This time, he tried “Billie’s Bounce,” of which he had mastered perhaps eight bars, so there was a promising wilderness of improvement awaiting him. Mimicking the masters was a learning tool, no more, but he was still at the stage of imitation. Laying down pathways in his brain.
And one of them was a pathway to his father.
Not a literal pathway; just a memory path, something to enhance the richness of memories. Because when you got right down to it, what else was there? Megan had told him that everything you thought was reality was a memory, because it all happened earlier. Maybe only a fraction of a second earlier, but earlier nonetheless. And then, the sensory information piggybacked in on earlier-laid memories eliciting reactions that had worked in the past, putting things into familiar categories.
Megan had told him a lot about the biomechanics of how music affected the brain. One thing that was very obvious, she claimed, was that musicians used more of their brains than most people.
“Just think about it,” she’d told him. “You’re using your language centers—music is a language. You’re thinking about intervals, the distance between the tones; you’re thinking in a mathematical, spatial way. Musical tones stimulate your emotional centers as well, and, quite often, you are visualizing as you play.”
“No wonder I’m not much good,” Brian had said. “I haven’t learned to use all those parts of my brain.”
She’d laughed. “Just keep it up, old man. It’s never too late.”
Brian did worry about Zoe, despite, or perhaps because of, her musical gifts.
Zoe had perfect pitch. She’d been in a Montessori classroom since he was eighteen months old, but Brian was pretty sure that she would have had it anyway. She had a fascination with sounds when just a baby—the screech of tires, the
ping!
of the microwave, the wail of a siren—and would imitate them, endlessly and irritatingly. Cindy, early on, surrounded her with many types of music, sang with her, and listened to her compose, precisely hitting only one or two keys at a time, sometimes hideous, sometimes lovely, pieces on the piano. Zoe was a certified violin prodigy; she’d progressed rapidly from scratchy Suzuki to a top private teacher. “As long as she enjoys it,” was Cindy’s credo.
Now, her music books were filled with dissonance. “Whens and Bitsy Argue.” “What the Fenceposts Said,” written as she ran a stick along an iron fence. “The Dishwasher, the Dogs, and the Rain” was rather nice, Brian recalled. But sometimes, as his daughter sat frowning, tongue sticking out, grabbing one marker after another to write her music, Brian thought that maybe it was more of an affliction than a pleasure. Once, Brian had made the mistake of asking why, since each color meant a precise note, she needed the lines of a staff.
Zoe just looked at him disdainfully. “Middle C or high C? Half notes, quarter notes? Time? I already ran out of colors. And then, who else could read it?”
“Of course,” said Brian, realizing that he’d belittled the complexity of her work. “I’m sorry.”
Was this furious attention to sound something she’d grow out of? Was it good, was it bad? Was it a sign of a problem? Megan said that synesthesia in and of itself didn’t usually bother those that had it; it just meant that the synaptic connections in their brains were not fully pruned after the brain had dedicated their use to one or another sense. Some remained crosswired, causing people to think of tastes as sounds, or smells as shapes. “I often think,” Megan said, “that maybe we could use this dramatic growth of brain cells that occurs in infants and toddlers later in life. After all, brain growth isn’t finished until twenty-five or so, and we’ve only been living as long as we do now, in such numbers, for a relatively short period of time.”
Brian soldiered on through his practice time, hoping his own brain was lighting up—it didn’t feel like it—and thought about his father, searching for him in the heart of every note.
And suddenly—he loved this part, when it all came together like an uprush of cold wind at a mountaintop—he was, indeed, flying. He did not consciously think about how to play. He just played.
He played “Billie’s Bounce” fast, slow, and in between. He made it sob, he made it laugh; he moved out into complete improvisation, a revel, a romp, a deepening of mind and heart.
It was not his father. It was him.
He played for an hour, neglecting work, not answering the phone, hardly knowing where or even when he was. He stopped only because the euphoria was beyond music.
He fell into his office chair, remembering, remembering, his mother, his father, his sisters. All of it.
Finally, when his phone rang, he did come back to earth. Cindy said, “Are you going to make it home for dinner?”
“Um—it’s—seven? Wow. I think those new vitamins are really working. Tell you about it when I get home.”
