But it had been like this the last time, I remembered, over a month ago. And I’d missed somewhere. They hadn’t let me go. Maybe, I thought, because they got too much money out of keeping me here. I didn’t really think that. These men were the best in their profession.
There was a lull in the questioning. They seemed to be waiting for something. For what? I wondered, and it came to me that the last interview had been like this, too.
The door behind me opened, quietly, but I heard it. And I remembered—that had happened last time, too. Just as they told me I could go back to my room and they’d talk it over, someone else had come in. I’d passed him as I’d left the room.
And, suddenly, I knew what I’d missed up on. It had been someone I’d been supposed to recognize, and I hadn’t. And here was the same test again. Before I turned, I tried to remember what Red had told me about people I’d known—but there was so little physical description to it. It seemed hopeless.
“You may return to your room now, Mr. Marlin,” Dr. Glasspiegel was saying. “We—ah—wish to discuss your case.”
“Thanks,” I said, and stood up.
I saw that he’d taken off his shell-rimmed glasses and was tapping them nervously on the back of his hand, which lay on the table before him. I thought, okay, so now I know the catch and next time I’ll make the grade. I’ll have Red get me pictures of my band and other bands I’ve played with and as many newspaper pictures as he can find of people I knew.
I turned. The man in the doorway, standing there as though waiting for me to leave, was short and fat. There was a tense look in his face, even though his eyes were avoiding mine. He was looking past me, at the doctors. I tried to think fast. Who did I know that was short and—
I took a chance. I’d had a trumpet player named Tubby Hayes.
“Tubby!” I said.
And hit the jackpot. His face lighted up Like a neon sign and he grinned a yard wide and stuck out his hand.
“Johnny! Johnny, it’s good to see you.” He was making like a pump handle with my arm.
“Tubby Hayes!” I said, to let them know I knew his last name, too. “Don’t tell me you’re nuts, too. That why you’re here?”
He laughed, nervously. “I came to get you, Johnny. That is, uh, if—“ He looked past me.
Dr. Glasspiegel was clearing his throat. He and the other doctors were standing now.
“Yes,” he said, “I believe it will be all right for Mr. Martin to leave.”
He put his hand on my shoulder. They were all standing about me now.
“Your reactions are normal, Mr. Marlin,” he said. “Your memory is still a bit impaired but—ah—it will improve gradually. More rapidly, I believe, amid familiar surroundings than here. You—ah—have plans?”
“No,” I said, frankly.
“Don’t overwork again. Take things easy for a while. And…“
There was a lot more advice. And then signing things, and getting ready. It was almost an hour before we got into a cab, Tubby and I.
He gave the address, and I recognized it. The Carleton. That was where I’d lived, that last year. Where Kathy still lived.
“How’s Kathy?” I asked.
“Fine, Johnny. I guess she is. I mean—”
“You mean what?”
He looked a bit embarrassed. “Well—I mean I haven’t seen her. She never liked us boys, Johnny. You know that. But she was square with us. You know we decided we couldn’t hold together without you, Johnny, and might as well break up. Well, she paid us what we had coming—the three weeks you were on the cuff, I mean—and doubled it, a three-weeks’ bonus to tide us over.”
“The boys doing okay, Tubby?”
“Yep, Johnny. All of them. Well—except Harry. He kind of got lost in the snow if you know what I mean.”
“That’s tough,” I said, and didn’t elaborate. I didn’t know whether I was supposed to know that Harry had been taking cocaine or not. And there had been two Harrys with the band; at that.
So the band was busted up. In a way I was glad. If someone had taken over and held it together maybe there’d have been an argument about trying to get me to come back.
“A month ago, Tubby,” I said, “they examined me at the sanitarium and I flunked. I think it was because I didn’t recognize somebody. Was it you? Were you there then?”
“You walked right by me, through the door, Johnny. You never saw me.”
“You were there—for that purpose? Both times?”
“Yes, Johnny. That Doc Glasspiegel suggested it. He got to know me, and to think of me, I guess, because I dropped around so often to ask about you. Why wouldn’t they let me see you?”
