by Ward Just
The CD ended with "I'll Get By" and Thomas heard the rafters creak once again—in protest, he believed.
He pushed his plate away, the steak uneaten. Thomas thought of putting something else on the player, then decided not to. He was content at the table in the silence of evening, candles guttering. He absently rubbed his foot, still sore from the misadventure in the storm. His good fortune could not be said to be hard-earned, more a winning lottery ticket, a stroke of luck similar to Bernhard Sindelar's discovery of outsourced mercenaries. Bernhard always had good luck. Russ didn't. Florette had had good luck until the very end of her life. Thomas thought he had always been very lucky until recently. Billie Holiday had terrible luck, though sometimes you had to suspend the rules when appraising artists luck. The jazz business did not encourage fair weather. Self-consciousness was part of the routine and luck was not the residue of design or anything else. The job took a terrible physical toll with the usual consequences. Jazz musicians were night creatures, natural prey.
Thomas regretted never hearing Billie Holiday in person. He had heard Sarah Vaughan and Carmen McRae many times and Mabel Mercer once. Mabel Mercer sang at a club on Third Avenue and one night, flush from the sale of a portrait, he had taken Karen to see her. The club was dark, each table with its own candle and vase with a single rose. They decided to have dinner because the club was nearly empty and it would seem as if they were being granted a private performance. When she finished her set, Miss Mercer made one bow to the house and one bow to her pianist and stepped off the platform. She passed their table, her bearing as composed as a queen's. She strolled on to the rear of the club, where a much older man was waiting in a banquette. He was very tall and slender, immaculate in black tie. When she approached he rose to kiss her on both cheeks. They held each other's elbows a moment, so happy to be together again. When they were seated he lifted a bottle of champagne from its bucket and slowly poured two glasses. They saluted each other and fell into an animated conversation punctuated by soft laughter. They were telling private stories, narratives that would be meaningless to strangers. Thomas tried to pay attention to Karen but his eyes kept straying to the banquette tête-à-tête. Their poise and good humor suggested to him that age would have superb rewards, though when he proposed that thought to Karen she rolled her eyes. While he and Karen talked, Thomas made a pencil sketch of Mabel Mercer and her black-tied gentleman, both of them looking—he supposed the word was continental, in any case an atmosphere of the fading old world, characters from a novel by Schnitzler or Fontane, people imprisoned by history and glad of it. They were their own jailers and their own judge and jury. When he retailed that thought to Karen she did not roll her eyes but laughed and laughed and at last leaned across the table and kissed him.
Thomas remembered now that it was not too long after that night that he began to think about Europe as a destination, and he wondered even then if he was in pursuit of something that had been lost or something he had never known. Was the attraction the old or the new? Alone in the stillness of his house, surrounded by memories, he recalled Mabel Mercer and her gentleman friend with absolute clarity. He remembered Karen, too, moving her chair close to his and looking over his shoulder, watching him sketch on a cocktail napkin.
She said, Can I have it?
He said, Of course.
A souvenir, she said. I want to remember this evening, she added with a wisp of a smile, tucking the napkin into her purse. Why is that?
I don't think we'll have many more like it, she said.
We'll come again, he said.
But it won't be the same, she said.
Why not?
She laughed and said, History doesn't repeat itself.
He ordered a bottle of champagne, both of them silent while the waiter popped the cork, poured, and with great deliberation settled the bottle in an ice-filled bucket. And a few minutes after that, Mabel Mercer mounted the stage again, nodded at her accompanist, and waited for the lights to dim. Then she closed her eyes and flew into "Mountain Greenery."
Karen's instincts were sound. They never again went to the jazz club on Third Avenue, and not long after that Thomas was on the boat to France. He recalled with a start that he had disembarked at Le Havre. He had no memory of the city then and no memory of whether he had stayed the night or pressed on to Paris. Nothing about his most recent visit had reminded him of his earlier journey. It was as if he were seeing it for the first time. Antoine had asked him if he knew Le Havre, and he had said no without hesitation. How strange was that? How encouraging.
Thomas pushed a button on the stereo and Billie Holiday was back on her sailboat in the moonlight, a voice filled with regret and desire; revenge would be the furthest thing from her mind. Successful revenge required the cramped discipline of an accountant and she preferred the unruly emotions of the spendthrift. She needed protection but there was none and so she sang. He threw a log on the fire and stood staring into the flames and then he threw another on for good measure. For what he was about to do Thomas needed fortification and so he poured a glass of calvados and listened to the song, true American blues, imitated everywhere in the world, never equaled. He wondered if there was anywhere in America now where you could hear the real thing. The Mississippi Delta of course, probably New Orleans, perhaps South Side Chicago. It would be a good thing if presidents were obligated to listen to the blues in the vast formality of the White House and a good thing also if they were to drink while listening. The blues would give them an idea of the limits of human ambition and the consequences of righteous action, an appreciation of grief and ecstasy and inscrutable providence and the certainty of betrayal, along with the imprecision of memory and often its loss altogether. Truth and falsehood were next of kin. That was what Lincoln knew.
