Blow-Up (29 page)

“For you, I know,” Johnny says bitterly. “For Art, for Dédée, for Lan … You donno how … Sure, every once in a while the door opens a little bit … Look at the two straws, they’ve met, see they’re dancing, one in front of the other … It’s pretty, huh … It began to open out … Time … I told you, it seems to me that time business … Bruno, all my life in my music I looked for that door to open finally. Nothing, a crack … I remember in New York one night … A red dress. Yeah, red, and it fit her beautifully. Okay, one night we were with Miles and Hal … we were carrying it for about an hour I think, playing the same piece, all by ourselves, happy … Miles played something so lovely it almost pulled me out of my chair, then I let loose, I just closed my eyes and I flew. Bruno, I swear I was flying … And I was hearing it like from a place very far away, but inside me just the same, beside myself, someone was standing there … Not exactly someone … Look, the bottle, it’s incredible how it bobs along … It wasn’t anyone, just that you look for comparisons … It was the sureness, the meeting, like in some dreams, what do you think?, when everything’s resolved, Lan and the chicks waiting for you with a turkey in the oven, you get in the car and never hit a red light, everything running as smooth as a billiard ball. And who I had beside me was like myself but not taking up any space, without being in New York at all, and especially without time, without afterwards … without there having to be an afterwards … for a while there wasn’t anything but always … And I didn’t
know that it was a lie, that that happened because I was lost in the music, and that I hardly finish playing, because after all I had to give Hal his chance to do his thing at the piano, at that same moment my head would fall out, I’d be plunged into myself …”

He’s crying softly, he rubs his eyes with his filthy hands. Me, I don’t know what to do, it’s so late, the dampness coming up from the river, we’re going to catch cold, both of us.

“It felt like I wanted to swim with no water,” Johnny murmurs. “It felt like I wanted to have Lan’s red dress but without Lan inside it. And Bee’s dead, Bruno. And I think you’re right, your book really is very good.”

“Let’s go, Johnny, I’m not getting offended at what you think’s bad about the book.”

“It’s not that, your book is okay because … because it doesn’t have urns, Bruno. It’s like what Satchmo blows, that clean, that pure. Doesn’t it seem to you that what Satch’s playing is like a birthday party or a decent action? We … I tell you I felt like I wanted to swim without water. It seemed to me … no you have to be an idiot … it seemed to me that one day I was going to find something else. I wasn’t satisfied, I thought that the good things, Lan’s red dress, even Bee, were like rat traps, I don’t know how to put it any other way … Traps so that you would conform, dig, so that you would say everything’s all right, baby. Bruno, I think that Lan and jazz, yeah, even jazz, were like advertisements in a magazine, pretty things so that I would stay conformed like you stay because you’ve got Paris and your wife and your work … I got my sax … and my sex, like the good book say. Everything that’s missing. Traps, baby … because it’s impossible there’s nothing else, it can’t be we’re that close to it, that much on the other side of the door …”

“The only thing that counts is to give whatever one has that’s possible,” I say, feeling incredibly stupid.

“And win the poll every year in
Down Beat
, right,” Johnny agrees. “Sure, baby. Sure. Sure. Sure. Sure.”

I’m moving little by little toward the square. With any luck there’ll be a taxi on the corner.

“On top of everything, I don’t buy your God,” murmured Johnny. “Don’t come on to me that way, I won’t put up with it. If it’s really him on the other side of the door, fuck it. There’s no use getting past that door if it’s him on the other side opening it. Kick the goddamn thing in, right? Break the mother down with your fist, come all over the door, piss all day long against the door. Right? That time in New York I think I opened the door with my music, until I had to stop and then the sonofabitch closed it in my face only because I hadn’t prayed to him ever, because I’m never going to pray to him, because I don’t wanna know nothing about that goddamned uniformed doorman, that opener of doors in exchange for a goddamned tip, that …”

Poor Johnny, then he complains that you can’t put these things in a book. Three o’clock in the morning, Jesus Christ.

