August hadn’t known, when he woke up, what his life was doing. He’d never dreamed its geometry, never felt the shape it had taken in its twenty-eight years. He’d never tallied the miles run, he said, not until he laid his hand on my thigh and saw the lashes of angels. By the time he got dressed that morning, he realized he was responsable. His mama wasn’t walking him down the street to fiddle lessons anymore. She wasn’t standing in his new apartment with her hand over her heart, frowning out his window at the streetchildren playing in the street (Lord have mercy.) She wasn’t sending him down to 116th Street to buy himself a four-poster bed, or waking him up on Sunday morning to drag him downtown to some new Jamaicans’ church. She wasn’t telling him anything anymore—the clay of his life had become his own.
He told me that when he saw all the blank space he had dominion over, he took a taxi all the way down to Chemical Corn and withdrew a quarter of his savings, then took the 1 train down to Hell’s Kitchen, where he sold off his fine Czech violin. Crossed over on the No. 36 bus to the Diamond District and bought the biggest rock he could afford. He hadn’t planned any further than that, but when he got to practice that morning—later even than I did, at four twenty that afternoon—it just seemed natural to him to settle things there, in the very room where we met.
I was jazzing up “Tom Dooley,” watching Verner pick some dry skin off the end of his nose, when August hurried in the door with his coat half off his shoulders and got down on one knee beside the piano bench. “Marry me?” he asked. Jim got to laughing. Letty mouthed “no” to Roland in the most horrified fashion. Verner got red around his nose like he was going to cry. When I didn’t say anything, August took the velvet box out of his pocket and said, “Please?”
“Yes, yes!” I said, out of breath from the shock of it, and when he rose to kiss me, the rest of the band was struck so dumb that it took the janitor, mopping up a leak in the corner, to drop his tin bucket and clap.
I played through the evening’s intro like it was a catnap dream. I saw the ladies and gentlemen of the audience but I couldn’t feel their laughter, heard them clapping but couldn’t see their hands. Mr. Schiffman had gotten more and more serious about the acts coming to the theater—we had Sam Cooke, and Ray Charles, and we had the jazz greats like Ornette Coleman and Cecil Taylor. The shows got longer and so did the breaks we had while the feature acts were playing, and I spent more and more time sitting in one of the little bunk beds Schiffman had fixed to the wall for us backstage. The other girls actually napped in the bunks, or they sat at the metal folding table, playing cards and gossiping about their boyfriends. Vivian Harris ate dinner, salting her chicken each time she put it on her fork. I tended to read. I was reading The Living Is Easy when Mrs. Elizabeth Fogle came backstage.
“I saw you playing!” she said brightly. “I couldn’t believe it was you. All that time you were my neighbor, and I’d never known.”
“Thank you,” I said, embarrassed immediately at how correspondingly little I knew about her. I couldn’t even begin to guess where she worked, what she did. “How’s little Johnny?” I asked.
“He’s good. We’re good. I’m good. I got married again.” She thrust out her hand to show off her wedding band. “I’m Mrs. Earnest Hudson now. Johnny and I moved into his apartment, and Reggie and Rodney moved into mine.”
I congratulated her, and she began running through what had become of everyone in Edith’s building. Mr. and Mrs. Donald Green’s beautiful little daughter had died, she said, and she’d caught Mr. Green’s mother standing downstairs outside the mortuary, watching Mrs. Green cry. The older Mrs. Green was a haggard old woman in a fur, Elizabeth said, telling Donald, “That’s the kind of thing that happens when you marry a nigger. What else did you expect.” The deaf girl’s husband packed off and left one day, she said, and all throughout the building you could hear the deaf girl’s sobs still, all these months later. The two men who habitually stood in front of the liquor store had joined up with Make Me a Herald and been baptized, though one saw them occasionally slipping into the store for cans of beer. The church secretary had disappeared altogether, perhaps to join a kinder, gentler religion.
“And you?” she asked. “Earnest will ask, of course. Give me something to report.”
I thought to show her my own diamond ring, but then I thought again, thought of her burning eggs and the occasional whippings she gave Johnny when she caught him misbehaving. Somehow, it seemed, she deserved to own the moment’s happiness.
