The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  The Bear dropped to the sofa and smelled the dust rise around him. "Wuf," he said.

  "So if you'd like to move downstairs," Iris told him, "it's perfect. I'll call C.J. and give him a week to get his equipment moved. Our problems are solved."

  The Bear's last comment was a heavy wondering sigh.

  About the time of the first light snow, he found himself more or less unconsciously adapting Siege's room to his purpose. Siege had taken his tubs and his enlarger out. It was cool. Siege said, but looked pissed off. Iris had fixed it on the phone with Stanlynn. You want to speak with her? The Bear said Hi Stanny Yes I know I should go see Chief Oren Lyons and I'm sure he would be good to talk to and it would help. But. But. You know me. Yeah I think the money is together for the foreseeable future. How's the llama-trekking biz? Great. If there's a problem here we'll handle it. Fine. Bye. Yeah, here's Iris. Bye.

  Down in the basement the Bear switched off the thermostat, then thought better of it and turned it up to the minimum so the pipes wouldn't freeze and burst while he slept. He hauled armfuls of fallen leaves in for the scent, pulled the foam mattress down from the built-in bed, jammed it into the

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  room's rearmost corner and fell into it to test its suitability for a long stay and because he felt like falling down.

  One thing he wondered: if he hibernated would he lose the capacity for speech and wake up in springtime a garden-variety bear? It seemed possible. He felt too tired to care. Besides, it might prove a rehef. Naw naw naw: this was some regressus he should avoid. This was happening on some deeply stupid perhaps he meant unconscious perhaps he meant deeply stupid level. Getting too sleepy to think.

  Still trying not to give in to the tide of granular dark seizing him body and brain, he trundled somnambulist-insomniac upstairs for a few last items one day when the house was empty.

  Just himself and the fading echo of the life he'd tried for.

  Pulled some cartons down through the attic hatch and fumbled through old stuff of his with blundering paws. Rummaging through his trunk he found what he was looking for, and clutched his old worn raincoat to him, felt a tide of absurd self-pity rising but was powerless to stem it. My old raincoat, he thought helplessly, and convulsively gathered it to his chest, once thought inexhaustible, and took in the old scent of himself from the fabric. What he was getting was nostalgia, but what he wanted was Lethe, Nepenthe, Oblivion, Death.

  There were baggy corduroy pants too, which although they'd been washed retained some essential tang of the past; and, good Lord, that bathrobe, its looped and windowed raggedness, could it still be said to exist?

  The Bear pulled these tangled things to his chest—impermissible self-pity at work but I can't stop myself—and, rheumy-eyed and stupid with want of sleep, he stumbled heavily into the doorframe on his way out of the room but succeeded in getting down the stairs without an arse-over-teakettle whoop-de-do.

  In the master bathroom he did the worst, and added a bedsheet rich with the scent of Iris to his hoard.

  In the basement he added these new treasures to the pile, pulled apart issues of the Sunday Times, wound the Iris-smelling sheet around his neck, lay down in his nest, stuffing the bathrobe under him, the raincoat on top, then thought. No, sat up and pulled the raincoat on. Tore some lining as he pushed his right paw through the sleeve but that was okay. He pulled the pocket inside out: toothpicks, a paperclip, clumps of grey-brown pocketfluff spilling from the seams, and a worn-out Rico reed.

  The Bear felt unbehevably sleepy. He laid his head. Really coming down, such a weight of sleep never before. Fine dark dust. Tons. And tons.

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  He felt his blood thicken, the big muscle of his heart gear down, brain descending into dark, lights dimming down, blinking out. . .

  You're getting more skillful with these descents, he told himself in a last waking blink of clear mind, smoother with these small deaths and late declines. You argue less, consent quicker. But is that wisdom or fatigue? Who knows, it might work out. Perhaps after all you're being shriven of the uses of this world. No telling what you'll be left with when you wake up from this one. Let fall. Hope still talk.

