Is Morris even still in New York? Not a word has passed between them since he left the States. The most deafening thing he’s ever heard is the silence between two people.
“Go ahead, book it,” he says to Bobby Blue Eyes.
The pills the bouncer sold him before the show are hitting their notes. In his knees a river is stilled white by winter; in his head a turbid sea laps away the shore. Don’t fight it. Roll with the cabin and there’s no getting sick, a stewardess once said to him on a plane.
Back at the booth the brandy glasses have been emptied and only one of the boys is there. It’s the lieutenant, slumped against the wall on the other side of the booth.
“Where did your friends go?”
“Someplace. They left.”
He’s visited by the sudden focus that comes to drunks at the height of inebriation. He studies the lieutenant’s upwardly curved eyes, made prominent under the barren expanse of forehead; they remind him of the expression on Morris’s face, humming a newly hatched tune as they walked down Broadway.
It was Morris who’d fed him the whirly phrases that built up his early songs. Morris, hunched over the desk they shared, whistling and filling music sheets with whatever was abuzz in his head. Morris, who loved even the most wretched parts of him. They’d had a wonderful, tender decade with each other, hadn’t they? They’d done all they could so others wouldn’t find out, so that, at clubs, they wouldn’t walk into abrupt silence where the other musicians sat.
“Did I tell you about when I played in West Berlin with Ambassador Satch?” He pauses to sip his glass.
“Are you okay there, Clyde?”
“As fantastic as ever. Thanks for asking.”
His voice feels like it has floated off and he’s in a darkened room, listening to someone else say his words. “So this is after I’ve left New York and am bumming around in Newark. One day I get a call, and it’s my old headliner friend saying, ‘Clyde, you ever gone east of Queens?’ So before I know it, I’m there in England and then Germany, and we’re having ourselves a hell of a time, because over there they still love us to death. Then one night, we’re at this club in West Berlin, just off the Bleibtreustrasse, and as I’m playing, I feel a chill down my spine, and I notice this fellow standing in the aisle, leaning against a wall, and he’s staring at us like he wants to rip our throats out with his teeth. I keep on playing, of course, but whenever I look out there I see this terrible face. Well, the show ends, and the crowd’s leaving, and this man’s walking up to me. I’m thinking, Louis won’t mind if I grab his horn to use in self-defense, but then the man sticks his hand out and barks out something in German, and as I’m shaking his hand, our translator says the man crossed the Wall that night just to come hear us live.”
His voice returns to his tongue, like a pigeon to its coop, and becomes his again.
“You want another one?” the lieutenant asks.
“I’m set.”
Under the table, Clyde brushes his leg on the lieutenant’s. The leg, warm underneath the man’s trousers, doesn’t move from where his has stopped: the side of the man’s calf. A frightened look flashes over the lieutenant’s face. How remarkable, Clyde thinks, that a grown man can so quickly become a child again.
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
A ringing phone wakes him. He looks around and sees that he’s alone in his own bed, still wearing last night’s pants. The rectangle of morning through his one window shines on the jacket hanging from a chair. It has a nasty tear, the right sleeve hanging on sinewy threads. A dull pain radiates across the left side of his face. When he touches it, looking in the wall mirror, he’s glad to find that it’s not swollen, just a purple blot he can cover with powder. He remembers now: ambling down an empty soi with the lieutenant, saying the harmless things he usually says to a man he’s just met and the lieutenant responding, one-worded. Then out of nowhere, he felt a shove, his collar yanked, and the lieutenant not being so quiet with a pair of right hooks.
“Hello,” he says into the phone.
“Making sure someone remembers to show up today.”
“Damn it, Bobby. I’ve been doing this since long before you learned how to chew your food.”
He takes a shower in the mildewy bathroom. He takes a bottle of Coke out of the fridge and rubs the cold glass on his face. He patches himself up and dresses. At three o’clock, he walks down the two flights of stairs from his apartment and hails a tuk-tuk in front of the building. As with every afternoon, the roads run thick with private cars and overburdened buses. Beaky scooters and children hawking flower garlands wind through short-lived gaps between crushing fates. It takes half an hour to go just a few kilometers.
