by Rafi Zabor
"I did too," said Levine.
"But you did something about it," Jones prompted.
"Yeah," Levine grinned, then did an assortment of aw-shucks gestures before getting into it. "I decided to make a couple of maneuvers. I decided to get down with the city and see if I could hondle. ..."
Jones let Levine tell him all about it.
After shaking hands on a definite maybe, Jones made a credit-card call on a payphone just the other side of the bridge in the lee of Police Plaza—he wouldn't mention the nearness of the police to the Bear if Iris could wake him up and get him on the line—but no one picked up. He tried the number again and let it ring about a dozen times—Jeez, people go outdoors and actually do things in the country. Jones decided to try again that night after dinner. He thought he might have a dram before going back up to Houston Street and waiting for his honey. Or, better yet, go over, browse J&R Jazz World and see how Sensible Shoes was doing, tell the manager the Bear would be opening the Bridge in six weeks and w^ouldn't it be good to put up a display for the album now?
He doesn't hibernate does he, ha ha ha? Levine had asked him in parting, and Jones had answered Of course not, ha ha ha.
The sun had gone down behind the buildings when Jones made it from PoHce Plaza to City Hall.
When Iris woke him—as gently as she ever had when they were lovers, so gently for a moment he thought they might be lovers still—several clouds of thought assailed him. He had been aware for some time that her voice was calling his name softly, an excellent thing in woman, and then that a gentle familiar hand had laid itself upon his shoulder; but he was deep down, he was all the way asleep, and that voice and hand reached him only through veils of dream and interpretation, not to mention the memory of desire, and some-
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thing like his love for her was groping upward out of sleepdust toward her but it was a long long way to go ... it had been so long since he . . . there was so much he wanted to say . . . did he still know how to say it?
WTien Iris' familiar hand took hold of his right foot things started not to fit into the pattern of his loves and wishes, and that was when he began to wake into the familiar world of mixed Hght and dark, time resuming its steady motion, and he remembered loss.
Mien he opened his eyes he couldn't see her clearly. She seemed to shimmer there as if only partly manifested out of aether. He wanted to speak to her but couldn't find a word anywhere, and for a moment was afraid that he had lost his grip on language. "Ssss?" he said finally. Maybe he had lost it. "Ssspingv^ed?"
"Is it spring yet?" Iris asked him. "Not quite."
"You do me wrong to take me out of the grave," he told her. Looked like he still had language. Was that a good thing? Maybe he could have done with a change. WTiere had it gotten him? "Thart so bliss." Tongue still thick in his mouth though.
"Jones wants to talk to you." Her voice still had that melodic Hit, and was still pretty much inscrutable. "He says it's important. Can you wake up? Do you want to wake up? If you're having trouble waking up, I could make some coffee."
A yawn pulled his jaws wide. "Thart a soul in bliss," he finally managed. He tried to look up at Iris but the daylight was unfamiliar and dazzled him.
"I could leave you alone and let you decide. I could come down again tomorrow."
It seemed he had managed to nod yes. But he didn't want her to go away. He raised a vague paw but she was leaving, the door swung shut, and she had left. And now he had some sort of decision to make. Even though he was for the most part unconscious, he nosed his way forward through the veils and made a selection among the levels of mind available to him; he found a band of unassuming sleep in which he could put off immediate decisions and coast with the currents until he could meditate the situation through, maybe wake up for real tomorrow. Three notes chiming down there in the bass. How strange to deal with all this multilevelled vagueness when the only issue really was a love supreme. Three, make that four notes chiming, an old favorite long-familiar tune, he thought, wiping from his mind a momentary confusion with Bostic's humming version of "Hambone, Hambone, Have You Heard." Once the Bear got Trane back in focus he sailed off to sleep on the notes—low sleek planar sleep, not the insensible depth dive of the last few months—a boat gliding out from shore on smooth dark water. He
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smiled at the simplicity of the notes. Admired their economy and efficacy. Dreamed.
