by Ami Rao
They’d been sitting in the bath, she was soaping his leg – that supple, lithe leg that he swung around her body, circling it like an animal – when he told her he’d met this Danish girl, that it just happened, and he thought he loved her.
She had got out of the bath then, just stood up and stepped out and then taken the toothbrush holder – a sweet ceramic thing, white with blue and yellow and green zigzag patterns – and thrown it to the floor in a rage. Somehow, she didn’t know how – and even when she thought about it now, after all this time had passed, she still didn’t know how, only that it was a sign, it had to be – a small piece of it had bounced on the side of the bathtub and ricocheted up, the jagged edge of it cutting the skin on the underside of her forearm, the fleshy bit just below the bend of her elbow. All this, as she stood there in horror, on the tiled floor of his bathroom, water dripping from her body, from her hair, while he sat there in the bath, with his impossibly toned stomach and his flaccid penis, with a matching look of horror – or maybe it was one of relief that he’d met the Danish girl, that at least she wasn’t some kind of raging psychopath like this one was.
But that was the thing, Ameena thought, as the blood gushed from her arm and the water from her hair dripped directly onto it, watering down the blood into a thin, pink stream – an insult, really, the whole thing – she wasn’t a psychopath. She didn’t throw things. But of course, he didn’t know that. He probably thought she’d done it on purpose, incredible narcissist that he was, he probably thought she had cut herself intentionally for him, out of love or rejection or whatever. In a principally perverse way, for Ameena had always had the capacity to see humour even in dark things, this thought made her laugh.
She exited the bathroom without bothering to close the door behind her, calmly picked up the various items of her clothing that lay strewn across his bedroom floor, then, once she was fully dressed, went back in, helped herself to his face towel and, wrapping it round her arm, said, ‘Well, I don’t know about the best dancer in the world, but you can sell the shit out of a partnership, that’s for sure,’ and left for home, people staring at her on the bus, the stolen towel now sticky and bright red, her hair still wet, still dripping on her wound.
Back in her apartment, she sat down on the bed and felt faint and wondered if she would die. She had heard of people who died from an excessive loss of blood. But then she must have fallen asleep because when she woke the next morning, the ugly cut had scabbed over, and she was not dead, only heartbroken.
He had called her later that day to ask how she was. She had called him a motherfucker – she rarely swore, she had never used that word in her life before – and told him to fuck the fucking hell off to Denmark. Or something like that. Which apparently he had done, because he didn’t call to enquire after her again. Following this, Ameena became wary, and promised herself that going forward, she would never lose sight of the principles of chemistry – or was it physics, she couldn’t remember – but whatever it was, it certainly betrayed biology when it declared that two similarly charged bodies attempting to come together, even under the pretext of fine and noble persuasions such as love, was likely to lead to a string of unmitigated disasters, and so when David told her that he wanted to be a composer, she found herself unable to offer words of wonder or encouragement or admiration; she found herself unable to offer any words at all.
1.19
what are you doing tonight? flashed the message on her phone.
Watching the lights of the great city, she replied truthfully.
She was lying in bed, facing the window, listening to the Fugue in G Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach – the man was a gift, David had told her, to all humanity. Now, she flipped from her side onto her back, held up the phone in front of her face, typed with her two thumbs.
A: You?
D: will pull up in cab, 20 mins, come down
A: WHAT?
D: 20 mins. don’t be late
A: But where are we going?
D: cello concert. friend had 2 tix
A: Where? What time does it finish? What do I wear?
D: surprise. don’t know. nothing.
A: Rubbish answer.
D: ;)
And then he was gone.
Twenty minutes later, she found herself next to David in the backseat of a yellow cab.
‘Well,’ she remarked, ‘this was spontaneous!’
‘Jazz has a way of teaching you to live in the moment,’ he said with a laugh. ‘You look beautiful by the way in your red dress.’ Then he whispered, ‘Step down from nothing, but not by a lot.’
‘Stop,’ she mouthed, but smiled shyly, immediately conscious of the chemistry between them, of his desire for her that he made no effort to mask.
‘Can’t,’ he said in a grave voice, shaking his head. Ameena pursed her lips to conceal a smile and pretended to look outside her window at the great city moving backwards.
A few minutes later, David tapped on the see-through plastic partition that physically separated the front seats from the back to get the attention of SUKHWINDER SINGH AHLUWALIA, licence number 4xxxx. ‘Can you go up Park, please,’ David said to him through the little window. ‘Sixth is always gridlocked at this time of the evening. Could have taken a left there – you missed it – oh come on!’
‘Why,’ Ameena said, turning towards him, ‘genuinely why, are New Yorkers always telling taxi drivers how to drive? Why can’t you just sit back and let him do his job? I wonder about this lots, you know… I’ve only ever seen it happen here. What is it about? Is it him? Or is it you? And can we ever know?’
At this, SUKHWINDER SINGH AHLUWALIA flips his turbaned head right round to stare at the seeker of such metaphysical truths.
‘You’re so Zen,’ David said, smiling.
‘Touché,’ she replied. ‘Anyway, cello concert? I thought you wanted me to listen to you playing jazz.’