Tica went back to New York, Johnny went back to New York (without Dédée, now happily settled at Louis Perron’s, a very promising trombonist). Baby Lennox went back to New York. The season in Paris was very dull and I missed my friends. My book on Johnny was selling very well all over, and naturally Sammy Pretzal was already talking about the possibility of an adaptation for Hollywood; when you think of the relation of the franc-rate to the dollar, that’s always an interesting proposition. My wife was still furious over my passage with Baby Lennox,
nothing too serious overall finally, Baby is promiscuous in a reasonably marked manner and any intelligent woman would have to understand that things like that don’t compromise the conjugal equilibrium, aside from which, Baby had already gone back to New York with Johnny, she’d decided that she’d enjoy returning on the same boat with Johnny. She’d already be shooting junk with Johnny, and lost like him, poor doll. And
Amorous
had just been released in Paris, just as the second edition of my book went to press and they were talking about translating it into German. I had thought a great deal about the changes possible in a second edition. To be honest within the limits permitted by the profession, I wondered whether it would not be necessary to show the personality of my subject in another light. I discussed it at different times with Delaunay and with Hodeir, they didn’t really know what to advise me because they thought the book terrific and realized that the public liked it the way it was. It seemed I was being warned that they were both afraid of a literary infection, that I would end up by riddling the work with nuances which would have little or nothing to do with Johnny’s music, at least as all of us understood it. It appeared to me that the opinion of people in authority (and my own personal decision, it would be dumb to negate that at this level of consideration) justified putting the second edition to bed as was. A close reading of the trade magazines from the States (four stories on Johnny, news of a new suicide attempt, this time with tincture of iodine, stomach pump and three weeks in the hospital, working in Baltimore again as though nothing had happened) calmed me sufficiently, aside from the anguish I felt at these ghastly backslidings. Johnny had not said one compromising word about the book. Example (in
Stomping Around
, a music magazine out of Chicago, Teddy Rogers’ interview with Johnny): “Have you read what Bruno
V—– in Paris wrote about you?” “Yes, it’s very good.” “Nothing to say about the book?” “Nothing, except that it’s fine. Bruno’s a great guy.” It remained to be seen what Johnny might say if he were walking around drunk or high, but at least there were no rumors of the slightest contradiction from him. I decided not to touch the second edition, to go on putting Johnny forth as he was at bottom: a poor sonofabitch with barely mediocre intelligence, endowed like so many musicians, so many chess players and poets, with the gift of creating incredible things without the slightest consciousness (at most, the pride of a boxer who knows how strong he is) of the dimensions of his work. Everything convinced me to keep, no matter what, this portrait of Johnny; it wasn’t worth it to create complications with an audience that was crazy about jazz but cared nothing for either musical or psychological analysis, nothing that wasn’t instant satisfaction and clear-cut besides, hands clapping to keep the beat, faces gone beatific and relaxed, the music that was driving through the skin, seeping into the blood and breath, and then finish, to hell with profound motives.

