Milo reached for a hand and it was not there. He felt the wall and it was cold with a slight pattern of microscopic bumps. He was back in his room.
He did not remember coming back to his room or how he had gotten into bed. The nurse must have brought him. Honor usually said good-bye but maybe he had been too lost to the world to hear her. Or maybe his madness had shut her up. He was embarrassed by his crazy self. He knew he shouldn’t be, least of all around her, she seemed so understanding. But the more she understood him the more he wanted to hide. What was he hiding? And how much did she know?
They never spoke about it, his stories. She would ask him what hurt, everything, what felt better this time, nothing, why wouldn’t he let her work on his front, that was none of her fucking business only he didn’t say it quite that way she was too nice and pretty and kind. Why did he deserve such kindness? Because he was one of the losers, he guessed. No legs that were any good, no real heroics to speak of, just dumb bad luck and now these wild imagined memories like he had been implanted with someone else’s brain, real science fiction bullshit that he had never been interested in, not in his whole life. As a kid he had loved books, he still loved books, but stories of real people, or fake real people, not impossible, mystical things.
The bumps on the wall sharpened to his touch. He moved his hand and it was like touching sandpaper but worse, a thousand needles. This was the way the pain would conquer him, he thought. It would take over his body, then his mind, and then the outside world. When even Honor’s hands hurt him, that’s when it would all be over. Then it occurred to him that the story inside him was not actually painful. He felt free from pain when he was inside the story.
A black saxophone case came through the wall. It fell down on the end of his bed. It opened to reveal its gleaming instrument. Now it clicked shut again and he was holding it and he was walking with it swinging above a cobblestone street. A smell of coffee came wafting out of an Italian pastry shop. She would have waited all day for him. A woman’s scarf slid onto the ground and when he walked into the pastry shop the voice of Billie Holiday was singing from the radio.
1936
Joe ordered a coffee and drank it with a lot of sugar. He was standing at the counter, it was a very authentically Italian pastry shop, and then he saw in the clean curving glass over the perfectly rendered pastries the reflection of a familiar pattern. She was standing next to him. She didn’t see him and he thought he would drink his coffee and leave but then the words came out of his mouth anyway.
I recognize your scarf, he said.
She looked quickly at him, a little frightened. Then she recovered.
Not my face? she said.
That too, he said.
He went to law school in the neighborhood. Vivian was using the library nearby, researching graduate programs. Her father wanted her to get a certificate to teach. She wanted to paint, but her parents told her that that was only for rich girls. They sat at a little table on the sidewalk. They were in Greenwich Village. All kinds of people walked by. Women with artistic clothes, he thought, students, businessmen, foreigners. His saxophone case bounced against his leg as he nervously jiggled his foot. He was playing a gig tonight downtown and so he was not going straight home after his classes. He had some time. She would show him her favorite bookshop. He tossed some coins on the scuffed black table and they headed west.
The winding streets took them past shops where the awnings flapped a little in the October breeze and the lettering looked like it could have been written centuries ago. Old watches and silver trinkets on trays lined with velvet, men in aprons standing outside their stores with their hands on their hips, gloved bohemian ladies walking up steep stairs, entering arts clubs and shuttered parlors. Joe spent most of his time at the law school, not soaking up the atmosphere downtown, and now he looked around as if suddenly the wallpaper had come to life. In window boxes yellow flowers spilled overboard and fell to earth. A little cemetery waited secretly behind a wall. In back of the Jefferson Market was a garden whose tall dying blooms stuck out through the bars of a black gate. They passed restaurants that had to be entered by walking a few steps below sidewalk level. The tranquil streets were lined with row upon row of stoops leading up to town house after town house, worlds within private worlds. As they were drawn west the tree-lined passages surrendered glimpses of the river, light at the end of a tunnel. It was by the river that he had first come upon her.
