by Barry Hannah
So when the band was breaking up, Edgar and Emma went backstage, which barely existed. There was Lambert, alone, unmobbed, smoking a cigarette but looking guilty, same as years ago. The old cancer thinness was on him, his face speckled and translucent on its skull. He lit up when he saw Edgar.
“I know you, my ’boner. Oops, sorry little lady!” His naughty hipness was imperishable, sealed with him. He wasn’t missing a thing with those eyes. Edgar wondered if his hearing, however, had dimmed.
He drew Edgar in, slipped into an undervoice—old collaborators—a few feet away from Emma, who was not really shut out. Lambert smiled over Edgar’s shoulders, always a dog for the wimmens. He told Edgar about Snooky, mother of two in Dallas. Parton Peavey had cleaned up and as everybody knew was a “rich old man, nearing the big four-oh.” Edgar was downed a little by how much they had aged.
“You guys didn’t know, but I invested for all of you, us, the cats, way back then. Young people, all they thought of was their axes. So there’s a piece of your salary you never saw. So, beautiful, it’s come to, da-dum, something big and tidy.”
Edgar jumped, very alert. He planned suddenly: cash in one bundle back to his aunt. A made man, he’d get his own place and fix up his parents’ house. He would buy an island, where? Emma would continue to work among the native deaf and he, what? He’d come out with a large thing from his meditative years.
“After what I did for you, I know you’ll sign it back to me. Parton Peavey, Smith, Snooky, no problem, they all did. You can see that I and the band, we needs the bread. Verily.”
Edgar, first raised, now bumped the wretched bum’s pavement.
“How much was it?”
“Near sixty thousand apiece. A hundred, near, for our legend Peavey. Isn’t that great? I brought the pen. You know what I did for you?”
Edgar signed three lines as Lambert held out the stock transfer.
“The band goes on. I can afford a casket.” Lambert winked. “Good young people making the band go on. Woodrow takes it when I’m planted. Your funds, Big Thunder Hounds Foundation, huh? Not even really for me, get it? Look at me.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And I saw that house where you live yesterday. Not gone with the wind, ho? The wind has come back and put you in a castle. Edgar, Edgar, I’m hating this, but could you spare me a little? A couple thou. What I did for you when you were a baby, remember. Times are rough. You can see. I’d never have seen you, chicken and peas La Grange, man—”
“I don’t have any money.”
“House-poor, huh? But a little scratch—the things I did for you—you cost me, the bus . . .”
Edgar moved away. Lambert was in a fit of his own virtue. Stooped and angry, Edgar caught Emma’s arm and they ran to where his aunt was waiting in the foyer, caught in the act of giving the snoot to a couple of leather punkers who’d come to (Edgar wished) spit at Lambert’s Wall Street Crash music.
“What’s this rushing?” his aunt wanted to know. They were in the car before Emma told her.
“Edgar has just lost a great deal of money he didn’t know he had.”
Emma’s work with the deaf must have given her some kind of ears, Edgar grieved.
“Oh, yes. The music’s wonderful for a while. But your musicians are notorious bankrupts,” said his aunt.
“They’re just ‘bubbles,’ aren’t they?” He smashed at her.
“Exactly what I said. My generation always knew that.”
By Christmas break, things had changed only for Emma. She had blitzed through her work and was taking the master’s. Her thesis on the deaf was heralded and would be published, with the help of her major professor, her major herald. Edgar didn’t know she was this good. She even got a small advance—one thousand—from publishers in New York, and was hounded instantly for it by her father, from the school of You Owe. All eight of his children owed him for their lifelong hard times. Emma gave him seven hundred.
They remained passionate, but she would not move to Hadley’s house. Edgar was glad. They did make love, though, on the sofa a few times. She opened his horn cases one morning and peered at the freckled and scarred instruments a long time. They seemed to make her angry. Without a word, she left the house and drove away in the Japanese wreck she’d bought.
He was baffled by her sadness, which was turning more into anger nowadays. She would clam up and sometimes beat her fists on whatever was near, including once, his thighs. She had a television and watched the war news through January. She liked to turn up the speech of the generals and said she had a crush on Powell.
