Young Man With a Horn

by Dorothy Baker

  ‘Only four stories,’ Amy said, ‘but it did the trick.’

  ‘Too bad.’

  ‘You never know, I suppose,’ Amy said. ‘All I know is that I’ve been in one school or another ever since, memorizing the wrong answers. He pays the bills, but I just don’t like to see him any oftener than I have to. He’s married again, and what he got serves him right.’

  ‘Good idea to put a slit in a flask,’ she said almost immediately. She held it up, trying to get some light into it. ‘It gives you something to go by. Your turn, Richard; drink according to your need.’

  He tilted the flask up sharply, and while he drank she watched him, saying: ‘Men are so much less mussy than women. There’s nothing, I suppose, so really classic as a wing collar and a white tie.’

  ‘It’s almost the only kind of clothes I wear,’ Rick said; ‘I sleep in the day time.’ He looked at her and said, ‘Your turn, Doctor.’

  Her eyes were wide open and clear. ‘Don’t call me Doctor, Richard. I’ve got my reasons for hating it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I won’t, then.’

  ‘It’s true, though,’ she said, when she had drunk from the flask; ‘there’s nothing in the world so beautiful and so astonishing as the spectacle of a really disordered mind. Unless,’ she said after a minute, ‘unless it’s Josephine. Where do you suppose she is? She was here a moment ago.’

  ‘We took her home,’ Rick said. ‘How do you happen to know her?’

  ‘How does anyone happen to do anything?’ Amy said. ‘As far as I know, you happen to do what you happen to want to do. It’s called freedom of the will, or determinism, depending on where you stand. It’s simply a question of making up your mind to do what you have to do. Nothing to it. So I saw Josephine the opening night of Big Trouble, and I met her that night too. You get what you bid for.’

  A car came out of a side street going fast. The taxi stopped short and the trumpet case fell off the seat. Rick laid the girl back, then, and kissed her. Her mouth was cool and firm. It was a change, something he didn’t know.

  ‘You’re tired, aren’t you?’ he said.

  She sat up and looked at him, very close to him.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I’m not tired.’

  ‘It’s entirely up to you,’ Rick said, very quietly, not touching her. ‘I believe I love you.’

  3

  Before the entrance of Amy North, Rick’s life went along almost by appointment. He worked hard and liked it; after hours he sought out birds of his feather, and then it wasn’t work and he liked it even better. He sat in with one band after another, played two pianos with Jeff Williams, played behind Josephine Jordan on recordings, and made records with who knows how many pick-up bands. He could do one thing, and that almost filled his time. For the rest, he gave himself five or six hours of deep sleep sometime during the day, he had a mild interest in the horses, a child’s faith in inside straights, and the girls he knew could all be called babe. Good, straightforward life, and shaped toward the single purpose of playing a trumpet that nothing could touch.

  But after the night when Amy came into Galba’s with Josephine, nothing was ever the same. She shouldn’t have come in; she knew too much and never understood any of it. She knew by instinct that Rick was one of the marked men, one of the odd-numbered ones. She wanted to find out what it was and why it was in him, and she must have forgotten what it was she was trying to find out about Josephine when she saw Rick, or else she must have decided that it didn’t interest her any longer.

  Rick didn’t have a chance to know what was happening to him. It was just there, very suddenly, and nothing to do about it. He’d never known a really complicated woman, the kind who knows how to strip the nerves and kick the will around, the kind whose voice can say anything. Such a one was Amy North, the terribly good-looking one who wore too-expensive sweaters and scarcely ever got to her classes.

  When she came into a room, Rick felt it and his knees went cold. When she bent her head to light a cigarette from the match he held, he was lost until the flame burned his finger. When she stood in her long white robe in front of the fireplace, propping an elbow against the mantel and crossing her feet in the classic attitude of insouciance, he couldn’t let himself look at her; the sight of her twisted him.

  It would have been much simpler all around if they hadn’t got married. The thing would have died down, as these things do, and no harm done. But it didn’t go that way. It went the hard way; ordeal by marriage.

  Rick was spell-bound and reverential. He spent the night before the wedding in a Turkish bath, in the state of mind of a squire about to receive knighthood. He didn’t know how it had happened, but he knew it was true, that Amy North would marry him. Most fortunate of musicians.

  It’s much more difficult to understand Amy’s side of it than Rick’s. It wasn’t Amy’s nature to sign her name to anything. She could talk the night out, do anything she wanted to with a word spoken, but she never put anything in writing. She was born cagey. And yet she signed the marriage license legibly and with a steady hand, and when, under oath, she said ‘I do,’ almost anyone would have thought she did.

  Rick moved in with her. She had an apartment and she owned the andirons, the sofa, the phonograph, the pictures, and the books that were in it. All Rick had to do was to hang his clothes in a closet, give away his phonograph, and stack his records with hers. It was never Rick’s house; it couldn’t have been. It would have been called a studio apartment. There was a skylight across one wall of the living-room, but there the studio aspect ended, and the rest was a matter of comfort for the other half to live in.