He adored his wife and when he passed an antique shop and glanced in the window he thought of Pearl and what she would like as a gift. He saw diamond rings and hanging earrings and wanted to shower her with tokens of his deep, heartfelt, steadfast appreciation. He remembered the feeling of coming off of the ship and into her arms and the way she had held him with her smile. She was his shelter. He wanted to share life with her, to take her to hear the music he loved, especially Count Basie, a new bandleader out of Kansas City, whom he’d heard only on the radio. He’d seen an advertisement in the newspaper saying that Basie and his orchestra would be making their New York debut on Christmas Eve at the Roseland Ballroom. He wanted to tell Pearl about it, but he was afraid that she would disapprove. She would say that they did not have the money. She would be right. She was sensible and her maturity extended to everything she did. He felt it in the way she held him tightly when he came home. He loved the strong familiar feeling of her touch. When he pictured Pearl and himself in his mind he saw them like two carved figures clasped in an embrace. He had known her for over thirteen years. They had met when they were very young. The feeling of his holding her and of her holding him was never far from his thoughts. He could not imagine his life without Pearl. But when he thought of the two of them holding each other close, he could not fail to notice that they weren’t dancing.
Honor
You have hands like the hands of a shaman.
What does that mean? Some kind of healer?
Something like that. I heard about it from a guy who was in Vietnam. He comes to talk to some of us. His plane went down in Laos. He lived with the Hmong. He met a shaman.
Honor was putting on her coat. He didn’t usually speak to her this much. He was still on the table. The nurse hadn’t come yet.
He told us that shamans go on journeys and speak to the dead. They meet the people, the spirits who haunt the sick. This guy said that to become shamans they usually had suffered an illness, or a traumatic injury.
She was winding her scarf around her neck.
Anything like that ever happen to you? he asked.
She kept winding her scarf.
No, she lied.
She stood there for a moment. She could still see the saxophone case. It was black leather and beat-up, with a metal lock that was slightly rusted from the ocean air. The handle was squarish with rounded corners and it fit snugly in a man’s hand. Honor lifted her messenger bag and swung it over her shoulder. She could practically feel the weight of the heavy horn in its leather case.
An autumn sunset, the boats on the river. Joe was standing next to Vivian looking out at the water. They seemed to be drawn together to the water. Her hair blew around in the wind and it looked like someone kept lifting it up and putting it back down. Her eyes squinted into the colors. She was not wearing her sunglasses. Boats rolled by. She told him about Italy and seeing the paintings there that she had always admired in books. He had been to Italy too, once, for a couple of days before his ship had sailed home, but he had not looked much at the paintings. He remembered the sound of the language. The music in the mornings of people talking in the quiet streets. The cups and plates and voices and silver clattering in the cafes.
Joe felt the thrill of talking to someone who had also traveled, who liked music, who felt deeply about places. He could tell that Vivian knew the excitement of waking up in an unknown room, of taking in the emptiness and freedom of a wind-ripped sky at sea. She also loved cities: the stink and beauty and business and nighttime of the city. And she loved music. He
broached the subject of music gently, because he was afraid that they might disagree too much about it and he would be crestfallen, but he was wrong, or right to care, because they shared that too. They both loved the wild sound coming east from the Midwest, and the sultry energy of the music uptown. She did not seem like someone who would understand it; she was elegant and intellectual and intimidating. But he didn’t really seem like he would understand it either. He might have appeared too conventional, too tame. As it turned out she was not too intellectual to feel it and he was not too conventional to understand. They loved the same music in the same way: like they would die without it. Like they could die from it.
She told him about a man, a distant relation on her father’s side, whose family had made cymbals in Turkey. They were an Armenian family and now they made cymbals for the jazz drummers in New York. They had a secret formula for making cymbals that had come from their ancestor, an alchemist in Istanbul in the seventeenth century. Joe laughed and said that he didn’t believe her. She said it was true. She would take him to meet them.
Do you know the secret formula? he asked her.
Yes, she said, but I’ll never tell.
