The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  "Yeah, how is Tim?"

  "Stunned he didn't lose his job or get busted. Says he sits at home in his armchair expecting the ceiling to fall in on him and after awhile when it doesn't he starts to smile. And his wife won't need the operation."

  "Happy ever after," said the Bear. "Friedmann says he's okay too."

  "So what's with the record, B? You should do it, you know."

  "I know, but I feel like I've lost the thread. What's BFD stand for?" asked the Bear. "Big Fucking Deal?"

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  "I think it's something Danish. This is a good deal, Bear. Krieger says you can use pretty much anyone you want on the date."

  "Sigbjorn Krieger? Mr. BFD? You talked with him?"

  "The famous Danish control freak himself. And it wasn't a bad meeting."

  "I like the way his records sound. What does he mean anyone?"

  "He suggested Jack Dejohnette on drums."

  "Uh-uh," said the Bear, recoiling. "I'm afraid of that guy. You ever notice how he always sounds better than anyone he plays with? I can't afford that at this stage of my," he gave a plosive little laugh, "career. Besides, I already have this good thing going with Billy. Is Billy available?"

  Jones nodded yes. "Piano?"

  "Monk's dead," said the Bear, "so I'd have to think about it. Mingus gone too. There goes the bass chair."

  "Krieger suggested Charlie Haden."

  "You're kidding. I could play with Charhe Haden? I'd do anything to play with Charlie Haden."

  "Even make a record?" Jones asked, looking clever, and raised some papers in the air.

  "If I have to. Is there anything I have to sign about selling them the old one.''

  "Hey, if your writing paw's still shaky a print'll do. The Bear, his mark. We do the blood contract later."

  "You know what I do want to do," said the Bear. "I want to do some press. I think that's the only way to go ahead without getting busted again. I've come to feel that in the last analysis the only way I ever really got hurt was by trying to protect myself."

  "Didn't I always tell you that? Didn't I tell you that years ago?"

  "Did you?" The Bear sort of remembered something of the sort, but it was unclear and compromised by ancillary circumstance, and anyway he thought it was bad form of Jones to bring it up just now.

  "Sure I did," Jones persisted. "I always told you you should go open, but noo, you hadda deal with it your way, you had to be secretive about everything because it was more subversive. WTiereas I always felt that was exactly the way to create the very dangers you were afraid of."

  "What I remember mostly about what you said is how much money we were gonna make if we opened widescreen. I remember that and how the risk was completely mine."

  "Aw, foo-foo. You always think everything's completely yours."

  "Thank you for sharing that with me. In any case I think it would be wise to go public now. Radical trust and the open road is the way ahead."

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  Jones tried to look impressed. "Well, that's new," he told the Bear.

  "That is new," Iris agreed.

  The Bear saw that both of them had raised their eyebrows, making it four raised eyebrows in all.

  "Let me get this straight," said the Bear. "Y'all think it's new."

  "You really want to do this big," said Jones, "I could probly get you on Letterman in a week."

  "Whoa hey wait a minute. Can't we keep this jazz-size, you know, next to invisible, I think the key word here is small?"

  "So what you want? Village Voice^ Down Beat} You want to go daylight maybe you should think about the Times^

  "I could do a couple of interviews," the Bear allowed. He felt himself starting to sweat beneath his fur. It never ends, does it. What a piece of work I am. "The Times is possible."

  "Well cool, daddy-o. Here's the one you got to sign." Jones proffered a single piece of paper. "Power of attorney, though don't worry, I won't do anything large without you."

  "Can we change the album title back?"

  "It might be negotiable. They're not gonna like it."

  "What's that clause down there at the bottom of the contract?" the Bear asked Jones, trying to make friends.

  Jones picked up on it, gave a little smile. "That's in case you go crazy on us. That's the sanity clause."

  "You no foola me," said the Bear, and Jones indicated with a nod that he should finish the line on his own. "There ain't no Sanity Clause."

  Iris looked at the Bear, then at Jones, then back at the Bear, and muttered something mostly inaudible about "boys."

