God's Gym (6 page)

"I'm sorry. I didn't know you were having difficulties too. If I had known, I wouldn't have bothered you for mayonnaise."

"You're not bothering me. What are friends for, if not sharing? And I hope we're going to be friends. I think mayonnaise is just a beginning."

"I didn't know. I just didn't know."

"What didn't you know?"

"That it would be this hard. I knew I was unhappy. I knew both of us had been unhappy for a long time. Since way before we landed here. When she said she needed to leave home, I decided not to try and stop her. We had to do something about the unhappiness. I thought,
Things can't get worse. Let her go.
But things can get worse. And I think they're going to get even worse than they are now."

"You see, you do need a friend. Here. Here's your mayonnaise."

"Thankyou so much. I'll replace this."

"Don't be silly. Just take it, please. It's just a stupid jar of mayonnaise. But you do owe me something in return. You can't just take the mayonnaise and leave. You owe me."

"Owe?"

"Oh, I'm just kidding. You know. Not like you actually owe me anything. I'm just making a little joke. But you could give me something in exchange—you could tell me your first name."

"My name?"

"Yes. And then I'll tell you mine. It's not
ma'am.
Let's trade names and smile at each other and then when the door closes behind you and I'm here alone again, I'll have that pleasant exchange to think about, not just mayonnaise. You don't have to worry about replacing it. I have plenty. That's not what I mean. I mean let's exchange names. I mean let's trade smiles. It's been four years. Far too long."

"I agree. I wish it hadn't taken so long. I wish it weren't too late."

"Too late?"

"Well, I think so."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, she's gone. There's a big empty house. There are my daughters in other cities. I'm not going to stay here. There's no reason for me to stay. So I don't know about a friendship. I don't know if there'll be time for friendship before I leave."

"You don't understand. I don't mean what you're thinking. That's not what I mean. That's not the kind of friendship I want this to be. I just want us to exchange names, smiles, maybe shake hands, remember each other that way. It's never too late to be nice to each other. You know what I mean. Sure you do. Never too late to be nice. Never. Never. Never."

O
NE NIGHT
years ago in Paris, trying to read myself to sleep, I discovered that Verlaine loved Rimbaud. And in his fashion Rimbaud loved Verlaine. Which led to a hip-hop farce in the rain at a train station. The Gare du Nord, I think. The two poets exchanging angry words. And like flies to buttermilk a crowd attracted to the quarrel, till Verlaine pulls a pistol. People scatter and Rimbaud, wounded before, hollers for a cop. Just about then, at the moment I began mixing up their story with mine, with the little I recall of Verlaine's poetry—
Il pleut dans mon coeur/ Comme il pleut sur la ville,
lines I recited to impress you, lifetimes ago, didn't I, the first time we met—just then, with the poets on hold in the silence and rain buffeting the train station's iron roof, I heard the music of Thelonious Monk playing somewhere. So sofdy it might have been present all along as I read about the sorry-assed ending of the poets' love affair—love offered, tasted, spit out, two people shocked speechless, lurching away like drunks, like sleepwalkers, from the mess they'd made. Monk's music just below my threshold of awareness, scoring the movie I was imagining, a soundtrack inseparable from what the actors were feeling, from what I felt watching them pantomime their melodrama.

Someone plays a Monk record in Paris in the middle of the night many years ago and the scratchy music seeping through ancient boardinghouse walls a kind of silent ground upon which the figure of pitter-pattering rain displays itself, rain in the city, rain Verlaine claimed he could hear echoing in his
heart, then background and foreground reverse and Monk the only sound reaching me through night's quiet.

Listening to Monk, I closed the book. Let the star-crossed poets rest in peace. Gave up on sleep. Decided to devote some quality time to feeling sorry for myself. Imagining unhappy ghosts, wondering which sad stories had trailed me across the ocean ready to barge into the space that sleep definitely had no intention of filling. Then you arrived. Silently at first. You playing so faintly in the background it would have taken the surprise of someone whispering your name in my ear to alert me to your presence. But your name once heard, background and foreground switch. I'd have to confess you'd been there all along.

