‘Is Ann still going?’ she asked causually, trying to keep her rising excitement out of her voice.
In the mirror she saw her room-mate make a grimace of distaste. ‘Ann said she wouldn’t go if I wasn’t going. I tried to persuade her, but, you know, I don’t think she’s really interested. Ann’s just a tag-along – she hasn’t any gumption. I’m sorry, Ellen – I know you wanted to go.’
She saw the smile that hesitated on Molly’s face before she replaced it carefully with a more contrite look. Why, she is pleased that she is spoiling my plans! I’ll show her! And, without missing a stroke of the brush, she said, ‘I’m going anyway. Someone will have to use the reservation.’
‘But, Ellen, you can’t!’ Molly’s tone was desperate. ‘You can’t go there alone. What would people say if they saw you?’
‘What would people say if we had all gone and they had seen us?’ She turned about and looked at her roommate, enjoying her discomfort. ‘You know as well as I do that no one from the conservatory is supposed to go to the Black Cat. The dean posted a notice on the bulletin board about it. What difference does it make if I go alone?’
Molly stood up and went over to her bed and fell upon it. She began to pound the pillow with her fist. ‘Ellen, you can’t do it. Nice girls don’t go places like that alone. You just want to get him to yourself, that’s all!’
She had finished brushing her hair, but she continued to look into the mirror. Molly had sat up again and was looking at her back reproachfully, her mouth compressed, her eyes bright with excitement. ‘What if I do want to be alone with him?’ she asked her. ‘What’s wrong with that?’
Molly said nothing. She stood up abruptly and went over to the dresser, pushing past Ellen rudely. She picked up a lipstick and smeared her mouth with it, then patted at her cheeks with rouge. Then she turned around and grabbed her coat out of the closet, went to the door and jerked it open angrily.
‘If you’re going out, you’d better know it’s raining,’ Ellen called after her. But the door slammed on her words. She looked back into the mirror and smiled at her own reflection.
As she looked at her own face in the glass, it began to darken, to pulsate and widen. And in the distance on the edge of her hearing, an orchestra sounded, wild, discordant, yet syncopated, the regular beat of a drum, the faint cries of saxophones, the shrilling of trumpets. She leaned forward to see her own face more plainly; but the closer she came to the quickly blackening glass, the fainter and more indistinct her own image became. Then, while she watched, the mirror seemed to dissolve, to lap away as tide recedes from a moonlit beach, revealing a depth, an emptiness, a greatly enlarged interior. Before she was wholly aware of what was happening, this huge area seemed to move forward, to surround her and enclose her – and she found herself seated at a table in the midst of a darkened ballroom, her eyes fixed on a point in space not far from her where a spotlight stroked a silver circle on the floor. All about her couples sat and talked; she heard the tinkle of glasses, and the soft, amorous voices of men, the hushed whisperings and feckless laughter of women; the air was smoke-laden and close and the glass in her hand was cold and wet. Yet she did not feel uncomfortable, or even alienated – her body trembled with eagerness, and the coaxing beat of the music that had ended only a moment before was now replaced with an expectancy, an urgent desire to experience what was about to occur.
A hand clapped, and then another, and another. Soon a mounting roar of applause added to her tenseness as she struck her own palms together, contributing her own sound to the mass propitiation. The silver spotlight wavered and shimmered, then suddenly streaked across the floor to the far end of the bandstand; there it picked out a tall, bowing form and the yellow varnish of a guitar. Someone whistled, and a woman on the other side of the great room cried, ‘That’s my Jimmy!’ The tall figure seemed almost shy and self-effacing. He stood clumsily at the edge of the spotlight, smiling hesitantly at the crowd for another moment before he walked to the centre of the dance-floor with long, loping strides, dragging his guitar behind him. A microphone, glittering in the harsh spotlight, descended on a wire until it hovered in front of him. He looked at it undecidedly and then reached up and caressed it with his hand. ‘Hullo folks,’ he said into it, and the loudspeaker spoke too, magnifying his soft tenor, throwing it into the corners of the smoky room. ‘Hullo folks,’ he said again, once more idly caressing the microphone, smiling placatingly at it as if it abashed him, ‘ah’ve come to sing you a song or so. The kind you like, ah reckon.’
