by Dylan Landis
On the fifth night’s visit the banging barely begins when it stops. After a long moment of silence the telephone rings. Did Howard sprint to Sixth Avenue? Tina stumbles into the hall and answers.
It isn’t Howard. It’s Gordy. He says he is phoning from the neighbors’.
“I just called an ambulance,” says Gordy. “You better come down.”
Tina runs downstairs in her pajamas and socks. Rainey calls from her bedroom, “Don’t let him in.” From blocks away a siren begins its song.
Tina spots only her reflection in the glass of the front door and cups her hand to it, peering out. The bulb in the lantern has been dead for months. No Gordy, no Howard. She pulls open the heavy door, shivers, and scans the empty sidewalk. Darkness is on the block like a lid. Streetlamps are on a short distance away, and snow billows through clouds of light. Tina glances down.
Howard is a dark form on the stoop.
“Oh, baby,” she murmurs. Then she turns and calls, “Rainey.” Snowflakes whirl into the foyer. Tina shoves Gordy’s trumpet case down the stairs and unzips Howard’s parka. “Baby, wake up. Wake up for me.”
The siren howls distantly from the direction of Saint Vincent’s. Howard is no longer an asshole, no longer a teacher, no longer a lover. He is a man Tina has to save. Disobeying every rule she knows, she bolts back inside, losing critical seconds, and shouts, “Rainey!” Then she straddles Howard under the sifting snow, crosses her palms over the face of a black man on his T-shirt, and pumps and pumps. Howard lies inert. He must be kidding. It is one of his sick jokes, like when he slowly felt up one of the girl musicians right in front of her, smiling at Tina the whole time. The man on his shirt has to be a musician. There’s lettering under his face, but her arms and the darkness obscure it. She lunges forward, pinches Howard’s nose closed, and breathes hard into his mouth, twice.
Strange that they call it the kiss of life. She knows what it means to kiss Howard Royal, whose mouth, he told her, had muscles—a strong mouth. Embouchure, he called it. You feel it, baby? From the clarinet. But this is nothing like a kiss. This is all business.
She is just pumping again when Gordy comes from next door with a ridiculous pom-pom hat pulled low over his forehead and says, “Don’t stop.”
Tina would never stop. “I’m not stopping,” she says, panting. A few minutes in, she feels a rib break, a thick icicle. An ambulance wails around the corner and onto their block. Where is Rainey? Why does her own mouth taste of cigarettes? Tina keeps going, but she is sure that Howard has left her, the way he stares up past the cornice with disinterest, and she knows from her grandmother that the dead only come back as ghosts. Tina pumps. She pumps. She remembers that Howard smokes; she remembers the taste of his mouth. Rainey does not materialize. The ambulance sails to a silent stop outside their door, its red eye flaring.
Lights come on in two townhouses across the street.
Two EMT guys gently pull Tina back. The bigger one takes over pumping Howard’s heart, and the other takes Howard’s carotid pulse for a long time. “You tried,” he finally says. “You did good. I saw you. We’ll need some information.”
SATCHMO. The lettering on the T-shirt says SATCHMO.
Gordy sits on the snowy steps, bent, his forehead resting on Howard’s calf.
“Let his daughter say good-bye.” Tina runs up to Rainey’s bedroom and peels the top of her quilt down. “Rainey,” she says, “he can’t yell at you.” She can’t say dead. “He isn’t mad anymore. You better come down,” she says, and Rainey looks at her with the eyes of someone falling off a roof.
From the stoop, in the strobe of red light, Tina watches her. Howard is on a stretcher. Rainey touches his beard.
“I killed him,” she says, almost marveling.
Tina sees Rainey, barefoot, on the sidewalk in a delicate frost, and she feels the snow through her own thick socks. She sees Rainey press her cheek to Howard’s, and feels the stubble prick her own skin.
WHEN RAINEY CALLS THE clinic the next day, Tina’s looking at the plump, puckered cervix of a sixteen-year-old girl. She spins away on her stool and gets the sample IUD and dangles it by its string.
“Look how small,” she says.
“No way you’re sticking that in me,” says the girl.
