David Gates - The Wonders of the Invisible World

“But I want to be with you. ”

Billy’s heart begins to slow down. He looks over at Deke. The pale skin, through which a blue vein shows at his temple. The soft hair that should’ve been trimmed weeks ago. The ragged, scuffed sneakers Billy’s been meaning to replace. So much need, and nobody else to help. He takes a deep breath, lets it out. “Well?” he says. “I’m here, right? I’m not going anywhere.” Kid doesn’t get it. Billy didn’t get it himself, until just now.

When the subway door’s about to close, you hear these two tones, like the phoebe’s call: three one. I tried to find it once on the clarinet, out of curiosity, and all it is, it’s just a third. D down to B-flat, say. Yes, well, obviously the phoebe’s call is sweet and breathy and organic and all that good stuff; I’m talking about the interval. And yes, I know it’s cheap irony, this thing of juxtaposing urban and pastoral. What am I supposed to do, not notice it? And, again yes, I know the Robert Frost thing about how the phoebes wept or didn’t weep or whatever the fuck. You know, what don’t I know?

I know, for example, that my daughter now has a piano, a Yamaha, but a good Yamaha supposedly, and has begun taking lessons. Sometimes when I call, I’ll hear the piano going. Lately Carrie won’t talk to me, and Laura covers for her as gracefully as can be expected. Oh, she’s so earnest about her practicing, it’s so dear to see it, this and that. So I’ll be getting the latest from Laura but really listening to Carrie playing “Lightly Row” or “Swans on the Lake,” and sometimes reverting to “Chopsticks.” Lots of fun, easy for everyone. And I know her teacher still uses the John Thompson book; Greenfield, Massachusetts, is a fucking backwater. Which of course is why it’s basically good that she’s growing up there and not here. Among other things, she stands a better chance of not getting an X-Acto knife held to the side of her neck and being told Give it up, bitch, which happened the other day to the woman who answers the phone for me and the two other assistant deans. When Laura told me that she and Walt planned to move to Greenfield, what could I say? After all, she and I had had a backwater of our own, though ours wasn’t quite so Bedford Falls. We’d agreed that it was essential (we meant desirable) to have someplace to bring a kid to. If only on weekends, assuming we couldn’t get out of the city for real. If we ever had a kid.

Our backwater was in this depressed part of Pennsylvania. Hey, that narrows it down. Two hours and fifty minutes, we used to tell people, not adding that this was from the GW Bridge. A beat-to-shit farmhouse on the last five acres of the original hundred; with our two salaries we could just about swing it. Gray asphalt shingles we were going to replace with clapboards. Among all the other plans. What ended up getting done was having the kid and ripping up the wall-to-wall carpeting. Okay, I’ll stop with the hard-boiled tone. But the house and Carrie did go together. Laura must’ve thought so, too, since she chose it as the setting for her announcement. This was on a Thursday, in July. She called me at my work from her work and asked if we couldn’t both get off early, drive out to the farm (as we called it) that afternoon and call in sick the next day. I said, “Absolutely. Fuck this.” It was like ninety-five degrees, and when you looked along the street you saw brown air all the way up the sky. Which gives you an idea of how young I was, thinking we deserved better air than other people.

So we drove out and I cut the grass while she made dinner. I was finishing the last little bit by the toolshed when she appeared holding a tall glass in each hand as if she were — forget it, no stupid similes. She was a vision. A vision of herself. She handed me mine, then went and sat in a lawn chair with her legs tucked under her, bare feet pasted with grass blades. The air smelled of new-mown lawn, and every once in a while a phoebe whistled those two soft notes: three one. So am I wringing your heart yet? I took a sip and said, “Holy shit. If yours is as strong as mine, I hope you’ve finished the chopping and slicing.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. “Enjoy it. You’re going to have to be drinking for two for a while.”

“What are you talking about?” I said.

And enough of that story.

The big news these days is that I’ve started fooling around with the clarinet again. In high school, I played in a Dixieland band that did “At the Jazz Band Ball” and “Midnight in Moscow,” but in my junior year I sold the clarinet to buy an electric guitar and like an idiot gave away all my jazz records that weren’t post-Parker. Even Ambassador Satch, the first album I ever bought, with all this amazing work by Edmond Hall. These days I buy nothing but early-jazz CDs, and some of the restorations sound so clear they bother me: I’m used to a hiss between me and the music. And for the last year or so I’ve been getting together with these guys on Thursday nights. Andy, a doctor in real life, plays okay trumpet (Punch Miller is his man), and we’ve got a good trombone player named James. I forget what he does; real estate or something. A pothead who thinks he’s discreet, going to the bathroom two or three times a practice.

