Under the Visible Life

by Kim Echlin

New York was a dump back then, bankrupt, prostitutes and sex parlours and peep-shows and porno theatres on Times Square. I said to the kids, Don’t look. I wanted to live in the Village where the jazz clubs were and the rent was still cheap.

  I found a two-bedroom in the building above the Surf Maid, across from the Village Vanguard. The neighbourhood was White Russian. I opened my wallet to count out first and last, and I took out the little scrap of paper from the nurse in Hamilton I had kept all those years. I dropped it down a New York drain. Wasn’t going to need that anymore. We had enough money to keep us for three months.

  The apartment was small and needed paint and a lot more, but I went back to the Y and got Bill and the U-Haul and the kids and we pushed open the door and I felt the kids’ eyes searching the high-ceilinged, run-down place, asking themselves, Home? It was dingy and dirty but at least now I had a key that fit a lock in New York. Rent-controlled. Well, it was no worse here than in Hamilton. Part of me wanted to sit in the corner and cry but I had a long way to go before I could do that so I said, Verrrrry eenteresting, from Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, which was a show Dexter liked.

  I felt him hesitate, and I was crossing my fingers because the other two always followed him, and inside I was saying, C’mon, c’mon. Then finally he said, You bet your sweet bippy.

  Jimmie said, Look that up in your Funk and Wagnalls.

  To make the boys laugh, Bea said, One ringy-dingy, two ringy-dingies. Hello and a most gracious afternoon! We don’t have to be fair, we’re the phone company!

  Bill laughed at them, said, Wish I could stay and help.

  I said, Me too, this faucet needs a plumber, but he didn’t know the song. Before you go, Bill, you gotta sit at our kitchen table with us.

  So Bill sat on the fifth chair and I ran down to the deli that was run by a morose and kindly Russian named Igor, and I told him I’d see him often and I found out he liked jazz and he said, Welcome to the neighbourhood.

  I took Ma’s envelope out of my purse and opened it. She had put in a hundred dollars in American bills, without a note. It was a lot of money, enough for a couple of extra months, and I stuffed it back in. Igor watched with interest. I bought my first jar of New York Maxwell House instant coffee and my first carton of Farmland Dairies New York milk and I was happy to come home to my own apartment and I gave the kids Cocoa Puffs for their first New York dinner at our kitchen table, the best place to be a family around.

  The second day, I signed up the kids at Public School No. 41, at 116 West 11th, two streets over, and we practised walking back and forth until they knew the way. I gave them each a few dollars of Ma’s American money. It was the first time Bea ever had her own and they examined the pictures of the American presidents and I said, They’re not coloured like ours. You watch whether you’ve got a one or a twenty, and everyone found this interesting and we stopped at shops along the way to buy things and I introduced them to Igor and we talked to other shop and deli owners and I memorized names. We read a sign behind one cash: Send a salami to your boy in the army. I said to the kids, That’s a New York rhyme. There were jokes about snow and I was trying to make a neighbourhood so we would not be alone.

  On the third night after scrubbing that apartment top to bottom with new blue Ajax, trying to plug up cockroach holes, hanging some batik on the walls, making dinner and reading to Baby Bea, I said to Dexter, I have to find work. I’m going to be downstairs in the Surf Maid and I’m counting on you to take care of things here. You lock the doors and don’t let anyone in.

  Even Daddy?

  Well he won’t show up tonight. He doesn’t know where we are yet. I’ll tell him tomorrow.

  Then I went downstairs to see Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. My hands were all red from the scrubbing. Damn. No one was playing piano and I walked right up on stage and joined in. I did not need my bandino hat anymore. I was plenty old at thirty. Blakey said, What do you think you’re doing?

  Well, I came to hear piano and there was no one playing so I thought I had better play some myself. I’m doing a recording with Marian McPartland’s new record company.

  I knew my chords. Art was known for hiring good musicians but he had never hired a woman.

  We’re here for ten nights, he said. I can’t pay you because you’re not in our contract. But I’ll give you the tips.

