No Matter How Much You Promise

by Edgardo Vega

  “We’re going to chip in and buy him a piano for his birthday but it’s a secret,” she said, knowing it would be only her putting up the money, even then feeling apprehension about doing so because Lurleen said it might prove to be expensive.

  “When he was young, my sister told me—”

  “The blond girl?”

  “Yeah. Anyway, Cookie said that our father jammed with Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter and had even played for Thelenos Monk. Not with him, but to show him he could play.”

  “Thelonious.”

  “Yeah, sorry. Thelonious.”

  “That’s pretty hip,” he said. “Far out. I mean, about your dad.”

  “Yeah, my mother … well, she’s like my mother. I don’t like to say ‘stepmother’ because that sounds like there’s a distance, and that’s not the case. Cookie’s mother, my sister’s mother, or whatever, says that jazz is the only true art form that the United States has given to the world.”

  “Some people would say that movies were also developed in the United States and constitute as important a contribution.”

  “Movies were developed simultaneously in Europe,” she said, suddenly feeling pedantic.

  “Yeah, maybe you’re right,” he said. “I guess if you consider its roots.”

  “The blues, right? Blind Lemon Jefferson. Leadbelly.”

  “Right,” he said and laughed. “The blues. I guess you’ve been instructed well.”

  “My family talks about music about eighty percent of the time.”

  They had returned inside and she’d gotten involved in talking with other people and dancing and eating junk food and drinking beer, which made her a little tipsy, and then Wyndell had asked for her phone number and she’d given it to him.

  He eventually called and asked her if she’d like to come and hear him play. Without even considering it she said, “Yeah, sure,” and she was going no matter what because she was fascinated by the way he talked, not bragging like Gordon Walker, the big football star up at school, whose father was a state assemblyman. Everything with Gordon was black this and black that. Everybody was scared of him because he was a football star and was always threatening to punch somebody. He even told Todd Sasso that he didn’t care how many Mafia uncles he had, if he had to get a gun and shoot one of them, he would. Todd had looked at him like he was crazy and later told Bobby Winthers that he wished he had a couple of Mafia uncles, but that all he had were these two uncles who made stringed instruments in Milwaukee, and Bobby Winthers said maybe we could get a couple of the bigger guys to get dressed up in dark suits and walk up to Gordon with a couple of violin cases. They all laughed and then went to biology class.

  But Wyndell was nothing like any black person Vidamía had ever met, and the next day she asked Lurleen was it okay for her to go out on a date with him. Lurleen said she was seventeen years old and as long as he was a good person and treated her with respect, she saw no reason that she shouldn’t see him. Vidamía then asked what Lurleen meant. Lurleen explained that she was on safe ground as long as he didn’t try to get her to do anything she didn’t want to do. Lurleen smiled and pushed her lank hair back behind her ears as she always did.

  Vidamía dressed demurely in a modest black dress, stockings, halfinch pumps, and a small black bag. She sat in the club and watched as Wyndell played way up-tempo things, like he was running a race but beautifully, the ideas coming out of the music so that she felt as if he were delivering a wonderful speech to the audience and then stopping and letting the trumpet and the piano and the bass play, and then alternating playing with the trumpet and then the piano, which he explained later was “trading fours or eights,” Vidamía not quite understanding and he explaining it so gently that she knew this was a very special person.

  He explained what he’d done during the lovely, sad song, which he said was a ballad that he’d written called “Amanda,” which was his mother’s name. The sound seemed so deep that Vidamía knew instinctively that his mother was someone he loved and respected. She listened to him playing the melody and then his own improvisation as he had explained: the pianist, the bassist, and the drummer drawing little figures of music behind him and the drums, just the brushes whispering behind his playing, the notes linking themselves to one another, not in a linear way, but as if they were part of finely woven cloth, one part of the pattern even, symmetrical, and another abstract and new.

  After he finished the set and they left the club and he was walking her to the Farrells’ loft, they got on the topic of a man hurting a woman because maybe she mentioned Becky’s aunt who had gotten beaten up by her husband and spent two weeks in the hospital. Vidamía said she would never allow anyone to lay a hand on her, that she would die before letting anyone do that to her. They hadn’t even kissed or anything yet, this being the first time since the party that they had seen each other. There was a great big pause and then Wyndell said he would never ever hurt her. His words went through her chest and lodged in her heart as if she’d been pierced by a long feather.

