Evan Hunter - Streets of Gold

They began asking me questions about famous American jazzmen, and since I’d played with many of them, including some of the old-timers, I was able to relate inside anecdotes, which they listened to intently. They were cautious about my blindness until I told them a story about Charlie Mingus and Lennie Tristano, who is a blind piano player, and a damn good one. Mingus and Tristano had got into an argument one night, and Mingus had said, “If you don’t shut up, Lennie, I’m going to turn out the lights and beat hell out of you.” The Italian musicians hesitated a moment in puzzlement. It was the saxophone player who burst into laughter, and then explained the anecdote to the others — “Tristano è un cieco, eh? Dunque, quando Mingus...” They, too, began laughing. Rebecca was bored. She had heard all my stories a hundred times before, and was getting a headache from all the Italian babbling. She excused herself at 2 A.M. and took a taxi back to the Hassler. When I came into the room at four, she was still awake.

“Do you really want to go to Saint Peter’s tomorrow?” she asked. “Frankly, I don’t care if I ever see another church as long as I live.”

“What would you like to do instead?”

“You’re the big wop,” she said. “You tell me.”

I hired a chauffeured car to take us to Villa d’Este the next day. Rebecca told me that the hundreds of fountains there only made her want to pee, and she spent half the day searching for ladies’ rooms. She could not get the word gabinetto straight. I told her to think of “cabinet.” She answered that a cabinet was in her mind something very far removed from a toilet. “Then ask for the pissoir ,” I said. “Everybody knows what a pissoir is.”

“Don’t be so smart,” she said. “If I can’t understand the language, I can’t understand it.”

“You should have gone to Berlitz. You had plenty of time to go to Berlitz.”

“What were you doing while I planned this trip?” she asked. “Besides getting your hand broken?”

“I was sitting around thinking how nice it would be to get away alone with you.”

That night, we made love together. In the shuttered room overlooking the Spanish Steps, the sounds of cats and taxi drivers filtering up from the Piazza Trinità dei Monti below, we copulated on the oversized bed, and when I asked, “Did you come?” Rebecca testily replied, “Of course I came! Will you please shut up?”

We left Rome in a rented Fiat. Rebecca, of course, did the driving. She found it exhilarating at first, but long before we reached Florence, she was complaining that we should have spent the extra money for a chauffeur-driven automobile, which we could most certainly have afforded. I explained to her that having a chauffeur along would be identical to sharing the trip with a stranger. She made no comment. In Florence, there was a letter from my mother. She told us that Dominick had spoken to Luke about going to Bellevue for a voluntary drying out, but Luke had refused. That evening we had dinner in a hotel outside the city. We ate outdoors on a terrace above the Arno.

“Do you remember the night we met? I asked her. “In that Staten Island toilet? You were with someone named Martin....”

“Marvin,” she said.

“Yes.”

“Yes, I remember,” she said.

We stayed at the Excelsior Palace in Venice, at the beach, but it was still too chilly to swim. Rebecca bought little glass animals to take home to the children. I learned that melanzana was the proper way to say “eggplant” in Italian, and not muligniana , the Neapolitan pronunciation I had learned as a boy in Harlem. We bought a ring for Rebecca. We visited the lace factory. We sat in San Marco’s and listened to outdoor concerts. We drank a lot. On a gondola ride, we heard rats splashing into the canal.

In Stresa, there was another letter from my mother. Rebecca recognized the handwriting at once, impatiently said, “Your mother again,” and tore open the flap. I waited anxiously while she unfolded the letter. My grandfather had found out about Luke, as of course had been inevitable. He had personally taken him to two meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous, and Luke seemed to be responding well, intent on curing himself, grateful for all the familial attention that was being lavished upon him. “I hope he gets better,” my mother wrote. “I love him so.”

“I wish she’d stop about Luke already,” Rebecca said. “There isn’t a word here about how the kids are.” To the desk clerk she said, “Is that all the mail?”

“Sì signora, è tutto,” he answered.

“I told my mother to make sure they wrote,” Rebecca said to me. “They have the itinerary, we should have at least got a card by now.” Her voice turned away. “The five bags there,” she said. “The green ones. No, the green ones.”

“Signora?”

“Le cinque valigie verdi,” I said.

“Grazie, signore,” the bellhop answered.

In the evening dusk, we sat sipping cocktails outdoors as Rebecca outlined the next day’s journey. A road map was spread on the table before her, I could hear it crackling as she nervously traced out the route. She was fearful of driving through the Alps and the Brig Pass. A man’s voice apologetically intruded. He said he couldn’t help overhearing our conversation, and offered the advice that we could put the car on a train at Domodossola, if we liked, and then take it off again at Brig, though actually at this time of year, mountain driving wasn’t all that bad. Rebecca invited him and his wife to join us. His wife said very little at first, she smelled of bath oil, and I envisioned her as small and dark. The man was a stockbroker. Rebecca immediately informed him that I was a jazz pianist, and though he had already heard my name in introduction, he asked again what it was, and I said, “Dwight Jamison,” and he was silent for a moment, and then said, “You’re kidding! Honey, this is Dwight Jamison! Jesus, I have all your records going back to the original quintet! Jesus, this is a real honor! Dwight Jamison! Jesus!” Beside him, his wife quietly said, “I love your records, too.”

In the evening after dinner, we strolled beside the lake together, the man walking up ahead with Rebecca, the wife by my side. She told me she was unhappily married. She told me she had a lover. She told me she missed him terribly, and wished he were here with her, instead of her stockbroker husband.

“Are you and Rebecca happy?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, “we’re very happy.”

“I can tell,” she whispered, and then sighed.

The bed in our room was a huge letto matrimoniale . I awakened in the middle of a nightmare, groping for Rebecca. I was shouting, “You can give it right back to the Indians!”

“Give what back?” she asked sleepily.

“Italy,” I said.

On the drive through the Alps, Rebecca kept cursing the stockbroker for telling her there was nothing to worry about this time of year. She also confided that he’d put his hand on her ass while we were walking the town the night before.

“What did you do?” I asked.

“What do you care what I did? You probably had your hand on Miss Bryn Mawr’s ass.”

“No, Rebecca, I didn’t.”

“Sure,” Rebecca said.

In Interlaken, we ate trout caught fresh from the river running beside the hotel, and Rebecca described to me the distant shrouded beauty of the Jungfrau. In Lausanne, there were hastily written notes from the boys, enclosed in a letter from Sophie. Rebecca read them to me as we sat on the terrace at breakfast in the morning sun, and flies buzzed around the jam pots. It was almost the end of May, the breeze was balmy. In the distance I could hear the delighted cries of children pedaling boats on the lake, and suddenly I missed my sons terribly.