Jazz Moon (18 page)

B
aby Back and the band spent the next day performing in private lounges for the
Bonaparte
's wealthiest passengers. A treat for the elite. Ben stayed in the cabin, practicing French. Verb conjugation. He'd mastered present tense and now toiled on past, struggling not to confuse the two. His brain, a well-guarded fortress of English, wasn't letting French in without a fight. So much to remember, so much to keep straight. He'd listened in on a few French conversations on the
Bonaparte,
trying to pick out words or strings of phrases, and had gotten horribly discouraged. For Ben, learning French was like seeing with new eyes that displayed the world in colors he wasn't used to.

Ben looked up the French word for “weakness.”
La faiblesse
. The noun was feminine. The adjective form was
faible
.

“
Je suis faible:
I am weak. If I want to use the noun:
J'ai la faiblesse
. I have weakness. Or if I want to use the plural form of the noun:
J'ai des faiblesses
. I have weaknesses.” He remembered he was supposed to be studying past tense. “ ‘I
was
weak' would be
J'etais faible
. But it ain't past. I
am
weak. The almighty Baby Back Johnston said so.”

He couldn't concentrate. He left the cabin, roamed the ship, ended up on deck. He found the string quartet, now permanently banished from the dining hall by Captain Olivier, had forsaken minuets for “Dinah.” The musicians smiled along with the lilting tune, backs swaying. A half-moon had plunked itself in the constellation-laden sky. The moon wasn't pretty tonight. It was gray and standoffish, half in shadow as if hiding. A shiftless, untrustworthy moon.

La faiblesse
.

What Baby Back said hurt. The way he said it hurt worse. Like
weakness
had been squirming on his tongue, chomping at the bit for release. No hesitation. Ben detested his candor and his drilling down on the accusations with such exactitude; was insulted by the moralizing and condescending tone, as if he was lecturing some naïve child. Being told what he didn't want to hear was one thing. Being told with relish was another.

Even if it was the truth.

What was “truth” in French?
La vérité
. Baby Back could have withheld
la vérité,
but he needed to keep himself strong and Ben weak.

That wasn't true. Baby Back told the truth because he needed a lover who could support, who could withstand, the coming onslaught of his ambition.
He told the truth to put me on notice, to build me up
. And in building Ben up, the trumpeter implicitly helped
himself
.

The quartet had segued from the lilting “Dinah” to the mushy “I'm Coming, Virginia.” Why were these French classical musicians infatuated with sentimental songs about Dixie?

He checked his watch. Dinnertime. He went to the dining hall. Baby Back was onstage with the band. Captain Olivier was at his table, hand drumming the tabletop, head bobbing in rhythm with the band's beat. Ben saw Clifford Treadwell waving him over.

He took a seat. “Where's Millicent?”

“Lying down, having one of her headaches.” Clifford spread foie gras on a thin piece of toast and popped it in his mouth. His attention went to the stage. “How did you and Baby Back meet?”

“In childhood. We're cousins, remember?”

Clifford laughed. “
Cousins
. I adore code.”

They ordered dinner. Clifford gave compressed biographies of himself and Millicent.

They came from prominent old colored families in Washington, DC, an exclusive world of Negro gentry where light-complexioned skin was akin to grace.

“Africa? Please. My family doesn't want to know the place exists. They think people
your
complexion are beneath them. They'd be appalled that you're eating with me instead of standing by with a tray.”

Still a bachelor at twenty-seven, his family pressured him to marry.

“Let's just say I had gotten into some compromising situations that could have jeopardized my family's social standing. And Millicent's family's fortune had dwindled. Bad investments or bad . . . something. I don't know. The solution was obvious. She needed to shore up her family's bank accounts and I needed—”

“—a cover.”

Clifford stopped in the middle of prying open a clam. “Such a tasteless way of putting it, however accurate.” He smirked like a rascal. “I'm a tad darker than she is. Married five years and she's still not happy about that.”

The smirk flattened. Clifford looked adrift, as if he'd woken up in some desolate place, positively stumped about how he'd gotten there. “It's tough. Living a life that's not you. You wouldn't understand. You have Baby Back.”

Ben took a pass on the raw plea for empathy. “Got kids?”

“That's what this second honeymoon business is supposed to be about.”

Ben lifted his champagne in a toast. “Have fun.”

Clifford scowled at him, then snapped open the clam with such force, pieces of shell went flying.

They ate in silence as Baby Back and company played “I'm Just Wild About Harry.” As Ben watched Clifford watching Baby Back.