And before he had finished speaking, before the softly slurred syllables had ceased echoing, the crowd’s roar of welcome had died, and in its place there existed an unnatural quiet, as if some ponderous animal had quit its snuffling and scuffling, had commenced to listen, to be aware, to perceive. This quiet deepened until it was an oppressive silence, as if the tall man at the microphone had thrown a spell on the room. He stood there, smiling to himself, wilfully enjoying his mastery of the crowd, the animal. His eyes glinted in the spotlight, which picked him mercilessly out of the surrounding dark – he knew that soon he must sing, that the wild creature out there demanded it, but that it was also his function to hold it at bay as long as possible. The silence seemed to have been stretched to the breaking point; it seemed that if another instant should pass the tension would be too great, a horrifying roar would burst loose from the animal’s thousand throats – it was at this point that Jim Shad chose to sing.
He sang quietly, as softly as he had spoken, and it was as if he sang to her. What he sang did not matter; she did not listen to the words, nor did she follow the melody, sort out its rhythm, its structure, its cadence. Yet his song had more meaning for her than any music had ever had before; it had the effect of an incantation, a direct magic that transformed her. As he sang, she fingered his letter, which had arrived only that morning, his invitation to meet him at the bar after his performance, to go to some quiet place where they could talk. Her throat went dry as he ended one song and began another, a quicker, jauntier one, and her cheeks burned as she remembered that she had not told Molly or Ann about the letter, that she had known they would not have approved of her meeting a man without an escort, that they would have insisted that she did not go out with him alone. But why should she worry about what they thought? – she was old enough to know what she was doing, wasn’t she? All she knew was that he had written to her, that he wanted to meet her and talk to her, that he was singing for her now.
As he finished his second song, and the dark, restive audience began to pound the tables and applaud, as the silver spotlight turned and his fingers experimentally plucked a few strange chords on his guitar, she rose and pushed her way through the crooked aisle of chairs back to the bar. She could still see him from there, could still hear his plaintive voice as it related the story of ‘The Blue-Tail Fly’, but his figure had shrunk, had become impersonal, her heart’s frenzied pulsations had subsided, and she found she could breathe more easily. To stand at the bar she had to buy a drink, and it was her third one of the evening – she sipped it slowly, but despite this caution she soon felt pleasantly silly, smiling to herself and giggling whenever she thought of Jimmy and the way he had addressed his songs to her. Until finally she realized that the audience was applauding again, that she no longer heard his voice or his guitar, that now even the applause was dying away. And she knew that the performance was over and shortly he would be with her. She stiffened and held herself as straight as she could, although it occurred to her that there was something very funny, something that if she could just think for a moment so that she might know what it was she would want to laugh at; but she dare not take the time to think now, when Jim was about to appear. So she looked in the mirror behind the bartender, looked at her own face brightly reflected in the vari-coloured light, smiling ever so slightly, holding her head at just the right angle – the angle she had worked out patiently so many times before, the angle she was sure was her best angle,
the inclination of her head that made her eyes seem mysterious, that emphasized the beguiling shadow that sometimes hovered over her lips, that made her seem self-possessed and dignified. And while she inspected herself, she saw him approaching, saw his tall form loom out of the surrounding darkness, saw his tanned, tight-lipped face coming closer and closer.
Frightened and shy now that the meeting she had been looking forward to all the week was at hand, she looked away from the mirror, looked down at her drink and the lop-sided cherry that still floated in it, waiting for him to speak. Behind her the orchestra began to blare and, with a scraping of chairs and a muttering of voices, the great animal got to its feet and began to shuffle around-the dance floor. She was aware that he stood beside her; she could feel the warmth of his body; if she had wanted she could have brushed against him. But she still did not look up. A tapping sound, hard and metallic, made her jump with surprise – she looked aside and saw his hand, holding a coin, striking it against the bar to get the bartender’s attention. Then she heard his voice, heard the sound of it before she heard his words, for an instant thought he was addressing her as she expected him to – and, consequently, looked up at him and smiled before she realized that what he had said had only been directed at the neglectful bartender, ‘H’yah, Jack! How’s about the usual?’