“This is it? You sure?” he asks the driver, but the man sputters off without a word.
He stands in the shade of the wrought-iron fence and the column of tall ashoka trees behind it. A servant, wearing a waistcloth like they do in the country, answers the buzzer and lets him in. He follows her down a stone-lined path, past a row of trellises heavy with yellow flowers the shape of gramophone horns, and then along a circular garden pond the color of split pea soup. For a moment, the choir of garden insects falls silent, revealing the sickly sputters of a boat engine. A canal becomes visible through narrow crenels striping the rear concrete wall. They walk along a driveway beside the wall, their footsteps measuring a few tranquil minutes—the sloshing wake, the songbirds overhead—until, finally, he spots a house awash with an air of the ancient in the tree-shaded light. They come to a roofed terrace that reminds him of the porch at his childhood home—his grandma’s white-and-green cottage, where he studied how the grown-ups played hymns and where at night, while his family slept, he silently scurried his tiny fingers a nail’s width above the keys. This house stands much larger, with two stories of arched windows and decorated eaves and terra-cotta tiles on the roof, much like ones he’s seen at villas in northern Italy where he played USO shows.
Inside, the house is cool and dimly lit. His nose picks up the faint scent of aged wood, sweet and dusty, like wisps of tobacco pinched from a tin. “This way. She’s waiting,” the servant girl tells him in Thai, gesturing down a hallway with her open palm. He steps into a parlor room with sea-blue walls wainscoted in dark teak. A trio of green velvet-backed chairs anchor the room. On the tallest chair sits a Thai woman about his age, wearing an ivory-colored silk blouse and a long brown skirt. The two puppies at her feet spring up to yap at him, and she quiets them with a clap.
“Make yourself comfortable,” she says in British-accented English. He brings together his hands, thinking to clasp them and greet her with a traditional Thai wai, but she offers her hand for him to shake. He sits down in the chair facing her and drops his Panama hat on the narrow table beside it.
“A grand house you have here, ma’am,” he says.
“It used to be my husband’s. He lives in London with his current wife. My son lives in New York, trying to be a starving artist. I’m here.”
“All the same, ma’am, it’s a wonderful home. All the same.”
“Would you like a drink, Mr. Crazy Legs? A water?”
“I’m quite all right, thank you, ma’am. Maybe I’ll bother you for that water later.”
“And you can stop addressing me as ma’am. Call me Pehn.”
“Will do, Khun Pehn. Likewise, please call me Clyde. Clyde Alston.”
“I’ve long admired your work, Mr. Clyde Alston. I must have listened to Starry Hour hundreds of times.”
“It’s been a long time since that album. I’m surprised anyone still knows of it.”
“You’re being too modest, Mr. Alston. It’s a remarkable record. Won’t you play from it for me?”
“I’ve had a few albums since then, Khun Pehn. Sure you wouldn’t like to hear my latest stuff?”
“The songs were dear to me during more joyful times in my life. Do
you prefer not to play them, Mr. Alston?”
Clyde remembers riding out to Hackensack with Morris to record Starry Hour at the sound engineer’s studio, which was no more than a wood-ceilinged living room with a control area behind glass. The acoustics, though, were better than most concert halls in the city. Afterward, Red and Tony happened to drop in, and they all played on, long after the recording session, everything humming: the air in the room, the blue of the sky outside. Shame they hadn’t caught that part on tape too.
“Of course not, Khun Pehn. Just that it’s been a while. I might be a little out of practice.”
For a long moment they say nothing further. A ceiling fan whirs overhead, and the shrill call of a lone mountain pigeon comes from somewhere outside.
