Body & Soul (17 page)

Private-eye movies.
The individual is isolated in a hostile world. Anyone may shoot anyone else in the back at any moment. Everyone lies. Greed prevails. It is necessary to be extremely careful at all times.

Cartoons.
The weak can prevail over the strong through applied intelligence. Humiliation is intrinsically comic.

Claude went to at least three double features a week. The theaters were huge, with vaulted ceilings, two balconies, and large screens. Hundreds of people were scattered through the darkness. In the evening, especially Fridays and Saturdays, it could be hard to find a good seat in an audience of more than a thousand. He preferred the late afternoon, and the thrill—having entered in the daytime—of emerging at night, as if the world had recognized the compressed, high-velocity emotional rides he had just experienced, and transformed itself accordingly. He liked the familiar kinds of movies, variations on tacitly understood themes, but he particularly relished movies that attempted to define their own terms. These peculiar movies came along once or twice a week.

Up in the balcony, slouched in his seat, feet up, he peered down through his knees and entered fabulous worlds in which, for the most part, virtue was rewarded and love, delirious, puissant love, sacred and profane at the same time, conquered all. Romantic love was deeply interesting, not only because it promised an end to loneliness, but because it suggested an elevated state of existence, a transcendence. Sometimes when lovers kissed on the screen it meant little to him, but sometimes, when the people were right and the story was right and the music was right, he felt as if his heart would break. Aware of the hisses
and catcalls from the remote children's section, hearing the snores of the fat man asleep in the next row, he nevertheless soared, flying out of himself toward the unbearable beauty of the kiss. When the images faded he would cover his face, as if to keep them a moment longer.

He stepped out of Loew's Orpheum into the early evening bustle of Eighty-sixth Street. On the sidewalk people walked quickly, shifting vectors, angling their shoulders, slipping through the traffic. He added himself to the side of the stream and moved toward Lexington Avenue, smelling beer, sauerkraut, and meat from the steam table as he passed a German bar, hearing Rosemary Clooney singing the oriental strains of "Come On-a My House" from the record store arcade, walking through the bright light spilling from the white interior of Fannie Farmer Candies. There was a stiff breeze, and men held down their hats. Paper swirled in the gutter.

He turned at the Automat and pushed through the revolving doors. Holding his change in one hand, he slid a tray along the chrome bars and looked into the compartments. Hot franks and beans in an oval dish. He dropped in a quarter, twisted the handle, and the door sprung open. Moving to the back of the room, he bought a hard roll, a glass of milk, and a cupcake. Someone had left a
New York Post
at an empty table, and he moved quickly to get it, putting down his tray in the center to establish his territorial rights. He ate unhurriedly, turning the pages of the newspaper with his left hand.

As he lifted a forkful of beans to his mouth, he saw a thin young man in a black topcoat, buttoned to the throat, approaching the table. The man carried a saxophone case and walked leaning forward, as if about to fall. He pulled up a chair and sat down, staring off into the middle distance. His long face was pale, the eyes heavy-lidded, his hair black with a pompadour over his brow, and brilliantined brushed-back sides in the style called a DA. The man sighed heavily and looked back to see an older man, also in a black topcoat, following with two cups of coffee. The older man also pulled up a chair from the next table.

"Drink this, for Christ's sake," the older man said.

They were sitting opposite Claude.

"I can't believe it, Vinnie." The older man's voice was pained. "What're you gonna do? Nod out on the fucking stand?"

"I'll be fine," Vinnie said, holding the case on his lap. "Polka. Um-pah-pah, um-pah-pah. See?" He gave a slow little giggle. "I can do it."

"Drink the coffee. We need this gig. We gotta look sharp. The owner's no dummy."

"Look sharp, feel sharp, be sharp." Vinnie raised the cup and drank. "Bong."

"Oh, shit." The older man looked down at the floor. "You were doing so good there."

"Don't be mad," Vinnie said.

"I'm not mad."

Vinnie considered this and said, "Okay."

The older man pushed forward the second cup of coffee. "This one too."

"I haven't finished the first one yet," Vinnie said. "Don't rush me."

During the long silence the older man stared at Vinnie and checked his wristwatch. Neither of them so much as glanced at Claude, who began carefully to peel the paper from his cupcake.

"You okay?" The older man asked Vinnie.

