The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  He hardly saw her. She slipped into bed beside him. "I miss sleeping with you," she said. "Let's sleep. Just sleep. Hold me."

  "I love you. Iris. I—"

  "Just hold me. Nothing noisy please. I love it just like this."

  "I was lying here," the Bear told her, "with this ache of absence where you would have been."

  "I know," Iris said. "First I hugged one pillow, then I put another one between my legs, then I said This is ridiculous and came downstairs."

  "But you waited for the dishwasher."

  "It helped but I was coming down anyway."

  He looked down at this smooth lithe form curled seashell-pink into his embrace, took in her architecture, the chords, the harmonies, the flows. Her nipples, an only very slightly darker tint of rose than the rest of her, were perking erect just then at the tips of the wonderful, fresh-smelling breasts she thought he thought were too small for his liking, a crazy notion of which nothing he said or did could disabuse her. He loved to see her there, like the sweet curve of law, swaddled in his arms. She nestled more

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  deeply, she cuned, she curled, she smoothed, she swam. "Venus in furs," he said.

  She opened her eyes and rolled them heavenward. "Give me a break."

  "You're so incredibly beautiful, Iris."

  "Don't overwork it, Bear. It's only skin deep."

  "Oh no," he murmured. "Though it is such lovely skin—"

  "It's only skin."

  "—it runs so much deeper than that." He almost began to say that he had been innocent of all design in saing ow' bedroom in front of the band, but thought better of it just in time. See? Signs of intelligence already. Things are looking up. She eased onto her side to press herself into the treasury^ of his chest. He held her with the motion of his breath, he enlarged his heart for her, smoothed a paw down the length of her back, pla}ing a frne imaginary^ melody on the delicate kevboard of her spine, tactfully frnishing the motion before reaching her cuppable litde ass. A throb ran through him any^^ay. He suppressed it.

  Iris twitched off after a few minutes, the gateways of her nenes letting go, her breath slowing. He watched her face let go of its waking strictures. She slept, it seemed to him, with something Hke a child's perfect trust in the world's goodness, or perhaps his own. He kept watch over her awhile before lowering his head to the pillow and closing his eyes.

  The Bear had never fallen asleep before her. Xot once, ever.

  il s too tall for itself. It's an odd-looking house," said Sybil Bailey peering through the windshield of the rented Chey Lumina as it halted at the T intersection.

  "Consider the tenants," Jones advised her.

  "There's that," Sybil admitted.

  Jones drove the Lumina across the road and up the grey gravel drive beneath the spruces. No one showed at the door to greet them, which maybe was just as well. Jones had a number of reasons for feeling shaky about this little visit.

  The first one sat beside him, of course. Sybil had been extra nice to him

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  since he got the job with Megaton, but she was known to have fundamental hots for the Bear. Not that she'd have a chance to do anything about it with Iris around; and the Bear, if phone calls could be trusted on the subject, was sounding awfully happy about his life with the little lady. But Jones found the aggravated sense of possibility a mite destabilizing all the same, and the fact that he was nerv^ous about it only emphasized his general tactical weakness. VVTiich made him more nervous still, so tactically weaker still. . . . Ladies and gentlemen, perpetual motion has been achieved.

  Then there was the way the Bear had been treating him lately. Such contempt, when once they'd been so close. Jones had decided two things: that this unfair friction had its origin in Jones' new sense of rough equivalence to the Bear, which in turn had issued from the near-death vision of his eternal individuahty in the garden, by definition equal to anyone else's eternal indi-viduaUty and therefore immutably worthy of respect; his second resolution was that he wasn't gonna take that kind of shit from the Bear anymore. No, things had to be straightened out, put on a new and firmer footing, made fair. I'm not just a sidekick anymore.