‘I did. I do! But then this came along, and I thought I’d love to take you, the cello can be magnificent if done well. And also.’ He reached for her hand on the seat and put his own over it. ‘Also, I was thinking, on my way here, maybe it’s not such a bad thing, it kind of follows my own progression in a way; my mother played – and taught – classical music so that’s what I was playing for about seven years before I came to jazz.’
‘How did you come to jazz?’
‘Ha! Good question. It’s a good story actually. So, at my high school, this is in Rhode Island – I grew up in Rhode Island, I don’t know if I told you that already – there was this science teacher who was a jazz bass player by night.’
‘God, David, that sounds like something out of a movie!’
‘No, seriously.’ David nodded. ‘And then, he convinced the school that he didn’t want to be a science teacher any more, so he transitioned into being a full-time jazz teacher. Or rather, educator, I should say.’
David thought back, not without some amusement, to Jack Winters, the science teacher who, to the class’s half-shock, half-fascination, would routinely fall asleep with both eyes open, often in the middle of his own sentence.
This unusual behaviour, which at first had been wrongly attributed to some very hip and illegal reasons, was eventually – and somewhat to the disappointment of a group of high school kids with fertile imaginations – explained away by less enthralling factors. For it was not a long time later that Mr Winters confessed to the school principal the practical impossibility of explaining the anatomy of a rat by day when he’d been up playing jazz all night.
A few weeks later, a timid-looking woman with glasses and stringy brown hair showed up to teach the science class, the music department introduced a new jazz class and the old science teacher became the new jazz teacher.
For David, it had been pure luck. One of those unexplained karmic forces that conspire to put you on a certain path for a certain reason which you d
o not fully understand and from which there is no turning back.
David looked outside his window.
They were driving past Columbus Circle, a shifting swirl of colour under the rainbow lights.
To Ameena, he said, ‘Frankly, anyone who is willing to teach jazz to high school kids is a hero. And Jack Winters, because he had this incredible ear-based, organic ability to play the music, understood that jazz is an aural tradition and needs to be taught in that same fashion. So, I guess I was very, very fortunate to have such an excellent first teacher. Beyond my mom, I mean. So, jazz-wise, credit where credit’s due, this guy was just phenomenally good at taking high school kids who had never heard a note of jazz before and turning them into, at the minimum, jazz lovers, if not more.’
‘That’s like a real movie scene,’ Ameena said. ‘It’s got that sweet, wistful sentimentality to it. Tell me you don’t see it!’ She held her hands apart as if she was holding a banner: ‘Students help teacher find true calling, spurred by a mutual love of jazz.’
David laughed as the taxi pulled up to the curb. ‘Well sweet, what can I say? It’s all true.’
‘We are hair,’ announces SUKHWINDER SINGH ALHUWALIA in a bored voice. It’s been particularly dull, he thinks with disappointment, this conversation at the back, after starting out with such promise.
‘Great,’ David said amiably as he handed over a twenty-dollar bill, ‘he says we’re here, so we must be here, and in perfect time too. No, I don’t need any change, you can keep that, thanks.’
Outside the taxi, he held her hand. Around them, New York City. Statues. Jumping fountains. A sea of yellow cabs. The flash of the greenback. Exquisite energy. Sinful. Sexy.
David said: ‘Let’s go watch this thing. Dress rehearsal. Then we’ll go watch the real thing. Just joking – you hear that sound? That’s my mother turning in her grave.’
‘David!’
‘I’m joking, I’m joking. It’s my father.’
‘You! Honestly, you’re something else!’
And in that way, David revealed to Ameena two important details about himself:
That his parents were dead.
That had they been alive, they would likely have disapproved of David’s proclivity for this one style of music vs. the other.
She picked up on both.
1.20
On the burgundy faux leather sofa, Ameena’s father Yusuf was troubled.
These were troubled times.
Someone, he read in the newspaper that morning at the barber’s shop, had raped an underage girl – a child for all intents and purposes – the previous day. She had been found, in the early hours of the morning, sitting on the smooth marble floor of the Arndale Centre, quivering and terrorised. Police were asking around for witnesses, anyone who may have seen something suspicious.
Please God, Yusuf found himself thinking, please don’t let him be Muslim.
This wasn’t an unusual thought for Yusuf to be thinking. In fact, of late, every time he read of horrendous happenings anywhere in the world, he found himself praying that the perpetrator was not Muslim, not Pakistani, not brown.
Not anyone who looked like his son.
1.21
It was intimate, far more intimate than she had expected from a venue of such eminence.
It had scale – Ameena imagined it could fit a few thousand people at capacity – and yet, the combined effects of the stage, the steeply raked stalls and the low gallery created a surprisingly personal venue, which delighted her, and she tugged at David’s arm.
‘I love this,’ she said, looking around.
‘It used to be a church,’ David whispered, ‘in the 1900s. And then people basically stopped going to church, so they sold it. It opened as a concert hall in the early 2000s. They did massive amounts of work on the acoustics.’
‘It’s wonderful,’ she said, ‘you feel like you can reach out and touch the instruments.’
