Rhode Island Red

by Charlotte Carter

  We all sat in silence for a few moments. Then Aubrey laughed obscenely. “Look like your partner was deep into something, Sweet.”

  He nodded.

  “But you know,” she continued, “a fella like that coulda spent sixty thousand just as quick as he spent that missing twenty-five. Your department probably figure the whole sixty already gone, right, Sweet? Right? I mean, ain’t they already kissed it good-bye, Sweet?”

  He said nothing, just twisted the sock until the contents were secure, and then pocketed it. Sweet leaned back into the sofa and lit another Newport, holding on to the paper match long after its flame had died.

  I looked at him while he drooled. I looked at Aubrey looking at him. What a nasty little dance. It would lead nowhere, of course.

  I had an absurd vision of Leman Sweet in a tight-fitting French navy uniform, walking all lovey-dovey with Aubrey through Marseilles. Then I cast myself in the female role, hanging onto his arm while I chatted over my shoulder with the odd fishmonger about the novels of Marcel Pagnol. It was almost enough to make me pull out my notebook and dash off a few lines. Needless to say, that poem would have been squarely in the surrealist tradition.

  All that aside, I could feel my chest expanding with the sweet rush of a righteous act. I had done what I was supposed to do—give back that money. It may have been a little short, it may have been a little late, but I’d done it! Sweet seemed to buy our version of events. And Sig—in all his incarnations—would be out of my life forever.

  Thank the baby Jesus, Leman Sweet left us at last.

  Aubrey leaned forward and consulted the mirrored top of the little cigarette table. She freshened her lipstick, all the while shaking her head in bemused contempt.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Country nigger,” she said low. “Where the fuck he get off hittin’ you?”

  CHAPTER 6

  Misterioso

  I stopped dreaming about Leman Sweet and his thunder thighs and his fists like dressed pork roasts. Stopped fearing that he was going to come and beat me up every time I watched TV instead of running scales on the horn; every time I said an unkind word about anyone or failed to sort the recyclables or ignored a phone message.

  I threw away the Marseilles pimp poem.

  Mom had an appointment with the rip-off contractors who do shit like aluminum siding. They were going to give her an estimate.

  And, oh yeah: Walt and I reconciled, in the usual way. The sex was still excellent. And he was for the most part on his best behavior—the upswing of the getting-back-together arc: dinners at those little places where he would take a client he was wooing; a fifty here and there to tide me over; always the movie I wanted to see.

  He was empathy itself when I recounted the horror story about Sig being murdered in my place, palpably guilty that he hadn’t been around to help me, suitably outraged over my treatment at the hands of the police. He did get a bit obnoxious with his jealous insistence on knowing what this long-haired white man was doing in my apartment in the first place. But I managed to make him feel like a petty lowlife for thinking about his dick when my very life had been at stake.

  So the sheets were humming and the Con Ed bill was paid. Walt and I were back on solid ground.

  Except he didn’t move back in this time. He didn’t ask. I didn’t invite. Despite the good times, there was still a diamond hard core of mistrust between us. I regretted that, wished it weren’t true, but there it was. He knew my moods and he knew my body, just as I did his, but there was that vast campground of head and heart where we almost never met. Once again I knew the pleasures of that fevered stripping off of clothes and Walter’s gorgeous chest and all the lovely wet stuff, the glass of cold wine and one of his cigarettes just before sleep and the so-long kiss the next morning. But I guess I’m just some kind of pervert when you get right down to it. It seemed I was genuinely happy only when I could nail him on some crap he was trying to pull.

  But while my love life had its limitations, my “professional” life was no less than blossoming … leaping … pumping … hot. A highly respected musician who had made a good living in the New York music world for some forty years—a friend of a friend—had accepted me as a student. We were going to start working together in a month or so. Was I excited? No. I was more than excited—I was serious. Practicing my ass off. For the first time in years, I was serious about something other than finding a bargain on red wine.

