Jazz Moon (30 page)

S
ebastien didn't come to Café Valentin that night. He didn't join Ben in the room in rue Condorcet later, nor did he straggle in the next morning. When Ben didn't see him at the Place Pigalle, he went to his boardinghouse, hoping he was painting, but prepared to find him pouting. He wasn't there.

Ben sat on the floor, surrounded by paintings, and waited.

He studied the paintings, analyzing each stroke, following every line's curve. Where shadows fell, he searched for the opposing light. The urge to critique sneaked up on him. He began finding flaws in the perspective; shadows and highlights that couldn't logically exist where they'd been placed. Some pieces screamed for more color. Others had been oversaturated. A few would have benefited from a simpler touch, and in a handful Sebastien had needlessly held back. Ben pondered how to present his critiques; how to be honest, yet constructive.

One thing he could be honest about: Baby Back. His former lover was like wildfire: The light and the heat tantalize, but stray too close and face obliteration. Ben didn't love him. He loved Sebastien. He'd make him believe it; tell him he'd been undone by jealousy of a man who was a vestige from Ben's past and press his case until Sebastien was convinced.

Hours passed. Dusk came. Then evening. Then night.

They didn't bring Sebastien with them.

“Fine,” Ben said. “I'll see him at the club tonight.”

He rehearsed a scolding speech. “Don't ever stay away like that again, you hear me?” he'd say. “People who love each other can't just run away when they get mad.” The part about
people who love each other
would be a good touch. Then he'd fetch Sebastien some soup and his favorite wine and close the argument with “Nothing's going on between me and Baby Back. I love
you
.”

He practiced it in his head, mouthed it to himself all night while he worked until he knew which words to punch, which to tap, which to massage. He perfected it, but never had a chance to perform it: Sebastien didn't show.

He amended the speech for the morning, but Sebastien didn't come.

Ben dressed and ran to his usual area on the Place Pigalle. He didn't find him. He went to his boardinghouse, inspected the room for evidence of Sebastien's presence since yesterday. Nothing. Back at the Place Pigalle, he made the rounds, inquiring if anyone had seen him. No one had. He went back to the boardinghouse, knocked on neighbors' doors. No one knew anything. He returned to the Place Pigalle and then to his own boardinghouse just in case and then searched at
Sacré-Cœur.

That night at Café Valentin, his hands shook so bad, he could barely write down customers' orders.
One-thousand-one, one thousand-two,
he thought as he fought to calm himself. He held his breath each time the door opened.

He went to the
Préfecture de police
on day three of Sebastien's absence.

“
Ces artistes,
” the officer said. He shook his head in sympathy. “You will probably find him passed out in a bar or a brothel,
mon ami
. Come back in a few days if you do not find him.”

Ben did search the bars and every café and back alley in Montmartre. He searched around Chez LeRoi, the Louvre, Montparnasse, Île de la Cité. He returned to Sacré-Cœur, tried to pray to the gold-hearted Jesus, then went home and pounced on his typewriter.

The house was in Neuilly, a suburb seven kilometers west of the center of Paris. It was mausoleum-like, more monstrosity than home with its rows of gravely symmetrical windows set in three stories of sterile beige brick. Balconies hugged both ends of the edifice. An enormous, overly ornate clock stared out from the center of the roof like an ugly face. Sebastien had said his parents were blasphemously wealthy, but that didn't prepare Ben. Gratuitous wealth remained an abstract concept for him even as he'd witnessed its trappings at The Pavilion and Chez LeRoi. This was the first time he had seen such wealth in solid form, close-up. It intimidated him.

He approached the tall front double doors—heavy wood, framed by a marble column on either side—and rang the doorbell, the chime as extravagant as a symphony. A butler appeared, a stooped-over old man, his age somewhere north of seventy. His mustache and surprisingly full head of hair were completely white.

“
Bonjour,
young man.”

Kind eyes. Kind smile.

“
Bonjour, monsieur,
” Ben said. “
Je m'appelle
Ben Charles.”

“What can I do you for you, Monsieur Ben Charles?”

An expansive marble-floored entryway fanned out behind the butler. Paintings that looked as old as the Renaissance hung on its walls.

“May I please speak to Monsieur and Madame Crespin?” Ben said. He took a breath. “About their son. Sebastien.”

The butler's smile waned. “What about him?”

“I'd prefer to talk to
them
.”

The butler looked down at his feet and said, “
Attendez-vous ici, s'il vous plaît
.”

