The Song is You (2009) (34 page)

“Well, it’s about five in the morning, I think, and I don’t know where you are, but you’ll get this eventually. I’m in your hotel room in Budapest, and I’m looking around and maybe seeing things, ah, a little clearer. I don’t—we haven’t seemed able to find just how to do this, half a Smiths song, half a dinner date, half a wild night in a Gellert hotel room, half a this and half a that, eh? Not quite adding up right, and I’m wondering if that’s maybe for the best. I’m not sure about that. I’m wavering as I say it. I could be convinced, Julian. Do you feel up for convincing me?” She stood on the balcony in his shirt, looked at the sky beginning to pale, maybe just a trick of the bridge lights. “But if here’s where the story ends, that would still be a pretty good story, wouldn’t it? I’m a lot of possible things, you know. I think I am. I sort of take some pride in that, in not limiting that, not being scared of finding out. But I’m not, probably, able to be absolutely
anything
at all, if you take my meaning? There are—are we really going to go to the movies and things, and meet each other’s … friends? You’ve a child, I think, and that’s not for me. Am I being boring? Maybe, maybe it is for me, how do I know? Maybe I’d be Auntie Cait or something, and you’d have to explain my presence to him or cancel meeting me because the little thing had the mumps or some such. I’m just tired. I don’t know. And I don’t know where the pretty woman with the black hair is in all this? I think you might have—no, I don’t know what I think you might have. You make me feel very clumsy, my friend, and a little young and stupid. We’re off to Vienna for a few days. I wouldn’t be surprised not to hear from you again. Nor vice versa, I suppose. Nor the opposite. If I know anything, it’s you’ve got plenty more tricks and surprises than I have. You’re endlessly creative, I suspect, Julian. So what are we to be, then? I think we’d best sort it soon. I can’t take any more nights like tonight.”

Aidan had happily house-sat while his brother was in Europe and now was simply trying to leave everything in better condition than when the owner left. He had just finished sanitizing the hazmat fridge and bathroom with some very high-end scouring powder he’d paid for himself, and now he sat on the couch listening to this call, knew what would be best for everyone, deleted it.

JULIAN’S EYES OPENED
to the room, brown with near daylight, the morning of his flight home to New York. His iPod was blank. He washed his face, tried to blink away the coming hangovers, physical and otherwise. He dressed, gathered his things, replaced her suitcase, left her room as he’d found it, didn’t want to leave anything of himself behind this time, because the picture would have been of a fool, for the first time, an old fool, impotently stalking and pleading for something she wouldn’t give him, because what, after all of this, did he have to
offer
her, he demanded of himself, knowing the sad answer. He was, after a lifelong spree, broke, outside a shop window, with nothing to spend but a little cry of desire—”But I
want”
—as if that had cash or artistic value. And she knew it didn’t.

When he opened her door, a weight rolled into her room toward him, landed next to his feet with a thump, and then unfolded and stood to become Ian Richfield, waking and confused and still steaming alcohol out of his skin. “Jesus Christ,” he said, looking at Julian. “You have got to be kidding me.” He stumbled back down the hall, pounded on the elevator button, and rested his head against the wall, rather hard.

So Julian took the stairs down to his own room to pack, charge his iPod, start trying not to think any more about any of it. His key opened his door but only an inch, until the interior chain caught.

Cait had hooked it just in time and now hid behind the door, half dressed and annoyed at being trapped. The voice mail she’d just left him was wrong. She didn’t want to be convinced. She was done, and she knew it right then. She didn’t want him, didn’t want any more of any of it, not his scraps of a life lived without her, before her, his children and previous wives, all this bulky past to stuff somewhere, or to hold over her, to compare her to, old sadnesses bending him over when he should have been with her, all his little triggers she’d have to be wary of. “Look, can you do me a favor?” she called.

“Anything, anything at all, I’m just so—”

“I need to leave now, and I’d like to make a graceful getaway.”

“No! No, no … We, we …”

“I do.”

“Please no. Please don’t. Please.” She was silent. He waited and waited and she was silent and the chain drooped there. “Are you sure?” he asked, squeezing his eyes shut, compressing everything into a single moment.

“I am. Can you—”

“Yeah.”

He turned back to the stairs, felt the tears prickling against his face, kept going down until he ran out of steps, opened a door to the lobby and then another to the street, and he walked up the hill behind the hotel and watched the flats of Pest brighten across the river, like the houselights coming up at the end of a play.

When he went back to his room, she’d ransacked it, taken all his relics of her, left him only the pieces that didn’t include her. The little photo album lay on his pillow next to Rachel’s postcard of the old Parisian couple. He picked up his shirt, held it to his face, breathed in Cait. He smelled her in his bed, too, the traces of the night they’d just spent together.

ON THE LONG FLIGHT HOME
, Cait’s scent on his shirt like the very last two curled leaves trembling on an autumn-chilled branch, Julian slept until Europe crumbled into the sea. When he awoke, his iPod suggested Billie Holiday’s
Chicago Radio Broadcast, 1959
, and Julian listened several times to his mother’s voice and Billie’s and the best of those piano solos until the music gave out with a plaintive flashing icon over Greenland.

The pianist Dean Villerman’s name only appears in a few comprehensive jazz encyclopedias as genealogically compulsive as the Book of Numbers and on half a dozen sporadically live websites devoted to other players, but even obscure-footnote sidemen are often someone’s pet favorites, and so it was with Villerman. He came up through white dance bands in the South, before the Second World War, a little white cat educated as a physicist, and some jazz-trivia buffs insist to this day that he played a minor role in the Manhattan Project. True or not, there is a photograph of a celebration at Los Alamos after the first successful test detonation, and in it Oppenheimer and Leslie Groves toast each other with glasses of something, and they stand in front of an upright piano played by a hunched-over figure who could certainly have been the younger version of the man Julian met forty-three years later at his last public performance.

