“He’s just off on a toot, Munster says,” Hamish told her, patting her arm. “He’ll be back in his spot in the park any day now, you’ll see. Please, you have to come home now, it’s no use you getting sick worrying about him, then you wouldn’t be able to cook him something when he does show up. Come on, the colonel needs you too, you know.”
“Oh, one time I can do something good. The colonel, he say, feed that man. And his cat too. I’ve seen too many hungry people not to care this one time, just to feed one old man, only one, a poor man and his cat. Poor Titus.”
“Come away, Ettie. I’ll ask the guys I play basketball with to keep an eye out for him, we’ll find him.”
But the days passed and no one had news of the Cap’n. His broad bulk was never seen on his bench in Washington Square Park. Miss Lily worried about him also, he never came around anymore. And sometimes, in those hours that seem to be no part of the real world, the predawn hours of night’s wakefulness and worry, she woke and saw his figure, willing it to come back to her.
As threatened, Paul Dresden had made Deen play elementary-level tunes day after day. He told her he was emptying her of all the wrong music inside her head and her fingers. The program also included scales, which he demanded she play endlessly, basic technique, he said, stripped of content and especially emotion. He’d told her something she’d found interesting, that she should play the same way she’d eat—correctly, efficiently, and with savor. “And forget the fucking manners,” he added. “No pinkies raised, no flourishes!”
Four afternoons a week Deen toiled with him in his studio. Sometimes she played two-voiced Scarlatti sonatas the entire session while Paul appeared to sleep.
Now they were gradually progressing to slightly more difficult pieces. Paul’s method of teaching was a negative one, involving shouts of derision, stinging criticism and sarcasm. Deen was beginning to rather like him.
Kristen continued to greet Deen at the door with her baby, presenting the stolid infant as if bestowing a royal favor, a part of the routine Deen had grown to loathe. Kristen also acted the role of keeper of the gate, making Deen wait in her noxious kitchen until she deemed the Great One sufficiently prepared to receive her.
For the infant Rinaldo’s part, it had taken as great a dislike to Deen as she to it. It opened its mouth wide and let out a scream each time it saw her.
Today, Deen had been invited to stay for dinner after the lesson, although children are not so much invited to do things as told to do them. Kristen had called Sadie to suggest it, saying they should all get to know each other better. She had in fact made the suggestion only in the hopes that Sadie would come, but her plan had backfired and Sadie had eluded her net. Sadie accepted for her daughter, making it rather too plain that she never for a moment considered going herself.
Deen had been dreading it for days. The lesson finished, Paul told her to go sit with Kristen, as he had some work to do.
“He’s composing a symphony,” Kristen said as Deen came in. “And I’m never to disturb him before dinnertime. I even take the phone off the hook. Not that anyone ever calls us.”
Kristen sat the baby in its high chair, carefully feeding its elephantine legs through the seat. “There now. I thought we could have a nice chat and a cup of tea. And after, you can help me give him his bath.”
Deen could think of no greater treat. She sidled around the table, hoping it wouldn’t notice her, but it looked up and its eyes went round and it began to shriek. Deen wished she could throw a blanket over its face, which had turned the color of raw beefsteak, with a stream of ochre snot dangling from its nose. A gob of the stuff went into its mouth. It gave a gulp then went silent, beating its fists on the tray. Kristen ran to it, her face white with fear as she tipped its head back. It fought off her hands with surprisingly loud smacks of flesh on flesh. Deen supposed she oughtn’t hope it choked to death. Finally it gave a great, slurping gulp and opened its mouth to howl again.
Lived to howl another day, Deen thought sourly. She dreaded what was going to be served for dinner, hoping that smell in the steamy kitchen wasn’t it. It smelled like scorched balsa wood.
When the delightful task of helping to bathe the infant was offered to Deen she demurred, saying that Paul had told her she mustn’t do any work with her hands. Kristen said nothing, just made a suffering face.
