All those women—the singers with three octave ranges pushing their hair under wigs, the ninety-pound Lindyfliers who could never quite manage getting into their Ladyforms—and not one of them so much as paused mid-false-eyelash when a man walked into the dressing room. Compared to Business, Talent was just about precisely nothing—not respect, not adulation, and most of the time not even money. The house band didn’t get paid every Monday at the Apollo. We got paid when Mr. Schiffman felt like sending his son, Nevil, down with his sheaf of twenties, and even then, August, the bassist, had warned me, we had to count our money in front of Robbie. If it was short, Nevil wouldn’t believe us later.
“Twenty-five dollars,” Mr. Glaser offered when he asked me, then, in the dressing room. “Mr. Jennings has taken a special shine to you.” He disappeared without saying when I’d see that twenty-five. I had my eye on a pencil dress with zebra stripes that I’d seen hanging in the window of Blumstein’s. It could wait, of course—it would be just as transformative two weeks later—but I didn’t want it to disappear.
Letty commandeered her usual point in the center of the dressing room. She stood like a Nereid, with waves of sequins on her leotard and a silk shirt that fell, in layers of feathers, at her feet. “Dean’s worth half a million dollars,” she said, loud enough that the dozen other women in the room could hear, “and he’s thirty-two years older than you are.”
For most of the evening, in his three-story brownstone on Strivers’ Row, Dean Jennings hovered, ignoring his guests, watching me play from the end of his Wurlitzer. “Such a rare bird as you,” he said to me when at last he thought to bring me a glass of anisette, “whose beauty flies so well alongside her talent.” His housekeeper had turned the lights down when the clock struck nine, yet Mr. Jennings’s pupils, in the candlelight, were like the points of needles. His voice was so raspy that I was almost sorry to hear him speak. Beads of sweat had broken out on his nose.
Despite looking like a gibbon he was confident, and Letty’s half-million-dollar quote stuck with me as a solid integer I might be attracted to on principle. Dean Jennings was worth 166 new Chevrolet Bel Airs, 33,333 weeks of rent, 1,478,521 plates of fried potatoes at the corner diner. I could feel the stiffness of the Wurlitzer’s disuse, but I could hear in its sound that it was the top of its line. The polished mirrors all around Mr. Jennings’s parlor made the house seem bigger than it could possibly be, and watching the guests’ reflections speaking to one another in those mirrors, I had the feeling that I was in the midst of something magnificent. What stuck in my heart about Mr. Jennings, though, were the dark, decaying places between his teeth, the hair alive only in patches over each ear. “My wife sails for Paris in the morning,” he said, but I couldn’t take my eyes off the white lines spreading like cracked glass on his tongue. “You should come play my piano while she’s away.”
I rang his bell Sunday at lunchtime, and, ushered in by an aproned cook, played for hours on his piano while he lay sidelong on a red leather mat in front of his fireplace. “Mr. Jennings, you’re sure you’ll tell me when I become a nuisance?” I asked.
“You’re more than welcome in my home,” he said. “And please, don’t call me Mr. Jennings. You can call me Emp.”
“Thank you,” I said, though I made up my mind that Emp was too strange of a name to ever say aloud.
“Even after Mrs. Jennings returns, you’re welcome here.”
“Thank you,” I said again, more quietly.
He smoked from a long brass pipe whose bottom rested atop coals, occasionally tapping his one socked foot against the other in time to my playing, and I didn’t stop. I started out with a tight little Jelly Roll Morton melody, and then loosened up to open into a slow Cole Porter. With my left hand I rolled broken chords up the bass while I lay on some solid half notes with my right hand. I played some ragtime, then moved on to a composition I’d dreamed up during an Amateur Night and had yet to put to paper, though August had asked me to show it to him. Dean put out his fire and ate lunch, offered me some, listened to me refuse, napped, woke, and then slept again, but when the sun began to set, he moved from his mat to a place beside me on the piano bench. Every time he inched closer, I could smell his movements in the smoke that eased out of his clothes. He moved closer and closer, until his elbow touched mine when I hit high notes. He kissed me on the neck, and the smell of smoke on his shirt overcame me with its sweetness, and I unrolled the cover and tucked away the keys. “My coat, please,” I said, and then, though I wouldn’t look at him, I heard him sniffling, as though I’d announced the end of an agelong affair. To his credit, he didn’t protest. He got me my coat, and had his maid show me to the door.
