Jazz Moon (32 page)

love

H
e dreamed he was on an ocean liner.

He was sitting on the deck, in the sun. A baby girl wrapped in a pink blanket rested in his arms. Plump cheeks. Sweet, drooling mouth. She stared at him with a worshipful gaze. He rubbed his nose against hers and she laughed, so he did it again, kept doing it, till she wore herself out with joy.

The water was smooth, the air warm and perfect, he and the baby the ship's only passengers. It occurred to him that he didn't know where he was headed or from where he'd departed. Was he going somewhere, or leaving something behind?

Night fell, abruptly, as if a switch had been flipped. They were still on the deck. The baby had fallen asleep. He watched her by the light of the full moon. A moon on which he could find shadows, if he needed them. But the only thing in the world he needed was to hold this baby.

 

Clouds draped the April sky, fat and drooping with imminent rain. Ben arrived at work earlier than usual to execute a creative project: Monsieur Rameau had requested an inventory report and Ben needed to devise figures that disguised the amount of booze that he and Sebastien and Glo had mooched.

Someone knocked.

“Not open yet,” Ben yelled.

Another knock.

“Not. Open.”

And then persistent knocks.

“
Merde
.”

He opened the door, ready to bombard the knocker with rudeness, but an old pal stood outside.

“Norman! Come in! How the hell are you? Let me fix you a drink.” He poured him a whiskey. “Been a while, Norm. What's happening over at Chez LeRoi?”

“Not a damn thing. Chez LeRoi closed down.”

Norman explained that the club's lifeblood dried up when Baby Back left, and it never flowed again.

“LeRoi tried some new talent—brought in a ‘star' pianist. Even hired one of them
Chocolate Jubilee
chicks to sing—one of them ‘fresh buds,' as you always called them. Nothing worked. Some weeks he couldn't pay us. And turns out he was in debt up to his high-falutin' eyeballs. From spending too much on all them white women, if you ask me. I wouldn't never let no chick bankrupt me.” He knocked back the last gulp of whiskey. “We closed the doors for good last night.”

They shared a moment of quiet to honor the club that, until recently, had been anything but.

“So now,” Norman said, “I needs me a job. Anything here?”

“Sorry, Norm. Got all the help we need. But I'll give you another drink.”

“Suits me. Anyway. How you doing? You still with your friend?”

“Yeah. Got us a place in rue Condorcet, couple blocks from the boardinghouse I was in.”

“Heard he was sick for a spell,” Norman said. “He all right now?”

Ben sometimes forgot how small Montmartre was, how easily gossip roved up and down its hilly streets.

“Sebastien's doing fine. Got a job waiting tables near Parc Monceau. He's painting—sold a couple of pieces last month. I'm writing. All the usual.”

Norman swirled the whiskey around in his glass. “Happy?”

Ben hated that question. Its pedestrian stab at courtesy; its intrusiveness. Happiness, like misery, was a private matter. He didn't want to talk about it. He didn't know how.

“Life's hard,” Ben said. “It's nice having someone. We help each other through it.”

“So . . . you
are
happy?”

Ben topped off Norman's drink, lit a cigarette for himself.

 

It began out of focus and fuzzy. From the fuzz emerged an empty Harlem street. Then a row of brownstones faded in. People appeared, magically, droves of them, hurrying here and hurrying there. Then they cleared out, revealing a little girl, alone, sitting on the steps of a brownstone. Five or six years old and pretty as petals. A braided pigtail dangled on either side of her head. She hung her head and hugged herself as if there was no one else to hug her. She looked like the loneliest little girl in the world.

It ended the way it began as the pretty-as-petals little girl went fuzzy and faded out.

 

He woke from the dream and then couldn't get back to sleep. Sebastien lay in his arms. Ben rolled out from under him with the expertise of an old married man and went to the kitchen. He poured a glass of whiskey, lit some reefer, looked around the apartment. It had everything they'd wanted. Space, light. A living room large enough to carve out two separate yet integrated artistic zones.

