Jazz Moon (24 page)

Dietrich's teeth and prickly tongue bombarded Ben's neck. François dug his tongue into his mouth. Ben cloaked his arms around him and reciprocated.

Then the Frenchman and the German escorted him into the shadows.

H
e paid no attention to the boys on the steps on his return trip up the street. He tried to inhale the night air, but the smells of Mon Club sealed up his nostrils. He rejoined the crazed crowd on the Place Pigalle and drifted back to the boardinghouse. Ben clumped up the stairs and opened his door. There sat Baby Back, a glass in hand, the cognac bottle before him, looking as if he hadn't moved at all since earlier, except his shirt was off.

Ben's sudden appearance seemed to startle him. He inspected the poet, head to foot. “Where were you?”

Ben caught a glimpse of himself in the mirror above the washbasin. Doused in sweat. Shirt untucked and unbuttoned down to his navel. Tie hanging about his neck like loose string. Pants fly undone. He started to button it, then didn't. Was it the Frenchman who undid his pants? Or the German? He didn't know. Once they had him in the shadows, once they'd gone to work on him, it hadn't mattered.

“I said, where were you?” Baby Back's eyes settled on the unbuttoned fly. He approached, took a big whiff, and Ben knew the stinky musk of those two men covered him. The way their hands had. Their mouths, their bodies. Funny. He couldn't remember their names. This was the first time he'd been intimate with anybody and then couldn't remember a name. He was shocked at his lack of shame. But the shock couldn't compete with the pleasure—gluttonous and fever-bright—that he'd devoured in those shadows. He should have felt dirty. Instead, he was delighted.

“Where were you?” Baby Back asked for the third time, louder, moving closer, using his height and his bigness to intimidate an answer from his silent, wayward lover.

“
Even Stephen
. That's where I was.”

Baby Back grabbed the lapels of his jacket and tugged him in close. Their foreheads and noses touched.

“Pack your things,” he said. “Get out. I don't want you back.”

 

“I used to sing at Mon Club, sugar.”

Glo held the gin bottle, Ben the reefer cigarette. They exchanged substances in one dexterous move. Except for the streetlamp light straining through the windows, the apartment was dark. Glo sat in her pink easy chair. Ben sprawled on the pink sofa—his new home.

“
You
sang in that dump?” He upended the bottle. Gin rinsed down his throat. The reefer inoculated him against the burn.

“Sure did,” Glo said. “When I first came here.”

“I hope you dressed better than that thing they had singing.”

“Probably didn't. Glo hadn't become the maven of fashion that she is now.” She coughed as she sucked in a lungful of reefer.

Ben emptied the gin. “We need that other bottle. I'll make myself at home and get it.”

“I remember one night,” Glo said. “I was in the middle of a song. None of them sissies was paying attention. They was too busy checking each other out and doing their business in them shadows. All of a sudden this man comes tearing down the stairs. Everyone thought it was a raid. Them sissies buttoned their pants up right quick. The man screams, ‘
Aidez-moi! Aidez-moi!
' and goes running into the shadows. Not a minute later, two more guys in suits come running in—gangsters—looking for the first guy. They knew exactly where they'd landed soon as they got down the stairs. Everybody was scared. Whole place got quiet. The gangsters started walking around, checking it out. Then they went to the bar and ordered drinks and mixed with the sissies, talking to people like they was just two guys out on the town.”

“Were they queer?”

“No, sugar. They was thirsty. The owner told me to keep singing, so I did ‘Tain't Nobody's Business If I Do.' Them gangsters was drinking and laughing and having themselves a good ol' time. Before they left, they told the owner they was shaking the place down for a five-percent cut per week.”

“What happened to the guy they was chasing?” Ben asked.

“Good-looking guy, hiding in the shadows of a sissy bar. What you think happened?”

Without a word they switched substances again in a seamless exchange. Ben relit the reefer and dragged hard until he floated in near oblivion. He couldn't move, couldn't think. He could feel, but only the periphery of things.

“What you gonna do without that big-headed trumpet player?” Glo asked.

He sucked and sucked and sucked on the reefer. Smoked it down to an ash that singed his fingers. “I ain't doing shit tonight. Tomorrow I'll probably cry.”

And so he did. Woke up late with a demonic hangover, went up to Sacré-Cœur, and hemorrhaged tears.

Before Paris, it was Baby Back who supplied color to Ben's world. Baby Back was saturated with color. It was the trumpet glowing gold and boiling red-hot and cooling down with blues. It was the blue in his blues. It was the savage, blinding, starlit orange of his jazz genius. It was the cold wrought-iron black of his bad moods, his ambition, his selfishness, his cruelty. It was so many rainbows. It was the rainbow pastiche of the grandma quilt. It was the rainbow delight of loving him. It was the rainbow bruise of loving him.

