CHAPTER 17
Parting Is Not Good-bye
I wrote a note, too. On the back of the one he’d left for me. But in the end I didn’t leave it.
I had it in my purse.
What am I doing here?
I belonged with Andre, didn’t I? He was the one who was so caught up with “belonging” to a place. Not me, not anymore. I was beginning to accept that I’d always be a little bit on the periphery. Fuck the place—it was Andre I belonged with, no? So what was I doing up above the world, heading back to America? Alone.
You’re taking Vivian’s body home. That’s what you’re doing. Her brother is going to bury her, and maybe you along with her.
To repeat, I belonged with Andre, didn’t I? Here was a man who had not only pledged the rest of his life to me. Not only could play “Billie’s Bounce” on the violin. Not only showed a willingness to face down my shitty karma. He loved me enough to take a bullet that by all rights should have been mine.
“Madame?” I heard a soft voice say.
The flight was only half full. The attendant with the chignon wouldn’t leave me alone. I had already declined the game hen dinner, smoked salmon, honey peanuts, champagne, the current issue of Paris Vogue, and the in-flight Julia Roberts movie. With each offer I turned my puffy, ugly old face to her and tried to answer in the fewest polite French words possible.
I had downed an ocean of black coffee since boarding the plane.
The poison gas began to rise again in my stomach as I had another flashback of Vivian lying in that alley with the back of her head blown off.
I turned on the overhead light to help chase the image away.
I lived too much in the past. That was my trouble. That’s what the music was about, when you really got down to it. It wasn’t just what I did for a half-assed living, what I respected and loved. It was my escape from the world as presently constituted.
Worse, it wasn’t even my past. All my life it seems I’ve been caught up with the people, the music, and the feel of life at another time, a time at least three generations removed from my own. Here you are, little Nanette, it’s 1969 and here’s the gift of life. Welcome to the world, dear. What are you going to be, a postal worker, a bank manager—you know, they let us do that kind of thing now—or a computer whiz? Me? Thanks, but no thanks. I’d rather be Mary Lou Williams. Ivy Anderson? Or, yeah, how about Sonny Rollins? I could never get with the music I was supposed to like. Nor the kind of man I was supposed to like. Nor the kind of ambitions that were supposed to drive me forward. I don’t give a damn about the things that excite or tie up the folks drinking shooters on the Upper West Side or hanging with Spike in Fort Greene.
Yes, through the music of the past I had, like Andre, found a way to honor my forefathers. But I knew there was something terribly dishonest about the way I lived. It wasn’t just living in a fantasy world, it wasn’t just being phony—it was wrong. It’s wrong not to live in the here and now. It’s cowardly and pious and arrogant and wrong.
And the other kids just don’t like me.
If I played my cards right I could spend the whole flight beating up on myself. I think it must have been Ernestine, that voice in my ear, that was telling me: If you feel this awful, you must deserve it.
Pictures of Andre were now interspersed with the memories of Vivian. Those big feet of his, and the way he moved, and that hollow place in his lower back. The day he took me on that breathless guided tour, the same day we first went to Bricktop’s. Teasing him then, I said he was crazy—that his devotion to the past had crazed him. Well, maybe that was no joke; maybe he was crazy, crazy for real. And, finally, those cold blue killer-for-hire shades that had obscured his eyes, hidden him, taken him from me during the last days we had together.
Belong with him? said Ernestine scornfully. You’ll never see him again.
It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair.
I dug a few paper napkins out of the seat-back pocket and dabbed at my eyes.
Would Andre continue to live and work in Paris, stay on in France forever? He sure had the talent and the determination. I had no doubt he would do our forebears proud, the obscure ones along with the famous. All those black people with a hyperdeveloped sense of the romantic which takes them to faraway places, out of the here and now they were born to endure in America. Maybe someday, as maturity softened his contempt, he’d be able to view Little Rube Haskins in a more sympathetic light. And Morris Melon. And me. All us permanent strangers.
