The table is full of other cavemen, dressed as carelessly as he. A dozen of them sit straight against the backs of their chairs, rigid in this house of curves, heads cocked, listening. Some have notebooks like his. They look to be Tristan’s age, which means that really they are eighteen, nineteen. There is one empty chair, at the foot of the table, and at the head, speaking, is a man who can only be Professor Pendergast. Tristan sees the glossy black back of his hair first.
The teacher pauses, turns, and smiles. “Brodsky, is it?” he intones with a hint of melody, clearly the master of his own voice. Tristan nods. Pendergast is dressed for a night on the town. Even his thin mustache looks exquisitely groomed, as if a tiny luxurious animal, perhaps an infant mink, has crawled onto his face and stretched out for a nap. A cigarette smolders in the ashtray at his fingertips, and the pack of smokes lying by his other hand, next to a burnished gold lighter, is a brand Tristan has never seen. He is beautiful, in a way no man Tristan knows would ever allow himself to be.
“Welcome to Contemporary Literature.” Pendergast gestures to the empty chair and checks his watch as Tristan takes a seat. “Let’s begin, shall we? No—wait—a thousand pardons. Not until we procure Brodsky a drink.” He spins a finger in the air before Tristan can consider protesting, and a moment later a glass of amber liquid is deposited by Tristan’s elbow. The other cavemen have been similarly feted.
Tristan lifts the heavy glass, takes a cautious nip, pulls back his lips and twitch-winces casually as he has seen men do in movies. Now Tristan understands why. The scotch burns, and he holds it in his mouth a moment, waiting for it to mellow before swallowing. His form, he feels, is excellent. A small warmth ripples through him.
“As some of you gentlemen have no doubt taken note,” says Pendergast, “this is not a conventional classroom.” A pause as the class chuckles and the professor smiles indulgently. He is younger than his bearing would suggest. Thirty, Tristan would guess.
“Nor, I regret to inform, will we be meeting here at the redoubtable Oswald’s again. Tonight is a reward which I hope, over the course of the semester, you will earn.” He halts once more, this time lowering his face to browbeat them. “I am a new breed of teacher,” Pendergast declares, raising his eyebrows, “and this, with your cooperation, will be a new kind of class.” He straightens, magisterial again. “You will read no contemporary literature this semester. Rather, gentlemen, you will write it.”
Pendergast taps the ash from his cigarette and waits, as if expecting the students to turn to one another and begin stage-whispering in excitement. Instead, they sit with the air of undecided jurors, and Tristan almost laughs. Cavemen they may seem, here at Oswald’s, but City College kids are far from dumb. These are the choicest members of New York City’s bumper crop of underprivileged Hebrews, and their reputation is for aggressive intellectualism, for educating themselves and one another when the school’s instructors prove unequal to the task.
You can find any debate you like being waged in the dining alcoves of the school cafeteria, passionately and at maximum volume. The Stalinists of Alcove One and the Trotskyites of Alcove Two go home hoarse every day, whether they’ve been arguing among themselves or against one another. Politics is the new religion. Tristan listens to the sermons as he wolfs down his homemade sandwiches, but he remains an atheist, believing only in himself.
For a moment, faced with the table’s silence, it seems that Pendergast has prepared nothing further. Then: “Here is life,” he proclaims, raising his arms like a king at a feast. “Here are men and women, drink and song. I wrote the first words of my novel in this very room, sitting in that corner, listening to the sounds you hear right now and some you will hear soon. I want all of you to find that spark, to feel the urge to press pencil to paper and invent.”
So this place is Pendergast’s muse. It is a cheap trick, trying to inspire them by showing them his lair, cheap and self-serving. And yet Tristan has to force himself not to fall for it; the ease and glimmer of the life Pendergast is putting on display are that seductive. Only the professor’s satisfaction with himself prevents the siren song from taking hold. The scotch glass is in Tristan’s hand again, and when he takes it from his lips, he finds it empty. He wants more.
“Montaigne said, ‘I write to compose myself,’” Pendergast announces. “Writing creates us, gentlemen, even as we create it. Certainly it can calm, as Montaigne suggests, but believe me when I tell you, lads: it can also inflame.”