He closed the door, then returned several minutes later and led Ben around the side of the house to a patio in back.

“
Monsieur et Madame vous parleront ici,
” the butler said.

“
Merci
.”

The old man turned to leave, then stopped and pulled up his stooped back. He gripped Ben's arm with surprising strength.

“Monsieur Sebastien . . . is he all right?”

“I don't know.”

The butler's hand fell. He resumed his stoop and walked away.

It began to snow. Ben shivered and waited. Several minutes passed before a man and woman appeared through a set of glass double doors. The man wore a black suit, the woman a gray dress. They were older than Ben had imagined and both tall, their statures as stiff and straight as the old butler's was bent. They held themselves so royally, Ben wondered if he should kneel. Despite the cold, they didn't shiver.

“
Monsieur et Madame Crespin?
” Ben said. No answer as they evaluated him with prim, expressionless faces. “
Je m'appelle
Ben Charles.”

He stepped forward, his hat in one hand, the other outstretched. Monsieur and Madame stepped back.

“We know your name,” Monsieur Crespin said. “Erneste told us. What do you want?”

“I'm here about Sebastien. I—”

“He told us that as well,” Monsieur Crespin said.

“Answer my husband's question,” Madame said. “What is it you want?”

Ben recognized their rudeness for what it actually was. The couple's words and tone, the malice with which they eyed him, the way they kept their physical distance—he had lived this in the States. Seeing it now was like resuming relations with a treacherous old acquaintance. After all, he hadn't been invited inside the house to meet with the Crespins, but outside, in back.

“Sebastien has been missing for days. I don't know where he is. I wonder if you've heard from him.”

He'd never heard his own voice sound so meek. His stomach felt sick. Snow fell harder. Even in his heavy coat he trembled with cold, while the Crespins, who wore no coats, were as still and rigid as the house behind them. Ben made himself look them in their eyes.

“I'm aware that . . . that you haven't been close in a very long time.”

“That is a private matter,” Monsieur Crespin said.

“And no business of yours,” his wife added.

Their voices were controlled and stinging. They stood in close proximity to each other, in total solidarity. Two Crespins operating as one unit. How many other enemies had they faced off against this way? How many had they vanquished?

One-thousand-one. One-thousand-two
.

“It's not my intention to intrude,” Ben said. “But he's been gone for days. I thought, just maybe . . .”

“That he would be
here?
” Madame Crespin said, and the control slipped a little as her volume tacked higher, accompanied by a contemptuous grin.

“If you know our son,” Monsieur Crespin said, “and you know our history, why, like an imbecile, would you think he would be here?”

“Because,
mon cher,
he
is
an imbecile,” Madame said.

Now they
both
grinned. An insect had flown voluntarily into their web. It was time to feast.

“
Monsieur et Madame,
” Ben countered, “in spite of everything, Sebastien loves you and misses you greatly. That's why I thought he might have come here.”

Madame Crespin stepped forward. “What is the nature of your relationship with our son?”

She snarled the words. They were husky and guttural. Capsized by her brusque inquiry, Ben averted his eyes, ashamed.

She walked back to her husband. “
J'avais raison!
He has become. . . intimate . . . with yet another black degenerate.”

“
Oui,
” Monsieur Crespin said, lightly, sighing. “Sebastien does seem drawn to these aborigines.”

The couple lifted their haughty noses at the same time, as if they'd planned it. The snow was really falling now. Ben's dark coat was alive with white. Annoyed, the Crespins brushed it off their own clothes like some bothersome pest, but didn't seem to feel the cold. He hated these people. He didn't comprehend why Sebastien missed them so. Monsieur and Madame Crespin were monsters.

“Get off our property,” Monsieur Crespin said.

“And if you do find Sebastien,” his wife said, “tell him to go to hell.”

 

He was shaking when he returned to Montmartre. He needed a drink. Or reefer. Or both. But then, maybe not. Drink and reefer would medicate him and possibly shave down the rough edge of his hatred, and he didn't ever want to hate those people any less than he did right now.

He considered going back to the police or checking the Place Pigalle again, but then headed to Sebastien's boardinghouse.
Maybe? Just maybe?
Snow still fell, the sky smoky with it. It had accelerated since he left Neuilly. He was a couple of blocks from Sebastien's place when he saw a hill of rubbish on the sidewalk in front of the building, lit with reds, yellows, greens, oranges. A tempest of color. Someone was dumping loads of bright clothes. Two someones, men, making repeated trips from the building to the pile and back. Something was odd. The men strained as they heaved the clothes, and each item banged onto the pile like wood hitting wood.