In a way it could end there, in a place as close to silence as silence gets, the moment before silence becomes what it must be next, what's been there the whole time patiently waiting, part of the silence, what makes silence speak always, even when you can't hear it. End with me wanting to tell you everything about Monk, how strange and fitting his piano solo sounded in that foreign place, but you not there to tell it to, so it could/did end, except then as now you lurk in the silence. I can't pretend not to hear you. So I pretend you hear me telling what I need to tell, pretend silence is you listening, your presence confirmed word by word, the ones I say, the unspoken ones I see your lips form, that form you.

Two years before Monk's death, eight years into what the critic and record producer Orrin Keepnews characterized as Monk's "final retreat into total inactivity and seclusion," the following phone conversation between Monk and Keepnews occurred:

Thelonious, are you touching the piano at all these days?

No, I'm not.

Do you want to get back to playing?

No, I don't.

I'm only in town for a few days. Would you like to come and visit, to talk about the old days?

No, I wouldn't.

Silence one of Monk's languages, everything he says laced with it. Silence a thick brogue anybody hears when Monk speaks the other tongues he's mastered. It marks Monk as being from somewhere other than wherever he happens to be, his offbeat accent, the odd way he puts something different in what we expect him to say. An extra something not supposed to be there, or an empty space where something usually is. Like all there is to say but you don't say after you learn in a casual conversation that someone precious is dead you've just been thinking you must get around to calling one day soon and never thought a day might come when you couldn't.

I heard a story from a friend who heard it from Panama Red, a conk-haired, redbone, geechee old-timer who played with Satchmo way back when and he's still on the scene, people say, sounding better and better the older he gets, Panama Red who frequented the deli on Fifty-seventh Street Monk used for kosher.

One morning numerous years ago—story time always approximate, running precisely by grace of the benefit of the doubt—Red said, How you doing, Monk.

Uh-huh, Monk grunts.

Good morning, Mr. Monk. How you do-ink this fine morning, Sammy the butcher calls over his shoulder, busy with a takeout order or whatever it is that keeps his back turned.

If a slice of dead lunch meat spoke, it would be no surprise at all to Sammy compared to how high he'd jump, how many fingers he'd lose in the sheer if the bearish, bearded schwartze in a knitted kufi returned his
Good morning.

Monk stares at the white man in white apron and white T-shirt behind the white deli counter. At himself in the mirror where the man saw him. At the thin, perfect sheets that buckle off the cold slab of corned beef.

Red holds his just-purchased, neat little white package in his hand and wants to get home and fix him a chopped liver and onion sandwich and have it washed down good with a cold Heineken before his first pupil of the afternoon buzzes, so he's on his way out when he hears Sammy say, Be with you in a moment, Mr. Monk.

Leave that mess you're messing wit alone, nigger, and get me some potato knishes, the story goes, and Panama Red cracking up behind Monk's habit of niggering white black brown red Jew Muslim Christian, the only distinction of color mattering the ivory or ebony keys of his instrument and Thelonious subject to fuck with that difference too, chasing rainbows.

Heard the story on the grapevine, once, twice, and tried to retell it and couldn't get it right and thought about the bird—do you remember it—coo-cooing outside the window just as we both were waking up. In the silence after the bird's song I said Wasn't that a dainty dish to set before the king and you said Don't forget the queen and I said Queen doesn't rhyme with sing and you said It wasn't a blackbird singing outside and I said I thought it was a mourning dove and then the bird started up again trying to repeat itself, trying, trying, but never quite getting it right it seemed. So it tried and tried again as if it had fallen in love with the sound it had heard itself coo once perfectly.

