article said, were both dead when police arrived on the scene. She has been identified as Inge Carlson. No witnesses had, as yet, come forward. Police said the motive for the killings was not known, but of course they had not ruled out the possibility that the girl and her canine companion had walked in on a robbery in progress.

I stared dumbly at the photo of that silly dog. Somehow I couldn't bring myself to look at Inge's face again. I wondered if her sightless eyes shone any brighter in death, but I was too scared to look, too sickened.

In my dumbass attempts to do right, I'd managed to cut a pretty wide swath through the endless possibilities of wrong. Sig, the undercover cop I'd taken in off the street, was dead because I'd made him sleep in the other room.

As for Walter, we'd been through the best and the worst together. I gladly took his money when I needed it, and his time, and his sex, and even, once in a while, his advice. In his own weird way, he loved me, I think. But I was fucking around on him, just as he'd said. Even if I was genuinely in love with the eccentric and gallant Henry Valokus—and I was—I was still cuckolding old Walt.

And now this, the latest grotesquerie. There was no doubt in my mind that the blind girl and her dog were dead because of that twenty thousand dollars I'd given her—her inheritance from Sig. I thought I was doing the right thing, the compassionate thing, the correct thing. Following the gospel according to Ernestine.

“Fuck!” I kept repeating through the tears I fought to keep in my throat.

There was a phone in the back of the coffee shop. I fumbled through my wallet and found Leman Sweet's card.