  As a kind of homage to Sig, I kept to that same spot just off Thirty-fourth and Lexington, even though he had told me I could make more money west. After all, while I really was applying myself to my music, I realized, number one, that I was at heart a novelty act—a big girl with long legs and a bald head—and number two, most of the people playing for coins west of Fifth Avenue would have blown me off the sidewalk.

  So what if I wasn’t ready to play Body and Soul? I had my fans nonetheless. The tips in my hat were showing a steady increase, a few fives among the singles. And then, one day, somebody gave me something a lot more thrilling than five bucks.

  I was blowing something playful—a 1950s thing called The Late Show—pretending that Dakota Staton was singing in my left ear—when I saw a strange looking shadow fall across the pavement. The shape turned out to be a young kid with a bouquet of flowers in his arms. I finished the set and bent to gather up my take. The boy went on standing there, smiling. Then he thrust the wrapped flowers into my hand.

  “This is for me?”

  “Yeah. With a note,” he said.

  I pointed down to my hat. He scooped up two quarters as his tip and was gone.

  I undid the wrapping paper.

  God! Long stemmed yellow roses. Nine of them. All perfect. A creamy yellow note card too, but nothing written on it. Instead, a twenty dollar bill paperclipped to it.

  I looked around in wonderment. I looked up to all the buildings where someone could be standing behind a curtain, pining for me. I looked down the avenue and around the corner and at every doorway. It was such a crazy thing, getting those flowers, so moving and yet so weird, that instead of breaking for lunch I packed up my sax and went home.

  The piece I wrote that night about the incident had the nine roses turning into eighteen, and the eighteen into thirty-six, and so on. Multiplying, dividing, transmutating. You know … roses, rose hips, my hips, hips, lips, yellow so yellow it’s white hot, its intensity like the sewing needle my mother once used to take a splinter out of my heel.

  Next day, it happened again. Only the delivery boy was different. And as for the new batch of roses—those love-some things—they were younger, a trifle smaller, their heads tightly curled back onto themselves and sitting atop pale green leaf collars—the yellow was even deeper. Impossibly deep, hypnotical yellow. I wanted to eat one. Could all but feel that color dripping down the side of my mouth like egg.

  I finished out the afternoon, which, without my noticing, had turned to velvet. Blew nothing but ballads. Two hip-looking dykes asked for an encore of Don’t Blame Me. Finished with Violets for My Fur. Sixty-two big ones in the fedora Ran home. Found second vase. Unplugged phone. Threw Lady Day on the machine. Poured drink. Long bath. No supper. Masturbated. Slept like top.

  I decided to clean up my act a little the next day. I put on Monk’s all-Ellington album while I pressed a skirt lightly and scared up a clean shirt and made coffee and picked up a little around the apartment. Then dressed and hunted for that Indian fabric out of which I had fashioned a neck strap for the ax. Finally I was ready to leave the house. I’d walked half a block before I realized my telephone was still unplugged. I ran back and reconnected it and the answering machine, and, as long as I was there, put on a pair of earrings.

  That was the day I caught him.

  I arrived at the corner at an off time, about an hour later than usual. The flowers came right away. And across the street I saw a man watching the delivery. He was standing in the recessed doorway of a run-down apartment building, looking highly furt
ive. He had a Mediterranean aura—maybe he was Greek, or Lebanese … Israeli? No. Whatever he was, he looked pretty unhappy in his expensive black overcoat and silk scarf. He was smoking furiously.

  I watched him for a few minutes, waiting for him to make a move. But he stood his ground, lighting one cigarette after another. Well, maybe I was mistaken. Maybe he wasn’t my secret admirer. I set up and started to play.

  I saluted the new born season, starting with Autumn in New York. Then Autumn Nocturne, during which my old friend, the one-armed gambler, strolled by, tossing a few coins in the hat with an apologetic shrug. Then Autumn Serenade. I was just about to play Lullaby of the Leaves when the rose man crossed the street.

