by Lewis Shiner
“Your usual self-possession,” Willcott said, “eludes you this morning. What precisely is this newly discovered flaw in the dissertation?”
She couldn’t think of another way to say it. “I don’t like it,” she said. “I’m not excited by it. I don’t want to write about it anymore.”
The topic was The Convergence of Centrifugal Themes in Moby-Dick, and Willcott had essentially bullied her into agreeing to it. Among other issues, including the fact that it was not her idea, was its reliance on an unpopular interpretation of the word “stricken” in the final chapter to mean that Moby-Dick was fatally wounded, one that Willcott had held for his entire career and which was believed to have kept him from a leadership role in the Melville Society.
“I see,” Willcott said. “And might I inquire as to whether you have come up with another topic sufficiently stimulating that you might bring yourself to write about it?”
“I just want to be clear,” Madelyn said, a drop of sweat stinging one eye, “that it’s not a problem with the topic itself, it’s that it’s not suited to me personally.” Oh Lord, she thought, I sound like I’m breaking up with him. It’s not you, it’s me. “I thought I could write it because of the intellectual challenge, but I need… I need emotional involvement too.”
“To wit…?”
She took a deep breath. “They Must Here Remain Stationary Until Utterly Extinct: Anti-Colonialism and the Other in Melville.”
“Colonialism?” Willcott packed a lifetime of disdain into the single word. “The Other? Please tell me you haven’t joined the brain-dead followers of Lacan and Derrida. Tell me you’re not contemplating a fashionable dissertation full of meaningless ‘theory’ and ‘texts’ and obscurantist jargon and hectoring wordplay.”
“No, sir, not at all. But the issues that Melville deals with in ‘Benito Cereno’ and Omoo and Typee are more relevant than ever now. White men are still enslaving developing countries, only now they’re doing it with loans—”
“Please spare me the lecture, Ms. Brooks. I am well aware of the evils of the white race. Can I remind you that we no longer live in the nineteen-sixties, thank God? Nor is it a requirement of this department that your dissertation be ‘relevant,’ nor that it have some specific percentage of political content. In fact, I am strongly opposed to politicizing literature, and if you insist on this new topic, I’m not sure that I would be willing to direct such an effort.”
“I expected that, sir, and—” Her voice was fading and she forced herself to speak up. “—and so I broached the subject, hypothetically, with Dr. Rosenberg. He said that if… if it came to that, he would direct it.”
She’d anticipated anger or cold dismissal. What she had not expected was the look of hurt in Willcott’s eyes. “I see,” he said.
“Only if that’s okay with you, sir,” she said in a guilty rush, wondering what she’d say if he refused to let her go.
“No,” he said. “I’m sure it’s for the best.” She had a vision of Willcott’s loneliness, his New Criticism credentials grown old, his students dwindling away, his place at the cultural table seized by wild-haired anarchists at war with meaning itself. “I believe our business is done. You can send me any required paperwork and I’ll sign it.”
“Sir, I—”
“Good day, Ms. Brooks.”
Sleet was now falling, and in her anxiety she’d forgotten her umbrella. She made her way up to Pennsylvania Avenue and tried to find a cab, the ice clotting in her hair.
She’d gotten what she asked for, she thought. But there was always a price.
*
Cole jogged along the embankment above the Mississippi, the Café du Monde and Jackson Square to his right, an oil barge chugging downstream on his left, the vast gray-brown river smelling of mud and diesel in the hot April afternoon. He was a mile into his run and completely soaked in sweat. Sultry, they called it here in New Orleans, what in Austin they would call so humid you might as well try and breathe underwater.
It was Saturday, meaning the Old Absinthe House would be mobbed. A slow night was its own kind of challenge, trying to convince the crowd to shut up and listen. A packed night, feeding on its own energy and consuming everything in sight, drained him emotionally and physically both. The tourists were all over the Quarter like powdered sugar on a beignet, crisscrossed in camera straps, men wearing Bermuda shorts and kiss me i’m cajun T-shirts with the creases still in them, women in floppy straw hats and giant sunglasses, college girls in halter tops and cutoffs. Cole slowed and sprinted and weaved his way through them, trying to bear in mind that some tiny percentage of their dollars eventually wound up in his pocket.