“Well, well,” Paul said, when at last he came in. “What a charming scene of domesticity. Sweetheart, do we have any of that cooking sherry left? I rather feel like a drink. Yes, a drinkie, let’s all have a slug of awful sherry. We so rarely have a guest, perhaps because we’re so damn poor we can barely feed ourselves, eh, my love? Ondine, I assume your mother lets you have a tiny glass now and then?”
“Yes, wine and sherry.”
“Ah, splendid. What care we for our great white leader’s so-called family values? Though they haven’t quite foisted him on us as our next president yet. What a farce of an election.”
Kristen went to the cupboard and poured him a glass of sherry, wiping the glass surreptitiously with the hem of her sweater first.
She brought it to Paul, who sat at the table looking around him as if he’d never seen any of these people before, and found them comical.
“And how is this great and thriving creature?” he said, looking at his son, who stared back at him with a crafty expression. “Fattening him up, I take it? Cells multiplying daily on a diet of milk and pureed carrots? Were there any giants in your family, perhaps an uncle with the circus, my pet? Kristen, our guest has not been given a glass of sherry, please correct that. There, Ondine, to your health.”
He raised his glass and drained it. “My, that was disgusting.” He stared at Kristen, who was still standing. “Sit down, for Christ’s sake!” he suddenly roared. “Can’t we even pretend to be civilized, just this once? Have a fucking glass of sherry and some interesting conversation, speak of greater things than nappies and washing powders? Are we but beasts to mill and constantly low? Put your withered ass in a chair, woman, at least try to act like the lady of the house.”
Kristen scuttled into her chair and put on a bright look. “Deen, I’ve been dying to ask you,” she said, her gaiety rather hectic, “what was your father really like? I had such a crush on him when I was younger. He was so beautiful, whirling onstage, all that long hair flying around him.”
“Ignore her,” Paul said. “That kind of codswollop you’ll do best to ignore as a matter of principle. All right, we’ve had our sham adult drink, made a stab at making it look like we don’t live in the most abject squalor and poverty, let’s move on. Get some dinner on the table, woman. I’ve been praying it doesn’t taste as foul as it smells, but so few prayers are answered. Do you pray, Ondine? To God?”
“Not much.”
“Nor do I. Aha, proof that there is no God,” he said as Kristen put plates on the table. “That bad smell is dinner. Even I, a disbeliever, hoped that it might just be a nappy crisis, but no, ’tis our daily bread. For which I am decidedly ungrateful. And Goddamn it!” he shouted, crashing his fist on the table. “Must we have spaghetti Bolognese every night? Only varied by the degree to which it is ill-prepared or burnt? You cunt! Can’t you learn to cook anything else?”
Deen had never had a father, neither one who was sweet to her nor one who roared. She’d never experienced that grace note of family life, the enraged breadwinner at the dinner table. She wished the floor would dissolve and swallow her up. It didn’t occur to her that what she was seeing was anything less catastrophic than a total breakdown of a marriage. She tried to think of what to say to get herself out the door, but just then Paul put his head down and began to eat. Kristen also seemed unperturbed. She was carefully cutting hanks of spaghetti into tiny bits and feeding them into her son’s mouth. Her rabbity face shone with adoration as the baby gummed down the food from a plastic spoon, making quacking sounds between each spoonful.
Paul slumped back in his chair. “You should see him eat a banana,�
� he said. “It cures you of any love you might still have for the human race.”
12
Gene’s Restaurant on Eleventh near the corner of Sixth Avenue was a haven to those who yearned for the vanished glories of the Village. Descend five red-painted steps from the sidewalk to a door with an ironwork grille and enter a dreamworld, an Italian joint that hadn’t changed since the fifties. A coat-check girl leans over the half door of her cubicle, her face slack with boredom. Across from her, Jimmy the barman stands, wide and genial in an ochre monkey suit, behind his polished mahogany bar. Beyond them the dining room is carpeted in a swirly pattern reminiscent of first-class railway cars. Waiters in monkey suits heft trays piled high, conversing with each other in Spanish and Albanian.