  "When can you let me know about whether you want to make a new record for BFD?" Jones asked. "Keep in mind that without it, they may not do the deal on the old one."

  "Would that be so bad?"

  Jones shrugged. "If trust is the way ahead . . ."

  "Despite the inexistence of the sanity clause," the Bear promised him, "I'll really really think it over. I'll do my level best." If I can figure out where level is, he thought.

  "How could you be so awful to him?" Iris asked once Jones had gone. "I thought we were over that. Is it still Torment-a-Bear week?" "You were horrible." "Ursus horribilis. I admit it. Can we let it go?"

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  "As long as you know how bad you were."

  "Okay okay, I confess. Look, you wanna see my impression of a bearskin rug?" The Bear jumped up from his chair and beUied himself down onto the living room carpet. He splayed his limbs out, exhaled and propped his jaws open. "Howzat?" he asked, and let his tongue loll out and his eyes roll back.

  Iris tried not to laugh. "And the only reason you're upset with me^'' she said, "is that I won't be a good girl and get into bed with you."

  "Wow, it's in the open," he said from his difficult position.

  "It always was," Iris said.

  "Well, it would be a nice gesture, wouldn't it?" asked the Bear, turning onto his side, leaning his head on his paw and batting his eyes in her general direction.

  "It's not happening," Iris said firmly. "And you didn't ask Jones if you could move back to the apartment."

  "We got distracted. I forgot."

  "Call him tomorrow and ask."

  The Bear got up from the floor and brushed his fur down. "You're a princess on top of a steep glass mountain, aren't you?" he said. "I must perform some appropriate heroic task or other. Have I got it right?"

  Iris tried not to smile. "You're so inexperienced," she said.

  "Try to think of me as an elderly adolescent."

  "Well, wise up," she advised him.

  "How?" the Bear wanted to know.

  "I'm going to bed. Maybe for once you could do the dishes. Use steel wool on the roasting pan and the long-handled brush on the plates and the glasses. If you come into my room I'll shoot you. Good night." She turned on her heel and split.

  The Bear stood there in the living room thinking, Wuh? Huh? Didn't that happen kinda fast and how much did I actually lose in the exchange?

  Later, though, lying in his narrow bed alone with an unread book sprawled open on his belly, it all seemed different to him. He remembered how easily he had thought of losing the deHcate beauty bit and seeing if maybe Sybil was available for fucking, and in retrospect this made him seem completely monstrous to himself. His heart was dark, a portable beating prison.

  After awhile his mind wandered, though, and he allowed himself to think of Iris sleeping. She was probably asleep by now. Once or twice after dinner that week she had fallen asleep on her living-room sofa, lying on her back with her head propped on the armrest, and the Bear had sat himself down on the edge of the coffee table to watch her breathe and dream, her eyes moving

  I

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  left to right behind their hds. The Bear had seen a few other humans sleeping—Jones looking like he'd been poleaxed, and a few women he'd had sex with who had tumbled into sleep afterward and left a residue of shipwrecked body behind—but he had ne
ver seen anything hke Iris. When she slept, all her habitual tension let go of her, her face relaxed and looked more pure and simple, and everything in her, especially her unprotected throat and face, urged the eye upward: it was not hard to see which way her soul had flown: right out of her, and had left behind an expression on her face of sweet release and perfect trust. She was never more purely beautiful than when she slept. No, that's not it either—she's more radiant and complex when awake, but watching her asleep the Bear understood why people in love felt the irresistible urge to say I'll love you forever, I've already loved you forever, even if they partly know themselves unequal to the task in the chaptering, sequential world. One moment of authentic love, screw it up how you may later on, opens a holy window onto something outside of breathing thumping time that you cannot completely deny, ever, no matter what infelicity or farce succeeds it later on. But because, when the true-blue moment comes, you can't recognize it for what it is, you say something in additive language about forever. As if an additive forever had anything to do with it. It's about the perception of eternity, for all the quotidian ticking of your mortal form. In this respect, it seemed to him, nothing is so privileged as love.

