The Bear Comes Home

by Rafi Zabor

  472 Rafi Zabor

  And then the strangest thing happened. Iris' face went bright red, her hand flew to her mouth, and her body began to hoop, to jacknife over, and the Bear's first impression was that she was about to projectile-vomit at his mention of hope, but what happened instead was nearly as bad: she began to laugh.

  "That's it," he told her, "laugh at me. Thank you very much."

  She shook her head furiously but continued laughing, bent into her hand, her body convulsing and her right foot stamping on the floor. "Oh my God," she managed to say before fresh gusts convulsed her.

  "Yes," said the Bear. "That's what I get for expressing something as unrealistic as hope when I should have learned from your treatment of me that there was none. Well, I'll be out of your hair in a few minutes. Jones should be coming up the hill soon and we'll get in the car and ..."

  Iris, her hand still cupped to catch her laughter, shook her head from side to side. "I just realized," she managed to say between gasps, "just realized what I said ..."

  "Well yes perhaps we've both said too much. Don't worry. I'll be out of your hair in a minute, and your life after that."

  This statement only served to render Iris more helplessly hysterical. ". . . what I said when I came in and saw you there. Someone's been sleeping in my bed ..." And off she went into fresh convulsions at the thought of it.

  "Yes, and much as I like to be insulted and laughed at," the Bear told her, "it seems to me . . ."

  "Oh you poor dope," she called him between spasms of laughter. "Don't you—"

  "Thank you very much. I need a breath of air. Can I get by?"

  Iris, still seized by laughter, pulled herself aside, and he went through the bedroom doorway.

  Past her probably for the last time.

  Leave 'em laughing when you go. My policy always.

  Went through the living room, slid the glass door open and stepped out into the air of the world, which had sweetened since earlier that morning; hint of new wine in the breeze, spring around the bend. So why do I feel like pulling a blanket of earth over my head and sleeping like the dead for another season? The Bear stretched his arms aloft for greater inbreath, reconnoitered a moment and started up the path that led away from the house along the base of the slope, kicking idly through twigs and leafrneal.

  Feeling the touch of someone's regard, he looked back over his shoulder to see fair-haired Amy framed in the shding glass doors, dressed in white, posed like an emanation of hope: she might almost have raised her hand to

  The Bear Comes Home 473

  wave to him but it was hard to see her through the reflections on the glass. The Bear walked on.

  Shortly he came to the clearing in which he remembered having a particularly fruitless talk about gardens with Jones. He began to pace its perimeter in the rough circle it allowed, head down, kak medved.

  He and Iris had almost achieved conversation, he thought, before shearing off into nullity and hysteria. Wonder how soon Jones'll be here so I can go. WTiat a sight the sky was last night, superabundant being without the least possibility of loss, the most ultimate, convincing vista he had ever been witness to. And what a sight I am pacing the limits of my old circle now.

  How can I possibly buy this smallbrained dichotomizing razzmatazz? It should be possible for a bear of any brain to hammer out a better working relationship between the poles of spirit and the manifest order than this.

  Then of course there was always the possibility that he was misunderstanding everything.

  Naah.

  He thought of all the changes he had lived through since he'd stumbled lit by vision down Second Avenue to the Tin Palace to play. Certainly he had grown in experience and understanding since then. He might even be a shade or tw^o wiser—but with so little material result! and the stone so incompletely rolled from the mouth of the cave. Why should ignorance and coarseness always drag us down and render our efforts null?

  Despite the dimness and confusion of the moment's current blink of sight, he felt a parallel consciousness working in him: gratitude to the past, gratitude to the present as an instance of available grace, and as to the future, how could it be less blessed than what had come before? How could he waste his time on regret?

  He regretted everything.

  The way was clear: ahead, behind, and where he stood.

  The way was muddied: he saw nothing in all directions, he was walking in a circle. Rumors of an upward spiral were just that: rumors.

  A fluttering in a nearby tree did not distract him from his brooding.