  Rear corner of basement room under blankets dried leaves newspaper sheet with scent of her fading and old raincoat, other odds and ends, sometimes it seemed to him in the early stages of his sleep that he drifted upstairs through the floorboards and joined Iris in her life up there in the light. Her daughters doing okay. But all so vague. Drawn there. Wasn't sure he really went. Once saw birds like that but where. Brain thicken. Heart slow. Whelmed in big slow wave. What he wanted, sleep so deep, deep so sleep, world gone only thing down there barely audible last link far dark center long low humm.

  Pilot hght. Need one while off sailing. Where?

  Went deeper. Knew that Friedmann had just died.

  After while—how long?—phone rang up there. Wun't anawon home? Anaboda pick it? Up? They all move back city leave me? House around him dark. Walls all run down rain. Soak rain earth smell. Try raise head heavy wugh. Put head down longer wider wugh. Thick slow brain tongue. Long slow heavy head. Sleep. He slep. t.

  pari sixe

  Thou art the unanswered question, Couldst see thy proper eye; Alway it asketh, asketh; And each answer is a lie. So take thy way through nature, It through thousand natures ply; Ask on, thou clothed eternity; Time is the false reply.

  — Emerson

  I practice all the time, to be there when the spirit comes.

  — Rollins

  il s an incredible idea," said Jones. He had never been inside the body of the BrooklTi Bridge before—who had?—and he stared up with undisguised amazement into the vaults and archways, where workmen in coveralls negotiated the scaffolding to smooth down ocher plaster, reinforce brickwork with fresh mortar or lay in large rough-cut light brown ornamental squares of facing-stone. Some lateral daylight pillared through the floating workdust from a couple of remade windows off to the right, but most of the illumination came from hanging bulbs in safety cages and, where men were plastering, brighter banks of floods. The matte-green steel balconies, a vaguely maritime curve to their fronts, supported below by thin steel columns of an identical green, had already been built into place, but virtually everything else was somewhere between shadow and act. "Though really," Jones told Bob Levine, "you should get Sonny Rollins to open the place. He's so identified with playing music on bridges and all."

  "Uh, yes and no," Levine said. "Yes we should, no he won't do it. The Bear's like an automatic second choice."

  "Is he?"

  "As far as I'm concerned. The mythic note. This place wants the mythic note. Don't you think?"

  "What about Ornette?"

  "Hard to deal with and he'd want to bring in his electric band."

  "The Bear would say Jackie McLean."

  "If the Bear says no I'll try to get Jackie to say yes." Levine laughed. "I can actually do this stuff. I haven't had this much fun since kindergarten."

  "That a Romanesque arch up there?"

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  "A Renaissance adaptation. You see those men up there? A family of Tuscan stone workers. Lafamiglia Fusi. Mia famiglia. lo trovato, leifatti. I brought them over from La Fattoressa and I leave it to them. They can even overrule the architect if they want, who basically is me anyway. Well I had a little help at first but after awhile I kind of took over. How do you like the hi-tech sound insulation? You hear any traffic? I don't hear any traffic, but right above our heads at this time of day there are five lanes of cars fighting their way down to three so they can all get across the river to Brooklyn. God knows why."

  "Mrs. Stahl's knishes?" Jones wondered.

  "You think? Myself, I go for Yonah Schimmel. Kugel that lays in your stomach like a rock for a week."

  "I can hear horns." Jones, posing with a hand at his ear, thought that it was no more than fair to point out this simple fact. "It'll put a crimp in your abihty to record live.
"

  "We won't be recording at rush hour and they can shield the mikes. And the city's putting up a sign."

  "Cool," Jones said, beginning to wonder about Levine. "Put it next to the one that says Okay Please Don't Murder Nobody Today."

  "Ha ha, that's fanny," Levine said. "They said they'll back it up. And even in Carnegie Hall you hear the IRT"

  "Not since they renovated," Jones broke the news. "The sound's not what it used to be but you don't hear the subway anymore." He had read about it in the Times.

  "I couldn't have put this place together without the support I've had from the city," Levine said seriously. "They could've had a dozen hot name boutiques. But I've had a lot of good support."

