She let him lead her back among the crowd and followed close. Outside somewhere in the streets beyond Roseland a siren wailed. A drunk cried out in the illuminated night. Joe realized that he could not have heard these things unless the ballroom had gone completely silent. He opened his hand slowly against her back and felt her shoulder blade slide beneath his touch. She leaned closer and her skin moved under his hand. Her dress was cut low in back and he felt her smoothness. He pulled her closer and gripped her dress. The lights changed again. Joe watched the spotlights turn on with his eyes ablaze. When they had turned on fully he suddenly saw the band enter from the side and take the stage. He saw the night unfold slowly before him. The gleam of the instruments shining in his eyes. The Count’s raised arm slightly tilted toward the band. The fingers slightly touching in a snap held motionless in the air and the band’s brass flung upward against the satin backdrop. The fingers snapped and from every corner the room swung.
Joe pulled her closer into an embrace and they began to dance. He thought the swinging would subside but the band would not let go of it and they whirled him with it again and again. She fell into him fending away the sounds but the music blared and he saw her truly scared for the first time her head leaning into him seeking him out like something rushing away from a fire. He held on to her and the floor seemed to be spinning underneath them. In a second of calm he brushed the hair from her eyes and took her face in his hands and he kissed her on the forehead. She seemed surprised. She was trying to hang on to him.
The next thing Joe knew he was leading her off the dance floor. She was back against the wall. He stepped forward toward her, pressing her, and although they weren’t dancing they were still spinning. They were in the dark. There was no light here. She moved her head to the side trying to get away. She gripped his forearm as if to push him off her but he held it firm. She tried again to move her head away but he was coming closer. He could smell her. She was wearing a sweet languorous foreign perfume. She closed her eyes and leaned her head finally against the wall. Joe dropped his hands on either side of her ribs and he stared through the darkness into what he could see of her eyes. She didn’t say anything. He leaned into her against the wall and ran his tongue along the corner of her mouth. He pressed against her and his legs wanted to bend crookedly to the floor and collapse but somehow he held them straight. The music had swung them here and it went on blithely swinging and it occurred to him that this happy romantic rhythm would kill them both. The lights changed again and he could see her eyes.
We should stop, Joe, she said.
We should go someplace else. I know where.
And they left Roseland.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
It happens every night: the sound of cymbals reminds him that it is impossible to keep time.
The Count and the reflections of the Count on the instruments sway slightly when he lifts his hand. He turns in time to the beat and his image dances along the line of brass, so that although he is gracefully and confidently conducting his orchestra, he appears to be imprisoned inside the music.
He nods his head. The room swings.
Usually, his band is vibrant and unafraid, but tonight they are overtired and underrehearsed. He hears the inevitable imperfection in their playing almost as soon as they take the stage. A subtle shift in tempo, an awkward note. When the illusion that his ensemble operates as a single consciousness is broken, he feels a sadness that verges on desperation, a deep disappointment with humanity. But then as quickly as the trombones swerve direction or the trumpets lunge, he forgets his philosophical troubles.
His mind itself swings. Like a screen door his mother used to say. Like long hair on a lazy girl.
He is a perfectionist in his head but a pragmatist at heart. He has them, for a moment he holds them in his spell. He feels the room lighten, as if the people on the dance floor had levitated to the height of the chandeliers, bubbles in a glass of champagne. He has them and he feels that as long as there is music playing, it is possible to forgive the world.
It is 1936. There is much to forgive. But he is lucky, he is making his New York debut on Christmas Eve at the Roseland Ballroom.
Just then, as suddenly as he recaptures the flow, the band loses it, and he is thrown back to the beginning. He knows now that they will have a rough night. There are critics here. The reviews will be mediocre.
He notices a beautiful face in the crowd. A dangerous face. There is always one of those.
But by the time the articles go to press, he won’t care about the critics. He will have ridden the crashing waves of cymbals a thousand times, and he will have lost himself over and over again, perspiring so much that it will feel as if he had literally been tossed around in the ocean. And then, finally, he will have found a kind of safety. A safety in loss, a safety in losing. Losing control and keeping it, the essential mystery of swing.
The face dissolves and resurrects itself behind a column. There is a body, too. Always one of those.
•
Years later, he will remember this night not as a fiasco of missed opportunity or an evening of more than minor humiliation, but as one of the highlights of what will become an illustrious, a shimmering career. He will close his eyes and see a man’s hand pressed flat against a woman’s shoulder, guiding her to the dance floor. He will roll his eyes backwards and recall the insinuating angle of a cigarette. A necklace splintering light like the eyes of a madman. A river of bodies, gliding noiselessly through time.
He will remember the moments when his orchestra seemed to conjure itself, when it achieved the purity of a single mind. A mind in which many different voices conversed, argued, flirted, seduced, philosophized, all within the limits of one being. He will remember the drums, he will never forget the drums, and he will remember the faces, the unconditional love he felt for those faces. He will not remember the uneasy feeling of failure, the brush with oblivion, the premonition of unrequited life. He will only remember the memory.
