by Rafi Zabor
"How come," the Bear asked Jones, "it used to be that whatever was wrong with my life was the world's fault and now apparently it's mine?"
"Parallax," said Jones. "You're growing up. You're becoming a star."
The Bear leaned into the van's front window and looked up, squinting, at the sky. "The Great Bear," he said.
"Can you see it?" Jones asked him.
"Dim the dashboard lights."
"How about this. . . ." Jones switched off the headhghts. The highway appeared before them, pearled by the waning quarter moon, and then, when their eyes had adjusted, the massive, patient night emerged, high and filled with stars.
"Wow," said the Bear.
"There without you all the time, world without end." Jones switched the headlights back on.
The Bear settled back into his seat and closed his eyes, trying to feel, in the rushing forward motion of his life, the stars that framed his bones, and in his own large body his true geometry of light, the larger peace he knew he lived in but could not entirely find. Why did it have to be such a guessing game? he asked himself, when the truth is right there, when we're made of it? He failed, for the moment, to understand why ignorance should exist at all, why there should not be only complete realization, perfect peace. He recalled the taste of his timeless self from his handful of meetings with it and savored its repose on the other side of strife. O fi-eedom, he thought. O freedom over me. Before I'll be a slave I'll be buried in my grave, and go home to my Lord and be fi-ee. Is that the only way? The grave? I don't buy that. "I've been thinking about archetypes," he confessed to Jones, by way of opening up a conversation.
The Bear Comes Home
53
"Great," Jones replied. "Have a ball but don't get spacey. While you were checking out Ursa Major I saw Orion's Belt. Big fucking hunter, man. Keep one eye on your archetype and the other on your ass."
The Bear pondered a moment. "Point taken," he said, and then, "You mind if I put on the overhead hght? You got some paper? A pencil? Pen?"
"What am I, God the provider?"
"You're not?"
When the Bear got the illumination and his writing materials sorted out, he roughed out a motif or two on paper, saw the way ahead and wrote down the first four bars, then sketched the likely changes in a subscript.
I
E^
;TLl r^r;ik, l >JT1
UT"^ J^-T'
^ m
11
Am FttmV G-7
C7l»9 FMaj7
Bi'i^
#11
Emii AJ',9
Interesting, he thought, taking a step back from it. Not my usual thing at all. An obvious Mingus tip to it, and someone else in there . . . Strayhorn? But what intrigued him was the uncharacteristic harmonic density, as if he were investing some new portion of himself in a study of understructure, girderwork, taproots running down into the dark, when usually he went for a flow of melody and an open chordal field for it to spread in; and even an untrained ear would pick out the tune's emotional ambiguity: it seemed obd-ous the tune was the beginning of a creative response to aspects of his new experience.
On the other paw, maybe he'd better finish writing it before all he was left with was speculation. After a moment's quiet, he pencilled another four bars down:
j7 Ai'7 DbMaj7 A7i'9 DMaj7jll ^^ D^'^IaJ' C^alt.
331
DMaj7
Which made it to the end of the A section. Obviously the tune needed a bridge. He had no idea, not a whisper, not a wisp, of what it might be, and he thought, if that's all I've got we could play it anyway.
Jones leaned over. "You have a name for it?"
"How about," said the Bear, and then wrote across the top of the sheet, "Billy Heart." Hardly enough to repay the debt I owe him, but he'll hke it.
54 Rafi Zabor
The Bear switched off the pinhght and looked out again. Thumbprint moon descending the western sky, first grey reef of dawn rising into sight on the horizon east.
"Still a hundred miles to go," said Jones.
"It figures," said the Bear.