  If only he weren't compromised by his complicity with Badiyi and the salary he was collecting from Megaton, albeit with massive deductions— Jones had had no idea that such a piratical degree of taxation existed in the world, and he had already shifted his political weight rightward. Taxwise the Bear was not a legal person, so Jones had helped him incorporate as Ursine Enterprise. His pubhshing company was Improbable Tunes. Badiyi's voice: Remember you're working for me now, not him. The posh Iranian had seemed improbably pleased to say so. As if my allegiance could be bought that cheap—Sybil had doublechecked the Bear's contract and it was free of thievery—but in the objective, observable world Jones had nodded yes to Badiyi and muttered a submissive syllable. After that, a tall pretty functionary in a puffy blouse and a tight leather skirt had shown him the way to his new desk and told him how to operate what she called the voice-mail system but what he could have sworn was a telephone.

  At least he and Sybil weren't actually sleeping at the Bear's house. They had a room at some inn nearby, and Sybil had already told him that its duck a I'orange and steak au poivre were semi-famous, so they might not even eat dinner with the Bear and Iris and the band. Which was probably just as well.

  Jones eased the Lumina to a stop at the Volvo's front bumper and squinted at the huge gold-brown station wagon parked behind it. He switched off the engine and pulled the handbrake tight because he didn't want the car rolling back down the drive. As far as he was concerned, this was wilderness and anything could happen.

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  Iris appeared behind the screen door at the top of the stairs, waving hello, wearing an apron and a grin. Such an exposed face, thought Jones. So naked a spirit, so visible its hopes of joy. Jones felt a pang for her and hoped the Bear was treating her right.

  When Jones and Sybil got to the top of the stairs Iris greeted them with hurried embraces, then retreated, pleading business in the kitchen, and the newcomers had to edge their way into the living room past shunted furniture and Linton Bostic's crash cymbal. "Hey," Jones called to the Bear, who stood in the center of the living room clothed only in his native fur and the saxophone hanging from his neck on a strap. There were no lights on in the room, and little direct sunlight, at that hour.

  "Hey," said the Bear, and returned his attention to the band.

  From what Jones could tell, the Bear was running them through the chord changes of some tune—it sounded familiar—and it was difficult because the chords were unusual, changed in odd places, and didn't add up to a normal chorus-structure of thirty-two bars or whatever. The Bear kept starting them up, then stopping them. The really stultifying thing, thought Jones, was that although the problems arose during the solo sections, every time something went wrong the Bear dragged the band back to the head and made them play the whole damn tune again. Jones was just on the verge of recognizing it.

  "And I'd like it," the Bear said to the bassist, a guy Jones had met and spoken with in the city and liked, Garrett Church, "if you wouldn't play the seventh there, just before the turnaround, because it distracts from the melody line."

  Church nodded, and made a pencil notation on his leadsheet.

  "Also, Linton," the Bear droned on, "don't feel you have to fill up all the space. In fact, try filling up none of it and see how it sounds."

  Bostic nodded from behind his hip little woodgrain drumset, fanning himself with his brushes. "Yeah it's such a beautiful melody," he said. "I didn't know Mingus could be so tender.^^

  Hatwell snorted from his place at the piano. "Read all about it," he said. There was a fancy black electric keyboard thingamajig on a table near him, but he had his back to it. The upright piano's lid was open on top and the front panel had been taken off to expose its ribs and veins of gold.

  "Excuse me," said Sybi
l and edged her way toward the dining room and the kitchen. Jones watched the rhythm section and the Bear turn their heads to follow her all the way, until she was gone.

  "All right," said the Bear, "let's take it, not from the top but from the half-tempo section in the bridge. Linton, can you find something high and small to hit on two and four until we go back into the main tempo?"

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  "How 'bout back end of a brush on a cymbal bell? You have the record? What's Dannie Richmond use?"

  "Finger cymbals. One," said the Bear slowly, then, "two," and Jones recognized the tune now: "Reincarnation of a Lovebird," a beautiful, sinuous, low-profile line that passed through degrees of light and shade and unexpected chords on its way to resolution, and Bostic was right, for a man best known for the amplitude of his furies Mingus could be almost unbehevably tender. The only thing was, the Bear kept stopping the band all the time again.

