by David Gates
I’m playing better, I think, although I’m still more comfortable on the slower stuff. Thank God we all agree that “High Society” has been done to death. I’ve never actually mastered the Alphonse Picou solo, which maybe I should call the George Baquet solo—didn’t he invent it? (It’s so me to know this yet not be able to play the thing.) I’m supposedly this big purist, but my man is actually Pee Wee Russell. A Chicago guy. And white. And zero technique, which is what I really like about him: just a bunch of bleating, supposedly denoting passion and pathos.
We use the piano player’s loft on Grand Street. He has a Steinway grand there, and his neighbors bang only if we go past eleven. He’s a piece of work, this Mark. A partner at some law firm, not anybody I’d be likely to know if not for the music. Andy either, as far as that goes. To be an assistant dean isn’t scruffy, exactly, but at my age it’s getting there. A late bloomer, you could call me, if I were blooming. I’ve been trying to get through one more winter with this coat by walking around with my hands in my pockets, thereby keeping the fraying cuffs tucked out of sight, except the edges of the pockets are fraying, too. When Mark first told me his address, I said, “Ah, where the neon madmen climb,” and he obviously thought I was a babbling burnout. He’s got a sleek, dark-haired wife and a pretty little blond daughter named Margit. Second wife, first child: you know the deal. Margit is four (Carrie’s now eight), and at bedtime she’ll pad in barefoot in her nightie and listen for a minute, eyes only for Daddy. And he’ll be sitting there at his Steinway in his pink oxford shirt, playing this Jimmy Yancey shit he’s learned note for note.
We’re still looking for drums—hard to find anyhow, but especially for this music—and string bass. We’d prefer not to go the tuba route. Bass sax might give things an interesting feel, though more New York 1924 than I personally care for. If we had drums and bass, Mark wouldn’t have to be holding everything together on piano. But the Hot Five got along fine without drums and bass—though they did have banjo, not to mention Louis Armstrong instead of Andy Kroll—so I suppose it’s not crucial.
Not crucial. Jesus, I’ll say.
• • •
Last Thursday I left Mark’s a few minutes after eleven and took the E train uptown to meet Jane. (You must have seen this coming, you ladies especially. Yes, even in his desolation—O lost daughter! O new-mown lawn!—he’s managed to get himself a new one. So now you know her name.) Jane had called me at work that afternoon: could I see her, that night, didn’t matter how late, kind of important. After a couple hours at Mark’s the subway makes you feel poor and put-upon. Across from me sat an old woman, dozing, her possessions tied with yellow nylon rope to a two-wheeled cart. White-crusted sores that looked like salt deposits on her swollen shins. I caught myself regarding her only as another disagreeable feature of the mise-en-scène and not as a fellow traveler to the grave. One more way you know you’ve been in New York too long. Or maybe just at Mark’s too long. Stop after stop, the doors opened and made the phoebe sound, and each time I clutched my clarinet case reflexively, though no one got on. While we were packing up, James had slipped me a sinisterly slender joint—“For you and your lady sometime”—and I was spooked about having it hidden in the case; it had been years since I’d carried anything around. Probably I should’ve been touched by James’s friendly overture rather than creeped out by his inserting himself into my sexual life. Years ago, Laura and I had tried to make love stoned, and I couldn’t control my mind. This was the time my brother and his grad-student cutie visited us at the farm. The two of them on the futon in the spare room. Jesus, the amount of stuff we owned back then. The lawn mower, the hibachi, the croquet set, the outdoor furniture, the indoor furniture. Most of it ended up going to a Scranton auctioneer who wore a cowboy hat and talked in a Bronx-like honk. I’ll think of his name in a second. It occurred to me, sitting there in the subway car, that most of these things, still solid and serviceable, must persist somewhere in the world. In displaced self-pity, I reached across and stuck a five-dollar bill under the yellow nylon cord on the woman’s cart. Which made me feel no better. Swapper Sam, that was the guy. We’d been regulars at his Saturday-night junk auction. Little thinking his box truck, with his smiley caricature painted on the side, would ever back up to our kitchen door.