"Sure. I'll play my ass off."

The older man seemed to think for a moment and then make up his mind. "Okay. Stay here. Drink coffee. I'll come back for you, okay? You read me?"

"You're a good man," Vinnie said. "I love you."

The older man walked away.

Claude ate his cupcake and drank his milk, moving as little as possible. After a while Vinnie took some coffee, shivered, and leaned back in his chair.

"I love the Automat," he said, as if his friend were still there. "All the different things to eat, everything tucked away in its own special little box. Like the special little creamed corn all cozy in the creamed corn box, just sitting there waiting. And when somebody takes it out, another little creamed corn comes along to take its place. It's very nice." He reached up lazily and scratched his jaw. He began to hum softly. Claude was finished now, but he sat motionless. "All the brass shining like that," Vinnie said. "Nice and warm and cheerful. All the people happy, eating their food and not bothering anybody, everything smooth, everything mellow." His body gave an almost imperceptible jerk, his eyes widened for an instant, and he lowered his head to drink some more coffee. When he finished he unbuttoned his topcoat. He was wearing a tuxedo. He started searching his pockets, leaning this way and that, his movements slow and studied. When he finally extracted some change he stared at it, lying there in his palm, for some
time. He picked out a nickel and placed it in the center of the table near the edge of Claude's tray.

"Listen," Vinnie said, "do me a big favor and get me a refill, would you? I'm a little under water here." His eyes took a moment to focus. His expression was gentle and he gave Claude a wry smile with the corner of his mouth.

Claude picked up the coins and the empty cup and went over to the coffee spout. He pulled the lever and hot black liquid came out of the mouth of a brass dolphin. He carried the cup back to the table, put it in front of Vinnie, and sat down again.

"So what's your story?" Vinnie asked. "Are you Italian? You look kind of Italian."

"No."

"That's how I got in the union. Because I'm Italian. I was just a kid and I screwed up the test, but he gave me a break. Sweet old goombah he was, that guy." He started searching his pockets, repeating all his previous moves. In his breast pocket he found what he was looking for, a drugstore inhaler. He took two quick sniffs. "Ahh." He shook his head as if to clear it, and put the plastic tube on the table. "You live around here?"

Claude nodded.

"I'm from Brooklyn." Vinnie said. "We're playing that German dance joint down the block. I could get you in. You like music?"

"Yes, I do. But I have to go home."

"Do you play?"

"The piano."

"Longhair," Vinnie said. "I bet you play longhair. I wish I could. A lot of that stuff is good. But I got the wrong ax."

"I like boogie-woogie too."

"Oh yeah? Well, it's the blues, and the blues, well, that's where everything starts." He picked up the inhaler, grasped the base with one hand, the tube in the other, and with a grimace, broke them apart. "You probably play F, B-flat, F, C, B-flat, and F. Am I right?" He examined the broken tube and the yellow cotton packing now revealed inside.

"Mostly I play it in C," Claude said.

"Yeah, C is okay." With two fingers, he carefully extracted the yellow cotton. "But F is the blues key." He dropped the cotton into his coffee and stirred it with a spoon.

Claude sensed it was better to remain silent about this strange
action. Both of them behaved as if nothing of importance had happened. Vinnie sipped the coffee and then poured in some sugar and stirred it again. He pressed the cotton against the side of the cup with the spoon, released it, pressed, and released it. He drank some more. "You know Bird's changes to the blues?"

Claude had no idea what he was talking about. Birdchanges? "No."

"The bebop changes."

Bebop? He shook his head.

Vinnie pulled the
New York Post
across to his side. "You got a pencil?"

Claude patted his pockets. "No."

"Go get one."

Claude went to one of the windows at the central change kiosk and asked the lady for a pencil. She gave him one and made him promise to give it back.

For all his strange talk, Vinnie seemed more normal as Claude returned. His eyes no longer had that sleepy look, and his movements were crisper. He took the pencil and wrote in the margin of one of the pages of newspaper. He tore it off, folded it, and handed it to Claude. "Put this in your pocket."

Claude obeyed.

"Look at it next time you play." He drained his coffee and placed the cup in its saucer with exaggerated care. "Look sharp, feel sharp, be sharp," he said. "Bong!"

"I better go," Claude said.