Happy?
Norman had asked. Defensively, Ben had been ticking off his reasons to be happy ever since: a job, published poems, Paris, Glo, an employed artist-lover starting to earn money from his art. And no calls from the shadows. Not a mumble. He did not need them. He did not want them. His love for Sebastien was a steel skin that deflected temptation. They were so close now. Lovers. Collaborators. Partners. Co-conspirators.

Sometimes Sebastien gave off heat. Physical heat, body heat, the heat of desire, yes, certainly. But also gauzier, prettier. A pastel heat. Balmy. Warm, pleasant wind whirring on the skin. Heat that delved deep through Ben's pores, laughed airily in his blood, sailed in his blood past imperfections and grief, past disappointment, to dock at a place of contentment.

Sebastien's near-death served as an essential element that aligned them. They didn't regret it, weren't ashamed of it, were proud to have survived it, and made no attempt to put it behind them. Instead they kept it humming in the foreground of their life.

They named it The Crisis. They referred to it openly and constantly. Sebastien might ask, “You know that café in the Latin Quarter? The one where the coffee is so rich because they have not rinsed the urns in a hundred years? When was the last time we went there,
mon chaton?
” Ben would answer, “Oh, we haven't been in a long time. Not since before The Crisis.” Or Sebastien might hold his nose and say, “What on earth are you cooking,
mon chaton?
It stinks worse than I did during The Crisis.” Even Glo got in on it. One night at Café Valentin, the two men were giddy and giggling after consuming a carafe of brandy. Glo clucked her tongue and said, “Lord have mercy. Y'all freeloading more booze than you did before The Crisis. And that's saying something.”

The Crisis empowered them. To both it was a trophy, a shiny, tangible prize to clinch to their chests and admire, each proud of the achievements it represented: to Ben, his overdue selflessness; to Sebastien, corporeal proof that the poet loved him.

An exclusionary love. Each reserved himself strictly for the other, sexually and otherwise. They set themselves apart from everyone. Except for Glo, and Norman maybe, neither had any friends. They were very lonely. But it was a collective loneliness that they endured together, as a unit. They accepted it. It hurt at times, but it suited them; suited their solitary natures, the solitary requirements of their art. They cultivated it, molded their loneliness into their own intimate work of art. They would both have been lonely anyway, had each been on his own. It was better to be lonely together. It was easier. They exiled themselves, cut the world out of their lives, their lives out of the world. Couldn't help it. It was who they were. And exile allowed for exclusive, consummate, dangerous investment in each other. They wanted that. They loved that.

Castaways, they had set up camp on an island of contentment.

And yet, these dreams.

Maybe they had begun because he'd kept little Katherine to himself all these months, stashed away from Sebastien and from Glo, like a picture in a locket. Maybe she'd grown so large and lively that she had to fly out, and Ben's dreams were her pilot. They tortured him, but he was indebted to them: They granted him the only means of seeing his child. She wouldn't let go. Her pastel heat also laughed in his blood.

Happy?
Norman had asked.

Another sip of whiskey. Another hard pull of reefer.

A pair of arms hugged him from behind.

“I am worried about you,” Sebastien said, his night voice soft cotton in Ben's ear, his bare chest warm and a bit stubbly against Ben's naked back. He'd put on weight, was sturdier than before The Crisis. Though still slim and svelte, the nooks and crannies on his body were filling in. His meatier chest was good on Ben's back.

“You have not been sleeping well,” Sebastien said. “You have not slept well in a while.” He took the reefer, dragged on it, took a sip of Ben's whiskey. “Your parents' death is an awful wound. It will not heal quickly. Still, I worry.”

They passed the reefer back and forth and finished it off. Sebastien took Ben's hand to lead him back to their bedroom.

“If you had other family,” Sebastien said, “perhaps that would ease your pain.”

 

The reefer put him to sleep, planted a new dream in his head. Not a full-grown dream, more like an impression:

A living room. Him and Ruby. Baby Katherine in Ruby's arms. Ruby handing her, giving her, to Ben.

