The Music School (14 page)

“Where do you live now?” the girl beside him asked, setting his hat on the bar between them.

The homosexual didn’t turn his head, answering as if the sailing couple had asked the question. “I live here,” he called. “In dear old St. Thomas. God’s own beloved country. Do you need a cook on your boat?”

The child tugged at his mother’s waist and pulled her down to whisper something into her ear. She listened and shook her head; a brilliant loop of hair came undone. The father drank from the glass in front of him and in a freshened voice called across, “Not at the moment.”

“I wish you did, I wish to Heaven you did, I’m a beautiful cook, really. I make the
best
omelets. You should see me; I just put in the old eggs and a little bit of milk and a glass of brandy and some of those little green things—what are they called?—chives, I put in the chives and stir until my arm breaks off and it comes out just
won
derful, so light and fluffy. If I cared about money, I’d be a chef in the Waldorf.”

The child’s whispered request seemed to recall the group to itself. The father turned and spoke to the German boy, who, in the instant before bowing his head to listen, threw, the whites of his eyes glimmering, a dark glance at the homosexual. Misunderstanding, the homosexual left his stool and hat and drink and went around the corner of the bar toward them. But, not acknowledging his approach, they lifted the child and walked away toward the rear of the place, where there was a jukebox. Here they paused, their brilliant hair and faces bathed in boxed light.

The homosexual returned to his stool and watched them. His head was thrown back like that of a sailor who has suffered a pang at the sight of land. “Oh dear,” he said aloud, “I can’t decide which I want to have, the man or the woman.”

The schoolteacherish girl sipped her daiquiri, dipping her head quickly, as if into a bitter birdbath. One stool away from
her down the bar, there sat a beefy unshaven customer, perhaps thirty years old, drinking a beer and wearing a T-shirt with a ballpoint pen clipped to the center of the sweat-soaked neckline. Squinting intently into space and accenting some inner journey with soft grunts, he seemed a truck driver transported, direct and intact, from the counter of an Iowa roadside diner. Next to him, across a space of empty stools, behind an untouched planter’s punch, sat a very different man of about the same age, a man who, from his brick-red complexion, his high burned forehead, the gallant immobility of his posture, and the striking corruption of his teeth, could only have been English.

Into the space of three stools between them there now entered a dramatic person—tall, gaunt, and sandy. He displayed a decrepit Barrymore profile and a gold ring in one ear. He escorted a squat powdered woman who looked as though she had put on her lipstick by eating it. She carried a dachshund under one arm. The bartender, unsmiling, awkwardly pivoting, asked, “How’s the Baron?”

“Rotten,” the Baron said; and as he eased onto his stool his stiff wide shoulders seemed a huge coat hanger left, out of some savage stubbornness, in his coat. The woman set the dachshund on the bar. When their drinks came, the dog lapped hers, which was a lime rickey. When he tried to lap the Baron’s—a straight Scotch—the man gripped the dachshund’s thirstily wagging rump, snarled “Damn alcoholic,” and sent him skidding down the bar. The dog righted himself and sniffed the truck driver’s beer; a placid human paw softly closed over the mouth of the glass, blocking the animal’s tongue. His nails clicking and slipping on the polished bar, the dog returned to his mistress and curled up at her elbow like a pocketbook. The girl at the corner shyly peeked at the
man beside her, but he had resumed staring into space. The pen fixed at his throat had the quality of a threat, of a scar.

The blond family returned from having put a quarter into the jukebox, which played “Loco Motion,” by Little Eva; “Limbo Rock,” by Chubby Checker; and “Unchain My Heart,” by Ray Charles. The music, like an infusion of letters from home, froze the people at the bar into silence. Beyond the overhang that sheltered the tables, night dominated. The bar lit up a section of pavement where pedestrians flitted like skittish actors from one wing of darkness into the other. The swish of traffic on the airport road had a liquid depth. The riding lights of boats by the wharf bobbed up and down, and a little hard half-moon rummaged for its reflection in the slippery sea. The Baron muttered to the painted old woman an angry and long story in which the obscene expressions were peculiarly emphasized, so that only they hung distinct in the air, the connecting threads inaudible. The Englishman at last moved his forearm and lowered the level of his planter’s punch by a fraction of an inch, making a stoic face afterward, as if the sweetness had hurt his teeth. The homosexual, nettled by the attention received by the drinking dachshund, took off his hat and addressed the ceiling of the bar as if it were God. “Hey there, Great White Father,” he said. “You haven’t been very good to me this month. I know You love me—how could You help it, I’m so beautiful—but I haven’t seen any money coming out of the sky. I mean, really, You put us down here in the manure and we need it to live, like. You know? I mean, don’t get too uninhibited up there. Huh?” He listened, and the Baron, undistracted, set another blue word burning in the hushed air. “That’s O.K.,” the homosexual continued. “You’ve kept the sun shining, and I appreciate it. You just keep the sun shining, Man, and don’t send me back to Queens.” At prayer’s
end, he put the hat on his head and looked around, his curt lips pursed defiantly.

