Love in the Years of Lunacy

by Mandy Sayer

  James glanced at the clock.

  Pearl, sensing that the mood of the party was going downhill at a cracking pace, asked her mother if there was any dessert.

  But Clara was on a roll now and waved away Pearl’s question, drunkenly declaring that the musicians from Sonny Clay’s band had also been diagnosed with venereal diseases.

  ‘Syphilis?’ murmured James.

  ‘It was there in the paper—in black and white.’

  James pulled on the cuffs of his sleeve and stood up. ‘I didn’t realise how late it is,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to get back to the camp.’

  ‘No!’ cried Pearl.

  ‘Good Lord, son—’ Clara waved her empty glass in the air ‘—we haven’t even served the tea.’

  James looked pained; it was obvious he wanted to flee.

  Aubrey suddenly burst into the parlour carrying a large rectangular box wrapped in gold paper, with a smaller one, covered in the same paper, balanced on top of it.

  ‘You can’t leave yet,’ he said, almost blocking James’s way. ‘The twins haven’t opened the rest of their presents!’

  He handed the smaller gift to Martin, who opened it to find a hand-tailored tweed suit, with a double-breasted jacket and silk lining.

  Aub handed the larger parcel to Pearl. ‘It’s from Mum and me.’

  Pearl put the present on the floor, kneeled, and tore back the wrapping to reveal a large cardboard box. Inside was a big black case in the shape of a thick question mark. Her heart was doing a fast tap dance in her chest as she flipped back the silver catches and opened the lid. Resting in recesses of plush red velvet was a gleaming saxophone.

  Her hands flew up to her face in shock. ‘It’s mine?’

  ‘Almost,’ said her father. ‘We took out a loan.’

  ‘Downpayment of five quid,’ said Clara.

  ‘Two bob a week,’ finished Aub, prodding the fire with an iron poker.

  ‘Better not get the sack now,’ joked Martin, putting the recording of Sonny Clay back into its sleeve.

  Pearl fitted the instrument together and held it out to James. ‘Here,’ she said, trying to cheer him up, to make him stay. ‘You get to play it first.’

  He waved her away. ‘It’s your birthday, Pearl.’

  ‘Then play for me,’ she implored him, but he shook his head and stood up.

  ‘Thank you for your hospitality,’ he said stiffly, looking at the carpet. ‘God bless.’ Then he strode down the hallway and out the front door.

  Pearl put down the sax and ran after him.

  About halfway up the block, she finally caught up and slapped him on the back. He stopped and turned to face her.

  They glared at one another. The street was empty except for some neighbours sticking black tar paper against their front windows in preparation for the night ahead.

  ‘Well?’ she said.

  He sighed and began walking again, cocking his head to indicate that she should walk with him. They strode up Victoria Street in silence. She could tell he was furious but she didn’t know how to begin to talk about it. They crossed William Street and came to the tram stop.

  ‘Hell, I don’t care about your mama,’ he said finally, ‘or goddamn Sonny Clay.’

  ‘What is it then?’ she asked, shivering in the wind.

  James closed his eyes, as if she’d asked a stupid question.

  At that moment a tram came clanging around the corner and pulled up. James jumped onto the running board and gave her a little salute. ‘Thursday morning. Ten o’clock,’ he ordered. ‘Botanic Gardens, by the roses.’ As the tram began rumbling down the hill, he shouted over the traffic, ‘And bring your sax.’

  5

  Pearl was so busy curling her hair, wanting to pretty herself up for James, that she lost track of time. After glancing at the clock—nine forty-five—she threw on her clothes, realising her stockings were sagging. When she gathered her bag and arrangements she noticed there was strawberry jam on one of her Goodman charts and then she couldn’t find her mouthpiece, which she eventually discovered when she slipped her foot into one of her black suede shoes.

