Crow Jazz

by Linda Rogers

  On the threshold, I look back. The guests are all our age, from another time. I think Rolling Stones, a band of beef jerky dressed like happy children. This is the zombie jamboree, none of them still alive in the way they were, twitching to the music, decapitated chickens.

  Robin is singing “Devil in a Blue Dress.” Good for him. First Wife smiles her deranged smile, gets up and begins to dance, her silver-blue skirts swirling around her.

  Got to be the finest girl alive

  She got such good lovin’

  that they cannot say goodbye.

  She is truly in her body. Arms raised, waving like octopus tentacles, she spins around the bobbers, pushing them back to the perimeters of the room where she lay several times on a mattress and gave birth while they watched and marvelled about the miracle of life, and once death because the cord was wrapped around the baby’s neck and they were too stoned to react. This is their bond. This is their journey, from start to finish.

  My husband and I back out the door. I am a stranger. He is a stranger. We look at one another and smile. Our smiles are for the First Wife. Her shadow dances on the walls. She owns the room. She always did.

  BEDTIME STORIES

  So that’s it!” Kiss Man, my permanent attachment, led me into a grass-covered square of light in the woods, a majestic stand of cedars smelling of bark scars, sap and damp leaves, with a picnic, a blanket and his fiddle, and made the Earth move. I wonder if any girl has ever been more surprised by lust than I was that afternoon, when after sup and sip, a murder of crows tangled wings, a frisson, in the yellow-taped crime zone between my legs.

  I had scars from inappropriate touching. Invisible wounds. When I fell off my bicycle and scraped my knees, I ate the scabs. My cannibal snacks gave me immunity to falling, better balance. Ditto to sexual assault. I thought I was immune to carnal love.

  “No thanks,” I’d said to grappling boys, their confidence fuelled by cherry cokes, as I ate my way out of the candy store.

  However, there is a back door to everything, one portal I’d missed, possibly because it is the front door to infinite pleasure.

  “How about dessert?” he began to play Mendelssohn, Jewish courtship. I felt ravens brushing my thighs with their feathers, calling my name, my first little death, a joke. I got it.

  The grass-shaped square of light trembled.

  So this was why my father locked himself in his library with his long-playing records and a bottle of whiskey, “Eine Kleine Nachtmusic,” sexy-time. I was genetically programmed for musical foreplay. After Mendelssohn, it was “Mysterious Barricades” and how mine fell. I rolled backwards, and it rained light, exploding sequins, iridescent notes.

  Back in the days of grinding boys and driving beats, I’d shut the door on music. But now it opened both ways; and there was no more playing with silence, Rostropovich’s mute broom handle, his first instrument. I dusted off my child-sized cello and practiced every erotic piece of music in the known universe: Messiaen’s “Joie du sang des étoiles,” Scriabin’s “Poème de l’extase,” Tristan and Isolde’s “Liebesnacht,” the sound of boots knocking in the Black Forest, with little breaks for mes petites morts.

  With him, I discovered minor keys, dark notes, sotto voce, the earthquake zone, rhapsodic chords with crashing cymbals, I had never imagined. We were bread and butter, salt and pepper, surprise, a duo.

  We rubbed bows in private, two happy grasshoppers “fucking with music.” “Let’s fuck with music,” he insisted, and we did, foreplay for what we call “The Infidelity Game,” pillow talk.

  Last night, it was his turn. He confessed that my former best friend stalked him for years, secretly went to my hairdresser for my haircut and bought clothes that matched mine, a magenta angora sweater for one, unmistakable, turned up in men’s washrooms (accidents, she’s high functioning on the scale and doesn’t get jokes), sniffing under the table at dinner parties (She was always losing her earrings. He thought it was the dog.) and digging deep for the popcorn at movies, the third party: one, two, three in a row, girl, boy, girl. I remember mentioning his beard tasted odd one morning. It was, he now tells me, the morning after she climbed in our bedroom window at midnight and, singing an Italian art song, sat on his face. “Caro mio ben,” is not a particularly original choice, but she’s a soprano not a rocket scientist. He woke up. I did not.