Atomic or not, in 1941 and 1942 Dean Villerman was in Manhattan, not New Mexico, and was hanging around Minton’s, Clark Monroe’s, and similar after-hours joints, listening and watching as bebop’s structural engineers hammered out its musical foundations. Unknowns like Villerman would wait patiently, hoping but not guaranteed to sit in, watching Monk’s hands as he figured out what it meant to play bop piano. Aspirants were willing to abase themselves, go into a back room and play “Rhythm” in all twelve keys, changing up a fifth every chorus, just to earn the right to go back and wait some more, sitting and smoking as long as necessary to take the dreaded and coveted chance, invited up well past three o’clock in the morning, Monk standing to the side, looking at the ceiling, while Villerman, for example—plaid cardigan, thick glasses, suspenders—played something that Bird dismissed after eight bars as “corny.” But bebop wasn’t Mandarin Chinese or even particle physics, and Villerman was a serious musician, so eventually he figured it out, could sit in for a few tunes with Dizzy and Bird and not feel a fool, though there were always going to be some front-row and backstage murmurs that—as a white boy—he could imitate it, but he couldn’t in some deep, nameless way
be
it or advance it.

Once he had it, though, he didn’t do much with it. He didn’t record as a leader or as a sideman. After the war he taught at a boarding school in New Hampshire—theory, private lessons, classical appreciation, a little jazz technique for the talented kids—now and then taking the
Yankee Flyer
down to the city to play a night or two of quiet standards at a restaurant.

Julian, however, knew Villerman’s name—implying a very, very deep jazz aficionado’s knowledge—because of a single radio date Villerman played with Billie Holiday in May of 1959, one of her very last public appearances, and literally her last sung notes to survive as a recording. You can’t buy it. Julian’s father made it, live in Ohio, by setting up a black Magenta-Sonic reel-to-reel, purchased at great cost for the event, in front of his white-and-gold, two-speaker Fidelio hi-fi. Over the years, Julian transferred his father’s tape to cassette, CD, then his computer and iPod, and he never found any other recording of it, not on Billie fan sites or as a commercial reissue or in the terabytes of the world’s uploaded audio and video. Julian owned, in this one case, the only recording on earth of something important.

His father had loved the tape, not because of Billie—she sounded hoarse and dazed, and she dragged behind the beat like a plow—but because of the piano: chords that combined joy and sorrow in countless and mysterious proportions, that carved a sculpture of the singer’s whole life as a tribute during solos and wove a support under her when she sang and stumbled, like a hand under her arm, or a blanket over her knees. Even Julian could hear, as a young boy, that something rare, almost celestial, happened that night on the piano. Something happened that night. Something descended and touched the piano player, and the music echoed on and on, outward and stronger, “live from the Skyline Lounge, on the thirty-eighth floor, high atop Chicago’s Excelsior Hotel.”

“Dean”—the fan speaks of players by first name when analyzing their work—”Dean was touching that piano like he knew she was waiting to die, and he was giving her his blessing, like he knew this one counted, and he was saying it was going to be okay,” Julian’s father liked to say of the recording.

Julian loved that piano work nearly as much as his father did, but he cherished the recording for another reason. Listen to it carefully: in the middle of “Don’t Explain,” when you’ve adjusted your sonic expectations down, down, to 1959 live-in-a-bar-to-radio-to-propped-up-reel-to-reel standards, and you can almost ignore the hissing from three generations of transfers, the rushing ions of 1978, 1988, and 2003, when you close your eyes and leap the treacherous abyss of inches between the Paleolithic tape recorder and the Neolithic hi-fi, strengthen with your will the feeble and faltering radio signal wheezing across the Great Lakes, overlook the quality of the microphones in the Chicago hotel, the clatter of dishes, the chatter—oh, yes, though the zoot-suited and wolf-whistling nostalgists will deny it when they snarlingly hush you tonight in a jazz club, there was chatter in jazz’s golden age, even in one of the very last moments of a goddess—the chatter of diners who didn’t think there was anything meriting their respectful attention in the background music to what was, after all, their night out, their pricey meal, their first or last date, their view of the Chicago River, their dramatic conversation about their private lives to which this dying singer was only light accompaniment—if you can hear past all of that and seat yourself at the front table and listen to Billie Holiday and her band, then you will also have the shock of hearing Julian’s French mother walk into her living room and say, “Will, where did you put my book? What? Oh, oh, oh,” quieter on each “oh,” whispering after the third, “Sorry, my heart.”

Sorry, my heart! Whispered! In that accent! When she was young and healthy! Julian never lived in that house, never saw that room except in photos, and could barely remember her before she got sick. Aidan reported that there had been a red leather-sided bar cart that lit up when it was opened, which he’d considered one of the great inventions of modern man. Dad would sit before it, preparing obscure cocktails from a recipe book (a red cover and the single title, in black,
Standish’s)
propped on the bar’s fake-black-marble shelf. “Sorry, my heart”: each time he heard that faint whisper in front of Billie croaking
“You’re all my joy and pain”
Julian could imagine his father’s wide-eyed plea for silence to save the recording, and Billie Holiday yet again wrestling with his mother for his father’s attention, his mother knowing she could retreat and win, again, every time, old Billie defeated with a whispered and victorious “Sorry, my heart.”

For Julian, who never learned the names of all those sharps and flats, merely felt them as emotional levers, Villerman’s music carried the very idea of a skyline, of a singer in lame dying within weeks, of a crippled man in front of his hi-fi, his French wife and their four-year-old prodigy child and the smell of late-spring air inside a little red house littered with inflatable toys and union rat designs, a lit-up bar cart, all of Julian’s family’s life, just without Julian.