  "Look, you guys," the Bear ground on, "you're just not swinging. Can't you play with this much restraint and still swing?"

  No no no, thought Jones. You're taking it too far. This is too much talk, definitely co77tra natiij-urn. You'll shut down the intuitive connection. But, against his expectations, the band nodded seriously, taking it in, still game, still ready to try.

  The tune started up again.

  See, this was what Jones had never been ever to relate to, all this sweat-work and repetition, these rooms and afternoons in which things had to be worked through atom by tedious atom before anything like beauty could be rendered or achieved. Look at them. I wanted to be like that but I could never relate to the drudgery enough. He remembered the clarinet—more difficult than the saxophone because the octaves didn't finger identically, though he'd worked out on the Bear's alto and eventually it came to much the same thing—and the idea of playing fluently in all twelve keys, well, the fin-gertangling physical transpositions on their own were enough to boggle your mind halfway to paralysis. Anything you tried to do, there was so much machinery to deal with. Was it that he wouldn't do the work, or did he really lack some essential substance?

  Maybe now that he was older he'd have the patience to sit still long enough and work something out. Only now he had responsibilities, Sybil, a real job . . . Nothing ever fits.

  Jones winced. Look at these guys. It had been the same with acting. There was that point at which things became too difficult to deal with. Something in you acted up and left you sightless. Love wasn't enough. Love had to find its way through the labyrinth of form, and Jones didn't have the muscle or the map. Well, half the musicians in the world didn't either, or lost it on the way. And the Bear had always said that the audience was the music's co-creator and that he, Jones, was an impeccable listener.

  Well hey. A plate of cold potatoes.

  Oh no. Was the Bear stopping the tune again} It seemed to Jones that the band was just starting to get into it.

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  "Now that we've gotten this far," said the Bear, pivoting to address his rhythm section, "I'd Hke to try out Mingus' concept of extended form, which means that during the solo sections we can hold any of the chords as long as we want, so we don't only have a forty-four-bar chorus to deal with but something larger and more flexible. The soloist can determine it, but it could also come from one of you when you're not soloing, why not?"

  The band was nodding yes and looking serious, and Jones had the dread feeling that they'd been at this tune for hours already and might keep at it for a few hours more. He mainly wanted to hear some music and was thinking about extended form and asking himself what does that have to do with anything really? But they were going to keep at it, weren't they. They were.

  "Also," said the Bear, "once we've got this stuff down, I want to put the intro together, all those Charlie Parker fragments, maybe not the ones Mingus used, but we're gonna have to play some unisons out of tempo."

  The band nodded again. It was incredible. They were still with him.

  "After this," said the Bear, "I thought we might do an odd tune. 'Tumblin' Along with the Tumblin' Tumbleweeds.'"

  "Something Sonny left off of Way Out West}"" Bostic asked.

  "Sorta," said the Bear.

  "Doesn't that have some funny minor changes in the chorus?" Hat^'ell asked from his place at the piano.

  "I thought we'd do it with a two-beat feel and yeah, you have some kind of memorv'^. There are these odd shifts into the minor."

  Hatwell pointed to his head. "I've heard everything there is," he said. "Can we get back to the Alingus? Such a great tune. I can't get enough of it. Let's work."

  Go figure, thought Jones.

  They moved the drums and the keyboard amp out onto the porch when they broke so there would be enough room for every^one to spread out and talk before dinner. There were still no electric hghts on in the living room, and outside the windows a bright pastel twilight, diffused as if by mist, an improbably French effect, spread itself through the air and the nodding tiers of the pines and other trees. The house seemed about to levitate, or perhaps deliquesce in light. The Bear opened the side door and a breeze blew through the rooms. Some bird nearby made a two-note call that tugged at the cords of memory, perky, plaintive, reminiscent of, what was it exactly?