The diners are straight from a Max Beckmann painting—raddled old dames in orange wigs, fat men smoking cigars and ordering double brandies, cadaverous poets with long manes of white hair. Most of them are regulars who’ve aged right along with the establishment, neither the clientele nor the owner exactly embracing change. It was the kind of place where a wineglass is set before a teenage grandchild in a party, nothing said. It had held on to its ideas and ways, and its pride in being slightly raffish.
George arrived at the bar each night around nine, slipping onto his stool at the corner, which Jimmy saved for him if he could, using many of the subtle arts of the good bartender to do so.
George was a writer. He wrote about New York. He’d had pieces in all the more serious publications, though if asked, would freely admit that it’d been some time since he’d had anything new published.
He delighted in listening to conversations, to the authentic. In his seat beneath the window facing the street at Gene’s he could hear and see almost everyone at the pocket-size bar. He sat there rapt, a knowing look on his face, gradually getting stewed until Jimmy, by certain coded signals, made it known that it was time for George to quit.
George followed the conversations around him with a look on his face so engaging and complicit that hardly anyone got annoyed. His face seemed to say, Do go on, this is most enjoyable, don’t mind me.
He was into his fourth Johnnie Black and completely at ease in his soul. His torso wafted slightly, as though fanned by gentle breezes. He smiled at a man who caught his eye. He leaned forward to listen to the couple around the corner. In their mid-sixties, he thought, and decided they must be in publishing, for the man wore a bow tie and a gray flannel suit, and the woman a stylish wool sheath and oversize round tortoiseshell glasses. He longed to ask her where she’d bought them, or if they were old and treasured, repaired numerous times. His mind wandered down a path, bordered by lustrous blooms, in which he’d write a piece about New York literary types and their eyewear. Yes, yes, it would be a wonderful piece, he’d interview that man at Dell & Myrowitz….
He was so excited he longed to rush home, start right on it. But first he’d have just one more; the couple’s conversation was getting interesting.
“I suppose he thought he was doing her a favor,” the man said.
“Some favor!” the woman snorted. “Her next book hit the remainder bins before it’d even been reviewed.”
They were both drinking rye and ginger ale. Behind them Marissa, the coat-check girl, was helping a tiny old woman into a vast mink, patting it into place around her shriveled body.
Rye and ginger; even the drinks here clung to the old ways, George reflected. Jimmy suffered agonies when some newcomer ordered a modish drink, though he, of course, made it with the blandest professionalism. Jimmy’s compendium of recipes was like a great leather-bound bible, filled with Gibsons, Manhattans, and whiskey sours. George rocked lightly on his anchor, recalling a pretty young woman who’d come in with her father some weeks back. She’d asked for a sidecar. Jimmy’s face had lit up like a blazing sunset showing between the clouds over Bayonne.
Ah, that’d been a rare, tender moment, George thought, smiling. He nodded yes to Jimmy’s, “One more, Mr. George?”
Right, he became Mr. George when Jimmy decided it would be his last drink, let the ritual begin. He watched admiringly as Jimmy selected a fresh glass from the mirrored shelf, placed it just so, then held the bottle of Johnnie aloft, timing the pour to meet exactly as a double. He carried it on the palm of his left hand, his right held slightly out, as if to say, Thus I come to greet my people, I your lord, of the House of Walker. A fresh cocktail napkin bearing the arms of Gene appeared magically from his fingers, upon which the sacred glass was set down. In his head, George could hear the muffled drum roll, and was stirred by it.
As usual he acquitted himself well, sat up straight, drank his scotch, and said good night politely to all. Then he took his cloak and strode up the five red-painted steps, his back straight.
A man at the other end of the bar, who was unknown to Jimmy, said, “That guy some kind of stone drunk? Sits there every night, ogling everyone and getting shitfaced?”
Jimmy’s face clanged down like a security grille, but as always, he was polite. “The gentleman is a writer, sir,” he said.
