by Jim Crace
But that applause, that darkened stage, the flustered concert host, the sense that at least some in that full, damp audience have battled through a storm to listen to his saxophone, the “live on radio,” make him feel—almost at the moment that his lips close on the reed, almost too late—too playful for Coltrane’s dark and modal meditation. But not too playful for some nursery rhymes. His entry still thrills him, the walk from backstage, playing, out of sight for the first few bars, a distant sobbing animal, the legato opening—the cheek of it—of “Three Blind Mice.” In the key of C. Four slow bars: three notes / three notes / four notes / four notes. Simplicity itself. See how they run. And then he finds the spotlight, his semicircle of sound boxes, microphones, and water bottles, his comfort zone where he can bend his knees, fold his shoulders, lean into the saxophone, and blow. See how they bleed, he says to Brighton with his horn on that appalling night of early snow and wind. Listen to the cutting of the carving knife.
However, as Leonard remembers all too well when those first slow but risky bars fill up the van once more, there is no grand design as yet. There’s certainly no cunning. He is simply taking what he has and stretching it, making phrases from those few root notes, subdued at first, using vibrato sparingly and attacking most notes on pitch, like a beginner. He is not ready to decorate or bend them or embark on any doodling with fillers and motifs. He knows he needs to make it sparse and stable, until he’s settled in. He’s just pub crawling, heading for the next bar, not rushing the notes but waiting to catch them as they pass. Keep it tidy till the sixteenth. That’s the rule. But then, too soon, he makes his first mistake, and has to dare. It is a misjudged voicing that, even as he listens to it now, ten winters on, causes him to shake his head and suck his cheeks, as if to take the notes back from the air.
Yet this is where the concert finds itself. The best of jazz is provisional. It often emerges in panic from an error. He hears himself attempt to rescue the mistake by restating it until the error is validated by repetition and seems to be deliberate and purposeful. He listens to the audience, both the virgins and the devotees, applaud his juicing of the blunder. They’ve all been fooled. They think he has planned every note of it. Do they imagine that he planned the snow, that high gusts from his saxophone have blocked the motorways with trees?
Leonard’s band has not been fooled, of course. They are never far from his thoughts, even as he busks his way toward the final bars of this first tune, if tune it is, even as he syncopates the singing rhyme, cheekily matching every grace note with a note denied. He can sense them laughing as he plays. Trapped inside their car, hard up against their instrument cases and overnight bags, listening to him on the radio, they will not have mistaken his misjudged voicing as anything but wide of the mark, a blaring gaffe. And they will not have missed his nervousness and inhibition, the loss of pitch caused by a tight throat and tense mouth. He knows they will be chuckling as they hear him “digging his way out of jail,” as Bradley, the percussionist, calls it. So he plays for them as well, and even though they cannot comment on a single note, he hears their contributions in some auxiliary chamber of his ear. No improvising jazzman will deny that there is telepathy. Indeed, the group’s most recent release is titled ESP. So Leonard measures every note he plays against each chord—each sweetness or each dissidence—that they might have offered had they been onstage with him. He sends his absent rhythm section clues, invites them to add accents to his saxophone, to harmonize with him, to influence the color of his play. He imagines how a single furry and hypnotic note that he holds for the full length of a bar might be accessorized if there were comrades on the stage. Thus he perseveres, extravagantly, a soloist in imagined company, murmuring, then sharpening his edge, more shaman now than showman—until that eerie modest rodent tune, as familiar as heartbeats, becomes both pulsing anthem and lament.
LEONARD LISTENS AND TAPS his fingers on the steering wheel in half-time, happy with himself, happy now to have been so happy then. He sees Lennie Less—as Francine has so many times recounted seeing him that evening—from the third row of the gallery: the spotlight at the center of the stage, his casual and expensive suit, blue-black, the brass-gold glinting saxophone extemporizing its one-night-only bars. “Did you ever see / Such a sight in your life / As three blind mice?” The van replays it back to him through her.
Francine says she was attracted to him “not quite straightaway—but soon.” Disarmed by music she has not expected to enjoy—she’s come reluctantly, at the last moment, and only to oblige her sister, who’s been given several tickets—and by the flattering stage lights, which make Leonard seem complex and shadowy, she has begun to think of him, despite the grotesqueries of his bulging throat and cheeks, as someone she might like to kiss. And she’s had fun, she says. At times his playing has become knotty, shrill, and edgy, just as she’s feared. On occasions he is more blacksmith than tunesmith. It is witty, though. And it has helped, of course, that she has rushed a few drinks in the pub beforehand and that she, and every other virgin there, has quickly recognized the common language of each tune, the program of nursery rhymes that on an impulse he has decided to play once his “Three Blind Mice” has struck such chords. “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” follows, to more laughter and applause—initially, at least. The less sophisticated and less sober concertgoers, Francine included, have actually sung along with “Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full,” until Leonard’s tenor deprives the singers of their tune and embarks on eight measures of bare but oddly poignant bleats, loosely pitched at first, then joyously unruly.
