A Little Night Music

A Little Night Musi
c

Kathy Hitchen
s

Copyright © Kathy Hitchens 2013

All Rights Reserved

One

Jon Desmarais had a music teacher who once compared playing a trumpet to making love to a woman in a dark alley—all wetness and determination and standing. Lots of standing. Something about opening up the organs.

The teacher got a pink slip the next day.

Jon couldn’t say what made him think of this nugget while playing his first set at The Blackened Lotus—
The Lotus—
as it was known to New Orleans natives. Maybe it was because the woman watching him at the front table, teasing ice with her tongue, looked like a woman who would be open to standing in a dark alley. Maybe he should have played the used trumpet he had bought that afternoon before a club full of people with ten dollar cocktails clung to his every note. Playing used brass was like being a fifteen-year-old virgin, fumbling blind in a closet with a girl who let every guy on the defensive line have a go. 
History
, he’d wanted. An instrument with
history
. Sounded good, anyway. Nostalgic.

But history had taught Jon that determination was overrated, women couldn’t be trusted, and that people in the second and fourth beat ecstasy of a song would do things they’d never ordinarily do. Like stare mercilessly at the crotch of the new trumpeter in the
Seems Like Old Times
jazz band. Or, as his ex taught him, fuck the therapist and make it a front page headline.

His music teacher had been right. Lots of standing. And wetness.

New Orleans in August was a circle of Dante’s Hell unto itself. Jon had sweat out enough moisture in the two weeks he’d been here to breach the post-Katrina levees. But with the neon lotus lighting Dauphine Street, the abundant flesh and the ritualistic thirst for melodies to access the soul like a drug, Jon was as far from his sterile Chicago boardroom as he could get. That made the spot he was standing in—despite tired legs and sticky shirt and the random, aggressive note in his high register—the most perfect place on Earth.

Jon eased away from the bouncy chorus notes of
The Way You Look Tonight
and rested his chops for his improvisational solo. His gut was a hive filled with a thousand bees ready to buzz through his lips—lips that had been trained classically, not in the carefree, sidewinder style of New Orleans jazz. Jon glanced over at Mongo, the pianist with the tar skin and gates-of-St.-Peter smile, the pianist who had fought the Lotus’s owner to give Jon a chance, the pianist who elevated space in music and love of his fellow man to an art form. In one chubby wink from Mongo Jon unleashed the bees, closed his eyes and slipped beneath the music.

The launch was strong, effortless, moving from the conscious to the subconscious in a few graceful bars. He should have been thinking of the place he wanted to take the night crowd. He couldn’t. In that moment a drizzling heat skated up the valves and through his fingers. Where they had flown they now faltered. Jon recovered with an up-tempo run, but the sensation blasted up his arms, circled his neck and settled low in his knees like a murky tidewater. The notes followed—sluggish, sultry, strained. Then, a vision.

His closed-eye blackness bled into another place, another time, a back porch with peeling columns, barefoot women in tattered dresses, flowers in their hair, men in soldier’s uniforms and derby hats, tiny children looped around them as they jammed on jazz instruments. A child in the moonlit yard blew a low note on a trombone that sounded like breaking wind. Their song was out-of-control, but the musical chaos was electrifying. Gooseflesh spread inward to Jon’s core. He had never felt more alive.

As quickly as the flash began, it faded.

Jon opened his eyes. The dizzying numbness lifted.

The woman at the front table stopped tonguing her ice.

Dezi, the club’s owner, stood gape-mouthed, his face the color of boiled crawfish.

Mongo’s eyes rimmed white then sank into half-moons that welcomed the high roundness of his cheeks. He drove what was left of the tune back into place with a flourish.

Trumpet lowered, Jon stared at it as if it had sprouted wings. Sweat perched at his hairline. He sat on a nearby stool and allowed his mind to run through what he ate that day, any moment of opportunity when someone might have slipped a Mickey in his drink. Sure, he had felt something that afternoon when he first picked up the instrument to try it out—a strange heat, a lightness in his right hand—but he dismissed it as overcompensation for finally having his own trumpet again. Nothing so out-of-body had ever happened to him while playing. Nothing. It scared the hell out of him.

Jon glanced around at the candlelit tables, unable to recall what, if anything, he had played during the haunting vision. Most of the patrons applauded and watched Mongo direct the saxophonist into
My Romance.
Some were preoccupied in conversation.

One stood near the club’s back entrance, eyes riveted on Jon.

A woman.

She was a statue, all legs and creamy shoulders beneath a flimsy floral-white dress. Arms crossed, her gaze covered in distance what a dozen dirty tables and a packed house would not allow. She pinned him to the stool, her light eyes accessible but unreadable.

Jon’s stare narrowed through the dimly lit bar .

She blinked slowly and disappeared into the standing-room-only crowd.

He realized he had been holding his breath like a long, dangerous note that threatens to erupt a kidney. He released it, his chest heavy, certain it had nothing to do with losing eye contact with the mysterious woman and everything to do with the humidity, the stifling closeness, whatever had triggered the hallucination. Jon joined the other ensemble musicians leaving the spotlight for a break and made a b-line for the hallway that connected the club to the kitchen.

The fluorescent glare ripped his eyes to shreds. He squinted and leaned back against the tattered notices stapled to the walls. Clanking dishes and ribald shouts in a mix of Cajun and French bounded down the hallway like a hundred instruments dropped in a fish market.

“What. The hell. Was that?” his new boss demanded.

Desmond “Dezi” Dupre sounded more Godfather than New Orleans fat cat, though his alligator skin and dark features placed him clearly in bayou country.

“Improvisation,” Jon offered, hopeful that temporary insanity had made him the next Miles Davis.

