by Ami Rao
1,2,3 (Waltz steps)
‘Not at all. I’m surprised, that’s all. I would have thought it would help take your mind off… other things.’
4 (Open position, open out like a book or a hinge)
‘You mean,’ she says, ‘like an ostrich?’
5,6 (Promenade, reaching step, weight on balls of feet)
He smiles. Doesn’t take the bait/lose the beat. ‘You’re great at your job. Just thought it would be a good thing at this time. Keep you busy.’
‘I don’t need to be kept busy. Don’t patronise me please, David. I’m not a child.’
7,8 (Step in front of partner. Signal close.)
3.6
The following night, she is lying on the sofa in the darkened apartment when he comes home after a session, but she sits up when she hears him. The light makes her squint. She’s been crying, he can see that; her eyes are swollen and puffy. She’s wearing his t-shirt again.
‘My mum called earlier.’
‘Oh?’
‘They closed the case. Insufficient evidence.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he says simply.
‘They didn’t even cover the cost of the window. Kareem got it fixed when my dad was out.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ he repeats, and he is genuinely sorry, but he knows how pointless they must sound, his words, how unhelpful.
She nods and disappears into the bedroom. She looks desolate, he thinks.
But a few minutes later, she comes back out. ‘Where’s the justice?’ she demands, of the room – or the universe – and then goes back in again.
David who is a bit more well-versed in the workings of the universe, knows that those who go looking for justice find it to be an elusive thing. The kind of thing that is only truly understood by its absence, the stuff that you don’t know you can’t find until something much more significant is lost. The stuff that Peggy couldn’t find from her own mother, Ameena couldn’t find for her art, her father couldn’t find from the insurance company, his mother couldn’t find from life.
The stuff of blindfolded Justitia with scales and sword, painted in a pretty blue sky on the high domes of ceilings of palazzos.
The stuff of mythology.
3.7
Just ten days ago, they had been standing on a street corner speaking of joy.
David had finished playing for the night. A Saturday night. Sunday technically; it was way past midnight.
‘God, David,’ she had said, her face lit, beautiful, against the stream of golden car lights that were continuously moving, like a line or a kind of living thing, ‘that was too good tonight.’
They’d been standing on the corner of West 4th Street trying to hail a cab.
Before them, a city lived. Walking, talking, eating, excreting, breathing, inhaling, injecting, dancing, singing, swinging, pulsing, bouncing, crying, dying, boozing, fucking, laughing, loving, living. You could see the city living. You could hear it. You could smell it. You could taste it. Or you could, as easily, miss it entirely.
Just here...
couple holding hands
dog walker
tourist with subway map
sleeping baby on daddy’s chest
musician with double bass
two gay men kissing
three Italian women speaking
ambulance weaving its way through traffic
noisy siren competing with Smooth Criminal blaring from someone’s red convertible
Just there...
group of half-clad teenage girls
three firemen crouching outside fire station eating pizza
half-clad girls checking them out
four boys checking out half-clad girls
whiff of chilli and cinnamon
hole-in-the-wall immigrant burrito guy with line around the corner
sound of laughter
tall, black, shaven-headed beauty turning heads
man eating ice cream cone
couple arguing loudly in foreign accent
Billie Holiday’s voice floating down from open apartment window
woman with headphones
homeless guy on sidewalk with sleeping dog and ‘veteran’ sign
off-duty police car
another one behind it
speeding yellow cabs
Only none with their lights on.
The wind tunnelled furiously down the avenue. Bright and high and perfectly round, the library clock beheld the streets, a second moon. Ameena craned her neck forward trying to spot a free cab. She had crossed her arms around her coat and was hopping from foot to foot.
‘God, it’s seriously cold. No, I mean, Piano-man, that was some seriously good shit.’