Ben was half a block away when he realized it wasn't clothes. It was Sebastien's paintings.

“
Arretez!
” he screamed. “Stop! These don't belong to you!”

“Who the hell are you?” It was the older man, in his fifties with a stevedore's muscle and a fat man's gut, coatless, his shirtsleeves rolled up to the elbow. He wore suspenders.

“I'm a friend of the man whose paintings you're trashing,” Ben said. “Who the hell are
you?
”

“His former landlord.”

“Former?”

“The vagrant has not paid rent in two months.”

Snow accumulated on the mass of paintings. When it melted and the water soaked into the canvas, would the paint run? Fade?

“I'll pay it for him,” Ben said. “How much?”

“
Trop tard,
” the landlord said. “A new tenant moved in this morning.”

Pleading: “I'll give you what he owes plus another two months.”

A delaying tactic. At the moment Ben's pockets contained not much more than lint.

The men threw the last of the paintings on the pile, then lit cigarettes as they walked away.

Ben collected as many as he could, shoved them under his arms, took them home, ran back for more. But the pile was gone, the spot where it had been now blank and rapidly filling with snow. A truck sped up the street, the paintings loaded onto it like garbage.

B
en, alone in his room. Evening. Sebastien's rescued canvasses sat in a corner on the floor. All but one: an unfinished, nude portrait of Ben. He held it lightly, but with the gravity with which one holds an infant. Sebastien had replicated the exact hue of his skin, the distinct pink of his lips, his long limbs. He captured the subtle but distinct ridge of muscle curving around the pectorals; the svelte midsection with only a morsel of flab; shoulders broader than Ben had realized; his winsome, arresting, handsome face. At first he dismissed the painting as idealization. Then he accepted—with a depth of satisfaction that felt like an epiphany—that this was no idealized rendering. It was the truth. He had never thought himself beautiful. Sebastien's portrait changed his mind.

More than the beauty, Sebastien had captured the complexity of his subject. Ben looked into the pensive face of his portrait self and recognized the intelligence, the curiosity, the hunger, the restlessness. The multiple layers enriched the portrait with the kind of brio that is possible only when an artist loves his subject.

But Ben was tired of love's vexations and illogic. There was love in this painting. The colors had been mixed lovingly. Love breathed on every brushstroke. And none of it mattered. The love was here; where was the lover?

Café Valentin was winding down. Down so low that an audacious dealer inventoried his remaining merchandise right there at a table in the shadows. Down so far that Glo and company had begun their last set, letting loose a love-blues, consummate in its yearning, appalling, pitiful, mesmerizing in the yearner's shameless blaze of anguish.

Ben smoked in the open doorway. The cold air sobered him from the day's calamities. He wished it would snow again, an incorrigible blizzard that would bury everything. Euphoric destruction. End of the world. A sneaky twist on the traditional apocalypse narrative: the world destructing in a furor of snow, not fire. Ben leaned against the doorjamb, took a puff on his cig, then submitted to a fantasy of where he'd like to be the day the world ended.

A sidewalk café. Coffee. Beignets. A favorite book of poems, the pages edged in gilt. A serenading band. Wistful jazz. Happy jazz. Glo. Gin. A poem dancing off the nib of his pen. The sun and moon holding hands in the sky. A tickle of champagne. A stroke of reefer.

And Sebastien.

Sebastien.

Something down the street caught his attention: a man, walking briskly, if a little unsteadily. A familiar something—long neck, narrow set of shoulders, lean torso—caused Ben to first remove his cigarette from his lips, then discard it altogether.

“Sebastien?” he shouted. “Sebastien!”

Sebastien stopped, looked around him, confused. He spotted Ben and ran, dodging down the street and over the snow while Ben raced to keep up.

“Sebastien, come back!”

Sebastien took an unexpected left and vanished. Ben took the same left and found himself in an alley lit by a few lanterns. The smell of trash almost made him vomit. A herd of rats dined on the remains of a dog. Shoddy, threadbare laundry hung on clotheslines strung across the alley. Sebastien swooped through a door. Ben ran to catch up and almost slipped in a puddle of foul, unidentifiable liquid. Huffing and puffing, he reached the door and was stopped by a thickset Chinaman.

“Ten francs,” the Chinaman said.

“I need to talk to someone. He just came in here.”

“Still ten francs.”

