by Amor Towles
Dicky: Paper airplanes.
Me: Great Caesar’s ghost.
As if to bail him out, the drummer wrapped up a Krupa-like solo with six booms on the kettle and then the whole band was swinging. It was like the drummer had jimmied open the door and the others were stealing everything in the house. Dicky was the one who was ecstatic now. When the vibraphonist began playing in triple time, Dicky swung around in his chair and his feet ran in place. His head did a few quick rotations, as if he couldn’t decide whether he should be shaking or nodding it. Then he goosed me.
Some people are born with the ability to appreciate serene and formally structured music like Bach and Handel. They can sense the abstract beauty of the music’s mathematical relationships, its symmetries and motifs. But Dicky wasn’t one of them.
Two weeks before, to impress me, he had taken me to Carnegie Hall to hear some Mozart piano concertos. The first was a pastoral designed to let the spirit flower in a nocturnal breeze. Dicky fidgeted like a sophomore in summer school. At the end of the second, when the crowd began applauding and the old couple in front of us stood, Dicky practically leapt from his seat. He clapped with wild enthusiasm and then grabbed his coat. When I told him it was just the intermission, he looked so crestfallen that I had to take him immediately to Third Avenue for a burger and a beer. It was a little place I knew where the owner played jazz piano accompanied by a stand-up bass and a high school snare.
This low-rent introduction to small group jazz was a revelation for Dicky. The improvisational nature of it was grasped by him instinctively. Unplanned, disorderly, unself-conscious, it was practically an extension of his personality. It was everything he liked about the world: You could smoke to it, drink to it, chatter to it. And it didn’t make you feel guilty for not giving it your full attention. In the nights that followed, Dicky had a gay old time in the company of small group jazz and he gave me credit for it—not always in public, but when it mattered, and often.
—Will we ever go to the moon? he asked, as the vibraphonist acknowledged applause with a tilt of the head. It would be so marvelous to set foot on another planet.
—Isn’t the moon a satellite? asked Helen with her innately unsure erudition.
—I should like to go, Dicky confirmed to no one in particular.
He sat on his hands and reflected on the possibility. Then he leaned sideways and kissed me on the cheek.
—. . . And I should like you to come.
At some point, Dicky shifted to the other side of the table to talk with TJ and Helen. It was a sweet display of self-confidence, as he no longer felt the need to entertain me or to advertise his claim on my attentions. It goes to show that even a man who craves constant approval can attain self-assurance through a little hanky-panky.
As I returned one of Dicky’s winks, I saw a ragtag crowd of WPA types collecting around the table behind him. In their company was Henry Grey. It took a moment for me to recognize him because he was ill shaven and had lost some weight. But he didn’t have trouble recognizing me. He came right over and leaned on the back of Dicky’s empty chair.
—You’re Teddy’s friend. Right? The one with the opinions.
—That’s right. Katey. How’s the pursuit of beauty coming?
—Rotten.
—Sorry to hear that.
He shrugged.
—Nothing to say and no way to say it.
Hank turned to watch the band for a moment. He nodded his head more in agreement with the music than in time with it.
—Got any cigarettes? he asked.
I pulled a pack from my purse and held it out. He took two cigarettes handing one back to me. He tapped his ten times against the tabletop and then tucked it behind an ear. The room was hot and he was beginning to sweat.
—Listen. What do you say we go outside?
—Sure, I said. But give me a second.
I went around the table to Dicky.
—That’s the brother of an old friend. We’re just going out for a smoke. All right?
—Of course, of course, he said, showing off his burgeoning self-confidence.
Though just to be on the safe side, he draped his jacket over my shoulders.
Hank and I went outside and stood under the club’s canopy. It wasn’t winter yet, but it was plenty brisk. After the cozy quarters of the club, it was just the ticket for me. But not for Hank. He looked as physically uncomfortable as when he had been inside. He lit his well-packed cigarette and inhaled with unapologetic relish. I was getting the picture that Hank’s lean and agitated physique might not be a manifestation of his struggles with color and form.