WTiatever Jones' conceptual handle on the Way of Heaven and Orion's size, the Bear decided that the man was right about the way the tour was working out and that his optimism wasn't idiotic. Two nights later at Sweet Basil—the curtain pressed back into service for the front windows of this converted drugstore, an unadvertised xMonday night before a three-day break, then two nights of live recording at the Tin Palace—he looked out at the audience over the top of an original blues he might put on the record and noticed fewer sensation-seekers in the house and maybe more real listeners than usual. There were even a couple of people, journalists most likely, taking notes while he played, although he was obscurely bothered by the plainness of their shoes. It was a shame he felt so unready to record. Not that he was playing badly or that the music wasn't working out, but he wasn't quite ripe yet, and what he and the rhythm section had going was still an incompletely glorified version of a pickup band. They were just beginning to move into something more fully their own, perhaps, and he would rather make a record of that, if it showed, than this incompletely shaped swarm of hope and things he'd practiced.
The Bear had begun to suspect that he had a shot at being an original— something he hadn't really anticipated—but if it was done on schedule the recording would be made a notch too soon. Ornette's comment at the Bottom Line rankled him. He wasn't there yet. He had always held the naive but understandable assumption that once he really got started in music he would have things exactly the way he wanted, but he was learning something new about that artually every day. The world was not holding still so he could take its conceptual snapshot, and there seemed to be no place within the music's ambit immune to the flux of life around it, no privileged spot on which to stand unmoved and stable, and this was what the Bear, in his exile from it, had always conceived a musical life to be.
Odd, wasn't it, how life turned out to be when you got there. Sweet Basil and bitter herbs together.
The Bear played a bittersweet little run reminiscent of Jackie McLean, pressuring the notes slightly flat to underline the point, and realized, as his eyes swept the darkened nightclub and its vague attentive forms again, that there was one spot in the room he had instinctively been avoiding: toward
The Bear Comes Home 55
the rear, almost into the windowporch, at a table partly obscured by a hanging plant, where a small graceful figure sat holding a cigarette, smoke rising in an unbroken blue thread above it like a line of thought. It was a woman, and she looked familiar in the dimness, but every time he began to make her out something distracted his eyes and mind and he looked away.
Suddenly and still without seeing her, he knew that it was Iris. His time faltered, he played an egregiously wrong note and earned an admonitory rimshot from Billy Hart, shook his head, squinted across the room, couldn't identify her, tried to play again, it didn't take, he rubbed at his face and waited for Donelian to play a transition to cover him. The Bear wanted it to be her, the Bear didn't want it to be her, he did he didn't he did. The Bear would go to the insufficient backstage space and forget about it, he would not go to her table, he would he wouldn't he would. The Bear felt himself being bound back onto the gain and loss of the earthly wheel and despite his unfinished love it was not what he wanted. I'm just trying to play some music. Why bother me with larger stuff? He shook his head to clear the insufficient brain within. Ludicrous that anyone, whether actually present or not, should have such power over his heart.
Apparently he had walked across the room to her table. She stood up, smiled, and took his paw as if she had rejoined him after a five-minute absence at a cocktail party. "I knew it was you when I saw the article in the paper," she told him.
"Iris," he said, always a hotshot with the right word at the right time. Her impact on his heart was immediate and overwhelming; he was still bound to her however much fife and time had changed him. In other words, when you got
down to it he was still the original unmodified idiot. "Good God it's you."
"I would have come to see you sooner," she said, with her usual delicacy and poise, in a polite and sociable tone, "but you don't advertise your appearances."
"I'm like that," said the Bear, and wondered what to say next. "Always was."
"I know," Iris said.
56 Rafi Zabor
ciclucilly • as the Bear would reflect later, when he had plenty of time for contemplation, his life had had a refreshing soHdity to it that night after meeting Iris at Sweet Basil's. As he looked through the club at the people enjoying his music and, near the back, at a small table beneath a hanging plant, at the smallish figure of a woman he loved and who possibly loved him, it had seemed to him that the terrible rift that had been driven between him and the rest of the world might finally have been healed, that perhaps he had at last been granted, as if by courier from the king, the imprimatur of reality. He looked at the assortment of friends and lovers in the candlelight and for the first time in his life felt approximately equal to them. Before this, he had always felt either immensely better or immensely worse. Provisionally at least, the burden of comparison had been lifted.