  In this way, the Bear had sat over her sleep a few times, feeling like a large dark planet revolving around the delicacy of her light, spun through the elliptical orbits of longing and gazing down through the vertiginous gulf between their species. He'd felt just about broken in two by the gap between his clumsy yearning and the elegance of her perfect formal achievement. Even so, whether in thrall or on guard, whether obeying his heart or the laws of some other subtle physics, he had felt large and dedicated and patient and slow.

  If this ain't love, it's the best a poor dumb bear can do.

  He would look at the complex cablework, as revealed by her head thrown back, that underwrote the classic thrust of her chin and jaw, and would admire the interweave of tendon and breath, see the pulses beating there, and loving this dreaming face and the spirit it had for the moment set free from its confines, he would surrender to the beauty of the construction and what it might imply about the uncreated, the more than merely built. He would stand guard forever, if need be, over that flown and precious soul, and the breathing house it lived in, to make sure that no harsh or harmful thing might intrude and disturb its being. I will protect her, above all if need be, from myself. Maybe he was no more than a random beast on watch, stunned

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  by the higher music her beauty set loose in him. Maybe that was all there was to it. And that might be enough.

  She's right: wise up.

  I wish I were more fit for this music than I am.

  His heavy bearshaped form had never felt so preposterous to him. There was nothing to be done with this situation. Nothing that he could see at all.

  Iris lay in her bed feeling a particularly satisfactory warmth spreading from her flat little belly into her extremities. It felt so good to have the Bear here in her apartment sufficiently tamed, so that she could control the pace of things. It felt almost as if she had walked into the ocean—Iris did not swim— and had laid her hand on the mane of a cresting wave and calmed its ocean-rolling potency momentarily into the sway of her command. If he were to come into the room right now, she would almost certainly be unable to resist him. She would surrender herself to every annihilation, offer herself to be burned up by whatever experience came, even if, as was likely, it would also be sordid and inappropriate and they would both have to pay for it later on. But the knowledge that, actually, he would not come into her room tonight made her strong. It was as if she commanded some large portion of the unmeasured force of nature right here in the rectilinear privacy of her home. It was as if she could lay her hand on that wave's foaming mane and muster its power to her own purpose. She let the warmth of this power thicken the too-thin muscles of her limbs. It felt good. It might strengthen her yet. What would happen to her if she went into his room?

  Absolutely not. Absolutely not tonight.

  In this state it was possible to feel lifted into sleep, as if by a wave, when usually she collapsed into it stricken and seeking refuge. Oh yes, she thought, it was a lovely night.

  if was almost noon and the Bear was looking out of Iris' living-room window, waiting for the van to come. He could see a bit of the housing project's interior roadway from where he sat. A lot of busy squirrels down there, and

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  people walking their dogs. It seemed to him that the dogs had more interested, curious and intelligent expressions on their faces than the people they led around on a leash, but maybe he was prejudiced in this regard.

  The Bear belched. He had downed a salad bowl of black coffee and eight bagels for breakfast and his stomach felt kind of acid. Could be a problem later on. Case of the runs coming on in the studio. He hoped not but it was possible.

  He had never gotten it straight whether this was Stuyvesant Town or Peter Cooper Village but it came to the same thing: a housing project built for the postwar middle class, set alongside the East River in the East Twenties, tall redbrick buildings angled a fair distance from each other across green triangulating lawns and walkways, strategically augmented by emplacements of trees and shrubs. What were probably the fattest, safest squirrels in the city were making a big fuss about walking around on all that geometric grass, wagging their plumy officious tails and chattering at each other the way they do. A lot of nickery chitter-chatter under the new leaves in the hazy lemon light. Yeah, city. Yeah, your life on earth. The Bear sank beneath the surface of words and mused on nothing, occasionally coming out with a sigh, for about the next ten minutes.