  Neither of them said anything for about ten blocks, from Sheridan Square all the way through Washington Square Park and a few blocks beyond. They eventually crossed Broadway and Lafayette and were standing next to the black cube on the Astor Place island across from Cooper Union when all of a sudden Wyndell Ross put his tenor case up against the base of the cube and, solemnly, as if he were introducing a composition of great importance, said, “Check this out”—

  If the Drum Is a Woman

  If the drum is a woman

  why are you pounding your drum into an insane babble

  why are you pistol whipping your drum at dawn

  why are you shooting through the head of your drum

  and making a drum tragedy of drums

  if the drum is a woman

  don’t abuse your drum don’t abuse your drum

  don’t abuse your drum

  I know the night is full of displaced persons

  I see skins striped with flames

  I know the ugly dispositions of underpaid clerks

  they constantly menstruate through the eyes

  I know bitterness embedded in flesh

  the itching alone can drive you crazy

  I know that this is America

  and chickens are coming home to roost

  on the MX missile

  But if the drum is a woman

  why are you choking your drum

  why are you raping your drum

  why are you saying disrespectful things

  to your mother drum your sister drum

  your wife drum and your infant daughter drum

  If the drum is a woman

  then understand your drum

  your drum is not docile

  your drum is not invisible

  your drum is not inferior to you

  your drum is a woman

  so don’t reject your drum

  don’t try to dominate your drum

  don’t become weak and cold and desert your drum

  don’t be forced into the position

  as an oppressor of drums

  and make a tragedy of drums

  if the drum is a woman

  don’t abuse your drum

  don’t abuse your drum

  don’t abuse your drum

  Wyndell finished and picked up his instrument and got ready to continue walking, but Vidamía was spellbound, watching this tall black person who made her heart feel strange, listening to his voice which was strong and fragile at the same time so that, when Wyndell asked her what was the matter, she wanted to know if he had created the poem.

  “No, that was a poem by Jayne Cortez,” he laughed and shook his head.

  “Cortez? Is she Puerto Rican or Cuban?”

  “I don’t know. She’s African-American. A poet. She’s a friend of my mother’s. She came to our house in Denver and there was a reading. I remember looking at this beautiful woman and she had an enormous dignity, reciting this poem
about a drum, with my father playing this intricate melody on the piano, not interfering with the words but sort of like a background. Something from Ellington. He’s a composer. And then the next morning I asked my mother about the poem and what it meant and she went and got the book which was signed by her friend and read it to me while I ate my Wheaties, and it’s always stayed with me. I mean, I liked it so much that I memorized it. Hearing my mother read it, I suddenly understood that maybe some men hit women. I know now that it happens but back then it never entered my mind.”

  “That’s a song,” she said, nervously, feeling stupid, knowing something wonderful was happening and suddenly wanting him to like her.

  “What?”

  “It never entered my mind. It’s a song.”

  “Oh … yeah,” he said, absently. “Yeah, I know.”

  “I’m sorry, I interrupted you,” she said.

  “I was twelve, maybe thirteen.”

  “Did your parents ever hit you?” Vidamía asked.

  “No. Yours?”

  “Oh, I think my mother probably gave me a swat once in a while when I was little, but nothing heavy. If I ever hit a child I’d feel awful and would regret it all of my life.”

  And then they kept walking, and when they turned south at Tompkins Square Park, Wyndell took her hand. When she looked up at him he had this shy look on his face like maybe he shouldn’t have done it, but she smiled and let her own hand fit into his and he gave a great big sigh and hanging on to the saxophone case let it come flying up in the air like he was cheering and he said, “Great, that makes me feel a whole lot better.” And she said, “What?” And he said, “Nothing,” and then, “Wow!”

  So as she watched the rain she recalled all of that and the next two months of going everywhere with him, worrying, in spite of her identification with the characters in Roots, what other people would think of her going around with this black person. After a while she forgot that he was black and just enjoyed the way he made her feel, how adult she felt because he always asked her what she thought of things and was very open about everything she asked him.

  39. Photo Album

  When Vidamía returned to school at the end of the summer of 1989, after she’d met Wyndell, it took her nearly the entire month of September to get used to not being in his company. Most days she moped around the school, recalling the times with him, replaying conversations in her head and smiling inwardly at their secrets, their intimacies. In class there was a languor about her that made her teachers concerned. Eventually she began to discipline herself and spoke to him briefly two days a week, forcing herself to be strict. On weekends she came into the city and spent long hours with him when it was possible. Often she simply sat and listened to his life and his dreams, prodding him, hungry to know more about his family. He would then elaborate on his father, the pediatrician in Denver who played jazz on weekends, no, not saxophone but piano; and on his mother, who ran her own small art gallery. He told her about his two older sisters, Garlande, who taught cultural anthropology at a college in Washington State, and Davina, who was a painter and lived in Paris with her twin sons by a Swedish trombone player.

  “Jazz?” she asked, when Wyndell mentioned his brother-in-law.

  “No, with the Stockholm Philharmonic. She and the children go back and forth from Paris to Stockholm.”

  “Are they separated?” she asked.

  “No, but their work is very important to them. Davina wants to paint in Paris. He needs to be in Stockholm.”

  “Do they love each other?” she asked timorously.

  “Yes,” he answered. “One thing has nothing to do with the other. And you should see the children,” he said. “They’re really beautiful.”

  “I’m sure they are,” she said.

  A few weeks later, during the weekend before Thanksgiving, when she came to see him at his apartment over by Sheridan Square, he made her sit on the couch and close her eyes. He then placed a huge leather-bound photo album on her lap and told her to open her eyes. She looked at the album, touched the leather gingerly, fearful for a moment of what she was to find inside, suddenly feeling as if by opening the album and looking at the photographs she was signing a compact to be a part of Wyndell’s life.

