Viral

by Emily Mitchell

  She thinks it is time to go home.

  When he is away she keeps busy. She has lots of friends and acquaintances in New York. She dines out often and has her women friends over for bridge. She volunteers for the Urban League. They talk on the phone from wherever he is, out on the road. She says: Tell me what you can see out of your window. I can see the Seine, he says or, I can see the Nile. I can see Hyde Park corner. I can see that damn wall and all the barbed wire they’ve got to stop people getting from one side to the other. And the guard towers that they shoot people from.

  She decides to renovate the kitchen. Louis will be on tour for another couple of months, so she can get most of the work done before he returns. She decides on an ocean blue for all the cabinets. She tells the designer she wants the doors to curve: no corners, just a smooth undulating front. And she wants certain things built into the counter so they disappear, folding away when she doesn’t want to use them: a bread box, a can opener, cutting boards.

  When the room is done, she feels like she is on board a ship whenever she steps into it, because no space is wasted, there is no clutter or inefficiency. The feeling pleases her, and for a few days she finds herself drawn into it repeatedly just to admire its clean simplicity, to run her hands over its smooth new surfaces, to inhale the fading odor of fresh paint and varnish.

  Louis calls her from Amsterdam.

  “I will have to do another couple of nights at the end of this. Another week or maybe two on the road. You want to come out here and join me, honey? We could go to Nice for a while when it is all done.”

  She shakes her head insistently no, and it is only after a moment that she realizes that of course he can’t hear this gesture over the phone lines. She doesn’t want to go back to Europe. She has had enough of traveling.

  “You just come home as soon as you can,” she says.

  “I will. Just as soon as we’re done recording . . .”

  After they hang up, she goes down to the kitchen and opens the cabinets slowly, one after another. The next day she calls her designer in and begins picking out molded wallpaper for the front room and the hallways. Mirrored walls for the bathroom downstairs. She likes the idea that each room will have its own texture.

  “If I go blind,” she tells the designer, “I want to be able to tell where I am by touch.”

  • • •

  He comes home and the house is full of people. The grown-ups sit in the living room and drink cocktails. Louis takes his little niece on his knee and teaches her how to burp on purpose until her mother makes him stop. Or some afternoons he will stand out on their upstairs balcony and play his trumpet so that the sound carries up and down the block. The neighborhood kids know that this is the signal: there will be a movie in their den that night, cowboys and Indians. There will be popcorn and soda served by Lucille. Louis runs the projector and then sits among them in the big, sagging, leather armchair in the middle of the room. Sometimes he will show a reel of cartoons before the main film, just like at a real movie theater. At the end of the evening, all the children go home and the house is quiet and empty. They make their way upstairs to bed.

  From one of his trips, this one to California, he brings her a glass tumbler hand painted with sixteen positions from the Kama Sutra. Stick figures of a man and a woman engage in coitus from every angle that she has ever imagined, and a few she can honestly say she never has.

  “What do you think?” he asks, barely able to keep a straight face as he watches for her response.

  “I love it,” she says, her voice flat. “I love it so much that I may have to break it so I don’t have to share the privilege of seeing it with anybody else.”

  He puts it on the low bureau in the front hall and stands back to admire it, hands on his hips, hamming it up for her benefit.

  “Oh no,” she says. “Oh no. You aren’t going to keep that thing there, not with all the children we got coming and going through this house all the time. No way.”

  “They won’t know what it is. They won’t even notice it. Perhaps it will work its way into their unconscious minds and help them out, you know, when they get older . . .”

  “Well, that is thoughtful of you. But no way. You put that thing upstairs, somewhere out of sight.”

  “Okay,” he says slowly, turning to look at her. “Okay. I’ll make you a deal.”

  “What deal?”

  “That picture of you, the painting that crazy French man did, the one you’ve got stuck away up in the study where no one but me ever gets to admire it?”

  “I know the one you’re talking about.”

  “You let me bring that down here. Hang it in the living room. Where everyone can see how beautiful you are. And then I’ll move my pornographic liquor glass up to the study and put it on a back shelf where no one under the age of twenty-one is ever going to know it’s there.” He folds his arms across his chest, satisfied. “Deal?”

  “Okay. Deal. But with one more condition.”

  “What is it?”

  “You have to move that damn picture down here yourself if you want it on display so badly.”

  Sometimes a journalist or, more rarely, one of their guests (who is afterwards never ever invited back) will ask about the things that some of the younger musicians have started to say about him. It always begins the same way: People say that your music has become too popular. How do you respond to that? Or, You know, it has been said that your stage persona is too . . . friendly. Lucille particularly hates this one. What does that mean, “too friendly”? She knows what it means; she heard the comments in their original, uncut form. They say he is clownish, that his good humor lacks dignity, that it panders to white notions of what a black man should be.

  Louis always fixes the person with a direct look. What do you think? he asks. The answer is usually deafening silence. He never gets angry about the questions, or not so as anyone could tell. He leaves that to Lucille.

