Another Kind of Madness

by Ed Pavlić

  Colleen tipped her head at the twins and made an “is this OK?” face. Ndiya nodded, please, and waved her hand.

  –The truth is I felt blasphemous and was trying to cover it up with fake guilt. I told myself that I felt the “failed to love it” kind of way like when I first spent time with Van Gogh’s peasants, or Caillebotte’s floor planers. But it wasn’t that.

  Ndiya stared at Colleen over the rim of her raised cup. She felt like she was hiding behind it.

  –I felt kind of sick—a dread at having been looking for “fun” or “art” or something “interesting.” You know? And then, I walked in here and ran into a glass wall.

  –A wall?

  –I mean, I don’t know. It was an unnamed—what’s the word? … an endeavor. A life was trying to happen. It needed space. But that space didn’t exist. I won’t say it was desperate, even that might be too self-conscious. But it was intense. That scared me.

  At the phrase “a life was trying to happen,” something clicked. Ndiya noticed that she’d been nodding without meaning to. It had happened on its own. She was leaning into what Colleen was saying, trying to follow but also pulling her forward. She thought she understood. She thought she disagreed. But she believed Colleen. She’d think about it. And then she thought, she believed Colleen had thought about it. Ndiya then, possibly, suspected that she did know what Colleen meant by incongruity, that thing about “endeavor.” And she thought she had glimpsed a small piece, likely involuntarily revealed, of Colleen’s endeavor. This conversation, or story, felt strange to Ndiya; it felt like something that might bend without breaking. Suddenly, she felt tears behind her eyes.

  She laughed to herself, thinking, “Damn, is this what trust feels like when it begins?” She’d never felt this kind of thing begin. She’d walk through plate glass for Shame. But she hadn’t felt that begin. She fell into that like stepping backward off a cliff. Even now, when she thought about it, it wasn’t him she trusted; it was something else, something he moved in that she’d committed herself to, that had changed the way she breathed. Ndiya had nodded because this Colleen was close. She’d shined her light in a way that had shown into Ndiya’s past with Shame. But not quite. A life wasn’t trying to happen here. Shame’s life had been dying to happen here. And here she was. Then Colleen:

  –What about you? Are you from here?

  Colleen’s question struck Ndiya back from her thoughts. In fact, she didn’t know who’d asked whom. Colleen took a sip of coffee like one does preparing to listen, so Ndiya thought she knew. Now, it was Ndiya’s turn at indecency. She lied and salted the lie with the truth.

  –Yeah. South Side, Chatham. Same old story. Whitney Young. College. Then I moved around a lot from here to there. Jobs. Mostly temp jobs. Paralegal-type work. I tell people, “You know what a nurse does for doctors, or the hygienist for a dentist? I did that for lawyers.” In other words, damn near everything. It paid pretty well. I found it easy. Finally, I took a job at a firm in Chicago. I came back.

  Colleen gave a doubting look. It was Monday morning.

  –Do you still work there?

  –No. I quit. What about you?

  –From here? No. I’m from Minnesota. Went to Oberlin to study music but ended up studying languages and art history. The rest is much closer to history than it is to art, believe me.

  Ndiya enjoyed Colleen’s laugh. It seemed to collect and clean the air like a windless spring rain. The woman seemed at home in herself and openly at odds with herself at the same time. But there was a comfort in it. She’d always instantly resented this, what she considered a privilege, in people, in white people mostly and in white women especially. It wasn’t like the Maurice Thomases of the world who’d made a grim, possibly heroic, discipline of being at ease. Nor was it like Yvette, who, with an equal heroine-ism, had made ease an over-the-top, in-your-face kind of thing. And white people’s ease mostly felt like it was stepping on your face in a way no one noticed but you.

  Ndiya felt none of that here. And she felt herself not feeling it. Maybe she was feeling for it. Years ago, a friend had told her she thought it was impossible to have an interesting conversation without some kind of sex in the air. Ndiya thought of that, now, about a feeling she could feel she didn’t have, and about what that felt like. And what did that mean, “some kind of sex”—a sense, a real sense of the person one talked to? Did that have to be an attraction? Desire? Or was the simple sense of it enough? Ndiya thought maybe it was the latter. Involuntarily, she slipped off her shoe and extended her foot under the table, subliminally expecting her toes to feel the edge of a cliff.