David shivered. ‘How are you wearing that tiny skirt? Here, have my scarf. Ameena, don’t roll your eyes, I can’t give you my pants can I? Yeah, that’s it, wrap it around your legs. Very sexy. The music… thanks, yeah, I kind of felt it too, honestly, it was different level tonight. Josh…’ David laughed, ‘Josh was really grooving it… his swing, his feel, his bounce, his pulse… and Roy, I mean, Roy just owns the beat in such an intuitive way, he doesn’t sound like any other drummer out there. But yeah, we had fun… finding, discovering.’ He nodded. ‘I felt it too, can’t describe it in words, it’s just the way we were playing tonight.’
‘I know!’ Ameena said. ‘We heard it off the bandstand. We felt it. And you know, you never talk about yourself and I guess that’s the jazz way, but the emotion and the expression, the variety of expression in your improvisation tonight was something else and I know enough now to tell you when it’s good. You were amazing, and together, you guys were killing it. Fluid, like a conversation. I still don’t know how you do it, you know. I mean mechanically.’
She was jumping now to keep warm, up and down, jump, jump, jump.
She looked at David quizzically. ‘Okay seriously, why is everyone staring at me? Naked guy right there with a bucket on his head, speaking to himself, and they’re staring at me? So, yeah, I’m probably still gonna be telling you this when we’re both eighty, but I don’t think I will ever understand how you guys play something that’s not written down anywhere, no notes, no instructions, no nothing, and still make it sound this good.’
‘Haha,’ David said. ‘You’re funny. I look forward to you being eighty – will you still have a man’s scarf wrapped around your legs, baby? Will you still be funny? Will you still seduce me with your good taste and eroticism? But hey, that is probably why it sounded good, the power of this music is in the making of the stuff, this idea that you listen, you imitate, you sing along with what you hear, and then you just try to play what you sing. And that we’re all doing it simultaneously – Josh, Roy, me. There’s a kind of organic truth to that.’ He shrugged. ‘Artmaking.’
‘Yes! You’re speaking to each other through your instruments, you say what you feel, you play what you feel. It’s all feeling. That’s all that remains. It’s rapturous.’
David mock bowed. ‘Why, thank you milady.’
‘No, thank you. What you give to your listener is unbelievable. Something happens to me when I listen to jazz, it’s beautiful, and beauty is a real thing! Your music moves me, it actually makes my body move, I just can’t help it, it’s like this magical involuntary thing that happens, I listen to your music and I want to extend it, in some way, in my own body… keep it going, you know? Oh my God, there are no cabs. Should I lift up my skirt and stick my leg out?’
‘We’ll find a cab,’ David said, and she noted with some surprise how his tone had turned just that little bit serious. ‘Ameena, do you know how happy it makes me that you’re enjoying jazz? Jazz for jazz’s sake I mean, separate from you and me. I was thinking about it the other day, that I should stop and thank you for caring about and appreciating my music and for b
eing so curious about our art as to try and understand it. I know that it isn’t only for my sake or because you feel like you’ve got to love what I love.’
Ameena smiled, but her words, though uttered casually, were also serious.
‘It’s not always obvious to me David, what makes you happy. But jazz, I know, does. Anyway, don’t be so silly, you don’t need to thank me. You filled my life with your music; you filled my life with you. Okay, I can’t wait any longer, I’m doing this.’
Freeing herself of the scarf, she returned it to its rightful owner, looping it loosely round David’s neck. She was about to move away, but David held her arm and pulled her close, bringing his lips to the hollow of her neck, where a tiny gold heart pendant sat prettily in the dip between her collarbones. His breath was uneven, and she could feel his desire, and from somewhere inside her, powerfully, her own. ‘Stop doing things to me, Piano-man,’ she said, ‘this is not the time. Or the place. Or the temperature. But hold that thought…’ She narrowed her eyes seductively, as she stepped back. And then, with her arms waving crazily in the air and one stockinged leg raised in a perfect right angle over 7th Avenue, she said thoughtfully, ‘You know what, David, the greatest lesson of jazz, for me, is joy.’