When it was time to go he walked close to her and the backs of their hands brushed. At the subway he offered to ride back to Brooklyn with her, he still had hours before he was going to play, but she said that it wasn’t necessary.
When it was time to say good-bye she looked away.
You never showed me the bookstore, he said.
No, she said. I guess I didn’t.
CHAPTER THREE
Milo came wheeling in wearing bloodstained boots. She wouldn’t have known it was blood but he told her.
Whose boots are they? Honor asked.
A dead man’s, he said. Actually, two dead men. Me, and the guy who saved my life.
Pearl
They were smiling in the picture in the picture frame. It sat on a little table by the sofa. Pearl looked at the smiles and saw herself years younger, her happiness captured like a butterfly pinned and resurrected under glass. Joe was smiling too and his warm eyes stared out at the simple room, the doorway to the kitchen, and her. She felt the warmth of his presence even when he was not home. Just knowing he was around and not sailing across the ocean gave her peace of mind.
She was cleaning the living room although it was not dirty. She had already shopped for groceries and washed his clothes and taken the lamp that had broken in to be fixed and gone to the butcher who was her friend, it was important to make friends with the butcher. She had carried the heavy bags up their street, Featherbed Lane. It was called Featherbed Lane because during the Revolutionary War it had been lined with featherbeds to muffle the sound of marching soldiers. She didn’t know anything about the battle, who had been fighting whom, or what they had been fighting for, but the anecdote gave a sense of history and romance to the otherwise dreary six-story building. It validated her feeling that important things would happen, were happening, for them in this apartment. Her cleaning was a kind of constant readying for this coming event. Her cleaning possessed a nearly spiritual anticipation. She had straightened up the desk in the living room where he studied for his law classes. She had stacked his books. She had put everything in its place.
The picture kept smiling. It had been taken on their wedding day, almost thirteen years ago, in the backyard of her parents’ stucco house in Los Angeles. She had met Joe in the desert. She had met him as the result of an accident. It turned out to have been, for them, a happy accident. And now that she thought about it, her whole life since seemed like a happy accident, a random occurrence. How could she have met her husband, her soul mate, in such an unexpected way if it had not been Fate? It was only a matter of time before the meaning of that fateful event would be revealed to her. She had not always felt certain about things, but she had developed over the years, perhaps out of necessity, a fierce unwavering faith in her marriage and its rightness in the world. The picture kept smiling.
1923
At night, in her tent, Pearl switched on a small electric lamp and opened a letter that she had found in her pocket earlier that evening. She lay on an army cot, not her usual bed, and stretched out her legs. There were a few bugs circling around in the glare of the light and their shadows cast enormous winged demons on the canvas sides of the tent. Pearl was not easily frightened but she would have turned off the lamp to get rid of the insects if it had not been for the letter.
Go away, she said, to the bugs, to the shadows, to the empty tent.
The letter was addressed to “The Wardrobe Girl.” There was no postmark—it had been slipped into her pocket like a reverse theft—and the handwriting was firm and clear, with a slight leftward slant. It was dated June 5, 1923.
Dear Miss Wardrobe Girl,
You probably have no notion of my existence, but I see you every day. And you see me. I am one of the Israelites.
I believe you took some notice of me yesterday when you handed me my loincloth. I have green eyes. Forgive me if I am mistaken. And please forgive my forwardness.
I long to speak to you. Will you meet me outside the gates of the city tomorrow morning at sunrise? I know you must wake up early, as we all do.
With Anticipation and Respect,
Solomon Eckstein
Pearl was eighteen years old and had never been in love. She’d had a sweetheart, a young man from the neighborhood who had an instinctive gift for the piano, but he didn’t support her desire to have a career, and so they had parted ways amicably when he left for college and she went on to finish high school and follow her dream. She felt some sadness about the boy from time to time, when she sat alone in her parents’ yellow kitchen late at night or when she saw a mother and child holding hands and felt a strange shiver of disappointment pressing against her ribs.