  A start. I was a jazzman. Not a single mother. Not a half-Chinese girl from Hamilton.

  I asked one of the musicians on the side why they called him Bu, and the guy laughed, said, That’s Buhaina, his Moslem name. All the cats knows that.

  Marian McPartland was playing the Carlyle Hotel. I went and talked to her and she said she could not do anything right away but to come over and see her studio on 65th Street with the two gold Steinways.

  Why did you bolt them together?

  She said, I didn’t, they came that way. Want to hear Halcyon’s first recording?

  It was Marian of course, with “Ambiance” and “Twilight World.” After we listened she asked, Have you been up to the Cookery? Mary Lou Williams is playing.

  Things were tight. I found thrown-out vegetables after the markets closed and made ratatouille. I stirred up tubs of polenta. I flavoured day-old bread with cinnamon. I told the kids that the favourite treat of a king is popcorn. I cobbled and juggled. I taught Dexter how to warm up spaghetti and Jimmie to make lunches and sweep. They did the laundry together at the launderette down the street on Saturday mornings and then they had a treat-lunch at the Hungarian, twenty-five-cent bowls of soup and Polish bread. Sometimes the owner, Tamás, felt flush and put a couple of schnitzels on their table too. I went to the Vanguard and dreamed about recording in that beautiful wood-lined triangular space. I went to the Columbia offices and tried to meet a record producer but the secretary said, Jazz? Why don’t you leave your demo? I did not have a demo. In the evenings the kids sat around the kitchen table, did homework together, like I used to do with Ma, and they read to each other from their favourite Book of Odd Events.

  What is the chance of getting injured from a falling frog? asked Jimmie.

  None, said logical Dexter.

  Wrong! said Jimmie with the authority of the printed word. This book says it is five percent.

  They laughed because for-five-percent-sure somewhere frogs were falling from the sky injuring someone. Bea liked the picture of the man pulling a fire truck with his teeth. She tied a leash to a chair (she was always asking for a puppy) and tried to pull her brothers with her teeth. Every week they switched chores except Bea was still not allowed to use the stove though she did when she thought no one was looking. Sundays we went to Central Park no matter the weather. Dexter wanted to know where the ducks went in the winter. I said they went south like Hamilton ducks. But King Jimmie said in his newly acquired New York accent, Don’t worry, they go inna duck barn at the zoo. Ducks get treated pretty good in this town.

  Getting enough money to keep us in food and clothes exhausted me. I couldn’t get out as much as I needed to and there were nights when I felt like breaking all our dishes I was so frustrated. Those nights I’d get them to bed and lay out my staff paper and start writing again. I found a regular sitter for Sunday nights to have a night out myself and I always went to Paul Pines’s Tin Palace on Bowery where I also wanted to play. I listened to Henry Threadgill and James Blood Ulmar, and sometimes I went across the street to the jams at Francis Hines’s loft. Paul Pines lived in a tarpaper shack on top of a building on Second Avenue. He took me to see it and I looked inside, said, You are even poorer than I am.

  I asked, Do you know anyone at the Vanguard?

  Of course he did.

  I want to record there.

  MAHSA

  The darkness of this northern place was lit on warm days with falling snow and on bitter days with rising columns of white exhaust that froze in the air. There were coloured lights wrapped around posts and buildings. I felt lonely watching the other students going home at Christmas after their first term
away. Everywhere were decorations, red Santas and deer who pulled an imaginary sleigh. One with a bright red nose was beloved by the children. What a strange and frightening idea, a big fat man climbing into your house through the long, dirty chimney, but here the children liked it. People carried full, live trees into their houses. This I had read about with the nuns when we studied British writers. One evening after work Monique and I bought the tiniest tree we could find and we took it back to my room and leaned it against a wall and she pulled shining silver streamers she called tinsel from her pocket and decorated it and said, Voila! Your first Christmas tree! She gave me a red hat to wear and said, See if you can find a sari to match it when you play. People drink a lot at Christmas. You’ll make lots of tips. Do you know any carols?