Il pleut dans la ville.
Rain in the city. When the rain starts to falling I my love comes tumbling down / and it's raining teardrops in my heart. Rain a dream lots of people are sharing and shyly Monk thinks of how it might feel to climb in naked with everybody under the covers running through green grass in a soft summer shower. Then it's windshield wipers whipping back and forth. Quick glimpses of the invisible city splashing like eggs broken against the glass. I'm speeding along, let's say the West Side Highway, a storm on top, around, and under. It feels like being trapped in one of those automatic car washes doing its best to bust your windows and doors, rapping your
metal skin like drumsticks. I'm driving blind and crazed as everybody else down a flooded highway no one with good sense would be out on on a night like this. Then I hit a swatch of absolute quiet under an overpass and for a split second anything is possible. I remember it has happened before, this leap over the edge into vast, unexpected silence, happened before and probably will again if I survive the furious storm, the traffic and tumult waiting to punish me instantly on the far side of the underpass. In that silence that's gone before it gets here good I recalled exactly another time, driving at night with you through a rainstorm. Still in love with you though I hadn't been with you for years, ten, fifteen, till that night of dog-and-cat rain on an expressway circling the city after our eyes had met in a crowded room. You driving, me navigating, searching for a sign to Wood-side you warned me would come up all the sudden. There it is. There it is. You shouted. Shit. I missed it. We can get off the next exit, I said. But you said no. Said you didn't know the way. Didn't want to get lost in the scary storm in a scary neighborhood. I missed the turn for your apartment and you said, It's late anyway. Too late to go back and you'd get hopelessly lost coming off the next exit, so we continued downtown to my hotel where you dropped me after a good-night, goodbye-again peck on the cheek. Monk on the radio with a whole orchestra rooty-tooty at town hall, as we raced away from the sign I didn't see till we passed it. Monk's music breaking the silence after we missed our turn, after we hollered to hear each other over the rain, after we flew over the edge and the roof popped off and the sides split and for a moment we were suspended in a soundless bubble where invisible roads crisscrossed going nowhere, anywhere. Airborne, the tires aquaplaning, all four hooves of a galloping horse simultaneously in the air just like Muybridge, your favorite photographer, claimed, but nobody believed the nigger, did they, till he caught it on film.

Picture five or six musicians sitting around Rudy Van Gelder's living room, which is serving as a recording studio this afternoon. Keepnews is paying for the musicians' time, for Van Gelder's know-how and equipment, and everybody ready to record but Monk. Monk's had the charts a week and Keepnews knows he's studied them from comments Monk muttered while the others were sauntering in for the session. But Monk is Monk. He keeps fiddle-faddling with a simple tune, da, da, da, da, plunks the notes, stares into thin air as if he's studying a house of cards he's constructed there, waiting for it to fall apart. Maybe the stare's not long in terms of minutes (unless you're Keepnews, paying the bill) but long enough for the other musicians to be annoyed. Kenny Clark, the drummer, picks up the Sunday funnies from a coffee table. Monk changes pace, backpedals midphrase, turns the notes into a signifying riff.

K.C., you know you can't read. You drum-drum dummy. Don't be cutting your eyes at me. Ima ABC this tune to death, Mister Kenny Clark. Take my time wit it. Uh-huh. One-and-two and one-and-two it to death, K.C. Don't care if your eyes light up and your stomach says howdy. One anna two anna one anna we don't start till I say start. Till I go over it again. Pick it clean. All the red boogers of meat off the bone then belch and fart and suck little strings I missed out my teefs and chew them last, salty, sweet gristle bits till the cows come home, and then, maybe then it might be time to start so stop bugging me with your bubble eyes like you think you got somewhere better to go.

Once I asked Monk what is this thing called love. Bebop, hip-hop, whatever's good till the last drop and you never get enough of it even when you get as much as you can handle, more than you can handle, he said, just as you'd expect from somebody who's been around such things and appreciates them connoisseurly but also with a passionate innocence so it's always the first time, the only time love's ever happened and Monk can't help but grunt uh-huh, uh-huh while he's playing even though he's been loved before and it ain't no big thing, just the only thing, the music, love, lifting me.

Monk says he thinks of narrow pantherish hips, the goateed
gate to heaven, and stately, stately he slides the silky drawers down, pulls them over her steepled knees, her purple-painted toes. Tosses the panties high behind his back without looking because he knows Pippen's where he's supposed to be, trailing the play, sniffing the alley-oop dish, already slamming it through the hoop so Monk can devote full attention to sliding both his large, buoyant hands up under the curve of her buttocks. A beard down there trimmed neat as Monk trims his.