The terrible day he went into the trailer, February was ending with a big blow that made the pines whoo and shiver, spooky, warning the homes on wheels beneath them. There had been, during the morning, a burst water main up the road, catching the whole trailer park without water. Emma had been busy cleaning with Lysol, and was outraged by the stoppage. She was in a torrent when he entered, with good news, he thought. Inspired by her, he was well into a book about Chicago bums. He could write again, and what he had was so good that the chairman was trying to get him a large grant to revisit his old haunts. It would be enough to take Emma with him. It was not a bad city at all. Away from the South, she might be happier—holy smoke, why shouldn’t she? She’d never left it. There was her depression, itself.
Edgar sat on the sprung bunk she slept on, petting her. He told her about bums.
For many years, he and female drunks had simply wound up together. He had a place. They just appeared in it, no memory of having got there, isolated by the blazing nimbus of alcohol. The woman might even be sober, some pitying angel on the spoor of a heartbroken man. You could not be awful enough for some women: they were stirred by emaciation, destitution, whiskey whiskers, bus fumes. For other women you could not get foreign enough. Witness Clem, the acned Iranian sot, always with a beauty queen. Some black women were greatly attracted to downed white men. What wild loyalties he’d seen when he’d been sober enough to notice. You had Commies, capital ists (ruined, but adhering), even monarchists, in bumhood. Take away the sickness, he had loved a good deal of the life. He even missed being insane, sometimes. The world matched his dreams some days. Something, a small good thing, almost always turned up. He missed making the nut of drink every day. He missed the raddled adventures. There always was a focus: securing the next high, defending the hoard of liquor money, but with chivalry; getting through the day without murder; being a world citizen, voting and passionate, about the headlines off some fat cat’s newspaper. What about the exploratory raptures of one’s own liquored mind? The drunkard, or bum, was not wasting his mind all the time. He was going deeper in than others: great lore, buzzing insights. The conversation frequently was above the university. Some few bums were renuncios. They had given up the regular world on purpose, and could explain why in long wonderful stories, each one distinct, bravely of no category or school. He’d also met deaf bums, of course. He knew more about them than she’d thought. He knew the blind, too—what stories he could tell about Rasta Paul!
Emma listened closely, having stopped her tears long ago. She seemed avidly sympathetic, her pretty mouth open, her dress falling off her shoulders like a flushed senorita’s, carelessly revealing those breasts that shot warmth through his manhood. Her eyes met his, and it was off with her spectacles and dress, on the bunk in a minute.
Hang in, all good things will come, Edgar remembered. Even his reverie about Sally, the doctor’s wife, lived out long and more on that dirty mattress, a single lightbulb shaking over it. Never had Emma been this carnal. She threw herself into long rituals of defilement, yes. Begged him to take her back there, as never before, and then she was on him with her mouth lest he finish without her tasting it all. She hurled back and forth, then out with her legs, voracious. The panther cry came, rose and fell, rose again. Then she suddenly cast him off, screaming no, no, no, no, no! Immediately she began to cry. She reached and put her spectacles back on, peering first at his nake
d chest, then at his throat.
“What the hell does that tattoo mean? I never saw that! There’s a war on. Are you for that monster we’re fighting?! Our generals, our airmen—they’re men, and you, you don’t have . . . moxie, moxie—that’s it! Your aunt keeps you! Peets Lambert kept you! You ungrateful bitch! You’re gothic, Edgar!”
This was terror. She wouldn’t quit.
“You won’t even play the horns—your natural God-given ticket! No, crowds get to you, weak bitch! Memory gets you! You drag me to your pitiful parents, and I saw the nowhere, the awful never, of you all. But I had to be there to prop you up! Your significant thing, your meditated thing, I’ve screwed, sucked, let you . . . You’ve even got gray, waiting, on somebody else’s motorcycle!”
And, before the dish came at him,
“Now your bums, your magical romantic bums. The deaf don’t have a choice, Mister Chicago. And let me tell you something else. After this book, the deaf aren’t going to be my life. I’ve done them, I’m tired. I’m too selfish, if you’ve got to know! It’s my time. I can’t help it. I want healthy people, and rich, traveling people, happy doing kings and princes. But I had to love you. Love you, I know, more than you do me! How could you?”
