by John Gardner
“Good horn,” said Yegudkin, and held the horn toward the graduate student, who sat, hands clamped on his knees, as if in a daze.
Jack Hawthorne stared at the instrument suspended in space and at his teacher’s hairy hands. Before stopping to think, he said, “You think I’ll ever play like that?”
Yegudkin laughed loudly, his black eyes widening, and it seemed that he grew larger, beatific and demonic at once, like the music; overwhelming. “Play like me?” he exclaimed.
Jack blinked, startled by the bluntness of the thing, the terrible lack of malice, and the truth of it. His face tingled and his legs went weak, as if the life were rushing out of them. He longed to be away from there, far away, safe. Perhaps Yegudkin sensed it. He turned gruff, sending away the graduate student, then finishing up the lesson. He said nothing, today, of the stupidity of mankind. When the lesson was over he saw Jack to the door and bid him goodbye with a brief half-smile that was perhaps not for Jack at all but for the creature on the bench. “Next Saturday?” he said, as if there might be some doubt.
Jack nodded, blushing.
At the door opening on the street he began to breathe more easily, though he was weeping. He set down the horn case to brush away his tears. The sidewalk was crowded—dazed-looking Saturday-morning shoppers herding along irritably, meekly, through painfully bright light. Again he brushed tears away. He’d been late for his bus. Then the crowd opened for him and, with the horn cradled under his right arm, his music under his left, he plunged in, starting home.
STILLNESS
It would be a strange thing, Joan Orrick often thought, to have second sight, as her grandmother Frazier was supposed to have had. It occurred to her, for instance, one day when she was forty, when Martin stopped the car to wait for a light at the corner of Olive Street and Grand, in St. Louis. They were just passing through. Martin had delivered a paper at Urbana, and now they were heading for Norman, Oklahoma, where he was to serve on the jury for something called the Newstadt-Books Abroad Prize. “What is it?” she’d asked when first the invitation to Oklahoma had come. “Actually,” he’d said, and had put on his pompous look, then changed his mind, “God knows.” “Maybe we should drive through St. Louis,” she’d said. He’d agreed at once, generous and expansive as he always was when preparing a lecture he thought impressive. She’d been less impressed than she’d pretended, but that was in the past now. And when they’d left Highway 70 and nosed past the arch into the city, she wasn’t much impressed by St. Louis either. Beyond the stadium, the scrubbed, unconvincing show of government buildings, the husk of the grand old railroad station where she’d met him all those birthdays and Christmases—the years before he’d gotten his motorcycle—everything was gray, windblown, burnt out. Riding down haunted streets, brooding on the thought of second sight, she was sorry she’d come.
What would she have thought, though—sometime in the late 1940s, standing on this corner, on her way to her part-time accompanist’s job at the Duggers School of the Dance—if she’d suddenly had a vision of what downtown St. Louis would be like just twenty-five years later? What would she have thought, what would she have felt, standing on that crowded, noisy corner, if the crowd had suddenly thinned to just three or four hurrying figures and the buildings had gone solemn, like prison or mausoleum walls?
She imagined the vision coming as pure image, like a photograph or drab documentary film, with no hint of explanation—saw herself, in her 1940s schoolgirl’s clothes, pleated skirt and short-sleeved sweater, dark green coat and light green headscarf, bobbysox and loafers, her hair in a permanent, shiny and curly and a trifle stiff, books in her arm—since she came in directly from school on the bus, or on a chain of buses that shuttled her from Ferguson to Normandy to Wellston to downtown. There had been—was it on this corner?—a wonderful ice-cream place, the Park Plaza, where for a dollar you could get a parfait two feet high, and all around this section there were magnificent theaters, as colorful as circuses, with high, bold marquees on which yellow, red, blue, purple, green, and white lights (lightbulbs, she remembered, and even then the few that had burned out weren’t replaced) went racing around tall, urgent titles—Rope, The Purple Heart, The Return of Frank James—and inside, the theaters were like palaces: great gilded lions; red-velvet-covered three-inch-thick ropes on golden posts; majestic wide stairways that made everyone an instant king or queen; ushers in uniforms from the days of Empire (God knew which empire); and in the great domed theater itself a hush that was patently religious, the boom of voices from the people on the screen coming from all sides and from within, or so it seemed, oracular.
All the great stores had been downtown then, Famous-Barr, for instance, glittering, high-ceilinged, richly ceremonious inside its towering gold-framed revolving doors—the aisles choked with shoppers, most of them white, the counters and high walls revealing wonders, coats and sombre-toned stately dresses with the sleeves pinned straight out, extended for flight far overhead like hovering angels, and—everywhere—draped artificial-pearl necklaces or ruby-red or pool-ball-green or -blue or -yellow costume baubles, bracelets the color of copper in flame, and everywhere the scent of perfumes and talcums, newly printed books, the leather of new shoes, a smell as exciting and at the same time cloying as a vault of roses in one of the big downtown flowershops, or the thick, sweet incense in a Catholic church. Suppose in the twinkling of an eye, Joan thought, that whole world had vanished, and the girl on the corner, herself at fifteen, looked, stunned and afraid, at a city gone dark and empty: suppose a silence had fallen, as if all the gay sounds of the world had been abruptly turned off, like the music and static on a radio, and there came the same instant a visual stillness, as if a heart had stopped—no motion but three or four hurrying Negroes, strangely dressed, dangerous, with hair grown long and alarmingly puffed up, nothing else stirring but two pigeons overhead and a newspaper blowing along the pavement. “I’m in the future!” the imaginary Joan would finally have realized, “and there’s been some terrible war, or a plague, and everything’s been ruined.”