“Rules,” I said. “That’s Glasspiegel’s system, part of it. Complete isolation during the period of cure. I haven’t even seen Kathy.”
“No!” said Tubby. “They told me you couldn’t have visitors, but I didn’t know it went that far.” He sighed. “She sure must be head over heels for you, Johnny. What I hear, she’s carried the torch.”
“God knows why,” I said. “After I cut—”
“Shut up,” Tubby said sharply. “You aren’t to think or talk about that. Glasspiegel told me that while you were getting ready.”
“Okay,” I said. It didn’t matter. “Does Kathy know we’re coming?”
“We? I’m not going in, Johnny. I’m just riding to the door with you. No, she doesn’t know. You asked the doc not to tell her, didn’t you?”
“I didn’t want a reception. I just want to walk in quietly. Sure, I asked the doctor, but I thought maybe he’d warn her anyway. So she could hide the knives.”
“Now, Johnny—”
“Okay,” I said.
I looked out of the window of the cab. I knew where we were and just how far from the Carleton. Funny my topography hadn’t gone the way the rest of my memory had. I still knew the streets and their names, even though I couldn’t recognize my best friend or my wife. The mind is a funny thing, I thought.
“One worry you won’t have,” Tubby Hayes said. “That lush brother of hers, Myron Courteen, the one that was always in your hair.”
The red-headed interne had mentioned that Kathy had a brother. Apparently I wasn’t supposed to like him. So I said, “Did someone drop him down a well?”
“Headed west. He’s a Los Angeles playboy now. Guess he finally quarreled with Kathy and she settled an allowance on him and let him go.”
We were getting close to the Carleton—only a half-dozen blocks to go—and suddenly I realized there was a lot that I didn’t know, and should know.
“Let’s have a drink, Tubby,” I said. “I—I’m not quite ready to go home yet.”
“Sure, Johnny,” he said, and then spoke to the cab driver.
We swung in to the curb in front of a swanky neon-plated tavern. It didn’t look familiar, like the rest of the street did. Tubby saw me looking.
“Yeah, it’s new,” he said. “Been here only a few months.”
We went in and sat at a dimly lighted bar. Tubby ordered two Scotch-and-sodas—without asking me, so I guess that’s what I used to drink. I didn’t remember. Anyway, it tasted all right, and I hadn’t had a drink for eleven months, so even the first sip of it hit me a little.
And when I’d drunk it all, it tasted better than all right. I looked at myself in the blue mirror back of the bar. I thought, there’s always this. I can always drink myself to death—on Kathy’s money. I knew I didn’t have any myself because Tubby had said I was three weeks on the cuff with the band.
We ordered a second round and I asked Tubby, “How come this Myron hasn’t money of his own, if he’s Kathy’s brother?” He looked at me strangely. I’d been doing all right up to now. I said, “Yeah, there are things I’m still hazy about.”
“Oh,” he said. “Well, that one’s easy. Myron is worse than a black sheep for the Courteens. He’s a no-good louse and an all-around stinker. He was disinherited, and Kathy got it all. But she takes care of him.�
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He took a sip of his drink and put it down again. “You know, Johnny,” he said, “none of us liked Kathy much because she was against you having the band and wanted you to herself. But we were wrong about her. She’s swell. The way she sticks to her menfolk no matter what they do. Even Myron.”
“Even me,” I said.
“Well—she saved your life, Johnny. With blood—” He stopped abruptly. “Forget it, Johnny.”
I finished my second drink. I said, “I’ll tell you the truth, Tubby. I can’t forget it-because I don’t remember it. But I’ve got to know, before I face her. What did happen that night?”
“Johnny, I—”
“Tell me,” I said. “Straight.”
He sighed. “Okay, Johnny. You’d been working close to twenty-four hours a day trying to put us over, and we’d tried to get you to slow down and so did Kathy.”
“Skip the build-up.”
“That night, after we played at the hotel, we rehearsed some new stuff. You acted funny, then, Johnny. You forgot stuff, and you had a headache. We made you go home early, in spite of yourself. And when you got home—well you slipped a cog, Johnny. You picked a quarrel with your wife—I don’t know what you accused her of. And you went nuts. You got your razor—you always used to shave with a straight edge—and, well you tried to kill her. And then yourself.”