  "Uh huh," said Jones. That was one of the first things Sybil had been able to find out about Levine's finances in her first few sweeps of the datasphere: most of his money was inherited, although he had made some on his own in residential real estate at the right time for the market; there was some import-export action without the usual hint of drugs, but then the story beaming back from dataland grew harder to substantiate. It seemed that Levine, true to his name, had invested in some promising vineyards in Chi-antishire but had fallen, one heard, beneath the wheels of hard practice, local corruption and the generic fate of even partly absentee landlords—word was the manager in question had retired to Sardinia cooled by a purloined miUion and an unassailable team of lawyers hooked up with the Camorra. Levine's family had thumped the escritoire, reeled him back from Tuscany to New York and ordered him to retrench. But was this retrenching? The only thing

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  more quixotic than opening a jazz club was aspiring to play in one. Levine's clothes looked pretty hip and his Mercedes was sufficiently blunted with use not to look vulgar, but the man had unsteadiness in him, Jones was sure, even if the stories were unverifiable.

  But he was tight for sure, he was hand in glove with some of the movers and shakers of the city. Which meant that the Bridge—the first nightclub since Birdland to pay tribute to a living musician with its name, since it pretty much translated as Sonny Rollins—would probably pass inspections and open on schedule after all.

  Jones half-recognized Levine's face fi-om around the circuit over the years, someone he'd seen at this table or that, or leaning in a doorway with some musician at the back of the room, sharing a laugh with Elvin Jones in the Vanguard's so-called kitchen, Elvin dripping sweat and showing his teeth in the usual crazed grin beneath black Mongolian cheekbones.

  Jones fixed a closer look on the man in the hope of some conclusive insight, but didn't learn anything new. An intelligent-looking guy with good features but an uncertain chin, in silver-rim glasses, fortysomething with a headful of wavy hair receding at the front and going harmoniously grey along the sides; hip expensive-looking casual clothes—something indefinably privileged about the simple crewneck sweater and the drape of those cream-colored corduroy slacks—and the stippled black leather bomber jacket was probably some upper-class kind of goatskin; and Levine had a certain set look about his face that made him look as if he knew something about money and its ways. But what about the Italian rumors and why was he investing in a jazz club? not to mention one as visionary as this place was fixing to be. He had weirdness in him. Which might be why someone as outside as Jones felt so comfy jawdng with the guy. A brother spirit, perhaps, beneath the skin of money and above the feet of clay.

  "The sheer weight of stone up there takes care of most of the traffic noise," Levine was telling him, "but you get potholes in winter and God knows what kind of never-ending repairs, three years of steel plate, whatever. So, make a long story short I was able to wangle a research grant that covered some of the cost." Levine smiled fondly, as if he amazed himself sometimes.

  "And you'll open in six weeks?"

  "Why not?" With a gesture, Levine ushered Jones deeper into the wonders of the construction. Jones stepped over the ends of some stacked two-by-fours and wondered if he should be wearing a hard hat just in case.

  "Watch out for that hole in the floor," Levine advised him. "We're still running wire and pipe."

  "I have to know about the six weeks part of it."

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  "The Bear has such a busy schedule? I heard he wasn't working just now."

  "Sometimes he's kind of touchy." Jones was pleased that he was still capable of understatement. Things had been going so improbably well in his life he tended to tell all, in the full confidence that you could show your hand and it wouldn't affect the basic onflowing Tao of things. And if people looked at you like you were an idiot when you told your all? That was their problem. "The Bear may have to think about it awhile. The last time he played New York he got busted and spent the winter in jail."

  "The Tin Palace," Levine said. "You should see the security I'll have in place by the time we open. What do you think of the back of the room?"

  "Great," Jones said even before looking. Most of the interior walls between the big grey stone supports had been bashed away; the scaffolding and joists seemed strong enough. Jones saw an occasional leg of stoneworker up there in the vaults and arches, and missed stepping into another hole in the floorboards mostly by luck. "Whatever the city's doing for you, this must cost a fortune."