Sadie, of course, was no great dotter of i’s and crosser of t’s when it came to finances. Some years back she’d made an attempt to actually figure out her annual income and expenses but all she’d been able to determine was that it seemed a bloody miracle they weren’t all in the poorhouse. Since then she just handed a bulging file to an accountant she’d heard of who had a reputation for being artist-friendly. Who then pushed and cajoled the figures to suit her client’s needs, and the need to keep the law at bay.
Sadie was Ree’s sole heir and executor and as such owned all his music rights and royalties. As he’d written most of the Royhatten Transference’s songs with Brian as cowriter, it was fairly straightforward and was handled by an entertainment lawyer they both used to save unnecessary costs. That part of her income was unfudgeable.
Income from record sales, videos, and recording rights had held fairly steady over the years, though CD sales were declining. The lawyer blamed emerging software for file sharing, and the Internet. Sadie put the blame squarely on the greed of the record companies. CDs had been a unique opportunity for them to lower the price of music, but instead they’d seen it as yet another chance to jack them up. So it was no wonder the kids were finding ways to get around forking out twenty bucks for a CD.
What hadn’t held steady was the cost of life in the Big Ampule. Sadie felt she hardly splashed money around, but was appalled by her monthly bills.
While Sadie was no financial whiz, she did have a certain crusty New England grip on what a dollar was worth. She’d never gone in for the stock market; it was all too confusing and filled with men with hyena faces and sporty suspenders. What she had done was realize she had a unique trove—a bank vault filled with reel-to-reel recordings of the RT. She’d fancied herself the archivist of the band and had either recorded many herself or kept copies of others. It was the basis of what she called her “dead man’s souk.” For years she’d been selling recordings to an ex-industry guy, for cash. Fortunately there seemed to be no limit to the market for bootlegs of the band. She’d offered to give Brian half, but he’d just laughed, saying, “You get what you can for them love, Ree’d kill me if he thought I were taking anything from you.” The cash had been a huge help; with it she floated most of their everyday expenses.
But this year, with Gretchen in that filthily expensive place, she was feeling about as skint as she had back in the early days with Ree. She’d just gotten another bill from Rollingbrook and didn’t know how the hell she was going to pay it. That night she drank her fears away but then woke sometime around two, knowing she was going to fret for hours.
At least Steve wasn’t there nattering at her. She adored his white middle-class rage, but he was getting to be a bit of a bore. And he was starting to give her tender looks. The problem with men was they were so unused to having sex and being treated pleasantly by a woman who didn’t give a shit about love or sharing or commitment that i
t made them restless, leading them toward the very trap they’d been avoiding most of their lives.
None of these thoughts is going to help me come up with fifteen grand, she chided herself. Gretchen was getting better, but it didn’t seem wise to spring her before some concrete progress was made, much as she longed to have her home. Oh, what had made Gretchen lose it like that? She’d always been such an easy child, not a big talker of course, a bit odd, in fact, but who with even a jot of imagination wasn’t?
An image from a 16 mm film she’d made flashed into her mind—seven-year-old Gretchen having a doll’s tea, her father sitting meekly on one of the tiny Mexican chairs while she gravely handed around cups. Ree had looked so incongruous, and yet not, with his long hair. The two humans were the long, fair-haired dolls, the other occupants of the table were toy animals—Gretchen had always hated dolls, had found them frightening.
What was plucking at her memory? Oh yes, Hames asking her to buy him a new computer. Well, that was out of the question. But what had he said? That he could add on equipment to be able to burn CDs from LPs, and then film to DVD. Boys, they could never get their hands on enough bloody equipment.
It had never occurred to her that there was money to be made from all the films she’d shot of Ree and the band, not unless she sold it all to someone for a documentary, and that wouldn’t bring in much…but they were good, she knew that, had been the one thing in her life she’d showed some talent for. And she had reels of the stuff, all carefully stored in a separate vault at the bank. She got out of bed and tied the sash of her bathrobe.
“Hey, kid, wakey, wakey.”
The Ballad of West Tenth Street Page 10