Letty laughed when I told her at Tuesday’s rehearsal. “One wife and six girlfriends,” she reported, “and I’ve got it from Glaser he goes through three grams of opium a day.” She refused to take her opinion of Dean Jennings away from the numeric.
I laughed with her then, but I iced over and began to lean with the cold weight of my own frost. Grew uncertain that Audrey Wallace had ever existed except as a girl alone with less than nothing. Grew uncertain that New York wasn’t trying to make a fool of me. I went to the little plywood writing desk that the landlady had put in my room and I got out my stationery. I wrote: “Dear Caroline, I have many stories to tell you,” but I stopped there. She was with Ralph, and she didn’t care about my troubles or my adventures. We couldn’t reach out and touch each other forever, even if it didn’t finish in fours: our season had passed, and there’d be no writing letters back and forth about boys. Through the walls of my little bedroom seeped evidence of the various permutations of love gone right and gone wrong—the tap of the bedframe hitting the radiator as a woman moaned counterpoint, the cries of a baby whose mother had gone down to the corner for news of her missing husband, the smell of the perfume my neighbor sprayed when she was ready to go dancing. Smelling her scent, I wondered whether my love, my very own love for good or for bad, would ever turn up.
Of course there had always been August, the bassist, the four days a week we all rehearsed, hunched over in front of the window reading Mao or Dubois or the Bhagavad Gita, texts of uplift that seemed to make him sadder by the volume. August, smiling anyway, ever-smiling, nodding serenely in agreement whenever Letty got short with him. August, quiet August, speaking on average of five times a rehearsal, to tell Verner to try coming in on the downbeat, or to tell Jim that his snare seemed a hair stiff, or to tell Roland that he needed to hold Letty closer when they waltzed, lest he seem to the audience like the queer he actually was. August, coming to tell me that the house band was booked on the Rudolph Guzz Jazz Hour for Saturday afternoon; August, patting my hand and telling me it would be fine when I gasped with excitement. August, saying all this with a sweet lilt that belied his seriousness. August, quiet August, not joking with the crew who came mornings to work on the stage’s settled-shut ventilation windows, not bragging with the rest of the band about weekend women coaxed up 52nd Street stairwells.
August, pulling his bass across the room to leave, passing me updated city bus maps and sticks of gum. August taking me over to the 28th Precinct house to apply for my cabaret card, slipping the cop a five-dollar bill for “processing” so I might be able to work when someone asked me to play Café Society or the Blue Note. “A quick study,” August said, so he loaned me the union dues to join the Local 802. Sometimes, during a final Saturday rehearsal, I’d get sad, realizing it was the last time I’d hear him play a particular connection of notes. After we’d finished at the theater, he’d take me to after-hours clubs, places like Minton’s Playhouse down in the Cecil Hotel and Tony’s in Brooklyn, dark, hot places where I’d sit and sip watered-down vermouth and let the cigarette smoke sear my lungs while August went onstage and jammed with musicians like Thelonious Monk and Gary Mapp. He’d wink at me sometimes from the stage, but I took it all as a professional vibration, thought he was happy because he’d killed his solo or changed the time signature on an arr
angement and gotten the rest of the band to follow. I thought he was just being a solid friend in the way that bass men are the foundation of everything. I never thought either of us was falling in love.
With his quiet came a loud scar, a line of vermilion that began at his hairline and ended at the peak of his collar. It bisected the left side of his face as though the face itself had been maufactured in two pieces, and made August look consistently to stage left as he played. Some nights he even wore a fedora whose shadow, under the stage lighting, hid his entire face. A shame, I thought, since he had beautiful skin, the same coppery auburn as mine but with a reddish flame beneath that threatened to burn through. His lashes were long as an ostrich’s, and he had jet black hair that he conked, and that curled into a bubbly fizz at the roots. His eyes were as dark as a spirit’s, and on the days when we had to play four or five shows, he’d shut his eyelids halfway, like an Eyptian on an ancient scroll. He made my heart race.