Tristan flags the waiter himself, using only his eyes. A slurred energy is beginning to fill him, and it’s not the booze. If anything, the fresh drink in Tristan’s hand will mitigate against the expanding desire to squeeze Pendergast’s words into paper balls, set them on fire, and watch them shrivel. From some unspelunked chamber inside Tristan a righteous fury is beginning to well, in defense of things he didn’t know he held so holy. Pendergast cannot be a real writer. He’s too comfortable, too handsome, too much on the inside of things, and what’s more, he’s a fool for laying all this Let’s Be Writers drivel out before a tableful of kids who signed up for a regular three-papers-and-a-final-exam English class.
Only a phony would bandy such ideas so carelessly, attempt to baptize everyone immediately in what should be sacred, hidden waters. Who the hell is Pendergast to throw open the temple doors? Tristan thinks of his mother’s grandfather and her stories of the old craftsmen’s guilds, the years of toil and apprenticeship a man endured before he attained even Journeyman status. Pendergast, you wileless schmuck, has your race no such standards?
He sips his new drink, blinks back his thoughts, and finds the professor has stopped talking. Pendergast is sitting with his legs crossed at the knee and his chin lifted to the stage. The other cavemen, too, have turned toward the narrow bandstand. Two colored men in suits are up there; one sits down at the piano bench and plays a nimble snatch of melody, then turns and looks into the room, making an arcane gesture at an unseen accomplice. The other clasps the neck of an upright bass with one hand and runs two long fingers against the strings with the other, loosing a low, pleasing thrum.
Tristan watches the class watch them, and sees in the students’ eyes a childish vacancy. They cannot define this in the language they know. It is not prelaw or premed or pre-anything; it is fully formed and alien, and they are unequipped. The sight should not surprise him, but it does, and Tristan clasps his hands in his lap and tightens them until the bones of his fingers ache, as if to compress the ambition surging through him into as small a space as possible.
He surveys the room and attempts to think in words, not sensory impressions, mind sprinting to translate what he sees, hears, feels. He can’t do it, not at all. The failure fills him with resolve. He thinks of the lunchroom politicians, shouting at one another, trying to bore their way into hearts and minds, and of the lawyers-and doctors-in-training laboring to master their small portions of the world. They have their limits, all of them. But a writer can strive to know anything—can tell his own story as if it is another man’s, another man’s as if it is his own.
Tristan’s thirst returns, but there is not a waiter in sight. He notices the drink at the adjacent caveman’s elbow; the glass is still full, and the fellow’s head is turned. Tristan swaps their glasses, takes another sip, and reflects. A writer can wrestle with the snarled, mystifying whole, with the fact that nothing is simple, that no answer is right, that life is twinned and layered and everything contradicts everything else. A writer, if he is good, might do justice to the complexity of the truth—reconcile, for instance, the simultaneity of Tristan’s desires to punch Pendergast in the face and to be him.
The problem with this firecracker string of epiphanies is not the rending of expectations or the sloughing off of everything Tristan has been told about himself. The problem is that they have come in Pendergast’s presence, and could even be said, by one with a muddled sense of cause and effect, to have been inspired by him. Tristan resolves to borrow the professor’s novel fro
m the library tomorrow, read it, and despise it.
Pendergast is banging his hands together for the saxophonist, who has now mounted the stage and stands with his back turned, conversing with the bassist. “This cat is going to be famous soon,” he tells the class over his shoulder. Immediately, Tristan doubts it. Cat?
The man hears, and turns. “Lady Pete,” he says, bending at the waist to shake Pendergast’s hand.
“Lady Les.” The professor clasps the musician’s palm in both of his.
“This your class?” Lady Les surveys the table with a dimpled smile, and Tristan grins back like everyone else. Pendergast could not be more pleased at his friend’s attention; he’s still holding on to Lady Les’s hand, as if he wants to make certain everyone sees the embrace before consenting to end it.