He’d moved to New Orleans the week after he passed the audition for the Old Absinthe House band, a year and three months ago. He hadn’t been in Louisiana since his parents left Lafayette when he was three, and he might have kept it that way had the phone not rung one Saturday night as he was headed out to Antone’s in hopes of a slow dance or two. The voice on the other end said, “Oye, vato, it’s me, Gordo,” and Cole became unmoored in time and space.
“Gordo?”
“Sí, hombre, maybe you remember me from Woodstock? Not the movie, though, I didn’t get to be in that because my lead guitar player was too fucking ugly.”
“Gordo! ¿Qué carajo? Where are you?”
They spent half an hour catching up. Gordo had stayed in San Francisco for a couple of years after the Quirq implosion, watching the whole scene follow the band into collapse, before going home to New Orleans. There he’d worked his way up through the clubs, playing whatever came to hand—disco, zydeco, blues, jazz—and getting a reputation for reliability. “Not the easiest thing for me, but I was all like Scarlett O’Hara, did not ever want to be hungry again.” For the last six months he’d been at the Old Absinthe House, one of the top clubs in the Quarter.
Gordo had a lot of questions. Was Cole still playing? Was he in a band? How were his chops? “I’m getting the feeling,” Cole said, “that this was not a completely casual phone call.”
“Our lead singer and our lead guitarist decided to start their own band and left us flat. I told the manager I could bring in a guy who did double duty, save him some bread. Can you fly out tomorrow, on us? Bring your guitar.”
The gig was strictly electric Chicago-style blues, so Cole auditioned on a Les Paul he’d turned up on one of his pawn shop runs. He’d put on new Grover machines to keep it in tune, and had otherwise not fooled with its sweet tone or tiger-striped finish.
The band was a six-piece, counting Cole. Hammond B-3, tenor sax, and drums, all black guys, Gordo on Fender Jazz Bass, and one of three or four different white guys from Tulane or Loyola on trumpet—Gordo said they never knew from one night to the next which one would show up. The players all had ferocious chops. Duncan, the sax man, was light-skinned with a dusting of freckles on his cheeks, tall and big-chested, with short processed hair. He’d learned circular breathing in the Fourth Army Band, taking air in through his nose and blowing it out through the horn at the same time, so once per set he would walk through the audience, holding a single note for three or four minutes and collecting astonished applause. The drummer, Henri, pronounced Cajun style, had purplish black skin and a short natural. He could play a melodic solo with his left hand and right foot while the right hand maintained a perfect shuffle on the ride cymbal and the hi-hat knocked down the two and four. Zeke, goateed, with his head shaved clean, played organ like Booker T., Jimmy Smith, and J. S. Bach put together.
They fucked with Cole at the audition, throwing in key changes or clean breaks without warning, all of which he handled with good humor, and when they were done, Zeke looked at the manager and said, “Hire this honky motherfucker. He’s pretty, and we can always teach him to play and sing.”
“Well,” the manager said, “I guess you’re in.”
Cole had boarded the plane believing that, if they made him an offer, he would have to think on it. He’d risen to foreman at t
he remodeling company, making good money for less work, and had been looking around for a house with enough land to grow some vegetables, hoping to ease the rootless feeling he couldn’t seem to shake.
Playing “Wang Dang Doodle” and “Smokestack Lightning” and “Get Out of My Life, Woman” again changed his mind. He’d just needed a few years to break the bad associations in his head. Fronting a great band felt like nothing else in the world, part conversation, part choreographed dance, part team sport, part armed combat. It was where he belonged.
