Arabian Jazz

by Diana Abu-Jaber

  Matussem left the house quietly, like a teenager breaking curfew. Without turning on the engine or lights, he slid the car down the driveway into the cicada-filled evening.

  He thought, as he drove, how it had felt at one time like there was pure joy in his life. If he had been asked, when had he really been alive—when had life been most vital?—he would have said, without pause, in the arms of his wife. The moon was washed with darkness, a portent of things to come. But then it seemed to him that he had spent the last twenty years seeing the world cloaked, day and night as drapery, where the appearance of life was not life at all, only gestures toward it; life was whatever lay behind the curtain. The world, to Matussem, was lying in wait, a place that he would go to someday and resume living. He was fifty-one already. How had that happened without his noticing?

  He pulled into the drive of the Key West Bar. Larry Fasco kept a set of drums ready for Matussem anytime, day or night. Matussem even had a key to the bar—not that it was ever closed; Larry got strange from time to time and locked himself out. What Matussem had grown accustomed to over the years of playing there, what he scarcely even noticed anymore, was the way his pulse leaped whenever he entered that parking lot, the way his blood sped like quicksilver. It was at his drums that he returned to life, raw and green, like a wind-whipped branch.

  THE KEY WEST was dead, as usual. There was quite a crowd, but few of the patrons spoke, laughed, or danced. They reminded Matussem of turtles; they had the same hide-skinned eyes, made the same event out of blinking. There were dairy farmers, junk dealers, and mechanics. Matussem picked out half-figures in overalls and seed caps, bent over their drinks, waiting like lost souls. At the center, sending out streams of light, was Larry Fasco, his bloodless skin shining.

  “Matussem Ramoud!” Larry called out over the quiet. “My old friend, my swarthy friend. Come here and buy a small businessman a drink.”

  The figures at the bar shifted and Matussem stepped up. Larry poured a whiskey for himself and a shot of peppermint schnapps for Matussem. Matussem touched the shimmering green glass and was swept by a desire to weep. “Larry—my girls—they’re not babies anymore,” he said.

  It was a hot night and the heat of the air tilted up like a wall. Larry watched him with his ice blue eye. He took a swig of his whiskey and said, “My friend, it’s the great American tragedy, that’s all. Don’t let it get to you.”

  Matussem nodded and began to feel his way along the bar, among the patrons, the schnapps cool as a tile in his hand. He wanted his drums. The patrons scarcely noticed as Matussem began to tighten his instruments, testing the drumheads. He knew some musicians believed there was no point to drumming without an overlay of melody, that drums had to follow guitar or saxophone, as a body follows its spirit. Matussem knew different. Even the first time he’d held drumsticks—still a young man, already a widower, looking for something to help the pulse of grief in his throat, in his hands—even before the drumsticks, he’d known about drumming in his body.

  There had been a drummer in his family village, a vagrant, who pounded at hide-covered drums with his hands at sunup and sundown. He had gone to weddings, funerals and births; the other men would sit with him, overturn pots and kettles and drum with three fingers and the heel of their palms, singing, the women ululating their high voices into the desert. The memory of singing mingled with his memories of the Muslim muezzin, caught like a princess in the tower of the mosque. Five times a day, his call to the faithful went out. In the still of morning, the settling of dusk, the domes of the mosques glowing, the song went out, passing through the elements, falling like dust, the voice twining, a serpent of prayer on its path toward God.

  He’d known it when Chief Stormy Weather and other men of the Onondaga Nation spoke of sun dancing and ghost dancing, of their movement together to the weaving of voices and drum, to the sound of their own bodies, tattooing the earth with the drumming of heart, blood, lungs, and spirit.

  That was what he knew, that it was all one and the same, the divinity of the body, the holiness of the voice, of the drums, that they were the spirit as well as any trumpet or harp, that they fled together into the rising up and dancing of life.

  “This go out to my wife, this go out for myself,” he sang softly, sticks rippling across the snare.

  The patrons watched him.

  “This go out to everyone who is tearing their hairs out over their children—”

  A broken cheer went up.