I got off at Lex, the station deep, deep underground. I associate the name Lexington with the color green. Which, come to think of it, isn’t such an uncanny mental leap. But Lexington, Massachusetts, aside, I also think of Lexington, Virginia, and Lexington, Kentucky, as green places. Like Old Lyme, Connecticut. Hell, Greenfield, Massachusetts. So it always seems to me that Lexington, not Park, should be the avenue with the grass down the middle. It was Laura’s mnemonic that taught me the order of the avenues: Fat Men Piss Less, Fifth Madison Park Lex. A side of Laura that Greenfield will never know. The other day she told me there’s now a place in Greenfield where you can get real H&H bagels; did you ever hear anything so sweet? I walked to the Third Avenue end of the platform, belatedly worrying about what Jane meant by kind of important, and belatedly wondering if she’d been counting on me to worm it out of her on the phone. I took the long, long stairs instead of the escalator, little as I felt like it. Good for the buns. A thing one thinks about these days.
The plan was, have a quick drink, talk about whatever this was, then get her home to her husband. You saw this coming too, no? His name is Jonathan. A something at WNYC, unless it’s BAI. I need hardly add that I’m the Older Man. Back when Laura and I would sometimes have an adulterous couple out to the farm for a weekend—my brother Miller and, what was the name, Alix, were one of several—we used to feel parental. Well … what’s the expression I’m looking for? Something in between tempus fugit and mutatis mutandis.
I found the place okay—a name like J. P. Donleavy’s, Something Something Somebody’s—and I just stood there staring at the door with its etched, frosted-glass panels. Not in the fucking mood. A panhandler played doorman, jingling coins in a cardboard cup. Shivering. To avoid his glance, I looked up: the sky was that corrupted pink you get from streetlights and neon in whatever combination. Snowflakes fell out of the pinkness, though not enough to amount to anything. You could hear Billie Holiday inside singing “Ain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do.” So you had to give them a couple of bonus points for playing the Decca material: the Columbia stuff was a cliché, the Verve too depressing. So how much, I wondered, would their good taste inflate the price of their drinks? With that five gone to the subway woman, which I now thought was stupid—it might see her through, what, half a day?—I had twelve dollars, three tokens and maybe eight bucks in my checking account until payday tomorrow. I stuffed a dollar bill into the panhandler’s cup and was told God bless you. I told him it was a cold night, which he already knew and which ungraciously implied that I wouldn’t have been so munificent otherwise. Hey, you can’t come out of every human transaction smelling like a rose.
I stepped inside and my glasses instantly fogged; dead Billie now sounded alarmingly loud above the chattering voices of the living. I stuck my gloves in my pocket, wiped the inside of each lens with a pinkie, and there it all was, exactly what the name and the frosted-glass door panels promised: the tiny square floor tiles, the polished brass, the polyurethaned oak, the stamped-tin ceiling painted glossy ivory. Had this evocation of whatever it was supposed to be an evocation of ever gladdened a single heart? Have I mentioned that I fucking hate New York City?
I spotted Jane sitting at a square table with a white tablecloth, on which was centered a clear glass bowl with a gardenia blossom floating. Perhaps to go with Billie Holiday, perhaps not. But it suggested—unless the mood forbade it—a bon mot to get things rolling. I would gesture at the gardenia and say, Hey, this must be Lady Day Day. No, too obscure. Was that even a gardenia?
“Sorry, you waiting long?” I said. “Cab got stuck in all this traffic coming up Lex.” Will you find this pretense of being a cabber-about-town less contemptible when I tell you
I kept it up partly for Jane’s sake? It seemed sad that her Older Man should be one who had to take subways. How many Older Men would she be vouchsafed in this life? Jane was appealing—the overbite, the boy haircut, the Trotsky glasses—but nonstandard. But appealing. Christ, she could get all the Older Men she wanted. Some of the younger ones, too. I seemed to be dishing out displaced self-pity to all comers tonight.
But what was she saying? “Say again?” I said, and put my index finger behind my ear as if the loud music was the problem.
“I said,” she said, “how can you go up Lex?”