She kneeled and brought up a bowl of Lysol and threw it in Edgar’s face. The pain was so horrible, the act so sudden, that he simply laid out his arms and rocked, before his hands came up on their own and dragged at his eyes. He was conscious of her running back and forth in the trailer. But there was no water, not there or in any trailer around them. It was a long, long time before she had him, naked, in her Toyota wreck. Something went wrong with it, though, and it stopped. He was blind. He was probably good and blind before she, having raced around desperately for ditch water, opened the radiator for its fluid and came to him with a few drops of it, sprinkling some on his eyes. It tasted like antifreeze.
When he left the hospital ten days later, he had only a speck of vision, low in his left eye.
Emma had never left him, and implied her remaining life in this act.
“I’ll never leave you, Edgar,” she crooned, over and over.
She never discussed anything with Auntie Hadley or him. She would be there at the house with him forever, or wherever, she said. Emma had real power in her guilt. The aunt might be flabbergasted, but Edgar couldn’t see things like that now. He never heard an incautious opinion from his aunt anymore. Emma said, indeed, that the woman was being sweet, real sweet. He could hear them in conference. They seemed to be agreeing about almost everything. Emma allowed the aunt to buy her clothes. She described them to Edgar, meekly delighted. All he could see were the new Paris shoes.
Her love for him, he felt, went on past the penitential, which he, manly, protested many times. She swore it was not so, not in the least. Horrible as it was, throwing Lysol at him had been an act that told her where she belonged. He could not know how much she loved him. That thing about kings and princes was just the last of her daydreamy youth shouting itself out.
Edgar asked for his valved Bach trombone. It didn’t really taste like whiskey at all. He practiced it awhile. Blind men had come forth beautifully in jazz. His aunt’s hand was on his shoulder, appreciative.
One day his parents came with a present of Lambert’s latest swing record, a minor hit. They said it brought back memories. Edgar loved them desperately, and he could hear the kind Emma celebrating his progress as they left, meaning to visit often. It was all delightful, but the horn itself was no go. It was as if he’d never touched one. There was weakness in his chest, not from the healed sternum, but something more. He just couldn’t. He cried a little. It was mainly for Emma, anyway. He didn’t want her to see him cry. In fact, he was glad he was no good.
He’d gotten the grant. Emma was ready to lead him in Chicago, back to the old haunts, anywhere. Handicaps very often increased being, she said. Such people were called the “differently abled” nowadays.
Edgar had never wanted to go back to Chicago. That wasn’t his item, his thing.
Once, a month blind and just sitting there, seeing if he could read a long speck in one of Hadley’s diaries, he came across something from 1931: “I . . . am . . . made . . . all . . . different . . . I . . . can’t . . . enjoy . . . anything . . . God . . . you . . . my . . . husband . . . pokes . . . at . . . me . . . I . . . am . . . angry . . . feel . . . there . . . is . . . a . . . dangerous . . . snake . . . down . . . there . . . not . . . him . . . me . . . before . . . he . . . got . . . there . . . God . . . help . . . me.”
Hadley made a movement. She was next to him, on a wooden chair. Emma was away. Auntie Hadley started whispering about Milton and that “Argentina man,” and Helen Keller’s triumphant books.
“Milton was years preparing for his life’s work—what a paradise regained for us all, Edgar. His daughters served him and took his dictation. I can have all this brailled for you. You could then dictate and Emma would surely help. She is all you. You are luckier than your ugly aunt, in many ways.”
“Actually, the blind can write,” said Edgar suddenly.
“A whole new world. ‘They also serve who stand and wait.’ But you wouldn’t have to wait anymore.”
Edgar grinned. She’d not seen him grin. He knew something deep and merry, the exact ticket.
“Your physical needs are all covered. Then there’s my will, after I . . . and a big sum for the book. And all the instruments, of course, for composition.”
“Do something for me, Auntie. Would you put Lambert’s record on the Victrola so we can listen together? The past, swing, times forgotten.”
She played it and sat, not a squeak.
God, the band was wretched, and yet they’d come round again with a hit. You never knew.
He screwed up his mouth when it was done, tongue against his teeth, watching Hadley’s foot bounce to this merde, holy smoke!