Ben didn't have enough cash with him. “I need to talk to my friend!
C'est urgent!
”

“Ten francs. Pay or go.” The Chinaman opened up his coat. The glow from a lantern reflected off the metal of a lean, sleek, exquisite gun.

 

“A Chinaman? A back alley?” Glo said. “That was a opium den.”

“Down the street. He's been down the street the whole goddamn time.”

“We don't know that, Benjy. But we
do
know Sebastien got hisself a bad habit. I ain't no praying woman, but I'll pray for Sebastien. And you should, too.”

The next day he walked right up to the Chinaman and held out a ten-franc note.

The door closed as soon as he stepped through it. A bolt locked into place on the other side. A flimsy candle mounted to the wall provided the only light. He waited for his eyes to adjust, then took the staircase down. He descended, cautiously, the wood creaking with each step. A large room opened up when he reached the bottom, better lit, but still dark. A sweet, pungent odor struck him. The basement was saturated with it.

The grimy concrete floor was littered with dozens of pallets that were nothing but piles of putrid sheets. People lay or sat on the pallets while holding the stem of an arm-length pipe to their mouths. A Chinese woman in traditional garments carried trays loaded with pipes, scissors, bowls, and decanters filled with a green liquid.

Ben scanned the room. He didn't see Sebastien.

“This way.”

A Chinaman stood in front of him. Ben hesitated.

“This way,” the Chinaman said, impatient, and directed him to a pallet.

He took a seat on the wad of rancid sheets. People around him lay on their backs, eyes closed. The man to his right moaned and groaned; in pain or reverie, who knew? The woman on his left giggled and conversed with herself. The Chinese woman came to Ben. She handed him a pipe and an oil lamp to light it. As soon as she left him, Ben set off in search of Sebastien.

Every person down here simmered in a delirium. Some mumbled and gesticulated. Others lay corpse-like. A man lay on his side, unconscious, as vomit poured from his mouth. A large rat skittered about, scavenging among dazed smokers while an attendant shooed it away with a stick. The sweet stench of opium weighed close and heavy. The darkness was a black quilt pricked here and there by the glow of the oil lamps.

He kept searching for Sebastien and found him.

He lay on his back, seemingly at peace. Like a dead man. He moved suddenly, an odd, jerky movement. He twitched again, but remained unconscious. Perspiration swam off him. The twitching evolved to violent convulsions—hands and arms and knees flailing. Ben crouched next to him and tried to restrain him.

“Help!” Ben shouted. “Help! This man needs help!”

The female attendant and the guard came running.

“Get a doctor!” Ben said. He felt Sebastien's face. It was cold.

Neither the attendant nor the guard moved.

“Did you hear me? He needs a doctor! Hurry! Why are you standing there?”

“I will bring water,” the attendant said.

“He needs more than water, you stupid bitch!”

Ben took charge. He slapped Sebastien's face. He slapped him again. And again. Harder and harder until his face turned crimson.

The convulsions slowed. His eyes half opened. Ben lugged him to his feet, then propped him up by draping him around his shoulders. But Sebastien couldn't move his legs. The convulsions started again. Ben lowered him to the ground, placed his hands under his armpits, and dragged him. He weaved around the pallets to the stairs, then pulled Sebastien up, step by step. He reached the top, out of breath, his lower back and legs on fire. The door was locked from the outside. He banged on it, he kicked it. It didn't open, so he battered it with his whole body.

“Let us out! Open this fucking door!”

The door opened so fast, Ben fell onto the ground outside. The Chinaman stood there with the gun aimed at his head.

“Please. I just want to get him out of here,” Ben said.

“Go!”

He dragged Sebastien through the alley, fearful the rats might latch on and tag along for the ride. Just before he reached the street, Ben lugged him to his feet again and propped him up.

“Taxi! Taxi!”

The taxi stopped.

“You have to help me get him in the car,” Ben said.

The driver was a very dark-skinned colored man. He examined the pair. “What the hell is wrong with him?” An African accent.

“Too much champagne.” Ben laughed, attempted to sound jovial. “You know how it is.”

“Too much champagne makes you pass out. It does not make you twitch like that.”

The driver faced forward, placed his hands on the steering wheel in preparation to leave.

“Please!” Ben shouted. “Just help me get him to my house. It's not far. I'll pay you double.”

The driver's skeptical eyes took their time sliding from Sebastien to Ben, then back to the twitching Sebastien where they lingered. Ben's arms and neck and shoulders ached from propping him up. His lungs began to sting from holding his breath, awaiting the driver's verdict.

“You will pay me triple,” the driver said. “Get in.”