Jazz Moon (26 page)

C
afé Valentin was off the Place Pigalle on a murky side street trolled by cocaine peddlers and prostitutes. It was a hole-in-the-wall, a little larger than Chez LeRoi, and as dog-eared as its surroundings, but its wood floors and walls of peeling plaster gave it a bohemian class.

Baby Back told Ben he'd be the new waiter, but neglected to mention that he would be the
only
waiter. He also left out that Ben would be the bartender. And the kitchen boy. And the cashier. The cooking and the entertainment would be the only areas not under his charge. He panicked when the proprietor informed him of this legion of responsibilities.

“Do not worry, Monsieur Charles,” Monsieur Rameau said. “You will find Café Valentin far less taxing than that man's—please forgive me—
LeRoi Jasper's
—establishment.”

Ben repressed a snicker and wondered what unpleasant history existed between the two entrepreneurs.

Monsieur Rameau's shiny black hair was forged into place with oil, then divided down the middle by a part so severe it looked as if it had been carved into his scalp. He had massive black clumps of wool for eyebrows, a matching mustache, and a monocle on his right eye.

“I am not here much. It will be up to you to open and close and order supplies. You will work six days and be off one. On that day, another waiter will run the club.
Vous avez des questions
?
Bon
.
Vous commencerez ce soir
.”

 

The place was even darker than Mon Club. Shadows outfoxed light. Ben needn't have worried about the quadruple threat of waiting tables, tending bar, cashiering, and playing kitchen boy. While steady, Café Valentin lacked the craziness of Chez LeRoi. The Baroness Deneuves of Paris didn't congregate there. Neither did entertainers, tourists, or slummers.

Café Valentin's clientele was comprised of people of the night.

Prostitutes wandered in alone, then wandered back out with a gentleman in tow. On Ben's inaugural evening, a man in an expensive suit slinked in, met minutes later by another. They leaned in close, spoke in low notes. There was an exchange of items, but in the somber light, Ben couldn't make them out. Later, a stylish young woman came, soon joined by a stately and commanding man in his fifties who looked accustomed to getting his way. They ate dinner, then left together. But the man paused in the doorway and looked up and down the street before exiting.

At the back of the room, a quartet of musicians jazzed it soft and easy. No star soloists. No vocalist. Just a steady repertoire of low-key tunes that suited the temperament of Ben's new workplace. The musicians wore hats with the brims pulled down so low, Ben perceived only shadows where he assumed faces lived.

At two a.m., just a few customers huddled about. Business was so dead, Ben sat on a stool behind the bar with a cigarette in one hand, a snifter of brandy in the other. He took a puff, then a swig, a puff, then a swig, as the band teased out jazz.

He was bored. But it was a clean boredom. Uncluttered and white with quiet. Paris was rarely quiet. The same was true of Harlem, and Dogwood, too, really. It wasn't often he found a virgin space to nest in, free of noise and floating on a lake of peace. Peace. An elusive and fragile thing to claim. If you wished to hold it long, you had to hold it carefully, and who in this world was capable of that? So he let this ephemeral slip of peace rest in his palm like a baby bird. Soon it would open its wings, take to the air, be gone, gone, gone. It would return, eventually, and in the interim he would seek its substitute in the shadows. It wouldn't be the same, but a poor substitute trumped none. Temporary intimacy topped nights alone beset by the affliction of failed love and unborn poems that mocked.

Another puff, another swig.

The bird had flown. Peace hightailed it. Its absence instantly embittered him. With peace gone he was left with plain old boredom, and not the clean kind. But the itchy, restless kind that begged to be filled.

A customer entered and sat at the bar. The brim of his straw boater obscured his face. He kept his head down. Ben swallowed the last of his brandy and greeted him. He didn't bother to hide the snifter.

“
Bon soir, monsieur. Qu'est-ce que vous voudriez boire?
”

“I will have whatever
you
are drinking,” the man said.

Ben poured him a brandy.

“
Merci
. Harlem was, indeed, extremely lucky to have you, Monsieur Ben. And now Paris is, as well.”

He removed his hat, lifted his head.

“I'll be damned,” Ben said. “Denny's escort. The one who wouldn't pay attention to her.”

“Norman said that I would find you here.”

“Find? That means you were looking.”

“Indeed.”

Ben refilled his own brandy. The band ebbed into winding-down mode. Not
le jazz-hot,
but cooling-down, cooling-off music. Music of the night. A prostitute sat at the bar's far end. She smoked a cigarette as she eyed the two men.