  Iris had come home from work last night happy and singing to herself. La la la, tra la. After hanging her coat up in the entrance-hall closet she had danced, her arms raised high, right into his arms and then out of them before he'd had a chance to embrace her, then had kept a careftil distance from him for the rest of the night. "I don't feel like cooking tonight, honey, so do you mind if I phone out for Hunan Chinese?" She'd casually called him honey, then gone on with all that tra la la, tra la. She'd had such a glow on, and so bright a smile that he'd thought she might be laughing at him. Either that or she was getting laid at work. "Aren't I allowed to feel happy for a change?" she'd asked him when he'd looked bothered. "Is that a problem for you, and if so, can a woman ask you why?" He'd felt so bulky and inept. Iris radiant in her living room, vibrating hke a compass needle that always pointed true, and him so dark and shuttered and possessive.

  What finally roused him from the dull penny of these musings was an irritated chitter-chatter coming at him from somewhere nearby.

  He raised and focussed his eyes to find a squirrel sitting up on its hindlegs watching him from a joint of branch and trunk. Hey, you made it this far up, thought the Bear. Let's hear it for your sense of enterprise. The Bear waved hello and the squirrel nickered at him again, shook its angry tail and advanced toward him along the branch, the bark still black from an early morning shower. The squirrel bared his foreteeth at him and raised up on its

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  hindlegs again in a posture of threat. Wow, thought the Bear, the territorial imperative at work. Just look at it go.

  The Bear didn't want to humiHate the Uttle guy but he couldn't help it, he had to laugh. "All right, I give up," he told the squirrel finally, raised his paws in mock surrender, got up from his chair and backed away from the window.

  The squirrel chittered at him again to make sure, then walked back along the branch gesturing rhythmically with its tail and showing the Bear its button of an asshole, contemptuous.

  The Bear had to laugh again. WTiat a way to put a world together.

  Rising from the chair, he decided to take a tour of Iris' apartment. He cast a sidewise eye at his saxophone case standing on end beside the armchair. No, his axe was cool, and all the necessary sheet music was tucked inside the case. He was ready. He was ready to go, although in fact the
urge to run away from eventing was prominent in his mind. Of course the trouble with running away from everiJiing was that everything, by definition, could not successfully be run away from. It wasn't only the pressure of the recording session that was getting to him though. It was the concourse of ongoing events, including his love or desire for Iris, and all the tributary circumstances that were subtly and imddiously conspiring him back into selecting a single life from the world of infinite options. It was the command aspect of the manifest order that troubled him: if you become this, you cannot become that. It was, as usual, having to be here at all, and the sheaf of laws that came with the package. He knew why he was here. He was here for love, but the consequences were a pain.

  He began his ramble through the rooms.

  Nothing much happening in the kitchen, and the smell of coffee fading on the air. Should he chow down some leftovers? No. In the bathroom, order prevailed and he had done a good job for once, though time would tell, sw^ab-bing up the fur after his shower.

  Surveying his own small square bedroom and its single bed, he nodded approval at the near neatness he had left behind, the bedspread smoothed, a few signs of life and inquin^ in the interlocutory^ bookmarks sticking out of the stack of books.

  He'd been avoiding Iris' room but finally he went in.

  Her room was full of the fine clean smell of her, and she'd left the bed unmade, its topsheet and blankets pulled diagonally back. He breathed her in through his quivering nose a few times but did not thrust his muzzle into the bedding. A faint indentation lay on the pillow where her head had been. A couple of small black lacy diaphanous items were strewn on the floor just inside the sliding doors of her walk-in closet but he wasn't tempted.

  r

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  Oh yeah, then why bring it up?

  Back in place at the window, he checked the view for King Squirrel and when he didn't find him sat in the armchair again. In about a minute he saw the van arrive in the small patch of interior roadway available to view—Jones' aim was true. It braked to a halt and the headlights flashed on and off, as in a spy movie. He could just make out Jones in a peacoat and watchcap behind the tree reflections on the windshield. The Bear stood up and waved, and Jones flashed the headlights back to acknowledge. Time to go.