Five Negroes, uncostumed, in motley clothes and as various in size as their instruments, had assembled on the shadowy platform, kidding and giggling back and forth and teasing the air with rapid, stop-and-start gusts of tuning up. Abruptly they began to play. The ping-pong, the highest pan, announced itself with four harsh solo notes, and on the fifth stroke the slightly deeper guitar pans, the yet deeper cello pans, and the bass boom, which was two entire forty-four-gallon oil drums, all at once fell into the tune, and everything—cut and peened drums, rubber-tipped sticks, tattered shirtsleeves, bobbing heads, munching jaws, a frightened-looking little black child whipping a triangle as fast as he could—was in motion, in flight. The band became a great loose-jointed bird feathered in clashing, rippling bells. It played “My Basket,” and then, with hardly a break, “Marengo Jenny,” “How You Come to Get Wet?,” and “Madame Dracula.” Nobody danced. It was early, and the real tourists, the college students and Bethlehem Steel executives and Westchester surgeons, had not yet come down from dinner in the hills to sit at the tables. There was a small dance floor on one side of the bar. A young Negro appeared here. He wore canary-yellow trousers and a candy-striped jersey with a boat neck and three-quarter sleeves. He had a broad, hopeful face and an athletic, wedge-shaped back. From his vaguely agitated air of responsibility, he seemed to be associated with the establishment. He asked the schoolteacherish girl, who looked alone and lost, to dance; but she, with a pained smile and a nervous dip of her head into her second daiquiri, refused. The young Negro stood stymied on the dance floor, clothed only, it seemed, in music and embarrassment, his pale palms dangling
foolishly. When the band, in a final plangent burst cut short as if with a knife, stopped, he went to the leader, the long-jawed red shirt on the ping-pong, and said, “Ey, mon, le peo-
ple
wan I bet ‘Yel
low
Bird.’ ” He phrased it, as the West Indian accent phrases all statements, like a question.

The leader took offense. He answered deliberately, unintelligibly, as if, the music still ringing in the pan of his skull, he were softly tapping out a melody with his tongue. The man on the bass boom, a coarse thick-lipped mulatto in a blue work shirt unbuttoned down to his navel, joined in the argument and gave the young man a light push that caused him to step backward off the platform. The bass-boom man growled, and the strip of hairy cocoa skin his shirt exposed puffed up like a rooster’s throat. No one had danced; the band was defensive and irritable. The leader, biting the butt of his cigarette, rattled a venomous toneless tattoo on the rim of his ping-pong. Then the shadow manning the cello pans—he had a shaved head, and was the oldest of them—spoke an unheard word, and all the Negroes, including the boy with the wedge-shaped back, broke into disjointed laughter.

When the band resumed playing, they began with “Yellow Bird”—played flat, at a grudging, slow tempo. The young Negro approached the blonde mother of the little boy. She came with him into the center of the floor and lifted her fat fair arms. They danced delicately, sleepily, the preening shuffle of the mambo, her backside switching in its tight white dress, his broad face shining as his lips silently mouthed the words:
Ye-ell-o-oh bi-ird, up in the tree so high, ye-ell-o-oh bi-ird, you sit alone like I
. Her thick waist seemed at home in the wide clasp of his hand.

When the song finished, he bowed thank you and she returned to her family by the bar and, as if sighing, let down her
hair. Apparently it had been held by one pin; she pulled this pin, and the fluffy sun-bleached crown on the top of her head cascaded down her back in a loosening stream, and she looked, with her weather-pinched face, like a negative of a witch, or what relates to witches as angels relate to devils. The little boy, as if his heart were climbing the golden rope she had let down, whispered up to her, and she, after bowing her head to listen, glanced up at the homosexual, who was complaining to the bartender that his vodka-and-tonic had gone watery.