  Did I remember seeing her ladder?

  One of the rules is that we are not allowed to say whether a story is made up or not. It is up to the other to guess, true or false. Truth or fiction, there is always a troubling equivocal detail. This story could be true. I wear earplugs because he snores. She might have left the ladder there. He didn’t want to spoil our friendship.

  “False,” I said.

  “Wrong,” he answered, fishing, and I consciously choose that word, a pair of foreign bikini underpants from the dream stash under his pillow.

  But of course, he could have stolen them off a clothesline.

  “You go,” he says, tonight being my turn somewhere in the middle of a thousand and one nights. “Tell.”

  “Do you want funny or sad?” I ask, mopping up after an unorthodox “Rhapsody in Blue.” We keep tissues in every room, just in case the muse captures us unaware.

  “Both,” he says. He is an omnivore. “Tell me about the threesome in Bath. We never got to that one.”

  “OK, and what are we wagering?”

  “Dinner at Brasserie L’école?”

  “Sure. I want steak frites and a really nice cab, Burrowing Owl for example.”

  “You always have whatever your heart desires.”

  “Don’t I know it?”

  “Begin.”

  I close my eyes and try to remember exactly how it happened, or not. The problem with being a storyteller is that, after several repeats, it is hard to distinguish between real and imagined.

  “It was the last time I visited Ruth in London. You had that gig in Berlin. We were having tea in the aerie at the British Museum, a tower of petites fours, lemon tarts and scones with champagne and tea.”

  “That tea cost a fortune.”

  “You were not supposed to look at the bill. Now, shhh, listen or I will lose my place.”

  “Ruth loves to play head games. ‘Will you take a dare?’ she asked.”

  “Depends.” For one thing, I wasn’t going to take off my dress and walk naked down the marble stairs to the enormous public hall downstairs.

  “How about if I offered you a thousand pounds to play ‘Kol Nidre,’ the Aramaic prayer of atonement?”

  “In a synagogue?” It made sense. It was fall, the right time of year.

  “No, this is a private performance, and you’ll have to go to Bath.”

  “Well I can’t. I don’t have an instrument.”

  “They will take care of that.”

  “Who is ‘They’?”

  “Not telling.”

  “A thousand pounds?”

  “That’s right, plus travel. You can take the train.”

  “Would I come out of this alive? Is this a murderer atoning for his sins and possibly getting ready to commit the next one?”

  “We are all murderers or accomplices. We eat meat don’t we? I will give you a clue. It is about sex and death and don’t forget that Charles and Patricia Lester dress you wanted at Liberty’s.”

  My mind went back to our picnic in the woods. I closed my eyes to think, and I saw myself feeding crows in a Lester pleated silk dress. So I agreed.

  “The next day, I wore white as requested, and Ruth dropped me at Euston Station. ‘Pray for me,’ I ordered, and she giggled, handing me a bag from Marks and Spencer’s, ham and cheese in a bun as it turned out. I was too nervous to eat the sandwich, but I did buy a beer on the train.”

  “When I arrived, a chauffeur carrying a cardboard sign with my name on it was waiting at the station. It wasn’t far. No distance would have been far enough. The streets in Bath all looked the same, tidy, symmetrical, unlike my u
nraveling life, or so I imagined. The familiar musical feeling, a coochie smile, reminded me that fear and sex lurk in the same abyss. If it hadn’t been for the Lester dress, I would have had the driver turn around and take me back to the train.”

  “After we arrived at a Georgian house like every other on the street, an elderly butler opened the door into a marble hall, veered left, led me into a conservatory filled with lilies and asked me to sit on a green velvet occasional chair placed a man’s length away from a matching chaise longue. I took in my surroundings and tried not to pass out in the scented heat while a maid served tea and poppy seed cookies.”