  One thing, this side of the sky or that, he told himself, I won't give up on love, however imperfectly I may have felt the thing. I refuse this crimp, this crink. I deny this cheap constriction any final say on the sight of things, this sky-above-mud-below dichotomizing dumbhead fracture of the realms of experience, this lucky-in-music-unlucky-in-love routine: I won't have it. I do not accept. I won't give up on love no matter what mess the two of us have made of it.

  474 Rafi Zabor

  "Nee-dn" came a two-note call from a branch a short distance up the hill.

  "Damn right I needn't," said the Bear, although, although ... he hated to admit it, but he knew . . . that when things had begun their still delicious decline between himself and Iris, his choice to make love to her every night—to frick her, call it that—instead of only when the spirit spoke, had been an attempt to bUss her into complicity and submission. Had been a selfish attempt to hold on to what was already being lost. He had employed unskillful means. And here's the payback.

  "Nee-dn" sang a silver voice from a tree.

  "Needn't ivhat?'' the Bear roared in anguish. "Needn't love? Needn't strive? Needn't worry how it works out? Needn't bleed? Needn't sweat the details because loss is illusion and love is universal and unHmited? I know that, but meanwhile I have time to pass down here and it's not working."

  "Nee-dn't."

  The Bear looked up, saw the grey bird fluttering to a higher perch affrighted by the violence of his roar, and for the first time realized who'd been tweeting at him. "Oh it's you," he said. "Back from Florida already? Is it really spring? How come I still feel like sleeping the world away?"

  "Nef-dn't." The catbird worked its beak against the branch and seemed to nod at the Bear. "iVee-dn't," it sang again, and bobbed its tail up and down, quite perky.

  "Easy for you to say. And where's the rest of the tune? That all you remember?"

  The catbird regarded him with fresh attention, tailfeathers ticking the air with what might have been time, head canted, dark round eyes expectant, alert.

  "All right alreadV the Bear conceded. He wetted his leathery Ups, pursed his snout and whistled the first bars of the tune.

  ^

  ^

  ^s

  b i j^^ r ^^ 1^

  He waited, but the bird was waiting too. The Bear performed the phrase again. "Your turn," he said, adamantine, all teacher, and folded his heavy arms across his chest.

  His student showed the usual stage tremor and reflex reluctance, twitching a wing out of place and back into tuck for diversion, but then opened its beak a crack, worked its throat and sang forth—the Bear loved to see the movement

  The Bear Comes Home 475

  of its throat. The song began well with four of Monk's true notes but got lost in the middle: the bird inserted a scribble of redwing song and dropped a beat before finishing with a clarion nee-dn it obviously hoped might pass.

  "Faker," said the Bear.

  "Nee-dn't," the bird insisted, with all the overmelodious fruitiness of a bluff. The Bear had used similar dodges himself. He had even tried it once or tuice last night.

  "Let me get this straight," said the Bear. "You've been down there the whole damn winter in Miami Beach or wherever without working even once on your Monk charts. If you think you 72ee-dn practice you're wrong. You ?2eed to practice a lot. You didn't do a lick of work, did you. I can hear it. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. The Bear se
es all."

  "A/ef-dn't," the bird insisted, and attempted to eye the Bear down.

  "Bullshit," said the Bear. "Everybody's got to practice. You can't get away from it."

  "N(?e," sang the catbird, but the Bear didn't let it finish.

  "Look," he said philosophically, "if you work the tune out, learn a couple others and mate, you might pass it on to your descendants, and a few generations down the pike where the fack will they be? I'm speaking to you from my own blind alley here, okay?"

  "N(?f-dn't," sang the bird.

  "You're right. It's a mistake to be that determinist about the prospects. No doubt your offspring will have better luck. I had an amazing night but it's been a difficult day." The Bear resumed walking in a tight argumentative circle, and readdressed his central fary to himself. "Maybe the whole enterprise of loving Iris was assimilationist weakness and a fallacy from the start. Maybe I should have been happier with my original lot. Maybe trying to enlarge my world was a mistake."

  "Ni?e-dn't," the bird affirmed.

  "Oh what the fiick do you know about it?" he asked the catbird. "Could you enumerate her beauties? Grasp the sum that overtops all addition of her parts? The dreams of angels outside time would be confounded into song by her, birdbrain, much less anything fools like you or I could come up with."