“Thanks for making the scene tonight, y’all,” Lady Les says, reclaiming his hand and tucking his thin, casually knotted tie more tightly into the vest of his rumpled charcoal suit. “I’m glad to have you here. You prick up your rabbits at what Lady Pete lays on you, now. This is my main man right here.” He tugs the brim of his porkpie hat in punctuation, or perhaps irony—and here it is, camaraderie and disdain together, the one beside the other, stratum upon stratum, the full weave of life revealing itself for an instant—then straightens and nods to the band. Behind him, the drummer counts off the song, and then a lushness spreads over the room, washing over conversation and eroding it to whispers: soft cymbals and piano, soft chocolaty bass, and then the most intimate, softest sound of all coming from the man’s horn, a tone so sweet and warm and light and airy that it feels as if he’s breathing right in Tristan’s ear.
It is astounding that such a contraption as Lady Les’s saxophone can produce these tender notes—softness from hardness, the full weave visible for an instant more. The song makes Tristan want to move very slowly with a girl he loves hard, pressed as close to her as possible. Lady Les stands with his eyes shut and his eyebrows prancing, immobile from the neck down except for his strolling fingers on the metal pedals. His arms are rigid, holding the horn away from his body like a first-time dance partner, and the instrument curves up and connects with the corner of his mouth like a forgotten toothpick.
The band does not pause between songs to share the titles, just swings into the next tune, as if playing only for itself. Pendergast is right: this man is something special. Tristan knows only a thimbleful about jazz music, but that only fortifies his certainty. He’s heard Benny Goodman on the radio—a Jew, a Jew, the Bronx jumps to its feet—and seen Louis Armstrong’s impossibly white teeth glinting from advertisement posters. His high school band played an arrangement of a Fats Waller novelty hit once. But this is nothing like any of that.
Even the Benny Goodman stuff, nobody’s all that affected by it. Music isn’t so important, unless it’s the cantor singing in shul. Such a voice, the women say, touching their fingertips to sternums. Plenty of kids suffer through piano lessons, but only about three adults in the whole neighborhood play instruments, guitars and bugles. Whenever the bugler tries to practice, he is shouted into silence within minutes, from four directions. Tristan imagines living in a neighborhood where music thrives, where men like these emerge from their apartments at night and stand on the corners playing songs instead of craps.
The whole room flares into applause when the band calls it quits, and Lady Les and his partners bow and step offstage, still unintroduced. Pendergast cautions his brood that class is far from over, that they will reconvene in five minutes and discuss the aims of fiction, and he leaps up from his chair to follow Lady Les backstage and wring his hand some more.
Tristan, too, would like to speak to Lady Les, or any one of the musicians, if only so he doesn’t have to sit there like a fan. The drummer is onstage still, packing his trap set into its cases. Tristan stands, pockets his hands, and ambles over.
“Thank you.”
The drummer glances up from the leather strap he’s fastening across the top of the bass drum’s box. “Our pleasure.” He is a small, lithe-limbed fellow, perhaps twenty-five, with skin the color of teak and a long scar over his left eye.
“They make you pack the drums?” Tristan asks, bracing to be indignant.
The drummer chuckles. “They’re my drums. I gotta haul ’em uptown now, to play a rent party.”
“Y’all”—Tristan tries to say the word sharp and quick like Lady Les did, but his tongue can’t make it work—“y’all are playing again?”
“Yessir. This was just to warm up.”
“What’s the name of the place?”
“Ain’t no name. We play and the cat who owns the pad charges some bread at the door so he can pay his house note. We jam as long as folks wanna dance. His wife be cookin’ up a hurricane, too, man. Plenty of food, plenty of liquor, plenty of women.”
“Are you leaving right now?”
“Soon as I can. Matter fact, if you want to tag along, we can split a taxi. The cats always stiff me, ’cause with these drums there’s only room for one more in the car. They split a cab three ways and leave me dangling. Never no girls left neither by the time I pack up. I’m telling you, I’m gonna do like Lester did and switch over to horn. I already got a tenor I been practicing on. So what do you say?”
Tristan fingers the change in his pocket, yesterday’s craps profits, and wonders what the ride will cost. “I’m with you—as far as thirty cents will get me.”
The drummer flashes him a smile, hands over a case. The cavemen gaze at Tristan as he walks past them, as though he is carrying the choicest slab of flame-charred mastodon on which they have ever laid eyes. Not until he’s clear of the table does one of them pipe up, a prodigiously nosed fellow who might be Sammy Fischer’s older brother.
“Dropping out to join the band?” he calls.