Billie Holiday was singing parlando, one of the late songs when she had lost her voice and had only her nerve in reserve. Thomas threw the last of the calvados into the fire, where it flared orange. Next, delaying matters still further, he backed away and racked the billiard balls with the triangle. He stood with the long stick in his hand surveying the field. When with one violent thrust he broke, the eight ball fell into the side pocket and the cue ball in the corner. He took this as an omen; he had hoped for a coup and now he was twice scratched and the game not fairly begun. He laughed out loud, concluding that he had committed the billiards equivalent of original sin.
Thomas put away the long stick and poked the fire. Then he stepped slowly to the coat closet and reached inside for the cardboard tube he had taken with him from Le Havre, the drawing of Florette inside. But when he gently shook the tube the bastinado fell out first, and he remembered slipping it inside as an afterthought, an appalling souvenir of the afternoon in Antoine's loft. He put the bastinado in his pocket, removed the Canson paper with its glassine wrap, and brought it to fireside. Looking at it critically, he decided he had drawn too quickly but even so it was an accomplished piece. He did not know what Florette was thinking but he thought he could hear her voice, a whisper of encouragement. The orange firelight cast strange shadows and distorted things. He barely recognized the portrait as his own work. But he was not himself when he drew it. He weighed the Canson paper in his hands and with a sudden motion placed it on the flames and watched it smolder, then flare, burning from the inside out. In ninety seconds it was ashes. Thomas adjusted the fire screen and waited one minute more to assure himself that everything was secure. Then he drew the bastinado from his pocket and dropped it on the fire, where it disappeared into the ashes. The rubber gave off an unpleasant smell. The smell followed him across the room and up the stairs into his bedroom. He checked the elephants one by one and got into bed and the smell still lingered.
He could hear, but faintly, Billie Holiday's parlando downstairs. The melody was unfamiliar to him but above the singer's voice he could hear Prez Young's soaring saxophone and Teddy Wilson's evenhanded piano, so surely the piece was from the standard repertoire. Thomas was wide awake, his t
houghts tumbling, trying and failing to identify the song. Thinking hard about the future, he had an idea it was time to visit America.
Mr. Parlando
HIS FIRST MONTHS in America were marked by irresolution, a fate as familiar to him now as the drawn face in the mirror. He had found equilibrium, a fine balance that allowed him to live but allowed nothing more. His past life seemed to vanish bit by bit and the future was a blank slate, leaving the precipice of the moment. He did not know where he belonged or if he belonged anywhere. Thomas contrived a nickname for himself, Mr. Parlando, because he was talking his way through the song. In New York he stayed for a time with Russ Conlon, lunching with Russ at his midtown club, visiting galleries in the afternoon and going to the theater at night. More often than not he fell asleep during the third act, and when he awoke suddenly he was unable to remember acts one and two. Russ introduced him to attractive widows but the attractive widows seemed to have more troubles than he did. Every time they opened their mouths he expected a dead husband to pop out like a jumping jack; and his mouth was full also. When they asked him about Florette he avoided answering or answered falsely and that annoyed them because Russ had told them the score. Does he think we don't understand death, for heaven's sake? Thomas seemed to them one of those men who trusted no one, a man in hiding. One night at dinner the conversation turned to the uses of torture and peremptory detention of persons suspected of terrorism, and one of the widows had said, Whatever it takes. Thomas said, Where does it end? The widow said, It doesn't matter where it ends. What matters is that it stop. And if you have a better solution, please tell me what it is. Her eyes filled with tears and for a moment Thomas suspected that her husband had had offices in the twin towers. That was not true. But she had been nearby on the morning of September 11 and had seen the bodies tumbling from the heights of the buildings and she still had nightmares, terrible nightmares, and for that reason demanded action, the more severe the better. She said, There were many victims of nine-eleven and not only those who died. We deserve satisfaction, too.
You of all people should understand that, Thomas. Thomas said he understood, but he didn't, quite. You've seen them face to face, haven't you? Thomas said he had. They don't deserve to live, she said. He did not reply to that. What did they look like? Most ordinary, Thomas said.
The conversation moved along to something less contentious, dessert, coffee, the settling of the bill. The widows were sympathetic but frustrated and concluded Thomas was damaged beyond their repair; and they were not eager for nurse work in any case.
Thomas was scarcely more communicative with Russ. Mr. Parlando didn't know how he felt. He didn't feel. He had lost the rhyme and melody of feelings and meantime he existed on his precipice, mindful always that there were many people in the world much worse off than he. To the extent there was a bright side, that was it. Thomas believed he had made a mistake in Le Havre but he didn't know what it was. He imagined the mistake was some form of Lebenslüge. But what was the lie that allowed him to live? He wondered if the lie was his refusal to have blood on his hands. So the interrogation at Le Havre, too, was unresolved and marked by doubt.
