Under the Visible Life

by Kim Echlin

  She was doing it all.

  Back in Montreal, Jean heard the new licks I’d learned from Katherine. He winked, said, Been playing Little Burgundy?

  His hair was longer and he tied it back now at the bottom of his neck. He said, I’ve got a gig for us to play the Esquire Club on Monday nights.

  I said, I can do that. I played the Village Gate in New York, and I have another gig there next month.

  That stopped his ironic winking. He said, Come for coffee, I want to hear all about it.

  I acquired one of the first Minimoog Ds because it was portable and I liked Sun Ra. Monique and I had parties, made cheap soups and saffron vegetable biryani. Jean always arrived with his double bass and stayed to the end and smoked and drank a lot and wanted me to play with him which was fine with me. One night an actor tried to stay. He said to me, I think I am falling in love. I said, You’re drunk. Help me clean up.

  I gave him a broom. I was picking up all the dishes and empty bottles and the place smelled of spilled beer and smoke and Jean was sitting in the kitchen with tea trying to stay awake. I told him to go home too, but he said, I’m not leaving you alone with that guy. By the time I finished the dishes the actor had wandered down the hall and passed out in my bed and I looked at him and thought, I can’t move him, so I went back to sleep on the couch but Jean was sleeping there. I put a coat over him and he stirred and took my hand and said, Mahsa, come here. I said, Go back to sleep. You’re my teacher. I figured he would not remember in the morning. He slept with a lot of students, but I was the one he played regular gigs with. Young men were drawn to me here and this was a novelty. Everyone was experimenting with each other and there was no one to stop me and it felt good to be desired. When boys flirted with me, I always thought about Kamal. I wished I could go to Karachi, stay for an hour or so, then come back. Monique was working at the Centaur Theatre. Creeps had opened and she was writing her own play called Simone et Jean-Paul for the Rideau Vert. It began with Simone de Beauvoir earning a second in her philosophy agrégation exam because the committee downstage secretly decided to give first prize to Sartre. They said a man needed it more for his career. Simone walked toward the audience and stage-whispered: Man is condemned to freedom and woman is condemned to be second. Marriage is a worn-out patriarchal oppression, a three-legged race.

  I did not see any subtlety in Monique’s writing but she said that it was not the time for subtlety. The women in the audience laughed and stomped. Monique said, Do the music for my next play, so I began to design stage music. I learned what the synthesizer could do and played and recited Arabic poetry at home for our parties while everyone smoked dope. Jean jumped up, said, Now I understand Persian, and danced with someone’s scarf. He got a recording gig for us with Metamusic. He played double bass and produced. It was my first recording since Abbu’s little 45. We started with me reciting from Ulayya bint al-Mahdi, whose brother forbade her to say the names of her slave-lovers in her songs.

  I held back the name of my love, repeating it to myself.

  I long for an empty space to call out the name of my love.

  We ordered one hundred cassette tapes, gave them to friends, left them at record stores, sent them to radio stations. I mailed one to Katherine. She mailed back a new set list for the summer and said she was juggling too much, that I should recite poetry in New York too, signed off, Peace, baby. I played once a month with Katherine at the Village Gate and I slept on her floor. Jimmie started getting sent home from school and once she smashed a cup in the sink and sat down and cried at the kitchen table. I looked at her kids and they looked at me and finally Katherine said, Jimmie, what the hell are we going to do? He was too worried to say anything and then Katherine popped her head up as if nothing had happened and said, Let’s teach Mahsa to skate!

  So we went to Central Park and rented ice skates at the Wollman Rink and I tried skating for the first time. Dexter and Bea held me up while I shuffled on those absurd little blades. I liked sledding better. Jimmie was sullen and sat on a bench. Katherine said, I don’t know what gets into him. Ever since the move. I guess he thought T might live with us. I got to keep him out of bad stuff.