Did the trumpeter find Clifford weak? Would he tell him so? Would he hesitate?

“I can help him,” Clifford said, eyes feeding on the trumpeter. “I have connections in Paris. Agents, promoters, record people. You tell him I can help him.”

Suspicion caught Ben's tongue. He distrusted this man. His extravagant audacity in not even attempting to conceal his attraction to Baby Back. The rudeness with which he—somewhat understandably—treated his wife. Something else, too: Ben had never met a rich, powerful colored person. He knew they existed but, till now, had never seen one up close.

“That's generous,” he said, at last.

Clifford took a final sip of champagne, dabbed his mouth with his napkin. “Yes. It is.”

He left. A moment later, Baby Back dove into the chair Clifford had vacated.

“Hey, good-lookin'. What did Treadwell have to say?”

Ben didn't hesitate. “Nothing. Small talk.”

“S
hit! I can't wait to see Chez LeRoi,” Baby Back said. “Big club. Big stage. Dozens of tables. All those spiffy, high-class folks there to hear me play. God
damn!
Mr. Jasper said it was the hottest club in Paris.”

“What the hell's he supposed to say? That he owns the
worst
club in Paris?”

“Why you trying to bring me down, Ben? Please don't do that.”

A genial request infused with a dose of menace.

A waiter came by with Ben's bourbon—his third.

“Hey. Take it easy. OK?” Baby Back said.

“No.
You
got high.
I'm
gonna get high.”

A musician gave Baby Back some reefer he'd smuggled aboard. He had indulged, but saved none for Ben.

They relaxed on a leather couch in the first-class smoking room—a room Ben had expected to be an all-male domain. But cigarette-smoking young women on one side of the large, Art Deco room counterbalanced the cigar-wielding old fogies on the other. Ben and Baby Back sat in between.

“Sorry I didn't save no reefer for you,” Baby Back said. “Guess I got carried away.”

His eyes were red. He smiled stupidly.

Ben downed a big slug of bourbon. It scorched his throat so bad, he thought it might leave a scar. “You gotta think about yourself, right? Gotta take care of
you
. I mean, all that ambition—it ain't gonna get you nowhere, ain't gonna make you no star, if you're busy taking care of anybody else. And wouldn't that be a damn shame?”

Ben recognized he'd poked a nerve because Baby Back went mute. The stupid smile shriveled. His reefer-red eyes minimized to the size of dots and then fastened on some vague spot in front of him as he popped his knuckles one by one.

“I take care of the people I love. You're here, ain't you? Instead of back in Harlem with that lying bitch.”

“Don't you call her that again. I ain't having that.”

Ben could see Baby Back was ready to shoot back, that he stifled the urge.

“Ohhhh,” Baby Back said, as if suddenly enlightened. “This is about that conversation the other night. Yeah. You been acting strange ever since.”

Ben knocked back more bourbon. “
Notre conversation de ce que je suis si faible
.”

“Come again?”

“That was French for
our conversation about me being so weak
. You might know that if you bothered to learn French. Don't make no sense to me how you can go live in another country and not even bother to learn the damn language. But Baby Back Johnston does whatever the fuck Baby Back Johnston wants to do!”

He had raised his glass and shouted. The young women and the old fogies looked at them. Baby Back scooted closer and took the bourbon from Ben so fast, some spilled in their laps.

“What's wrong with you?” Baby Back said, with rage, with fear, with disappointment.

The disappointment struck Ben the most. There was pleading in it, and sorrow. As if Baby Back mourned something lost.

“We'll be in Paris day after tomorrow,” he said. “We're about to have the time of our lives. Don't you fuck it up. Don't you dare.”

The pleading again. The menace. His face was in Ben's. Ben was scared of him. He wanted to move away. He couldn't. He was subservient, defenseless,
faible
. But he managed to say, “You mean you're about to have the time of
your
life, don't you?”

“No! No! This is
our
chance to be together.... Finish it. FINISH IT!”

Everyone in the smoking room watched them. The waiter hurried over.

“Go away!” Baby Back yelled. When the waiter stayed put, Baby Back stomped toward him. “I said go!” The waiter took off. Baby Back pulled Ben up by the arms. “Come on.”

He marched him toward the exit like a truant child. The three bourbons had started to take effect. He had drunk too much, too fast. The scar in his throat itched. They were almost to the door when Clifford Treadwell walked in.

“Strangers. Haven't seen you gentlemen in a couple of days.” He scrutinized them. “You guys OK?”