“You owe me,” the bartender said, “a dollar fifty, and if you let the drink sit there hour after hour, damn right the ice’ll melt.”

“I don’t have a dollar fifty,” was the answer. “I have washed my hands, forever and ever, amen, of filthy lucre. People want me to get a job but I won’t; that’s the way I am. It’s a matter of principle with me. Why should I work all day for a pittance and starve when I can do nothing whatsoever and starve anyway?”

Now the whole blond family was staring at him fascinated. The glow of their faces caught the corner of his eye, and he turned toward them inquisitively; memory of the snub they had given him made his expression shy.

“I want one dollar and fifty cents from you,” the bartender insisted, with unconvincing emphasis; his anxious sweat and obscurely warped posture seemed that of a warden trapped in his own prison, among inmates he feared. He gulped some orange from his glass and looked toward the outdoors for relief. Pale square clouds rested above the sea, filtering stars. Laughter like spray was wafted from a party on a yacht.

The homosexual called, “Really, he is the most cunning little boy I have ever seen in all my
life
. In Hollywood he could be a male Shirley Temple, honestly, and when he grows
up a little he could be a male what’s-her-name—oh, what
was
her name? Jane Withers. I have a beautiful memory. If I cared, I could go back to New York and get on a quiz show and make a million dollars.”

The German boy spoke for the group. “He vunts—your hatt.”

“Does he? Does he really? The little angel wants to wear my hat. I designed it myself for the carnival this weekend.” He left his stool, scrambled around the corner, set the hat with its glade of decoration squarely on the child’s spherical head, and, surprisingly, knelt on the floor. “Come on,” he said, “come on, darling. Get on my shoulders. Let’s go for a ride.”

The father looked a question at his wife, shrugged, and lifted his son onto the stranger’s shoulders. The birds on their wires bobbed unsteadily, and fear flickered not only in the child’s face but in the grown face to which he clung. The homosexual, straightening up, seemed startled that the child was a real weight. Then, like a frail monster overburdened with two large heads, one on top of the other and the upper one sprouting a halo of birds, he began to jog around the rectangular bar, his shaved legs looking stringy and bony in their shorts. The steel band broke into a pachanga. Some tourist families had come down from the hills to occupy the tables, and the athletic young Negro, whose flesh seemed akin to rubber, successfully invited a studiously tanned girl with orange hair, a beauty, to dance. She had long green eyes and thin lips painted paler than her skin, and an oval of nakedness displayed her long brown collarbones. The Baron cursed and yanked his own lady onto the floor; as they danced, the dachshund nipped worriedly at their stumbling feet. The Baron kicked the dog away, and in doing so turned his head, so that,
to the dizzy little boy riding by, the gold ring in his ear flashed like the ring on a merry-go-round. A stately bald man, obviously a North American doctor, rose, and his wife, a midget whose Coppertone face was wrinkled like a walnut, rose to dance with him. The homosexual’s shoulders hurt. He galloped one last lap around the bar and lifted the child back onto the stool. The airy loss of pressure around his neck led him to exhale breathlessly into the bright round face framed by straw, “You know, Mark Twain wrote a lovely book
just
about you.” He took the hat from the child’s head and replaced it on his own. The child, having misunderstood the bargain, burst into tears, and soon his mother carried him from the bar and into the night, their blond heads vanishing.

The dancing gathered strength. The floor became crowded. From her high vantage at the corner of the bar, the schoolteacherish girl studied with downcast eyes the dancing feet. They seemed to be gently tamping smooth a surface that was too hot to touch for more than an instant. Some females, of both races, had removed their shoes; their feet looked ugly and predatory, flickering, spread-toed, in and out of shadows and flashes of cloth. When the music stopped, black hands came and laid, on the spot of floor where her eyes were resting, two boards hairy with upright rusty nails. A spotlight was focused on them. The band launched into a fierce limbo. The young Negro with the handsome rubbery back leaped, nearly naked, into the light. His body was twitching in rhythm, he was waving two flaming torches, and he was clad in knit swimming trunks and orange streamers representing, she supposed, Caribbean slave dress. His eyes shut, he thrust the torches alternately into his mouth and spat out flame. Indifferent applause rippled through the tables.