Although something bothered him still. All this instant fulfillment, didn't it make too simple a creature of him? What possible dignity did he have if all it took was for Iris to walk back into his life for him to feel Completed? And wasn't there more than a faintly proprietary air in his attitude towards her, some cheap, possessive, anticipatory lie? And—hey Bear, how come you forgot to ask her? is she still married? Try that one on for size. He watched her from the stage, once he had regained it to finish the set, and tried to remind himself, for all his years of wanting her, that she had her own existence and was probably as subtle and elusive as ever. By the time the band had packed up and Jones and Sybil had driven him to Iris' apartment in the van—she had gone ahead to straighten the place up—the Bear knew she wasn't married anymore, but wasn't sure he really wanted to see her. Oh, of course he wanted to see her, but he didn't know that he wanted his boat rocked this hard just now. Jones pulled the van up outside Stuyvesant Town on East Twentieth. "You know the apartment number?" he asked. "Yup," said the Bear. "And she told you she's divorced."
The Bear nodded. "You want to go ahead and ring me in?" "It's four in the morning. There won't be anyone around. Go 'head." "C'mon Jones," the Bear said. "At least check out the street for me." Jones yawned without covering his mouth. "A bear's gotta do what a bear's gotta do. Me, I'm not getting out of this van until I'm home."
The Bear pulled up his coatcollar and lurched uncomfortably out of the
The Bear Comes Home 57
van, feeling abandoned by his friend and betrayed into the anonymity of the night. The street was empty, but he had the unpleasant feeling that he was being watched. He walked across the black lawn and into the entrance hall, where—a Skinner box, he thought—once he got the buttons figured out and Iris rang him inside, the elevator came up fi-om the basement, and when the aluminum doors rolled open a short sourfaced woman with dyed red hair and a cigarette stuck in her face stood inside holding a blue plastic basket of laundry. The Bear walked in, pushed four and tried to look inconspicuous. He took a quick glance sideways as the doors shut. The woman was looking directly at him. The cigarette smoke rose into her eyes, but she did not bUnk. "Just what are you supposed to be," she asked him.
"Delivery boy," said the Bear. "How'd your wash come out? You get those whiter whites?"
"WTiat are you, some kinda joke?"
"That's it," said the Bear. "I'm some kinda joke."
"Well you don't fool me." She narrowed her eyes to demonstrate how^ difficult she was to fool, slapped at the bank of buttons behind her, and the elevator stopped at the next floor. She got out and turned to face him. "I know exactly what you're thinking," she said.
"These days that's more than I manage," the Bear told her, and tipped his hat good night. You know, he thought as the doors rolled shut and the elevator resumed its upward journey, if I have that effect on all the ladies I'm gonna be fi-esh out of luck tonight.
Iris was waiting when the doors opened on four. She smiled up at him, her face small, bright, and about as perfect as it always had been. "Didn't Jones come up with you?" she asked.
"He thinks I should learn to take care of myself."
"That's not the point," said Iris. She took him by the paw. "This way."
"There was a woman in the elevator on the way up," the Bear explained as Iris led him down the hallway. "With laundry."
"And red hair? Did she squint at you and tell you she could read your mind?"
"She do that to everybody?" asked the Bear.
Iris nodded yes and laughed into her ft-ee hand. "I think coo-coo is the technical term. You thought it was you but you were wrong this time."
"Paranoia," the Bear admitted.
"Vanity," Iris said. "Here we are. I'm afraid the place is a bit of a mess." She let him go in first.
"It's beautiful," said the Bear, spinning around the living room in a kind of domestic ecstasy. "So spacious, so big and bright."
58 Rafi Zabor
"It used to belong to my father. I came back to to^^Ti and took it over when he moved to Florida. It's bigger than I need, but the rent is low."
"You should see the hole Jones and I are Hing in. This is gorgeous."
"You two used to live prett^ well," Iris remembered. "Big stereo, fresh salmon, good champagne ..."
"That was a long time ago," said the Bear, "and a lot of water under the bridge." He refocussed his eyes on Iris. "Your hair used to be red."
"You just noticed that?"