  I let Jimmie play on my Minimoog and we jammed. He had a great sense of rhythm, like Katherine. I cut my hair myself and I got Jimmie to hold the mirror. I cut it like Mick Jagger but I left it long enough that I could wear it up when I wore my sari. Now I had two looks. Downstairs there had been a benefit for Timothy Leary and everyone came to the Village Gate and I was happy to be playing there. I loved those New York weekends and arriving at the Port Authority Bus Terminal and my first smell of bagel and exhaust. Katherine said, I’m going to get us a recording gig for two pianos. I’ll send you the charts.

  KATHERINE

  Jimmie asked, Are there snake charmers?

  Dexter kicked him, said, That’s India.

  Mahsa laughed, said, I have seen snake charmers on the beach at home. They keep them in big baskets.

  I was coming in after playing the ballet classes and Dexter was helping Mahsa cook, rice and chicken with coriander that she grew at home and brought in her backpack.

  Are they poisonous?

  They’re cobras, dummy.

  Do they really hypnotize them?

  Mahsa said, My uncle told me they sew the mouth almost shut to let only the tongue dart out. The venom comes from the jaws. People think they are dangerous but they are not.

  Bea said, Sew their mouths?

  Yes, it is very cruel.

  We all felt satisfied with this behind-the-scenes information. I loved those years with Mahsa when she stayed with us on the weekends. Growing up, the kids on my street were boys and I had always played with men in bands. Then Mahsa came along and she had talent and liked my kids and she helped. She admired me. I could be myself with her. I never had a best friend that wasn’t T until I found Mahsa.

  We went with the kids to see George Harrison and Ravi Shankar at the Bangladesh concert in Madison Square Garden. When I took the kids home to Hamilton for a week Mahsa sat in for me with a trio. Don’t you steal my gig, I said and she laughed. She studied on the kitchen table and I was curious about her books and she showed me what she was doing, music history and harmony and composition and I wished I had studied more too but she said, You could be teaching this, to make me feel good.

  When the kids were asleep, we sat around and talked late at night.

  Why didn’t you stay with T?

  It didn’t work, with him on the road and me home. Once I threw his clothes out the window in a paper bag. He was mad as hell.

  Do you miss him?

  I see him enough. He’s still the kids’ father and I’m still in love with him. We’re like loons that separate in the winter but come back every year to the same nesting lake. If the partner shows up, they get back together again. That’s T ’n me, we travel alone. What about you?

  I fell in love in Karachi but I was too young and I wanted to be free. What is a loon?

  I loved those days and nights with Mahsa. She cooked. In every way.

  But I wanted a recording gig. That was why I moved here. I was a pain. I kept leaving messages for Marian, acting like a kid. Can I play yet, can I play yet? Then one day she said, Listen, I have four musicians, Mary Osborne and Vi Redd and Lynn Milano and Dottie Dodgion. I’ve got the two gold pianos. Come to our rehearsal tomorrow and if it works, we record next week.

  I placed the receiver back in the cradle and saw its plastic shine and the black numbers on white discs. I looked up and the room was brighter. I heard sirens down the avenue. Someone was hurt or dying inside one of those ambulances and I was getting a break. I was going to play with Mary Osborne, that gifted guitarist who moved to Bakersfield where her husband worked. I was going to play with saxophonist Vi Redd, who’d done ten weeks at Ronnie Scott’s in London but hadn’t played in public for a decade. I was going to play with Dottie Dodgion, legendary drummer. Jimmie’s forgotten homework was scattered on the floor and h
e would be all right, and Bea needed a new leotard and I’d find a way to pay for one because I was getting a break. There was a package of pasta and half a box of cereal in the cupboards and four bananas and three apples and a bag of potatoes and onions but it was going to work out. I was getting a break. I looked out the window and New York was the best place in the world to be, right here, right now. My first recording. My turn. Dirty dishes. City-streak grime on the windows. Me too excited to breathe, and who could I tell?

  T was in town, of course. Everyone was playing New York. He played the Studio Rivbea. I was jealous of that. He played Stanley’s at 12th Street and the Annex. He was part of the loft scene and they were playing all night and smoking and shooting up and the music was very, very free. I heard lots about him. He was pushing it out and ESP records offered him a contract. There was another baby somewhere. One night I was playing the Surf Maid for a band whose pianist was in prison and I looked up and saw T standing shadowed in the doorway. I felt that same old flip inside and I thought, Damn!