These are the moments—the blacksmithing, the bleats—that most please and terrify Leonard, the moments of abandonment when he can sense the audience shifting and disbanding. He fancies he can see the flash of watches being checked. Certainly he can see how many in the audience are on the edges of their seats and how many more are slumped, looking at their fingernails or fidgeting. He knows he is offending many pairs of ears. They’ve come for those cool and moodily bluesy countermelodies that have made the quartet celebrated, not for these restless, heated, cranked-up overloads. But still he has to carry on, he has to nag at them, because he won’t be satisfied until he has lost and possibly offended himself. So that night, this night, at Brighton’s Factory, this night of radio and storms, this night of musical soliloquies, is one he cherishes because he has not backed away. The watches and the slumpers spur him on. As soon as he’s dispatched the mice and sheep, he’s taking further liberties, he’s giving Francine and two hundred others in the audience, plus any late-night listeners who’ve not switched off their radios, “Ding, Dong, Bell,” sending pussy down the well into musical deep space with a tumbling crescendo, followed by some risky trickery, not blowing on his saxophone at all but drumming with his fingers on the body and the keys close to the microphone so that it seems a lost and distant cat is scratching frantically at bricks.
However testing this might be, however intractable, no one there can say that Lennie Less does not love or does not suit his instrument, his perfect southpaw tenor, a costly Selmer paid for by Mister Sinister, his unexpectedly successful first collection. From the sardonic extra curve of the crook where the body meets the mouthpiece and the lips to the great flared bell that, depending on the slope and stoop of his back, can just as readily swing priapically between his legs as fit snugly against his abdomen or thigh, this saxophone has become a visceral appendix to the man. Flesh and brass seem unified. It is as if his fingertips and the flat tops of the keys are made from one material, as if breath and metal share substance and weight. So he is mesmerizing. Even for those who are impatient with his gimmickry or antagonized by his excesses or dislocated by his syncopation, there is plenty to wonder at and watch. This man who has come onstage in a dark suit with a shiny patch on the right trouser leg, at pocket level, where the bore and bell of his Selmer have worn the cloth, this man so evidently beset by nervousness that he at first can hardly lift his head to face the audience, this musician who has
opened so carefully and timidly with “Three Blind Mice,” has started to transmogrify—there is no better word—before their eyes. It’s theater. You could be deaf and it would still be theater.
Leonard feels it too. He’s on the tightrope, balancing. It’s technique and abandonment. He is elated, yes, but he is also terrified. Usually when he is stepping in to improvise he can expect to play what he hears: all his daily practices, those hours spent running through arpeggios or exploring patterns, accents, sequences, and articulations in his song repertoire, provide him with a soundscape of tried and tested options; he merely has to choose and follow. He has exhaustively prepared in order to seem daringly unprepared. But here, tonight, he is not playing what he hears; he is hearing what he plays, hearing it for the first time, and only at the moment he—his lips—impart it to his reed. Each note is imminent with failure. But there is no retreat. Nor does he want to find a safer place, “a comfort groove,” as it is called. This is the moment he’s been waiting for, the moment when the wind picks up the kite and lets it soar. Some of the greatest improvisers claim, at rare times such as this, that when the music tumbles out unaided, as it were, it seems as if the notes are physical, fat shapes that dance, or colors pulsing, currents, swirls. For Leonard, because he always taps a foot, playing is more commonly like walking, corporal and muscular, walking tightropes, walking gangplanks, walking over coals, also walking on thin air, on ice, in darkness, on rock, on glass, but always walking blindfolded. Tonight, though, he is walking through a landscape forested in notes toward a clearing sky. The wind is at his back. The path ahead is widening. Statement, repetition, contrast, and return. Another sixteen bars and he’ll be there.
Recognize when you have done enough, he tells himself. Head home. He’s hardly moving now, no showboating. He doesn’t even tap his feet or rock his body. Apart from fingertips just lifting and the bulging of his throat, he is a statue voicing nursery rhymes, the final measure, ding dong bell.
The music’s ended for the moment—but this rare night in Brighton has an unrecorded track, an afternote, a human lollipop. Leonard has finished signing a handful of booklets and programs with a shaking hand, his autograph a mess. Euphoric and consumed, wanting more but not expecting anything except a hotel room, he heads out of the auditorium onto the snow and toward his taxi. A small group of intimate strangers in the mostly deserted lobby smile at him and shake his hand. They call out, “That was beautiful.” And “That was fun.” And “That was truly weird.” All men. All hardcore fans. Then, yes, then Francine speaks to him. She has delayed him at the taxi door. Her hand is on his arm. “Truly valiant,” she says, blowing smoke, still a little tipsy and not quite knowing why she’s chosen the word, a word that even now has resonance for both of them. Leonard sees a woman just a little younger but a good deal shorter than himself, large-featured in a girlish way, her hair unkempt, her red coat still damp from the storm and smelling slightly wintry. “Valiant?” he repeats. “Does that mean rash?” Rash as in reckless? Foolhardy? He hopes it does. “No, I mean valiant,” she says. “You know … valiant, taking risks. Yes, it was pure valiance.” Embarrassed by her loss of eloquence, her tipsy failure to summon the simple word valor when she needs it, she laughs. Such a pealing, mezzo laugh. The evening’s most melodic note, he thinks. And that becomes the start of it, his great romance.