—So, how’s my brother? he asked, flinging his match into the street.
I told him I hadn’t seen Tinker in two months and that I didn’t even know where he was—though I guess my tone was a little sharper than I intended, because Hank took another drag and studied me with interest.
—We had a run-in, I explained.
—Oh?
—Let’s just say I finally figured out he wasn’t everything he presented himself to be.
—Are you?
—Close enough.
—A rare specimen.
—At least I don’t go around implying I went straight from the cradle to the Ivy League.
Hank dropped his cigarette and scuffed it out with a sneer.
—You’ve got it all wrong, spider. The scandal here isn’t that Teddy plays it off like an Ivy Leaguer. The scandal is that that sort of bullshit makes a difference in the first place. Never mind that he speaks five languages and could find his way safely home from Cairo or the Congo. What he’s got they can’t teach in schools. They can squash it, maybe; but they sure can’t teach it.
—And what’s that?
—Wonder.
—Wonder!
—That’s right. Anyone can buy a car or a night on the town. Most of us shell our days like peanuts. One in a thousand can look at the world with amazement. I don’t mean gawking at the Chrysler Building. I’m talking about the wing of a dragonfly. The tale of the shoeshine. Walking through an unsullied hour with an unsullied heart.
—So, he’s got the innocence of a kid, I said. Is that it?
He grabbed me by the forearm as if I wasn’t getting the point. I could feel the imprint of his fingers on my skin.
—When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: and when I became a man—
He let my arm drop.
—. . . More’s the pity.
He looked away. For the second time, he reached behind his ear for the cigarette that he’d already smoked.
—So what happened? I asked.
Hank looked at me in his discerning way—always weighing whether he should deign to answer a question.
—What happened? I’ll tell you what happened: My old man lost everything we ever had, bit by bit. When Teddy was born, the four of us lived in a house with fourteen rooms. Every year we lost a room—and moved a few blocks closer to the docks. By the time I was fifteen, we were in a boardinghouse that leaned over the water.
He held his hand out at a forty-five-degree angle so I could picture it.
—My mother had her heart set on Teddy going to this prep school our great-grandfather went to—before the Boston Tea Party. So she squirreled away some cash and combed his curls and plied his way in. Then, in the middle of Teddy’s first year, when she went to the cancer ward, my old man found the stash and that was that.
Hank shook his head. One got the sense that with Hank Grey there was no confusion as to whether one should shake or nod.
—It’s like Teddy’s been trying to get back in that fucking prep school ever since.
A tall Negro couple was coming down the street. Hank put his hands in his pockets and gestured with his chin toward the man.
—Hey, buddy. You got a smoke?
He said it in his abrupt, unfriendly way. The Negro didn’t seem put out. He gave Hank the cigarette and even lit the matc
h, holding his big black hand around the flame. Hank watched the couple walk away with reverence, as if he had newfound hope for the human race. When he turned back to me, he was sweating like he had malaria.
—It’s Katey, right? Listen. Do you have any dough?
—I don’t know.
I felt in Dicky’s blazer pockets and found a money clip with several hundred dollars. I considered giving Hank the whole thing. I gave him two tens instead. As I took the money out of the clip, he unconsciously licked his lips, as if he could already taste what the money would become. When I handed him the bills, he squeezed them in his fist like he was draining a sponge.
—Are you going back inside? I asked, knowing that he wouldn’t.
By way of explanation, he gestured toward the East Side. The gesture had an air of finality, like he knew we wouldn’t be seeing each other again.
—Five languages? I said before he left.
—Yeah. Five languages. And he can lie to himself in every one of them.
Dicky, the crew, and I stayed well into the night and were rewarded accordingly. Just past the witching hour, musicians began arriving with instruments under their arms. Some of them rotated onto the stage while some propped up the wall. Others sat at the bar, making themselves available to acts of charity. At around one, a group of eight musicians including three trumpets began the beguine.