"Iris and I hardly talked," he told Jones, climbing forward as the van swung away from the ticketbooth along the curving ramp and found the straight vein of the Thruway south to the city. "Though she said we had a lot to talk about when I come back after the gig next week. The kids and I kept out of each other's way. It was some kind of a truce, I guess."
"Did you practice?" Jones asked him pointedly.
"Yes, I practiced. And I can still play. Thanks for the empathy."
This exchange yielded a few miles of silent highway, bare trees flicking past. The Bear fiddled with the heater and unbuttoned his raincoat, the snazzy charcoal-grey one, and adjusted his hat.
"I think we might be getting married," Jones said finally.
"That's sweet, man," the Bear told him, thinking that sometimes Jones had an unerring instinct for the wrong thing to say, almost good enough to match his own. "I'm touched of course, but you know I don't really need the ceremony. And seriously, Jones, what church would have us? You know I love you anyway, right?" The Bear batted his eyes and placed a paw atop Jones' right hand where it held the wheel.
Jones turned his head as if it were mounted on gimbals and gave the Bear a Look. "I was thinking of marrying someone else. You remember Sybil." His head returned its attention to the road.
"Oh yeah, her. I think you'll make a lovely couple. If you need a band for the reception you should call my guy and have him book me. He works at Megaton, he'll set it up. Yeah, give yourself a phonecall and negotiate a deal."
"On the other hand," said Jones, "for our wedding entertainment you could just go fack yourself." He pulled the van left to pass a long black tarp-shrouded truck laboring on an upgrade, ends of rope flapping here and there at its edges. Once past that, he joined a line of cars doing seventy-five in convoy against the legal limit, tucking into the slipstream at the rear.
"I was trying for humor," said the Bear, "but it came out kind of testy, huh."
"You? Testy? Never happens. Well, hardly ever."
"Jones, let's clear the air. Of course I'm happy for you. I'm bitter about my own losses. Which is an explanation, not an excuse. Are you and Sybil really doing well? That's terrific."
"Everything is lox, clam and veloute. It seems we've worked our issues out."
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"Jones no shit that's great to hear." The Bear looked his buddy over head to toe. He seemed better settled in his flesh than ever, yes. Marrying Sybil was probably the best thing that could happen to him. "She coming down to the club tonight?"
"Of course she is." Jones cleared his throat and fiddled in a stage-business way with the knobs and levers of the heater. "She'll whip up a gala post-gig supper and be down for a late set at the club."
The Bear reset the heater the way he liked it once Jones was finished fiddling. Of course she's coming down. And of course Iris is staying home with the girls. He was still sure that Tracy and Amy were supposed to love him, but some unaccountable error had interposed itself on fate's necessary pattern so that all of them—he, Iris, Trace and Aim—were missing the moment's intended boat. If he could somehow manage to reposition this presumptive boat at the dock they could all climb aboard and eventually learn to enjoy the ride. It should be the simplest thing in the world to clear the entire misunderstanding up, but trivial, idiot, unimportant things kept barring the way. Passing Tracy on the stairs last night for instance . . . the look she'd given him . . . how it had made him stumble into her and she had made that look as if he had tried to grope her ... Could she really be that ma
levolent? It wasn't possible. She was a smart, nice kid. If she'd only understand that he was no threat to her possession of her mother. If Iris would only be less brittle and afraid she'd see there was room in her world for all of them. But they were riding on rails like locomotives powerless to alter course. How was it possible that none of them could summon up the necessary quantum of clear-eyed, liberating perception? What was wrong with them? Who had cast the spell? It was such a waste.
"You want to talk about things?" Jones asked finally, his voice wavering up out of its usual range. "You want to talk about Iris?"
"Do I want to talk about Iris?"
"I think that's what I said."
"Do I want to talk about Iris."
"This is getting repetitious. Maybe we should forget it and turn on the radio."