  It couldn’t have been Rick’s house. It is conceivable that a good salesman could have got him to buy a Maxfield Parrish for decorative purposes, but he could never have known the painters Amy liked. She had ten or so good reproductions of French moderns on her walls. The four walls of the bedroom supported four paintings of the female nude: north, south, east, and west; Gaugin, Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse. On the wall above the mantel in the living-room there was another Matisse, the one called The Piano Lesson. When Rick looked at it for a long time one day and spelled P-L-E-Y-E-L backwards the way it was painted on the piano in the picture, Amy said, ‘Yes, French for Steinway.’

  There wasn’t much chance, of course, for anything good to work out of it. Rick didn’t know what his wife was talking about most of the time she talked. But she was well rounded; she could speak the esperanto of normal males, too, and when she did she was very good at it. She was too good at everything. She kept her Phi Beta Kappa key hanging by a chain from the head of the shower, to remind her, she said, that she was too bright a girl ever to try anything funny in the bathroom, like drowning herself standing up or drinking iodine through a straw.

  The truth probably was that she married Rick because she would have given her eyes to have what he had, to have one firm ability and along with it the intimate, secure knowledge that it was worth something. She may have thought (she had her mystical side) that by marrying him she could share this depth with him like sharing his name.

  They did have a good time. They were natural spend-thrifts, both of them, and during the time they tried to act domestic, purse-strings were nothing to them. They bought a Steinway, full sized and black as a crow; they bought a down quilt covered with blue satin and marked with a white M, a quilt so light you could almost blow it around the room. The Steinway and the quilt started them, and they went from there to a deep white rug that turned out to be the wrong color to trample underfoot. Then they discovered that they were devoted to monograms and had M’s put all over everything. And when all the obvious things had been bought, they felt let-down, and so they worked out on surprises for each other, things like pajamas and dressing gowns, wrist watches and pipes and gloves and cigarette cases and cologne and shirts, ties, socks, books, records, God knows what. Surprise after surprise.

  At first they were together almost all the time except when Rick was ac
tually working. They had dinner together, half the time at home, and then Amy went to a show or saw her friends or studied or killed time in her way until one o’clock when Rick was free, and then they spent the night together, sometimes around town, more often at home. The nights when they came back to the apartment and drank until nothing was real were as close as they ever came to anything good: the night when Amy played Stravinsky on the phonograph, and Rick, lying on the white rug in front of the fire, swore it was Jimmy Snowden playing that trombone, nobody but Jimmy had that kind of feeling for trombone; and the night when Rick got up and played the piano with records to prove to Amy that he could play the piano along with a record as easily as he could whistle with one—if you can get a piano to trust you, all you have to do is think what you want it to do for you and it will. ‘But they just don’t like me,’ Amy said. ‘Oh, I know it, they loathe me; they stiffen up when I come near.’

  ‘I’ll tell you something,’ she went on, after she’d thought it over, ‘I can play the piano. I know how to play one piece, only one. It makes me feel strange to talk about it, because once I was so in love with this piece that it tore me all up. It was in my last year in college and it was really driving me crazy; so I hired a piano teacher, practically a governess, and she taught me to play it. It took us three weeks, day and night; and I paid that piano teacher tutor’s rates and kept her right there in my rooms.’

  She stopped to light a cigarette, and then she said: ‘I’ll play it for you one of these times. But you can see how it is; if you’ve only got one piece, you have to pick your occasion to play it.’

  The night she played it, she played it seven times. It was Debussy, ‘Clair de Lune,’ and she played it impeccably. Rick had fallen asleep, and she left him and poured herself a drink and then she played it. Rick heard it far away, stood up and began to walk toward it, and when he came to the door he saw Amy across the room, her shoulders naked and white above the piano, her face tense above the music, and a long, unlighted cigarette in her mouth. The sublime grotesque. Rick stood in the doorway and let himself see her as she was. He never got over it. And that was the only time he ever heard her play.

  But the nights turned up one after the other and the days followed them in natural sequence. The Martins sank below the surface and stayed there. They were crazy about each other, and crazy. They were groggy tired, too, all the time, and the pulse-beat of either one of them would have been a thing to record and think about.

  In those days and on those nights Amy was peerless, She was night itself, and through it all there was her voice cool and clear as spring-water telling Rick things he had never heard, and never would understand for having heard them. She spoke words that were their own reason for being and she spoke them to hear herself speak. She would twist suddenly in Rick’s arms, and of all the things she could have had to say to him then, she might say, ‘God, I love Shakespeare.’

  4

  The change came when Amy reformed. She was sick one day, so very ill that Rick called a doctor. The only thing the doctor could say was that she needed rest and iron shots and that it might be a good idea when she felt better to go through the clinic. When he left, Amy roused herself enough to tell off the medical profession once more, bunch of tramps, not one of them with nerve enough to come clean and call a hangover a hangover. You don’t have to go to medical school to know a hangover. You’d know a hangover, wouldn’t you, Rick?

  ‘Oh yes, I’d know a hangover.’

  ‘Then why did you call in that punk to tell me iron shots and clinic?’

  ‘If I don’t have a hangover, I don’t see why you do.’