  The shopping places and the churches were visited more than usual and people were having parties with cheeses and toasts and many sweets, like holidays everywhere.

  I felt foreign and I remembered Abbu and the Beach Luxury at Christmas, and the music he taught me about kings and babies. I had especially liked one about a poor boy who was a drummer. I thought too of Mor and Eid in her village, holding her mother’s hand and watching the blood of the dying goat on the ground and the new clothes she bought for me on the holiday. When she wanted to know why they made the sacrifice in front of everyone in the middle of the village, her mother squeezed her hand hard and said, Sh!

  But why here?

  Her mother whispered in Pashto, Be quiet! Your great-grandfather slew his newborn daughter on this spot because he did not want a female heir. This is why all ritual slaughter in the village is here.

  I bought my bus ticket to New York City so I too had somewhere to go and because I had always wanted to hear American jazz.

  I walked from Times Square to the Village Gate on Bleecker Street. Everyone performed there, Earl Hines and Nina Simone and Bill Evans. The place was empty but I went upstairs anyway. A man with a beard and glasses was talking to some people who were pushing tables around. He said, We’re closed.

  Are you Art D’Lugoff?

  The same.

  Could I play here?

  He took a better look at me, my backpack. He gestured to the piano and I sat down, breathed, played. I started to pump it out. I had to get Art’s attention.

  How long you in town for?

  A couple of weeks.

  Got an agent?

  I shrugged.

  That was how I got my first gig in New York. He let me play warm-up for Larry Coryell for three nights. Later he told me he tried me because I surprised him. A lot of things happened in those days because of chance. People gave each other breaks. The atmosphere was very free. Everyone was playing each other’s music and I did too. Abbu used to say, Porcupine, the best musicians always steal from people who play better.

  I had asked him, Did you write “Kansas City”?

  He said, I don’t write. I got that song from Little Willie Littlefield. You could play it. That would be great, wouldn’t it? A half-Afghan, half-American Karachi girl who likes jazz and pahada playing “Kansas City” like she owns it. Isn’t that a world to live in, Porcupine? You play it.

  *

  The first set at the Gate I wore my sari like I did at Rockhead’s but it felt wrong. Everyone was talking and clinking their glasses and I don’t think one single person listened and I couldn’t get their attention. Art came by at the end and said, Fantastic! Some lies are like ointment, meant for healing. I guess he’d seen lots of people bomb. I had to make myself stay. I went into the bathroom and changed into my jeans, listened to Coryell, and later I went downstairs to hear Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers.

  That was the night I met Katherine.

  She wore a black hat and she had huge hands like a man and she was tall. When she sat at the piano she looked like a question mark. She had a thing with the drums and perfect rhythm, and listening to her playing with the Messengers gave me ideas. I needed to stop hiding behind my gimmicky girl-from-Pakistan routine. I went up to her when the band took a break and I told her I liked her playing and that I was playing upstairs for a couple of nights.

  I said, I heard a recording of you playing in the Mo Billson band.

  Her serious eyes studied mine, absorbing. She said, Your eyes are grey.

  I nodded.

  She asked, How’d you get to play upstairs?

  I asked Art if I could.

  A tall man carrying a sax case came up to her and she said to me, See you, and left the club with him. I went back to my room at the Y alone and felt the city humming outside and I made up a new set list. Coryell’s audience liked technical and complicated. I decided to play Mingus. Bud Powell. I lay in bed and wished I could fall into a dark crack. What if I was a zero in New York? What was I good for? Saint-Antoine joints. This was why men slouched around Times Square. They were so lonely they could die.

  The next night I went back to the Gate and wore jeans and a coral camisole and my hair loose like Katherine and hoop earrings like hers that I bought on the street. I ramped it up and the chatter dropped away and people listened. Magic.

  Art said, You got them tonight.

  Sunday night I saw Katherine listening from the doorway. Near the end of my set, I stood up and said to the crowd, Can you believe it? Katherine Goodnow is here. Come up and play.