“You’re skipping the details,” I said. “How did she save my life?”
“Well, Johnny, you hadn’t killed her like you thought. The cut went deep on one side of her throat but—she must have been pulling away—it went light across the center and didn’t get the jugular or anything. But there was a lot of blood and she fainted, and you thought she was dead, I guess, and slashed your own wrists. But she came to, and found you bleeding to death fast. Bleeding like she was, she got tourniquets on both your arms and held ‘em and kept yelling until one of the servants woke up and got the Carleton house doctor. That’s all, Johnny.”
“It’s enough, isn’t it?” I thought a while and then I added, “Thanks, Tubby. Look, you run along and leave me. I want to think it out and sweat it out alone, and then I’ll walk the rest of the way. Okay?”
“Okay, Johnny,” he said. “You’ll call me up soon?”
“Sure,” I said. “Thanks for everything.”
“You’ll be all right, Johnny?”
“Sure. I’m all right.”
After he left I ordered another drink. My third, and it would have to be my last, because I was really feeling them. I didn’t want to go home drunk to face Kathy.
I sat there, sipping it slowly, looking at myself in that blue mirror back of the bar. I wasn’t a bad-looking guy, in a blue mirror. Only I should be dead instead of sitting there. I should have died that night eleven months ago. I’d tried to die.
I was almost alone at the bar. There was one couple drinking martinis at the far end of it. The girl was a blonde who looked like a chorus girl. I wondered idly if Kathy was a blonde. I hadn’t thought to ask anyone. If Kathy walked in here now, I thought, I wouldn’t know her.
The blonde down there picked up some change off the bar and walked over to the juke box. She put in a coin and punched some buttons, and then swayed her hips back to the bar. The juke box started playing and it was an old record and a good one—the Harry James version of the Memphis Blues. Blue and brassy stuff from the days back before Harry went commercial.
I sat there listening, and feeling like the devil. I thought, I’ve got to get over it. Every time I hear stuff like that I can’t go on wanting to kill myself just because I can’t play any more. I’m not the only guy in the world who can’t play music. And the others get by.
My hands were lying on the bar in front of me and I tried them again, while I listened, and they wouldn’t work. They wouldn’t ever work again. My thumbs were okay, but the four fingers on each hand opened and closed together and not separately, as though they were webbed together.
Maybe the Scotch was making me feel better, but—maybe, I decided—maybe it wouldn’t be too bad-Then the Harry James ended and another record slid onto the turntable and started, and it was going to be blue, too. Mood Indigo. I recognized the opening bar of the introduction. I wondered idly if all the records were blues, chosen to match the blue back-bar mirrors.
Deep blue stuff, anyway, and well handled and arranged, whoever was doing it. A few Scotches and a blue mood, and that Mood Indigo can take hold of your insides and wring them. And this waxing of it was solid, pretty solid. The brasses tossed it to the reeds and then the piano took it for a moment, backed by wire-brush stuff on the skins, and modulated it into a higher key and built it up and you knew something was coming.
And then something came, and it was an alto sax, a sax with a tone like blue velvet, swinging high, wide and off the beat, and tossing in little arabesques of counterpoint so casually that it never seemed to leave the melody to do it. An alto sax riding high and riding hot, pouring notes like molten gold.
I unwound my fingers from around the Scotch-and-soda glass and got up and walked across the room to the juke box. I knew already but I looked. The record playing was Number 9, and Number 9 was Mood Indigo—Johnny Martin.
For a black second I felt that I had to stop it, that I had to smash my fist through the glass and jerk the tone arm off the record. I had to because it was doing things to me. That sound out of the past was making me remember, and I knew suddenly that the only way I could keep on wanting to live at all was not to remember.
Maybe I would have smashed the glass. I don’t know. But instead I saw the cord and plug where the juke box plugged into the wall outlet beside it. I jerked on the cord and the box went dark and silent. Then I walked out into the dusk, with the three of them staring at me—the blonde and her escort and the bartender.