Still, I’d never once thought of him as maybe him, not until the night Roland was ill and Letty danced with a broomstick while cursing us all to hell. She was especially rude to me, once taking her broomstick and raking it up my black keys to make a point. “Gotta run to the ladies,” she finally said, and we all untensed our bodies, cataloging the anger that had lodged in our arms and shoulders. We were living in the end of October, and night came rapidly: the notes in our fake books were running from discrete dots into blocks of black. When Letty left, I went to the window to try and find some final bit of sunset, some last denial of the coming winter, but all I found were street signs already set alight, the headlamps of cars drifting slowly in rush-hour traffic. I saw, caught in the high branches of a tree down the street, a red something. It might have been a cardinal.
“Dreaming of murder?” August asked. He’d come to stand behind me, so close I could smell his shaving lotion. Cloves. A hint of vanilla.
“Death’d be too good for her.” I didn’t turn to face him when I spoke, because I didn’t need to. He’d come so close that I could feel every breath he took, hear every blink of his eyes. I heard him when he swallowed, smelled a hint of myrrh coming off him. “Anyway,” I said, “I’m not thinking about Letty.”
“What, then?”
“Thinking of home,” I said. “You see that bird in the tree?”
He moved up to stand beside me, and looked out the window for some time before he said, “That’s a bag from a shop. A little red paper bag from a shop.”
“It’s awfully sad that you think so.”
“You’re unreal,” he said. “Looking out the window when there’s nothing to see. It’s what I keep saying to myself—you’re one of those chicks with an unlimited mind. I hope New York lets you keep it.”
I folded my hands on the windowsill, and August took his finger and tapped one of mine four times. Traced an imaginary line across the backs of my hands, as though drawing a string that would join them as a pair.
“I miss the sun,” I said. “At home, summer stays with us all the way through November.”
He relaxed his hand so it covered mine, and said, “It’s a grace, your summer.”
We both looked out the window, though I was actually looking at the reflection of our hands together, a hand atop mine at last. The edge of my black shawl still showed at the bottom of the window, as did two of the pearly buttons in his silk shirt.
“What’s your mother’s name?” I asked him.
“Auchidie.”
“She must be a fine, fine mother.”
We’d been whispering, of course, though Letty’s bathroom trip had lasted long enough that Jim had gone upstairs on the roof to roll his marijuana. Verner, ever dull, had remained in the studio, and when August moved close to me, he began to walk about the room in small semicircles of anger, making noise that might cover our declarations. He unhooked his horn from its neck strap and set it loudly on the floor. He kicked the feet of Jim’s hi-hat. “What’s happening, little man?” August asked him. My face warmed as I thought of Verner’s fingers up the sleeve of my coat. Verner took up his jacket and left the room.
I’d never before been that close to holding a man’s hand, and I wanted August to go on standing there with me forever, wanted the dull four-counts and trivial harmonic inventions of rehearsal to cease. I wanted the world to stop rushing and growing and dying so that I could stand there and look at August’s shirt in the glass while he went on saying lovely things. But he didn’t stay. He went back to his bass and tuned its strings. He held it around its middle, as if he were sitting with a lover rather than so much hollow wood. When he leaned in to listen, the bass’s neck brushed the scar on his face, and I got jealous. He tightened and loosened all five strings until first Letty, then Jim and Verner, returned. “What the hell is going on in here?” Letty said, to no one and everyone, meaning that we should all get back to work. Herbie Hancock was playing the theater that night, and since the day his name had gone up on the marquee, I’d been storing up anxiety in a silo fashioned of envy. Just then, all that disappeared into the dark brume of evening. Letty could snap at me for nothing, call me an idiot and a moron, threaten not to pay me, break the broomstick over my head—I wouldn’t care. I’d found maybe him, the someone who might be my Someone. And I hadn’t even had to leave the theater.
PART FOUR
Caroline
3:10 TO YUMA
Come the fourth of June, Roy McKinley was supposed to be taking me to the Strawberry Festival up in Lexington. It was going to be right special, Roy told me, with a Ferris wheel ride and bumper cars, and all manner of strawberry preserves and pies and even strawberry bread crinkly like Christmas paper, and the town dog, Smiley Pete, on parade with the horses what run the Derby last year. The most special part, for me, was going to be Roy hisself—Roy, with them straight white teeth and a dent in his chin like Jackie Robinson’s, his hair cut down to a shiny moss and his top two buttons undone like a singer on the front of a record album.