“Yeah. Sure,” Baby Back said. “How you doing, Clifford? Say, where's Millicent?”

Clifford laughed. “She wouldn't be caught dead in a smoking room. Too unladylike, she says. Hey, Mr. Jazz Man, I can't believe you've been so elusive. What, you don't want to meet important people who'll help your career?”

“I'm sorry? Come again?”

Clifford looked from Baby Back to the nauseous Ben. “Looks like someone neglected to tell you about a certain conversation. Allow me to fill in the blanks.”

 

“Start explaining.”

Ben sat on the bed. Baby Back stood over him, arms crossed.

“I don't trust him,” Ben said.

“You don't trust him?
You don't trust him?
Hell, I don't even
like
him. But if he knows people who can make me a star, I don't give a damn.”

Maybe it was the bourbon or the nausea or the raw memory of Clifford Treadwell's triumphant face in that smoking room, but the ease with which Ben spoke his next words surprised him. “I wanted to hurt you.”

He kept his eyes in his lap. He didn't have to look at Baby Back to know the rage, fear, and disappointment of earlier now siphoned down to simply rage.

Baby Back grabbed up his trumpet case, so fast it seemed to fly into his hands. He was almost out the door, but he came back, knelt down, got nose-to-nose and eye-to-eye with Ben.

“Don't you ever, and I mean
ever,
do nothing like this to me again.”

“M
illicent. Hello. May I join you?”

Her lips twitched in and out of a nervous smile. “My husband isn't here. He'll be arriving shortly.”

“Well, is it all right if I join you?” Ben asked.

Her attitude was a definitive
no,
but she said, “Why, certainly.”

He asked if she was enjoying the voyage; which ship's activities she had participated in; if she and Clifford had friends in Paris and would they be visiting them; living in Washington, DC, must be really nice, right? She shunned his small talk by snapping short answers and not once lifting her nose from her dinner menu. Millicent made clear that first night at Captain Olivier's table that she was complexion-conscious.
She don't want nothin' to do with us dark-skinned niggers,
Ben recalled one of the musicians saying. He lamented that her husband didn't share that view.

A waiter appeared. Millicent shooed him away, avowing that she would not order until Clifford arrived.

Ben detested the Treadwells. Their snobbery, their machinations. Their presumption of entitlement based solely on their wealth and their “superior” skin color. How were they any different from whites? He wanted to excuse himself, go back to the cabin to practice his French, but extending friendship to the Treadwells could be his bridge back to Baby Back.

Since Millicent refused to be engaged, Ben concentrated on the band. Something was amiss. The music meandered without a coherent through line. It sat weighted on the air. Ben scanned the stage. Baby Back wasn't there, and without his beacon of a horn to guide them, the musicians drifted lost.

Ben tried again with Millicent. “Clifford made Baby Back a very generous offer. Both of us appreciate what he's gonna do for him.”

She lowered her menu. A ripple of nastiness wrinkled across her face. She looked him flat in the eye. “Of course you do. Naturally. Although I doubt there's anything
natural
about this.”

Ben was so relieved he almost laughed in her face. He no longer had to feel guilty for hating the Treadwells. Millicent had just proven his hatred justified. She had lowered her menu and also her mask, exposing the private Millicent, the
real
Millicent, who normally stayed hidden and discreet but had flared up unexpectedly. She was ominous and unsightly. He couldn't look at her.

He shifted his attention back to the stage. Baby Back was still absent, the band all but useless without him.

Clifford arrived. Millicent recomposed herself into the meek guise of her public self. “I can only imagine what kept you, dear,” she said. She smiled. Affection toppled off of her bride-sweet mouth. It was clear then: She loved Clifford. It was the one sincere thing in her. The travesty of it caused Ben to detest her slightly less.

“Thanks for keeping Millicent company,” Clifford said. “She's been positively starved for good conversation this whole trip. I'm sure you filled that void.”

“I'm sure I tried.”

And then he saw it: the purplish bruise at Clifford's neckline, peeking out just above the collar of his starched, white shirt. A love bite. Recently administered. It scorched his light skin. Ben studied his menu but his eyes kept shuffling back to Clifford's neck and Millicent's now-public face. Both alarmed him. He focused on the band for distraction and finally heard cohesion because Baby Back had taken to the stage. He was in performance mode—eyes shut, knees bent—as passengers clapped and snapped.

Ben regarded the Treadwells again. His eyes alighted on Clifford's neck once more as Baby Back purred on his horn and the
Bonaparte
sailed toward Paris through the jazz-slicked night.