Sure, Andre would distinguish himself in print or as a venerable lecturer or an acclaimed performer. He’d get—I made myself say it—get married, become a French citizen, like he wanted, and grow into his Inspector Simard role. A stone cottage in the provinces, two dogs—the whole bit. Un homme français.
The aircraft shimmied a little and then the pilot’s reassuring baritone issued from the loudspeaker. In a nutshell: Go back to sleep, it’s going to be okay.
Would I ever see Paris again? Probably. It was unbearable to think of dying without seeing those lights once more. Would I ever cry again as I drove past the Arc de Triomphe or walked in the Bois du Boulogne? Maybe. Would I ever again feel that the city belonged to me, and I to it? Like I wasn’t just another savvy tourist, or even a starry-eyed expatriate, but the genuine article—une femme française.
No.
Turn the page to continue reading from the Nanette Hayes Mysteries
CHAPTER 1
’Tis Autumn
Who said something bad about Charlie Rouse?” I demanded, my voice slow, bullying, vile. “Goddammit, I will kill a motherfucker who says something bad about Charlie Rouse!”
A silence fell in the room.
“Who?!” I yelled, knocking over several drinks. I stood with my hand on my hip. I know I must’ve looked ferocious, because a couple of women on the sectional sofa started clawing at the coat sleeves of their men.
“Uh … Nan? I think we need to go home now.”
I looked at him—my little date—with supreme scorn. “Your hands off me, yutz. You go home if you want. Ima have another drink.”
“You’ve had enough, Nan. Let’s get your coat.” He sounded like Richard Pryor doing his uptight white guy accent.
I won’t recount what I said to him then. It would make me too ashamed. Just know it was filthy and cruel and utterly uncalled for. I didn’t know I had that kind of poison in me until I heard it rolling off my tongue.
That guy shrank away from me, gasping like a Sunday school teacher in a Storyville whorehouse. I had humiliated his ass in front of his friends—well, I’m guessing they were his friends. Maybe, even worse, they were his colleagues from work, whatever work he did. The truth is, I don’t remember what he did for a living; I don’t remember what he looked like, except that he was a tall black man who wore nice shoes; and I don’t remember whose apartment we were in, because, see, I was drinking pretty heavily then, and had been for months.
And hey, as long as I’m being honest here? To say I was drinking “heavily” is kind of a laughable understatement. The fact is, I was drinking suicidally.
To his credit, my date, whoever he was, turned out not to be such a wimp after all. When my vile, party-killing monologue was over, I began to wend my way back to the table where a gorgeous young sister in dreadlocks and a white apron was serving the drinks. I never made it back there. Before I knew what was happening, my man had a hold of the neck of my shirt. I was thrown out of the front door so hard that I bounced off the back wall of the waiting elevator, landing on my butt. A split second later, my brown suede jacket came sailing in after me, looking for all the world like Rocky the flying squirrel.
I cussed all the way down to the lobby, where I stumbled past the tight-lipped doorman, who had undoubtedly watched the whole episode on his little security monitor.
It was a Saturday night. I remember that because of all the strolling couples. The ones I looked at with such hatred. The ones whose heads I wanted to saw off because
they looked so fucking happy together.
How dare they be happy! How dare they! I wished I had my gun.
And a drink. I wished I had a drink, too.
I’m not trying to paint myself as a badass or anything—this stuff was nothing to brag about. I was out of control and I knew it.
It had started as a severe post-affair depression last spring, when I returned from Paris. It simmered and deepened over the ugly New York summer, during which I scratched out a living by day—playing my sax long hours on the street and picking up tutoring or translation jobs here and there—and kept to myself at night. I sought the company of no one except for my best friends, Mr. Gin and Ms. Tonic. I kept the answering machine on all the time but rarely returned any calls. Too scattered to read, too listless to write, no hanging with friends, no men, only sporadic contact with my mom and my oldest friend Aubrey to let them know I was still alive.
The cooler weather meant a switch to bourbon. In the month of September I drank, if not a river of whiskey, then certainly a major tributary. I also acquired a weapon.