"You can't pick up anything on this stretch of road. Why would I want to talk about Iris?"
"Because it's happening to you. Because it's happening to you and it's important and you might want to talk it over."
"I never talk about anything important," said the Bear. "You know that."
"You could experiment. You could consider the possibility that not talking about it might be part of the problem."
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"Humans," the Bear said, "and their human ways."
"Let me see if I can make this clear to you," Jones suggested. "Iris ... is a human. You, who are a bear, are invoked with Iris, who, you remember, is a human. Her daughters, also human. That means there is a four-person situation here, in which three of the four persons are human. To talk about it with a friend is also human. So is the friend. He's human too."
"WTiat's your point?"
"You don't see a connection here?"
"W^ere?"
"Iris human. Kids human. Situation therefore mostly human."
"Yeah that's prett}' much what s wrong with it," said the Bear, "as far as I can see."
Jones persisted. "Talk like human to human friend about human situation."
"Mud upon mud. Only make it worse."
"Maybe good. Maybe help. Don't you see? Human-human-human-human."
"Jones, you're talking like an idiot. WTiat's up with you?"
"You're giving me a headache."
"Funny," said the Bear, "I didn't know you could give someone a headache by pulling their leg."
"You're pulHng my leg?"
"Jesus, I hope it's your leg. . . ."
They watched the miles go by awhile. Jones futzed with the radio and found that what the Bear had said about this stretch of road w^as true. The Bear checked his gig-bag for the umpteenth time to make sure he had packed enough reeds, then waved hello to some astonished, happy kids in the back of a slick new olvo wagon. They were jumping up and down, baring their teeth and fingernails, and the Bear was smiling back and showing them nature red in tooth and claw, reised version. See, he told himself, they like me. "See," he told Jones, "they like me, and they don't even know how wonderful I really am once you get to know me."
"It might help that you're not fucking their mother."
"I'm not fucking anybody's mother," the Bear grumbled.
Jones decided to pass the olvo before the kids' parents scoped the Bear and things got out of hand. He gunned the engine but it was awhile before the van was able to gather sufficient speed to creep ahead, the kids jumping up and down all the way and the Bear waving back and making faces.
"You know," said the Bear, "if Iris and I had known how to talk a Httle better ..." He lapsed into silence. "Maybe ..."
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"Uh huh," said Jones.
"But the way it turned out. . . We just. . . you know."
"Yeah?" said Jones.
"We just. . . yeah," he sighed.
"You still know how to tell a story, Bear."
"Yeah," the Bear nodded, then looked down at the backs of his paws, something he had done in cubhood to assure himself that he was there and at the same time wonder why. "Like that."
"Thank you for sharing that with me," Jones said.
"It was nothing," said the Bear.
"Pretty close."
Bare woods still flicking past, stripped branches reaching up to white winter sky as Jones eased off the gas and let the van fall back. As the van dropped into the right-hand lane, the truck they'd passed before whooshed ahead of them looking Uke death with flapping cloaks and ropes, and left them rocking in the afterdraft.
It's preposterous, he told Iris in his mind, gnawing at the subject like a paw caught in a trap. You'd think we would be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. I could have my music, you could have your kids, and we could meet between sets and work it out. It ought to be simple but there we are without a clue between us. Who would have believed it?
He kept turning their failure over in what passed for his mind, trying to rejig the picture, see it clear, get it right. They'd both been given an unconditioned opportunity—for him best typified by the astounding instant he had first entered Iris and woke up wearing a cosmic multiplicity of heads and limbs—and they'd each made of it what they'd known how to want or ask for. I got sex and bliss and music, she got her kids. Not enough. What a loss.
But if their tantric moment, if that's what it had been, represented unconditioned opportunity, and the botch they'd made of it was a result of selfhood, how was that different from life in general?
Jones cleared his throat. "What I was wondering, if you don't mind telling me, what was hibernation like?"