But he had seen her smile, and it had pleased him; now that she had looked at him, she found she could not look away. He turned his head slightly in deference to her, so that his bright, brown eyes glanced directly into her own, inquiring of her why she had smiled even as his lips pursed and he breathed a long, quiet, admiring whistle. Her cheeks flushed and she felt her own smile freeze, become irretrievable, in embarrassment; for it was obvious to her now that he did not recognize her, that he could not have recognized her, since he had never seen her, that she was only a stranger who had smiled provocatively to him. And yet she could not speak, could not say the words that would clear up the misapprehension that must be forming in his mind, could not even find the strength to lower her head and look away. He took her discomfiture for boldness and his smile broadened into an anticipatory grin. ‘Why, hullo, beautiful,’ he softly said. ‘Wheah have you been all my life?’
The only response she could make was to seize her drink more tightly, to raise the glass tremblingly to her lips and swallow it quickly, cherry and all. He raised his eyebrow slightly and whistled again, this time at the bartender. ‘H’yah, Jack. What you keepin’ us waiting for? This lady an’ myself are prit near dyin’ of thirst!’
The bartender bobbed into view and took her glass from her reluctant hand. Without it, she did not know where to look except to look at him. And what was wrong with that? She liked to look at him, didn’t she? She had arranged to meet him, hadn’t she? She sighed and her smile relaxed, became a little less frightened. In just a moment, she knew she would be able to speak to him, to tell him who she was and why she had smiled. But before the words had formed properly in her mind he had covered her hand gently with his own, a friendly, confidential pressure, and had drawled, ‘What’s the matter, honey? Has the old cat got yoh tongue?’
His question, although she knew he meant it jocularly, that he had said it only to be pleasant, had not necessarily expected an answer, unsettled her and made it still more difficult for her to speak. Instead, she poked restlessly at her hair, turning away from him as coldly as she dared to stare at the pale reflection of her own blue eyes in the mirror. But, even so, she did not escape his inquiring glance. He, too, turned and looked into the mirror, his elbow leaned against the polished bar, the image of his sunburned face above her own and just beside it, the tiers of amber bottles on either side acting as a frame making it seem that she was staring at a picture of them both, a dull and clouded picture in an amber frame, a picture taken on a dark and rainy day. Then, almost as if he had wished to make the effect complete, he put his arm around her, gently, persuasively. And he was saying, ‘Why don’t we have our drink an’ go for a drive, beautiful? My car’s parked just outside an’ I hear tell there’s a moon—’
While she watched, while she was still too amazed to do anything about his arm that rested so familiarly – as if it had always belonged there – about her shoulders, the mirror shivered and cracked into a million slivers, the night invaded it, the swirling blackness, and she felt herself caught up and held, lifted gently but with a firmness that was reassuring … she felt herself carried. Many voices existed on all sides of her, some shrill and demanding, some quieter and more resourceful, but one voice dominated them all, softly but persistently, and then the voices died away and it was quieter and cooler and she closed her eyes and gave herself to whatever it was that was happening.
Slowly the strange sensation grew stronger, gradually it took possession of her, became a part of her that was essential to her being; it was a sensation of freedom, of disassociation – she floated high above all earthly connexions and gloried in her ascension. This cannot be real, she told herself, it must be an illusion. Yet for her, at that moment, it was the only possible reality. She kept her eyes closed, fearing to open them, while she felt herself become lighter and lighter until it seemed she had no weight, no substance, had changed into an essence, an abstraction. Most wonderful of all, she realized, was the happiness she had attained, the sense of contentment, of perfect, immutable equilibrium. She was at peace, at rest, wholly free of the suzerainty of time and space. And then, without thinking about it, she knew what had happened to her, and she also knew that it was what she had always desired, although she had never before had the wit to put it into words: she had become music.