First two telegrams came (one to Delauney, one to me, in the afternoon the newspapers came out with their idiotic comments); twenty days later I had a letter from Baby Lennox, who had not forgotten me. “They treated him wonderfully at Bellevue and I went to fetch him when he got out. We were living in Mike Russolo’s apartment, he’s gone on tour to Norway. Johnny was in very good shape, and even though he didn’t want to play dates, he agreed to record with the boys at Club 28. You I can tell this, really he was pretty weak”—I can imagine what Baby meant by that after our affair in Paris—“and at night he scared me, the way he’d breathe and moan. The only thing that softens it for me,” Baby summed it up beautifully, “is that he died happy and without knowing it
was coming. He was watching TV and all of a sudden slumped to the floor. They told me it was instantaneous.” From which one inferred that Baby had not been present, and the assumption was correct because later we found out that Johnny was living at Tica’s place and that he’d been there with her for five days, depressed and preoccupied, talking about quitting jazz, going to live in Mexico and work in the fields (he’d handed that to everybody at some time or other in his life, it’s almost boring), and that Tica was taking care of him and doing everything possible to keep him quiet, making him think of the future (this is what Tica said later, as if she or Johnny had ever had the slightest idea of the future). In the middle of a television program which Johnny was enjoying, he started to cough, all at once he slumped down all of a sudden, etc. I’m not all that sure that death was as instantaneous as Tica declared to the police (Johnny’s death in her apartment had put her in an unusually tight spot she was trying to get out of, pot was always within reach, and probably a stash of heroin somewhere, poor Tica’d had several other bad scenes there, and the not completely convincing results of the autopsy. One can imagine completely what a doctor would find in Johnny’s lungs and liver). “You wouldn’t want to know how painful his death is to me, although I could tell you some other things,” sweet Baby added gently, “but sometime when I feel better I’ll write you or tell you (it looks like Rogers wants to get me contracts in Paris and Berlin) everything you need to know, you were Johnny’s best friend.” And after a page dedicated to insulting Tica, you’d believe she not only caused Johnny’s death but was responsible for the attack on Pearl Harbor and the Black Plague, poor Baby ended up: “Before I forget, one day in Bellevue he asked after you a lot, he was mixed up and thought you were in New York and didn’t want to come see him, he was talking all the time about fields full
of things, and after he was calling for you, even cussing you out, poor baby. You know what a fever’s like. Tica told Bob Carey that Johnny’s last words were something like: ‘Oh, make me a mask,’ but you can imagine how at that moment …” I sure could imagine it. “He’d gotten very fat,” Baby added at the end of her letter, “and panted out of breath when he walked.” These were details you might expect from a person as scrupulous as Baby Lennox.

All this happened at the same time that the second edition of my book was published, but luckily I had time to incorporate an obituary note edited under full steam and inserted, along with a newsphoto of the funeral in which many famous jazzmen were identifiable. In that format the biography remained, so to speak, intact and finished. Perhaps it’s not right that I say this, but naturally I was speaking from a merely aesthetic point of view. They’re already talking of a new translation, into Swedish or Norwegian, I think. My wife is delighted at the news.

S
trange how people are under the impression that making a bed is exactly the same as making a bed, that to shake hands is always the same as shaking hands, that opening a can of sardines is to open the same can of sardines
ad infinitum
. “But everything’s an exception,” Pierre is thinking, smoothing out the worn blue bedspread heavy-handedly. “Yesterday it rained, today there was sun, yesterday I was gloomy, today Michèle is coming. The only invariable is that I’ll never get this bed to look decent.” Not important, women enjoy disorder in a bachelor’s room, they can smile (mother shining out from every tooth), they fix the curtains, change the location of a
chair or flowerpot, say to put this table where there isn’t any light wouldn’t occur to anyone but you. Michèle will probably say things like that, walk about touching and moving books and lamps, and he’ll let her, stretched out on the bed or humped down into the old sofa, watching her through a wreath of Gauloise smoke, and wanting her.