“What am I saying? Up Park.” I didn’t go into my riff about how Park should be Lexington. “Here, where can I stash this? On the floor, I guess. Don’t let me get hammered and forget it, okay?”
I set the clarinet case by my chair, craned around looking for a coatrack, then remembered to lean down and kiss her. She offered a cheek. I thought, Definitely not the Lady Day thing, then went and hung up my coat, arriving back at the table just as a waiter in a white apron set before Jane a grotesquely large snifter with a thimbleful of brandy in the bottom. I sat down and said, “You have Maker’s Mark?”
“Gee, I think we’re out,” he said. I’m far from the only bullshit artist in New York.
“No problem,” I said. “Jack Daniel’s? Over ice?” On the rocks sounds old-time, like ordering a Rob Roy.
“So,” I said.
“This has to be quick,” she said. “I’m officially at the movies with Mariana.”
“All ears,” I said.
“It’s weird,” she said. “I feel like more of a shit lying about that than actually—you know.”
“Well, better safe than sorry.”
She looked down into her glass and said, “Yeah, right.”
“So,” I said.
“So,” she said. She took a deep breath and let it out. “So yours truly thinks she’s pregnant.”
“You’re shitting me,” I said. “What do you mean you think?”
“Well, for one thing I’m like three weeks late. And I’m never late. Plus I’ve been sick to my stomach the last two mornings. I went out this afternoon and I bought one of those pregnancy things, you know, at the drugstore. Except I’m too scared to use it.”
“Unbelievable,” I said.
“Really,” she said.
“How could it have happened, though?”
“If I knew that,” she said, “it wouldn’t have happened. Obviously. I don’t know. Some stupid thing, I’m sure.”
Billie Holiday was singing “Baby Get Lost.” I know; I didn’t believe it either.
“Well, look,” I said. “Let’s not panic. For one thing, you’ve been under a lot of stress. Which can make people late. Which could also upset your stomach. Anyway, even if anything was wrong, I don’t think, as nearly as I can remember, I don’t think you’d be feeling sick in the morning this early on, would you?”
She raised her eyes and gave me the look I deserved.
My Jack Daniel’s arrived.
I looked over at the rows and rows of bottles behind the bar, presumably doubled by a mirror. I looked back at Jane. She was looking down into her glass.
I said, “Whose would it be?”
She shrugged. “Up for grabs,” she said.
“Have you told Jonathan?”
She shook her head, still looking down.
“Have you thought what you might do?”
“I’m a married woman,” she said. “Married women get pregnant, they have a baby, right?”
“Yes, but when—”
“I mean, that’s what you do, right?”
“But isn’t this a tad more complicated?” I said.
She shook her head, still staring down. Not no to my question, just no.
“Look,” I said. “First thing, you need to go to a doctor. Forget the kit thing. Until you actually see a doctor and actually find out something concrete, we don’t even know what we’re talking about.”
Now she looked at me. “I know what we’re talking about.”
I woke up Friday morning, not to the alarm itself, but to the click you get just before the alarm goes off; I reached out and preempted it. Eight o’clock. In Greenfield, Carrie must have been out in the winter air, waiting for the school bus. Bundled up, I hoped. For all the good my hoping did. And on Eldridge Street, a twenty-three-year-old woman, vomiting perhaps, perhaps thinking, Dear God, what now.
I lay there, pain in my head, pain in my back, and stared at the ceiling fixture I would never have chosen: convex disc of frosted glass with this kind of wheat-looking design around the edge. I thought, Surely there must be some good somewhere in the world that wouldn’t exist if not for you.
Well, Carrie, of course.
Problematic.
“How the hell do you live?” I’d asked Jane during our first long talk. Like a plutocrat indignant over slum conditions and about to start pressing ten-dollar bills into trembling palms. Jonathan, she said, made a little money each time they aired one of his pieces; that plus what she made working part-time in Graduate Records got them through. Later, when we’d begun taking cabs to my place at noontime, she told me Jonathan sometimes moved a little coke for people. One look at my shithole of an apartment should’ve put me in context for her. But maybe after Eldridge Street, Thompson Street looked passable. If you were twenty-three. Middleaged lovers, listen up: if you’re too depressed to change your sheets, at least stick the pillowcases in with the clothes you drop off on the way to work. The fresh-laundered smell will tell her, if only subliminally, that you’re hanging onto your self-regard.