"Iris, the fact is I'm too dazzled to take in much detail just yet."
"You are not," said Iris. "You just don't remember me ver' well."
"I've thought of you, you don't know, I've—"
Iris put out her small hand firmly, hke a traffic cop. "Don't. Just don't."
This produced a pause in which it would have been difficult for the Bear to feel more awkward. Meeting Iris again was Hke walking into a wall of subtlety, a dazzle of gentleness, an immaterial aura he had lost the refinement to see; but it acted on him anyhow. He wanted to live in it but he was not ready. He was insufficiently transformed. So what? He loved her. Wasn't that enough?
"As to my hair," Iris resumed when she judged that sufficient time had passed. "After I left my husband I lived in an unbeatable cottage in winter. I contracted scarlet fever, nearly died of it, and when it was over my hair had gone this dishwater brown, dark blond, whatever it is."
"You're still so lovely," said the Bear.
"I am not. Please don't He to me."
"I have never bed to you," the Bear said firmly enough, it appeared, to finish with the subject for the moment. He had stopped beside a coffee table, looking down. ''Winnie the Pooh}'' he asked, picking up the book. "You leave this out for me?"
Iris blushed and her eyes shone. Her features are so mobile, the Bear remembered, but that's not it. Something subtler comes through her skin, her eyes. A kind of fight. "Oh I uh, I was reading it tonight before going down to the club. Mien I came back I didn't know whether or not to put it away, I put it away twice and finally left it out."
The Bear sat down on the couch and propped his feet on the table. His feet looked enormous. He wiggled his claws. "And do I remind you of Winnie the Pooh?" he asked.
There was still some red in her face, but it was fading. "Of course not," she said. "Don't tease me. Would you like something to drink?"
"A beer if you have one."
"I see your tastes haven't changed. I prepared." Iris went around a corner into the kitchen, and the Bear looked around her living room at the tasteful
The Bear Comes Home 59
but worn furniture, the old stereo and TV, and at her paintings on the walls. He had always liked the way she painted, the general shape of the pictures, her use of color, the emotion that came through.
>
"You can stay the night," came her voice from the kitchen along with the sound of bottles and glasses, "if it's a hassle going home. I made up the extra bedroom."
"Um," said the Bear, and toyed with a heavy glass ashtray on the table. "I don't think so," he added, but too softly for her to hear.
She came back carrying two large glasses of beer. The Bear watched her body moving under her dark green dress."That copy of Winnie the Pooh,'^ Iris was telling him, "was one of the few things I took with me when I left my husband." She handed him one of the beers and sat a certain distance from him down the sofa, letting her shoes fall to the floor and curling her legs beneath her. "I used to read it to the kids." She put her glass on the coffee table and appeared to forget about it completely.
The Bear took a first sip of beer and collected a moustache of froth on the front of his snout. "How come your husband got custody of your children? Don't women usually . . . you know."
"Herb is a well-known psychotherapist and a nearly pathological liar. He diddled the court. He can do anything."
"He convinced a judge you're crazy? That's not possible."
But Iris nodded. "I'm unstable. I'm an unfit mother." Her eyes were very bright, and she had composed her hands in her lap to conceal a slight but irrepressible trembling. "He had colleagues come in and tell lies about me. It was horrible."
"Why did you leave him?"
"I didn't hke him anymore," she said, as though it were a simple thing to marry someone, have two kids with him, then not like him anymore. The Bear, who had never married but believed in lasting relationships, was so unable to come to terms with the casualness of her statement that he failed to recognize it as a way of closing the subject. Iris placed her fingertips lightly on her forehead, as if to steady her mind, but when she resumed speaking her voice retained its usual poise. "When I read the stories to my daughters I told them Pooh was an old friend of mine from New York. Then they only wanted to hear stories about Pooh and me, and never mind the book." She laughed down into her lap. "I started telling them about you, growing up crazy, playing the sax, beating Jones at chess, your family in the old country and here. You became their favorite character, and then, funny thing, they must have picked up on it, they asked me if Pooh was in love with me."