  Slowly she opened the photo album and took in the photographs, allowing Wyndell’s history to enter her, seeing the family resemblances and immediately loving the dignity of the people, the naturalness with which they seemed to be living. The rooms of the houses were elegant and bright and well furnished and the people dressed with enormous good taste so that she felt as if somehow, through some magical and exciting device, she was in the company of regal people, except that everything that came through spoke about what she’d read about white America, and these people were black.

  She recalled reading Roots and suddenly she needed desperately to believe that beneath the color of their skin Americans, black and white, were the same people. Her need to believe was enormous, and whether it was true or not, she wanted it to be so. They were the same, she thought. Perhaps there were exceptions, but for the most part there were more similarities than differences. If one took the time to examine deeply, to go beyond appearances, in attitudes and beliefs they were the same. Only their skin was different.

  “They’re beautiful, Wyn,” she said, tears forming at the corners of her eyes.

  “The photos? Oh, yeah. I called my mom and she Fed-Ex’d me the album,” he said.

  “No, your relatives,” she said. “They’re beautiful.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Yes.”

  “I want to meet them,” she said.

  And then he knelt in front of her and told her he loved her. It was the first time he’d said such a thing to a woman and meant it. She leaned forward and took his face and brought it to her breast and held him there, kissing very gently his eyes, misted now by his own tears. Quite naturally one thing led to another and they made love and she cried, not sure whether she had done the right thing but feeling her heart expand and accept how much she loved him.

  She didn’t like to think of her virginity in terms of losing or surrendering it to Wyndell. Instead, she felt as if Wyndell had helped her to cross a mythical barrier into adulthood. Whether her decision had been based on an impulse caused by Wyndell’s sharing his life with her or peer pressure no longer mattered. It was done and that was the end of the discussion. She often heard her parents’ friends talk in Spanish about women giving themselves. It was nonsense. In her mind the woman was in control and the man cooperated in the defloration ritual.

  In the unusually warm air there had been a breeze of jasmines and geraniums wafting over her from the garden as her head floated pleasantly from two glasses of wine. She had finally done it, at the age of seventeen years and four months. Not crying at first, as she had read in a novel, but surprised by her curiosity and the almost cold and calculated interest she had taken in the process; concentrating solely on how Wyndell behaved; letting him do whatever he pleased and moving this way or that; letting him open her legs and lift her thighs, kissing him and enjoying it, but having no idea what she was supposed to do until he was touching her with his fingers and she was sucking at his tongue and breathing so heavily that a few times a moan of pleasure escaped her and then his fingers were in her and she was moving involuntarily; desperately wanting to touch him and explore the hardness she felt against her legs, but not daring for fear that this wasn’t done at this point in the lovemaking because it wasn’t the same as with the dopey boys that had wanted handjobs, which she had never done, rejecting their needs, and merely listening to the excited discourse of girls who had manually satisfied their boyfriends.

  And then he asked her to wait. She watched him fit himself with a condom and then they were kissing again and a short time later he was inside of her, his organ forcing her open seemingly but then sliding in and out smoothly; wondering if there was much blood because she had read that sometimes there was; Wyn moving slowly at first and she conce
ntrating on what he was doing; forgetting now her own sensations until he was moving violently against her and then pounding at her pelvis, driving her into the bed and his hands beneath her buttocks squeezing her to him and then he was finished and then she cried and was confused but he held her and she relaxed and it was wonderful to be with him.

  She remembered thinking after looking at Wyn’s album again that Elsa Santiago and Billy Farrell must have had a similar scene. Knowing her mother and her theatrics, she must have uttered some words of supposed passion. And then she knew that it had happened exactly that way. She had called her father vida mia, my life, my darling, my beloved, and whether genuine or insincere the emotion had been there to at least wish to create theater; enough for her father to have picked up on the core of the feeling and inquire about the phrase. Vida mia, she thought. She was probably the only person in the entire world with such a name. My life. She played with the words in English. Mylife. Melife. She tried the little French that she knew. Ma vie. No, that was no good. In French it sounded like the drink she had liked so much in Puerto Rico. She always asked her grandmother to buy it when she visited her on the Lower East Side in the summer.

  Mabí. She recalled seeing the word once and running downstairs and into the library. After about ten minutes of looking on the shelves she found Augusto Malaret’s Vocabulario de Puerto Rico, which had all sorts of words common to the island, words that had Indian or African roots. She looked up mabí and there in the middle of the definition was: “Arbol pequeño de corteza de sabor amargo con la que se hace la bebida de este nombre,” describing as bitter the bark of the tree from which the drink was made. “Colubrina reclinata,” explaining that it was sometimes written mavi and that some people thought that it was written this way because its origins were in the French ma vie, my life. Why? She replaced the book on the shelf and went looking for a French—English dictionary. When she found it she looked up the word bitter. Amer. It was like the Spanish amargo. So maybe when the French found the bark, they tasted it and one of them said, “C’est comme ma vie, amère.” It’s like my life, bitter. She was proud that she had been able to come up with a possible explanation for the origin of the name of that drink. Her life was nothing like that. Vidamía. She loved her name, and her life was not bitter at all.