  I finished my set but when I looked out again he was gone. Sunday night he was at the Tin Palace. I listened and I saw him after and I said, Let’s figure this out. The kids miss you.

  He said, Figure out what?

  So I stopped talking about what he was not going to talk about and took him home. I took him to bed and we made love. I missed him and I missed sex. We smoked cigarettes and fell asleep and an hour later at dawn the kids sensed him and woke up, jumped on him, Daddy’s here! and everyone was laughing. They didn’t want to go to school that day but he said, Ya gotta go, I’ll walk with you and meet you after, and Jimmie stayed in school that day, and T came home to me and that felt right too.

  We made love and slept and woke up in each other’s arms all morning. I loved the salt-and-smoke smell of him, the feel of his skin on mine, saw my burnish against his blue, thought, What the hell does it matter? And then I was thinking about our matter-of-fact Baby Bea at school. I told T that she spent too much time alone, and when I asked why she said, Jimmie and Dexter are lighter than I am, it’s easier for them to get friends. My children often surprised me, but not so often sad-surprised me like that. It felt good to share it all with T.

  I played hooky from whatever the hell I was supposed to be doing. I told him that I felt like the world was lost when he wasn’t there, which was true in that moment but not in others, and he said, My world’s here, babe, with you, which was also part-time true.

  He went out and brought food home from a deli and he was not high when he got back. I thought, This is how it could be if I didn’t have to do every damn thing myself.

  I said, I saw you in the doorway at the Surf Maid.

  He laughed and said, Babe, you never did miss a thing. He lit a cigarette and with one eyebrow cocked up high the way he knew made me laugh, said, A woman plays better when she’s gettin’ some. I was checking in to see how bad you needed me.

  Well, from what I hear you’re getting a lot.

  He laughed again. Sometimes I play about what I don’t got and want. It’s always about you.

  I’ve made love with T ten thousand times. That day was one of the special times. I said, You’re not one of those guys who rolls over and falls asleep.

  He put his big hand on my thigh and I loved his eyes and he said, Babe, we never were like other people.

  I said to him, Jimmie needs you. Stay for a while. I’ve got my first recording gig. The kids need you around.

  But he left again the next night. There was a big hole in our crowded apartment and the kids missed him like crazy but I told them, Daddy’s on the road. He’ll come back, don’t you worry. I told myself that our love was one-of-a-kind because it was. I had to think about my next dollar, my next gig, keeping the kids going. I had songs I was writing. I had unsayable things to say. Play. Tell the truth. Keep going.

  T ’n me are room No. 9 and I like how I feel with him. I don’t care if it is obsessive. When I get so old that I start forgetting, I want my love for him to be the last thing I remember, my sweet, good, complicated beginning and end.

  So, I held on to that day in bed with T and I let him go. His love was somewhere out there for me. He could not stay and I was not going to be in his way and that was fine. Most of the time.

  Only Mary Osborne looked funky, in wide pants with enormous pink roses on them. The others dressed in tailored slacks and flats. I walked right by them when they were standing outside the recording studio on the sidewalk. They wore their hair short and tidy and could have been any middle-aged housewives in town up for an afternoon of shopping.

  Marian handed out our charts and I was aware of my wild permed hair and my black jeans and the white cotton shirt I wore everywhere because it worked for the clubs with big earrings but was suitable enough for my day jobs if I tied back my hair and took off the earrings. I never had time to go home and change. These women did nothing to make themselves look like personalities. But when they put lips to reeds and mouthpieces, fingers to strings, hands to drumsticks, they were some of the best musicians of their generation. I closed my eyes, and listened, and concentrated to keep up. I was feeling Dottie’s drums pulling me into her groove and at the break I said, That was great. You had me in a sweat out there.

  She laughed, said, I played so hard I’ll have mops for hands.

  I loved the feel of Dottie, smallish and round and cool on those drums behind me and that language coming out of her calm middle-aged-lady face. She said, It isn’t how much power you have. It’s where you put it.