  He played for a long time; people came and went. Larry left his place behind the bar from time to time to accompany Matussem on harmonica. Customers would step up and take a stab at singing a cappella. For the most part, Matussem played alone, until, somewhere in the far stretches of night, a brawny woman, with fast eyes and hair like quicksilver, stepped up.

  “You’re good, Matussem Ramoud,” she said, looking straight into his eyes. She laid the back of her hand against his and compared them. Strips of light fell over her hair and face as she bent toward him. He lowered his sticks.

  “Don’t you think you want to buy me a drink?” she said.

  “Right now?”

  She backed up, curling one finger at him. He followed her like a sleepwalker, mesmerized, into the recesses of the bar. There were a few people left; a cathedral glow clung to the bar. Drinks were already waiting at their table. “Here’s to you,” she toasted him. “Father of great nurses.”

  “One. Nurse, I mean. The other daughter is…not a nurse.”

  She nodded. “Father of great all-around women, then.”

  Matussem sipped at his peppermint schnapps, and she grinned at him, something glittering in her teeth. “I like a man who can drink green syrup,” she said. “Not many can.” She knocked back her shot and sighed. “Bourbon. Cleans your tonsils. Watch out, I’m breathing fire now—the fifth one always does that to me!”

  There were no clocks, no time, no movement. It was the magical night, Matussem thought, the Fourth of July. The evening did not move, but churned at its edges. Matussem finished his schnapps and she was leading him again; she had his hand and he was navigating the air. She was towing him like a kite, and he saw things from a great distance. Larry Fasco and Hilma Otts waved from the bar and he waved back. He felt exhilarated and melancholy; he was a kite, a balloon, perfect stillness at his center.

  They left the bar and outside the truck was gleaming with the moon and stars as well as the pink neon sign of the Key West that struck the sides of the rig in iridescent bursts. In this light, at close range, the truck was breath-taking; it looked like a living thing.

  “Mama mia,” Matussem said. “Ach du liebe, Augustin.”

  She turned to him and gestured toward the cab. “Want to come up and see my etchings?”

  “Oh. Well. But the fireworks!” he said, his throat suddenly tight. “It’s the Fourth of July, I gotta meet somebody—I can’t miss—”

  She was already waving one of her conjurer’s hands in the air. “You missed that, buddy boy, it’s over by hours. I watched them on the way over here. How long you say you been in this country?” she asked, climbing up and popping open the door to the cab.

  HE HAD NO good answer to her question, not in this country of hers, where time flew away on pointed wings and left no trace. The cab was as tall as a tower. He sat behind her oversize wheel and peered outside. “You drive all the way up here?” he asked.

  “That’s not all I do, junior,” she said. Sliding aside a panel behind the seats, she said, “Get a load of this.”

  Her bunk was deep and high, dominated by a kingsize bed in its center. There was a remote-control TV built into one wall and a stereo system in the other.

  “Here, try it out,” she said, patting the bed.

  When he sat on it, the thing moved and he leaped up. She laughed. “What’s the matter? Don’t you know about water beds?”

  “Beds of water? Yes, of course,” he said, frowning and eyeing the thing.

  “And look up,” she said,
pointing.

  He turned and saw the source of the soft light in the truck; it was moonlight filling a glass ceiling. He could see the night clouds doubled, turning their bodies. Inside the bunk, the light moved, nuzzling her hair, touching her eyes as she leaned against the other wall, watching him.

  Then he saw what would happen: he saw himself pouring into the center of that bed. As he was doing it, the images came to him, each a moment before. He knew the weakness that would stun his limbs, filling his head like sleep, too heavy to move. He had been in this country before; he recognized its signposts and was pulled down its path. Her waist, shoulders, and legs moved into his hands as she joined him at the center of the bed of water, clothes peeling open, her mouth peeled to its softest flesh, to water, the shambles of their bodies as they joined, turned to cinders.

  His mind was not with him, his languages left him as he poured into her. They rolled together, into the current of the bed, the room, the stunning night above them. They turned and turned and turned again. Over her shoulder, Matussem saw the moon set and was lost in that face that the night sky could show him when he looked up too long from the layers of heat and gravity of his own home. He stared until he was lost somewhere alone in those tangled stars and looking down into the damp sheets and then up again, her hair in his mouth, her fingers at his neck, at the inner crease of his knee, and he was seeing the colors before dawn, a flicker of an unfamiliar star.