Later, as we were leaving, the big Negro who had played the saxophone in the ensemble intercepted me at the door. I did my best to hide my surprise.
—Hey, he said in a monastic octave.
But as soon as I heard his voice, I knew who he was. He was the saxophonist we’d seen play at The Hotspot on New Year’s Eve.
—You’re Evelyn’s pal, he said.
—That’s right. Katey.
—We haven’t seen her round in awhile.
—She moved to L.A.
He nodded his head in heavy understanding, as if by moving out to Los Angeles Eve was somehow ahead of her time. And maybe she was.
—That girl’s got an ear.
He said this with the appreciation of the too oft misunderstood.
—If you see her, tell her we miss her.
Then he retreated back to the bar.
It made me laugh and laugh.
For on all those nights in 1937 when we had frequented jazz clubs at Eve’s insistence, and she had cornered the musicians to bum cigarettes, I had attributed it to her shallower impulses—her desire to shed her midwestern sensibility and mingle in the Negro’s milieu. While all that time, Evelyn Ross was a jazz lover of enough subtlety that the musicians missed her when she was out of town?
I caught up with the others outside, giving a little prayer of thanks to no one in particular. Because when some incident sheds a favorable light on an old and absent friend, that’s about as good a gift as chance intends to offer.
Dicky wasn’t kidding about the paper airplanes.
Having been out late at The Lean-To, the next night we indulged in that sweetest of New York luxuries: a Sunday night at home with nothing to do. Dicky called down to the kitchen for a plate of tea sandwiches. Instead of gin, he opened a bottle of self-pacing white wine. And as the night was unseasonably warm, we took our little picnic onto his fifty-square-foot terrace overlooking Eighty-third Street and entertained ourselves with a pair of binoculars.
Directly across the street on the twentieth floor of No. 42 East Eighty-third was a stifling dinner party at which know-it-alls in smoking jackets were taking turns making ponderous toasts. Meanwhile, on the eighteenth floor of No. 44, three children, having been put to bed, had quietly turned on their light, built barricades with their mattresses, seized their pillows, and commenced a reenactment of the street fighting in Les Misérables. But straight across from us, in the penthouse of No. 46, an obese man in the robe of a geisha was playing a Steinway in a state of rapture. The doors to his terrace were open, and drifting over the faint sounds of Sunday night traffic we could hear the strains of his sentimental melodies: “Blue Moon,” “Pennies from Heaven,” “Falling in Love with Love.” He played with his eyes closed and swayed back and forth, passing his meaty hands one over the other in an elegant progression of octaves and emotions. It was hypnotizing.
I wish he’d play “It’s De-Lovely,” Dicky said wistfully.
—Why don’t you ring his doorman, I suggested, and have him send up a request?
Dicky put a finger in the air indicating a better idea.
He went inside and came out a moment later with a box of fine paper, pens, paper clips, tape, a ruler, and a compass—dumping it on the table with an expression of unusual intent.
I picked up the compass.
—You’re kidding, right?
He plucked the compass back from me with a bit of a huff.
—Not in the least.
He sat down and organized his tools in a row like the scalpels on a surgeon’s tray.
—Here, he said, giving me a stack of paper.
He bit the eraser of his pencil for a moment and then began to write:
Dear Sir,
If you would be so kind, please play us your interpretation of “It’s De-Lovely.” For is it not de-lightful to-nightful?
Your Moonstruck Neighbors
In rapid fire we prepared twenty requests. “Just One of Those Things,” “The Lady Is a Tramp.” And then, starting with “It’s De-Lovely,” Dicky went to work.
Brushing back his bangs, he leaned forward and stuck the point of the compass into the lower-right-hand corner of the watermarked page. He deftly inscribed an arc, and then, with the precision of a draftsman, spun the compass around on the pencil tip, replanting the needle point in the center of the paper in order to draw a tangential circle. Within moments he had a series of circles and interlinking arcs. Laying his ruler down, he scored diagonal lines the way a ship’s navigator sets a course on the bridge. Once the blueprint was complete, he began folding along the various diagonals, using his fingernail to sharpen each crease with a satisfying ssffit.