He ran across the foot of Canal Street, where the low nineteenth-century sprawl of the French Quarter transformed itself, as if by some evil sorcery, into the skyscrapers, banks, and chain hotels of the Central Business District. Up Poydras to Loyola and then back into the Quarter, around the St. Louis Cemetery where Marie Laveau was interred, her tomb marked with Xs and littered with dimes left by those seeking favors. Then up Rampart Street, the western boundary of the Quarter, where the trees and the charm had long since dried up, then down to the river once more and up Toulouse Street and through the wrought iron gate into one of the hidden courtyards that had fascinated Cole on his first days in the city, red and purple geraniums in hanging baskets, bougainvillea climbing the pink stucco walls, white lilies growing in the fountain in the middle of the rough concrete floor. He ran up the stairs to the second-floor balcony and unlocked the deadbolt on the eight-foot-high antique wooden doors of his apartment.
Tina sat on the couch with Jezebel, one of her stripper friends. Tina had her arms around her and Jezzie was crying. Tina, who had never stripped, had somehow ended up den mother to a gaggle of abused women, who sometimes slept two at a time on their foldout sofa. Her orphans, she called them. Cole didn’t mind having beautiful women hanging around the place, especially these, who were careless about their personal modesty. They were New Orleans in a nutshell—sexy, permissive, risky, going nowhere. Tina, who’d had her own substance problems, was a stickler about not permitting booze or drugs in the apartment, and on the rare occasions when one of the girls fucked up, she didn’t hesitate to flush the problem down the commode. As for Cole, Tina had told him that as long as he kept his hands to himself, he was free to look all he wanted. The truth was he preferred Tina’s factory accoutrements—tall, rangy body, honey-blonde hair, wide hips and champagne-glass breasts—to the aftermarket parts on her friends.
He’d met Tina at the 544 Club where she tended bar. Their R&B band was widely considered the hottest in the Quarter, and when Cole and Zeke had a free night they liked to drop in. The first time Cole ordered a club soda from her, she sized him up and said, “How long you been sober, sugar?”
He had to stop and think. “Three years and change. You?”
“Five years, three months, two days.”
“Not that you’re counting.”
“Who, me?”
He looked again, saw that she was older than he’d first taken her for, mid-thirties at least, and saw that a light went on in her crinkly eyes when the ends of her mouth went up. Though he was not ordinarily one for Southern accents, he wanted to hear hers again.
“Hell of a place to be sober in,” Cole said.
“I don’t know.” She put her forearms on the bar and leaned forward so she didn’t have to shout. “Being surrounded by all these negative examples does the trick for me.”
A few nights later she came to check him out at the Absinthe House and hung around till closing. When she came home with him that night he assumed she was easy. In fact she had come to stay, and she slipped into his life without either of them missing a beat.
They didn’t have a lot in common, though she was a college dropout and had a troubled relationship with her parents, same as Cole. She was the oldest of five kids and still thought she might want some of her own one day, though she knew time was running out. She had wanted to be a brain surgeon when she was little and had somehow lost her way on that one too. Her family had been dirt poor outside Knoxville, Tennessee, where her father was a long-haul trucker and her mother was a part-time waitress. The first order of business when Daddy got back from a trip was to administer the spankings that her mother had been saving up, and it didn’t take Sigmund Freud to work out how much they’d looked forward to his coming home.
She liked cnn over Cole’s mtv, funk and blues over Cole’s current fascination with Duran Duran and Thomas Dolby, Coca-Cola over Cole’s fruit juice and soda water. She was into actions more than words and they had never said “I love you” to each other. She was more concerned with walking the walk of daily kindness than putting a name on what they had. It was that day-to-day comfort, the mutual respect and the lack of fights, that had set the hook in Cole.
“Troubles with Jake again?” Cole asked Jezzie. She was 19, with the kind of delicate beauty that wouldn’t last long in the Quarter, especially with the company she kept. Dark brown skin, broad African nose, innocent eyes, massive silicone breasts on a petite frame.
Jezzie nodded and sobbed, and Tina said, “He was passed out with a hooker in their bed. Again.”
“Same hooker?” Cole asked.
“They all look the same to me,” Jezzie said.
The idea of aids made Cole very nervous, and he’d been using condoms until Tina came along, and they both got tested, and agreed to keep it one-on-one. He was amazed by the way that people like Jezzie had unprotected sex and shared needles, and it made him think about what Charlene had said about junkies and death wishes.
