The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  The receptionist across from him at her desk, streaked blond hair bound sensibly back into a bun but still luxuriant in tone and volume, looked momentarily up at him from her work. Jones nodded and smiled to indicate that he was doing fine, thanks, and didn't mind waiting a little. When she lowered her eyes again to the things on her desk, Jones saw that she had looked up absently, and only accidentally at him—the point was, she hadn't focussed. He hadn't required focussing upon.

  WTienever, as a kid in his twenties, Jones had trudged out for straight jobs—following up those endless ads in the paper, feeling like a dutiful, purblind mule harnessed about the grindstone—he'd almost never gotten as far as the final interview. Usually, once he'd impressed the company with the results of his IQ test, his phony resume and a little intelligent patter, he'd find himself seized by fierce countercultural emotions—whole armed divisions of feeling massing up in him to rage against business as usual consuming the earth to make billions of shiny objects no one needed, et cetera—and he tended to spht the scene before meeting the man or crossing the water. He fetched up, most times, at the Ninth Circle on Tenth Street, over a hamburger with a slice of Bermuda onion on Russian pumpernickel, a mug of dark beer and a basket of peanuts he'd helped himself to from the barrel at the end of the bar, his feet shuffling amid peanut shells to the Horace Silver record on the jukebox: "Filthy McNasty," or sometimes "Senor Blues."

  It is human nature to be tormented into a shape which you are then predisposed to glorify, or at least defend. There is almost no way out of it.

  In any case, the Ninth Circle had turned into a gay bar before vanishing completely, and corporations didn't give you IQ tests anymore. Everyone had been to college and was smart, the counterculture had become the overcul-ture, sort of, and selling out was buying in. Even he had something of a rep these days, had been semi-responsible for contracts and a couple of records with the Bear. He was a putative someone for all anyone could tell, and not the partly manifested phantasm he still felt himself to be. If it weren't for

  242 Rafi Zabor

  Sybil he wouldn't be there, pinned to the sofa and beginning to perspire despite the aggressiveness of the air-conditioning. But Sybil had insisted and he had said okay. She'd made him promise, at the end of a four-course, homemade dinner, that he would go the distance, and then he'd made a joke about the new dessert topping they ought to use on the pecan pie—Pussy Whip, regular or fish-flavored—she was serving him for dessert. He and Sybil had had a good long laugh about it together and then she'd taken him to bed and blown his brains out.

  A party of three went past in loose white shirts and smiles, a chic Japanese girl between two broadshouldered American guys, and why were all of them, including the Oriental girl, so fucking tall? Jones himself was of average height. Wasn't he? He thought, at five nine, he was still about average for New York, but maybe things had changed while he wasn't looking.

  Were these the people, he wondered, who paid two grand a month for a studio apartment or half a million down on a IBR? then a couple grand a month for the so-called Maintenance Charge—he'd seen Sybil's bill, and despite her explanations it didn't seem a whole lot different from rent. After that, thirty or fifty grand for the right kind of car. Was it therefore possible, considering the degree of tax and other bites, that they were rubes like him even if they got to feel terrific about themselves until Megaton downsized and they found themselves without a rhythm track?

  All Jones needed was a shirt, a roof, some Charlie Parker records, a team of horses, a charabanc and a moat around the castle. I mean, fuck all this superfluous American shit.

  The horrible thing was, you know? once he got in harness he'd probably make a pretty good corporate shill.

  The receptionist called his name. When he looked across she was recradling the telephone on its cantilevered axis. "He's sorry to keep you waiting, but someone will be out to collect you in a few minutes," she said.

  Jones put together something made of grin and hands that he hoped would pass for gracious response.

  Jones felt that he was being reduced to his leastmost self, to pained, late-adolescent resources that were in fact a set of behavioral recordings he had not sufficiently updated in the decades during which he had lived joined at the hip to a talking bear. These people were as knowing as they looked and he was the one scrambling around on all fours.