As Dicky worked, the tip of his tongue pointed through his teeth. In four months, it was probably the longest I had seen him go without talking. It was certainly the longest I had seen him focused on a single endeavor. Part of the joy of Dicky was the ableness with which he flitted from moment to moment and topic to topic like a sparrow in a hurricane of crumbs. But here he displayed an unself-conscious immersion that seemed more suited to a defuser of bombs; and pretty endearing it was. After all, no man in his right mind would make a paper airplane with such care in order to impress a woman.
—Voila, he said at last, holding the first plane on both palms.
But if I enjoyed watching Dicky at work, I was none too confident in his aerodynamics. It looked like no plane I had ever seen. Where the planes of the day had smooth titanium noses, rounded bellies, and wings that jutted out of the fuselage like the arms of the cross, Dicky’s plane was a cantilevered triangle. It had the nose of a possum and the tail of a peacock and wings that had the pleats of a drape.
Leaning a little over the balcony, he licked his finger and held it in the air.
—Sixty-five degrees; wind at half a knot; two miles of visibility. It’s a perfect night for flying.
There was no disputing that.
—Here, he said, handing me the binoculars.
I laughed and left them in my lap. He was too preoccupied to laugh back.
—Away we go, he said.
He took one last look at his engineering, then he stepped forward and extended his arm with a motion akin to a swan extending its neck.
Well, the thing of it is—Dicky’s streamlined triangular fuselage may not have mimicked the planes of the day, but it perfectly anticipated the supersonic jets of the future. The plane shot out over Eighty-third Street without a tremble. It sailed through the air for a few seconds at a slight incline, leveled, and then began to drift slowly toward its mark. I scrambled for the binoculars. It took me a moment to sight the pl
ane. It was drifting southward on a prevailing current. Ever so slightly, it began to wobble, and then descend. It disappeared into the shadows of a balcony on the nineteenth floor of No. 50—two addresses west and three floors shy of our target.
—Drat, Dicky said, with enthusiasm.
He turned to me with a touch of paternal concern.
—Don’t be discouraged.
—Discouraged?
I stood up and smooched him on the smacker. When I pulled back, he smiled and said:
—Back to work!
Dicky didn’t have one paper airplane—he had fifty. There were triple folds, quadruple folds, quintuple folds, some of which were doubled back and reversed in quick succession, creating wing shapes that one wouldn’t have thought possible without tearing the paper in two. There were those with a truncated wing and a needle nose, others with condors’ wings and narrow submarine-like bodies ballasted with paper clips.
As we sent the requests across Eighty-third Street, I began to slowly understand that Dicky’s proficiency lay not simply in the engineering of the planes, but in his launching techniques too. Depending on the plane’s structure he would use more or less force, more or less incline, showing the expertise of one who has launched a thousand solo flights across a thousand Eighty-third streets in a thousand weather conditions.
By ten o’clock, the ponderous party had come to an end; the young revolutionaries had fallen asleep with the lights on; and we had landed, unbeknownst to our fat pianist (who had waddled off to brush his teeth), four musical requests on the tiles of his terrace. With the last plane launched, we too decided to pack it in. But when Dicky bent over to pick up the sandwich platter, he found one last piece of stationery. He stood up and looked out over the balcony.
—Wait, he said.
He leaned over and wrote out a message in perfect cursive. Without relying on his tools, he folded it back and forth until he had one of his sharper models. Then he carefully aimed and sailed it out over the street toward the nursery on the eighteenth floor of No. 44. As it traveled it seemed to gather momentum. The lights of the city flickered as if they were supporting it, the way that phosphorescence seems to support a nocturnal swimmer. It went right through their window and landed silently atop a barricade.