He has never been one for afternoons. He hates how the day hangs so thick and undecided, as if it’s staring him down and expecting an answer. Morris would go run errands or play the numbers or both, and then come back some hours later to slap together two of his huge, piled-on sandwiches with cold cuts from the Jewish deli over by Connie’s. Winters, they almost never left their apartment on 137th Street unless for a show. They wormed under blankets and drank dirty birds until the next day’s light knocked on the window. He’d rest his head on Morris’s chest and listen to the growling stomach of the man he loved and think that was the happiest anyone could be. It was on one of those nights that he noticed marks at the bend of Morris’s arm. Not long after, he found a kit hidden behind a dresser.
“Not to be rude, Khun Pehn, but Bobby let you know my fee?”
“I don’t know who this Bobby is, but yes, here’s all of it.”
She hands him an envelope, and he puts it in his pants pocket, not bothering to peek. He’s curious how Bobby Blue Eyes even found out about this gig.
“So where’s this party I’m playing?” he asks, gesturing with his hand in the direction of the garden.
Khun Pehn chuckles, covering her mouth with a wrist.
“Party? This Bobby, did he not tell you?”
She gets up, and he follows her down the hallway under the staircase. The room they enter has bare teak walls and a window that looks out on a vegetable garden. At the far side of the room, Clyde sees a turn-of-the-century piano with elaborate inlaid patterns on the mahogany case and carved moldings on the key bed. Nearby, a man in a white tunic sits cross-legged on a Louis XIV sofa.
“I’m playing for him?”
“Master Rai? He’s only the medium. You’ll be playing for the spirits,” Khun Pehn says, pointing to a wooden pillar by the window.
“In there,” Clyde says.
“Yes, mainly. Master Rai counts twenty or so spirits in the pillar. They visit me in my dreams, and I’m tired of it. A woman my age needs her sound sleep.”
He looks the pillar up and down. Weathered and knotted, with dark globs of sap bleeding at its base, the pillar reminds him of a giant twig. One magnificent day, he’ll cut himself loose from Bobby Blue Eyes.
“What do these spirits want?”
“They’re unhappy with me. They think I’m selling the house.”
“Are you?”
“Nobody wants me to sell. Nobody lives here but me. I feel as if I’m trapped in one of those boxes they fill up with odd mementos and seal in the ground, so others can dig it out a hundred years later and amuse themselves. Do you know what I’m talking about, Mr. Clyde Alston?”
“Can’t think of the exact term at the moment, but yes, I do. What I’m not clear on is my part in this.”
“They also told me, through Master Rai, that they haven’t heard a musician play for them in ages. My husband’s parents brought in mahori ensembles. I thought I’d change the tradition a bit.”
Clyde lifts the cover and taps out the first bar of a standard. The piano’s tuned, depriving him of an honest excuse.
“Khun Pehn, this is giving me the heebie-jeebies. I don’t know.”
Master Rai, speaking in some dialect, mumbles something that Clyde doesn’t catch. After hearing the man out, Khun Pehn says, “He wants you to know the spirits here are very eager for you to perform. And if you’d like, you can invite some of your own.”
Standing over the piano, Clyde tells himself that this is no different from any other gig. In a week or two, he’ll be gone from Bangkok, and this will be just another of his memories of the place; the mother of future laughs across gin glasses.
“All right, Khun Pehn. Show’s on.”
“Very well. Shall we?”
* * *
☐ ☐ ☐
Hunched in front of the piano, Clyde sees only the shiny keys and his own softened reflection in the dark lacquer. Khun Pehn and Master Rai are sitting somewhere behind him, but it feels like he’s the only one in the room. He wonders when he should start, not used to being deprived of opening applause, no matter how polite and pitiful.
He can’t remember when he last played these songs, even on his own. He hopes that his mind only has to pull the familiar levers and his fingers and feet will break into the remembered motions. The keys at the tips of his fingers feel steel-cold. He presses down carefully, as if stepping forward on a lightless street. He slides the chair out of the way.