  "Nee-dn't" sang the bird.

  "Needn't pile metaphysics atop what is after all a pretty simple appetite? What a bunch of crap that is. You sound pretty sure of yourself, but how much of the world have you experienced really?"

  "iV>f-dn't," sang the bird again.

  "The more you travel the less you know? The old Taoist party line? I only ever bought that in an abstract sense. Practically speaking it doesn't play."

  47^ Rafi Zabor

  "Nee-dn" sang the bird again.

  "It's boring but at least it beats the shit out of Nevermore," the Bear allowed. "How is it possible," he asked in a calmer voice, "that I've seen so much and trust so little? Can you tell me that?"

  "Nee-dn't."

  "Needn't tell me? Needn't trust? Needn't ask? Needn't for fuck's sake what?'' The Bear looked around him, woke briefly to the encircHng scene: the earth beneath him, patient pines, bare deciduous trees praying their way nearer leafdom as the sun inclined, and just look at my bare branches. Why am I having this idiotic conversation with a bird that is only repeating a couple of notes it less than learned from me? What a pathetic fallacy. For the first time he noticed the massive grey nearly bihemispheric boulder at the clearing's edge that had once reminded him so vividly of a brain.

  And maybe it was a sort of brain.

  He attuned himself as best he could to the infinitesimal pace of its cold deliberate mineral cognition. Lichen climbed its sides, and star moss, already refreshed into edges of brilHance by the changing weather and the incHning sun, gathered at its base greedy with what it no doubt took for an unprecedented radiance of green, something the world had never seen before. Egoism identically stupid on all levels everywhere. Phantasmal all my scalar attainments.

  Had Jones come uphill yet, his mortal body warmed by one more breakfast?

  Tick tock clock. Another day.

  The fatuity of individuation generally.

  Its incomparable beauty.

  How reconcile? How make sense?

  "N^e-dn't."

  "Oh fuck off. Stop impersonating the voice of wisdom." On the other paw, who was to say what was speaking through the catbird's limited voice? God had all the voices, except one's own. Unless you're obliterated and indistinguishable, as he'd been last night. Look at the dumb duaUsm he was mired in now. So quick. Pure stupidity, utter mindblock. It was a simple problem really, and the real solution perfectly obvious.

  Whatever. The Bear was tired. Whatever's right.

  He would go back to the house after awhile. He would manage, if not now then eventually, to talk with Iris outside the dominion of their blind opposed compulsions. If he had to wait for Aim and Trace to go off to college, that would be okay. That was the kind of Bear he was. Dumb but willing. Earnest to the end. Life has found me out. This is who I am.

  The Bear Comes Home 477

  'Wff-dn't," sang the bird, then made a new attempt at the whole two-bar statement.

  "Better," said the Bear, "though you're still trying to fake your way through the middle."

  And so was he. For all last night's glory, he was not an example of spiritual victor}^ He had bifurcated and botched it. What good were big visions if you spoiled everything that came your way by what you made of it? if you had the big Hollywood moments but breath by breath lived your life like a dog?

  The Bear had not arrived where he had hoped to arrive.

  "N(p^-dn't," sang the bird, returning to its known, too simple certainty.

  "I suppose you're right but I'm tired anyway," said the Bear.

  To that large grey rock, thought the Bear, and the longdrawn processes of its mineral cogitation, the interchange of day and night was no more than the flickering of a film. Even less. To the rock, day and night were imperceptible in themselves, for all their vital gestures and chambered drama. Probably Bach knew this better than anyone else doing music: the law, excluding no beauty or intellection along the way, proceeding in ordered fashion without stopping or special cry. But the rock didn't know much about beaut}^. To the rock, the eyeblink rise and fall of walking lives, the barely more persistent flickering into leaf then back down to dust of trees, were all hysterical illusory gestures of self-assertion quickly gone.

  Under eternity's eye, as he'd seen through it last night, the stone itself was only another bhp, its persistence illusory, its substance insubstantial.

