by Ami Rao
It had come through the post, a simple black audio cassette along with a little typewritten note that read: ‘Summer homework for jazz students: listen to this cassette.’ And David (but naturally!) had done his homework. It would be his first ever encounter with jazz.
Resting his head back on the sofa now, he caressed the arch of her right foot with his thumb, marvelling at how soft her skin was there, underneath, on the soles of her feet, one shade paler than on top.
‘There were six or eight tunes on that tape,’ he mused. ‘I didn’t know a single one, I didn’t know any of the musicians, I wasn’t even sure sometimes what instrument I was listening to, but none of that mattered. Once I started listening, I just couldn’t stop. Jazz got me.’
He shook his head, as though marvelling at his own childhood innocence, his ignorance, at how far he had come from there.
‘When the summer was over and I walked into that jazz class for the first time, I still didn’t know anything about anything, but the one thing I knew, without the shadow of a doubt, was that I had fallen in love with this music. The thing was, Ameena, I didn’t have a music of my own. I was kind of ambivalent to what my friends were listening to, the pop music of the day, and I also wasn’t deeply passionate about the classical music that I was playing, even though I was able to appreciate its beauty on some level. But to me, that was my mother’s music, music that needed a kind of solitary discipline, a different type of emotion than what I was feeling… I couldn’t get myself to think of it as my music.’
Ameena nodded. ‘I know what you mean. Who you are, who you want to be, is so important, being able to discover that for yourself. Basic existentialist creed, right?’
‘Right,’ David replied. ‘It’s a kind of freedom. And that’s how I felt, that my mother’s music was hers. In a way, it was also my dad’s. But it wasn’t mine. But this music hit me, moved me in a way that no music had up until that time. In fact, I would say the only thing that had moved me in a similar kind of way by that age were books, some novels that I’d read, by Bellow I think, and Faulkner and a few others – I thought of them kinda as these “stylists” you know, of American literature – but from an artistic standpoint, this was my first experience of that feeling of communion with art. And I think that was enough to give me passion to at least try to figure out the puzzle of how this music is played. But I never thought I could become good enough to make a life from it.’ He looked at her pointedly. ‘I guess I still don’t.’
Ameena matched his gaze, copper-brown meeting green-gold. ‘But that’s fine,’ she said. ‘Actually, I like that about you.’
‘You like what about me?’
‘That you are still writing your story.’
1.25
The only other item of sentimental value that Ameena took with her when she left home was one of her mother’s hijabs, a square piece of silk charmeuse, striking in its pattern – black with pinks and yellows and blues and greens splashed over it in abstract shapes. Something about the pattern made Ameena think of it as a work of art, created not by a single artist but by a group of artists, each holding a paintbrush dipped in different-coloured paint, then walking up to the stark black background, turn by turn – and then, a small shake of the wrists, paint spurting from brush onto blackness, altering its essence with each successive shake, each amoebic blob of paint.
An expression of collectivity. Disobedience. A kind of anarchy.
A birthday present from her father.
Ameena’s mother had worn it on the day, but never again.
It fell, her mother’s birthday, in the prime of the English springtime, a joyful season of new beginnings and new life, when the whiteness of winter waned, and the colours appeared and deepened, and the blackbird hopped, and the first swallows were seen, and the air grew fragrant and the whisper of something wonderful lingered.
‘It’s too bright for me,’ Zoya said when Ameena once asked her mother why she never wore it, ‘but I didn’t want to hurt his feelings.’
Ameena thought it was beautiful, the idea of it, the idea of art on a cloth. In truth, the hijab had probably been made by a machine, with little care or human intervention – one of a few hundred or so pieces made on an assembly line in some factory somewhere in northern China, and then sold on by Marks and Spencer for twenty times the price – but Ameena’s brain wouldn’t even allow her to imagine such a possibility, let alone process it. To her, it was art. A kind of aspirational thing. Plus, it smelled of her mother. And so, when it came time for Ameena to leave, she took it with her. She took it without telling her mother; the alternative seemed pointless.