The high school intern knocks and hands in a green message slip. “The lady said it couldn’t wait,” she says. “Sorry.”
No autopsy, says the slip.
“Just take care of me,” the girl says. She wears a silver band around one toe and has neatly painted her toenails white. Her vagina is pretty, a little purse. Tina wonders if male gyns get picky about their lovers’ vaginas, or if it all becomes a field of pink and hair. It is something she wishes she could ask Flynn, laughing, intimate, in the way that she wishes she could fuse with all of Rainey’s men.
“Let me make an appointment for this, too,” Tina says. “You’ll barely feel it.”
On the message slip, it says, Thank God.
“No thanks,” says the girl.
“I still have to make a referral,” says Tina. “I don’t do abortions.”
She has never said this before. She can get fired for saying it.
Of course there would be no autopsy; it was just a heart attack. But what if Howard had a congenital arrhythmia? If he did, sudden rage could short-circuit his heart so it quivered instead of pumped.
Tina sees it glossy and shivering, failing its true purpose.
Rainey could have this condition, too. Brugada Syndrome, maybe, or Long Q, one of those.
“You’re not paying attention,” says the girl. “You’re supposed to take care of me.”
Tina loves Rainey more than she loves anyone.
“I want to get on with my life,” says the girl.
Also, there is this.
Rainey could get tested to see if she has this grenade in her chest. If she does, she could live serenely. Have a placid marriage. Say om. Certainly don’t go plunging into cold water. Screw the Jersey Shore.
But if she has it, Rainey would know she could die at any time. She might hate Tina Dial for letting her lock Howard out, for being the messenger, something.
Tina’s not risking that. Four years ago she lost her grandmother. Rainey Royal she loves so much, she doesn’t get why God made them both girls.
She should say nothing. Let it be a regular heart attack.
“I don’t want another doctor,” says the girl. “I want you.”
In her mind’s eye Tina sees the fetus radiant and slick inside the girl, a second thrumming heart. It’s not First, do no harm, Tina thinks. It’s First, define harm.
HOWARD’S DOORKNOB IS COLD in Tina’s hand, and the hall is velvety black. She eases the door open.
His room still smells of him. She moves confidently to the bed in the dark and turns on a lamp.
Socks. Books. Records. T-shirts, inside out. He lived like a teenager, except the posters and album covers on his walls were signed and framed, and his name was on some of the albums. Piano: Howard Royal. No one has made his bed—Rainey stopped doing that a few years back. The bed’s an antique, with carved pineapples on the four posts, and he told Tina once that pineapples meant hospitality.
The room does not feel hospitable now.
Tina wants something Howard cared about. Something that feels like him in her hand, or triggers her olfactory lobe; or a photo—something Rainey won’t miss.
Not his nightstand drawers; she knows what’s there. His bureau, maybe. She scans the room in dim light. Between the windows, under stacks of paper that render it almost useless, stands a narrow desk.
Though she’s sure it’s full of sheet music and reeds and dried-up pens, she tugs gently on the long top drawer. It sticks. She yanks harder. The drawer shrieks. It sounds like a train braking.
Tina freezes. She waits for discovery. For a long moment she stands motionless at the desk and waits. Then she thinks, What the fuck am I doing? I need to look completely innocent. Gingerly, sh
e turns her back to the door and starts sifting through papers.
In about a minute the door opens.
“Hi,” says Tina. Slowly, she pivots. Her left hand bristles with papers, and she sets them on the desk. Show no weakness, she thinks. Without apology, she says, “I wanted something of his.”
“Uh-huh,” says Rainey. “I think you left something in his room you didn’t want me to find.”
Tina stares. This is going to be easier than she thought.
“Oh, please,” she says. “I wanted some little memento. Anything. I’ve known your father since I was a kid, and I barely had a father of my own.” Tina silently prays for forgiveness; she has a perfectly good father, he just wasn’t around.
“That’s all?” Rainey lifts her hair with all ten fingers as if massaging her thoughts. “Why didn’t you say?”
“I said it now. I thought it would sound funny if I came out and asked.”
Rainey slants a look at her. “It shouldn’t sound funny,” she says. “Why would it sound funny?”