  Down here in the passing world of the Bear's life, the rock of fact was still obdurate and immovable, however, and circumstances solid. There were conditions to deal with, this side of the sky. Down here the Bear was still the Bear, Iris still Iris, and any essential movement between them difficult in the extreme. Spiritual vision offered to ameliorate the difficulties but only served to confuse the issue.

  For instance, at the moment his attempt to think clearly was clouded by a wish made visible posing as psychic second sight: in his mind's eye he saw Iris leave the house by the glass doors and start up the path toward him. If the Bear beUeved that his psychic faculties 1) still worked, and 2) signified anything, then he might put some faith in the sight of Iris coming his way, her finelined features rounded by excess of merriment, but he knew it for the wishful hallucination it was.

  If we could see things with the eye appropriate to each world in which they had their being and know false invariably from true, we might get somewhere. We might even begin to swing. But as things stand . . . pphhht, it's a wash.

  478 Rafi Zabor

  His mind's eye continued watching Iris come up the path but he didn't give it any credit, because to think that Iris was really on her way to him would be to believe that grace had significant consequence not just in the spirit but down here on the ground, and fi*om long habit and fi-equent rehearsal he doubted it.

  He saw her brush a dark green branch of pine with her shoulder as she came: more psychic flimflam, another hustie.

  In another few minutes he'd go back to the house and see what the true day would put on show. But in the meantime he'd have what passed for a think, beneath these passing trees, provisional skies.

  "N^^-dn't." Another catcall from the catbird seat.

  What do you know about it? he asked the bird, in what passed for his mind. Budge that brute rock with your bit of misremembered, half-accomplished song. That's what I've tried to do all my life, and look where it's gotten me. The famihar weary round. Budge that.

  The Bear walked up to the rock and sat himself down.

  Iris swept into the clearing still laughing, her arms open wide, and fairly skipped across the intervening distance to embrace him.

  aclt noii>leclg tnc tils

  1 am indebted to the generosity of the musicians who have allowed them
selves to be represented in this book: Lester Bowie, the late Steve McCall, Arthur Blythe, Roscoe Mitchell, Joseph Jarman, Malachi Favors, Don Moye, Ornette Coleman, Billy Hart, Armen Donehan, and CharHe Haden. Similar thanks to non-musicians Bob Cummins and Stanlyn Daugherty. Julius Hemphill hovers but never appears; neither does he die: were it so.

  The book owes a large debt of gratitude to Peter Giron (bass, Paris and Bordeaux) for his road stories and buffalo shows; for providing/confirming the book's harmonic content; and for the use of his tune "Billy's Heart," slightly retitled. Wayne Reiss (piano, Brooklyn) worked out the changes of "Book the Hook." Bruce Jackson (drums. New Jersey) confirmed Giron's road stories, lent the Lead Sled and only one one-liner; but Jackson is one of the funniest jazz people alive, and I have learned extensively from his example. I must also thank Branford Marsalis & Co. for showing me road-humor at its most scabrous; and Peter Himmelman & Co., especially Jeff Victor, for all those road-miles across the Caucasus and Central Asia. Ronald Shannon Jackson, for the loan of his Accord. Robert Rahim Harwell, in England, for the use of his name. David Breskin, for an early review oi Sensible Shoes.

  The author owes a special debt of gratitude to Jack Dejohnette for a world of education at the drums, all those sessions at the Power Station, and much insight into the music and its musicians, to which Lydia Dejohnette contributed much. I owe all kinds of musicians all kinds of debts, and hope the book begins to thank them.

  Other bills due:

  A nomadic author benefits from many hospitalities: In Konya, Turkey,

  480 Acknowledgments

  that of Ali Bey at the Olgun Palas, where the book began; Asim and Muzaffer Kaplan, Jemal Palamut^u, Ahmet Kavut and Yashar Kemal. To Atesh Baz WaH and the town's other elders the author owes an unrepayable debt.

  In Sherborne, Gloucestershire, Siddiqa Cass, in whose house I drafted most of Part One, performed feats of hospitality above and beyond the call of duty; her back garden also provided the songbird with an interest in Monk.