On the day of her first meeting with Suzy Lipskis, Ameena pulled this out of her cupboard and wrapped it round her neck – a scarf to go with a simple sleeveless, knee-length black dress – partly for colour and partly for luck. She stood in front of the mirror and assessed her reflection – self-assured and composed, the antithesis, in fact, of the apprehension she felt inside. How little, she thought, how little we can know about someone else just from looking at them from the outside. And yet we do this all the time, make assumptions about people based on their clothes or their shoes or how they wear their hair – how confident they are, how successful, how happy, what kind of marriage they have…
She frowned. But then, equally, she thought, the irony of the converse; you could know someone for a lifetime and still not know them at all. That was true as well… You never truly know, she concluded, with other people, if you are dealing with them or their reflections.
She took one last look at herself in the mirror before she left, straightening the scarf, dismissing with efficiency the runaway twinge of longing she felt for her mother.
The art gallery was a chic, pristine space, located discreetly on the corner of two narrow cobblestoned streets. There was something about the structure that Ameena took to straight away. A former warehouse built of concrete, it seemed to her to have the right architectural bones that shaped the ambience of viewing art, a place with the capacity to exhibit the physical experiences that are often part and parcel of visual representation. Or, as the Chinese would say, she thought approvingly, it had good chi. The front door pushed open easily, but when Ameena stepped inside, there seemed to be nobody about. She waited hesitantly for a few minutes by the entrance, then decided to look around. Currently on display was the work of a painter who Ameena had never heard of before – his name sounded male, Greek? She shrugged. It almost didn’t matter. In art, she felt the creator was always secondary to the work, or at least that was the Barthesian way in which she thought about her own work. This artist, she decided as she studied his work admiringly, seemed a master of that idea; the characters on his canvases were so alive, they appeared to be painting their own abstract versions of self.
She was struck by one of the pieces in particular – a gathering of people in evening wear doing a kind of ballroom dance in the middle of someone’s living room, wooden chairs with velvet cushions stacked haphazardly on sofas and tables, right side up and upside down, seemingly moved hurriedly out of the way to create floor space – a sort of stage – for the dancers. So intently was she studying the brushstrokes, how the artist had so expertly captured the detail of the grain in the wood, the distinctive texture of the upholstery, the folds in the silk dresses of the women, that she hadn’t realised she was being watched.
‘Captivating, yes?’ A woman’s sonorous voice came from behind her, and she spun round immediately so they were standing facing each other. She could feel the other woman’s eyes on her, taking her in, assessing her. What would she see, Ameena wondered – reflection or reality?
As for Suzy – the observable Suzy, that is – Ameena saw in her a small, neat woman with a mane of silver hair, bright red lipstick and black-rimmed glasses. She wore large diamond solitaires on her ears, a smart black and white jacket over a tailored black skirt and a long vintage Chanel pearl
necklace that looped round her neck twice.
‘Yes,’ Ameena replied smiling, ‘completely.’
‘Shall we go to my office,’ Suzy said brusquely, and it was a statement, Ameena realised, not a question. Ameena followed the older woman into a small room with glass walls that looked directly onto the gallery space – she’s always watching, Ameena thought to herself, from her fishbowl. Suzy pointed to a chair and gestured for Ameena to sit while she perched herself neatly on the edge of the beautiful mahogany desk that Ameena guessed was some kind of priceless antique. Wordlessly, she flicked a key on her keyboard and the computer sprang to life.
Suzy’s monitor had been turned at an angle so Ameena also had a clear view of it and when she saw the screen fill with images of her work, all her art that David had so meticulously photographed, she found herself colouring, embarrassed suddenly, ashamed even, as if not just her work, but she herself was on display. She wanted to look away, overcome with a kind of nausea as Suzy zoomed in on the images one by one, but of course she couldn’t without making herself look ridiculous. This was the essence of art, she knew that, one of the rare times that one got consent – the permission – to take someone else’s thoughts into the private space that contain your own. Still, she found the permeability of that idea unnerving. She cleared her throat nervously.