  Everyone stopped talking and looked around, afraid to miss someone famous though they didn’t know who she was. Katherine was a real performer. She blinked the surprise out of her eyes and she walked right up like a star. I slid over and she sat down on the bench beside me and I played “Autumn Leaves” and she spread her large hands over the keys and started to riff, and we were listening to each other like crazy and we played some Brubeck and we started cutting a little, showing off. We were bumping elbows, we needed two pianos, and the audience was into us.

  Art said, They dug you two. Want to play next week?

  Of course we did.

  Katherine said to me, You got time for coffee?

  I had time for everything. My bed in the Y was the last place I wanted to be.

  The stars were faraway New York glitter that night, eighty-eight constellations, eighty-eight piano keys. We walked to the Surf Maid and listened for a while, and then she said, Let’s go to my place. I got kids. Come upstairs.

  Her apartment was all kitchen table. She threw her hat into the sink, slipped into the children’s bedroom, came out, asked, Where’re you from?

  She made instant coffee with hot water from the tap and we talked about music and Hamilton and Montreal. It was her first few months in New York. She said, I play anywhere they pay me. Where did you hear Mo Billson’s band?

  At the library at McGill. You were playing with a sax. It was great.

  I haven’t thought about that for years.

  I never heard the piece before. What’s it called?

  I wrote it. It’s called “Tell a Woman-Lie.” The sax is the father of my kids.

  I told her I had a lover in Karachi. She said, Well, lovers aren’t always around.

  She put on Coltrane’s “Crescent,” very low, which I had never heard, and that was the night that I knew how I wanted to live. With musicians. I would write songs. I would stay up all night with strangers and listen to music and earn a living in music and I would be part of the unfurling beauty of the world. I looked through the window at the streaky black-blue of the Village and the flashing neon outside, my hands cupped around a stained mug full of instant coffee. It was three in the morning and Katherine said, I gotta get some sleep. You can stay here if you don’t want to walk back to the Y.

  She showed me her double bed behind a curtain in the living room. She said, Do you want a T-shirt to sleep in? and handed me one from a laundry basket in the corner of the room.

  She said, Sometimes in the winter and sometimes in the fall, I slip between the sheets with nothing on at all.

  I reached for the shirt and she said, My ma used to say that when I was putting on my pyjama
s.

  I brushed my teeth with my finger while she looked in again on her sleeping children and then got into bed beside me. She rolled over and said, We should play together again. Her breath lengthened and she was gone. That was how Katherine fell asleep. Like a penny in a fountain.

  Those cold New York Christmas weeks. I wandered around the Village. I wandered uptown. I walked in Central Park. I went out every night to listen to music. Katherine asked, You got anywhere to go for Christmas? and invited me to join them. I bought a game called Monopoly because a store clerk told me children here liked it and I bought oranges and chocolate because there were pictures of these things in a Christmas basket in the subway, and when I arrived Katherine had decorated a tiny tree in their apartment and Jimmie knocked it over but it was small and I took down a picture and tied it to the nail. I helped her make dinner, a turkey with bread and butter and celery and an apple inside. Katherine said, This bird cost me a fortune, thank goodness you brought dessert. T came in and he filled the rooms and his children were happy he was there and they tussled about who was sitting next to him. He went to Katherine and stood behind her and put his arms around her and said, Merry Christmas, babe, and it reminded me of how Mor and Abbu sometimes were all alone in a room in which they were not alone at all. I watched the children watching and I knew their feeling too, and I said to them, Give me your hands, I will teach you a Karachi love dance, and we made a ring around Katherine and T and ran around them while I sang the Beatles song, Love, love, love and after dinner we played Monopoly and at the end of the evening everyone said it was lucky that I came for their first New York Christmas and I said I was lucky to be with them for my first Christmas ever. The next day, I got Art to give Katherine and me a gig for February. I asked him, Two pianos?

  I can’t get another piano up there.

  I’ll bring something.

  Suit yourself.

  Katherine said, Great. I need to get work as a sideman and make some money. I need to get Bea new ballet slippers, she’s out of hers. How much is Art paying? You can stay here if you don’t mind the floor.