* * *
A few days later he got a Q from somebody on S.J.’s list, asking him to stop by the Gypsy Cat late Friday night around midnight to sit in.
At first he thought,
Don’t be silly
. But Cindy urged him to go, although he suspected that she thought he might be so embarrassed by the experience that he would give it up. But accordingly, on Friday night after everybody else was sound asleep, he left home just before midnight and headed over to the place, which was on U Street.
He’d heard of it—a co-op, basically, in a Hungarian restaurant that rented its space on late weekend nights for extra cash. He paid ten bucks to a man dressed in a suit and tie, and felt ragged in his jeans and T-shirt. But the guy was friendly enough, nodded at Brian’s sax case and said, “Tear ’em up.”
The bandstand was permanent, apparently. Three black women were performing: a flutist, about six feet tall and thin, dressed in African garb; a woman playing an odd sort of drum that Brian could not name; and a guitar player, a man, doing some kind of jump slack-key. Their music sounded both jazzy and Middle Eastern.
Brian found an empty table and a kid in an apron actually came by and took his order for a beer and
halászlé
, which turned out to be a spicy, dark soup filled with onions and rockfish, accompanied by good bread.
As time passed, the place filled up, and people were standing. The brick walls sweated, and faded travel posters of Buda and Pest and various ethnic foods were wavy inside their cheap frames. Smoking was apparently not verboten. The air was blue; he smelled some marijuana lingering in the air as well. He ordered another beer. Groups came and went, and finally what Brian thought of as a straight-ahead jazz streak got going, with drums, the hi-hat, and the piano. Brian became a bit more alert; perhaps he could inflict himself on the stage soon and get it over with.
A man came over and asked to share Brian’s table. Behind him were his group, a man and a woman. “Sure,” Brian said.
The man’s fedora was tilted slightly so that it covered one eye. He sat back from the table so he could cross one long leg over another, and Brian was slightly relieved that he was not wearing plaid shorts, or long socks with garters, but plain khaki slacks. Also, he had no beard. He carried a felt drawstring bag that, when he set it on the table, draped over what looked like a cornet. At the same time, Brian noticed that some other men in the club also wore fedoras, in varying styles of pinched crowns and bent brims, so the sudden, paranoid thought that this was Megan’s Walking Man almost made him laugh. In fact, he also saw a few flat-topped porkpies, and way too many black berets. His own head felt unstylishly naked.
The woman’s dramatic black, curly hair, pulled back with a red scarf tied beneath one ear, contributed to her gypsy look, as befit the venue. Bright, gauzy fabric swirled around her, seemingly in motion even though she was sitting, and gold hoop earrings as large as dollars dangled from her ears. She’d ordered grapefruit juice and kept her face turned to the stage, so he saw only her profile. The man, who rested a violin case on his lap, was thin, weathered, tanned, and ancient seeming, with crow-black eyes and narrow lips. Not very tall. He downed glass after small, quick glass of grappa.
The man with the hat ordered Q-Town, a local ale. He and Brian smiled and nodded at each other, but any attempt at conversation was squelched by the music.
The Jay Street Band departed the stage to scattered polite applause; their timing was awful, and timing was everything in jazz. It might be time to head home. Slink home might be more accurate, yet he hadn’t really heard anything that he wanted to help out with.
As if to an unseen signal, the other three people at Brian’s table rose. Fedora Man looked over at Brian with a broad, open smile and said, “Come on, we could use a sax.”
Brian hustled stageward. Stepping into the spotlight, he quickly assembled his sax, and Fedora Man and Violin Man fiddled with mikes. The woman sat down at the piano. No drummer, then. He hoped the woman would set a good rhythm.
“Body and Soul,” said Fedora Man, and counted off the beats. Brian was in luck—Coleman Hawkins’s version was grooved into his brain from early childhood.
The woman played an intro, and they played eight bars together, establishing the melody. Violin and cornet began to weave around each other, and Brian added a phrase whenever one came into his head.
It was exhilarating—like what he imagined skydiving might be like. He had flown in small planes … hadn’t Mom had a plane?