  “So let me get this straight,” she says after one of these occasions. “Before it was a problem for a black man to be too serious in public, and now it’s a problem for him to be too funny?”

  “That seems to be the size of it,” he says. They are sitting at either end of the breakfast table, drinking their morning coffee. The sun is coming through the gaps in the blinds making frets on the floor. She rises and comes over to him, taking his head in her hands and cradling it against her belly.

  “How does it feel to be a problem?” she asks quietly, speaking to the air around her as much as to him. Being a problem is a strange experience—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else . . .

  She isn’t with him when he has his first collapse. He is in the studios over in Manhattan and suddenly he feels lightheaded. Hot and cold waves undulate through his body, and he sits down, abruptly, then falls. He is rushed to the hospital.

  This is where she finds him, propped up in bed on a pile of white pillows looking pale but not frightened. She comes and sits beside him.

  “Baby . . .”

  “I’m all right,” he says.

  “You gave me such a scare.”

  “They say I need to take it easy for a while. No more touring. No more playing or recording for a while. Get some rest.”

  “Well, you better do what the doctor says.”

  “Yeah, I suppose I’d better. They say I might not be able to play like I used to.” He sighs and then looks down at his hands, which are lying on top of the sheet as though they don’t belong to him, as though they are something someone else left behind when they came to visit. In his face she sees, more clearly than she has in all their years of being married, a deep seam of sadness that stretches down, down, out of sight. And she knows it goes all the way through him, back to New Orleans, to Storyville, to when he was a child, to the sound of women laughing from upstairs rooms with locked doors, the sound of women crying for their lovers who’ve left, the smell of men getting drunk in the afternoon. She remembers those things, too, from anoth
er city but the same. Suddenly, he looks up at her, looks into her face. His eyes are wide and serious.

  “I’ve got to show you something,” he says.

  “What?”

  “I can’t tell you. I’ve got to show you. You ready?”

  “Yes,” she says, straightening her posture. “I’m ready.”

  He reaches down beside the bed. There is a loud mechanical buzzing sound, and she realizes that he is slowly tilting away from her, the top half of his body moving steadily downward until, with a click and more buzzing, it begins to move back up.

  “Check out this bed!” he says. “The bottom part moves, too, you know, the legs. Look.” He presses a different switch and his legs begin to elevate slowly until they are nearly level with his chin. “Is that great or what? Come on. You can have a go, too.” He lifts up one side of the covers and pats the mattress. She hesitates, then slips off her shoes and climbs into bed beside him, laughing while he moves the levers so the bed rises and falls beneath them.

  After a while he can’t manage the stairs, and she has an electric chairlift put in so he can get up to the second floor.

  “Better than that bed,” he says. He rides up and down in it for fun. He is restless, wanting to do more than he can handle. He records the conversations of people who visit them, the sounds of their street, sometimes. He sits in the garden when the weather is nice.

  She makes food for them and they eat supper out on the patio. He is on a new diet.

  “I can eat fish and rice and salad,” he tells their guests. “Or I have the choice of rice and salad and fish. Or sometimes on special occasions, salad and fish and rice. But no liquor. Isn’t that a terrible injustice?”

  One evening, she finds him standing out on the balcony of his study upstairs. The day has been especially golden and now the light is slanting among the low buildings as the sun makes its way from the sky. He has his trumpet out of its case for the first time in some weeks. He puts it to his lips when he sees her and plays, something slow and sweet that she doesn’t recognize. It must be new. She sits down at his desk and listens to him.

  “I think I’m ready to get back to work,” he says. “I feel good. I’m going to call up the band tomorrow.” He inhales deeply, holding onto the railings and looking out at the street where they have lived for thirty years.

  That night Lucille wakes up suddenly and opens her eyes in the darkness. When she listens, she cannot hear him breathing anymore.

  She knows it is not a healthy impulse making her insist that the closet needs to be wallpapered all over again. She understands perfectly well that it is neither necessary nor appropriate for her to demand that the flowers match up. But she doesn’t care. She is angry, she realizes after the designer leaves, politely promising that the men will come to strip and repaper the walls before the end of the week. She is angry because here she is in this house and all she has left is money. It is not that she objects to money as such. She is not sorry to have it. But by itself, it is something of a disappointment.

  She papers the interior of the bureau herself, pasting and smoothing the foil into place in each of the twelve drawers, top, bottom and sides. Sometimes when she is working, she forgets that this is anything more than another temporary absence. It is not that she thinks it: once she begins thinking the game is up. But she feels, fleetingly, that he will call, from Cairo or Los Angeles or Hamburg. That he will be on his way home any day. She is going to finish fixing up the house just as though he was still there to come back to it.

  But at a certain point there is nothing left to do. She walks from end to end of the place, and every inch of it is just as she envisioned. She sits down on the couch that faces the bay window in the living room and watches the street shift quietly in its bed. Sometime later, it might be hours, or months, or even years, she isn’t sure, there is a ring on the doorbell. When she opens it, a young man is standing there. He asks if he can come in.