He begins tapping the floor with a foot, and for a while he rides fast up and down a series of chord changes, quickening the tempo after every few bars. When he reaches a frenzy that verges on his running off with the piano, he freezes and lets his voice pierce through, a grand cry like—as Morris once instructed—the first one outside his ma’s belly.
After that outburst, his fingers sing in his place. He opens with the quick-footed bluesy numbers, each about three minutes long, each moody and nervous but not without an underlayer of burgeoning rapture. He then tempers the pace to what might be called a ballad, a reliable crowd melter from when he made the rounds on Fifty-Second Street, a conceit, he admits, to set them up for the bombardment to follow.
Some newspaperman had once said that he played the keys as if they were on a machine shooting out confetti. When he had much of the crowd swaying and nodding their heads at the table, he knew the irrepressible moment had arrived. He’d call them to the floor and out they’d tumble, tugged from their seats by a hand they might only hold for that night. Folks sure went wild, given the permission of a mess.
He shouldn’t be surprised by what a song can do. Morris liked him to spread a song wide across the keys and build the chords up high. Each progression begs what’s next, and before long, they’re exploding further and further and further from where the song got started. Even though he’s the one pressing the keys, he has no choice but to hang back and let the music go where it’s leading him. He has long known that a song can make a man feel like he’s the luckiest being alive or help him smother his loneliness or, if it’s in the mood, retrieve to him, with its lengthy reach, times he didn’t even know he’d let sink to the murky bottom. This one returns him to the living room with the drab wallpaper and the green sofa rescued from a fire and the dust-encrusted rug where he stood saying to his love, “You think just because you wrote these, I owe you my life?”
It’s late in 1967, and they’re living not on 137th Street but in a house in Greenville, New Jersey, within earshot of the foghorns that sound from the docks in Elizabeth. They don’t play more than a couple of nights a week. A businessman gets bloodied in the Playbill’s parking lot, and the white crowd stops coming to Newark.
Morris says to him, “You’re running from me.”
Clyde says back, “Now why would I say no to playing in Europe with them? You think I’m getting a phone call like that again? You think I should stay here and look at the bugs on this wall and you cranked up on whatever you’re on?”
He knows he’s breaking a man to pieces. You can’t go, I’ve nothing without you, Morris is going to say, like he does time after time, staggering out of the haze in his blood—no more
bothering to hide the habit, no errands, no nothing—to barter for forgiveness with any word still retrievable to that flickering mind. An hour from now, Clyde will be on the early train to the city, and at Idlewild, after splurging on two gimlets in the cocktail lounge, he’ll board the flight to Frankfurt, and as the plane makes its rattling escape from the earth he’ll stare down at cloudy plumes of dissolving sandbars and dots of seabirds lifting their reedy legs through drowned grass and, like the other passengers, try to forget the end that meets those who fall from dizzying heights.
“Excuse me, Khun Pehn. Might I have that glass of water?”
“Certainly. Is anything the matter?”
“Everything’s right and dandy. I need a sip, that’s all.”
Khun Pehn calls out to the hallway, and not a minute later, a servant girl arrives with a filled glass held high.
“Thank you,” he says in Thai, and drains the contents of the glass. It’s clean, glorious water subtly scented by a pink-hued tincture that has brought back to his nose the floral wreaths laid around his grandma after she’d found her irrevocable peace. Each gulp helps calm the frantic squeezing inside his chest. He’s hardly begun to play, but already torrents of sweat have flooded his back and arms.
When he was young, barely a musician, he got booed onstage for the first time. His hands froze, and the noisy disdain grew to fill the room until he couldn’t distinguish it from the wall and the piano next to him and all the eyes burning in the dark. He sat there, unable to move, until the club manager dragged him out of the chair.
He’s no longer intimidated by a cruel crowd. He doesn’t care anymore what other cats say about his playing. But how did he have the gall to imagine that after all this time he might make things right with the man whose life, by word of friends touring through Bangkok, was not claimed by a syringe after all? A man more fearsome to him than any ghost.
Bangkok Wakes to Rain Page 3