Later, when they ask him about that first night at Roseland, he will lean back and he will close his eyes and he will say:
You should have seen us. You should have been there.
Joe
He took her to the apartment of a drummer he knew, someone who wouldn’t be home. He remembered where he kept the key. It was in a planter in the hallway. A dying plant opposite the elevator. His friend would be traveling. The apartment was dark and empty.
She said she didn’t believe that he would ever leave Pearl. He said he would. It would be very difficult, but he would. She said that tonight she would believe him. He said that he would take care of her. He said that she could trust him.
They were lying on the floor. She wouldn’t go into the bedroom. The light of a December morning came up cold and very white and her skin looked almost silver.
Later, she said: I didn’t think that the band was all that great.
Her head was resting on his chest and he looked down at her and smiled.
You’re impossible, he said.
No really, she said. They sounded off of their game.
I don’t know. I thought they were good, he said. But I might have been distracted.
Milo
One day Honor realized that he would not always need to live in this place, that he was getting better, that she had helped him. She took comfort in the fact that even when he seemed to be guiding her through the past, she must have been doing something to help him move toward the future.
Still, although he could walk again, Milo would never lie on his back. He would not give up his secret. Stories yes, but never his secret.
Tell me what happened, she said.
It’s just another story, he said.
It’s not just a story, she said. It’s you.
PART THREE
In the slaughterhouse of love,
Only the best are killed …
Don’t run away from this dying.
—RUMI
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
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It was almost funny. First Pearl told him with tears in her eyes and an optimistic yet resigned expression. Then Vivian told him the same thing, only with a terrified, stricken look on her face. He had two women depending on him more than ever and he could do nothing other than walk along the river with his hands in his pockets wondering how he could get on another liner not only to escape his predicament but more important, to make some money. He reassured himself by thinking that Pearl would probably not make it again this time and then he despised himself for having such a thought. And Vivian, she was not ready for this but perhaps it would settle the matter once and for all; he would have to be with her now. It had been weeks and he had still not spoken to Pearl about Vivian. But once Pearl saw that he and Vivian would be a family, he surmised, she would have some sympathy. Again he was disgusted with the way his mind worked. Why should Pearl care about his happiness? Why would he imagine that she wouldn’t be sickened by his betrayal and hate him for it? Of course she would not wish him and Vivian well. He was insane to hope for that. Worse, he was a terrible person for thinking of leaving her. Ever. But most of all now.
His mind swung. He was leading the beat in his head with the percussion of his heart. His head and his heart were no match for time. He had been swept up in the music and now the music had swept him aside. He was just someone in the midst of the music of history. History conducted by a bandleader. History, conducting life.
But what was so historical about his problem? It was a timeless dilemma, no specific circumstances had given rise to it, just romance and passion and stupidity. He didn’t care about seeing himself as important or unimportant, but suddenly it occurred to him that if there hadn’t been a Depression he wouldn’t have been playing on ships, if he hadn’t been playing on ships he wouldn’t have met Vivian on the dock, if he hadn’t met Vivian … But this was such shallow, faulty reasoning that he nearly laughed into the wind. No, his problem was simply his. Still, there was the music, the current of which had carried him here. And there was a moment in time that had given rise to that music, a moment and a music that had seemed so isolated from history. No one thought about the fact that swing music really started in Constantinople at a time of great cosmopolitanism and cultural exchange. No one thought that what seemed so American had come from an Armenian alchemist in seventeenth-century Turkey. Only Vivian was smart enough to think about something like that. Thinking about it now made him suspect that although his problems seemed exclusively his, perhaps they did go further back than he could imagine. What he didn’t consider was how far forward they might travel. That they might reverberate through time like the sound of cymbals across a dance hall, that he did not contemplate.
The wind stirred up the river. There were whitecaps today, streaks of white like dashes across the blue, making a moving poetry out on the water. He wondered what Vivian would have said about that. He thought about her, scared and burdened and feeling alone in the dim house with the heavy rugs. He thought about Pearl, hopeful for the sixth time. He thought about what a spectacular mess he had made. He thought that maybe finally he was going to have a child. Or two. What this kind of beginning would lead to he had no idea. What kind of person or people would thrive or wither from such an origin as this he had no idea. He couldn’t read the future. He felt ashamed at the way this unborn child’s life had begun and nevertheless proud that if his actions were going to ride on the waves of the future that they would ride in the form of life. Life, he figured, had been riding these waves for centuries and would always find some kind of rhythm. No, there was no way to hold on to time. He would just throw it up in the air like a smiling baby. He would swing it in his arms.
2005
I never liked him, Honor said.
He’s a prick, Milo said, but I feel for him. He doesn’t know any better.
He should.
She pushed some hair out of her face with the back of her hand.
This doesn’t sound like you. You’re usually so forgiving.
She had finished on his back and she was looking at nowhere. He sat up.
What is it? he said.
I don’t feel for him, she said. Something’s changed. I don’t feel like I have to forgive everyone. He should know better. He’s ruining lives, she said.