“Why were you looking?” Ben asked.

“I wanted to talk to you about Harlem. It fascinates me.”

“You and everyone else. Sometimes I think if one more person asks me about Harlem or if I know Josephine Baker—which I don't—I'll shoot them.”

Sebastien recoiled. “You sound resentful.”

“A little. There's more to being Negro than Harlem and Josephine Baker.” Then, mostly to himself, “More than jazz and nightclubs, too.”

Ben stubbed out his cigarette, retrieved another. Sebastien lit it for him.

“Denny had to move heaven and earth to get you to light hers. I must be special.”

They appraised each other by the dim electric light and the full moon sidling in through the window. Sebastien was about Ben's age. A dab of ruddiness tinged each cheek. His dark, slicked-back hair curled slightly. His high forehead held eyebrows set low over his eyes. A prominent
V
in the center of his upper lip dramatized his mouth. The folds of his chin tried to gather into a cleft, but didn't quite. His neck, slender and long, was mounted to a pair of narrow shoulders that sat atop a lean torso.

“Are you going to tell me how you ended up with Denny?” Ben asked. “Or just sit there looking at me?”

“How do you Americans say? I can walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Ben topped off their brandies. “You like Americans?”

“
Oui
.”

“Especially the colored ones.”

“Does that make me awful?” Sebastien said.

“It makes you a French cliché.” He took a fat drag off his cigarette. He saw from Sebastien's downcast eyes, the flood of ruddiness to his cheeks, that he had hurt him. “I shouldn't have said that. Forgive me?” He extended his hand, expecting a handshake. But Sebastien leaned in and kissed it. The prostitute at the end of the bar smiled.

“I am a painter,” Sebastien said. “I had a showing of my work at a very small gallery in Montparnasse. On opening night, only two people attended. They liked my work—or so they said—and told me they had a rich friend who would love my paintings and could possibly serve as my patroness and would I like to meet her.
Oui, certainement,
I said.”

“Then you found out what you had to do in exchange for her patronage.”

“
Oui
.”

“And you did it anyway.”

Sebastien took a long drag off his cig. “My rent was late. No one wants to be homeless. But I will not see her again. I cannot bear to.”

Ben opened a new bottle of brandy, took a swig, passed it to Sebastien. He swigged, passed it back. Low, dark notes trickled off the piano, italicized by the murmur of the brass and the banjo's steadying strum.

“Where do you live?” Ben asked.

“Montmartre. A boardinghouse in rue la Bruyère.”

“I thought all the artists moved to Montparnasse.” Ben took another, deeper swig.

“Careful,” Sebastien said. “You are working.”

Ben gestured at the mostly empty club. “You call this work? You should see what I had to do when I waited tables in New York. Or Chez LeRoi, for that matter.”

“You lost that job. After that fight with that horrible man.”

“I forgot you were there that night. You should have come to my rescue.”

“Someone beat me to it. It seemed the fight was caused by... what do you Americans call it? A love triangle.”

Ben laughed out loud. The prostitute leaned toward them, as if she wanted in on the joke. The brandy caught up with Ben. He closed his eyes, feeling woozy. Something touched his cheek, something light and warm. He opened his eyes. Sebastien was caressing his cheek, his touch just firm enough, just tender enough. Ben closed his eyes again and let him. Sebastien's fingers feathered random loops up, down, and across his neck and throat, pressed his temples, cradled his cheek. Before he could help himself, Ben turned his face into the cup of that hand and kissed it. Sebastien's finger meandered to his mouth, then took one full minute to travel the length of his bottom lip. Ben got dizzy, started to swoon, opened his eyes to steady himself. The prostitute placed some coins on the bar and left, nodding her approval.

Sebastien looked around. Café Valentin was empty. “It is just us and this band.” He leaned in toward Ben, close, as if he would kiss him. “Tell me, what do you do? Besides wait on tables?”

He had dropped into a whisper so patently suggestive that Ben wasn't sure which to address—the question or the innuendo.

“What do you mean? What do you really want to know?”

“I want to know who you are.”

He still felt the impression of Sebastien's feather touch. He lifted the brandy to his mouth, but thought better of it. “I'm a writer. I write poems. Or try to.”

“That is very close to what I do. I paint with a brush and colors. You paint with words.”

