End of the Jews

by Adam Mansbach

  II

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  “I must keep Albert’s music alive,” Mariko told Tris, her mouth hard and her dark eyes flooded with sincerity. It was the first fall of the new millennium, and after a lifetime of willful invisibility—after forty-five years of shielding her husband from the appetites that had once threatened to destroy him, and that continued to, at least in her mind, until the day he died—Mari was about to take the stage herself.

  And so after two years’ vacation from the road, Tris was back in his dress shoes and musician’s suit, ready to reprise his role as drum setter, wine fetcher, dressing room confidant. He looked Mari over now—the spindly hand clutching its customary cigarette, the drawn mouth overembellished with pink lipstick, the eyes perpetually narrowed, as if staring down a foe—and saw the cost of eternal vigilance, the toll of decades spent holding a fragile world together and a demon at bay.

  Even during those moments of respite when she’d sat backstage bending his ear, Mariko had always been listening to Albert through the door. Anticipating, with every synapse, the nightmare moment when his saxophone would caterwaul and cut out and she would run onstage and find him slumped facedown, or shaking uncontrollably, with the other musicians staring slack-faced as musicians always did. And just like that, it would be 1959 again, and Mariko would sling his ashy elbow around her neck and drag him out of there, frame buckling beneath his sweaty weight, Albert’s legs knocking together as he underwater-walked.

  That scene had never played and now it never would, but it was still as real as yesterday to her, much realer than tomorrow. She tapped her Dunhill against the glass ashtray and Tris thought, You don’t have to do this, Mariko. You can go home and find yourself some peace.

  But this dressing room in Amsterdam was home, as much so as a hotel in Nice or a nightclub in London or a restaurant in Chicago, and maybe more so than the mildewing loft on Third and MacDougal, where Albert and Mariko had never spent longer than six months at a stretch. All Mariko’s domestic skills were geared toward travel; she kept an impeccable house in sixty cities around the globe, remembered what to order from room service at the Madrid Hilton and what not to at the chain’s New Orleans branch. She could tell you how to pack for a fifteen-day, six-city swing versus a two-week string of one-nighters, where the best music shop in each city was located in case Albert needed reeds or Murray busted a drum head, how to fly with an upright bass in a hard case and a seven-piece trap set and never pay the airlines’ extra-baggage fees.

  “You know what Albert tell me one time?” she asked, smiling. Tris raised his eyebrows. “He say, ‘Don’t worry, baby. If you die before me, I’m gonna kill myself.’”

  “Mmm.” Tris said it with conviction, made the syllable an amen. This was a rare story, not in regular rotation. He believed it had happened—even Mariko wouldn’t invent something like that—but Tris had never been convinced the saxophonist had meant what he’d said.

  “I was so shocked, Tris! I never dared to bring it up again.”

  The irony was that it had been Mariko who’d ended up the subject of a suicide watch last month, when Albert passed away. Her stated purpose in life was to give the world the gift of Albert’s music by keeping him alive and drug-free, taking care of anything that might distract him from his calling. Nobody had ever thought about what Mariko would do if Albert died, and so they assumed the worst.

  But when he did, her instincts told her: Play. The watch disbanded within hours.

  Mariko reached into her patent-leather purse and extracted another cigarette. The gig was scheduled to begin in ten minutes. In Albert’s band, the guys would have been massing in the hallway to trade wisecracks, repeat the set list to each other, resolve minor song-structure confusions. Tris opened the door and peered out, but the untested young men who comprised the other two-thirds of the Mariko Van Horn Trio were nowhere to be seen.

  “No one know Albert’s music like me,” Mariko said to herself, giving the vanity mirror a hennish nod. Tris didn’t argue, though he could think of many who might. All the musicians who had played it with Albert over the years while Mariko sat in the wings muttering encouragement, for starters. Murray Higgins was off performing Van Horn’s music right now, with an all-star lineup of their former bandmates, in a group dedicated to Albert. He’d invited Mariko to manage the tour, but she’d declined: I tell him I not manager for hire. I only manage my husband.