  Sybil lived in the business world but was more rounded, womanly, warm. What she looked like, in fact, was someone who had borne and raised a child or two, but in fact Sybil had miscarried in her only pregnancy with her former husband. She was still hoping to fulfill her more-than-merely-

  k

  The Bear Comes Home 243

  biological-destiny-thank-you, while her clock still ticked, and it seemed like maybe she'd chosen Jones to be It. Well, it was a long time since anyone had done Jones the favor of thinking of him as It, and Sybil looked so good in the lineaments of gratified desire. On that level, she and Jones got along fine. If he had any self-esteem, her attentions would have done a lot for it.

  Though really, he didn't have to think about it much, just sit across the dinner table from her—candles, flowers, wine—to know that she could have the kid with him and if he didn't pan out ditch him and raise Junior on her owTi. The world had never left him in any doubt about how easily he could be dispensed with. Why did he continue to expect mercy from women when all he'd ever gotten from them was the Law?

  Sybil was well enough set up not to have to work outside the house for vears if she had a kid and dumped him; and he had to agree, she would probably raise any son or daughter close to ideally well. And the prospect of parenthood had always overwhelmed Jones' sense of responsibility anyway.

  The big question was not whether she had Plans A and B on hand, but whether ditching Jones with the afterbirth was A or B. Was keeping him around her preferred option or not? Could she possibly be as cold-blooded as that?

  Anyhow, there he was on a corporate sofa, straightening his hip Italian tie. He was individuating, or was trying to.

  That self you saw outside of time and space, contented in the garden: did it have anything to do with this?

  The distance between here and there made his head spin.

  How come I'm still excluded from everything I want to be a part of? Something is happening but you don't know what it is, do—

  "xMr. Jones?" a voice asked aloft.

  "You came in one bar early," Jones said. He rucked his brand-new cross-hatched wheatstraw cotton-linen slacks into some semblance of worldly order as he stood, but the tall young guy with the fashionable flop of hair, square jaw and unshaven look was crowding him still. White shirt, black pants that ballooned at the thigh but tucked back in at the ankle. Jones smoothed his slick new jacket, shot his cuffs, thumbed the knot of his tie: take that. Bears talk to me, not you.

  "Mr. Badiyi will see you now."

  "Lead on," answered Jones, but called him Osric in his mind. Pathetic.

  The guy about-faced and Jones followed him down a corridor, then past a warren of desks fenced off by a flapdoodle of white partitions; there were actual offices for the bigger fish, and a leathery, spartan conference room or two, but when, at the end of a last turning, he was ushered into the expanse of

  244 Rafi Zabor

  Badiyi Central, he clocked the simple forthrightness of the power display at once: the narrow door of the private elevator in the rear left corner, the deeper tinting of the window-wall cornmanding an above-average stretch of urban vista, the unusual species of potted palmetto, the solid teak desk with ebony inlay echoing its contours and, Jones took note, the purposeful absence of a Persian carpet on the expanse of floor Jones had to cross in order to reach the elegant man, about sixty and only slightly reminiscent of the late Shah.

  Badiyi rose to meet him, arm extended in an ambiguous gesture Jones had to interpret on the spot as an invitation to a handshake or not. Jones leaned awkwardly across the depth of desk to shake the manicured
extremity. His hand was accepted but Jones was still left wondering if he'd made the wrong move.

  Jones watched Badiyi's hand withdraw: gold signet ring with an inset diamond, but no watch.

  "Please sit."

  "Thank you."

  "So." ; "So-so."

  The funny thing was, Jones found himself sort of liking this styhsh-look-ing music-biz potentate, the handsomely modelled face with its savvy eyes and ledge of nose, the assertive hairline from which grey and black swept toward the rear of the head in waves; the suit of light grey fabric that lay upon the man's body like a sort of liquid metal: mercury: communication: of course. Jones liked the expert smile and assessing eyes, and asked himself what he was responding to. A modulation of the power vibe? The parody of a father? The cartoon aspect of the scene?

  Badiyi Aga was loaded, sure, but he was a paid employee after all, albeit with a chunk of stock. Badiyi had certainly earned his credentials in the biz over the decades, though he'd never acquired the degree of corporate control the Erteguns had over at Warner—mere Turks: must miff him. Still, the man was a big fish, a real monster of the deep. Jones wasn't sure why Badiyi had wanted to see him.