  Colleen sipped her coffee, admiring the way Ndiya, discreetly but noticeably, absented herself into faraway thought-lands during conversations with people she’d just met. She wondered if Ndiya had any idea what her comings and goings felt like to be around. What she looked like? It was like standing to the side and trying to talk to someone who was riding a huge carousel. She found it pleasant enough. She was curious just where Ndiya went off to. Of course, she wasn’t going to ask.

  –How did you meet him?

  Ndiya wondered where to go now. Her extension of Colleen’s sense of what she called Shame’s endeavor was still on her mind; a life was dying to happen. She had felt it immediately. So the usual shortcuts were out. And so was the truth, which even she didn’t quite believe yet: Oh, how did we meet? Thirty-three lightning bolts and a bum email? Come on. Quit my job and moved in? What else? Shared destiny and simultaneous orgasms? Soul mates? It was all she had. And it didn’t fly. The rest was off-limits even to her: clouds of static, pendulums, invisible trains—

  –Oh, you know, we met by chance. Some party. Then, after that, one day we ran int—

  –Wait—you ran?

  They both laughed.

  –I know. I deserved that. So, we met again by another chance. Finally, you know, the truth is that I really met him down here and I never left. It’s been about six months. Five months? Feels a lot shorter and a lot longer than that. Both. Now, I’m here. These twins’ mother, and a few other mothers in the neighborhood, they used to drop their kids off at Shame’s in the evenings—

  –They stayed with him? Are some of them his kids?

  –No, though that crossed my mind too. But no. Well, now, some drop off kids during the days, as you can see. I handle all that.

  –They pay?

  –No, no. It’s not about that. For now, that’s what I do. That’s really all I can say—

  –No, that’s enough. That’s plenty.

  Without another word, Colleen and Ndiya both moved to get up at the same time, which made them both smile and shake their heads. They walked past the twins and to the door—

  –Ndiya, it’s been so nice to talk. So lovely to meet you. I better get back to work. Tell Shame I’ll tell him what I find out about his Bedia … or maybe I should take your number, I mean, since you didn’t leave me a message at the gallery? Or at least, the message didn’t have your number in it, did it?

  –No, you and Shame can deal with his painting. But take my number too. Call me sometime, we’ll continue our—whatever it is.

  –I know, I’d like to continue our—as well.

  –Our endeavor.

  Laughing again.

  –OK. Lovely to meet you. Bye, girls.

  –OK, bye.

  – … Ms. Morgan.

  –Ms. Morgan.

  –No. Bye, Ms. Morgan.

  –Bye, Ms. Morgan.

  –OK. Talk to you later.

  Ndiya closed the door and turned around, feeling like if she leaned back against it she’d fall free into the hallway.

  Cass emerged from the washroom, clicked a penlight in his right hand and, in his best attempt at an usher’s instruction, murmured a low,

  –This way.

  Ndiya followed. When she came through the doorway, a dim red light was spilling out of the ceiling fixtures. It fell around her neck like a collar of ermine. She put a hand on Cass’s shoul
der, drew him back, and whispered,

  –Nice touch, Cass. The lights.

  –That’s right.

  Cass smiled, then winked.

  –No shame in that, right?

  – …

  –Come on.

  She was shocked, she had to admit, at the human density in the room. It was a divided density. All the seats occupied by black folks. Some she knew, like Lee Williams and Lucious Christopher, were seated in booths, others at the bar. She may have glimpsed Muna’s red crest of hair in a booth along the right side of the room. The white people stood in the capital T of standing room. The stem of the T led between the booths and the bar and was crossed in the space at the end of the room against the blacked-out windows and the fogged-over front door. The place was packed.

  She didn’t look, she said she wouldn’t, but she heard Shame’s chord change. The sound was still deepened as if amplified. Possibly, she thought, the crowd of people caused it: Just less air in the room? Human acoustics? Shame’s right hand shuffled a deck of quadruplets now, three sets each, each with the forth note bent in a different direction. As she followed Cass, who made the way, she could see it: the left-hand chord was the crowded room, thick; the right hand was finding its way through. She could feel it bumping into folks, into things, a stool, and pausing to keep it upright. Keep it civil. She heard Shame’s right hand step on someone’s shoe and apologize. And some echo down low in the left hand. No, it was below that, the low echo said, “Alright, it’s alright.” She listened again, something happening below Shame’s left hand was saying, “Whatever happens is alright.” This was certainly a new sound for Shame.

