People rarely saw him without headphones on. Several times he was almost hit crossing streets in Flushing. He lived for jazz. It was all he cared about. And so at fourteen, his parents allowed their son to take the subway to Harlem twice a week for trumpet lessons with Kiss Me Williams—whose records could be found in almost every secondhand shop in New York City.
Mr. and Mrs. Wong were happy their son had a hobby, and hoped he might one day put down his trumpet and pick up some chemistry books. But by the end of high school, Ray Wong was already known in most of the underground jazz clubs as “the Pearl” or “Mr. Noodle,” on account of his frantic runs.
A few of the old-timers said they could hear the influence of Kiss Me Williams. They wondered what ever became of him, whether he was living or dead.
* * *
• • •
It was only a matter of time before Sophie asked her parents for a piano. A few days after it arrived Stan saw her in the lobby.
“I heard somebody in this building—I won’t say who—got something big and noisy.”
It took months to find the right teacher. Eventually, her father called Juilliard, and a slim Jewish girl with dyed black hair appeared one day at the apartment door.
“Tell me what you love,” she said. “And I’ll teach you how to play it.”
* * *
• • •
It took Ray Wong years to find his voice on the trumpet. He practiced many hours a day, and never missed a lesson. Kiss Me Williams had not only taught him how to play his instrument—but also, how to talk the language of producers, booking agents, and the session musicians he would come to depend on for income.
Ray’s parents sometimes went to jazz clubs and listened over glasses of hot water. They liked to see people nod appreciatively when he played difficult parts. Their favorite song was “Afternoons with Mrs. Fang,” which Ray wrote a few months after she died. It was the first piece on an album he was writing called The Wong Way.
Ray’s teacher recorded his first song in Louisville, Kentucky, at the beginning of 1947. He wore a double-breasted, pin-striped suit. It still hung in his closet but was full of small holes. Soon after, he went to St. Louis. Then New York City.
When the lesson was over, Ray sometimes used the bathroom before the long subway ride to Flushing. On the wall was a black-and-white photograph of his teacher with a woman. Once Ray asked if that woman was his wife. The old man laughed. “That’s Marilyn Monroe.”
“How come you have a picture of her in your bathroom?”
“Because when she sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to the president of the United States—it just so happens that yours truly was on the horn, with Hank Jones on piano.”
Sometimes Ray brought his teacher salt-and-pepper shrimp, or hot and sour soup with extra croutons. The young student was curious about the old man’s life, but their lesson never went beyond that old suit in the closet, or the black-and-white picture on the bathroom wall.
As Ray earned money from his gigs, he wanted to take more lessons and come to Harlem every day. But his teacher had another job, and sometimes left early in the morning.
One spring, someone hand-delivered a letter to Ray’s home in Queens. It was an offer for two records and a European tour. Ray read it again on the train to Harlem and tried to imagine his teacher’s face.
But when he showed it, the old man gave it back to him and said his eyes were bad—told Ray just to read it aloud. He listened to what the letter said, then went into his bedroom. A moment later he appeared with a battered instrument case.
“You could probably get a new one with your own name on the side, but use mine until that’s figured out.”
Ray took the case from his teacher and brushed the dust off.
“I didn’t know your name was Stan?”
His teacher walked him to the subway and said good-bye at the top of the steps. “Go show ’em how we do it in Harlem, boy—and don’t let them call you Mr. Noodle no more.”
* * *
• • •
By the time he was twenty-three, Ray Wong had played with Wynton Marsalis at Lincoln Center, and his second album was a bestseller in fourteen countries including Japan, Germany, and Sweden. One night, midway through a concert at Carnegie Hall, Ray listened to a voice mail during intermission. It was from a building manager on Fifth Avenue. A staff member had died while on duty. Ray’s name and phone number had been entered in the employee records as “next of kin.”
The building manager wanted Ray to see the body and pick up the old man’s things. There was a horn player from Lagos in the audience with his wife, and before the next set began, Ray asked if he would continue the concert in his absence.
As the taxi cut through Central Park, Ray realized it had been almost a year since he’d seen his old teacher. When the taxi pulled up, there were two police cars, and the building manager had forms for Ray to sign. The body had already gone to the morgue, if Ray wanted to see it. The building manager was confused as to how they knew each other. He couldn’t believe it when Ray told him about the lessons, the moth-eaten suit, the old records with Stan’s face on them, and playing horn for the president and Marilyn Monroe on the White House lawn. The building manager had thought Stan was just another old man.
When the police left, the manager went inside. It was quiet as though nothing had happened. Ray looked up past the white-trimmed purple awning, up the cement walls of the building. Most lights were off, but from an open window three floors up, he could hear the tinkling of a piano.
Someone was playing jazz. He listened and, with each break in the traffic, could hear hands that were slow but sure on the keys. Ray put his trumpet case down and sat on a low wall. Central Park was dark now, the footpaths long and empty. He wondered if it was a pianist he knew, someone he had played with.
Mrs. Fang once told him that after death, spirits sometimes hang around, watching the people they loved.
So Ray took out his trumpet and played along to the few, faint bars of music that drifted down to the street. One or two lights flicked on. The building manager appeared with a lit cigarette.
When the piano stopped, Ray lowered his trumpet, then packed it away in Stan’s old case. By the time Sophie had dressed and come downstairs, Ray was gone and the building manager was back in his small room watching baseball.
Sophie’s parents thought their daughter was trying to express grief when she explained what she wanted the next morning. But a week later she asked again, and convinced them it was something she had to do. Her father was dead against it.
“At least let me go in with you,” he implored her.
But his daughter was determined.
“Well, you just can’t go alone, Sophie, it’s unthinkable.”
Sophie’s mother put down her coffee cup purposefully. “She’ll be in college next year, Martin. She’ll be alone then.”
Sophie’s father seemed wounded. “You’re supposed to be on my side.”
Remembering a line from her favorite film, Sophie smiled. “There are no sides, Dad.”
And so the following weekend, Sophie’s parents drove her around to the different jazz clubs in their black Mercedes, watching as she disappeared inside after chatting with the doormen. They figured she would give up after one night, but three weekends later they were still dodging drunks and crawling through industrial streets in Bushwick and Long Island City—on the hunt for open doors with people outside holding cigarettes and glasses.
Live jazz was nothing like recorded jazz, and Sophie lingered in each place longer than she had to. Men offered to buy her drinks then laughed when she told them she was blind and seventeen.
Then at 2:48 A.M. on a Sunday morning, she descended the carpeted stairs of a small club in NoHo and heard him playing a trumpet version of “Stairway to the Stars.” There was a piano, and all she had to do was get
up onstage during intermission, and start to play.
* * *
• • •
Stan had gone to work that morning with a sense something might happen. He’d been up most of the night with pains in his chest. And his legs were going numb. It was hard to dress and walk to the bus stop.
On the journey south, he passed a group of children going to school. Boys and girls in uniforms. One of the boys had thin ankles and long feet. He was holding a folder and walking quickly, trying to keep up with the older children. For some reason, the boy looked up when the bus went by, and caught a face staring at him through the glass.
Stan remembered then how it felt when he was young. His house had a porch and stood at the end of a dirt track. He used to watch his mother load the stove with wood. He remembered her voice like no time had passed, not words exactly, but the tone of how she spoke, like ripples through his body.
There were many things he would like to have told her. He wondered if they would meet again. If she would recognize him as her son, or is memory something we don’t get to keep, that gets left behind in the world, to live again as music.
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The Sadness of Beautiful Things: Stories Page 12