Jazz Moon (31 page)

T
he doctor produced a needle and a vial of clear fluid. “Morphine.” He injected Sebastien, whose agitation immediately ceased. “You will be attending him?”

“Yes.”

“You will have to inject him several times before the withdrawal is over. I will show you how.”

The doctor gave him more needles and a few vials of morphine. “Be extremely careful with the dosage. Administer less and less each day. Morphine soothes the withdrawal pain, but if you give him too much he will become addicted to that, too. And that would be far worse than opium addiction, I promise you.”

Ben paid him for his service and his silence. The vigil began.

Hours later, Ben's hand trembled as he filled the hypodermic needle. He tapped a vein in Sebastien's arm, then pierced the needle into his clammy flesh. The reaction was almost instantaneous—Sebastien's convulsions calmed and he drifted into sleep.

A few hours of calm, then Sebastien awoke and vomited. The cramps in his gut curled him into a tight ball. Pain wracked him. He howled and vomited some more. Ben injected him with morphine, cleaned up the vomit. He filled the washbasin with cold water. He undressed Sebastien and saw that he'd defecated. He was emaciated. Already slender, Sebastien had lost so much weight, his ribcage almost tore through his skin.

Ben sent a message to Glo. She came over with soup she'd made. “Something he can keep down,” she said.

The cramps returned as soon as Sebastien woke again. He curled up so tight, Ben and Glo had to pry him loose from himself. It went on all night. Waking and injecting. Waking and injecting. By morning, they had cleaned up vomit and defecation twice, attempted to feed him to no avail, and covered him with every blanket they could find to warm his shivering.

That night, Ben sent word to Café Valentin that he wouldn't be in.

By the next day, Sebastien was conscious most of the time, which made his withdrawal more agonizing because he was fully awake through it. The cramps and the sweats and the shivers left him begging for morphine.

“Please,” he said as the cramps sliced his insides. “Another injection.”

Ben, torn between easing the torment and heeding the doctor's warning, said, “Not yet. A little later.”

“Hold me.”

Ben climbed into the sweat-sodden bed and rocked him. Sebastien needed reassuring, too. He didn't think he'd get better; the pain would never end; he regretted everything; he thought he'd die; might as well die; wanted to die; was terrified of dying. Ben rushed to cool Sebastien's rising panic. Rushed to cool his own.

“I'll tell you a story. Listen to
me,
not to the pain.
D'accord?
”

“
D'accord
.”

“The first time I heard jazz, I had just moved to New York. One day I was wandering around Manhattan, looking for work, and there were these two guys on a corner. One played the banjo; the other was on the clarinet, improvising. There was a hat for people to drop coins in, but I was the only one paying them any attention. Even though I didn't know a thing about jazz I could tell they were amateurs. But there was something about the music. It was sweet. And spicy. Kind of complicated. A little low-down. And intricate. And a little naughty. I threw a penny in the hat, which I had no business doing because me and Angeline were broke. She would have killed me. After that I started hearing about jazz clubs. There sure as hell wasn't money for that, but I went to a club one night and stood outside and listened. It was a lot better than the street corner cats. I was hooked. When Angeline and me started doing better, we went to clubs all the time. Almost lived in them. Ha. Now I work in them.”

A surge of cramps hit Sebastien. He shut his eyes and grinded his teeth as he growled in pain. His body tightened so violently, it seemed his bones might snap. The stink of fresh defecation filled the room. Ben kept rocking him. At last, the surge subsided. When Sebastien spoke again, his voice was ragged and aged.

“Tell me about Angeline.”

“She was my best friend. She saved me. At least for a while. She enabled me to hide. And that's what I needed at the time.” He shook off the bout of nostalgia. “I told you how she tricked me, almost prevented me from—”

“—coming to Paris. With Baby Back.”

The first mention of Baby Back since Sebastien's return.

“Thank God her trick did not work. We would not have met,” he said.

Ben steeled himself. “Sebastien. I'm so sorry. What you walked in on—it shouldn't have happened. I hurt you terribly. But you shouldn't have left.”

Wind howled. The radiator hissed.

“I wanted to punish you,” Sebastien said. “I wanted you to feel as abandoned as I did. I stayed away because I found peace. Yes, in that opium den, in that wretched place, I found peace. Some measure of it anyway.”

“You wanted peace more than you wanted me.”

Sebastien's tears came in spasms that rivaled the cramps. “
Oui
.”

Damning disbelief shook Ben first. Then outrage, quiet and quick-boiling. But hurt outdid them both and coaxed him to retaliate.

“I went to your parents.” He let it dangle, like a Christmas ornament.

Sebastien hefted himself out of Ben's lap, his eyes alarmed and red. Dark blotches swelled beneath them. He reeked of shit and salty, dirty sweat. “How did they treat you?”

Ben's eyes cut into Sebastien's. “How do you think?”

“Oh God. If I had known you would go to them . . .” He shriveled into Ben's lap again and cried.

The room was too warm. It stank. Ben wanted to open the window, let in the fresh, cold, freezing air. He wanted to take off all his clothes, sleep naked as snow blew in. The room darkened as evening fell. He hadn't turned the light on. He needed a drink. An unopened bottle of whiskey called to him from his desk drawer. Next time Sebastien slept, he'd answer. He wished he had a phonograph. And some records. Jazz records. And some classical. The symphony intrigued him. He'd never been. Maybe that was something they could do, together, when Sebastien got better, when this hell was finished with them.

After minutes of stillness, Ben resumed rocking him. He rubbed his neck, his shoulders. He massaged the knots in his upper back and, with playful fingers, scratched his scalp.

