They let me see Cornelius the night before his execution. He seemed comfortable enough in his tiny cell, and he assured me that he had been well treated. In the dim light of a grille-covered bulb, the small windows covered by blackout curtains, we smoked Luckies and talked for the last time.
“What really happened that night, Cornelius?” I asked him. “You didn’t touch that girl, did you?”
He said nothing for a moment, just sucked in some smoke and blew it out in a long plume.
“I know you didn’t,” I went on. “Tell me.”
Finally, he looked at me, the whites of his eyes big and round. “It was a good night,” he said. “One of the best. I enjoyed our talk, the whiskey. I always enjoyed our talks. You treated me like a human being.”
I said nothing. I could think of nothing to say.
“It was a fine night outside. Hot and humid. It reminded me a bit of home, I suppose, of Louisiana, and I was walking along thinking about all those years ago when I was a kid fishing off the levee, hooking the bracelet. When I got to the park I heard some sounds, stifled, as if someone was being gagged. It was dark, but I could make out two figures struggling, one on top of the other. I’m not a fool. I knew what was happening. When I got closer I could see that he was…you know, thrusting himself in her and beating her face. I grabbed him and tried to drag him off but it took all my strength. The girl was nearly unconscious by then, but she managed to lash out and give me that scratch. Finally I pulled him loose and he ran off into the night.” Cornelius shrugged. “Then I went back to the base.”
“Did you recognize him?” I asked.
For a moment he didn’t answer, just carried on smoking, that faraway look in his eyes.
“Yes,” he said finally. “I recognized him.”
“Then why the hell didn’t you say so?”
“What would have been the point?”
“The truth, Cornelius, the truth.”
Cornelius smiled. “Frank, my friend. You have the white man’s trust in the truth. It’s not quite the same for me.”
“But surely they would have investigated your claim?”
“Perhaps. But the man who did it is a black man, like me. Only he’s a really bad man. People are scared of him. The morning after it happened, even before you came to see me, he made it clear that he wasn’t going to take the blame, that if I tried to accuse him, everyone in his hut would swear he was back on base when the attack took place.”
“What about the guards on the gate?”
“They can’t tell us apart. Besides, they don’t even pay attention. They just sit in their gatehouse playing cards.”
“So he’s just going to let you die instead of him?”
Cornelius shrugged. “Well, I don’t imagine he’s any too keen on dying himself. Would you be? It doesn’t matter anyway. What happens to him. That’s between him and God.”
“Or the devil.”
Cornelius looked at me, a hint of the old smile in the turn of his lips. “Or the devil. But even if he hadn’t managed to get it all fixed, they wouldn’t have believed me anyway. They’d have simply thought it was another trick, another desperate lie, that the two of us darkies were in it together. They had all the evidence they needed, then I came up with some crazy story about trying to save the girl. What would you think?”
“I know you wouldn’t do what they accused you of.”
“But they don’t know me. To them I’m just another no-good nigger. It’s the sort of thing we do. If I’d given his name, it would have been just one more nigger trying to lie his way out of his just desserts by pointing the finger at another.” Cornelius shook his head. “No, my friend, there’s no way out for me.”
He lifted up his sleeve. “At least I got my bracelet fixed and they let me have it back,” he said. “No longer evidence, I guess.” Then he unfastened the clasp and handed it to me. “I want you to have it,” he said. “I know I said it was going to be for my girl, but I never did find her. Now I’d like my friend to take it.”
I looked at the bracelet resting in his palm. I didn’t really want it, not after everything that had happened, but I couldn’t refuse. I picked it up, feeling an odd sort of tingle in my fingers as I did so, and thanked him for it.
That was the last time I saw Cornelius Jubb. The morning they hanged him, I walked and walked the length and breadth of the city, feeling as if I was the one living in a foreign country, and when I came to the biggest bomb site in the city center, I took out Cornelius’s charm bracelet and threw it as far as I could into the rubble.
The Magic of Your Touch
Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell.
—Edgar Allan Poe, “The Tell-Tale Heart”
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter.
—John Keats, “Ode to a Grecian Urn”
One night, many years ago, I found myself wandering in an unfamiliar part of the city. The river looked like an oil slick twisting languidly in the cold moonlight, and on the opposite bank the towering metal skeletons of factories and cranes gleamed silver. Steam hissed from tubes, formed abstract shapes in the air and faded into the night. Every now and then a gush of orange flame leaped into the sky from a funnel-shaped chimney.
I was lost, I knew now. The bar where I had played my last gig was miles behind me, and the path I had taken was crooked and dark. The river lay to my right, and to the left, across the narrow, cobbled street, tall empty warehouses loomed over me, all crumbling, soot-covered bricks and caved-in roofs. Through the broken windows small fires burned, and I fancied I could see ragged figures bent over the flames for warmth. Ahead of me, just beyond the crossroads, the path continued into a monstrous junkyard, where the rusted hulks of cars and piles of scrap metal towered over me.
