Night Soul and Other Stories, Page 24

  What’s going to happen Wednesday? Right away they’re arguing a school night and the boy vetoes a baby sitter, and that’s good night. The man will leave him dinner.

  Right over the keyboard, wrists low, hands where they belong cup the notes. Let them argue. After the long day at the day job branching and hopeless but not as jazz is.

  The man had played for his wife, and could still. It’s her loss to have run out of time with him, a jump of memory answering answer, fighting it out, beyond fatherdom and standard love, the beat is all, left hand, right hand working our way along the edge. The keyboard could go its own way. Finding in the dozen bars to come waiting already with you the surprise (her loss) climbing down through doubt and a flat-seven ninth to turn upon a jabbed two-finger second that would sound like a mistake in someone else’s playing, to a major seventh in a cousin key somewhere still a standard spinning daydreams to tell a story if it could, escaping to one single coastline longer, more indented, longer still.

  Redoing the tune in the backwards forwards truck or just incomprehensible or tune-dumb someone had said—furious you could call it, finicky, to crowd the keys to stumble on, the song somewhere surging above the rocky bite and interruption, give of sand, swirl of wind, rush of wave, of which, in spite of what his son asleep (he hopes) tells him, comes to not just equal and opposite reaction to these life forces so fine and off the map, though left by a woman one hundred ninety-nine days ago to lift your shoulders like a shrug. Walking on fingertips with soft claws—and watched, he would think—only to then lean back, wrists high and classical, never mind from time to time three felt hammers it will cost a hundred-and-fifty-dollar tuner to unstick. (“What did I say? Your work’s on hold but you’ll get back to it, was I right or what?” his lunchtime friend had said.)

  With your hands you would hit out, hearing someone—at the door—overhead—no, it’s bare feet paused at the hall threshold awake, and Vic doesn’t miss a beat eye to eye with his son across the room never thinking You should be asleep—not looking at the keys. How he got the club call, who it was remembered him. That’s not it, but that he got the call at all. The boy’s listening in his pajamas, to a sudden untypical run of octaves up and down. “They’re doing themselves a favor,” he tells the boy, who doesn’t move, but will go back to bed.

  Question what’s the worst was no question but shakes him in the morning, his son just out the door, leaving then himself, bumping into bearded super in elevator who grins knowingly, like there’s something to know; Vic simply falling away from the apartment into the train, the creeping noise of fact another slant on the question postponing itself which is asking itself in the supermarket that afternoon or finding the tubes at a place he knows, screws at the hardware, thinking to fix his Vector Research tuner-amp himself, and home again waiting for the elevator as cell goes and it’s Lou’s Corner—Hey you got a bass backup maybe, maybe not, said the woman’s voice in that asking tone as if it was up to him; drums, we hope. While the super opening his cell asks at Vic’s floor, “Workin’?”—Vic answering, “You?”

  Anger even at the boy of the father trying to keep up, isn’t real but just giving the finger to the absent mother who’ll phone Lang apparently before the man got home, hear about the gig, but as if Lang, home from school, and with the phone in the bathroom because he didn’t like the toilets at school, half preoccupied with his things to do, half thinking basically that his father’s kind of always here, is half talking with her as Vic lets the front door fall shut behind him,—the kid correcting himself, “He just came in.”

  At dinner, “What did you research today?” the kid makes conversation. Thinking about tomorrow, the answer.

  Three sets was one too many on a Wednesday school night, he would be late. Though a sitter vetoed by the boy, about to be thirteen. You don’t get it, Dad. And he phoned home at nine-thirty, the place of homework, Lang busy; the woman now in front of him, happy, a kind of manager who’d introduced Vic, taking the phone back, surprised he didn’t know Bill Flyte, who had told them about him, Vic still wondering how he’d left his cell home.

  The second set let him think what he was doing. A room longer than he recalled, stool-sitters at the bar, some standees, and a familiar face from Boston, Columbus, Philly, and in a white shirt and tie a great little timekeeper you used to see all business with his sticks. Photos of Herbie, his glasses mirroring his hands, and Chick (think of it) and Buddy Holly for some reason, Monk holding forth with a trumpeter, Bud Powell, who you’re pretty sure never played here, the wart on his forehead or whatever that was, and a woman behind him at a table; and Errol Garner seeming tall all by himself at the keyboard. A fugitive Cecil Taylor snapshot taken by a customer blown up.