“Strange,” Ben said. “You were escorting Denny and now you're here with me, in this hole-in-the-wall, talking about poems and painting. I've seen her with many, many other handsome young men.
Elle a une collection
.”

“Ahh. You find me handsome.”

Ben was caught.

“I find you handsome, also,” Sebastien said.

“Handsome? Not wild or exotic? Not sensual? Or primitive?”

Sebastien eyed him, perplexed. “
Non
. Bitter perhaps. Angry. Hurting, I suspect. But no less handsome.”

The band played something airy and quiet. It floated through the walls of Café Valentin like breath. The tune was lean and spare, like carefully selected words in a poem or thoughtful strokes on a canvas.

T
he room was tiny. Paintings everywhere. Hanging on the crude, plaster walls. Perched on easels. Stacked upright on the floor, one after another like dominoes. Some completed, others sketched in chalk outline, waiting to be filled in with color. A washbasin rested on a stand in one corner. Nearby a freight of books weighed down a chest of drawers. More books in orderly loads on the floor. In the middle of the floor was a rug, faded and unraveling at the edges and splotched with spilled paint, but thick and warm and soft. The floor underneath was rough wood. By the room's lone window sat a small table with pens and paper and more books. It seated two.

The window gave a perfect view of the moon, but it was the art that held Ben's attention. He took his time examining each brushstroke, each dab of color, as if by studying the art, he could learn Sebastien.

His style married the grace of the Impressionists with the jagged electricity of the Cubists, the result the mixed-blood offspring of the Old Masters and the new modernism. There were landscapes whose breadth and detail dazzled; portraits whose subjects seemed live flesh and bone on the canvas. In one series of paintings, the Eiffel Tower held court above the Paris skyline while another presented patrons—sometimes refined, sometimes ornery—drinking it up in cafés.

And there were nudes, so many, divided into two camps. The first consisted of slender-waisted young men—some white, some Negro—with smooth, flat chests and skin that glowed in a bath of sunlight or moonlight. The boys frolicked on boats and in verdant forests or lounged on rocks or beaches, sometimes solo but more often in pairs and groups. The settings were idyllic, pastoral; the subjects idealized and rosy.

The other camp was all ruddy-skinned youths with dark curls and sex in their eyes, partnered with sailors or workmen in seedy rooms, a nearby bed always prominently featured. The sailors had big backs and hair on their barrel chests and in the pits of their arms. Often a sailor sat or stood while a youth knelt before him. Ben could almost smell the grimy rooms, the sailors' sweat. In both camps of nudes, the men's privates were teasingly, frustratingly obscured. A leg placed just so, a piece of furniture that happened to be waist-high.

Overwhelmed by the amount of art in the small room, Ben asked, “Do you paint every day?”

“Most every day, yes.”

And now Ben felt envious and unworthy because of his own gift held hostage. His hardheaded child who refused to come when called. He began to cry. Sebastien had been shadowing him as he perused the paintings. But now, from behind, Ben felt hands on his back, a kiss on the back of his neck.

“Why are you crying,
mon chaton?
” Sebastien said.

“I love your work. I love that you
can
work. It's been months since I've been able to write. It's terrible. I miss it.”

Another kiss.

“I'm afraid that I've lost it. That it'll never come back.”

Sebastien wrapped his arms around him. “It will come back. I promise.”

The reassurance felt good, the pressed warmth of it, even as he doubted it.

The room was quiet, except for the bustling Montmartre street life intruding from outside. A string of jazz notes from a nearby club flounced into the room.

“How do you know?” Ben said. “You don't know me.”

“Come here.”

He took Ben's hand and led him to the table by the window, sat him down, positioned a piece of paper and a pen in front of him, then sat in the chair opposite. “Let art inspire art.” He smiled, patient, waiting.

The expectation spooked Ben. “I can't. Not like this. I—”

He turned away and Sebastien's paintings flew into his sights. Even in the darkening room, the colors shone. Wild colors: blood-red, wine-red, rust.

He picked up the pen. His fingers trembled with desire. Then, almost on their own, they began to scratch out words. He allowed the momentum to cruise through his fingers and the words surrendered themselves into verses.

A poem! Rough, yes, and lopsided, but a poem still. Momentum stung his blood. He kept scratching out words, afraid finicky momentum would betray him if he stopped. He wouldn't let the pen leave the paper. He wrote and wrote and wrote. And Sebastien smiled, and waited.