Yes, she had become majestic sound, a rolling, evanescent structure that billowed and cavorted, that made light of time and space because it had grown out of them, was compounded of them, was their inevitable result. She was tone and melody and rhythmic beat, she was harmony and colour. In her the woodwinds blew and the brasses stormed, she inhabited the sweet turbulence of the strings, the intelligence of the keyboard. This was what she had longed for, even if she had not known it; this was her grace, her beatitude…
She opened her eyes and saw that she floated high in the air, that the moon was her neighbour and that small clouds raced playfully by her side; below, like an overturned saucer, the earth existed. And she discovered that though the world was far beneath her, she could see anything that happened on its surface, if she cared to look for it. So it was that she found the automobile, the long, low-slung roadster with its bright red body and its chromium exhausts, flying along a country road in the shadow of the clouds, her clouds that scudded companionably beside her. And so it was, by looking a little longer at this reckless car, by following it with her eyes and mind, by haunting it with her melody, that she discovered its occupants, the two of them: the lean, saddle-faced man who drove like a demon, eyes hard upon the black streak of road, arm thrown about the small form of the girl, the dreamy-eyed child who nestled against his shoulder, the conservatory student who had fallen in love with a cabaret performer. As she realized that this was another of her selves that she was watching, another, more tangible Ellen, a shudder interrupted the flow of her sound, a discord like a crash of thunder or the scream of a rising gale, a dissonance that was like a premonition of disaster.
Now she began to hear her own sound, to listen to a procession of mournful notes against the funereal crepitation of muffled drums, the solemn shuffle of a dead march. And, as she listened, she looked away from the speeding roadster, away from the huddled, loving figure of the wayward girl, only to glimpse another scene, to take ineluctably the next step on the path to catastrophe. She saw, below her, an ill-lit room. It was as if the roof had been lifted off and she peered down into the interior, as if she were watching a play from the heights of the stage. The time was later – this she half-sensed, half-remembered; weeks had passed, and with them many surreptitious appointments, many careless journeys over country roads. The man and the girl were in this room, the girl sittin
g in a pool of shaded light thrown by a lamp, resting languorously, her long, bare legs and half-naked torso bathed in its dim effulgence. The man was seated on the brass bedstead, his head tousled and his eyes red and sleepless, a wisp of smoke curling from the cigarette that burned near his lip, a yellowed instrument lying in abandonment across his lap. He, too, was only partially clothed, his brown arms and heavy shoulders bulged muscularly out of his sodden, greying undershirt, glistening with sweat. They stared at each other, the girl and the man, exposing the animosity that belongs only to adversaries who are also intimates, and the girl’s bosom heaved under the dully shimmering blue sequins of her bandeau. As she watched from above, her eyes falling down on the foreshortened figures, the gloomy music that was a part of her swelled to a crescendo, a mighty protestation of despair – only to fall away, to cease dramatically, as the man stroked his hand over the guitar’s strings and a broken chord rang out with the resonance of steel on stone. At this clarion sound the girl rose ghostlily, seemed to hover on her toes above the room’s scarred floor. She saw that she was clothed in glimmering blue metalled cloth, cerulean stars on her breasts and thighs. Taut and trembling, caught at a point in the middle of her back, two fragile wings of finest wire and gauze hung in a frenzy of awkward levitation as she pirouetted. Again the man on the bed struck a broken, peremptory chord, but this time he followed it with another and another, each subtly different, each less startling, more anticipatory, until his right hand came in, too, and a melody was formed. The girl began to dance, still on her toes, still taking mincing steps, making fluttering, indecisive motions; and, softly, the man began to sing:
When I was young I used to wait
On Massa and give him his plate,
And pass the bottle when he got dry
Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly Page 11