After the hemorrhage, he looked up at the sky. At that late hour of morning he could still see the moon. A light imprint. Ben wondered about the other side of the moon. He could only speculate. Or fantasize. But he was certain it wasn't uniform, perhaps not even predictable, in its terrain, its textures. Perhaps something (new colors?) on that other side, that far side, both complemented and contradicted what he saw from his perch on earth.

He felt like the moon: a stray and lonely body.

His gaze slid down to the Paris skyline.

Paris. Bright miracle. But behind every bright thing creeps its shadows. The moon had its shadows and Paris hers. They lurked in her back streets and back alleys, in parks and in basements. The shadows attracted Ben like a snake cajoled from a basket by the arousing notes of a flute. He had his shadow side. Just like Paris. Just like that pesky, double-sided moon.

shadows

H
arlem had truly, finally come to Chez LeRoi.
Chocolate Jubilee of 1926,
an all-colored musical revue from New York, had sailed into Paris and anchored at the Music-hall des Champs Élysées. The cast and crew christened Chez LeRoi their official after-performance watering hole. Denny and her set adopted them, then proceeded to suffocate them with champagne and attention. The troupe was bewildered by the welcome, their instant celebrity. Ben envied them. He recalled that he had been the celebrity just six months ago. With an entire passel of Harlem Negroes to pet, he was now relegated to mere servant. “Ben!” Denny would snap. “Bring more champagne! Right now! We have
real
Negroes in the house!” On these occasions, the impulse to discharge a crisp reply would set Ben's lips tingling, until he remembered that Denny was Chez LeRoi's most important customer and his biggest tipper.

The cast of
Chocolate Jubilee
displayed a bewitching parade of attitudes and temperaments, moods and natures.

The women:

There were girls—late teens, early twenties—whose first show this was. Ben could tell by their fresh, pretty, unblemished faces; by their pertness and laughter that tinkled like the
ping
of a crystal goblet. They were still too naïve to grasp that their fresh, pretty faces might harbor the formula for fulfilling their ambitions.

The foils to these fresh buds were women a little older and miles wiser. Pretty, too, but they had partied too much, worried too much, loved harder than they should have. It weighed on their careworn faces, in the silk-fine creases prickling under their eyes like unruly lines on a map. They once nurtured ambitions, but learned that ambitions beget consequences. Survivors, these tough-skinned women slung mean words at anyone foolish enough to mess with them and spoke their minds as if firing a weapon, as when Denny asked the
de rigueur
question of whether they knew Josephine Baker.

“I know that heifer,” one of them blasted, primed to unleash a massacre. “Worked with her on the road back in '21 or '22 in
Shuffle Along
. Bitch thought she was better than everybody else. She fucked anybody—male, female—as long as it had something between its legs and a wallet full of cash or a way to get some. Hope she chokes on that banana skirt.”

Ben expected mortification from Denny's set at the butchering of the Queen of Harlem, but they poured more champagne for the butcher, drew their chairs closer, and licked their lips over the delectable gossip.

Then came the saucy colored girls. Neither as naïve as the buds nor as hardened as the survivors, they wisecracked and chicken-necked and their laughter clattered off the walls in reaction to their own salty jokes. They smiled a lot, drank plenty, thrusted themselves into life, and held back nothing. It made them lovable, seemingly invincible, and vulnerable.

The men:

The guys of
Chocolate Jubilee of 1926
were men in the basest sense: fluid in desire, ever-wavering in commitment. They were mysteries, yet transparent and easily deciphered. One of middling height, handsome as a king and quiet as a kitten, kept an arm around a certain saucy girl and his eyes on a particularly ripe bud. Then there was the male couple, sometimes affectionate and inseparable, other times snuggling up to the men of Denny's set. Denny's men would amble outside with one or the other of these guys for some fresh Paris air, then return with their hair mussed, their white dinner jackets rumpled. Rumors spread that the male couple could be had—one, the other, or both together—for a price.

These
Chocolate Jubilee
men were stage people: transient and itinerant by nature. They didn't know what would become of them three, five, six months from now, so they lived and ate and loved while they could, as much as they could. Ben watched the couple's suavely lean dancers' bodies and cheered them on.

He understood them.

Since the split with Baby Back, Ben had sunk himself in Paris's shadows. Daily. Nightly. Loving while he could, as much as he could. Not
loving,
really. More like feeding. Being fed. Being fed on. The shadows welcomed him, offering delights and guiltless pleasure. Even in daylight the shadows hummed, like the afternoon in the Montparnasse train station restroom. Men entered and set about their business like automatons, looking into no one's eyes, saying nothing except, perhaps,
excusez-moi
if they stumbled into someone's way. And even this was said quickly, with their eyes on their shoes and a sharp pivot left or right to get out of the way. A man he'd been casing held his gaze steady like a rope to reel him in. Ben halfheartedly washed his hands in the sink. A mirror hung above it. They looked at each other in the reflection. The man walked to a urinal and paused, put a finger to his temple, scratched deliberately, then proceeded inside, leaving the door ajar. Ben dried his hands, walked into the urinal. It was over quickly. It usually was. And, as always, in that transitory moment right after, Ben asked himself if it was worth it.
Why am I doing this? To forget Baby Back? Maybe just to forget.