  HE WOKE WITH his wife’s name in his head and turned to see the sheets were mussed and shaped in the way they used to be when she had just left them. But she wasn’t there anymore. His wife was too young for him now, laughing and lovely, twenty-nine, and here he was fifty-one; how had he left her behind? She had been nineteen, he twenty, when they’d joined hands, promised to follow each other into the world.

  The light now was coming hard through the glass dome of the bunk and when he sat up in the shifting bed he had the taste of peppermint and lipstick in his mouth and a feeling of having done something momentous, rash, and astounding. He found a small curtain just over the head of the bed and drew it to one side. At first his eyes were muddy and the light hurt them. Then, as Matussem began to focus, he recognized the door of his own house: they were parked on the front lawn.

  “Well, good morning, Cowboy Bob,” the woman said, pulling back the panel and sticking her head in.

  “Good morning,” Matussem said and drew the bed sheets up to his neck; he was blushing. “You know, I thinking maybe I don’t know your name.”

  She laughed and tossed her head so her hair floated back in a bright floss. A seam of gold glittered in her smile. “Well, hot-buns, everybody just calls me Train.”

  JEM WOKE LATE the next morning to the familiar sound of Melvina calling the police. She was saying something about a kidnapping, a truck, and a “disfigured” lawn.

  For a moment the air in the room was still and sweet. Jem closed her eyes and tried to float, to let her mind clear like a pond. Piece by piece, the previous night came back to her. There was that business of marriage, all that writing down of offers on slips of napkins, pushed back and forth across the table between Melvie and Kier, as if they were haggling over the price of a car. Kier’s writing bled into Arabic and tended to say things like: I Give Everything. Melvie’s said things like: #1. I will be allowed publicly to claim to be married to you, with caveat A: that we are not officially married, and caveat B: that I am allowed to renegotiate this contract at any time.

  They borrowed more money from Melvie, then bought her and Jem a row of fuzzy navels and coral okobojis. When the disc jockey switched to slow music, Jem found herself and Melvie out on the dance floor. Jem was too tired to hold herself up; she leaned into Saiid’s arms, her shoulders leaning against his, eyes dipping. The evening was sliding down around her shoulders. Points from a revolving mirrored ball shifted around the room, inside her eyes. It was lovely to let go, to be held. At one point she saw her sister’s face, calm as sleep, tucked into Kier’s neck; Jem did the same, closing her eyes, putting down her head, and she wondered, was this what it was like to be married?

  Hours later, she was still feeling that fatigue in her arms and legs and even the top of her head. Now, alone in bed, she was pinned by her own body, so she could move only her eyes to follow when Melvie marched into her room and went directly to a window, yanking open the curtains and admitting a pillar of sun.

  “Well, you’ll be happy to know that there is some sort of truck monstrosity in the process of obliterating our front lawn, and that I have good reason to believe that our father—who was not in bed last night—is being held captive somewhere in its confines,” she said.

  Jem struggled to lift her head, then gave up. “A truck, you say?” she said feebly. “What exactly do they put in coral okobojis anyway?”

  Melvie wheeled from the window to look at Jem. “Well, there goes our good name! I’m sure that evil little man Gilbert Sesame has some long-distance hand in this. Maybe that’s his truck! Maybe it’s Uncle Fouad’s! Maybe it’s to transport drugs over international lines. Oh why, oh why have I procrastinated so long in buying a handgun!” she wailed and marched back out of the room. “A baseball bat will suffice for now,” she said from the hall.

  Melvina rummaged in the hall closet as Jem worked to get out of bed. She gradually sat up, pulled a sheet around her shoulders, and moved toward the window. It looked as if all outdoors floated in a watery color that had descended overnight, bathing everything it touched.

  On the front lawn, gleaming like an idol, wedged perfectly between two flamingos and a Doc, was the truck. It was painted in primary colors, the cab lashed by painted flames, trumpets of red, borders of blue, white and yellow edging the cargo box and the words exploding in a sunburst at the center: Prime Movers. To Jem, it looked more like some divine agent than a truck, the sort of thing God might ride.