He told her there would be a declaration when Emma came back. He wanted a gathering. This was a big moment for him.
Emma sat, a Manhattan like Hadley’s in her hand, at six-thirty that evening. They told him it was snowing out even though it was early April—so very rare and lovely and ghostly quiet. The town was filling up and mute. A beloved merchants’ calamity thrilling the young at heart.
“All right, let’s get started. A real book knows everything. Let’s clear the air in two ways. First, Auntie Hadley, to get modern, when did you first know you were a shit? Was it a sudden revelation, what? When did it arrive that you were and would be, awful? Next, we of the addicted must write letters of amends to everybody alive. Maybe even to the dead. I want to hear that pen scratching near me while I’m at my work, sweetie. This needn’t take forever, though the sheer amount of paper will be staggering.”
There was silence before she acquiesced. Did he hear something moist and flowing from her?
“Emma, dear.” He himself began crying. “I release you body and soul. Don’t need no cellmate, not even no lovin’, till the old opus is done. Think it over then. Have at the kings and princes.”
Why was he so happy, so profoundly, almost, delirious?
Loud and bright and full of jazz, Rat-Face Confesses— that would be the title of their book.
Scandale d’Estime
THEY WERE DESTROYING A THEATER IN KOSCIUSKO, AND MY FATHER bought the bricks. He had made a good deal. He asked me and a buddy of mine to live there a while in a hotel to stack the unbroken bricks for him and load them on a truck.
We were, my buddy and I, probably seventeen. We read Downbeat magazine and knew a few Dylan Thomas poems, which seemed to us as good as poetry could get. Horace was the better reader and memorized poems whole. There was a small college in our town, and we knew some of the younger faculty who had left in despair and irony over the puritan expectations of it. As they had been able to talk about upwards of three books, we considered them great poetic souls. I wish there were a good term for the zeal we felt for these older hip brethren, which included one stylish lady named A
nnibell: cats almost got it, when the Beats and jazzers established themselves. Those who got the joke and continued on with their private music. A personal groove.
Now and then there was a question of what we should do with the new women in our heads. You might go out with some local girl, but she was not really there, she was not the real faraway city woman in your cat head. You might kiss her and moil around—but she was, you knew, fifth string, a drear substitute for the musical woman in a black long-sleeve sweater you had in your mind on the seashore of the East—the gray, head-hurting East, very European to my mind, where you thought so much and the culture labored so heavy on you your head hurt. The beauty and the wisdom of this woman—uttered along the seashore in weary sighs—was a steady dream, and I woke with it, pathetically, to attack a world fouled by the gloomy usual. I yearned to talk and grope with a woman who was exhausted by the world and would find me a “droll” challenge. She would be somewhat older. She either sighed, or mumbled pure music. I had no interest in the young freshness of girls at all.
Every brick I unearthed from the dust and chalky mortar, cleaning it off with a steel brush and wet flannel rag—which made my hands red and sliced with little lines all over—became part of the house I was building in my mind for this woman. New York Slim they would call her. The house would be on the seashore, where you could look out the window and sigh in a big way. For her, even a special sighing room.
The old hotel we stayed in had rail balconies on the inside floors where you could lean and look down into not much of a lobby, your feet on a gone tan carpet.
It felt good to be tired and cut up at the end of the day, just showered and looking down at the lobby with your hair slick. You felt you were a working man. I had a red kerchief tied around my neck like a European working man, all shot with working blood. A whole new energy came through you. This was before I began to drink and smoke, and I would not feel like this, clean and worthy and nicely used in the bones, for many more times, for a great long while. The only problem was that there was absolutely nothing to do. The town might have been named for a Polish patriot who led American troops in the Revolutionary War, but the glory just mocked you in a town where shops slammed shut at five to prevent any history whatsoever beyond twilight. We had no car and had read all the magazines backward. There was a bare courtesy light bulb at the bus station, and we actually went to stand beneath it, hoping to invite life. But nothing. A man who hated to move ran a restaurant up the way and we soon got tired of his distress. Nobody even played checkers there. Gloomy John Birch literature would fall off the checkout counter, and there were flags bleached to pink and purple in a bottle on it too, seeming to represent a whole other nasty little country.