He’s not killing anyone, Milo said.
We don’t know that. And killing isn’t the only way to ruin lives.
No, but it’s a good one, he said.
He got down from the table and started to put on his shirt.
He was supposed to be moving out soon. He was walking. He was ready, they said. She was helping him find a place to live. He would need to stay nearby for a while to keep up his rehabilitation, so he could not go back yet to Maine. She was happy. He would stay close. They didn’t talk about it, but it was clear that they would stay close.
When he finished getting dressed and she was ready to go, he held the door for her and they walked down the hall together.
1969
When she was rummaging around the apartment she found the photograph. It was under the table on top of a pile of papers. Iris saw them looking up at her from a skewed angle as if they were watching her on the ceiling while they lay in bed. She knew the photograph would be there someplace because she had sent it to the photographer. She had sent it with a note that said: “Remember us?”
Now she had come to take other pictures away. She felt no qualms about taking them; she felt they were rightly hers. She thought of the pictures as a kind of shadow self, her ghostly twin. They represented an alternate life, what she might have been, not a photographer but a photograph. A subject, an object, an object of affection if there had not been the photographs. The photographs reflected her missing self, the negative that she felt herself to be. She saw them everywhere, scattered carelessly around the room. The old ones had been black and white but these were Kodachrome and infused with the melancholy yellows and reds of the era, the muted bleached-out colors of a city afternoon. A child on the subway looking up at an advertisement, her mother staring down at her, their bodies twisted both toward and away from each other. A group of children in the park, one persuading the others of something, a face gripped with determination and laced with contempt. A little boy lying down on the sidewalk looking skyward with a carefree arrogance. All children in every one of them, but none innocent, each individual. The artist had seen every one of her subjects as a person and had not shied away from the humor and terror just below the surface of their faces and lives. Iris glanced at them quickly, her ink and chemical siblings, and threw them into a shopping bag. She gathered contact sheets and rolls of film. She left the wedding photograph where it was. She left.
Out on the street with her vigilante shopping bag she felt watched, as if people would know what she was carrying, what she had done. Then, overeducated girl that she was, she thought how ironic that was, that she would feel herself watched, looked at, as if she herself were a picture. She had turned herself into a photograph! Perhaps that way she could get some attention! She smiled to herself and looked quickly to the side before crossing the street. It was warmer out than she had expected and her feet were swelling slightly in her shoes. She was getting blisters. But still she continued walking, afraid to stop, to lose momentum. It was a long walk home. She calculated: from Twelfth Street uptown, over seventy blocks, more than three miles. There was a manic energy to her movements, her legs scissoring exceptionally quickly, her head switching side to side to check for traffic at every crosswalk, strands of her hair flying as she propelled herself home. Home, where the baby would be, where Alex would not be, yet. Iris tried to construct a warm and welcoming feeling from the notion of home, but she had never actually experienced that. Even as a child, although home had been friendly and her parents doting in their way, home had never felt like a place where one could actually be understood. Her sense of not belonging, she later grew up to believe, was what everyone felt, and so she did not dwell on it, but of course it hurt
, it confused her, and then when there was an answer, or something to pin it all on, she clung to it. The bag was getting heavier.
She stopped. She put the bag down. It was a large lavender thick paper bag from Bergdorf Goodman with an image of black silhouetted shoppers parading at an angle up the side. Iris had saved it from the purchase of a new dress. A crocheted dress, very of-the-moment, something Alex would like and yet not fully appreciate. Certainly he would not appreciate the price. She rubbed her hand. The twisted paper handles of the bag had dug into her palm, creating new lines, a new future, she thought for a moment. Then, and this was the way her mind worked, she seemed to enter that new future and for an instant the past disappeared. She was standing on a street corner with an overstuffed Bergdorf’s bag at her feet, a breeze blowing over from Madison Square Park tangling up her hair, and she had no past. She saw herself as if in a black-and-white photograph taken from the window of a building nearby, seen from slightly above, a woman on the street, lost, or so it would appear, rubbing her hand, the wind coming from behind her, blowing her hair forward, she a silhouette, yet unlike the figures on her bag not parading but standing still, held in place by the wind and the force of forgetting, a person caught in time. She was too intelligent to not see herself but not wise enough to help herself.
A photograph, she thought suddenly, is like an ink and chemical memory in the mind of the subject being photographed. I am standing here, she thought, and a picture of me would be a picture of what I can imagine, as if the image itself were lifted from the mind of the woman being photographed. I should write an essay about that idea, she thought. And then she picked up the bag and kept walking.
1937
Joe and Pearl sat in the living room after dinner with the lamp on. Outside the winter night had long ago gone dark. He was studying and had his books piled up on the low coffee table, his feet up next to them, crossed and in socks. She was knitting and her fingers moved with furious intent, whipping around each other and sliding the needles through the yarn with a machinelike choreography and precision. He asked if she was making something for the baby. She said no that the yarn she was using was too rough. She was making him a scarf.
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