Mostly, however, she was too busy with work to think about men, and if she’d really thought about it she would have said that anyway she adored her job. This was accurate, but what she later came to realize was that she had gravitated to the line of work she was in, in large part because it continually held forth the promise of true love.
She walked to the gates at dawn. She passed rows of tents, storerooms, two huge mess tents, and an emergency hospital. Children were heading toward the large school tent. To the north, under a still twinkling sky, trainers and herders were starting their day of tending to more than two thousand animals. The entire city was waking up, and Pearl felt the military purposefulness of people gathered for a common goal. As the last shreds of night were brushed away and a pink light lifted over the desert in waves, she breathed in deeply and stepped under the three-hundred-foot-high gate of the temple of Ramses II.
When she emerged, it occurred to her that she had no idea who she was waiting for. She had tried to remember a face with green eyes, but she had no memory of one. She stood in front of the exterior of the massive gate, which was sculpted with seated Egyptians and large horses and faintly anachronistic-looking wheels. Ahead of her stretched an enormous avenue of sand lined with twenty-four sphinxes. She looked tiny standing before the gate, like a plastic figurine from an aquarium or a dollhouse tossed onto a piece of human-sized furniture. It was cold. The sand began to blow around, covering her shoelaces and collecting in the folds of her socks and skirt and wool coat. She wore a pale blue scarf around her neck and now she took it off and tied it around her head. She felt ridiculous, but after a while she lost herself in the majesty of the double row of sphinxes, and beyond them, the distant unfixable line of the sea.
A man approached her. She didn’t recognize him, but she was not disappointed. He was tall and wide-shouldered, with dark wavy hair. He was squinting against the blowing sand.
Mr. Eckstein? Pearl said.
No, no, he said quickly. I’m his friend. I met him on the train out here. My name is Joe. He held out his hand and they shook hands.
I don’t understand, she said.
Solomon couldn’t come.
He’s been injured. He was helping overnight with the animals and something happened. Something with a horse. He was thrown.
Will he be all right? Pearl asked, finding herself deeply concerned about this man she didn’t remember.
I don’t know.
Pearl followed the stranger, without thinking about it, she later realized, to the emergency hospital. On the way, Joe explained that Solomon had told him at dinner the night before about the letter and the plan to meet in front of the gate, and that when Joe had heard of the accident he thought it was only decent to find her, The Wardrobe Girl, and tell her what had happened. He said all this while rushing through the men’s half of the camp, nervously pulling her by the hand. The men’s and women’s camps were strictly separated because Mr. DeMille wanted absolutely no hanky-panky. There was even what was referred to as a Sex Squad on the location to scour the moonlit beaches at night. Mr. DeMille had seen affairs on set cause too many problems and he could not afford to have anything go wrong. Even the extras knew how far over budget this ambitious and difficult project was going, and rumors flew through the mess tent every night at dinner. It was said that just yesterday Mr. DeMille had been heard screaming into the telephone at one of the producers: “What do you think I’m making? ‘The Five Commandments’?”
Solomon was asleep in the infirmary. Joe told the nurses that Pearl was Mr. Eckstein’s beloved sister and so they let her in; skeptically, however, because Pearl did not look a thing like her brother. Solomon Eckstein was one of 225 Orthodox Jews that DeMille had insisted on casting for his epic. Advertisements had appeared in the daily press and a booth was set up in a vacant lot at the edge of downtown Los Angeles. In grave opposition to his parents’ wishes, Solomon had eagerly applied for the job. He had always dreamt of being in pictures. Even if it meant becoming one of Pharaoh’s slaves. Even if it meant shivering in the windy desert wearing nothing but a loincloth. Even if it meant being sprayed daily with gallons of glycerine to make it appear as if the Israelites were sweating. Each morning he submitted to being stripped and covered from head to foot in special oils which gave him the appearance of being almost black with sunburn.
American Music Page 3