The impression blacked out.

“G
lo, you think Sebastien's strong?”

They were having coffee-gin at her place. His question seemed to stun her.

“Don't tell me he done got caught up in that opium mess again,” she said.

“No! No.”

“Oh. Well. Sebastien's a good man. Kind. Talented. And, sugar, I know he loves you.”

“Ain't what I asked you,” Ben said. “Kindness and talent and love ain't the same as strength.” He looked at her, hard, and repeated his question through teeth he didn't mean to clench. “Do you think he's strong?”

She looked alarmed. As if an imposter had suddenly replaced her best friend. She didn't answer.

“Glo! This is important. Do you think . . . do you think he'd be all right without me?”

Her alarm faded, replaced with her authoritative no-nonsense. “What the fuck is this about? You been acting strange lately. Quiet, distant. You tell Glo what's going on. Right now, you hear?”

He did.

All she could say was, “Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord.”

“Fatherhood was so far down on my list of wants,” Ben said, “it might as well have been buried in a hundred-foot-deep grave. But I
am
a father. And I love her. I ain't never seen my little girl but, Glo, I love her.
My daughter
.”

“Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord, Lord.”

When she stopped Lording, Glo, in low notes of warning and fear, said, “Benjy. You ain't thinking what I think you're thinking. Is you?”

Last night's dream-impression replayed in his head for the hundredth time, the images not washed out and no less fresh for all the replaying. “She's mine, Glo.”

“No, sugar. She
ain't
yours. She belongs to Ruby Tate and her husband.”

“Not if I go back and say I want her. They'd
have
to give her to me.”

She got in his face, took him by his shoulders, and shook him. “You stupid, stupid, stupid man!” She spat the words so hard, his face was wet. “You think it's gonna be that easy? You think you'll just walk into Ruby Tate's house, say, ‘I want my daughter,' and she'll hand her right on over? Hell, sugar, if you think that, you're worse than stupid. You're plain silly.”

“It can happen. I got the law on my—”

“Did Angeline tell that woman about you? About
why
you left? Who you left her for?”

It sunk in all at once. And slapped down all his hopes. Ben threw himself on the sofa. He drank the last sip of his coffee, then refilled the cup to the rim with straight gin.

“And even
if
you was to go through with this cockamamie plan,” Glo said, “and even
if
some miracle happened and you got Katherine—then what? Stay in the States? What about Sebastien? You gonna bring him over there, too, and the three of you, what, live together? Like a family? Or you bring Katherine to Paris and what? You and Sebastien raise her? Together?” She laughed. A scornful laugh with teeth. “I can see it now: a colored man and a white man living together and raising a child. Sugar, that's too modern, even for Paris. And sure as fuck too goddamn modern for America.”

She dropped into a chair, breathing hard, exhausted.

They didn't speak. They didn't look at each other.

Ben was angry. At Glo for being unkind and right. At himself for letting dream-impressions govern him; for allowing a child thousands of miles distant, whom he'd never met, wrap him body, heart, and soul around her darling little finger.

He drank his gin. His lungs screamed for smoke, but he had neither cigarettes nor reefer with him. Glo might, but he refused to talk to her right now.

Katherine versus Sebastien. Ben loved them both, wanted them both. He'd agonized at the injustice of having to choose one at the expense of the other. Glo's unkind logic rendered the choosing moot.

But since little Katherine couldn't have her daddy, at least Sebastien would keep his lover.

He finished off the gin, got up to go, decided he wouldn't say good-bye to Glo.

“Didn't want to be harsh,” she said. “But you know Glo: She gotta tell it like it is.”

She tried to hug him. He wouldn't let her.

“All right, Benjy. You can be that way for now. Ain't the first time you got mad at Glo for telling the truth. I understand. Hurts when someone tells you something you don't want to hear. Hurts the one telling it, too. You go on home. You go home to your man, you hear?”