“Improvisation, he sez,” Dezi said to no one but Billie Holiday on the flier behind him advertising a soul dinner special. “This ain’t the Jon De whatever the hell your name is band. You lead dem into shit, dey play shit. I gots seven other trumpet players streaming outta my ass for this job. Get it together or you’re out.”

Dezi stormed down the hallway. Fliers lifted from the wall in his portly wake.

Jon barely had time to wrap a lukewarm emotion around being potentially fired from a job he didn’t need—though he would miss Mongo—when his cell phone buzzed in his pocket. He checked the display: James Birchmier.

Shit
.

Who else would it be? His best friend since college and co-founder of J.J. Birch Financial Services—voted in May’s
Business Quarterly
as one of the Top Ten Rising Corporations in the nation and featuring a glossy photograph of the two atop the Willis Tower—had rarely let an hour pass in Jon’s two week unexplained absence without calling. Once James determined Jon was gone by choice and not foul play Jon thought the calls would stop. No luck. James may be the capital behind the dream but he was lost without Jon.

Still, it had been five days. Reluctantly, Jon answered.

“What?”

“What do you mean ‘what’? We’re about to file a missing persons report.”

A tray dropped in the kitchen followed by a raucous round of laughter and curses.

“Where are you? I can’t hear you.”

“I told you, I’m fine. I’m just not coming back.”

“Ever?”

“Sounds like a plan.”

“Jesus, Jon. You’re acting like a nutcase. The board is worried about the merger.”

“I’m hanging up now.”

“If I have to come to New Orleans myself and drag your ass back, I will. You can’t hide from this forever.”

“Watch me.”

Jon severed the call, pocketed the number for Billie’s take-out special and went to the bar to guzzle enough water to float him like a barge on the Mississippi.

Losing yourself played hell on a guy’s thirst.

Ellington Leroux wove her way through the thick crowd at The Lotus. A few drunks stared down her cleavage and closed in around her, but she kept her eyes trained on the bartender until he systematically served his way to her end. When he saw her, his eyes brightened.

“Hey, Elli.” He shouted and leaned way over the bar to give her a peck on both cheeks. “Long time no see.”

Gabe Marchand was nothing if not a flirt. With a head of thick red hair from his Irish mother and the heart of his father, a local philanthropist, Gabe was the most distinguishable bartender in the city.

“Been out of town.”

His easygoing smile turned sober. “Hey listen, I’m sorry about your mom. If I’d known…”

“I know. It was time. Thank you.”

“First one’s on me. So-Co and lime?”

Elli nodded.

She left the other women gathered around the bar to look after Gabe’s muscled physique. Elli had eyes for only one thing.

Her gaze drifted to the stage. Resting on a velvet cloth beside the clarinetist was her father’s trumpet. She might have suspected from the tarnished colouring or the ding she had inadvertently put on the valve slide when she was ten and channeling her namesake during a gymnastics routine on the porch. But if she suspected at its appearance, she knew beyond a conjure of a doubt when she had heard it. Her throat closed for the second time that evening. She promised herself no tears tonight. Daddy never would have wanted it locked up for all those years, tonight should be a celebration.

Gabe returned with her drink and an introduction—to the man who had raised her father’s spirit on this night.

“Elli, this is Jon Desmarais. Jon, this is the finest lady in all of New Orleans.”

Elli finished a sip and extended her hand. Her lungs swelled with pride, to be that connection between a local trumpeter’s unparalleled talent and the attractive package that would continue his legacy. Dark scruff contrasted his sculpted, pale jawline. His hair, though damp at the forehead, waved silky and dark. And his lips? Well, they were sixteen ways of perfection—for a white man.

The trumpeter glanced at her offered hand as if it was a scorpion poised to sting. He turned to Gabe. “Water, please. I’m dying out here.”

Jon lifted his shirt from his body by its buttoned-front to fan himself. If he hadn’t been such a certifiable jerk, she might have lost herself in the view of his firm pectoral muscles and smattering of chest hair.

Elli’s hand collapsed to a fist. Warmth from the alcohol, the bodies pressed against her, the memories of her father, drained from her body.

Gabe shrugged at Elli as if to say
sorry
, scooped ice and sprayed out a stream of water faster than Elli had time to formulate a response. Maybe Jon hadn’t heard Gabe. The Lotus
was
noisier than usual tonight. She tried again.

“I’m Elli.”

“Heard the first time.” Jon tipped his head back and drank greedily.

“That so? You might have said something.”

“After an hour set, I value oxygen.” His tone locked each word in a deep freeze.

Elli steamed. She made the decision right then she wouldn’t be leaving The Lotus tonight without the trumpet.

“Heat wasn’t the only thing killing you out there,” she mumbled. Jon lowered his glass.

“What did you say?”

Elli straightened, chin raised in defiance. “Heat wasn’t the only thing killing you out there,” she repeated. Loudly. “I’ve heard better from a fifth-grade marching band.” Which, of course, she hadn’t—far from it. But she wasn’t about to tell
him
that.

Jon turned fully toward her, his hand-slung-low-on-his-hip, stance an unmistakable challenge.

Gabe filled Jon’s bar glass again. “Go easy on him, Elli. No one could make that horn sing like your daddy.”

“How did you…?” Jon asked.

“Issa at Mama Dee’s. Told me he sold it to a guy from Chicago. Had to come myself to make sure he gave it up to the right person.”

“And?”

“Anyone who can’t be gentleman enough to shake a woman’s hand doesn’t deserve it.”

“That so?” He said, tight-lipped, all Eastwood.

In the time it took for Jon to down his second fill of water and slam the glass a little too hard on the polished bar, Gabe supplied, “Any guy whose wife left him for another woman deserves a mulligan from women for a while.”