  ‘Oh, but I do,’ Amy said. ‘I’d know one anywhere. I get cumulative ones every second month, and when I get them, I want to die.’

  She stayed in bed that day and night, and when Rick came home she only said hello and went back to sleep. She was up early the next day. She went to Columbia and somehow got herself reinstated in her classes, had dinner with a school friend of hers, and was asleep when Rick came home.

  She was busy and impersonal. Overnight she became Spartan Boy, took her showers cold, and bought a rowing machine. She went to a brain-modeling class Tuesdays and Thursdays from two to five, and to topographical anatomy at the same time Mondays and Fridays. She spent Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings being told about the physiology of the endocrine glands, and Tuesday and Thursday mornings she was at the Psychopathic Hospital with four internes doing clinical psychometrics. She always had dinner in town, and she was almost always asleep when Rick came in.

  It had Rick worried. He was sure he’d done something wrong, but he couldn’t think what. One Wednesday afternoon he got Amy cornered and asked her about it straight out. She acted professional for a minute or two, explaining patiently that she was a student, and that being a student entailed going to classes, and that study was required if one were to progress with the class work, that one’s brain didn’t do its best work on a regimen of straight alcohol and no sleep; ah no, it did its worst work, it did no better work than that putty brain there on the desk. She kept it going on and on; she’d got into the groove of a patient, slightly ironic way of speaking and she couldn’t let it go.

  Then, when there wasn’t much more to say, she broke out of it suddenly and said: ‘Oh, damn it, Rick, I’ve simply got to amount to something. I’ve got to stay with it this time. Let’s have a drink and talk it over.’

  There was a long talk, and Rick failed to make the only point he could honestly make, that life had been so much pleasanter before Amy went back to school; and Amy, on the other hand, made point after glorious point in defense of science, scholarship, feminism, one’s debt to society, work to be done, faith, hope, charity. She had herself stirred to the core. Rick was stirred only by the feeling that he’d lost her. If she did stick it out and become a psychiatrist, it was almost certain that they’d never go shopping again. There was scarcely anything for him to say. He finished his drink, went to the piano, and played ‘Blue Room’ for the sadness that was in his bones. Amy stood beside her desk and poked at the lump of putty. Then she left the room, and a moment later Rick could hear the shower going full force, symbol of discipline, emblem of the great reformation. He sat at the piano and listened to the shower, and when he found himself wondering whether Amy still took showers with her watch on, he got up and left.

  There was almost no chance for him to see her. When he came home at night all he could do was watch her sleep. He stopped coming home and began to wander around town, killing time until morning so that he could go back and watch her get up and go off to school. She was constantly pushing her sleeve up to look at her watch while he talked to her. She didn’t seem to mind seeing him, but when she talked it was never the old, flowing, senseless talk, it was a new kind of thing, a mock-professional tone that went ravishingly with the tough, clinical manner she had worked up. She would tell him, as if he’d asked her, that medicine is a matter of trial and error, and keeping it up until you know for certain that almost everything is erroneous, but still and all, my advice to you is to try a bromo-seltzer, Mr. Martin, the moment you think it might be your old trouble. I’ve got to get out of here if I don’t want to be twelve minutes late. Get Ramundo to fix you one.

  She’d do some fast, last-minute scouting for books, purse, pen, and then she’d be out the door and gone. There were times when she would turn at the door and say, ‘So long,’ or ‘See you around,’ but more often she seemed to forget that there was anyone there to say good-bye to, and Rick would stand still and hear her go down the stairs, taking them on the run, and he’d be left alone with Ramundo, the sleek-haired, smoky-eyed Filipino boy who did what cooking there was, and answered the telephone, and took the cat out, collected all the ash trays every morning and washed them and hid them, and always seemed to be trying to make the bed at the same time Rick was trying to get into it.

  And beyond that there was the cat, a Siamese cat, great confidante of Amy’s, that took sensua
l pleasure in walking across Rick’s face the moment he was asleep and never a moment before. Wonderful cat. She always knew when the bars were all the way down. She never let Rick see her, she just waited under something until he was asleep. There was something about it that unnerved him.

  From almost any point of view it was an unsatisfactory life, but the worst thing about it was that nothing in it ever seemed real. Everything was foreign, Ramundo, the cat, the nudes; there was nothing except the piano that the master of the house could have the slightest confidence in. He knew now that he had never known Amy. He could remember things about her; he could remember things they’d done, but it was as if someone else had told them to him. It was impossible now to believe that he and Amy had ever had more than a speaking acquaintance. She seemed not to know he lived there. They just used the house in shifts; she got it nights and he got it days. They couldn’t even fight, push each other around, call names, or resort to any of the traditional air-clearers. Rick decided fifteen times that what he wanted most to do was sock her, give her a good solid clout alongside the jaw, let her know who he was, but he couldn’t do anything about it when he saw her, it wouldn’t have been real. There’s no satisfaction in thumbing your nose at an objectionable face on a magazine cover; the act, no matter how firm, cannot discountenance the face. Nor would Amy know she’d been socked; she was too busy, too much preoccupied.