  Her hand on Cass’s thick shoulder as they moved through the edge of the crowd, she pulled Cass back again and whispered,

  –Is this possible?

  –No. It’s not.

  Cass had answered too loudly, and on purpose.

  –Cass, shhh.

  So, then, even louder:

  –Girl, please, this is my place!

  And then, like a diagonal flick of a wrist:

  –Your seat, saved, just for you—

  And facing up to her, face closed, Ndiya saw a bald, dark-skinned man in a black, open-necked shirt and a woman with short-cropped hair and silver earrings dangling. Next to an open space on the facing seat sat a big honey-brown man with a shadow of a beard along his jaw, steady staring through the crowd standing between him and his view of the front door.

  Ndiya took her seat, mouthed a mocking “Thank you” to Cass and smiled while mouthing “Evening” to the table. The two across from her nodded blankly. Ndiya thought, “Oh, great.” Cass’s profile descended, exaggeratedly, into her view as if he was about to kiss the tabletop.

  –A drink, m’lady?

  –A double.

  –Very good. Jah Reeve.

  And then, almost tenderly, with a gesture across the room, as if waving over an extensive estate:

  –Could be a while.

  –See what you can do.

  Cass was off. Ndiya leaned back into the seat. She faced the front door from the back booth that, she knew, wasn’t ten feet from the piano in the corner. “Back to back,” she thought. She didn’t watch Shame play in public, though she could stare at him effortlessly when he played at home. She knew he hadn’t prepared anything formal. She thought, just then, that she knew that the family of a tightrope walker never watched the wire. She knew you didn’t watch the wire when the ones you love were on the wire. The wire couldn’t hold someone you love; it could only betray them. The wire could only convey something else, something it wasn’t, to the other end. She glanced beyond her booth into the crowd that stood there staring at the piano and the man behind her. “No net,” she thought. She felt a sting like smoke in her eyes, so she stopped. She didn’t really listen, either, but she loved to be in the sound. She decided to be there.

  By now Shame had talked to her a little, just a little, about playing. She heard the little something he had said as if he repeated it behind her,

  –If you fuck up and say more than you know, you’re trapped in what you said. This old piano taught me that. And it’s true. Then I learned that if you hold back, and say less than you know, you’re trapped in what you didn’t say. You can’t think about playing when you play. Too many things happening all at once, if you think about them, you paralyze yourself; you’re trapped outside. But if your mind wanders onto something else, anything else, you make mistakes. Or nothing happens in what you’re doing, no door opens. Trapped again, this time inside. So the discipline is to keep the mind open and sit right next to it and play only what comes in and out of the door. When it steps in, play that. When it steps out, you let it go.

  The way he said this scared her. Ndiya’s life maintained a constant vigilance against exactly those kinds of comings and goings. After he’d said it, though, she’d found the same was true for her listening. She didn’t listen to the music; she didn’t listen to anything else either. The open door of the ear, she learned not to aim it. If she sat next to the open ear, she felt within reach. What it meant to be “in-touch.” Not touched, not untouched; in-touch. In that place she found an action, a physical action, part memory, part vision—or hallucination—unlike anything she’d known. She felt the fear at what might appear, of what might touch her, like going to sleep within arm’s reach of a barred window on the fire escape. She remembered nights with Arturo in Alphabet City. They prayed for a breeze through the small window, measured the possibility of cool air against the chance of someone coming up the fire escape and reaching in through the bars while they slept. She heard it: dreams of a cool breeze on an open throat. Unconsciously, she held the root of this need, this vigilance, at a distance.