Well, I reckon it weren’t meant to be, that particular day with Roy, ’cause long about then Miss Laverna Vaughan over in Owingsville asked me to stay a spell with her boys. Twin boys, both of them with the same cookie dough skin turning from Mr. Vaughan’s light to Miss Laverna’s dark, same big pretty eyes the color of plain coffee, same juicy little feet with the second toe longer’n the big one. Twin boys still fresh out of heaven, with long puppy dog lashes. Three weeks old and not even holding their chins off their necks yet, but Miss Laverna’d come down with the nerves after she had them, so old Mr. Vaughan (so much older than Laverna, she called him “Pop” when she was out with her girlfriends) took her on a little fiesta down in Tennessee. “Hoping,” he told me, “she might feel some better.”
He was picking his teeth with his thumbnail when he said it, and seem like he wasn’t paying me a bit of mind. He was such a fat man that his face was in the middle of his head ’stead of on the front of it, and ever time he stuck his thumb in his mouth, his second chin shifted around under his first one. He had a look in his eyes like he was always at a funeral, and seem like he was thinking on how Miss Laverna might never feel better, how she might be laying up in her bed with her eyes closed for years upon years while he did all the washing and cooking and nose-wiping and shoe-tying for two loud nasty boys what’d grow up and not remember the first thing he did for them, be calling “Mama, Mama” when it was time to throw roses and accolades, just like anybody else. Well, Strawberry Festival was coming up but so was the winter, and Imagene was going to need a new coat and shoes. Cute as Roy McKinley might’ve been, I needed the money, so I stayed at the Vaughans’.
The Vaughans’d left out Sunday directly after church, and it wasn’t even Tuesday lunchtime when I found myself outside listening to them baby boys screaming something awful through the window screen, with their hands all in their own shit. They ain’t said nothing when they woke up, and so I stayed on outside reading the paper, but by the time I heard one of them start to cry it was shit everw
here—matted in the twins’ hair, walking in handprints across their crib sheets, cased between their fat little sausage legs, packed in the roof of one of ’em’s mouth. I took one boy under each arm like they was footballs and hauled them into the kitchen, unpinned their diapers on the washstand and got the water ready in the sink while they laid there just a-screaming about all the shit they done plastered. I got them all washed up right fast then pulled the plug out that kitchen sink, wrapped them twins in a towel, and laid them on the floor so they could keep screaming in peace, then I walked over to the clapboard house next door, through that high grass probably just full of cottonmouths, and told Miss Gail Ashby in no uncertain terms to send word down to the Colored store for somebody to get a hold of Laverna and Pop.
“You can’t take care a two itty-bitty babies?” Miss Ashby said. She was Laverna’s friend who suggested the fiesta in the first place, and she ain’t cared a whit whether I lost my mind and drowned myself in Miss Laverna’s cistern.
“Ain’t just little babies out here,” I told her. “It’s pigs I got to look after and cats I got to feed and Lord knows what all else.”
“Shit,” she said. Laughed a big huh what wasn’t really a laugh at all. She leaned forward, and her front porch creaked under me. “When I was your age I had three little kids already and a mama with the chronic pleurisy to boot. Now here’s just a little piece a farm, and you can’t take care of it?”
“Look like Miss Laverna couldn’t take care of it all by herself, and she been living out here for years. Babies need their own mamas, they that little.”
Since Mama been dead, I ain’t had the wherewithal to watch my mouth. I wait and wait for the cutting things to leave my mind, but they always leave my mouth instead, the way they was flying out at Gail Ashby right then. The righteous little daisies beside her porch was blowing in the breeze and her electric fan was circling in her front window and I was standing there just a stewing. I turnt on my heels and started marching on back over to the Vaughans’, but I was still so fried I stopped halfway through the grass and turnt back around. Them cottonmouths could crawl straight off to hell. “Hey,” I yelled at Miss Ashby. “If I’d of spread my legs three thousand times with thirty different men, maybe I would of come up with three little kids by the time I was eighteen, too.” I shrugged. “But I ain’t. So, no, I don’t know nothing about two newborn babies and a piece of farm.”
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