Tina said, “How was your run, sugar?”
“Soooltry,” he said, and her eyes crinkled up.
He took a shower and they cooked a couple of pans of cinnamon rolls from the freezer and squeezed some fresh orange juice. While they ate he felt Tina’s foot rub up and down his leg, and after washing the dishes they left Jezzie to watch tv and retired to the bedroom. As a lover, Tina was more languorous than madly passionate. Cole was fine with that, and the sex was plentiful and satisfying all around.
Dinner was lentils, brown rice, salad with fresh avocado. At 7:30 Cole took his Les Paul out of the locked, reinforced metal cabinet, kissed Tina goodbye, got a hug from Jezzie, and walked to the club.
He was just in time to see a cat fight in the street outside. Two trannies, bare to the waist to show off their breasts, had thrown their wigs onto the sidewalk like football players discarding their helmets and gone after each other with fists and fingernails, screaming insults. Drunken tourists stopped in the middle of Bourbon Street to cheer them on, and two uniformed cops watched from the sidelines, talking back and forth as if trying to pick a winner. The owner of the strip club where they worked stood in the doorway, arms folded, and Cole imagined he was weighing the benefits of the free publicity against the possible damage to his assets.
Cole still struggled with the paradox of the city’s genuine warmth and its harsh cynicism. In some ways the Quarter was a parody of the anarchist paradise the counterculture used to talk about, openly libidinous, a proud mixture of races and genders and sexual preferences where altered consciousness was the norm, except perverted into a carnal Disneyland where everything had a price and little was what it seemed, all of it only a few hundred yards from the grinding poverty of the Ninth Ward.
Cole was part of the fraud, a white suburban kid masquerading as a blues man, costumed in Hawaiian shirt and Ray-Bans, shoehorning the authentic music of despair into perfectly calibrated 45-minute sets. Yet Cole owned a piece of the paradox, putting his heart into every note he played, as did every other man in the group, night after night.
Like a lot of clubs in the Quarter, the Old Absinthe House was open 24 hours a day, so everything that happened, from mopping the floors to restocking the bar to rehearsing the band, happened in front of an audience. Zeke was already there, working up a couple of new arrangements with Duncan and tinkering with the set list. By the time Cole tuned up, Gordo had arrived and they played through the new songs. Henri never needed to rehearse and the trumpet player would be wo
rking off a chart anyway.
At nine sharp they changed gears from rehearsal mode to performance and the soulful clockwork took over, the precisely delimited spaces for improvisation, Zeke’s piercing whistle when somebody threw down a good solo, the crosstalk and shouts of encouragement. The manager had ruled out cumbia footwork as “culturally inappropriate,” but Cole and Gordo still exchanged the occasional «¡échale!» and «¡sabrosón!».
Halfway through the second set, Cole saw Alex in the audience.
He raised his guitar neck in greeting, and Alex waved. At the break, Cole squeezed into a chair next to him. There wasn’t room to stand up for a hug. Cole gripped Alex’s elbow with one hand and they grinned at each other. A couple of months had gone by since they’d last talked on the phone, and something was clearly up because Alex’s hair was long again, curling past his collar in back.
Over the noise of the crowd, Cole pieced the story together. Alex had split from Callie—details to follow—and was working as a programmer for the company that provided his father’s computers.
“It’s like playing music,” Alex said. “It’s all rhythm and logic and progressions. It turns out I’m good at it.”
Cole explained that the couch was taken, but they had an air mattress if he was game. He set Alex up with a couple of free beers and went back to work.
During the next break, before the final set, he asked Alex if he wanted to come up and jam. “Those guys would eat my lunch,” Alex said. “I think all of that really is over for me. I sold all my gear except the acoustic that Jesús made. Most of my records, too. The divorce cleaned me out. It’s okay, though, I needed to lighten up, you know?”
Perversely, Alex’s apparent satisfaction with his own life left Cole melancholy. Had he been nursing some idea that he and Alex would be in a band again? He also hated that Alex’s endless push-pull with his father was in the push stage again, for both their sakes.