  In Tris’s time as a roadie—ten or fifteen short tours between ’97 and ’98, whenever the Van Horns were playing someplace too cool to pass up or he felt a hotel room might be a more conducive place to write than his and Nina’s clutter-filled apartment—Mariko had never so much as fingered a piano. Sometimes she sang along, under her breath, to a Japanese folk song she’d arranged for the band; that was the closest to performing Tris had ever seen her come. How she’d even booked this handful of European gigs was a mystery. On the strength of her last name and her history with the club owners, presumably. Quite a chance they were taking. And on a woman whose unparalleled ball busting they’d spent the last forty years sniping over, at that.

  “Are you nervous?” Tris asked, and instantly regretted it.

  Mariko scowled, waving away the question the same way she did her own smoke.

  “How your grandfather? I not seen since Albert’s funeral.”

  “He’s okay, I guess. Still working on his new book.”

  “Of course. Gotta keep working. What about you? When your book come out?”

  “Four months.”

  “Fantastic. Your grandfather read yet?”

  Tris felt his stomach pitch, and shook his head. “I’ve been too scared to give it to him.”

  Mariko clicked her tongue. “Nonsense. He gonna love. I can’t wait read myself.”

  “You’ll get the first one.” At the reception after the funeral, he’d found Contents Under Pressure sitting atop the same pile of CDs on which she’d placed it four years earlier, when he’d presented them with a signed copy. It was for the best. The Van Horns had no respect for hip-hop, didn’t consider it music, resented it for pushing jazz further toward the margins of financial viability. Tris had always been careful, in their presence, to disassociate himself from it. A young painter, he remembered telling Albert when the horn player asked what his book was about, declining to mention that the painter’s canvases were New York City’s slumbering subway trains, his medium shoplifted spray cans.

  Mariko wagged her forearm, and the silver flecks in her slate-colored dress shimmered. “No, no. I buy. Never give nothing away, young man. Friends gotta support the artist. Not easy to make a living.” She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head once, and just like that, Mariko was speaking in reverie, in reruns. “I feel so bad for black musician. To be black man in America so hard! But Albert got his freedom! He overcome! Albert the last of the Mohicans.” She shooed Tris without looking at him. “Tell band two minutes for me, please.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He crossed the hall, rapped at the door of the other dressing room. “Ready when you are, gentlemen.”

  Tris hustled down the stairs and took up position by the sound booth in the farthest corner of the club. The room was crowded, the vibe of the audience unlike any Tris had ever felt. They did not move with the ease of sophisticates out for a night on the town, and an expensive one, but with the formal gravity of funeral attendants filing into church pews. Tris saw his own doubts reflected in the jitteriness of their movements: the way they tapped their feet, glanced compulsively over their shoulders, worried their napkins, made geometric figures of the hard plastic stirrers garnishing their drinks. They didn’t know whether to trust her, either.

  “Ladies and gentlemen, please join us in welcoming the Mariko Van Horn Trio!” She marched to the piano on the left side of the stage, arms rigid at her sides. She sat down, twisted at the waist to bow to the audience, then dropped her head and stared at the keys, hands folded in her lap.

  The noi
se faded, until only small rumblings persisted—the recrossing of women’s nyloned legs, the clearing of male throats, the deliberate rise and fall of drink glasses. Even those died away, and there was true silence, odd forward-creeping silence that promised to deflate at any moment, punctured by delicate piano tinklings or authoritative drum strokes. The drummer and the bassist hunched over their instruments, faking cool reflection but really glancing over at Mariko in search of a cue. The pianist’s hands stayed in her lap, and the room waited. A second round of rumblings erupted. Men scratched their temples, women leaned slightly toward them or away. More sips were taken, more glasses replaced.

  Then a small noise from the piano bench perked up their ears and froze the crowd. Mariko was sobbing. Her back was turned, but the shaking of her thin torso was unmistakable. She sat and cried, growing no louder and no softer, and the club and the musicians and the soundman and the roadie watched, paralyzed. Tris caught a refracted fragment of her face in one of the decorative slivers of mirror hanging behind the bandstand. Makeup ran in streams down her cheeks. He found himself walking toward her.