  “Vic.” Two women he didn’t know in skirts stood over him, and named some names and he nodded while he had a bite, lifted his face to the dark one with her hand on his shoulder for some reason who told how it was like a duet of the two hands and asked had he been out of New York for a while? “Always getting the hang of it,” he said. “With everything in between,” said the other, who was cooler, not so nice maybe, “but no tonal center (?),” she said, which was correct and he looked at her, her blue eyes still discernible in the light, and when she offered to buy him a drink and said she hadn’t heard the last number before, and received a call on her cell, “New work,” he said.

  “Does it have a name?” said the first woman, who was a little wild, personal, but a man in a bow tie, gruff and grizzled, stopped by to say thanks for “Got the World on a String,” he could hardly make out the tune, he introduced himself, he had heard of Vic, and, asking if Vic could play “Dancing on the Ceiling,” seemed in his ironic enunciation to be testing you as if it was a business proposition. The second woman, closing her cell, who was not turned on to whatever, knew Annabella as it happened and this “thing” she was finishing (?), this book (?) (as he lifted his glass to drink his club soda). And something else the woman was saying he didn’t listen to at all, as the first one said, “I’ll give it a name.” “It’s not about anything,” Vic said, “it’s about time.” The first woman laughed and it touched him.

  “We heard you were…”—the second woman shrugged—“but you don’t seem that way at all,” she finished.

  Two or three men at the bar he knew but didn’t visit, though this was a mistake. All the instruments still packed under the hood of the best instrument of all, laughter behind him leaving well after midnight. A hand of applause.

  Two blocks from home and no umbrella, there is their lighted window on the third floor. The worst thing that could happen was so small the rain gave crystalline distance-vision. The worst that could happen absolutely vibrated, yet for it to be so far off and at the same time in you you had to be vast.

  The long table, once dining, finds itself strewn with mail, large and small nail clippers, Parent-Teacher notice, intermediate algebra like a coffee table book, and there a stranger at the edge a half-tumbler of coke, an ice cube surfacing. He heard Lang’s door click. A photo album open on the floor. “Who was here?” He knew the answer as he asked. Lang came out in boxers. “That guy Flyte (?).” “Flyte!” “He buzzed.” “You let him up?” “I thought you forgot your keys.” “You let him in?”

  By a street window the recliner. On the piano a Post-it flagging the music stand.

  “That’s what you do,” the boy faltered.

  “You ask who it is,” the father a father who has to keep to the question yet now realizes his son did ask who it was. “I remembered him. He’s big. He knew where you were playing. He knows the owner.” “He got the photo album out. He knew Mom when she was a baby sitter.” “Not only.” “I got to get up in the morning.”

  “He’s a session player.” “What’s that?” “Recording studio. I used to hate him.”

  “Used to?” Lang hauled on the fridge door and looked inside to no avail. “…Dad?”

  On the kitchen table an ice tray loitered.

  “He’s not
a father,” Vic said. Lang leaning to close the fridge, a snapshot slips its magnet, and his father asks if he remembers Flyte. Not somebody you let inside your house.

  “A friend of Mom’s.”

  “You knew that.” Lang knew more. “But nowadays he would never just visit.”

  “He did.”

  “We were rivals once.”

  “He’s funny. Mom told me.” The father hears the visit remark passed over. The truth of it, Flyte’s coincidental visit. “Some woman he said came up once after a set ‘misty-eyed’ and asked you to play something and you’d just been playing it.” “He would remember that.” “He smelled.”

  “What a boy needs a mom for.” “What’s that?” “Warn you ’bout the people you meet. Not somebody you let inside your house,” Vic said drily. The man has picked up the snapshot of Lang with his tennis racket in the park and tucked it under the magnet.

  A silence in the joke bears them into the night sleep-shortened each. Father awake to the rain, some piano voicings, and actually the women at the club.