  The Bear returned to his seat near Hatwell at the dining table.

  "Pretty well, pretty well," Hatwell told the Bear, resuming. "Think we need to play some more tomorrow?"

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  "If we feel like it," the bandleader said. "I think weVe done pretty well. I think we've got most of it covered."

  "Yeah," said Hatwell, "but you do know the extended-form thing didn't work, don't you."

  "Yeah. We'll drop it. You want another beer? Split one with me?"

  "WTiatever's right."

  "You go get it," the Bear suggested, and stretched his arms wide. The heavy wooden chair in which he sat creaked dangerously as he leaned into its semicircular back. "I'm just gonna sit here and lay waste to the furniture."

  WTien Hatw ell had gone into the kitchen—the Bear closed his eyes for a moment, then opened them and there he was—Jones took his place in the opposing seat. "Hey old buddy," said the Bear, and laid a heavy paw on the dining table. "So what do you think of the band?"

  "Yeah, they're great," said Jones distractedly. "Listen, there're a few things I . . ." For Jones the atmosphere of all that heavy, detailed musical work lingered in the room and bothered him enough so that he left his intended sentence unfinished.

  "I forgot to ask," said the Bear. "How's the corporation gig?"

  "I'm getting to meet people there, a young, pretty hip bunch. They're okay and there's a lot of goof-off time."

  "Around the water cooler, huh. Have you got any input, creatively speak-ing?"

  "Time will tell," said Jones, and tried to look worldly.

  "Er uh," said Bobby Hatwell, "I only brought two of these," and raised his sweating bottles of Corona by their necks.

  "Keep one and give him the other," said the Bear. "I'll take something later."

  Hatw^ell passed a bottle to Jones and perched on the edge of the dining table. "You know, if we do play tomorrow," he said, "I think you should open up and play your ass off for the guys."

  "Otherwise they'll think the record was a fluke?" the Bear asked him.

  Hatwell shrugged but obviously meant yes.

  "Okay," said the Bear. "I'm easy"

  "Did you listen to that cassette I sent you of the final mix of Sensible ShoesV ]onts asked the Bear.

  "Actually I did."

  "No kidding. What you think?"

  Sybil Bailey came in from the kitchen and stood behind Jones' chair. After a moment's pause she rested her hands on Jones' shoulders and bent briefly

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  to kiss him on top of his head, where the hair was thinning. When she was done the Bear grinned up at her and she grinned back.

  "What a comphcated dynamic," Bobby Hatwell muttered, and drifted
off to join his rhythm buddies on the other side of the smokestack, where cries of welcome rose to meet him. R^i-heem.

  "I thought," said the Bear, "it was a pretty good record, considering that my playing was fake. Yeah, as an example of pure self-impersonation it might even be some kind of a classic."

  "You're nuts," Jones told him.

  "Oh I'm way past nuts," said the Bear. "Tell me something new."

  Now Iris came out of the kitchen bearing a stemmed glass of white wine; its sides ran with condensation; she herself was lightly beaded with honest sweat. The Bear watched her clock the grouping, then walk past Jones and Sybil to stand behind the Bear's chair and place her hands on his big shoulders. The Bear watched Sybil remove her hands from Jones' narrower hairless version. This was some exceptionally dumb game of chess, or maybe an alpha-wave contest or something. He had the usual impulse to blow up the set and start over, but in the interest of world peace he suppressed it.

  "Well how about a movie," Jones said slyly.

  "Love 'em," said the Bear. "We going out or renting?"

  "As it happens, Megaton has its own film division, but through recently acquired connections," and here Jones tried looking archconspiratorial, "I got in touch with some of Spielberg's people and they're interested."

  "In what," asked the Bear. "The hazards of improvisation without a net?"

  "They're interested in a film about you."

  The Bear tried not to take this seriously and partway succeeded. "How interesting." Now he wished he had that beer. "Tell me even larger lies."

  "I mean even if you didn't want to participate in it yourself—"