  “Wowie,” Jem said. Then she heard the front door slam and saw Melvie, baseball bat in hand, start up the lawn. Jem ran out after her.

  MATUSSEM WAS HAVING something like an out-of-body experience. He felt his mind skimming along the cabin ceiling, looking down, regarding his body propped on the bed, eating chocolate doughnuts and drinking milk from the O-G market. Next to him, a woman in chartreuse halter and matching hot pants sipped at a bottle of lite beer, while only a few yards away stood the house that held his daughters. He turned and pulled the curtain open for just a peek. “Uh oh,” he said. “I should just known it.”

  “What?” Train leaned across his legs to the window and started laughing. “Will you look at—what is that?”

  It was Melvie, gleaming like a statue in her white off-duty clothes, brandishing a baseball bat, and shouting. Jem was running after her barefoot and in a nightgown.

  “That’s my daughters,” Matussem said, rolling back and sighing. “They crazy ’bout me.”

  “Oh yeah,” Train said. She moved back, looking as if she’d rather not deal with it. “What’s she saying?”

  Matussem put his ear against the window. “She says she sees someone peeking at her, the police are on the way, they have the license number, we should give ourselves up. She won’t use deadly force unless she has to, and she won’t negotiate with terrorists.”

  Train nodded. “Damn! I could use that gal on my rig. What say you ask her for me?”

  Matussem ran a hand over his face and then peeked at her between his fingers. Train looked damaged by the morning. The hair that was fine spun by evening’s light was now thinning and bleached. Her face was canvased by a network of lines and infinitesimally small cracks, like an aged hide. There were wells of shadow under her eyes, and her lips, without paint, rolled in and disappeared. All the same, Matussem felt that instant the panic of her leaving, and anxiety rushed over him. He felt a crushing press of time, a need to hurry.

  “Don’t leave me,” he said, grabbing her hands. “No, I don’t want you to go.”

  She laughed and fluttered her eyelashes, then extracted her h
ands. “Well, aren’t you a sweet pair of sticky buns?” she cooed.

  “Or, maybe I could come with you,” Matussem said. “Please, Miss Trains—”

  “Just Train, dear heart.”

  “Train, I’m serious. I could be keeping you company, reading maps, I wash the truck, change the radio station, what you say, okay, I do it.” He was almost out of breath. He was imagining his daughters, Fouad and Fatima, the guys in the band, Zaeed, and Larry Fasco; they would be standing on his front lawn waving good-bye as he sat next to his tower of a woman, a pair of tomtoms in his lap. He and Train would head for the gray swath of highway as he played the drums.

  Train was looking at him blandly. “Matty, honey,” she said. “I think you must’ve hit your head last night or something. I hate to have to tell you, but it takes a certain kind of something to be a truck driver. It’s not your run-of-the-mill personality, not for these big babies.” She stroked the wall of the bunk. “I have to tell you, Sugar Nose, I think generally speaking, there’s usually only but one trucker born per family, if any, and in this crew, it ain’t you.”

  Matussem nodded, slightly relieved. He knew there was no way Melvina would ever stand still on the front lawn waving while he rode off with a lady trucker.

  “Look, Big Daddy,” Train said, setting herself against him so the bed swooned; she laid a ham-heavy hand on his shoulders. “Everybody puts it in reverse once in a while. I mean, if you’re the kind that lives on and on in one place, then you’re always dreaming about going away. And if you’re like me, always going, then you dream about staying put. It’s the human curse, I’m telling you. Here I’m thinking what a sweet deal you’ve got going here, sugar-plum fairies and apple pies and all. Living with your daughters and your fat-slob brother or whoever that creep is—”

  “Fouad.”

  “Yeah, and this house, and these flamingos on the lawn, and God knows what, neighbors I guess, a corner store—look, you’re lucky, you’ve got a place you can stay in. It may be boring, but look at me, running so long I lost track of my legs. When I die I’m gonna have to be cremated and have them dump me in a river so my ashes can go on and see the world. I don’t like it, but I can’t stop. It makes my bones ache when I stick around too long, and I’ve got more bones than average. Stay where your heart is, Big Daddy—not to sound like a Valentine’s card—but then you’ll get the best deal. Look, you just live in your house and I’ll come to visit you.”