A neighbor of mine had been raped over the Labor Day weekend. The cops thought the guy was responsible for a string of attacks further uptown as well. In the grip of spiraling nihilism, I purchased an illegal piece, figuring that if he came after me, I’d be the last episode of his series, because I was going to cancel his ass. I fully realized the bastard just might take me with him. But if it came to that—well, so be it.
I knew a conga player, Patrice, from Haiti, who had kind of a thing for me. Lovely man, but we never quite got our riddims together, to use his words. He had a cousin who specialized in putting people together with the right weapon. Patrice and I made a night of it. He took me first to a Filipino meal on First Avenue; next, to a new club on Avenue A, where a group with a sensational tenor opened for a rising male singer; and last, working our way steadily east, into the bowels of a red brick building on Avenue D.
The cousin, whose name was never mentioned, was one scary fella. But when I emerged onto the street again, I was the proud owner of an only slightly used little Beretta, which, I was told, a former policewoman had traded for heroin. It fit neatly into my hand but was guaranteed to have the punch of a much meaner piece. And, as a bonus, seeing as how I was Patrice’s bitch, I was fixed up with regular as well as hollow-point ammo.
Luckily for the both of us, they caught the rapist.
I was walking around in perpetual gloom or hostility or sourness, no gratitude for life and no taste for living. Nothing moved me. And I mean nothing—not the most beautiful tenor solo I heard on the radio, not the heavenly gold and flame that anointed the parks and gardens, not even a good hamburger. My impersonation of Lady Hardass went on. Tough Nan and her beat-up saxophone. She didn’t like the way things were, but she bit down on the loneliness and took it like a man.
I had three or four lovers in October. But there I go again, understating. Four men in one month and you never see any of them again—those are tricks, not lovers. And the drinking went on unabated, and the isolation, and the just feeling shitty and not knowing when, or if, the clouds would ever lift.
My friend Aubrey had not given up on me completely; of course not. But she was damned tired of my self-destructive nonsense. We spoke on the phone but seldom got together for dinner or going out to visit my mother—or anything. Things had not been right between us for months now—ever since my return from Paris and the affair that I was mourning. On the rare occasions when we did meet we just seemed to get on each other’s nerves.
And so November rolled around. I was still depressed, and more evil than ever. What could I do? I knew my Lady Hardass act was sheer self-indulgence. But I hurt; I hurt so bad. And then, one night, I met this guy at a jazz club—I think that’s where I met him—and tried to take some solace in a fling with him.
Cut to: that jive party in that deluxe hi-rise building, that Saturday night when I went way over the top.
Understand, Mr. and Mrs. Hayes did not raise any heathen daughters, and as a person of some refinement, I was unaccustomed to being asked to leave people’s homes, let alone being hauled out by the scruff of my neck and tossed into an elevator like I was a crate of lettuce that had gone bad.
Yet I knew I deserved what that guy did to me—and worse. I had behaved abominably.
I got out into the brisk November air, a hint of winter in the wind, and I saw those couples in their big sweaters strolling with their arms around each other. And laughing—that’s what really got to me—their sweet, exclusionary laughter. They were done with their little dinners in their little trattorias. They were coming home from the movies. Stopping off for fucking decaf espresso. Going to hear music somewhere where the lights were low. I wanted to kill somebody.
But of course that isn’t what I wanted at all. Just the opposite. To be precise, I wanted Andre, the man I had found and then parted from in Paris.
I zipped up my jacket and crossed the street, hurrying up the block and out of the sight of the doorman, now regarding me as if I belonged in a zoo. I barely made it into the doorway of the shuttered cigar store before the dam burst. I broke down and began to sob helplessly. I cried in the way I’d been trying to cry for months, but somehow had not been able to. Mouth wide open, screaming almost, testifying. Snot on my chin. The whole nine yards. I cried so hard and so long that I gave myself a nosebleed.