  "Are you a smoking man?" he asked Jones, extending the box, raising the inlaid Ud with an index finger. A retro gesture, thought Jones, very 1930s. 1 am. HI Jones looked at the cigarette he had taken, thicker than normal, the paper

  nearly diaphanous and the tobacco curled inside it very blonde. They both lit up, Badiyi extending the lighter; it was a good cigarette, but if you wanted to get technical about it, Jones liked a bit more, um, Turkish tobacco in the mix.

  The Bear Comes Home 245

  Jones noticed a trim black negative-ionizer ticking discreedy away on die left-hand extremity of the desk. Lots of neat things. A Testostarossa caged up next to the S Mercedes back in Sneden's Landing or wherever?

  "Well," said Badiyi, and in order to fill his indicated slot Jones began to speak. This speech, which he was certainly making too soon although it was easy and fluent on his tongue, came increasingly to sound like some kind of incantation, or perhaps he was trying to weave a spell. He began by confessing that he had a couple of good ideas, for example Abdullah Ibrahim, Dollar Brand as was, hadn't put out a record in about six years, wasn't signed with anyone just then and they should get him into the studio with a large ensemble if they could afford it and a small group, anything from four to seven pieces, including Carlos Ward, if they could not. And how about a Carlos V^ard record with Geri Allen, Charlie Haden and Elvin Jones? A ballad album by Archie Shepp, if possible with Haden and cameos by Lester Bowie and Tony Bennett. Jackie McLean didn't have a long-term contract with anyone at present, so why not reunite him with Jack Dejohnette and some young fast company? Also, he would personally undertake to talk turkey with Ornette Coleman and try to urge him into the studio with an acoustic group. And oh yeah, did I mention Steve Kuhn has gotten stuck making gorgeous records for minor labels no one hears? Let's call him in from the cold. And there are a lot of younger kids in the post-Marsalis mold that the other majors hadn't picked up on yet, and Jones was out there on the scene spotting them early, and here Jones started to make up names: Ivan Taylor, Anthony Tierney, Jackie Heywood, Wahid McDee, Royal Wheeler, Aaron Chisholme—

  "Young musicians are sexier than established ones," Badiyi pronounced, exhaling smoke. "I'm speaking of marketability of course."

  Well, sure. By the way, had Badiyi ever heard Florent Schmitt's string quartet, a major twentieth-century composition and still unrecorded, except once uncommercially on a ten-inch disc by the Florent Schmitt Society—^you have a classical division, right? and there's also Thomas DeHartmann's classical oeuvj'e —you know, the guy who worked with Gurdjieff?—likewise unrecorded and quite substantial I assure you. But to revert to jazz.

  "Please."

  Well, there's no end to what's going on, is there? I mean, it ain't like going out in the old days and wondering should I go hear Ornette or Mingus or Sonny or Trane but there are certainly a lot of people around who can play, and it's not all just a holding pattern, keeping the standards up until another genius comes on the line. For example this Hatwell kid, did you hear him on the Bear's record?

  246 Rafi Zabor

  "I've listened to it," Badiyi said, and gave out a measured smile.

  Well, Jones said, he had heard some of Hatwell's buddies in Brookl^Ti and thought they were prett)' incredible really. They were probably going to tour with the Bear this summer, and Hatuell knew plent}' of other young cats who hadn't even come to New York yet, and you could scoop the other majors with these kids and get level on the jazz scene generally. Because if you don't mind my saing so, at the moment you're a bit behind the cun^e. I mean, I grew up on Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and that still seems to be the working model whatever the Aliles-and-Coltrane harmonic extensions, but the music is gathering its strength, and even though no one knows when or if it'll get its muscles working for a leap into the next dimension, the time is still propitious for a . . . Jones grew uncomfortably aware that he was beginning to sound impermissibly like an aging hippy in the steely light of a different kind of day.

  "All ven^ sound thinking no doubt, but the main point," Badii came in on Jones' uneasy pause, examining his cigarette's end . . . But here his speech died on the air.

  At length Jones inserted a "Yes?" and this seemed to work.