“All this,” I said, motioning around me to the gowned women, the rushing stagehands. “I’m really happy.”
August ran over and practically dragged me down the hall as I waved goodbye to her: he was telephoning Glaser, he said, and wanted me there.
“We want fifty percent,” he said into the phone when Mr. Glaser answered. Mr. Glaser must not have recognized his voice, because he then said, “August Barnes. And my wife,” he added, and Mr. Glaser must have asked Who? because I heard August say “Audrey.” There was a long silence between them then, and August grinned at me, and then Mr. Glaser must have said they’d talk, because August said, “Looking forward to it,” and hung up.
I hugged his waist all the way home that night, and when we got off the bus and upstairs to 3D, I got out paper for a letter to Mother. I’m getting married, I thought to write, or You’d never guess what happened to me today. I finally settled on a weather report, an epistle on how dirty a snow becomes in the city, a letter that would keep in touch without touching. More good news to follow, I left off. Love to Mr. Barbour and Baby Nate. Who’d been born a boy after all, despite Mrs. Yvette down on Fifth Street, who held a string over Mother’s belly and said, when it blew east, that Mother was having another girl. Mother’s friend Saundra Greer said of course it was too early for Mrs. Yvette to tell such a thing, but Mother’d painted the crib pink anyway, with hearts on the headboard even. Mr. Barbour, she’d written in her last letter, can’t bring himself to go near it.
Before I posted my letter, I looked again at my Love to Mr. Barbour, disbelieving it a little. But after my lifetime of waiting, love had finally come to me, so I licked the paste and closed the envelope: everybody deserved love, and perhaps my mother, like Mrs. Fogle, deserved finding it twice. I thought, for the first of seconds, that I’d write Caroline again, because she’d understand that eighteen felt old enough, that forever is worth smashing your mother’s heart for, that love like mine and August’s didn’t run on a printed timetable. I remembered how we’d been in brassieres already when we saw the blood moon, and we’d run all the way to town and climbed up the roof of the Colored store so we could see the whole of it, all its craters and scars. We’d been in the middle of October, when the veil between us and the spirits was at its thinnest, and we’d thought our ancestors had sent the blood moon to tell us something. You won’t die in Mt. Sterling, the blood moon said. You’ll have names and lives that people will remember. I wondered, as I sealed my letter, if we’d read the moon right. I’d escaped to New York City, but so had three thousand other girls who could play the piano like a dream, and as it turned out, playing music was as much of a job as driving a tractor. Caroline, for all her big plans, was probably still in Kentucky, and it wasn’t simply because there were no Colored girls on Broadway.
August was across the kitchen table, spread across a Passantino music paper, coloring the head on an eighth rest. “So when?” I asked, rolling my ink pen down the table until he stopped it with his palm. “When can we have a wedding?”
“Next fall. There’ll be a week’s break in the schedule. We can go on a proper honeymoon. That Colored resort in the Adirondacks, maybe. Or up to Niagara Falls.”
Fall and Canada were so far off. But when we went to bed and he turned out his lamp and his hand found its way back up my nightgown, I didn’t say a thing. I thought about Elizabeth Pounds Johnson, the way the dimple in her chin would stretch with the scream she’d emit if she saw the big diamond ring on my finger, and I
let him inside me. “Love, love, love you,” I whispered in his ear, as he shuddered in surprise.
BRUBECK
The weekend is big: we hear so on WBAI. William O’Ree, the first Negro in the National Hockey League, is traded to the Boston Bruins. The Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries meets for the first time. World Airways Flight 830 crashes three minutes after takeoff from Guam, killing eighty people. I fix myself faster and faster to August’s apartment, folding myself into his couch to listen to him rattling the newspaper, setting up a full-sized ironing board from Woolworth’s along the wall that separates the kitchen from the dining room. Counting clothes he needs for rehearsal and performances, August goes through twelve shirts a week, and six pairs of pants. An hour and a half worth of Sunday ironing, he needs, and with the board that close to the kitchen, I won’t have to wander too far from a steaming coffee kettle or tomato soup come to a boil. It’s the warmest space in the house, and sun from the window cheers me as I work. Afterward, I wipe the crumbs out of his silverware drawer with a soft green tea towel that’s too pretty to use, really, and August listens to the Knickerbockers play a hot second half. Jelly Roll hops up on the end table, where he broke the blue-tinted flower vase that held my roses. He looks for the vase, perhaps to rebreak it, but the flowers are just phantoms now. We settle into a rhythm, August and Jelly Roll and I, one no longer lived unconsummated.