Scenes like this were regular occurrences in the city: some poor soul, usually a woman, crying her heart out, publicly, past all embarrassment. The pain is almost tangible. You get a sharp, sudden pang of empathy in your throat. You want to cry too. You start hurting too. But you don’t stop, you don’t interfere, you keep walking. And now the poor soul was me; I was the one on display.
Nobody paid me any mind. New York, right?
At last the storm was over. I was exhausted. I was ravenous. And I was still very sad. But, oddly, I felt a whole lot better. I walked a couple of blocks north and found a no-name diner. While my BLT was being made, I went into the ladies’ and cleaned myself up as best I could.
I polished off my sandwich in no time and had a stale cookie with my third cup of coffee. Lord, I thought, I hope this is rock bottom—Saturday night, alone in a Greek coffee shop where the most attractive man in sight was gumming a roll that he kept dipping in his watery chicken soup, and me with bloody snot on my good coat and my face looking like a hot air balloon in the Macy’s parade. I hope there’s nowhere to go but up from here.
It was nearly 2 A.M. when I left the diner. For a brief moment I thought of going back to the party to apologize for my behavior. I quickly scotched that idea. I just knew I didn’t want to go home yet. The thought of walking into my empty apartment just then was unbearable. Besides, I owed apologies to somebody else.
I jumped into the first taxi I saw, thanking my stars the cabbie was an Indian. Not that they know the city so well or are such superb drivers—many of them are awful. It’s only that they usually pick up black people when nobody else will and it was two in the morning and I looked like I lived under the Brooklyn Bridge.
Under ordinary circumstances the last place on earth I’d want to be at 2 A.M. was Caesar’s, the club where Aubrey dances with her tatas hanging out six nights a week. Under ordinary circumstances that loser Greek diner would be preferable to Caesar’s Go Go Emporium. But tonight its gaudy neon lights were like a beacon of hope lighting up that scary little patch of Sixth Avenue.
Aubrey was on and it was a full house. Like always, the men were enthralled, loving her moves, eyes riveted to the stage.
I made my way over to the bar, where I saw Justin, the manager, settling in on his reserved barstool. He smiled at me and elbowed a customer off of his stool so that I could sit next to him.
“God amighty!” he said, getting a good look at me. “I hope you caught the license number of that truck.”
“I know, I know” was all I said.
“Did you get mugged or something?”
&
nbsp; “No, I’m all right.”
“Where have you been all this time, Smash-up? Ugly school?”
I laughed in spite of myself, shaking away the runaway tear that was creeping down my nose, and he put a consoling arm around my shoulder. He shook one of his stupid long cigarettes at me and I took it gratefully.
“Well, even in your bag lady drag, it’s good to see you.”
“I’ve been lying kind of low. Emphasis on ‘low.’”
“You got some troubles, right?”
“It’s a long story, Justin. And you’ve heard it a thousand times before. Only the names change.”
“Oh,” he said knowingly, “that. Say no more, child. Mens! Can’t live with ’em, can’t chop their pricks off.”
He bought me a brandy over my protests that I’d had enough to drink.
We fell silent for a time, until he commented, “Aubrey’s still number one,” he said, his eyes following her gyrations. “Girl’s looking fabulous tonight.”
I nodded, and echoed, “Fabulous. And you, Justin. How are you?”
“Little me? Your favorite fagorita is cool.” He turned the smile up a notch, then not so much said as sang, “Met somebody noo-hoo.”
“No kidding? That’s terrific, J.” He did look exceptionally happy.
“Still playing your jazz music, Smash-up?”
“Yeah. Still playing. Lot of tourists around this summer. I made out pretty good. I’ve got to hustle up some kind of steady income soon, though.”
“We can always put you in a wig and you can wait tables here. With that shelf of yours, the tips would be awesome. Maybe you could work up some kind of topless routine with your sax. Who knows, darling? Anything goes.”
Now that was something I’d never thought of. Topless lady saxophonist. That would secure my place in the annals of jazz, surely.
“I’ll give it some thought,” I said. “How long do you think it’ll be before Aubrey’s done?”
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