Sebastien was so ravaged, it was as if Ben held in his lap a piece of raw, limp flesh.

“Think about something pleasant. Something you can look forward to. Come on. We'll make a game of it.”

“You first,” Sebastien said, coiled in his tight ball.

“I'm looking forward to you and me getting a place together. A place where I can write and you can paint. Something with lots of space and light.”

“I would like that.” Sebastien's voice strained through the pain. “And I want to finish my portrait of you. I want that very much. I miss my paintings.”

“They're here. Some of them.”

He climbed off the bed, retrieved the rescued canvasses, and showed them to Sebastien one by one. Eight paintings, all he'd been able to save.

Later, after another injection eased the latest wave of cramps, Sebastien said, “Wait. My paintings. Why are they here?”

“I . . . I missed you so much, I brought a few home. To be near a piece of you. Go to sleep. I love you.”

“I love you.”

 

By day four, the vomiting stopped. The shivers and cramps abated. Sebastien was no longer drenched in sweat. Color returned to his cheeks. His appetite returned, too, and with it, his desire to paint.

“You gotta tell him,” Glo said. She had brought more soup while Sebastien napped.

“Not yet. He's still too weak.”

“He's gonna take it hard no matter what. Sugar, he's sick, but he ain't no invalid. He'll resent you treating him like one.”

 

A letter arrived from an American literary journal that once published one of his poems. They had rejected every poem he'd submitted since, were likely rejecting him now, so he stuffed the envelope in his pocket and headed to work, reluctantly, the first time he'd left Sebastien alone.

“Go,
mon chaton
. We will need the money now more than ever.” They had agreed to get an apartment together.

“There must be lots of room for my paintings.”

It was late when Ben remembered the letter. He opened it during a break and was surprised to find another sealed envelope inside it. The sealed envelope had a Harlem return address for Ruby Tate, a friend of Angeline's.

F
rom Sacré-Cœur, Paris looked like a cemetery. Snow and fog deadened the lights of the cityscape and made tombstones of the buildings. A cold night. Too cold and too late to be up here.

Ben's grief sat on top of him, bore down.
Angeline, dead
. Inconceivable, like some mythical creature that rises from nowhere and stands in front of you: You don't believe in it, the possibility is absurd, but there the monster is. He hadn't recovered from losing his folks before getting slapped with the near loss of Sebastien. Now this. His old pastor in Dogwood (or was it one of those street corner preachers in Harlem?) once said that God never saddled a man with a bigger burden than he was capable of bearing. Ben now had a chance to test that—if his repudiation of God didn't disqualify him from that experiment.

But this grief was no experiment. Experiments could be modified, ended, walked away from.

Angeline. Dead. And a daughter—
my daughter!
—left in her wake.

“Katherine. Katherine. My child.”

He kept saying it. To convince himself of its truth. Or to undo it. He was caught in an indeterminate realm, somewhere between nightmare and dream. The bludgeoning grief over Angeline was compounded by guilt. Once more his selfishness had struck down someone who loved him. And this time a baby was a casualty. But the grief and guilt were tempered by the fact of his daughter. He sequestered himself there. He had to. It was the only safe place for him. Without it, without
her,
he'd have no choice but to leap from this hill and end it.

Did little Katherine have her mother's prettiness? He hoped so. Would she inherit her brassy mouth? He smiled at the thought. Or perhaps she possessed Angeline's beauty, Ben's shyness and creativity, both parents' work ethic. Ben tried to picture her little eyes and mouth; her little toes. He imagined two versions of her: one without hair, one with. Why hadn't Ruby enclosed a photograph? He'd never liked that woman and told Angeline so. They used to fight about it. Ruby was always telling people what to do, as if she knew best. How dare she take his daughter and inform him as an afterthought. But he was grateful to her: A parentless child was a tragedy; a parentless colored child in America doubly so.

He looked up at the moon and recalled when he'd wanted to explore its other side. He'd done so and found its shadows. But on
this
side was Katherine, a little soul, a small piece of himself.

 

He went home, found Sebastien in his ratty opium den clothes. It was staggering to see him so raggedy-thin, his body not much more than skin dripping off meatless bones. The wild blotches under his eyes remained. The smell of decay and near-death enveloped him yet.

Sebastien clutched a half-drained bottle of whiskey. He sat on the extreme edge of the bed, as if it was a cliff he might leap from.

“I went to my room.”

He swigged from the bottle. Whiskey splashed down his chin. He drew his arm across his face to wipe it and moved the bottle toward his mouth again, so hesitantly Ben was unsure if he would drink from it or throw it. Sebastien slammed it down on the nightstand, tossed himself onto the bed, rolled onto his stomach, and wept.

Ben wept, too. But his tears didn't fall for Sebastien. Not at first. They fell for Angeline, whom he'd abandoned. They fell for Katherine, whom he'd abandoned. They fell for his parents because he'd abandoned them, too. So much abandonment. He'd caused so much death and pain.

But here was Sebastien, a man he loved; a man he'd risked his life to rescue; a man he'd nursed through fits of vomit and defecation and terror; a man he'd protected. The one person with whom he'd been selfless. One person.
One
. In his twenty-three years on this earth.

Ben sat next to him, laid his head on Sebastien's back, felt the protruding bones, could tell that only a flimsy layer of fat separated Sebastien's skin from his insides. But the near-death smell seemed less strong now, a little less foreboding.

“You'll have to start over,” Ben said. “And you can. Those paintings were your life. You still have those eight in the corner. A small piece of you, I know. But it's something.”