Tuesday, after a crisp gray weekend, rain returns to New York. This time, it’s torrential. We take a taxi to the theater, where August covers me with his umbrella while he drags his bass on the other side of him. Fidel Castro is coming to Harlem, it’s been said, and a lone policeman in a blue NYPD poncho patrols a set of barricades that form a bisecting chain all around the Hotel Theresa. Letty’s outside under the Apollo’s awning, half in and half out of the rain. She’s drinking coffee from a tiny take-out cup, and on our way in, she grabs me by the arm and holds me back. When she tosses what’s left of her coffee onto the cold sidewalk, it steams. The aroma makes me click my teeth for an anxious 6/8. “Morning,” I tell her, as August walks on without me.
“Nice one,” Letty says. She throws me a dancer’s smile so wide it can only be fake. Raindrops soak her auburn hair, turning it brown. We both stand and listen while the wheels on August’s case clack over the threshold of the revolving door. Thump, thump, they go, up the carpeted stairs, and then the door’s clicked shut. Letty fixes a wise look on her face that, from a foot away, looks like rapture. Her features, this close, are a bust’s: eyes carved out of stone, nose like a slope. She’s inside herself, blooming in this cold. But in an alley cat’s voice she says, “Lemme see that ten-cent ring he gave you,” and after rolling my finger from left to right in the day’s light, she drops my hand like it was a dustrag. She narrows her gray eyes. “You may live a long time,” she says, “but I can guarantee you this is the stupidest thing you’ll ever do. If you do it, that is. It’s not too late to back out. Move back to Edith’s. I’ve talked to her. She’ll take you back.”
“Gee whiz. Thanks for being happy for me.”
“Marriage is not about happiness, which you’ll certainly discover if you marry August Barnes.”
Letty tells me to think it over and let her know by dinner, as if the afternoon will transform August into some sort of atrocity, right before my eyes. I let her words travel around the rim of one ear and off into the falling rain. She’s wrong about August, and nothing proves that more than the way, when Letty and I finally climb up to the studio, he’s sitting on my bench, waiting. He gets up and scoots it out for a foot or two for me to sit down, which sets Jim to laughing again. Verner rolls his eyes. Letty just counts the slowest, calmest eight beats while August sits back down in his chair to his own instrument.
She works us like plow mules, stopping us sometimes after only one measure, having Verner adjust his reed five different times for flat notes. She works Roland so hard, making him dip her so low and lift her so high, the poor man has two perfectly round O’s of sweat on the cheeks of his backside by dinner break. When Roland goes to the bubbler for water, Jim laughs so hard he passes gas.
“Kentucky,” Letty says to me, when we’re finished and everyone else is packing off backstage to change clothes. “Come over here for a minute.”
She’s got on her diamond drop earrings, and I wonder what’s the occasion, whether it’s Mr. Schiffman’s birthday, or whether her old, broken-down, alabaster mother and father are coming again to watch the show. James Brown is playing tonight, with Brubeck, but even great artists are usually not enough to get her in the diamond drops.
“Mr. Glaser is offended.”
I shrug my shoulders. “That’s his problem.”
“No, now it’s my problem. Which makes it your problem.”
“Why should it be?”
“There are things,” she says, pulling up her skirt to take down her nylons, “that you clearly don’t understand.” She slides each sleeve off its leg, then crumples the pair and tosses it in the wastebasket, though they looked perfectly fine to me. “I think you might reconsider all this.”
“All this what?”
“August. Asking for half the take. Getting married. All of it.”