“Six o’clock, the critical hour,” Pierre thinks. The golden hour when the whole neighborhood of Saint-Sulpice begins to alter, ready itself for the night. Soon the girls will begin to emerge from the notary’s office, Madame Lenôtre’s husband will thump his leg up the stairs, the sisters’ voices on the sixth floor will be audible, they’re inseparable when the hour arrives to buy a fresh loaf of bread and the paper. Michèle can’t be much longer, unless she gets lost or hangs around in the streets on the way, she has this extraordinary capacity to stop any place and take herself a trip through the small particular worlds of the shop windows. Afterward, she will tell him about: a stuffed bear that winds up, a Couperin record, a bronze chain with a blue stone, Stendhal’s complete works, the summer fashions. Completely understandable reasons for arriving a bit late. Another Gauloise, then, another shot of cognac. Now he feels like listening to some MacOrlan songs, feeling around absently among the piles of papers and notebooks. I’ll bet Roland or Babette borrowed the record; they ought to tell somebody when they’re taking something. Why doesn’t Michèle get here? He sits on the edge of the bed and wrinkles the bedspread. Oh great, now he’ll have to pull it from one side to the other, back, the damned edge of the pillow’ll stick out. He smells strongly of tobacco, Michèle’s going to wrinkle her nose and tell him he smells strongly of tobacco. Hundreds and hundreds of Gauloises smoked up on hundreds and hundreds of days: his thesis, a few girlfriends, two liver attacks, novels, boredom. Hundreds and hundreds of Gauloises?
He’s always surprised to find himself hung up over trifles, stressing the importance of details. He remembers old neckties he threw into the garbage ten years ago, the color of a stamp from the Belgian Congo, his prize from a whole childhood of collecting stamps. As if at the back of his head he kept an exact memory of how many cigarettes he’d smoked in his life, how each one had tasted, at what moment he’d set the match to it, where he’d thrown the butt away. Maybe the absurd numbers that appear sometimes in his dreams are the top of the iceberg of this implacable accounting. “But then God exists,” Pierre thinks. The mirror on the wardrobe gives him back his smile, obliging him as usual to recompose his face, to throw back the mop of black hair that Michèle is always threatening to cut off. Why doesn’t Michèle get here? “Because she doesn’t want to come to my room,” Pierre thinks. But to have the power to cut off the forelock someday, she’ll have to come to his room and lie down on his bed. Delilah pays a high price, you don’t get to a man’s hair for less than that. Pierre tells himself that he’s stupid for having thought that Michèle doesn’t want to come to his room. He thinks it soundlessly, as if from far off. Thought at times seems to have to make its way through countless barriers, to resolve itself, to make itself known. It’s idiotic to have imagined that Michèle doesn’t want to come up to his room. If she isn’t here it’s because she’s standing absorbed in front of a hardware or some other kind of store window, captivated by a tiny porcelain seal or a Tsao-Wu-Ki print. He seems to see her there, and at the same time he notices that he’s imagining a double-barreled shotgun, just as he’s inhaling the cigarette smoke and feels as though he’s been pardoned for having done something stupid. There’s nothing strange about a double-barreled shotgun, but what could a double-barreled shotgun and that feeling of missing something, what could you do with
it at this hour and in his room? He doesn’t like this time of day when everything turns lilac, grey. He reaches his arm out lazily to turn on the table lamp. Why doesn’t Michèle get here? Too late for her to come now, useless to go on waiting for her. Really, he’ll have to believe that she doesn’t want to come to his room. Well, what the hell. No tragedy; have another cognac, a novel that’s been started, go down and eat something at Leon’s. Women won’t be any different, in Enghien or Paris, young or full-blown. His theory about exceptional cases begins to fall down, the little mouse retreats before she enters the trap. What trap? One day or the next, before or after … He’s been waiting for her since five o’clock, even if she wasn’t supposed to arrive before six; he smoothed out the blue coverlet especially for her, he scrambled up on a chair feather duster in hand to detach an insignificant cobweb that wasn’t hurting anybody. And it would be completely natural for her to be stepping down from the bus that very moment at Saint-Sulpice, drawing nearer his house, stopping in front of the store windows or looking at pigeons in the square. There’s no reason she shouldn’t want to come up to his room. Of course, there’s no reason either to think of a double-barreled shotgun, or to decide that right this moment Michaux would make better reading than Graham Greene. Instant choices always bother Pierre. Impossible that everything be gratuitous, that mere chance decides for Greene against Michaux, or Michaux against Enghien, I mean, against Greene. Including confusing a place-name like Enghien with a writer like Greene … “It can’t all be that absurd,” Pierre thinks, throwing away his cigarette. “And if she doesn’t come it’s because something’s happened; it has nothing to do with the two of us.”