  He took a few steps toward me, but then immediately backed away. I raised the sax to my lips and once again he stepped forward, this time muttering to himself. What the hell was the matter with this guy? When he was quite close, I pointed down at the bouquet and smiled at him. It was a question.

  He nodded, reluctantly at first, and then more vigorously.

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Henry Valokus,” he said with a half bow. “And I am embarrassed at what I have done.” He didn’t have an accent, exactly, but he spoke English in this queer, slow way—with a kind of all-purpose, assimilated European lilt.

  “What have you done, Henry?”

  “The flowers.”

  “But they’re exquisite. They don’t embarrass me.”

  “I have listened to you since you first came here. Listened to your playing. You are charming.”

  Now I was a bit embarrassed.

  “You’ve sent so many roses. I’ve run out of vases, you know.”

  “Ah,” he said, “then I have done too much. I always do too much. It is my nature.”

  He stood there smiling shyly at me while I memorized his face. Every crag and culvert of it. And especially those black mourning eyes.

  “I would consider it a great honor if you would lunch with me.”

  I hesitated.

  “For instance,” he went on, “we might go to one of the nearby Indian restaurants here on Lexington.”

  Mr. Henry Valokus had pushed the right button. I love Indian food desperately. There was a time there, twelve or thirteen pounds ago, when I was eating it for breakfast.

  “You have finished?”

  I wondered if he was being sarcastic. I wasn’t just finished, I was bursting. “Oh, believe me,” I said, “I am finished.”

  He signalled the waiter and removed a silver cigarette case from his breast pocket in a single, fluid motion.

  “It must be difficult to make a living as you do,” he said sympathetically. “I wanted to make things nice for you.”

  I laughed and took one of the proffered cigarettes without even looking at the brand. “What a gallant you are, Henry. Do you make a practice of rescuing penurious lady musicians? Or am I special?”

  “You are special,” he answered immediately.

  I let that one lay there for a few minutes. I blew across the top of my spiced tea to help it cool.

  I hadn’t even noticed him order the drinks, but a few minutes later two outsized snifters were placed before us.

  “You appreciate cognac,” Henry stated. “I am certain I have not guessed wrong about that.”

  “Henry, you have yet to hit a wrong note. But listen …”

  He leaned in close.

  “… What, exactly, are you after?”

  Mr. Valokus’s face went a little red. After a minute, he said, “I will be totally honest with you.”

  “Okay. Honest is good.”

  “What I would like from you is … is … to … well, to understand.”

  “Understand what?”

  “Music. Well, not all music. One particular thing, I mean. Something—someone—that is with me like a ghost, like a memory. Except that I don’t understand where it came from.”

  “Henry, you’ve lost me.”

  “Let me say it this way: if you were to come with me to my apartment at this moment—”

  I burst into a guffaw, but when I saw the hurt on his face I stopped laughing. With a nod of my head. I signalled that he should continue.

  “If you were to come to my apartment, what you would find is a kind of shrine I have created. Hundreds of recordings. Hundreds, I tell you. And books. And photographs. Posters. Posters everywhere. And all concerning a single musician. The one who obsesses me. And until I have a complete understanding of him and his music, until I have comprehended his heart and his soul, he will obsess me. As long as I live. Do you see, Nanette, what I am saying?”

  “Not at all,” I said. “But who’s the musician?”

  “Bird.”

  “Beg pardon?”

  “Parker.”

  “As in Charlie?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  “You’re telling me you’re obsessed with Charlie Parker?”

  “Yes. It is true.”

  “And you want me to help you understand?”

  He nodded.

  This time I couldn’t hold it back. Before long, I was doubled over with laughter. Racism is a stitch, ain’t it? White people think you’re either a half wit, genetically determined criminal or an extraterrestrial with some kind of pipeline to the spirit.

  Oh well. There didn’t seem to be much point in going out on this weird guy, Valokus, whose face had again clouded over with pain and incomprehension. Besides, what was he asking of me, essentially? To talk to him about music. What was so bad about that? It wasn’t as though he was asking me to clean his place or suck his dick.