Out of nowhere, it seemed, I began to hear snatches of melody: a light, romantic, jazzy air underpinned by wondrous, heartrending chords, some of which I could swear I had never heard before. I stopped in my tracks and tried to discern where the music was coming from. It was a piano, no doubt about that, and though it was slightly out of tune that didn’t diminish the power of the melody or the skill of the player. I wanted desperately to find him, to get closer to the music.
I walked between mountains of scrap metal, sure I was getting closer, then, down a narrow side path, I saw the glow of a brazier and heard the music more clearly than I had before. If anything, it had even more magic than when I heard it from a distance. More than that, it had the potential to make my fortune. Heart pounding, I headed toward the light.
What I found there was a wizened old black man sitting at a beat-up honky-tonk piano. When he saw me, he stopped playing and looked over at me. The glow of the brazier reflected in his eyes, which seemed to flicker and dance with flames.
“That’s a beautiful piece of music,” I said. “Did you write it yourself?”
“I don’t write nothing,” he said. “The music just comes out of me.”
“And this just came out of you?”
“Yessir,” he said. “Just this very moment.”
I might lack the creativity, the essential spark of genius, but when it comes to technical matters I’m hard to beat. I’m a classically trained musician who happened to choose to play jazz, and already this miraculous piece of music was fixed in my memory. If I closed my eyes I could even see it written and printed on a sheet. And if I let my imagination run free, I could see the sheets flying off the shelves of the music shop and records whizzing out of the racks. This was the stuff that standards were made of.
“So you’re the only one who’s heard it, apart from me?”
“I guess so,” he said, the reflected flames dancing in his eyes.
I looked around. The piles of scrap rose on all sides, obscuring the rest of the world, and once he had stopped playing I could hear nothing but the hissing of the steam from the factories across the river. We were quite alone, me
and this poor, shrunken black man. I complimented him again on his genius and went on my way. When I got behind him, he started playing again. I listened to the tune one more time, burning it into my memory so there could be no mistake. Then I picked up an iron bar from the pile of scrap and hit him hard on the back of his head.
I heard the skull crack like a nut and saw the blood splash on the ivory keys of the old piano. I made sure he was dead, then I dragged his body off the path, piled rusty metal over it, and left him there.
Now there was no one to stop me, no one to claim plagiarism, I had to get back to the hotel and write down the music before I lost it. As luck would have it, at the other side of the junkyard, past another set of crossroads, was a wide boulevard lined with a few run-down shops and low-life bars. There wasn’t much traffic, and I was beginning to get nervous about the neighborhood, but after ten minutes I saw a cab with its light on coming up the road and waved it down. The cabbie stopped, and twenty minutes later I was back in my hotel room, the red neon of the strip club across the street flashing through the flimsy, moth-eaten curtains, as I furiously scribbled the notes and chords etched in my memory on to the lined music paper.
I was right about the music, and what’s more, nobody even questioned that I had written it, despite the fact that I had never composed a piece of any significance in my entire life. After all, what else did Charlie Chaplin write other than “Smile,” or Paul Anka besides “My Way”? Plenty, of course, but do you remember anything else? I thought not. Besides, I suppose I was well enough known as a competent jazz pianist in certain circles, so people just assumed I had suddenly been smitten by the muse one day.
I called the tune “The Magic of Your Touch,” and it became a staple of the jazz repertoire, from big bands to small combos. Arrangements proliferated, and one of the band members, who fancied himself a poet, added lyrics to the melody. That was when we really struck the big time. Billie Holiday recorded it, then Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Peggy Lee, Mel Tormé, Ella Fitzgerald. Suddenly it seemed that no one could get enough of “The Magic of Your Touch,” and the big bucks rolled in.
I hardly need say that the sudden wealth and success brought about an immense change in my lifestyle. Instead of fleabag hotels and two-bit whores, it was penthouse suites and high-class call girls all the way. I continued to play with the sextet, of course, but we hired a vocalist and instead of sleazy bars we played halls and big-name clubs: The Blue Note, the Village Vanguard, Birdland and the rest. We even got a recording contract, and people bought our records by the thousands.
“The Magic of Your Touch” brought us all this, and more. Hollywood beckoned, a jazz film set in Paris, and off we went. Ah, those foxy little mademoiselles! Then came the world tour: Europe, Asia, Australia, South Africa, Brazil. They all wanted to hear the band named after the man who wrote “The Magic of Your Touch.”
I can’t say that I never gave another thought to the wizened old black man playing his honky-tonk piano beside the brazier. Many times, I even dreamed about that night and what I did there, on instinct, without thinking, and woke up in a cold sweat, my heart pounding. Many’s the time I thought I saw the old man’s flame-reflecting eyes in a crowd, or down an alley. But nobody ever found his body, or if they did, it never made the news. The years passed, and I believed that I was home and dry. Until, that is, little by little, things started to go wrong.
I have always been of a fairly nervous disposition—highly strung, my parents used to say, blaming it on my musical talent, or vice versa. Whiskey helped, and sometimes I also turned to pills, mostly tranquilizers and barbiturates or ’ludes, to take the edge off things. So imagine my horror when we were halfway through a concert at Massey Hall, in my hometown of Toronto, playing “Solitude,” and I found my left hand falling into the familiar chord patterns of “The Magic of Your Touch,” my right hand picking out the melody.