  Another part of her wondered if the whole open ear-door thing was just an erotic illusion, something only private, like the way desire closed down the field of vision, slowed time, amplified feeling into echoes in a way that made a person blind and numb to everything else. She wondered if it was real at all, or just between them. If she was honest, part of the motivation for these nights at Inflation was about that. She’d needed to test it, to see if it existed, even for her, beyond them when they were alone. She wondered if she’d forced Shame into a similar confrontation. Ndiya had no way to know how the stakes of confrontation could deepen, how its scope was uncharted, beyond reckoning.

  She realized she had her eyes shut. When she opened them she found a double shot of bourbon and a small glass of ice with a spoon next to it. The ice glowed red in the low light. She spooned in an ice sliver, stirred it gently. She thought she could feel the eyes of the man across from her on the motion of her index finger stirring the ice. She threw the thought off to the left, took the ice out of the drink and, absently, put it in her mouth, rolling it around until the heat of the bourbon disappeared. She let the ice diminish in her mouth, cooling her tongue until it was gone. She thought and whispered it to herself: “Exactly like that.” She’d sit by the door like that. “If this trapdoor-eyed Negro across the table was watching,” she thought, “let him watch.” Then she took a double sip of her drink.

  Almost reluctantly, she drew her eyes up. The woman with the earrings had her eyes closed too. One hand on the table, every few seconds her middle finger and thumb feigned a snap like her fingers were dreaming about snapping. Ndiya’s eyes panned to her left and the man was there. Ndiya thought, “Or somewhere.” To look at him, she thought, you might not imagine music existed. His bald head didn’t even move the way something stock-still still moves. His face wasn’t calm or contained, with the stress and overflow those features always convey despite themselves. He seemed more sharply focused in her vision than her eyes were capable of, as if seen through an optical lens of some sort, sharp in the unapproachable way a dream image was sharp. His skull and face looked like someone pulled a thin, black silk sack over a black marble sculpture of a face. She didn’t realize she was staring, if she was, until their eyes met. And he smiled in her direction
, conveying no sensation at all that he’d smiled at her. He was still neutral except, by some invisible motion, all the features of his face reflected in his dark eyes. They weren’t trapdoors. “Eyes like tunnels,” she thought, “until they folded into bright, cold candles.”

  In that moment, the man Ndiya saw wasn’t himself anymore. This wasn’t the man she’d sat down in front of a few minutes ago. The eyes were not candles because there was no glow in the brightness, no motion in them. Surgical light. Or ice. And she heard a distant falsetto, at once a lifetime away and so close it felt like earlier that night:

  … shine like diamond ice.

  That was it. And she felt cold and wished she hadn’t left her coat in the back. She focused beyond him on the fog-frosted windows. She knew it wasn’t cold in the room.

  The man blinked and his face fell back into its place across the table, as if someone had snatched away the silk sack and flung it into nonexistence. Ndiya nodded imperceptibly and a hand reached out of Shame’s sound and tapped her gently on the shoulder. Within reach, intouch. Then another tap, and a whisper:

  –Um, miss?

  It was the man next to her. She looked his way and he pointed down where space between them would have been if there’d been room.

  –My hat?

  Just then she felt a lump under her. Reaching down slowly she pulled out a flattened suede driving cap with a pair of thin leather gloves folded in it. She handed it to him, cracking her brow into a silent apology. He wasn’t bothered. His mouth tipped a tolerant, as-long-as-you-know-you-were-sitting-on-my-hat “no problem” to her. He put the gloves in his pocket and then reached down and fit the cap over his bent knee under the edge of the table.

  Within reach, in-touch. And another tap, this time on the other shoulder. Expecting someone immediately to her left, Ndiya leaned to the right and looked up into an empty space. What she saw wasn’t where she expected it to be. Blurry, in the back of her vision, stood a thick black man wearing a small hat, white shirt, and dark jeans rolled up at his ankles. Before her eyes adjusted, she thought, “He’s dancing with a maple-skinned mannequin.” Then the image focused, “No, he’s playing an upright bass.” Shame had paused and the man’s hand on the strings was making its own way through the crowded room. Now he stood behind the hollow question of his instrument, eyes closed, agreeing with himself. He stared up at the ceiling through his shut eyelids. Unlike Shame, he seemed incapable of playing three notes in a series that didn’t imply a melody she wanted to hum along with. She wondered if they’d been rehearsing and Shame hadn’t told her. That was impossible. Or was it?