  By the time she rushed up the path towards the rose garden, lugging her new saxophone, it was almost half past ten, and she was flustered and out of breath. From a distance of about twenty yards, Pearl saw James sitting cross-legged on the grass, hugging his knees. His eyes were closed and his face was tilted back to the sunshine, which highlighted the coppery colour of his skin. His hair seemed darker in the morning light. Catching her breath, Pearl stood watching him. Then, struck by a mischievous idea, she darted behind a weeping fig, opened her case, and quickly fitted her instrument together. Hiding behind the tree trunk, she began to play ‘Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea’. She was trying to imitate the way she’d heard him play at the Booker T. Washington Club, but found the tempo she’d begun with was too fast. During the second chorus she struggled to maintain it, then slowed down, fraction by fraction, until it was eased back into a medium bounce.

  She finished with a flourish, expecting him to applaud or whistle or perhaps even laugh, but when she peeked around the trunk she was surprised to see he’d vanished, and in his place on the lawn was a magpie. The magpie suddenly took wing, and for one crazy moment she imagined her solo had somehow transformed him into a bird and he’d flown away and out of her life forever. She looked across the rose garden to the iron gates, and back down a path that led to the water. There was no sign of him.

  ‘Lesson number one,’ a voice boomed.

  With a gasp, she looked up to see him directly above her, straddling a branch of the Moreton Bay fig. ‘Don’t ever be late for a lesson.’ His face looked cross in the leafy play of light and shadow.

  ‘Lesson number two: in order to play fast you gotta play slow. Real slow. Practise everything like it’s a ballad.’

  She shielded her face from the sun with her hand, confused. ‘I hate ballads.’

  ‘Play the tune again,’ he ordered. ‘This tempo.’ He began clicking his fingers at a ridiculously slow pace, so slow she could hear the honking of ferry horns and chirps of birds between the beats.

  After her first lesson with James, she was a bit shaky. She hadn’t expected him to be so stern and exacting. It was as if he became a different man when he was teaching, one who was abrupt and impatient. Still, they parted on good terms, with a furtive kiss and a hug behind the fig.

  Later that night, after playing at the Trocadero, she met up with him at the back of the Booker T. Washington Club and he smuggled her through the basement kitchen and up the stairs to the ground floor. He led Pearl into a walk-in linen press, where he turned on the light by pulling a string. He undressed her gently, sliding her woollen jacket off first, then undoing the mother-of-pearl buttons of her blouse one by one. He slipped down her brassiere straps, cupped her breasts and kissed them. She could smell the tart scent of starch and Sunlight soap and everything inside the press was white, except James. He rubbed the small of her back gingerly, as if she were wounded there, then he slid his hand between the waistband of her skirt and garter belt. That night she wasn’t wearing knickers—she hated the bite of elastic against her skin—and with time and a little probing his fingers found places that made her insides ripple. Everything was slow and rapturous and her legs grew so weak she thought her knees would buckle. She could hear the faint laughter of men. The sound of approaching footsteps. Short gasps for air that she realised were her own until everything swooned through her in a rush and she was biting into James’s shoulder to keep from shouting.

  Days later, James told Pearl that when he was out at the Granville base, unloading trucks and sweeping out offices, the imprint of her teeth was still there on his shoulder. When he went to bed at night on his straw-filled mattress, when he was bawled out by his white sergeant, when he was put on latrine duty for the third time that month, when he felt anxious or bored or just plain frustrated with the army, he’d raise his hand and finger the oval-shaped branding
and recall her salty taste.

  But it wasn’t all lust and longing between them. Sometimes, when he could secure a leave pass, they would catch the tram down to Bondi and picnic on the beach. James had never seen surf before and his first sighting of the huge rolling waves left him wide-eyed and speechless. There was nothing so powerful in Louisiana, New Orleans, or even along Brooklyn’s Rockaway Beach. Pearl tried to get him to come into the sea so she could teach him how to body surf. She wasn’t sure if he was afraid of the breakers or just plain modest about his own body, but the closest he came to swimming was allowing the water to lather around his bare brown feet. While she swam he often played with small children on the shore, building castles and digging tunnels. Once, she emerged from the breakers to find that a group of kids had buried him in sand right up to his neck and had crowned his head with a wreath of seaweed. The children were laughing and so was he, laughing with complete abandon, and she realised she’d never seen him so happy.