I’m playing better, I think, although I’m still more comfortable on the slower stuff. Thank God we all agree that “High Society” has been done to death. I’ve never actually mastered the Alphonse Picou solo, which maybe I should call the George Baquet solo — didn’t he invent it? (It’s so me to know this yet not be able to play the thing.) I’m supposedly this big purist, but my man is actually Pee Wee Russell. A Chicago guy. And white. And zero technique, which is what I really like about him: just a bunch of bleating, supposedly denoting passion and pathos.

We use the piano player’s loft on Grand Street. He has a Steinway grand there, and his neighbors bang only if we go past eleven. He’s a piece of work, this Mark. A partner at some law firm, not anybody I’d be likely to know if not for the music. Andy either, as far as that goes. To be an assistant dean isn’t scruffy, exactly, but at my age it’s getting there. A late bloomer, you could call me, if I were blooming. I’ve been trying to get through one more winter with this coat by walking around with my hands in my pockets, thereby keeping the fraying cuffs tucked out of sight, except the edges of the pockets are fraying, too. When Mark first told me his address, I said, “Ah, where the neon madmen climb,” and he obviously thought I was a babbling burnout. He’s got a sleek, dark-haired wife and a pretty little blond daughter named Margit. Second wife, first child: you know the deal. Margit is four (Carrie’s now eight), and at bedtime she’ll pad in barefoot in her nightie and listen for a minute, eyes only for Daddy. And he’ll be sitting there at his Steinway in his pink oxford shirt, playing this Jimmy Yancey shit he’s learned note for note.

We’re still looking for drums — hard to find anyhow, but especially for this music — and string bass. We’d prefer not to go the tuba route. Bass sax might give things an interesting feel, though more New York 1924 than I personally care for. If we had drums and bass, Mark wouldn’t have to be holding everything together on piano. But the Hot Five got along fine without drums and bass — though they did have banjo, not to mention Louis Armstrong instead of Andy Kroll — so I suppose it’s not crucial.

Not crucial. Jesus, I’ ll say.

• • •

Last Thursday I left Mark’s a few minutes after eleven and took the E train uptown to meet Jane. (You must have seen this coming, you ladies especially. Yes, even in his desolation — O lost daughter! O new-mown lawn! — he’s managed to get himself a new one. So now you know her name.) Jane had called me at work that afternoon: could I see her, that night, didn’t matter how late, kind of important. After a couple hours at Mark’s the subway makes you feel poor and put-upon. Across from me sat an old woman, dozing, her possessions tied with yellow nylon rope to a two-wheeled cart. White-crusted sores that looked like salt deposits on her swollen shins. I caught myself regarding her only as another disagreeable feature of the mise-en-scène and not as a fellow traveler to the grave. One more way you know you’ve been in New York too long. Or maybe just at Mark’s too long. Stop after stop, the doors opened and made the phoebe sound, and each time I clutched my clarinet case reflexively, though no one got on. While we were packing up, James had slipped me a sinisterly slender joint—“For you and your lady sometime”—and I was spooked about having it hidden in the case; it had been years since I’d carried anything around. Probably I should’ve been touched by James’s friendly overture rather than creeped out by his inserting himself into my sexual life. Years ago, Laura and I had tried to make love stoned, and I couldn’t control my mind. This was the time my brother and his grad-student cutie visited us at the farm. The two of them on the futon in the spare room. Jesus, the amount of stuff we owned back then. The lawn mower, the hibachi, the croquet set, the outdoor furniture, the indoor furniture. Most of it ended up going to a Scranton auctioneer who wore a cowboy hat and talked in a Bronx-like honk. I’ll think of his name in a second. It occurred to me, sitting there in the subway car, that most of these things, still solid and serviceable, must persist somewhere in the world. In displaced self-pity, I reached across and stuck a five-dollar bill under the yellow nylon cord on the woman’s cart. Which made me feel no better. Swapper Sam, that was the guy. We’d been regulars at his Saturday-night junk auction. Little thinking his box truck, with his smiley caricature painted on the side, would ever back up to our kitchen door.