Suddenly Tina is exhausted. She wants to collapse on the bed. She also knows that she must not ever, in Rainey’s presence, sit on Howard’s bed. “I practically grew up here. He was like my second dad,” she says, and this time she asks no forgiveness.
Rainey crosses her arms over her red silk bathrobe, stained below the waist. Over the years tiny rips have appeared in the sleeves, and though she sews beautifully, she has not mended them. The bathrobe is an old thing of her mother’s, and it touches Tina, the way Rainey can neither give it up nor tend it. “Look me in the eye,” says Rainey.
Tina says, “I am looking you in the eye,” but it’s a lie. She adjusts her gaze.
What does a person need to know about a father? John Dial pages her at work, tells her the facts of his life. It was just a little blood, baby. A man can cough up a little blood, and it don’t mean nothing. John Dial requires an X-ray, which he refuses to get, and cash, which she does not have. She remembers riding on his shoulders when she was little and now she can’t spare a few bucks for the OTB.
The tip of a strand of hair finds its way into Rainey’s mouth.
“Okay, here goes,” she finally says, and Tina stops breathing. “I’m going to give you something special of his. And it’s going to kill me to do it. I want you to know that. Wait here.” She leaves the room, her red robe fading into the dark hallway. Tina looks longingly at the bed.
Rainey comes back with her palm extended.
The watch is silver in color, with a worn brown leather band whose cracks are as meaningful and impenetrable to Tina as the creases on Howard’s palm. Its face, silvery-white and generous, says HAMILTON. Tina stops herself from mouthing the word. Her heart starts ticking. She had not known until this moment that the watch was what she sought.
She says, surprising herself, “I don’t think you should give me that.”
“Why not?”
Tina’s wrist feels naked already, though she is wearing Paul’s watch from ten years back. It dawns on her now that she will have to take Howard’s watch off to shower. “Because you’ll miss it,” she says. Because I’m going to wear it every second of every day, and you’ll always wonder.
“I know,” says Rainey. “I’ll miss it the rest of my life.”
Tina closes her fingers around the watch and inhales deeply, involuntarily, sighing on the exhale—almost a shudder, as if she had shot up from the bottom of a pool.
She feels Rainey watching her closely.
Rainey says softly, “Teen? I think you should get out of my father’s room.”
“Absolutely,” Tina says.
THE CLARINET HAD KEYS that looked like sterling but weren’t and bits of cork inside where the parts met. It didn’t seem to Tina there should be cork in a musical instrument any more than there should be Styrofoam in a human body.
“Listen.” Howard had been lying on the bed with his head on her thigh, and after she struggled with the fingering for a while—irritated by the tiny vibrations the clarinet sent through her lower teeth—he sat up and took the instrument from her. He played something that was like a scale but short, fewer than eight notes. She thought it might be sharps on the way up, the music climbing a crooked ladder, and then flats on the way down, a kind of sad skidding. Howard could have handed her a tuba, and she would have followed his instructions if it meant sitting on his bed like this, looking at his upside-down face.
“You’re bored,” he said. “Don’t be bored. A scale isn’t always major notes. It can be minor, melodic minor, harmonic minor, chromatic—what you just heard.”
“I don’t know what I heard,” said Tina. “I don’t have an ear.”
“You’re right, you don’t,” said Howard, beaming at her. “If I told you the difference between this”—he put the clarinet to his mouth again and played a note— “and this”—he played virtually the same note—“was of the utmost urgency, would you believe me?”
“I guess,” said Tina guardedly. “I don’t know. They sound the same.”
He set the clarinet between them on his rumpled sheet and took her hand. Her nails were jagged and had peeling pink polish on them, and his were large and clean and shapely. Rainey kept them filed. “If I told you,” he said, rubbing her forefinger and then her middle finger, “that the difference between this knucklebone and that knucklebone was of the utmost urgency, would you believe me?”
“Yes,” she said. “If you’re going to be a doctor, right?”
“It’s the same thing,” he said. “Notes and knucklebones.”
“I’ll still never be any good.”
“Then be disciplined.”
There was weather in his eyes, and in his beard. “I am disciplined,” she said. “I’m very disciplined. Can we go to bed now?”