"Yeah, sure. In a minute, in a minute. Tony's coming back." His face seemed paler now than before. "What can I tell you? Make sure you listen to Art Tatum. Fast, fast, fast, and he swings. Hands like snakes, you know? They open up like that, like when a snake opens its mouth, you know, wide, and then wider, like it's so wide it's impossible." He began to drum his fingers on the saxophone case in his lap. "Go up to Minton's and listen to—" He stopped abruptly, his mouth open.

Claude's peripheral vision seemed to close down until all he could see was the man's frozen face.

"Oh. Oh. Oh." Vinnie's hands went to his chest.

Claude didn't know what was happening, but the hair rose on the back of his neck. Vinnie's eyes were locked, staring into his own, and the boy saw the change, the instantaneous transformation as life left
them. Even before the man fell forward, his head sending a spoon end over end to the floor, before the saxophone case slid sideways, before the faint tang of shit in the air, Claude knew he was dead. Unbelievably but entirely dead.

There was complete silence, but everything was going on as before—people eating, getting change, carrying their trays. A woman with a plate of pie walked by the table without noticing anything.

Claude understood that he had just witnessed an event of profound importance, utterly off the scale of his own experience or knowledge, but somehow he could not bring himself into focus. His mind seemed to be swimming aimlessly in the silence, going around in circles. As he got to his feet he stumbled, and held on to his chair for a moment. He glanced at Vinnie—whose skin had gone gray, the color of cement, his body still beyond stillness—and backed away a few steps.

Now, suddenly, as if a switch had been thrown, he could hear the sounds of the vast, open room. The low burble of a hundred voices, the clinking of plates, the sighing of coins falling down the chutes at the cashier's window. He saw the yellow pencil next to Vinnie's hand, moved forward to get it, and went to the kiosk.

He put the pencil on the counter.

"That man just died," he said to the woman, and pointed to the table. "He's dead."

The woman looked at Claude, at the table, and then back to Claude. "Dead drunk," she said. "I saw him come in."

"No. Really."

She cracked a roll of dimes on the edge of the counter and fed them into the change machine. "I'll take care of it."

The boy stood, waiting. Her maddening casualness suggested that something was slipping away. In his encounters with adults he was used to being barely visible, to being beneath notice—it was the way of things—but surely this situation was different. The very magnitude of the event ought to have ensured that he would be taken seriously. But, indeed, whatever dignity or power he might have gained from witnessing Vinnie's death was slipping away instant by instant. He felt cheated.

"You can go," she said. "I'll take care of it."

He walked toward the revolving door. A policeman entered and took off his cap. Claude pointed back to the table.

"That man there," he said. "I was sitting there and he died and fell
over like that. I told the woman in the change booth but she didn't believe me."

The cop didn't speak at first. He was heavyset, with a square, weather-beaten face. His gray eyebrows rose and then came down as he looked across the room. "Okay. Wait here."

As he watched the cop go to Vinnie, Claude felt the first stirrings of fear. Very rapidly he no longer cared about being taken seriously. The cop half knelt at the table, reached out to take Vinnie's pulse, and gently turned the dead man's head. Claude saw the fixed eyes, and saw the cop close them, one at a time, with his thumb. As the cop rose and looked back at Claude, the boy felt a wave of warmth and he heard a sound like the ocean in his ears. He backed away to the revolving door. The cop motioned him forward with his arm, but Claude turned, pushed the brass bar, and ran out into the street.

The black topcoat was right in front of him. Big. Getting bigger. Impossibly, the dead man was about to fold him into darkness. Claude veered and bounced off his hip.

"Hey! Take it easy," Tony said. "What's the rush?"

Claude kept running, weaving through the people, who seemed to him like mannequins frozen on the sidewalk. What he had heard the black topcoat say was
Come Claude, come Claude
in a soft, intimate, all-pervasive voice.

When he reached the northeast corner of Lexington, with the insulation of the crowd behind him, he got control of himself and ducked into the subway arcade. He sat in the doorway of a vacant shop and waited for the storm in his body to subside. He understood that the voice he had heard was both real, because he had heard it, and unreal, because it was clearly impossible. It had not been Vinnie's voice, but a voice of pure authority, from some other realm. Whatever threat it might have represented was now gone. For a moment he had been at the threshold of an immense black void, the voice calling him, but it had only been a moment, and it was over.