‘Why watercolour?’ Suzy asked without any introduction or pleasantries.
‘Oh!’ Ameena said, slightly startled by the question, though she wasn’t sure why – it was, under the circumstances, a perfectly natural question, and yet, there was something about its tone or in the directness of Suzy’s glance that unnerved her. ‘I… I don’t know… I guess it’s what I started with and I just feel more comfortable with a water-based medium. I’ve experimented with oils, but I found myself coming back to water. I enjoy its fluidity of movement, its organic flow.’
‘I don’t like experiment. I like fulfilment,’ Suzy remarked, almost to herself. Then: ‘Do you consider yourself a figurative artist?’
‘I don’t think of myself as figurative, no.’
‘But I do.’ Suzy took off her glasses – she had brown eyes, sparkling with a kind of astute intelligence – and peered into the screen. ‘In your work, it’s quite clear.’
‘Oh?’ Ameena said again, feeling flustered. ‘Is it?’
‘Why do you deny where you clearly shine? Is there a reason you wouldn’t want to be a figurative artist?’
Poised, yet forceful – questions that insisted upon an answer. A skill, Ameena thought admiringly.
‘No, no,’ she faltered, ‘I guess… I guess I try to represent bodies in a more abstract and performance-based way. So, you see there is no literal presence of a figure, but… perhaps… well obviously, you see it… there is a strong sense of “someone” in my work.’
Suzy peered at her, even though Ameena had dropped her own gaze. Then the gallerist opened her mouth as if to say something, but paused and appeared to change her mind, and with her eyes now back on the images, she asked coolly, ‘Is your work religious?’
‘No.’
‘Political?’
‘Isn’t everything?’
Suzy nodded.
‘Either we see it, or we pretend that it doesn’t exist,’ Ameena said but Suzy chose to ignore the comment.
She swivelled the computer back towards herself and seemed to study the images very carefully and quietly, as if she was looking for something in them, and then she turned to Ameena and without any emotion or explanation, said in her faintly Russian-inflected accent: ‘I offer you a solo show at my gallery this October.’
‘Gosh!’ Ameena exclaimed. ‘Really? I mean…’
‘It was George Orwell.’
‘Sorry?’
‘What you said. That it is political for art not to be political. George Orwell said that. We will be in contact. You know your way out?’
‘I like her,’ Suzy told David later that evening over the phone. ‘Your girlfriend. Her work is… luminous.’
1.26
From the outside, it looked like a blind pig straight out of the 1920s, a tiny charcoal-coloured arch-top door set into a deep russet stucco wall, a small awning above and a blackboard outside on the sidewalk indicating that tickets were $20 for the night.
Ameena furrowed her brows.
‘What?’ David said, looking at her. She was wearing lipstick, a deep, ruby red, and she looked very beautiful, David thought, like a character from a novel, someone marvellous and mysterious, like Anna Karenina or someone.
‘Nothing, I’m just thinking that it doesn’t quite look like I expected…’
‘Oh? Is that good or bad?’
‘Good, good. It looks… scrummy.’
‘Wait – scrummy?’
‘Yeah! Like scrumptious. Tasty.’
David chuckled. ‘You English people say the weirdest things. I’m not even going to ask you to explain that! Shall we go inside?’
He knocked on the door and nodded at the man who opened it, who nodded back at David and gave a quick, barely interested glance at Ameena before letting them in. The man wore a suit, dark glasses and a navy-blue Yankees hat. This, Ameena thought to herself, must have been exactly what it was like to enter a bar during Prohibition. Inside, there was a tiny square of foyer, which led immediately to a narrow flight of stairs going down below street level. Ameena held David’s hand and followed him down to enter the club’s subterranean main room, a dark, plush space, suffused with the smell of whisky and adorned with mirrors and velvet and black-and-white photographs of the jazz ‘greats’ placed somewhat haphazardly on its exposed brick walls. It struck Ameena immediately how tiny the whole place was, how intimate, like your grandma’s living room.