  Is it the third night of an alternative picking up speed? The worst thing he could imagine keeps where it is. A set of nights is asked of him, music, rain, the street. Things others around him knew—that he would be out tonight—so don’t worry how, it doesn’t matter how, like the spit this pretty well-known session player shakes out of his horn when he’s done, who Vic doubts he’s still that close to Annabella Lang. Though in the morning at seven, in the same space light-shifted, half his cereal left, the boy will ask if he played great and who came. Lang had “really wanted to” (as if what stopped him was homework). Two sets, he’d have been there writing up his oral history project, speeding through his math shortcuts at a tablecloth, where they would bring him something to eat. But three sets. So Lang didn’t go. Unfortunately, as it turned out.

  The album still open on the living room floor. And now, a New Yorker running late, Lang (whose given name the man had not originally favored) couldn’t stay to hear his dad ask about homework, describe the crowd.

  While in his running-late out the door, an industrial-weight backpack looped over one shoulder, Lang mentioned this guy he was seeing after school. Though then the man could regret not telling Lang he’d be late after Parent-Teacher, divided by the boy, the phone, the face of his wristwatch which the hand, knuckles, fingers beyond it can blindly deny. Bent on asking what he and Flyte discussed; and this friend in an upper grade who wanted to meet Vic?—and the piano across the sunny room; the yellow Post-it with four, five named chords; and these broken rhythms that bear you through it all or bop you with doubt and music.

  And now, as Vic will tell it at a New York lunch hour side by side with his unmarried friend at a counter that looks out the street window onto the sidewalk, having mentioned that he had to go for Parent-Teacher conferences today, he had taken the breakfast call, seeing “Anna Lang” on ID knowing he’ll be held up, the dishes sinked, framed photos tacking like sailboats on the long, strewn table, Lang’s room a disaster area—hearing that she’d be taking their son to the Cape Friday right after lunch, drive back next Wednesday—

  Wednesday! quietly exclaims the lunch friend, entertained, thoughtful.

  A hundred and twelve or thirteen hours at Truro, missing three days of school, it was news to the father. “He can get his assignments.” “Who from?” “He can play golf” (Golf? Vic’s lunch friend is appealed to)—miles of beach, the water, the air, fresh fish, great place to work. “Work?” Vic asks his friend, imagining that beautiful coast.

  “We’ll pick him up…—hmm,” she goes.

  “I don’t think so.” “You what?” “He’s not crazy about missing school.”

  “It won’t make a particle of difference,” lips, tongue, teeth audible, a darkness of pomposity he loves her for still a little, “He can get his assignments,” she said in a different voice, partner annihilating partner…—“and what are you offering for the weekend?”

  “More than a weekend.”

  “What did you” (the friend speaking with his mouth full) “do?” who, not having been there, wouldn’t know what followed. “She said I left him alone last night.” “She knew about the gig?” “I think from Flyte; remember Flyte?” Vic gives back a look, knowing less than he implies. “Said I would ask him.”

  “She already had,” the friend guesses, high-fives a mute laugh side by side at the narrow counter positioned up against the wide window like city choices. The view right on top of sidewalk passers-by, two women screaming with laughter, two men importantly grim.

  And something else for this New York friend not to hear, who asks, “What’re you leaving out?” when Vic eyes his wristwatch and mentions Parent-Teacher again.

  “Oh,” (for Vic’s cell vibrated against his leg groaning now under the counter below the remaining half of his sandwich) “she said we need to see a lawyer.”

  “She’s right,” returns the other, easing off his stool, Lou’s Corner calling. Vic’s cell proffered—encore Saturday, this time drums and bass fer sure.

  Already! You see? Friend would try to come. And nobody’s business the music now under way at lunch-break in your head persuading you that Flyte visited the apartment because he was sent. A lunchtime pang. “What are you leaving out?” the friend eyes the half a sandwich left on the open wrapper.

  Scrolling up son’s e-mail, as a matter of fact, the wreck of Lang’s room this morning monitored by multi-gigabyte computer screening an ecstatic brunette her mouth and cell-phone open, DOWNLOAD THE HOTTEST RINGTONES. One attachment the father would not access beyond, that is, the beginning “Confessions of a Strung-out…”—(Hustler, he supplies) fool that he is to let his son’s mother in this far—who is said lately to tell her own real-life story smartened up (one understands) not only in photos but through some applied buzz thinking. This person who zooms in on science she knows measurably zero probably about.