  “She said the tea was ‘Emperor’s Tears.’ I suppose it was to put me in the right frame for playing the ‘Kol Nidre.’ The conservatory was uncomfortably warm, especially as I was wearing a wool dress, and the smell of lilies was suffocating. I made myself swallow a biscuit and several sips of tea. Eventually the butler returned carrying a cello case, which he laid against the chaise longue, and told me to take the instrument out, to be ready to play, but not to speak. Then he took away the tray.”

  “Was the tea drugged?” he asks.

  “Stop interrupting. I mean it. You will have to forfeit the prize.”

  “You always make me pay,” he says. “What’s the difference?”

  “I took the cello, an Amati, out of its case and tuned it, then sat and breathed in and out with the lilies. I thought they sighed.”

  “After many expirations of plant breath, the owner of the house, a thirtyish man who could have been plucked from a pre-Raphaelite painting came into the conservatory wearing a maroon dressing gown. He was carrying a life-sized bride doll bundled in silk and net, which he laid on the chaise, and followed by a large yellowish hound.”

  “Was the bride a Japanese inflatable with French braided pubic hair?”

  “Goddammit. I am going to smother you with your pillow.”

  “Look out for dirty underpants.”

  “Without speaking to me, or even acknowledging my presence, the man began to undress his flaccid bride, first the bodice, which he unbuttoned slowly, covering her bosom with kisses. There was no cue, but I assumed this was where I should play.”

  “Since Ruth paid half my fee in advance, before I left London, I could have got up and left. But I didn’t. I was transfixed.”

  “In the beginning, I tried not to look, but eventually I did, and I could see that this bride might not be a doll. She could have been a corpse, or someone drugged to resemble death, like Juliet. Trust me, my back hair stood up. My teeth chattered. My blood froze.”

  “And your meat curtain rose.”

  “You bugger interrupter.”

  “Of course it did.”

  “The bride was wearing nothing but her peau de soie dress, no petticoat, no other underwear. There were no marks on her that I could see. Either she was drugged or he had killed her. Maybe she was a suicide, dead on her wedding day. Maybe she loved someone else.”

  “I decided to play for her, not him.”

  “She must have heard, because her soul got up and stood behind me. I felt her cold dead hands brush my shoulders. The frisson made my bow shiver.”

  “Meanwhile he took off her wedding slippers and kissed each white foot in turn. Then he removed her veil, and I saw her features properly. She was neither smiling nor unhappy. Her face looked indifferent. He undid her long black hair, which had been held in place with pearl ornaments, and covered her body with it. Then he lay down on top of his passive bride and made love to her.”

  “I kept playing. The hound howled. He actually knew the tune.”

  “Electric impulses jolted my nipples and groin. Averting my eyes again, I played until he finished, and looked up when he came, raising his arms in the air gasping like a great bird then sinking down on her, losing himself in her hair.”

  “The bridegroom ignored me, speaking only to his bride, while the butler brought in another tray, just for them. He got on his knees and fed his doll bride sips of tea, which dribbled down her chin and into the little lake of tears at the base of her neck, begging her to taste a piece of wedding cake wrapped in a napkin on a china plate. Then he put it under her pillow. “Sweet dreams,” he said.

  “All the while, I played and the dog howled. When the song was finished, he picked her up and carried her out. The hound stayed.”

  “So this was atonement.”

  “The dog swallowed my ham and cheese sandwich in one gulp. He left tooth marks on my hand. That was the grace bite. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough.”

  “I put the cello back in its case, stood up, backed to the marble hall saying ‘nice doggie,’ and found a powder room where I washed and washed my hands and wrapped the injured hand in a monogrammed hand towel, which I kept. The butler then saw me to the door and handed me an envelope, which I was not about to open in front of him. The event in itself was humiliating enough. I am sure the manservant, lurking somewhere behind the flowers, had heard my gasps of pleasure as I played.”

  “A terrible noise came from an upstairs room with an open window: my employer sobbing, the dog caterwauling and the one word, ‘Lily!’ so intense I heard it all the way out to the street, where my driver waited.”