The Bear looked out at the woods whipping past. "Deep," he said. What am I doing going down to New York City to play some gig? What he wanted was more sleep. What he wanted was to hold Iris in his arms and to beUeve that love still meant something. "It was deep," he told Jones, nodding his big head.
"Restfiil?"
"Not the word I'd use."
"Restorative?"
"I couldn't say. At the moment I feel not so much restored as emptied out.
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Annulled. Most emotions neatly excised." Why was he saying this? It wasn't hterally true. But it felt true. Something had been taken out of him. What?
"A liberation?"
"I'm not sure but I keep looking." He wanted neither self-acceptance nor self-rejection but a state in which self was off the map, but he hadn't reached that point yet. What he had reached felt suspiciously hke the Lesser Void, not a plenum but a blank. Empty world, and cold.
"Tell me about the club," he prompted Jones, just to get out of the rut.
"It's pretty trippy, being in the bridge and all. It's like a metaphor, a symbol of something."
"I meant how are the acoustics."
"It's like the bridge between two orders of perception, two worlds."
"I hate to be pedantic," the Bear began.
"You love to be pedantic."
"But if the club is set in the piles at one end of the Brooklyn Bridge, then it can't possibly suggest a transcendent crossing to the farther shore. The imagery doesn't play. I understand we have a cash guarantee up front and otherwise we don't play note one?"
"That's the way I set it up."
"When'd you become such a hardass?"
"I'm in the business. I've been observing. It's how these things are done. Trust me." Jones reached out and patted the front of the Bear's raincoat. "Hey, you really lost some weight there, all that sleeping."
"If music gets too tough I could do an infomercial. Sleep It Off: The Ancient Ancestral Wisdom of the Bears."
"ToUbooth coming up soon."
"Should I get in back?"
"Just pull your hat down and drool and they'll know you're a musician."
The Bear shunted his body into the rear and sat down on the edge of a wheel-hump. Smell of oil, trace of other industrial substance. It seemed strange that the sweet immaterial motion of music should require such heavy instrumentality: vans, buses, heavy flesh. It ought to be subtler. He sighed. Iris. How was it possible to lose that much beauty and
wind up riding in a van that smelled of oil to play some music?
Maybe the music would rise to meet him when he got there. Or maybe someone'U do me a favor and shoot me. I can't do another few decades of this shit. If Iris and I can't work it out, maybe I'll just bag it, go off into the woods and do the rest of my life on the natch. Why would I want to play a bunch of notes?
The van approached the tollgate in a series of lurches, then stopped. The
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Bear watched Jones pass the ticket and a couple of greenbacks out the window, and the gesture reminded him he had to talk to Jones about money. Jones rolled the window up as the van accelerated back to normal. The Bear gave it another thirty seconds, then climbed forward. "Another thing," he said. "If Sensible Shoes is selling so well and the single of 'When a Man Loves a Woman' is a minor radio hit, how come I'm not getting any royalty checks? Iris says our money's getting short."
"Sybil and I looked through the papers, and it's all straight."
"Iris looked through the papers too and there's all this money the album has earned that I don't get yet. Why?"
"A lot of the money's coming in from foreign sales, and Megaton uses that to pay themselves back for the twenty grand they gave you in front. As soon as that's earned back the money starts to come to you. But not before."
"The way it looks to Iris," said the Bear, "the album has already earned the advance back but because this money hasn't officially come in, I don't get any yet. Which sounds Hke a bunch of shit to me."
"That's because there are scheduled royalty periods twice a year, so when the money comes in at the European end there's a lag before the payout, and when the money's shunted to the company's American end, the six-month period in America doesn't coincide exactly with the European six-month period, so—"
"Oh I think they've got their six-month periods coinciding just the way they want," said the Bear. "They get to keep money I've earned for up to a year before I see a nickel. In the meantime I'm running short of cash, though it's hard to believe it given the way the album's doing."