  “You done?” the lunch friend indicates the half a sandwich, and asks if Anna had Parent-Teacher today? Didn’t ask her. Didn’t ask her when? his friend echoed and slipped the unwanted sandwich-half into a Ziploc produced from his raincoat pocket. Well, a second phone call coming in on your way out you’re freed from—an after-thought he figured for Annabella Lang to ram home, left for the machine to sustain, while the neighbor’s bacon confidently frying was inhaled on the early morning landing and the boon of coffee smoking through floor and wall, embedded grain of somebody’s toast, could be enough…“You think my life is out of control,” Vic said. “The opposite,” said his lunch friend. Keep talking, his parting words to Vic.

  Shuttering his day, a dark light from the remembered album. Abandoned open on the floor last night at the onset of rain by the owner of, as Vic recalled, a vintage Chrysler Le Baron convertible. Open to a twilight shot Flyte evidently had turned to of father holding baby witnessed by a cactus in bloom facing a page of Flyte in swim trunks bellying, his big mouth open, a weathered Cape Cod railing. Page after page, all equal for Vic, who recalls Flyte on a band stand, slotting his trumpet vibrato at the head of the pianist, who recalls now an emotional Japanese banger, out of the picture, but a New York tennis court or men playing dominoes Saturday on Columbus and somewhere a hook-and-ladder shot cornering an avenue. Carole King at a Christmas keyboard, smiling just huge. A drenched child, unmistakable, playing with the active sprinkler head in the park, his bare buddy shoving, hey not taking turns, and, accompanying the crystals of water light, unseen little girls remembered singing nearby. Lang tottered down a hall half out of focus; or in a high chair at the breakfast table fed spoonfuls of sweet potato. Filaments of light from the day saved. Vic and Anna ensconced on the couch paging each loaded sleeve of an album backward—when he got home he would have to find that shot—the photographer their son clicking just before a fight—over Vic’s piano “daydreams” but really over money, before she got up and left the room.

  At school parents in line let past the security desk stride for the stairs t
o sign up outside class rooms, Global, English, Math (Mrs. Mukta regrettably absent)—Biology time falling into a three-minute hour-glass: the teacher when it’s your turn respectful, spectacles on a cord, tapping a laptop keyboard, granting that Lang “gets it very quickly”—staff-eyes blinking, a whole-face blink. “Then he…”

  “Coasts?” from a smiling father.

  “…Mmm…Yeah, ‘coasts.’” Why did father not believe teacher? Earring? Laptop? The sound of his yeah? His human mmm?

  The boy’s depth is why.

  Did this Global guy know the substitute, T.P.? Everyone knew T.P. A stained Mets mug recalls a lunchtime pang, a hunger.

  Yet returning home late in the day, at the touch of the phone machine button expecting Anna’s voice and on the way to the piano across the room liking the bare floor better than the rug they used to have in front of the bookcase, hearing his own chords before a finger meets the keyboard, he must hear from not Anna but Flyte that morning message of, for Lang curiously, these weird little thoughts: Hey make a day of it if you’re around (?)…—the pool and diving board in Flyte’s building, some stuff he could show Lang uptown, a lab at Einstein open on the weekend, this world-class acoustic guitar maker, a recording studio, later hear some music at Déjà Blue (“gotta coupla—”).

  Saturday with someone else’s kid? Did Déjà Blue print tickets? Would the piano tell you Flyte hasn’t been with Anna for a while, or do you tell the piano, hand over hand, a flock of nestings peeling off one after another? Tracing the music, putting off kitchen hunger. Two hands engrossed, he’s alone here.

  Until the pianist hears one soaring gong from the church down the street—five-fifteen? when an aroma of beef roasting says it’s six-fifteen, a warmth of apples baking somewhere.

  One hand before it has stopped advancing answers the other in reverse. This standard tune about “the world” knows actually the real music against his mingled steps, Bach to Bartók, before they’re gone. All the things felt like math not known till they are. Voicing he will use Saturday no matter what, with company on the bandstand this time, he’s been promised. The question lurking between three felt hammers that can stick keeps clear of the keys.