  Tris reached the stage and stood below it. He brought his hand up, almost placed it on Mariko’s back, then changed his mind, recalled it to his side. Her sobs were like her singing voice, as clear and delicate as soap bubbles. Tris reached for her again, and this time laid his hand against the crushed velvet covering her spine.

  Mariko jumped, and so did the room. Without turning toward him, she reached behind her and grabbed Tris by the wrist so hard he felt his pulse throbbing beneath her thumb. Mariko was strong enough to swing drum cases off an airport baggage belt herself if nobody else was paying attention.

  He winced and leaned forward on tiptoe to whisper in her ear, trying to exercise what discretion he could. “Do you want me to take you upstairs, Mariko?”

  Mariko shook her head, releasing his hand and turning far enough toward Tris for him to see the tears had stopped. “No. Thank you, Tris. You good friend.” She sighed through her nose and gave him a weak smile. “I cry for Albert plenty when he alive, but hardly at all since he gone.”

  “You don’t have to play, Mariko. Everyone will understand.”

  “Bullshit. I gonna play Albert’s music so fucking loud, he gonna hear me. Tell soundman to turn down monitors.”

  She turned back to the piano and held her left hand aloft, then brought her right up from her lap to meet it and dropped them both onto the keyboard, and a chord rang out and jolted the drummer’s left foot back to life. His hi-hat pumped once, the first beat of a resuscitated heart. Tris stepped back, and Mariko brought her hands down again. Doon, another chord, and now the bass player was standing straight as a sunflower, his hands performing shiatsu on the big old double fiddle and his mouth moving along with his fingers, echoing each note he played in a soft, breathy baritone.

  Mariko ratcheted her body up and down on the cushioned bench, long black hair already coming loose from its bun, frizzing into a mane, and a swell of sound rose up around her. Tris dropped into an empty stage-side seat, jutted his head and knit his brow and grimaced happily. That was what you did when somebody was swinging like a motherfucker.

  A minute later, it hit him. Mariko was trying to play Albert’s solo, the one on the record, and she was getting most of it, too. Every now and then she’d fork off, like a river diverging into a pair of streams, and play something of her own devising. The music would rush slower, shallower, and then when the time was right, she’d reconnect with Albert’s notes and seize on their momentum and surge forward for a while more. How many of his solos had she committed to memory? Probably all of them, Tris decided. Probably every note he’d ever played. But how—when—had she learned to pound the keys like that?

  An hour later, Mariko sat alone with a Campari and soda, and Tris stood outside the closed door of the dressing room, explaining to an anxious line of friends and well-wishers that Mariko was resting for a few minutes, would receive them shortly. The club’s owner fronted the delegation, his face shiny with perspiration and his fist choking the equally sweaty neck of a champagne bottle. Just as Tris was tiring of the bouncer role, Mariko summoned him inside.

  She had rebunned her hair and reapplied her makeup. Smoke willowed from a cigarette lying in the ashtray, and Mariko sat rifling through her purse.

  “Tris, I don’t wanna see nobody for ’nother ten minutes. Tell Rolf come back later. I gotta talk to friends first. I don’t wanna insult! Some of these people I known thirty years!”

  Rolf must have been the owner. Tris had shaken his hand earlier but hadn’t bothered to register a name. “No problem, Mariko. You want me to let them in one at a time?”

  “No, no, I can do. You gotta go on errand.” Her hand emerged, and Mariko extended a Dutch bill. “Down the street, they got a place called Talking Blues.” She bent toward the mirror and corrected her lipstick with a curled pinkle. “I need you pick up some hashish.”

  Tris stared at her in disbelief, then grinned. Mariko ignored him, occupied herself in rummaging.

  “Any particular kind?”

  “I have no idea. I never smoke in twenty years. Whatever you think.”