The bartender called out “Hey!” but didn’t go on with it when I went on out without turning. I saw them in the mirror on the inside of the door as I opened it, a frozen tableau that slid sidewise off the mirror as the door swung open.
I must have walked the six blocks to the Carleton, through the gathering twilight. I crossed the wide mahogany-paneled lobby to the elevator. The uniformed operator looked familiar to me—more familiar than Tubby had. At least there was an impression that I’d seen him before.
“Good evening, Mr. Marlin,” he said, and didn’t ask me what floor I wanted. But his voice sounded strange, tense, and he waited a moment, stuck his head out of the elevator and looked around before he closed the door. I got the impression that he was hoping for another passenger, that he hated to shut himself and me in that tiny closed room. But no one else came into the lobby and he slid the door shut and moved the handle. The building slid downward past us and came to rest at the eleventh floor. I stepped out into another mahogany-paneled hall and the elevator door slid shut behind me.
It was a short hallway, on this floor, with only four doors leading to what must be quite large suites. I knew which door was mine—or I should say Kathy’s. My money never paid for a suite tike that.
It wasn’t Kathy who opened the door. I knew that because it was a girl wearing a maid’s uniform. And she must, I thought, be new. She looked at me blankly. “Mrs. Martin in?” I asked. “No sir. She’ll be back soon, sir.” I went on in. “I’ll wait,” I said. I followed her until she opened the door of a room that looked tike a library.
“In here, please,” she said. “And may I have your name?”
“Martin,” I said, as I walked past her. “Johnny Marlin.” She caught her breath a tittle, audibly. Then she said, “Yes, sir,” and hurried away.
Her heels didn’t click on the thick carpeting of the hall, but I could tell she was hurrying. Hurrying away from a homicidal maniac, back to the farthest reaches of the apartment, probably to the protective company of a cook who would keep a cleaver handy, once she heard the news that the mad master of the manse was back. And likely there’d be new servants, if any, tomorrow.
I walked up and dow
n a while, and then decided I wanted to go to my room. I thought, if I don’t think about I can go there. My subconscious will know the way. And it worked; I went to my room.
I sat on the edge of the bed a while, with my head in my hands, wondering why I’d come here. Then I looked around. It was a big room, paneled like the rest of the joint, beautifully and tastefully furnished. Little Johnny Dettman of the Cleveland slums had come a long way to have a room like that, all to himself. There was a Capehart radio-phonograph across the room from me, and a big cabinet of albums. Most of the pictures on the walls were framed photographs of bands. In a silver frame on the dresser was the picture of a woman.
That would be Kathy, of course. I crossed over and looked at it. She was beautiful, all right, a big-eyed brunette with pouting, kissable lips. And the fog was getting thinner. I almost knew and remembered her.
I looked a long time at that photograph, and then I put it down and went to the closet door. I opened it and there were a lot of suits in that closet, and a lot of pairs of shoes and a choice of hats. I remembered; John Dettman had worn a sweater to high school one year because he didn’t have a suit coat.
But there was something missing in that closet. The instrument cases. On the floor, there at the right, should have been two combination cases for sax and clarinet. Inside them should have been two gold-plated alto saxes and two sleek black Selmer clarinets. At the back of the closet should have been a bigger case that held a baritone sax I sometimes fooled around with at home.
They were all gone, and I was grateful to Kathy for that. She must have understood how it would make me feel to have them around.
I closed the door gently and opened the door next to it, the bathroom. I went in and stood looking at myself in the mirror over the wash bowl. It wasn’t a blue mirror. I studied my face, and it was an ordinary face. There wasn’t any reason in that mirror why anyone should love me the way my wife must. I wasn’t tall and I wasn’t handsome. I was just a mug who had played a lot of sax—once.
The mirror was the door of a built-in medicine cabinet sunk into the tile wall and I opened it. Yes, all my toilet stuff was neatly laid out on the shelves of the cabinet, as though I’d never been away, or as though I’d been expected back daily. Even—and I almost took a step backwards—both my straight razors—the kind of a razor a barber uses—lay there on the bottom shelf beside the shaving mug and brush.
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