  "The main thing," repeated Badiyi, managing a smile, but fell again to contemplating the castle of ash on the tip of his cigarette.

  Jones felt some of his sense of comedy restored. He wanted to slap Badip on the back and have a laugh with him about the ornateness of his act. No, seriously, Jones would say, I hke you, I get it, give it up, let's relax. Jones had a happy flash of insight: anyone this theatrical couldn't be all that tough. I have to admit it. I keep learning from the Bear on the subject of travest}^. This is just one more number from the world's well-worn jokebook. This is more airy nothing on a platter.

  Right?

  Jones looked out the window-wall at the offering of midtown. If something is going to collapse under the weight of its unreaHty, it's more Hkely me than New York. But we can coexist awhile, can't we? It could work out. Imperatives are in play. Demands have been made upon my essential substance. I have to get this job. Afterward, in compensation, the Hkely meed of sex with Sybil, and then, who can tell and let's not overdo it, a life.

  "Usually," Badiyi was telling him, "someone new to the company, like yourself, would not be interviewed by me. In your case I made an exception."

  "Thank you," said Jones, and felt his body warming pleasantly. Well, why not?

  "I do not ordinarily involve myself in the jazz operation these days. It's not a moneyspinner, nor is it what I was hired for, and my tastes in that area

  The Bear Comes Home 247

  are those of an older generation. The ideas you propose all seem intelligent but I am not the person to discuss them with ..."

  Some modulation in Badiyi's tone, a gathering seriousness, perked Jones' ears up. Is he about to say something real? I think he is. Will I like it? Pigs might fly. Bears might talk, even play alto—as well as anyone since CharHe Parker, don't ever tell him I said that.

  "... and while I'm not sure how much room the young men responsible for our jazz output will make for you, I suggest you get to know them and give it a college tr^."

  Well that sounded good, but Jones began to make out—although it was impossible, at the moment, completely to distinguish anxiety from intuition—the familiar outline of a pie on the event horizon, the pig's bladder fiill of sawdust being raised into the air . . .

  "Of course the most important thing you can do for us, for me'' and here Badiyi nodded his head with seeming deference, "is to keep your friend the Bear on board. He is a musician of obviously unique potential and it would be a shame for us to lose him. Contrary to the laws of jazz, he might even make the company some money."

  Yup, there it was, the famiUar
cadence, pie encountering face, bladder bashing mazzard. It was all about the Bear, as usual, and nothing in it for me at all. Is this all the world will ever have to say to me?

  Jones' heart plummeted, or something did.

  Should have seen it coming sooner. Should be smarter than I am.

  "Keep the Bear on board and the firm will be grateful to you." Badiyi extinguished his cigarette in an onyx ashtray, and gave the butt a final twist to expunge the last of its smoke. "I am confident that you will otherwise earn your keep. You will easily manage to write press releases and deal with intermediary people of all sorts." Badiyi tossed an invisible object into the air. "Press, management, artists. Whatever."

  The rest of the interview got a Httle blurry for Jones.

  "As to the Bear, I should also make clear that once you are employed by us you cannot also be working for him. . . . I'm sure you understand."

  Ah, thought Jones, I'm being offered a morsel of betrayal too. Wouldn't it be simpler just to crush my balls between two stones? Less subtle in its excruciation, perhaps, but fuckin'-A effective, and less ambiguous.

  Badiyi mentioned that Megaton had recently opened a film division—who could say what the Bear might make possible in that arena?—and then Jones watched a figure for a starting salary float past him, thirty-seven five plus the usual benefits. Press releases were mentioned again, Jones felt, in order to assure him he had actual duties and to smooth the passage of the blade.

  248 Rafi Zabor

  Yes, after all I wrote a couple of columns for the East Village Other, he heard himself idiotically assert before leaving.

  In the capsule elevator going down, Jones wondered a few things:

  Mercy! Pity! Peace! Did they have any place in the world at all? Did he? His demands in the area of human dignity weren't very large. He'd accept simple mousehood as long as someone kept him fed. . . . What about the timeless self in the garden? I must have a place somewhere, here below.