The stage had been set up, the various instruments placed on the seats of chairs or stood up in front of them. It was amazing, Ameena thought, that in a few minutes, all those instruments would be playing at once; so many talented musicians on one stage, playing their different instruments, whatever each played best, yet all coming together as one to celebrate a single piece of music.
‘I want to feel the music,’ Ameena said as they took their seats, ‘the way you feel it.’
David smiled. ‘You know that Michelangelo quote, “I liberate the statue from the marble”? That’s what I’m hoping they will do for us tonight, a liberation of the statue in sound. I hope we will both feel it resounding around the room!’
‘And what a room!’ she exclaimed, turning her head all the way round and then up towards the elaborate cathedral ceiling.
David delights from her excitement. She’s infectious, he thinks, this girl is infectious.
‘I know it’s night-time,’ he said looking up at the large multicoloured panels that rose above the balconies on each side, ‘but if you come here during the day, you really appreciate the stained glass. It was designed by a Danish guy, he learned the art of stained glass while working here in New York with Tiffany.’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘how nice. Another Danish person bringing virtue to the world.’
‘Huh?’
‘Nothing. Tell me about the stage set-up.’
He looked at her curiously. ‘Is this your first time? Watching an orchestra?’
She nodded, suddenly feeling inadequate, a kind of realisation that when it comes to certain experiences in life, some people are so much richer than others.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘do you think less of me?
‘No, no, not at all. I just didn’t realize you were a music virgin that’s all,’ he said, with a twinkle in his eye.
‘Music virgin?’
‘I’m honoured that your first time is with me. I promise I’ll be very giving.’
She hit him on the arm playfully. ‘You’re such a perv!’
He smiled, and she noticed how his dimples played on his cheeks, the left one deeper than the right. ‘Haven’t even gotten started…’
She waved her hand dismissively. ‘Whatever.’
‘I’m absolutely serious,’ he said, and he looked at her and her face was boundless like the sky and her eyes were like stars.
‘What do you mean?’ she asked.
‘You’ll see,’ he said. ‘Actually, I take that back. Maybe you won’t.’
In the darkness, everything was heightened.
The sound of her own breathing, the sound of his, the breath of the bow drawn across the strings. And the vibrations, the breath of the vibrations, as they ricocheted through her chest.
‘Do me a favour?’ he had said a few minutes earlier. ‘Close your eyes. Don’t open them till the end.’
She looked at him, her dark eyes penetrating, searching. ‘What? You brought me here to see this thing, but you don’t want me to see this thing? Like at all?’
‘You wanted to feel the music? Then feel it,’ he said softly. ‘Suppress one sense, heighten the others. Music is a tactile experience. Emotion over perception.’
Ameena turned towards him. Then she smiled and shut her eyes as if to test it out, examine for herself if there was any truth to what he was saying. He looked at her for a long moment, sitting like that, eyes shut, lips gently parted, marvelling at the simple beauty of her face. On an impulse, he placed his palm over her eyes, the lightest touch, leaving it there for a few seconds before brushing his fingertips over her face, caressing it, his fingers moving downwards, reaching her neck, stopping only at the hollow between her collarbones.
Ameena took in a breath.
‘Okay…’ she said, but she opened her eyes and looked around the packed room.
‘It’s full,’ he said as if in confirmati
on.
She nodded.
He held her hand. ‘You can watch if you prefer to watch. Don’t listen to me, do whatever you want. The beauty is in the music and all the different ways you can feel it and understand it. You’ll enjoy it either way, I promise you.’
The musicians picked up their bows. A quiet descended. Ameena felt the silence around her, the tension of it, like a rubber band stretched tight.
On the stage, she saw the woman in her black dress and her long hair, her chin tilted, her bow drawn, her thighs apart, creating a nest between her legs for the instrument to lie in. And then it snapped. The silence snapped. And the silence was accompanied, but not replaced, by something else. The sound came, deep and rich. Companion to silence, knit together, a marriage.
And Ameena. She is disarmed.
She looks at David, at the unique composition of his face, examining it, studying how his each feature exists in relation to the others. The irises of his eyes, she notices, are striking, green-gold and open and full of integrity.
He squeezes her hand and instinctively she squeezes back.
For a moment, exquisite and ephemeral, their eyes lock.
Then she shuts hers.
On stage the cellist is playing the tune in E minor. Somewhere in the room, a phone rings, then abruptly stops. Ameena shuffles lower in her seat and reclines her head, dark hair fanned out against the deep maroon velvet of the cushion. David doesn’t know this at the time, but it is a vision of her that he will always remember, as if in that moment she is not real, but a kind of dream or ideal.
Almost involuntarily, he leans into her, lifting her hair up and over her shoulder, and kisses her neck, and there is a gentleness about the way he touches her, and a great yearning stirs deep within her.
‘David, I just want you to know…’ she starts to say, but then the moment had already glided into the next, and her voice stuck in her throat.
‘I already know,’ he said softly.
On stage, the orchestra burst forth in a blaze of passion. To Ameena the sound was enormous. Everywhere. Everything. She let it flow over her and fill her, all the empty spaces within her, into those dark hollows encasing her heart, and then all the emptiness was gone, and she felt a lightness and she was rising, up, up, up.