Of course, the audience cheered wildly at first, thinking it some form of playful acknowledgment, a cheeky little musical quotation or segue. But I couldn’t stop. It was as if I was a mere puppet, and some other force was directing my movements. No matter what tune we started after that, all my hands would play was “The Magic of Your Touch.” In the end I felt a panic attack coming on—I’d had them before—and, pale and shaking, numb and dizzy, I had to leave the stage. The audience clapped, but the other band members looked concerned.
Afterward, in the dressing room, Ed, our stand-up bass player, approached me. I had just downed a handful of Valium and I was waiting for the soothing effect of the pills to kick in.
“What is it, man?” he asked. “What the hell happened out there?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I told him. “I couldn’t help myself.”
“Couldn’t help yourself? What do you mean by that?”
“The song, Ed. It’s like the song took me over. It was weird, scary. I’ve never experienced anything like that before.”
Ed looked at me as if I were insane, the first of many such looks I got before I stopped even bothering trying to tell people what was happening to me. Because that incident at Massey Hall was, I soon discovered, only the beginning.
Playing in the band was out of the question from that night on. Whenever my hands got near a piano, they started to play “The Magic of Your Touch.” The boys took it with good grace and soon found a replacement who was, in all honesty, easily as good a pianist as I was, if not better, and they carried on touring under the same name. I don’t really think anyone missed me very much. My retirement from performing for “health reasons” was announced, and I imagine people assumed that life on the road just got too much for someone of my highly strung temperament. The press reported that I had had a “minor nervous breakdown,” the money continued to roll in, and life went on as normal. Almost.
After the Toronto concert, I developed an annoying ringing in my ears—tinnitus, I believe it’s called—and it drove me up the wall with its sheer relentlessness. But worse than that, one night when I went to bed I heard as clear as a bell, louder than the ringing, the opening chords of “The Magic of Your Touch,” as if someone were playing a piano inside my head. It went on until the entire song was finished, then started again at the beginning. It was only after swallowing twice my regular nightly dose of Nembutal that I managed to drift into a comalike stupor and, more important, into something approaching blessed silence. But even then I could still hear faint strains in the distance, like ripples in still water, and when I awoke, the ringing and the music were still there, louder than ever.
No matter what I did, I couldn’t get the song out of my head. Every minute of every day and every night it played, over and over again in a continuous loop tape. The pills helped up to a point, but I found my night’s sleep shrinking from four hours to three to two, then one, if I was lucky. Only with great difficulty could I concentrate on anything. No amount of external noise could overcome the music in my head. I couldn’t hold intelligent conversations. People shunned me, crossed the street when they saw me coming. I started muttering to myself, putting my hands over my ears, but that only served to trap the sound inside and make it louder.
One day in my wanderings, I found myself back in the part of the city where it all began, and I retraced my steps as best I could remember them. I don’t know what I had in mind, only that this was where the whole thing had started, so perhaps it would end here, too. I don’t know what I expected to find. I suppose I was beyond rational thought.
Soon, the landscape became a familiar one of decaying warehouses, oily river, and factories venting steam and belching fire. I saw the junkyard looming ahead beyond the crossroads and followed the path through the towers of scrap metal, rusty cars, engine blocks, tires, axles and chrome fenders. Then I heard it again. Uncertain at first, hardly willing to believe my ears, I paused. But sure enough, there it was: “The Magic of Your Touch” played on an out-of-tune honky-tonk piano, the music outside perfectly matching the loop tape in my head.
/> I could see the brazier now, a patch of light at the end of the narrow path between the columns, and when I approached, the wizened old black man looked up from his keyboard with fire dancing in his eyes. Then I saw what I should have seen in the first place. The flames weren’t reflections of the brazier’s glow. They were inside his head, the way the music was inside mine.
He didn’t stop playing, didn’t miss a note.
“I thought I’d killed you,” I said.
“Lots of folk make that mistake,” he replied.
“Who are you?”
“Who do you think I am?”
“I don’t know.”
“You took my song.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what got into me.”
“No matter. Now it’s taken you.”
“I can’t get it out of my head. It’s driving me insane. What can I do?”
“Only one thing you can do, and you know what that is. Then your soul come home to me, where it belong.”
I shook my head and backed away. “No!” I cried. “I’m dreaming. I must be dreaming. This can’t be real.”
But I heard his laughter echoing among the towers of scrap as I ran, hands over my ears, the insufferable melody I had come to detest as much as I had once loved it now going around and around for the millionth time in my head, gaining in volume, just a fraction of a decibel each time, and I knew he was right.
When I got back to my hotel room, I took out paper and pen. You have no idea what a struggle it was to write this brief account with the music loud, relentless, precise and eternal inside my head, what an effort it cost me just to wring out these few words. But I must leave some kind of record. I can’t bear the thought of everyone believing I was mad. I may be desperate. I may be beyond reason. But I am not mad. It happened exactly the way I told it.
The Price of Love and Other Stories Page 12