After a fortnight in Russ's flat he took a suite in a downtown apartment hotel and began to sketch again but without conviction. He attempted a series of self-portraits but they were not successful, owing to his minimalist approach, five or six long looping strokes; he was not Matisse. His material was somewhere else. He had no idea where. Thomas thought that going to America was a mistake, as whims almost always were. Because you were born in a country didn't mean you had a connection to it. It was only a birthplace. The country was so foreign to him that it might as well have been on another planet. But here he was, and he decided at last that he should make an attempt at reconciliation. Thomas rented a car and drove west to Wisconsin, his apprehension growing with each mile. LaBarre was confounding, like visiting the abandoned set of a familiar film and finding that the characters you knew and loved had vanished. Mr. Rick and Miss Ilsa were long gone long with Ferrari and the piano player Dooley Wilson and the crazy Russian and all the others. The house he had grown up in had been demolished to make room for a two-story apartment house called Covington Court. The lawn at Covington Court was unmowed, the garbage cans upended in the street. Cats were round and about but the sidewalk was empty. Thomas stayed at a Best Western near the LaBarre Mall, wandering the streets for a day, arriving in late afternoon at the police station. Russ had told him that a high school classmate had become chief of police. Thomas wanted to buy the chief a drink and catch up on the news of the town but the desk sergeant told him that was impossible, Chief Phillips had taken his retirement five years before and moved to Florida for the tarpon. After a few minutes of aimless conversation the desk sergeant became suspicious. What did you say your name was? What are you doing here? The sergeant sat in a swivel chair behind heavy glass and spoke through a microphone. I don't remember any Dr. Railles. That name is not familiar to me at all. You better be on your way, the desk sergeant said.
And put that out.
No smoking in this facility.
Jesus, the sergeant said. Everyone knows that. Secondhand smoke. Biohazard.
Where are you from, anyway? France, Thomas said.
Well, the sergeant said, you better get back there, then.
Thomas left for Chicago the following morning, stopping in Milwaukee for lunch at the Pfister. He thought the bar looked the same but couldn't be sure. He had no trouble recalling the conversation with his father forty-five years before and the promise of a thousand dollars to ease his passage to New York. He ate a club sandwich and read the Milwaukee paper, filled with news of the war, two local boys killed in Fallujah, assailants unknown. He read every word of the account, then put the paper aside, wondering if he should visit his two portraits at the Milwaukee Art Museum. No, he thought, wait for Chicago. Thomas knew no one in Chicago but put up at the Drake in a room with a view of the gray lake. At dusk he stood at the window and looked at the water, flat as a billiards table. Not a painterly lake, he thought, because it lacked depth. The weather was fine and in the morning he strolled down Michigan Avenue to the Art Institute. When he inquired after his portrait, Young Woman in a Fur Hat, he was told it was not on display. At once Thomas expected the worst.
Deaccessioned?
No, the clerk said. In storage.
That's a shame, he said. I wanted to see it. I've come a long way. I've come all the way from Wisconsin. Are you a friend of the artist? I am the artist, Thomas said. Oh dear, the clerk said.
Thomas imagined the fur-hatted woman, a friend from Barcelona days, in a dark closet somewhere in the basement weeping bitter tears over her exile, the Spanish diaspora reaching even to an air-conditioned basement in Chicago. She was a high-spirited señorita who adored the Catalonian sunlight and often sunbathed on the balcony of her apartment overlooking the Ramblas. He had drawn her in a fur hat on the balcony on a chilly sunlit morning in January. Thomas took his time in the uncrowded rooms of the Art Institute, avoiding the room where Young Woman in a Fur Hat had hung. But when he came upon the room he could not resist a peek and was unhappy when he saw a de Kooning in its place. Thomas enjoyed himself in the soft light of the museum, revisiting many of the rooms and standing for minutes at a time before his old favorites. He was looking at the edges of canvases, defining the limits of the idea. There were many scenes from the south of France and from Aquitaine, too. He recognized many of the villages and rivers and mountains and the people who inhabited them, and inhabited them still. French visuals, human and topographical, had not changed in centuries. He paid serious attention to American artists but was always drawn back to the Europeans. It turned out that dead European impressionists were most companionable and the plump girl in the haystack reminded him of Florette.
Thomas returned to New York but after a month decided that equilibrium did not come easily in the city that never slept; even at five A.M. it did not have repose. He bought a car a
nd took trips out of the city, trying to find a suitable venue which, if asked, he would have been unable to define. In due course he settled in the state of Maine, attracted by the raw light and habitual fog. He rented a house on an island north of Portland, the house situated two miles from the village on a low, rocky bluff with a view of the sea. Ferry service to the mainland was infrequent but dependable. He rarely traveled to the mainland in any event. The house was small, two bedrooms up, one big room down, including the kitchen. Half the big room was given over to his easel and canvases. The ensemble reminded him of the studios he had rented in New York more than forty years before, except there was no carnival outside the windows. At night there were no sounds at all except the harbor foghorn and the occasional stutter of a fishing boat entering port or leaving it. At night the old house creaked, seemed to strain at its moorings, but these sounds were companionable, compatible with silence. In this uncomplicated zone of well-being Thomas had the idea that anything could occur, including the miraculous.