Tristan spins, heat rising to his face, and almost floors a passing waitress with the snare. The cavemen are all smiles, and it takes Tristan a moment to understand that the attention is friendly.
He sets down the drum case, lifts a hand to his upper lip, and smoothes the tips of an imaginary mustache. “I am inflamed,” Tristan declares. “By men and women, drink and song.” The cavemen erupt in laughter. The sound is loud enough to dominate the room, and all around Oswald’s, heads turn.
“Godspeed,” says Fischer’s double, and Tristan nods and hefts his parcel. The troll opens the door for him, and Tristan exits the club and stands on the corner, guarding the drum. The name stenciled in white on the black box reads Albert Van Horn.
“So why is the saxophone player called Lady Les?” Tristan asks him when they’re both wedged into the cab, drum cases atop and between their knees.
Albert shrugs. “Just Lesterese. He calls everybody Lady. Reefer is ettuce, like lettuce without the l, cops are Bob Crosbys, the bridge to a tune is a George Washington, anything depressing is a Von Hangman. Just keeping up with his jive is a job in itself. Sometimes I be figuring junk out weeks late. Les always used to talk about his people after a gig, like ‘Boy, my people were smooth tonight.’ One time, I said to Paul, ‘I didn’t see Les talking to anybody. What’s all this about his people?’ Paul told me, ‘Man, his people is what Lester calls his finger pedals.’”
Albert shakes his head. Tristan stares out the window, turning over the idioms of Lesterese in his mind and enjoying the ride. He’s been in a cab only once before, the time his brother broke a wrist playing street football and had to be rushed to the hospital. Medical bills are a luxury this family cannot afford, Jacob had lectured the kids afterward, pacing back and forth before the dinner table with the hospital release form rolled in his hand like a diploma. From now on, I expect all you kids to be more careful.
Harlem slides by outside the dirty windows, block after block of artful brownstones, snatches of angry noise and melody, dark liquid silhouettes. Albert taps his hands against the flat top of the drum case on his lap, reprising the rhythm of the set’s last tune.
“So can you dance?”
he asks.
“No, but I can eat.” The cab pulls up to a four-story building on a leafy residential street, a block down from the bright commercial strip. The third-floor windows are a shadow theater of backlit bodies, and as he steps from the cab, Tristan can already hear a thump piano, the clamor of conversation.
Between the two of them, he and Albert manage to haul the trap set up the bald-carpeted stairs. A man with shoulder muscles that must earn him his living greets them at the top of the third landing. The sleeves of his white crewneck are pushed to the elbows, and one of his leather suspender straps keeps slipping down his arm. He holds a floppy newsboy hat in one hand, a wax-paper cup swishing with some kind of liquor in the other. “Al Van!” he says, draining the cup and donning the hat. “Our prayers have been answered!” He relieves Albert of his burdens, leads the way inside.
Tristan follows, lugging the snare and the leather cymbal bag, and finds himself in a small living room dense with people. An L-shaped sofa beneath the front windows is crammed tight with couples leaning forward to talk over the notes and voices. Two tired-looking women, one old and one young, bookend the couch, fanning themselves against the rising body heat. The old woman uses her hat, the young one her hand.
Plates, drinks, and the ghosts of drinks litter the coffee table, and everything jumps when the portly, sweat-soaked man sitting at the piano by the opposite wall, a personal cemetery of crushed paper cups and empty plates around his own feet, digs in and starts swinging fast and loose and the dancing picks up. Young men in their shirtsleeves stand close to women, whether dancing or just talking, and everyone is shouting and drinking and half-hearing one another. Gumbo and bottled beer and cayenne pepper and fried chicken and whiskey and gin and cologne and sweat and almond cake and cigarette smoke funky up the hot air but the smell is good.
A big woman is jitterbugging to the music as Tristan struggles through the room, toward the alcove where Albert is unpacking the drums. “Uh-oh,” and “Watch out,” people exclaim, stepping back as much as they can to make room as the heavy dame and the pianist lock eyes and he ratchets the tempo skyward. Tristan has never seen such a large woman move so well. There are plenty of them in his neighborhood, his mother being one, but they all walk arthritically and act as if they went to grade school with Methuselah, and he can’t picture any of them cutting loose.
End of the Jews Page 2