  Tris gangled down the stairs, laughing, and hit the street. Inside the club, it was easy to forget what country he was in, but now Tris stood in the middle of an iridescent midnight thoroughfare pungent with great rich clouds of herb smoke, thick with bicyclists, and multinational with barhoppers.

  Not even Pleasure Central, though—with its rows of mood-lit hash bars and its twenty-four-hour money-changing stands, its pink-piped sex-shop windows and, most garish of all, its two-story McDonald’s—could match the impact of listening to Mariko pull so much sound from that piano. Even the knowledge that around any corner might be a fully bonded and licensed whorehouse, with a near-naked woman standing behind the glass of each full-length window, flirting in mime language, was less discombobulating than the fact that Mariko was planning to sit in her dressing room and suck down a joint Tris would no doubt have to roll for her. Mariko—who fired cats for showing up fifteen minutes late to a sound check, who looked askance if Albert ordered anything stronger than wine, who’d taken young musicians publicly to task for sloppy table manners and muttered loud aspersions about their lack of home training. It was a brand-new day.

  Talking Blues was a Jamaican-themed coffee shop built out of weather-beaten aluminum to evoke the charm of a Trenchtown hovel. A six-pack of obvious Americans, fresh off the train and more concerned with getting baked than finding lodging, was sunken into mismatched armchairs, mammoth backpacks by their feet. Aussies with blond ropes of dreadlocks winding down their backs bent forward over low tables, intent on rolling perfect cone spliffs. A trio of bored-looking Dutch waitresses, name tags still clipped to their blouses, sipped fruit smoothies and watched the tourists indulge.

  Tris turned to the adjective-crammed menu posted on the wall, wondering what Mariko sought in a high. He couldn’t picture her “giggly” or “mellow,” didn’t think he’d care to see her get “cerebral,” was too cautious to bring a woman in her sixties any botanical described as “potent.”

  He settled on a “mild, relaxing” Chinese hash and got in the wind, eager to run interference between Mariko and the public before anybody’s night got ruined. Years of shielding Albert from the drug dealers and lowlifes he’d once counted as his buddies had taught her to distrust strangers, to clutch grudges long past relevance, occasionally to abuse her power as gatekeeper. Tris had seen her slam doors in the faces of people she’d known half her life, for no other reason than to demonstrate that she could. Yesterday’s misdemeanor was tomorrow’s felony, and whether transgressors were permitted to plead their cases was, likewise, a matter of whim. Mariko might listen to a musician’s five-minute dramatization of how he’d done some dumb shit like oversleep and miss sound check, nod, and let him off with Next time, ask front desk for wake-up call. And then a week later, when a cat tried to explain how he’d been trapped i
n an abandoned mine shaft without food or water and had only escaped by weaving his body hair into a rope, she’d glare and wave her arm. I don’t wanna hear! Musicians gotta be professional! You gotta think of Albert’s reputation!

  Tris reached the club, still spangled with patrons, climbed the staircase to the dressing room, and knocked. The door swung open, revealing Mariko sitting just as he had left her: hands mufflered in her purse, cocktail gone watery on the table beside her.

  “Ah.” Rolf smiled, clutching the doorknob. “You see? There he is.”

  “Tris, where you been? I getting worried.” Gauging travel time was not Mariko’s forte.

  “Sorry.” Behind her, half-sitting on the waist-high lip of the counter, was a tall nineteenish blond girl with a lit cigarette cocked by her ear. There was a rangy, athletic restlessness to her, as if she were waiting to catch a fly ball or return a serve. A white hippie pullover billowed around her, sleeves pushed to the elbows to reveal thin, tanned forearms ringed with woven hemp bracelets. Automatically, Tris sized her up—she was a female in his field of vision—and his brain recorded the finding that she was fuckable, filed it away somewhere.

  Rolf saw him looking. “My daughter, Saga.”

  “Hi,” she said, then leaned toward her cigarette as though someone else were holding it, and took a drag without breaking eye contact. It was a profoundly goofy maneuver, but wholly original. Saga’s whole full mouth relocated to the left side of her face and she blew the smoke behind her so as not to offend.