And then came a maelstrom of a bridge; call and response, moving into the key of F, then a few solos, the piano keeping a basslike beat, strong yet sinuous, with odd, jazzy chords reminiscent of Monk’s occasional dissonances.
The violin solo was vivid yet smooth; quick phrasings and surprising twists in which Brian lost himself, recalling, indeed, flying in a small plane with his mother piloting, and then a larger plane—but no, that wasn’t possible—then coming to when solid applause filled the room. Gypsy Violinist held bow downward with one hand and violin with the other, nodding his head briefly and stepping back.
The cornet solo was much different; haunting, aching, lost. Yet, oddly, the piano accompaniment provided an understatement of surety with a use of notes and rhythm that Brian knew; even as he heard it he would have to spend a week dissecting to ponder how the two could call up such disparate emotions. This was, for Brian, the heart of jazz, and his near-hallucinatory visions changed to a hundred small clubs, the frontier of a new art form, new sciences; huge crowds packed in to see Ellington, a burst of light—
A moment of piano vamp, a restless cough from the audience, while he realized it was his turn, and he was able to come in perfectly on the downbeat, just as if he’d planned it in his head. And as he played, he actually was thinking ahead, in full jazz sentences, phrases pulled out of his gut he didn’t know he had, things his dad had shown him, fingerings he had forgotten—
The final, unison chorus brought thunderous applause, and Brian wiped sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, closed his eyes against the bright overhead lights for a long moment. Where had that come from? He felt changed—new—like he could go on playing forever—
But no. When he opened his eyes, a man was kneeling on the stage in front of him, removing an electric guitar from its case; a woman vocalist in a short, tight dress adjusted the height of the mike; behind him, a few exploratory splashes of cymbal.
He looked around. His compatriots were gone. He exited, stage left, knelt and returned his father’s nickel-plated sax to its refurbished case, wiping it down, removing the mouthpiece, thinking, Shit
, maybe S.J. put some kind of
magic
into this thing …
A man with slicked-down black hair, wearing a tight black vest over a black T-shirt came over. “Man, that was great. We’ve got our own jam session in Macon’s basement every Thursday night. And Elroy’s an old-timer. Come jam with us some time. Here’s my card. We’ve even gotten a few paying gigs here and there.”
“Thanks,” mumbled Brian, and stuck the card into his reed compartment. The other band was doing “Begin the Beguine,” Bossa nova–style, and the woman’s cool tones were perfect, understated. They were good. As Brian walked out the door, they swung into some Afro-Cuban piece that followed him down the street to his truck.
He opened the cab door and set the sax inside, then noticed a ticket on his windshield. What the hell? He grabbed it and looked around, saw a metal sign reading:
RESIDENTIAL PASS REQUIRED MIDNIGHT TO EIGHT A.M.
Where had that sign been when he parked?
It had been over an hour since he finished his last beer. His head was crystal clear.
That was, perhaps, why he noticed that he felt … changed. Different. Renewed, recharged. He stuffed the ticket into the glove compartment with the others.
Onboard Breathalyzer test passed, he swung out of his space and trundled down empty streets, windows open, night air cool, filled with the sounds of frogs and a whip-poor-will as he waited at a traffic light. Cindy had been in a rock band as a teenager. She’d be their drummer. Zoe, jazz violin; some of her pieces sounded jazzy already. She got it. Megan or Jim, piano. Jill—
He laughed. She’d love it. Jill could play trombone.
Megan and Abbie
ZOZO
June 20
M
EGAN GOT OFF THE BUS
and hurried up the hill. Jim had asked her to come home early. He had a suddenly-yesterday deadline and the babysitter couldn’t make it. She had found herself looking up side streets from her bus window, trying to spot Walking Man.
When she let herself in the front door, she was puzzled. No one in the living room. No one in Abbie’s room. She poked her head inside Jim’s office. “Where is she?”
Jim nodded. “In your room. In the loft.”
“But—”
“I put up the ladder. She’s fine. She has a grip like a monkey. Close the door when you go out, please.” Jim became very short when on deadline.
Megan went down the hall and heard Abbie chattering. She opened the door, thinking that Abbie must be talking to someone on the phone. But no, she was talking some kind of weird baby talk.
“Mareem? Ush gondo maybe.”