The moment over, Ben smoothed down the sleeves of his jacket, adjusted his tie, cocked his hat, and exited the urinal.

 

Chez LeRoi could have been renamed Chez Baby Back. His hit records had cemented a loyal following and secured him occasional gigs in some larger venues. Glo received less stage time as the show—formerly
her
dominion—became Baby Back's.

“What the fuck am
I
there for?” Glo screamed, waking Ben, as she thundered around the apartment one morning in her housecoat and slippers, flask in hand. “That big-headed fool done took over!”

She screamed and pleaded as if he could reverse time, transform things to the way they were before Baby Back barnstormed Chez LeRoi. He squashed the pink pillow onto his head and tried to go back to sleep.

“You're ignoring me?” Glo said. “Excuse you. You're living in
my
house and sleeping on
my
couch and your little, skinny, poetry-writing ass is ignoring me? Fuck that. You can find somewhere else to live.”

That afternoon, he did.

A boardinghouse in rue Condorcet, way south of the Place Pigalle, almost on the outskirts of Montmartre. The room occupied the rear corner of the first floor where sunlight waged a losing battle. The lone window looked out onto an alley fortressed by a stone wall. Shadows bathed the room. But it had warmth. It was clean. The hardwood floors had been kept up. The cherrywood desk, chair, wardrobe, and headboard were worn with age and use, but still lovely.

Ben unpacked his things, stood back to admire his new home. He smiled until he saw the double bed. A bed with no grandma quilt. He missed it. He missed Baby Back.

They hadn't spoken. If they happened upon each other at Chez LeRoi or out and about in Montmartre, they kept walking. No greeting. No sidelong look. He stayed at the club because he wanted to be near Glo. And he refused to back down from Baby Back yet again.

“Looks like he done moved out that boardinghouse y'all was living in,” Norman the bartender had said. “Making so much money from them records, he rented a fancy place in rue des Abbesses.”

What Norman omitted, but Ben had heard through gossip, was that Clifford spent a lot of time in Baby Back's new, fancy place.

He thought of their breakup as The Demise: capital
T,
capital
D
—investing it with all the weight it deserved. One more notch in the increasingly vivid history of one Ben Charles, the current phase being solitude in a warm room flush with shadows in a city with its share of them. A miracle city where Negro skin could illuminate the shadows like a torch, attract white moths to the flame. In those moments Negro Ben was strong, handsome, worthy.

A blizzard had deposited a cargo of snow on Montmartre. More was falling. Ben trudged across the tightly packed snow on the Place Pigalle. It crunched as he walked. He looked up at Sacré-Cœur, its white façade nearly invisible against the falling blur. He wondered how Paris's snow-filled ruts and grooves looked from that hill. He wanted to go up there, but didn't.

Christmas was coming. It was December, but the thought of Christmas hadn't occurred to him until last night. He had spent last Christmas with Baby Back in Harlem, but this year the trumpeter would be with Clifford. Ben had been trying to write—a tepid poem with no marrow in its bones, the only sort he seemed capable of lately—when he realized it. The thought had tormented him away from his typewriter, through the snowstorm, and into Claire de Lune, known for its large contingent of sailors and the old crone who acted variously as advice-giver and raconteur. He smoked reefer, snorted cocaine, and awoke that morning in a bed, somewhere, with three muscular sailors. He wondered if he'd ever see them again, and if he'd recognize them if he did. Wasn't one muscular sailor just like any other? In the end, only one thing mattered: that fleeting, cardinal moment of release.

He looked up at
Sacré-Cœur
again, then walked to work. Norman was behind the bar, polishing champagne glasses.

“Hey, Norm. How you doing?”

Norman put a glass down as Ben went to the spiral stairs. “Ben. I gotta tell you something.”

“Tell me in a minute. I want to say hi to Glo. Don't get to see her as much since she kicked me out.”

“She ain't up there.”

Ben continued up the stairs. “Sure she is. She's singing tonight.”

“Damn it, I'm telling you, she ain't up there!”

He had been taking the steps two at a time, but now made a cautious descent. “What happened, Norm? Why ain't she up there?”

“LeRoi fired her. Just happened a half hour ago. When he told her, she cussed him out, threw shit at him. Screamed something about how Baby Back took over and how unfair it was.” Norman chuckled. “Told LeRoi he could go to hell and then fuck himself when he got there. Looks like that dressing room gonna be Baby Back's now.”

Ben visualized him strutting down the spiral stairs and onto the stage to mad applause. The royal
entrée
of Chez LeRoi's undisputed king.

“I sure is gonna miss Glo,” Norman said. “I hope she lands on her feet. Jobs is scarce. Even for talented colored folks.”

Ben sat on the bottom step. Norman shook his head and went back to polishing glasses, as if he had played his part in the drama and could be of no further use.