NOW, WITH THE WORST of the country roads and the best of that day’s weather behind him and with fresh suburbs gathering, their snouts pressed up against the fields, Leonard listens to himself again, listens to the music of everybody’s childhood, spontaneously reshaped, listens to the retrieved mistakes that masquerade as wit and bravery, the risk-taking, the nerve, the valiance, almost unaware of traffic, the dimming sky, or the windscreen wipers, and certainly without much thought of Maxim Lermontov. He presses the track button and returns to the beginning of the broadcast. “In an unexpected adjustment …” And then again. And then again. Announcements and applause, with Francine in the audience—but that was then—admiring him.
3
BY THE TIME LEONARD has been navved to Alderbeech and parked the van outside the makeshift village of personnel buses, television trucks, portable lavatories, and police catering units on designated waste ground near the hostage street and the inevitable crowd of spectators, the gunman in the mask has been identified, or almost. He is, the radio announcer misinforms, “Maxie Lemon, a U.S. national.” Renamed, he sounds more like an end-of-pier comedian than a criminal or a terrorist. He has, they say, two accomplices, of whom no details are available, though one is possibly a female. Leonard wonders briefly if she might also be somebody he could identify but will not. He is at first a little disappointed that Maxie has been named already—but above all he is relieved. His knowledge hardly matters anymore. No decision that he takes will make a difference. When has it ever? If he chooses, he can stay dry—it is still raining despite the assurances of that morning’s forecast; the pavements are slippery with leaves—and drive home straightaway, with an almost easy conscience. He has not betrayed his Texan, despite his greater duty. He should feel more pleased than he does. He calls up Francine on the van’s speakerphone, but her handset is turned off. He can picture her in class, sitting with the children at her feet, singing nursery rhymes, her voice unburdening. Three blind mice. He hesitates for a moment when her answer service picks up his call. He wants to say that he has lied to her, and then explain it all. But it would take too long. Instead, he records, “It’s Leonard. Soaking day. I’ll be home before you are. Give yourself a hug.”
He needs a break from driving, though, and he is keen to get closer to events, to step into the news, to be at least an eyewitness. How can he come this far and not commit those extra meters? That would be perverse. He has not brought wet-weather wear, although there is a beach cap in the glove compartment: yellow linen with the logo QUEUE HERE across its peak. He turns up his collar, pulls the cap low, protecting his thin hair, and walks across the waste ground toward the street. It is a windy day as well as wet. The best of it is sorbus leaves, brick-red and orange, snapping free with every gust. The worst of it is beating rain. That morning’s blue has been misleading. It has been mischleading. He says the word out loud. Then, “Soaking day. Hugs, hugs …” He’s talking nonsense to himself. He’s walking through the wasteland mud in his beach cap, unprepared for anything but summer, and talking to himself.
Leonard has imagined on the journey down that he will be able to walk past the house as closely and as innocently as someone exercising a dog, that he will stand outside and stare into the rooms. And then, will Maxie Lemon / Lermon / Lermontov be peering out, behind his mask and E-clips, and see him there? The female too. He dreams up recognition on that veiled face, an eyebrow lifting possibly, a hand half raised, a gun held out at shoulder height and pointed playfully at Leonard in the street. Kapow. You’re scathed. Kapow. You’re dead! But of course the streets around the hostage house are sealed and Leonard must, like everybody else, like all the curious and nosy, find a place behind a barrier and try to glimpse—beyond the fire engines and ambulances, beyond the little group of armed officers in flak jackets and armor coats, beyond the row of freshly naked rowan trees (no alder here, or beech), the cars, the city furniture—a skinny view of the house’s gable and its chimney pots, little more than silhouettes on this dusklike morning. When Leonard arrives, the know-alls in the crowd are pointing at an upper window where a landing light has been turned on and there is a shadow, briefly. Everybody watches for a while, until a helicopter catches their attention, and then a running man in uniform (but running only to escape the rain), and then some other movement at the curtains in another room.
It’s tedious to stand and stare. Such scenes-of-crime are always more dramatic on a telescreen, when they’re well framed and mediated by a journalist. Here there’s very little to observe, and nothing to experience except the waiting. Leonard checks the time. It’s almost noon. He’ll stay till noon, six minutes more, and the
n decide on how to waste the afternoon. But finally and just in time there is a fresh development. Not in the street but on the television news, of course. Leonard’s neighbor at the barrier unfolds the screen and turns up the volume on his palm set for a headline summary. Maxie Lemon was identified, it claims, by an “estranged British relative. No more details at this time.”