“Ten more times,” said Howard. “Show me the fingering ten more times.”
He gave her that clarinet, a good one. A gift should hurt, he said. She lied and told Rainey it was a loaner. Rainey didn’t care what it was—she hurled it into a Dumpster.
Tina told Howard she’d been mugged. “I live in Spanish Harlem,” she said, and hated herself for it. Sick with herself, not with him—with the way, after she said Spanish Harlem, she let him kiss her again.
She remembers these things the day of Howard’s burial. The cemetery is in Queens: damp air clinging to their faces, tamped-down snow crunching underfoot. Today is just family: Flynn, Leah, Gordy, a brother of Howard’s and a cluster of older cousins, shivering in dark coats after the minister leaves. Tina pretends she is just at the interment of her best friend’s father. None of this is for me.
The big jazz funeral, the real thing, is in three weeks at Saint John the Divine’s. Tina can’t take off twice. It’s killing her.
In her pocket she has a prayer card—one of her grandmother’s—to drop into Howard’s grave.
Rainey wears a vintage hat with a half veil across her face, and a thrift-store Victorian black blouse that Tina buttoned up the back for her that morning. She wears a floor-length black moiré skirt, another thrift-store find, that trails below her peacoat in the snow. Her hands are bare. “Here, babe,” says Tina. She takes off her own purple gloves.
“You look like an Edith Wharton novel,” says Leah, touching the high lacy collar of the blouse.
“I wasn’t in English that day.” Rainey leans into Flynn.
Tina watches Gordy look down at the head of the casket like a man who might jump in. The casket is black, so shiny she could almost lick it. She watches the relatives glancing toward their cars. She fingers the bent edge of her Saint Anthony card, and her head floats, as if the lining of her brain has been suctioned out. She is losing Howard to the ground, and she might be losing Rainey to Flynn. She doesn’t know what comfort to offer that Flynn isn’t already providing, his arm drawing Rainey in close.
“Why won’t you admit that I killed him?” Rainey says in a low voice.
Leah’s hand flutters to her mouth. Fl
ynn pulls Rainey in tighter. Tina doesn’t flicker. She says, “Because you didn’t.” She has been telling this half-truth all week. She reaches out and recalibrates Rainey’s veil. “Because he had a bad heart; because it was going to happen anyway.” She may never get to the next part—Listen, you ought to get tested. Something could set you off, too.
Leah peels her hand off her mouth, staring. After a moment she walks to the mound of dirt, pulls back the tarp, and turns to them holding a shovel. How did she know it was there, Tina thinks, and then, she’s going to bury him herself. Leah says, “Rainey?”
“You’ve lost it,” says Tina. “Put that away.”
“Sweetie?” says Rainey, peering at the shovel.
“I want—” says Leah. She seems to get stuck there. Everyone is looking at her now, this red-haired girl standing in a cemetery like she plans to move that whole pile of dirt wearing cute boots and a corduroy miniskirt. Gordy’s now inches from the edge of the grave. “I want—”
Tina’s tempted to wrestle her for the shovel.
“I want to buy a tapestry.” It comes out as one polysyllabic word. “Remember? You said my walls were too bare? I want one now.”
Gravestones rise in every direction away from them regular as the Green Stamps Tina’s grandmother used to paste into those books. Not far off a stone angel guards a crypt, and his plumage curves and dips in their direction.
“A tapestry,” says Rainey. She nods at the shovel. “What about that?”
Leah looks down at what she’s holding. “Right.” Tina sees her trembling, or shuddering, she isn’t sure which. “At a Jewish funeral, you’d take one shovel of dirt and …” She lifts her chin toward the grave. “For closure,” she says.
Rainey wraps her arms around herself. “That sounds unbearable.”
But Tina likes it. She thinks of her grandmother’s funeral, of Rainey hesitating and then bending to kiss the granite forehead.
“I think it sounds like you,” says Flynn. Tina stares at his gloved hand on Rainey’s shoulder and feels the pressure through her own coat. And it’s not just Flynn, she realizes. It’s every man who belongs to Rainey. She will always feel their hands on her.