  “I got in and laughed hysterically all the way to the train station. I couldn’t help myself, unaccustomed as I am to playing Jewish laments for mad dogs and perverted English aristocrats. The driver gave me a handkerchief that smelled of lavender, and I opened the envelope containing the balance with a generous tip and a note saying, ‘There is no greater agony than love’ written in green ink.”

  “Do you think that green ink was his blood?”

  “How would I know? Maybe it was hers, plus formaldehyde. Aren’t aristocrats supposed to have blue blood?”

  “What did Ruth say when you got back to London?”

  “She asked me how it went.”

  “And you told her everything, including your response?”

  “Of course. She said it was some sort of ritual initiation. All the new string players in her orchestra are given challenges.”

  “What happens if they refuse?”

  “I have no idea. She took me out to a pub for dinner with the string section that night, and there were lots of jokes and toasts. I think they had all done it.”

  “With the same dead body?”

  “Well, maybe it was a doll.”

  “Or perfect embalming. Or actors.”

  “Ooo creepy. I wonder who pays?”

  “No idea.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I’m telling you now.”

  “We’re both good at keeping secrets.”

  “And lies.”

  “Now it is time to guess.” I can feel his little buddy nudging my backside.

  “OK.”

  “I say false. I think you slipped up on the living or dead detail.”

  “You lose. Want to see the scar on my wrist?”

  “Wasn’t that from the Thanksgiving your father kissed the au pair girl while your mother was carving the turkey and you got between them?”

  “That’s another story. You pay this time.”

  NESTING

  We call it nesting. Woolgathering and phenomenal collection: memories, songs, sticks and feathers, yes, a nest.

  This evening, you added one more, hung your new painting in the only wall space left, over the bathtub, a hybrid collision of Le printemps with Guernica, exploding blossoms in the foreground, black storm in the background.

  I’ve turned down the bed, run the bath, poured in lavender oil and lit the candles.

  We get in, hopefully to relax, admire the view, the new landscape, a vernissage, and our garden filled with birds settling down to rest.

  “Is that smoke?” I ask, pointing to the dark cloud in the painting. It’s hard to see in candlelight.

  “No, it’s blackbirds.”

  “Ahhhh.” Our jazz combo, birds on the telephone wire swagged in the trees
in front of our house, is already asleep.

  When the water cools, we step out, shake, turn out the lights and feel our way to bed, operating on instinct, navigating our inessential necessities, sometimes stumbling because we are flawed species, male and female.

  “Scratch please,” I ask when we get into bed. Our ritual.

  And you do, then we kiss, more of a peck, the disappearing lips, and turn to sleep, welcome the pair of enchanting smooth groove roller skaters who invited themselves into our dreams after we saw them perform on YouTube.

  We call it brain TV, and we can’t or won’t turn them off, the picture anyway.

  The soundtrack is anyone’s guess. Unlike the dance, it segues into morning.

  Sometimes it’s faint, sometimes silent. Could be Ella and Duke on the radio, but the real music is a man and woman skating backwards, into the radiant arch, our arms lifted up to make a bridge, first couple in the country dance, London Bridge, sometimes safe for lovers.

  The roller skaters barely touch, just a nudge, hips and knees, the right way to ride a horse, with signals, equestrian dancing but not dressage, no reins and bits, no cruel drool, just a beautiful ride to the shining city on the hill. Rapture.

  It don’t mean a thing/if you ain’t got that swing

  The smooth groove skaters cross step, never trip. It helps that their feet turn in. Pigeon toes are their secret ingredient. They float, no wind resistance, arms held out for balance, moving the air like swimmers in pools of pure oxygen.

  We are touch navigators too.

  There’s no moon tonight. We fly blind in synchronized sleep, feet tangled, top sheet untucked, winding us as we turn and turn while the smooth groove skaters keep on rolling, rock and roll, thank you Mister Domino, maintaining the gospel bounce, steps in sync, wings lifting.

  Blackbird singing in the dead of night

  Take these broken wings and learn to fly.

  All your life, you were only waiting for