That first afternoon, in a student bar stinking of beer and pizza, I’d bent her ear about what I called “my band.” She’d said, “Oh, neat.” No italics, no exclamation point. “Did you know Woody Allen was into that?”
I knew.
“Do you believe he really did all that stuff to the little girl? I don’t.”
“I believe anything of anybody,” I’d said. I mean, who had the luxury to give a fuck about Woody Allen?
“Ooh,” she’d said. “Cynicism alert.”
“Myself included,” I’d said.
“I assumed,” she’d said.
She, in turn, had bent my ear about how she wanted to transfer to NYU to do her thesis with some guy who’d done a biography of Cotton Mather. She hated our department’s Early American guy, who—horrors!—had made a pass at one of her friends.
“Pretty late in the game,” I’d said. “You know, to be changing.”
“Sometimes people commit before they know what they really want,” she’d said. I read this as being about her and her husband.
“I’ll drink to that,” I’d said, then thought to add, “he said tritely.”
She wanted to do her thesis specifically on The Wonders of the Invisible World. Some feminist take, as far as I could make out. At least she wasn’t deconstructing it, or I guess maybe she was. “It’s like he wrote the thing, but as he’s writing it you can tell he doesn’t want to write it?” she’d said, setting down her beer to pull one of the straps of her tank top back onto her shoulder. “And of course he ends up getting incredible grief for it anyway.”
“Least he had his fifteen minutes,” I’d said. “You know, I’m embarrassed not to know this, but what are the wonders of the invisible world?”
“Well, basically devils,” she’d said.
I rolled onto my side, worked my legs over the edge of the mattress and sat up. My headache seemed to balance my backache, as intellect balances emotion in the well-regulated soul. The one pain didn’t exactly cancel out the other, but having both ensured that I wouldn’t be homing in on just one, so there was that to be thankful for. I decided to skip the shower for fear warm water would make the backache better, which would make the headache seem worse. The way things were shaping up, I wouldn’t need to be date-ready. Which didn’t excuse me from shaving, though I wondered fleetingly (being half-awake) if it did. I went into the b
athroom, ran some hot water and washed my face, trying not to look at Mr. Detestable. Then pushed the top of the can of Colgate: white lather came hissing out into a globule on my fingertips. The usual childish thought that this was like ejaculation. The related thought of bad boys in my high school masturbating their Adam’s apples and making spit appear at their pursed lips. Particularly unwelcome thoughts this morning.
Obviously, if Jane did the sensible thing (I know what we’re talking about), one should offer to cover it, considering her meager budget. Their meager budget. I pictured limp bills tucked into a coffee can. A Maxwell House can, in honest workaday blue. But how does one make such an offer? How, for that matter, would one swing it on one’s own meager budget if the offer was accepted? Beg off on child support for a month? I mean, since old Walt seemed to have things so well in hand up there in Greenfield. The alternative was unthinkable: another child of mine in the world, more lost to me even than Carrie, secretly scrutinized by its mother for signs of my features twitching up out of its generic baby face, as if in a horror-movie transformation. On the one hand, life forever with a mystery child; on the other, an abortion forever hidden from your husband. Not a choice I’d care to make. And guess what.
To dress and drink coffee by, I stuck in a Jimmie Noone CD. He’s always intimidated me, and the idea, crudely put, is that if I listen every morning I’ll somehow absorb Jimmie Noone, like learning French in your sleep. Of course it might also help to fucking practice. I was flipping through my shirts—the white with maroon stripes? the Classic Fit Poplin from the Gap?—when “My Daddy Rocks Me” came on, Jimmie Noone backing some tenth-rate singer. Chippie Hill or somebody. I looked at the clock, the clock struck one / I said Daddy ain’t we got fun. And I thought it would be a natural for Andy to sing—just change “Daddy” to “Mama”—so I hustled into the living room to put my clarinet together and figure out what key they were in. Not because Andy would sing it in her key necessarily. Just so I could say, Well, they do it in whatever.