  They knew what it was to play punishing four, five hours every night in a different place on their tours, and it made them good and they knew it. They’d done a lot of it during the war. But things changed for them after V-day. The club owners did not apologize when the men came in and threw their music all over the floor and sat down in their chairs. The club owners said, Shucks, ladies, the house band came back today. I told them they’d have a job when they got home.

  We don’t get notice?

  I can’t. The men wanna play.

  What about our money?

  Ah, c’mon, you understand. The boys are back from war.

  There was resistance to them everywhere. People were trying to recover from the shock of terrible things. The women pitched in on that too, helped rebuild and move on. Maybe they should have stood their ground, but I knew why it happened.

  Mary asked me, Where have you toured?

  Only in Ontario. I loved it but I was pregnant and I had to stop.

  They all laughed as if that were the funniest joke any woman in all time had ever told.

  Marian went out to get us some food and one of them said, She still seeing Morello?

  Nah. Now she’s not with either of them. But she still sees a lot of Jimmy and she still talks with Joe on the phone for hours.

  They looked at me and Dottie said, Marian’s been in love with two men for a decade. Then she goes and divorces her husband and breaks off from her lover. How’s that for love?

  I said, Sounds like a song.

  Everyone laughed. They were tight and professional and I learned a lot during those sessions, following the groove, taking my turn when it came.

  They went out for drinks before heading back to their homes in Rochester and California and Ohio. I replayed that recording session over and over in my head and practised their licks and thought about their stories of sidemen and husbands and lovers. I had asked at the table, What’s the most important thing?

  Marian said, Fanatical, unreasoning desire.

  I said, I meant to get a gig.

  She laughed and said, Oh well, being around. Knowing people. And once you get a gig, never miss it unless you’re dead. The only time I ever missed one was for a man.

  Dottie said, Morello.

  No one was supposed to say her lover’s name. Marian got annoyed and said, When I was with him I played freer, looser, more myself. I’m glad I broke the rule.

  She turned to me and sa
id with mock sternness, Never fall in love with two men. But if you do, you won’t have been able to help it.

  I wondered if Marian would bankroll a recording for me. I was ready. Here was this studio with two pianos waiting for Mahsa and me. Walking home I was thinking about those women who played so well and gossiped and got jealous and resisted what resisted them. Those women could really swing. And they had let me in.

  I passed a market and someone had thrown out two quarts of bruised tomatoes and I picked them up. A cheese vendor closing down for the day called out, What you doin’?

  I’m getting tomatoes for my kids’ dinner. You know what, I just made my first recording.

  What you play?

  Piano.

  Well good for you. Then he asked, What you cookin’? Spaghetti bolognese.

  Wait a minute.

  He reached down and then he tossed a package to me and said, For your kids. You might need some parmesan.

  A perfect day.

  MAHSA

  Crystal snowmelt flooded down the streets like a liquid chandelier, and I skipped class and walked up to the cross to look over the watery city, everything smelling of mist and earth. I had been away from Karachi for nearly two years and it was my second spring melt. I was planning to move to Katherine’s in the Village for the summer, she had lots of gigs lined up. Jean offered me my first tutoring job. He said, I want you to teach here. Finish your degree and study some more. See if you can swing it.

  We had regular gigs at the Esquire and we always played at home. Jean liked to smoke before we played, said he heard the low tones better when he did and he often asked me to go home with him but I always joked, You’re still my teacher, and I have someone else.

  He took my hand and said, I won’t be your teacher forever. Dump the other guy.

  Monique’s boyfriend moved in with us and I asked her, Do you want me to move out?

  She said, Non, pas du tout. I’d rather live with you. This way I get both.

  I liked the strangeness of wild animals that were free among us in Montreal, squirrels and raccoons and on the mountain little otters and sometimes mink and once a deer that stopped traffic on the road. At home, no animal was free, but captured and used. Uncle had written that Aunt missed me and to come back to Karachi for July, I surely needed a break from my studies, and he enclosed my ticket.