Who’d await the future if she could see it in advance? No use to tell the girl on the corner, “We’re happy, Joan. Don’t be afraid! There are beautiful places, though this one may be gone.” She’d have backed away, frightened and betrayed—yes, terrified, of course. What else could she be, addressed by a strange, wild woman in dark glasses such as Negroes wore then in the most dangerous parts of East St. Louis, a fur coat that looked as if the lynx had died of terror, adrenaline exploding, every hair on end—a woman whose beauty was like fine cutlery, hair falling plain as an Indian’s, except red, as brightly burnished and fiery as her own—leaning from the window of a dark blue Mercedes Benz driven by—how weird!—a sorrowful, baggy-eyed man with silver hair that swept down like angelhair to his heavy, hunched shoulders—a monster who was, she had a feeling, suddenly, someone she was meant to recognize.
The girl would have stepped back in fear and anger, raising her hand to the braces on her teeth, and the real Joan would have called to her, shouting past the dead years in pity and anguish, “Child, child, don’t be silly! We’re as harmless as you are, we’ve betrayed nobody, nothing! Look at us!” Now the child did look, and recognition came: the rich, wildly eccentric lady (who had beautiful teeth, Joan thought, and smiled, feeling a surge of affection for the big-nosed innocent on the corner), the lady in the fur, with emeralds and a ruby and a diamond on her fingers, was herself—her own “child,” Wordsworth would say—and the driver was Buddy Orrick, grown sadder and crazier, but still alive, and married to her: so they’d made it, they’d survived! She came a step nearer, her face eager, full of questions (We could drive her to Duggers, the real Joan thought; it’s only a few blocks) and her small hand came cautiously toward the real Joan’s hand on the Mercedes’ wing-window, both hands equally pale and solid, the child’s and the woman’s, until suddenly the child’s hand was gone and Joan Orrick was gazing at a cracked sidewalk, a piece of dirty cardboard: Fragile
.
Martin glanced over and saw her tears. “Hurting?” he asked.
Yes, she was hurting, as she nearly always hurt these days, sometimes such pain that she passed out for a moment—hurting even when the drugs were at work, as now, causing visions, or almost-visions—but she said, “No,” and gave him a reassuring smile, “just thinking.”
He reached over, touched her hand. The light changed, and the car glided forward without a sound.
She said, “The Duggers School of the Dance was just up ahead. Remember?”
“Which building?” He ducked down over the steering wheel to look.
She pointed as the car came abreast of it. It had been gutted by fire, like most of the buildings in this neighborhood. He scanned the boarded-up, blackened storefronts. She could see he wasn’t sure which one she meant.
Jacqui Duggers was tiny, the classic teacher of ballet but in perfect miniature, hair so tightly drawn back you might have thought from a distance that it was paint, as on a Japanese doll. She spoke with the accent all ballet teachers use, even those raised in Milwaukee or St. Louis, wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist like an actress, called Joan “dahling” with perfect seriousness and unfeigned affection, though one failed to notice the affection at first, since she was always hurried, always slightly tense, as if in half an hour she must catch a plane for Munich or Paris. She was—or so it seemed to Joan—a superb dancer, though Joan never saw her dance more than a few steps. Her old photographs seemed to confirm the impression: the Jacqui Duggers in the pictures had that authority one sees at a glance in professionals, and they proved she had danced with good companies of the so-called second rank in both the United States and Canada. “Ah wone,” she would say, and Joan’s hands would move automatically on the keys of the piano.