‘Illegal,’ she said suddenly. ‘That’s the word I was looking for, in my head – illegal. Inside and out, it looks illegal.’
David laughed out loud. ‘Well,’ he replied, following her eyes as she looked around, ‘this might probably be as legal as you’re going to get outside of New Orleans. There’s no fooling around here, it’s the real deal. Like love,’ he said, cheekily, his dimples deepening. ‘And by the way, speaking of love, I worked things out with the guys so I’m playing just the first set tonight. Usually I would play all three, then we’d jam a bit, then I’d stumble home way past your bedtime in a musically induced stupor of euphoria!’
‘Oof! Sounds… sexy. I think I might be jealous! Think about it, I’ll never know what it feels like to be in a musically induced stupor of euphoria!’
David laughed.
‘Why?’ Ameena said.
‘Why, what?
‘Why are you only playing one set tonight?’
‘Why? To hang out with you of course. We can watch the rest together or we can leave if you’re bored.’
Ameena shook her head and smiled. ‘Well, Piano-man, I can already tell you that I’m not going to be bored!’
‘Come on,’ he said, taking her hand, ‘let me introduce you.’ He led her to a group of three guys standing towards the front of the room. They were all dressed, like David, in variations of the jacket-jeans-untucked-shirt combo, and one of the guys had a hat on. A hat, and, she noted with some amusement, glasses with distinctively bright cobalt blue frames. They looked up as David and Ameena approached, and she noticed the particular way in which the men greeted each other, a kind of warmth, inscrutable and marvellous – it was camaraderie of course, but it was also something else, she thought, something more.
‘My boys,’ David said, sweeping his arm in her direction, ‘this here, all the way from Manchester, England, is my friend, Ameena…’
‘Hello Ameena,’ the three guys chorused.
‘…who has never heard jazz before!’ David finished, and as if on cue the three men dropped their jaws in mock horror.
‘Wait, no,’ Ameena protested, �
��I have heard jazz before, we had this “jazzathon” thing at the pub at uni sometimes…’
‘…And she’s never heard jazz before,’ they all said almost in unison, and Ameena laughed.
‘But Manchester,’ one of the guys mused, ‘a city that believes in its music.’
‘I know, but,’ Ameena replied, visibly embarrassed, ‘my family was diff— I guess we were never exposed to… culture as such.’
‘Well, miss,’ the guy with the hat grinned, tipping it in her direction, ‘nothing like getting an untainted perspective! Let us know what you think later. Don’t hold back now!’ He winked.
‘I won’t,’ she said, grateful for how generously he had circumvented any potential ignominy over the broad, nebulous subject of her upbringing. ‘Love your glasses by the way. Very fashionable.’
‘Think we’re about ready to go on,’ one of the other guys said, motioning to the stage.
‘Be right up.’ David nodded before turning to face Ameena.
‘They seem so nice,’ she whispered to David.
‘All musicians are nice,’ David said, pulling her close to him, ‘especially this one.’ He kissed her then with a kind of unusual possessiveness, and then stepped back. ‘Time to play. See you from up there, enjoy it.’
‘Good luck,’ Ameena said, and she felt moved by the intensity of the kiss, and by his reluctance to let her go and by what she thought she saw in his eyes, a certain conviction and with it… was it… affirmation? She couldn’t be sure. Stemming from… what? Was it… it had to be… she felt, from allowing her access to this part of his life and to himself, for surely in bringing her here, he was expressing the desire to experience a kind of shared joy together with her, and she was surprised by how she felt by all this, by his willingness to offer himself up in this way – a kind of giddy, stupid pleasure.