  He says:

  “I used to come here to watch movies sometimes. My family lived on this street but they moved away. The Harrises, Sharon and Roy. I’m sure you don’t remember . . .”

  But she does. “Terrence, right?” she asks.

  “No,” he says, “Terry is my older brother—lives in Chicago now. I’m Jake.”

  “That’s right,” she says. “You wanted to play baseball when you grew up.” Terrence and Jacob. They were as alike as twins but cast from different-sized molds, she recalls, though both had these astonishing legs that stretched practically to their chins. Terrence was the noisy one, the natural performer. Jake was the reader.

  “Do you ever have movies here now?” he asks, a little later, over a glass of tea. “For the kids that are around here these days?”

  “I haven’t done that since Mr. Armstrong got sick,” she says. It hadn’t occurred to her to do it without him. She can’t really even imagine a room full of children without him in the middle of it.

  “Well, that’s too bad. Those are some of my best memories, sitting on the floor downstairs here, watching cartoons, getting my fingers all covered in butter and salt. You should think about starting that up again.”

  When he goes away she forgets about what he has said for a while and then, one day, it is there in her head, this idea, as though it has simply been waiting for the rainy fall weather to come back. She thinks, today is the day for a film. But she realizes that without Louis she doesn’t know how to tell people what is going on. For a while she is stuck and then she has an idea.

  One by one, she takes the speakers down from where they sit on the shelves of his study. Each one is encased in a solid wooden frame and they are heavy to lift. Where they have been standing on the shelf, there is an outline marked in dust, and she tuts to herself; she thought she’d kept the place neater than that. She opens the French doors and carries them carefully out onto the balcony so that they are pointing into the street. Then she goes to the cupboard where he kept all of his recordings. She realizes to her profound surprise that she has not listened to any of them since he died.

  She thumbs along the spines of the eight tracks and chooses one. Something from one of the sessions he did with Ellington, she isn’t sure exactly what is on there, but she has a feeling about this one. She slides it into the machine and presses “play” and listens. It is beautiful and sad, the music like a whirlpool, and within it the sound of his trumpet is a smooth, strong fish with shimmering scales along its length. It pulls her down into the depths of the song. And at the bottom of all that glorious sound, there he is. He has been here all along; when she thought she was all alone, in fact he was only waiting here for her to find him. You didn’t know? the trumpet is saying to her now. This song is for you. And so is the next one. And the one after that one, too.

  Is that so? she asks into the sound.

  Yes, the trumpet says. Here; listen.

  The trumpet pauses and the band plays a few chords of introduction. And then out over the street, his voice goes like a flag, like a banner, like a story of what is to come.

  States

  An Itinerary

  NEW YORK

  We at Solitary Sphere Travel suggest that you begin your visit to America with a few days in New York.

  Be prepared for culture shock when you arrive. People in this city are infamous for saying what they really mean, and after the polite evasions of our own culture this may grate a little on your nerves. Try to remember that this is just the way Americans behave: they think it is a good idea to say whatever comes to mind regardless of the consequences. In New York the effects of this bluntness are even more pronounced than elsewhere because everyone has to shout just to be heard over the traffic.

  New York City is not the capital of New York State, although it is the tallest city. There is some dispute about whether it is largest in terms of population, since many of its denizens have been shown conclusively to have several different lives and personalities, each of which they inhabit for part of every day. This make
s them difficult to get to know on all but the most superficial level.

  Regardless of this, New York City is truly a world city, replete with grand avenues, skyscrapers and beautifully maintained city parks. It contains a multitude of artistic and cultural institutions and other tourist sites. These include the famous Statue, which stands guard over the harbor, raising her reading glasses in her left hand to peruse the great book clasped in her right. What is written on the stone pages of this book has been read only by a handful of workers and restorers, as it is impossible to see either from below or from the platform on the brim of the Statue’s bowler hat to which visitors can ascend by means of an interior staircase. These workers say that the pages of the book contain lists of slurs aimed at every race and ethnicity that has ever come to this most polyglot of cities, ranging from the thoroughly archaic to the most contemporary. The city fathers were not aware of this when the Statue went up (it was a gift from abroad), and by then it was too late. Periodically, a citizens’ group will protest publicly that the book’s contents go against the spirit of the city and should be erased, but someone else always counters that it would be wrong to destroy a famous work of art by altering it so drastically. The argument goes on until everyone gets tired or distracted by some more urgent problem. Because all groups are insulted with equal virulence in the pages of the book, no particular faction has been motivated to mount a sustained campaign to have the offending matter removed.

  Make sure you see the Statue, along with the nearby Museum of Imaginary Art, world-famous for its absence of exhibits, and the zoo.

  New Yorkers are brash in public, but they are gentler in their private lives. You’ll find the homes of New York are frequently decorated with mirrors in unlikely places. Some people attribute this to unusually high local levels of vanity, but really it is because people in New York tend to live in small houses and apartments, and mirrors make their rooms look bigger.