She’s crazy. All of it is wonderful. In a couple of years, August will be famous and I’ll be sharing him with the world. We’ll live a whole lifetime, raising kids and making house notes and growing gray hair, and never again have nights like we’re having now, rushing through Harlem in the rain, filling ourselves with late night daquiris in Greenwich Village and catching John Coltrane at the Zebra Room. Girls my age in Kentucky ruining their fingers in underwear factories and raising their armies of sad, hungry brats. This is the most romantic time in my life, and Letty’s just jealous. I’m the luckiest girl in America, and she can’t fell me not even one inch.
“I’m fine, Letty. Just fine. I know what I’m doing.”
She narrows her eyes at me, then smiles, and becomes as serene as I’ve ever seen her. She walks off in her stockingless feet, and pauses at the door. She’s talking into the hall, so it takes me a second to realize what she says—“it’s your funeral.”
Backstage downstairs, in the busy hallway, I change into one of the gowns on the ladies’ rack and then gobble my dinner like a goose up for fattening, washing my catfish down with Coca-Cola to make it digest. August sprinkles clove buds under his tongue. Peculiar. Superstitious. But I’m glad he is. I take his hands in mine, knead the six soft spots between his eight knuckles, massage the length of each finger, and wish for these strong hands to make our future. All the while, he’s staring at the back stairwell, which is naked of paint.
“What’re you looking at, August? What are you thinking about?”
“We should find a drummer and a horn and make a record of our own. I get tired of playing other people’s music.”
“But we’re usually playing our own.”
“And there’s where you’re wrong. The minute you play something here, Schiffman owns it. Anything that gets recorded, he sells it. You think I’d be holding back so much if I owned that shit?” He looks out the window again as if someone were hunting him, then turns back and gives me a light peck on the forehead. “We won’t find just any horn. Not a sax or a trumpet. What we need is a trombone. I bet you can’t name one modern quartet with a trombone in it.”
“Can’t say as I can.”
“Exactly. It’ll make us famous. It’ll make us rich. And all the money’ll be ours. Mr. and Mrs. Barnes Incorporated, you know? Shit. We ought to be down at Birdland.”
Walking onstage with this trotting around in my head, the thought that I’m actually living something far smaller than what he’s thinking for us, I have to take short, shallow breaths to stop the excitement from smashing me flat. Backstage, while the six of us stand there getting our heads ready, while the crowd chants A-pol-lo! into the blacked lights, I grab August and kiss him. I put my cheek to his and transmit whatever chemicals make up forever. Only
the purple floor lights, the ones Schiffman wired into the floor to keep the performers from tripping, shine.
Letty floats by our kiss, then Roland and Jim, then Verner. They’re just spirits in the corner of my perception, tiny rises in body temperature I feel when they pass closest. When I break loose from August and look into his eyes, the lights are tiny purple ovals in his black pupils. Everything runs in slow motion: A-pol-lo! A-pol-lo! all the way up to the balcony, and the smell of grease in the lights, and the rush of cool air from the box fans in the catwalk. These people in the audience, I know, are the same people I pass in the streets, the same ones getting on the bus at seven in the morning cussing the conductor for running early, and the ones getting on the bus again at four, cussing him for running late. The same ladies who threaten their children with belts for moving an inch on the sidewalk, the same boys who take pisses in alleys when they think no one is looking. Right now, they all sound like angels. Even my skin feels electric, like somebody’s rubbed witch hazel all over it.
“We’ve come so far,” August says, “but there is farther to go. We’ll save two, three thousand dollars, and we’ll split. With the money from Columbia, it shouldn’t take us more than a year. We’re going to be out of this world. Cosmic.”
I scratch my shoulders where the sequins bite them, and August takes my hand and leads me out past the curtain. “Ladies and jagomints!” yells Vivian Harris. Everyone laughs. Vivian has the spotlight, and the rest of the stage is black, but as soon as we get to the edge of things, someone turns a spot on me and August. “Well, would you look at these two lovebirds here,” Vivian says, and the surprise of the light and her voice makes us drop hands and blink. “Tonight is the very last night for bassist August Barnes and his intended, pianist Audrey Martin. Let’s hear it for the happy couple!”
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