  Occasionally, they went to the movies, mostly musicals and comedies. His favourite films starred Laurel and Hardy, and the harder the two comedians hit one another, the clumsier the pratfall, the louder James laughed, until he looked as if he was doubled over in pain.

  Gradually, she learned more about his life back in America. His father was a white guy named Floyd, who’d been a cornet player and gambler. He’d run out on James’s mother when James had been only five. His mother picked soy beans on a farm to help make ends meet. Later, in grade school, at the suggestion of his teacher, he took up the tenor sax. It was a large instrument for a young boy, but he was the only kid in the class who was tall enough to hold it, let alone play it. By this time he was living with his mother’s sister, Aunty Bee. For a few years he studied with and performed in the school marching band. On Sundays he played with an ensemble at the Bogalusa First Baptist Church. At night, he’d sneak out of his room and go and jam with the old blues guys down in the High Yella juke joint, which was just a boatshed standing on crooked stilts over the river, selling bootleg corn liquor and pickled pig’s feet. After the juke joint was burned down by some white guys on the other side of the railway tracks, James kissed his aunt goodbye and hitchhiked with the drummer to New Orleans. There, he found a job on a riverboat. For nine months he played night after night on the stretch of the Mississippi River between New Orleans and Memphis. He could already sight read, and knew a lot of tunes. An old clarinettist patiently corrected James’s embouchure, and taught him intricate chord progressions. At fifteen, he hitchhiked to Kansas City and hung around the clubs there, sitting in with bands and jamming. Sometimes, he couldn’t cut the tempo and the older musicians laughed him off the stage, calling him White Boy and Yellow Butt.

  Humiliated, he was determined to improve. He began listening to records of Lester Young and Chu Berry over and over, for hours each day, practising in his rented single room every run and lick that burst from the gramophone. He lingered in the doorways of clubs, trying to figure out how Buster Smith could double the time on any tune he was playing.

  It was during those months that he felt a deep sense of urgency churning away inside him, as if he needed to double the tempo of the pace at which he lived; he drank black coffee with Benzedrine because it allowed him to keep playing, day and night, without sleep. His lips cracked and bled on hard new reeds; and his heart raced all the time now, a thunderstorm in his chest.

  A season passed, and by the time he returned to the jam sessions he’d once been laughed out of, much thinner and looking older than his years, he’d developed a lightning technique and could glide through chord changes that even Buster Smith was unable to follow. One night in a club he was spotted by the clarinettist Benny Goodman and was invited to join his tour. James hadn’t yet turned sixteen.

  And thinking of all this, about everything he’d told her, Pearl daydreamed about forming a band with James, playing the latest American jazz styles. She imagined herself composing music that astonished crowds and had them begging for more. She saw herself and James harmonising one another, attuning themselves to the rhythms of country roads. Of course, there was one small problem—the war—but she knew it couldn’t go on forever. It had been nearly three years since Britain had declared war on Germany. She was giving it another six months; she could wait that long. Anyway, she figured she’d need that much time to absorb the material he was teaching her, to become as good as he was.

  During the first few weeks of her apprenticeship, James had her practising only one thing: she had to play long tones on her instrument for four hours each day. This was to refine her breathing, pitch and timbre. As the sun moved across the sky, as shadows inched their way over the footpath and garden, she’d stand on her bedroom balcony, blowing one sustained note over and over, until the barking of dogs turned to howls and neighbours complained and she was banished to the basement air-raid shelter by her mother.

  By her sixth lesson in the gardens, when James thought she was ready, he asked her to play, in succession, all the major scales and their triads, which turned out to be a series of lurching rises and falls, a breathy ladder of awkward progressions. When she achieved the right tone, her fingering was inconsistent, and when the fingering was correct her embouchure faltered. The two techniques never seemed to unite and she grew frustrated.