  Then Jones had an unnaturally clear attenuated moment in which to open his mouth, begin a pointless gesture with his hands and watch a chunk of masonry about the size of a television drop out of the vaulting toward the floor about fifteen feet behind Levine. The crash, when it finally hit the floor, was enormous, and Levine leapt forward almost into Jones' arms. Jones was able to steady Levine on his feet just short of a full embrace.

  "^ bene?'' a voice came from somewhere up there in the heights.

  "We're alive, Amedeo, grazie,'' Levine called back. Then to Jones: "Maybe we'd better go back outside."

  "Sure," said Jones. "I can relate to that."

  Levine gave a last anxious look back over his shoulder, where fresh dust was rising around the fallen masonr}^ chunk, took Jones' elbow and steered him past all obstacles toward the club's proposed ft-ont door. "xMost of the work's not structural. By now it's mostly decoration. We're together."

  "I'm sure," said Jones, thinking about traffic vibrations and falling rock. It won't collapse and kill the band the first week. A couple of months later, who knows? The opening is safe. That's what I'll tell the Bear. And what'll he tell me? Find me two pillars and place my paws on them.

  They had made it to the greater safety of the entrance area, and peered out the small square of plexiglas set in one of the steel utiHty doors. After a dumbshow of head-gestures that ended in reasonably unison nods of yes let's go, Levine pushed the left-hand door open and they walked outside into Tuesday afternoon and what was left of the uncertain midwinter lull—storms had come and gone, and presumably would come again, but meanwhile there

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  was a kind of peace. A damp gust of wind had a go at them, but there was no ice or hatred in it, and after this first gesture it let them be.

  "Wow," was what Jones managed to say.

  They stood on the large square landing atop the roughed-out stairway and looked riverward across to Brooklyn. It was an indecisive afternoon: the small rain down had rained and now, south on their right to the Battery, a white \dnter sun alternately masked and unmasked itself behind migrating cloud. The grey underside of the bridge soared out over the river and diminished toward its farther landing, the water beneath the bridge dull as lead except where sun found it and tipped the surface. They could hear the sound of traffic above them on the bridge, and pretended they were too cool to notice, about at eye level on the right, cars driving past them on the elevated bridge approach road slowing down to rubberneck, the occasional window rolling down, one guy trying to get their attention, calling, "Hey. Hey!" By now, of course, it was too late for them to respond and they were dealt the regulation New York epithet: "You stoopid fuckin' assholes
, heyP^

  The car passed on and was eaten by other cars where the lanes narrowed before the hairpin bend that would swing them up onto the bridge.

  "He probably just wanted to know what was going on here," Levine explained of his fellow New Yorker. "The staircase, the couple of opened-up windows, all that."

  Jones nodded. "It would have been hard to establish an adequate dialogue," he said.

  For years, or perhaps decades, Jones himself had wondered, passing by in cars, about the brick walls and bricked-up windows that filled the arched space between the hulking grey stone supports at the Manhattan landing of the Brooklyn Bridge. He had wondered what had filled those bricked-in spaces once, a customs house? some composite Abe Lincoln Walt Whitman Hart Crane enclosure of abstract historical space? the dusty, preserved aether of another epoch? what?

  "If the club succeeds, the city'll let boutiques move into the other arches. It could turn into a neat little bazaar here and I could keep the place open in the afternoon for lunch, maybe hire a piano player."

  "Actually," said Jones, "there's a neat little bazaar in the neighborhood already. Best smack south of 110th Street, though most people don't make the trip and settle for bags of Laundromat or Bag-in-a-Bag on Avenue D."

  "Down here? I didn't know."

  "Sure. Right here on Pitt Street." Jones didn't know where Pitt Street was, so he waved in some direction or other.

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  Levine reset his head atop his neck the better to direct an assessing look at Jones. "You have a habit?" Levine asked him.

  "Naw," said Jones. "Just trying to sound street. I have an informant who tells me these things."

  "Who's your informant?"

  Jones decided to look cool and say nothing. The lunchtime piano gig might be worth something, and why should he queer it for Bobby, who said he was kicking again anyway. "I used to wonder about these bricked-up arches," Jones said, looking back up at the body of the bridge.