  So I pulled myself together and took another sip of my cognac. Charlie Parker wasn’t no goddamn mystic, he was a musical genius—for some, the musical genius—fucked up behind heroin and being an American Negro—so what else is new? But instead of saying that to Henry, I reached over and patted his hand a little.

  In turn, he took mine and kissed it lingeringly. Then he called for the bottle of Remy and poured me a really big drink.

  Valokus took me back to my corner and left me there with the paper container of cappuccino he had purchased at the new cafe in the neighborhood. He was going uptown now, he said, because he’d heard Colony Records had a new shipment of some live recordings of Bird club dates.

  Just the tiniest bit unsteady on my feet, I watched him walk up the block and disappear around the corner.

  Pity I’m not a true whore, I thought. I could take this fool for a real ride.

  Henry wasn’t kidding. His apartment, which I visited after our third lunch date, was a shrine to Charlie Parker.

  Everywhere you looked there was a piece of Bird memorabilia: poster size blow ups of old black and white photos of Parker, “Bird Lives” calendars, back issue jazz magazines, an unpublished PhD thesis, books, postcards.

  And then there was the music itself: records, cassettes, CDs.

  I was speechless. This time it didn’t occur to me to laugh at Henry’s Birdmania Something happened on that first visit to his shrine that made me a little less high handed about his obsession. A sudden shock of recognition, I guess. I realized that my feeling for France may not have been so different from Henry’s Birdaholism.

  France was hardly my home. Yet I kept fleeing there. It was where I felt safe, the most alive, the most understood, the most welcome. French was not my mother tongue. Yet if I had my way every school child would start studying it at age six. I tried to write in that language. I loved the way it felt in my mouth. I was positively turned on just hearing it on the radio. But that was all romantic crap. I’m not French. And no power on earth could make it otherwise. I’m as colored and American as Charlie Parker. That moment of recognition and empathy with Henry Valokus was a turning point in my attitude toward him. His Bird thing was no longer just silly; it had become endearing.

  We talked quite animatedly that afternoon about our shared disappointment with the film they’d made about Parker’s life, though we both loved the a
ctors who’d played Bird and Chan. We chose five tunes and dug through all the music in the apartment, comparing live versions of those songs to studio recorded ones; early recordings to late ones; those done in New York to those recorded in Boston to those recorded in California. Before long we were hungry again. Henry ordered in Indian food from a grand place on Fifty-sixth Street and champagne from the liquor store and the talk fest continued.

  It wasn’t until he’d closed the cab door after me that night and the driver pulled away from the curb that it occurred to me: Henry had not tried to make me. Not once.

  So, after dinner a few days later, I seduced him.

  On the elevator up to his place, I wanted him so much I thought I was going to detonate. The wanting was like a noose around my neck. But I was cool. And remained so through both sides of the Parker with Strings cassette we’d picked up from a street vendor in the Village. I was wearing the world’s shortest suede skirt, absolutely sure I was sending out telegrams of sexual funk, and pretty sure he was answering the door. He put on the smokiest ballads in the house, and while I sat eating a seckle pear, he took off his tie. Then, out of the blue, he asked me to dance with him!

  Which I did, for about sixty seconds, just long enough for the first extended kiss. And then I knocked him down.

  His mouth on my nipple sent chain lightning through me. As he rolled down my tights and began to stroke me I gripped him, scratched him, as if I were trying to mark him for my own. I came and came back again, came and came back again. I tore him out of his pants there in the lamplight and took him. We fucked on top of a Nat Hentoff essay. We did it standing up under a framed photo of the Birdland marquee. I couldn’t get enough of him, couldn’t feel enough of him inside me—thick, strange, hungry. And when he had no more to give me, when he was lost in his own frantic shivering, I opened my mouth, mercilessly and bit into him like a cannibal.

  CHAPTER 7

  Trinkle tinkle

  I had two lovers. Two men do not a slut make. But, still and all, two ain’t one.

  Aubrey thought it was funny.