  James instructed her again to merely practise minor, major and blues scales, with corresponding triads, in slow, long tones. It was monotonous work and sometimes her mind would drift from the next chordal progression in the scale to thoughts about him, their conversations, to the stories he’d told her as they strolled beneath palm trees or sipped milkshakes down at Circular Quay.

  There was one aspect of James that still perplexed her, however, and late one night, when they were playing cards in the Arabian Café, she decided to broach the subject.

  ‘How come, when we’re out, you don’t—you never . . .’ She was trying to sound casual but her voice came out all high and nervous. She took a deep breath. ‘How come you’ve stopped touching me? Not—not even my hand?’

  James frowned and rearranged his cards. The pianist was playing ‘My Blue Heaven’ with lots of flourishes and cadenzas, his wooden leg thumping in time against the floor.

  ‘Well?’ she prompted.

  James sighed and put his cards face down on the table. He fixed his eyes on her. His gaze was steady but his right eyebrow was twitching.

  ‘Honey, where I come from, no white girl’d invite a guy like me to her home—’specially not to meet her parents.’

  ‘Why not?’ she asked. ‘Why not just as a friend?’

  James’s eyes suddenly flared. ‘You know, my granddaddy got hanged from a tree in the Bogalusa city park?’

  She was shocked into silence. He began balling and releasing one fist against the table, as if he were warming up for a boxing match.

  Finally she asked him, ‘Why?’

  A drunk lurched out of the toilet and steadied himself against the piano.

  James sighed. He leaned across the table. ‘Because he whistled at a white girl who passed him on the street.’

  Pearl gaped at him. What he had just told her seemed impossible. What about the justice system? What about the police?

  James had a sour look on his face, as if he just swallowed something bitter. He took a sip of water, then held the glass with two hands and gazed into it intently. ‘Last time I toured the South,’ he said, ‘I was with Benny Goodman’s band. Me and the bass player, Herschel Evans, we were the only Negroes in the group. And every restaurant the band stopped at, me and Herschel always had to eat in the kitchen.’

  Pearl picked up her teacup and gulped at her wine. James’s voice remained low, but angry, almost menacing.

  ‘And forget about hotel rooms. No niggers allowed. Sometimes me and Herschel’d doss down with a local black family. A couple of times—in Georgia—we even slept backstage after the gig. And some nights, when the band pulled into a new town and the club owner realised there were
two niggers in the band, they’d cancel the booking but wouldn’t pay us.’

  She started to say something, to express her outrage and dismay, but he cut her off.

  ‘But the worst time,’ he continued, ‘was when the sheriff of some two-bit Texas town ran us offstage with a shotgun. We had to fight our way out of the hall and back to the railway station before he put a bullet in us both.’ His eyelids were half closed now, as if he was trying to shut out a flood of bad memories.

  Pearl hung her head, blushing at her own naivety. James had experienced more misery and fear in his life than she could have ever imagined, let alone endured. Losing his grandfather like that, and having been threatened so often himself . . . And she’d been thinking only about herself; about why he wouldn’t walk arm in arm with her down a city street, why he refused to kiss her in public.

  She reached across the table and rested her hand on his. ‘Sorry,’ she murmured. ‘I’m so sorry, James.’

  He didn’t reply, just slid his hand away and rummaged in his pocket. He pulled out a crumpled pound note and threw it on the table. ‘C’mon,’ he muttered. ‘Let’s get out of here.’

  Pearl never broached the subject again. He was a complicated man with the kind of history she’d never understand completely. Instead, they talked about music: mixolydian scales and perfect fourths.

  These lessons excited her more than a rollercoaster ride, especially when James put his arms around her from behind, placed his hands on hers and applied pressure to her fingers against the saxophone keys, demonstrating some particular technique, which turned into a kind of musical foreplay. Then they’d creep off to an isolated part of the gardens and make love behind a curtain of jasmine vines or on a bed of dewy ferns. And as his fingers traced paths around and inside her, all his talk about harmonics and embellishments and scales united into the one tingling sensation and coursed through her in a flood.