Joseph McElroy - Night Soul and Other Stories

“Vic.” Two women he didn’t know in skirts stood over him, and named some names and he nodded while he had a bite, lifted his face to the dark one with her hand on his shoulder for some reason who told how it was like a duet of the two hands and asked had he been out of New York for a while? “Always getting the hang of it,” he said. “With everything in between,” said the other, who was cooler, not so nice maybe, “but no tonal center (?),” she said, which was correct and he looked at her, her blue eyes still discernible in the light, and when she offered to buy him a drink and said she hadn’t heard the last number before, and received a call on her cell, “New work,” he said.

“Does it have a name?” said the first woman, who was a little wild, personal, but a man in a bow tie, gruff and grizzled, stopped by to say thanks for “Got the World on a String,” he could hardly make out the tune, he introduced himself, he had heard of Vic, and, asking if Vic could play “Dancing on the Ceiling,” seemed in his ironic enunciation to be testing you as if it was a business proposition. The second woman, closing her cell, who was not turned on to whatever, knew Annabella as it happened and this “thing” she was finishing (?), this book (?) (as he lifted his glass to drink his club soda). And something else the woman was saying he didn’t listen to at all, as the first one said, “I’ll give it a name.” “It’s not about anything,” Vic said, “it’s about time.” The first woman laughed and it touched him.

“We heard you were…”—the second woman shrugged—“but you don’t seem that way at all,” she finished.

Two or three men at the bar he knew but didn’t visit, though this was a mistake. All the instruments still packed under the hood of the best instrument of all, laughter behind him leaving well after midnight. A hand of applause.

Two blocks from home and no umbrella, there is their lighted window on the third floor. The worst thing that could happen was so small the rain gave crystalline distance-vision. The worst that could happen absolutely vibrated, yet for it to be so far off and at the same time in you you had to be vast.

The long table, once dining, finds itself strewn with mail, large and small nail clippers, Parent-Teacher notice, intermediate algebra like a coffee table book, and there a stranger at the edge a half-tumbler of coke, an ice cube surfacing. He heard Lang’s door click. A photo album open on the floor. “Who was here?” He knew the answer as he asked. Lang came out in boxers. “That guy Flyte (?).” “Flyte!” “He buzzed.” “You let him up?” “I thought you forgot your keys.” “You let him in?”

By a street window the recliner. On the piano a Post-it flagging the music stand.

“That’s what you do,” the boy faltered.

“You ask who it is,” the father a father who has to keep to the question yet now realizes his son did ask who it was. “I remembered him. He’s big. He knew where you were playing. He knows the owner.” “He got the photo album out. He knew Mom when she was a baby sitter.” “Not only.” “I got to get up in the morning.”

“He’s a session player.” “What’s that?” “Recording studio. I used to hate him.”

“Used to?” Lang hauled on the fridge door and looked inside to no avail. “…Dad?”

On the kitchen table an ice tray loitered.

“He’s not a father,” Vic said. Lang leaning to close the fridge, a snapshot slips its magnet, and his father asks if he remembers Flyte. Not somebody you let inside your house.

“A friend of Mom’s.”

“You knew that.” Lang knew more. “But nowadays he would never just visit.”

“He did.”

“We were rivals once.”

“He’s funny. Mom told me.” The father hears the visit remark passed over. The truth of it, Flyte’s coincidental visit. “Some woman he said came up once after a set ‘misty-eyed’ and asked you to play something and you’d just been playing it.” “He would remember that.” “He smelled.”

“What a boy needs a mom for .” “What’s that?” “Warn you ’bout the people you meet. Not somebody you let inside your house,” Vic said drily. The man has picked up the snapshot of Lang with his tennis racket in the park and tucked it under the magnet.

A silence in the joke bears them into the night sleep-shortened each. Father awake to the rain, some piano voicings, and actually the women at the club.

Is it the third night of an alternative picking up speed? The worst thing he could imagine keeps where it is. A set of nights is asked of him, music, rain, the street. Things others around him knew — that he would be out tonight — so don’t worry how, it doesn’t matter how, like the spit this pretty well-known session player shakes out of his horn when he’s done, who Vic doubts he’s still that close to Annabella Lang. Though in the morning at seven, in the same space light-shifted, half his cereal left, the boy will ask if he played great and who came. Lang had “really wanted to” (as if what stopped him was homework). Two sets, he’d have been there writing up his oral history project, speeding through his math shortcuts at a tablecloth, where they would bring him something to eat. But three sets. So Lang didn’t go. Unfortunately, as it turned out.

The album still open on the living room floor. And now, a New Yorker running late, Lang (whose given name the man had not originally favored) couldn’t stay to hear his dad ask about homework, describe the crowd.

While in his running-late out the door, an industrial-weight backpack looped over one shoulder, Lang mentioned this guy he was seeing after school. Though then the man could regret not telling Lang he’d be late after Parent-Teacher, divided by the boy, the phone, the face of his wristwatch which the hand, knuckles, fingers beyond it can blindly deny. Bent on asking what he and Flyte discussed; and this friend in an upper grade who wanted to meet Vic? — and the piano across the sunny room; the yellow Post-it with four, five named chords; and these broken rhythms that bear you through it all or bop you with doubt and music.

And now, as Vic will tell it at a New York lunch hour side by side with his unmarried friend at a counter that looks out the street window onto the sidewalk, having mentioned that he had to go for Parent-Teacher conferences today, he had taken the breakfast call, seeing “Anna Lang” on ID knowing he’ll be held up, the dishes sinked, framed photos tacking like sailboats on the long, strewn table, Lang’s room a disaster area — hearing that she’d be taking their son to the Cape Friday right after lunch, drive back next Wednesday—

Wednesday! quietly exclaims the lunch friend, entertained, thoughtful.

A hundred and twelve or thirteen hours at Truro, missing three days of school, it was news to the father. “He can get his assignments.” “Who from?” “He can play golf” ( Golf ? Vic’s lunch friend is appealed to) — miles of beach, the water, the air, fresh fish, great place to work. “ Work ?” Vic asks his friend, imagining that beautiful coast.

“We’ll pick him up… — hmm ,” she goes.

“I don’t think so.” “You what?” “He’s not crazy about missing school.”

“It won’t make a particle of difference,” lips, tongue, teeth audible, a darkness of pomposity he loves her for still a little, “He can get his assignments,” she said in a different voice, partner annihilating partner… — “and what are you offering for the weekend?”

“More than a weekend.”

“What did you” (the friend speaking with his mouth full) “do?” who, not having been there, wouldn’t know what followed. “She said I left him alone last night.” “She knew about the gig?” “I think from Flyte; remember Flyte?” Vic gives back a look, knowing less than he implies. “Said I would ask him. ”