Just ten days.
3.8
Time moves irreversibly forward. Sometimes we cannot help but move irreversibly backward.
And so, just ten days later, it was one of those nights, he cannot remember which one, they have all melted together into one, like multiple flavours in an ice cream cone that’s started to drip, first from one side, then from another – you have to lick it, quickly, desperately, turning it round and round and round like a crazed person, just to keep it together.
‘Can’t you just turn that damn light off? I can’t sleep,’ she snapped, sitting up in bed suddenly, a dark fury raging in her eyes.
‘Can’t you just say that nicely?’ he replied, but he put his book down on the side table. She could hear it in his voice and given their propinquity she could feel it, radiating from his body to her own, those silent pangs of hurt.
She slumped back with a thud as if dragged down by some invisible force and turned on her side, her back to him. ‘I really don’t need to say it at all. You can see I’m trying to sleep. Can’t you?’
The next morning, a Sunday, she seems bright-eyed.
‘Do you want omelettes for breakfast?’ she asks, then rolls over, on top of him now, straddling him, sitting up, pulling her t-shirt over her head. ‘Or me?’
And like that, the fight is over.
‘You’re still squeezing,’ he says, after.
‘Am I?’ she asks, surprised.
Later they eat breakfast together, side by side, watching how the sunbeams make the river shine with an almost frenetic exuberance.
‘I think I’m just the wrong person for this,’ she says casually as she butters her toast.
‘Wrong person for what?
‘To be an artist. I’m the wrong person to be an artist.’
‘What do you mean you’re the wrong person to be an artist?’ David said, and slipped headfirst into the crack.
They are elusive, these cracks, whether in people or in walls. Sometimes they come disguised, by doorframes or by desire, but look closely and you see them, the dark fissures where two bits have split, exposing what’s private, what’s weak. And you wonder, when you find them, you wonder where they came from, how they could appear just like that, because one minute the wall seems intact and the next, you’re slipping into the crack.
‘Why is this so difficult to understand?’ Ameena was saying. ‘I’m the wrong person to be an artist in this city at this time.’ She rolled her eyes. ‘Or maybe it’s any city at any time. But I’m the wrong person. Wrong name, wrong colour, wrong religion, wrong sex. Wrong in every way.’
‘Ameena… I—’
‘No. You know what? Please don’t. Please don’t say whatever it was you were going to say. In fact, please just eat those excellent omelettes I made for you and don’t say anything at all.’
‘I was only going to say,’ David continued, ignoring her, ‘and it’s better I say this to you than a stranger – or worse, a prospective new gallery – that I know you are stinging from what’s happened to your family and I don’t blame you for it – at all – but I don’t think what happened at the gallery has anything to do with race or sex or religion or anything else that you seem to be hinting at. These are two unrelated incidents. Related only so much as you had one on your mind when the other happened. Terrible timing. I’ll give you that. But not everybody is crazy. Not everybody has an agenda. The pig guy is crazy. The pig guy had an agenda. This guy? This guy just didn’t like your work. Sucks. But that’s the nature of what we do. Not everyone is going to like your work. It can annoy you, but you can’t let it control you. It’s not easy for any kind of creative. You, more than anyone else, know how long I’ve been trying to get someone to look at my stuff and I don’t even know where to begin or if I’ll be any good at it, or even, quite frankly, if it feels right creatively to be going down that path at all.’ He sighed. ‘It’s a pretty solitary place to be, for all of us.’
Ameena pressed her lips together. Her head was starting to hurt.
‘For all of us?’
‘Yes. Us. People like us. You and me.’
‘You and me? You cannot be serious!’
‘I am completely serious. The world still undervalues the arts. I’m sorry but that’s a fact. The vicissitudes of life are that much more unpredictable for us. It’s an uphill struggle – to be any kind of artist. You need a break. Every successful artist has had a break and he or she will admit that openly. You might want to think you’re alone because it suits you to think so at this moment. But, you’re not alone. And if you’re alone, I’m alone too.’