Her husband, Pete Duggers, taught tap-dance in the mirror-walled studio below. He was nearly as small as she was, but thicker, almost stout, in fact, and he looked and moved like some Disney cartoon of a tap-dance teacher. He had a red face and wonderfully merry blue eyes, wore vests and old-fashioned arm-elastics. If he ever touched the floor when he walked (and he did), Joan had been prepared to believe that he did so by whim. Jacqui’s movements at the barre had a look not of lightness, cancellation of gravity, but of eloquent, powerful control, as if her muscles were steel and could no more speed up or slow down against her will than the hands of a clock could escape the inclinations of its mainspring. Rising on her toes in the middle of the room—a brief jerk and click as the heel and ankle locked, a brief trembling like a spasm, then the firmness of an iron wedge—she gave the impression that touching her calf or thigh would be like touching a wall. Pete’s dancing feet moved, on the other hand, as if swinging by themselves, as if his body were suspended like a puppet’s from invisible wires. His taps were light and quick, as if he never put his weight down with either foot, and they rattled out around him as gaily and casually—and as unbelievably fast—as the fingers of his Negro piano player, a tall, flat-haired boy who sat sprawling in his chair with his head laid far over so that he seemed to be always, except for his forearms and fingers, fast asleep. The speed and lightness with which Pete Duggers danced were amazing to behold, but what was truly miraculous, so that it made you catch your breath, was the way he could stop, completely relaxed, leaning his elbow on empty air and grinning as if he’d been standing there for hours, all that movement and sound you’d been hearing pure phantom and illusion. That was unfailingly the climax when he danced: a slow build, with elegant shuffles and turns, then more speed, and more, and more and still more until it seemed that the room spun drunkenly, crazily, all leading—direct as the path of an arrow—to nothing, or everything, a sudden stillness like an escape from reality, a sudden floating, whether terrible or wonderful she could never tell: an abrupt hush as when a large crowd looks up, all at the same moment, and sees an eagle in the sky, almost motionless, or then again, perhaps, the frightening silence one read about in novels when a buzz-bomb shut off over London. He stood perfectly still, the piano was still, his young students gaped, and then abruptly reality came back as the piano tinkled lightly and he listlessly danced and, as he did so, leaned toward his students and winked. “You see? Stillness! That’s the magic!”
Olive Street was already going down at that time, so the storefront was shoddy, solo dancer and dance-class pictures on the windows, big, vulgar stars, the glass around the pictures crudely painted dark blue, as if the Duggers School of the Dance were some miserable third-rate establishment not worth breaking into or stealing from, though the door was not locked. But that was a trick—the dancing Duggers had trunkfuls of tricks: artists to the marrow of their chipped and splintered bones. The scuffed, unpainted door in front opened into a scuffed, unpainted entryway with a door to the left and a knotty, crooked stairway leading upward. On the door to the left, a sign said “TAP DANCE STUDIO,” and above the worn railing at the side of the stairs, a sign, cocked parallel to the railing, said “SCHOOL OF THE BALLET .” When you opened the door to the tap-dance studio for the first time, you did a mighty double-take: there were glittering mirrors with round-arched tops and etched designs of the sort Joan would occasionally discover years later in the oldest London pubs, and above the mirrors there were walls of red and gold and a magnificent stamped-tin ceiling. In fact she’d never completely gotten over her surprise at the elegance inside, though she’d worked there four years, into her college days. It was a large building, at one time a theater. The tap-dance studio—and the ballet studio directly above it—took up the first thirty feet; then there was a railing, also red and gold, from which one looked out at the long, wide ballroom floor, at the front an enormous stage boxed off by ratty, stiff wine-colored velvet curtains, along the side walls candelabra between high, painted panels—dancing graces, Zeus in majesty, nymphs and satyrs, peacocks and fat reclining nudes done in highly unsuccessful imitation of the late style of Rubens.
She’d walked there once with Martin—in those days “Buddy”—when he’d motorcycled in from his college in Indiana and had offered to drive her to work in her father’s De Soto. He’d driven fast, as usual, his eyes rolling up to the rear-view mirror, on the look-out for police cars, and had gotten her to work much too early.
“Care to have an interesting experience?” she’d said.
Their footsteps echoed. The ballroom was half dark. They could just make out the carved figures on the ceiling, two storeys up, circling around the empty spaces from which once had hung huge chandeliers.
“It’s like a church,” he said. He had a crewcut. Leather jacket. He hung his cigarette off his lip like Marlon Brando. Already he’d written two novels—unpublishable; terrible, in fact, though of course she hadn’t said so. She was convinced, in spite of them, that he’d someday be famous, someday when he’d given up James Joyce.
She’d squeezed his hand and they’d stopped and, after a moment, kissed, then walked on, up to the front of the ballroom and up onto the stage, where the Duggers students gave their dance recitals. They looked up at the shuttered lights, ropes, catwalks—it was darker here, spooky, as if the stage machinery belonged not only to a different time but to a different planet. Again they paused to kiss, and he put his arms around her and after a minute she moved his hand to the front of her sweater, then under the sweater to her breast. With his usual difficulty, for all his practice, he unsnapped her bra. She felt her nipples rising, and he pressed closer to her. With a grandiose sweep of his free arm in the direction of the dim, ghost-filled hall, he whispered, “Lady, how would you like to be fucked, right here in front of all these people?”
“Hmm,” she said. After a moment, still with his hand on her breast, her hand keeping it there, she led him toward the further wing and the small door opening on a room she’d discovered weeks earlier, half filled with crates, electric wire, old tools, cobwebs, the rotting frames of old sets. Here and there stood old pieces of furniture—chairs, tables, couches—protected from the dust by tarpa
ulins. “Maybe we need a rehearsal,” she said. They passed under a high window through which a single crack of light came and she glanced at her watch. Fifteen minutes. She stood looking around, both his hands on her breasts, until he finally noticed the couch and went over and pulled away the tarpaulin. As he came into her, huge and overeager, as always—but so was she, so was she—she said, “Isn’t this an interesting experience?”