Ameena laughed.
And with her laughter, the crack was no more a crack.
‘Oh,’ she said at the end of the laugh. ‘Oh, Oh, Oh! Poor David. Poor Jewish David. Trying to make it all alone in the world. You think I’m hinting at something? Well, how’s this for a hint? You are trying to do what everyone else who is exactly like you has already done. In fact, there are the African-American musicians to whom this music actually belongs and then there’s like five people remaining in the world who have done what you want to do that aren’t like you! That’s the marvellous irony of this whole thing! That you actually think you’re alone. You want me to recite them back to you? The names of your idols? These people you aspire to be like, these people you want to become? Irving Berlin, Bernstein, Sondheim, Benny Goodman, Herbie Mann, Getz, Konitz, Buddy Rich, Artie Shaw, John Zorn, Ziggy Elman, Bernard Herrmann, Zimmer, Schoenberg, Philip FUCKING Glass!’
She raised her arms in the air.
‘Shall I go on?’
David’s face had turned white.
But Ameena wasn’t going to stop there.
She’d seen on the news the other day, while David was gigging at the Blue Note club and she was home alone, sitting on the sofa, watching TV, eating ice cream, rum and raisin, straight out of the carton, a story about a woman in Idaho who went into a blind rage and stabbed her married lover twenty-five times with an eight-inch steak knife, right there in his wife’s pinewood kitchen.
This is how rage arrives, a force of nature, like a tsunami, wrathful and indiscriminate; claiming everything, sparing nothing.
So, no – Ameena wasn’t going to stop, even though his face had turned white.
‘Yup,’ she nodded at David’s white face, ‘those are the people you want to become, don’t you? But guess what, David? I’ll let you in on a great big secret – you don’t need to become them! You already are them! A whole bunch of people who look like you, who speak like you, who sound like you, who probably all fuck like you.’
He made a sound then, a tiny, strangled sound,
barely audible, the kind of sound made by a small child in pain.
Ameena heard it and she took pleasure from it, from the pain she was causing him. It gave her satisfaction, a strange form of comfort, as if in hurting him she would no longer be the only one hurting.
‘And you know what? Every one of those names, you taught me. You taught me. I may be a shitty artist and an even shittier girlfriend but at least you can’t say I wasn’t a fucking good student.’
3.9
Ameena’s fury during those weeks! She rages at everything. The discoloured patch on a Pink Lady apple, the filth of the melting snow, the Chinese tourists, the sour taste of Hershey’s Kisses, the long lines at the supermarket, the rats on the subway tracks, the unhelpfulness of the credit card helpline, the head cold that she can’t seem to shake, the interminable wait at the doctor’s office, the infrequency of the elevator, the loudness of the neighbour’s dog’s bark, the short lifespan of Manhattan milk…
And when there’s nothing left to rage at, she still rages.
‘Iva-fucking-nov,’ she says, ‘I wish he would die. I wish he would go somewhere and just quietly die.’
David searches everywhere for his old lighter. Finds it in the pocket of his Yankees sweatshirt. It smells of Ameena. The sweatshirt, not the lighter. Smokes three ‘jazz cigarettes’ back to back. Feels the panic subside. Throws away the debris. Stows away the lighter.
It helps him to pretend that these moments never happened. It is easier, sometimes, to pretend that something never happened.
3.10
Spring played truant again that year. Summer arrived. The snow melted, and the days lengthened and there was light under the dark.
Ameena emerged in this same way.
The fury ended as swiftly as it had begun. Now, she carried a moodiness that seemed to follow her at all times like a shadow attached to the bottom of her feet, but at least, David thought, she wasn’t spending all her time in the bedroom with the door closed, she had brushed her hair the other day, she wasn’t wearing his clothes.
