Know the Night (14 page)

When I lie in the dark, I try to remember the light, hold on to it, to my daily runs when the sun is coming up or going down; the day when I ran through the woods along the ocean and the falling sun lit the trees sideways with orange spots that looked like trail blazes, so that it wasn’t until my shadow erased them that I understood they hadn’t been painted on. And the autumn day that had been as dim as a burrow, the ocean had looked like lead, and most of the leaves were down, but I found some maples still dangling their light high up; they were black sentries with yellow campaign flags. And the times R and I have sat on the beach with the boys in late afternoon just to experience the light turn peach and gold and the illuminated grasses hold back the dunes. I stroke these moments like rosary beads.

T
here was the morning R and I went to New York City without the boys—we went by train, riding along light-saturated, weedy Connecticut fields, past graffiti and junkshops and wetlands, which always seem to me like the
behind
of things, like being backstage except well lit. We’d wandered through Central Park, past marathoners and a man wearing a bath towel praying fervently on the
sidewalk, facing the rising sun. There was something remarkable about the sun that day—that when setting, it would align itself with the cross streets, fully illuminating them in long slices; the effect, occurring twice yearly, has been dubbed
Manhattanhenge
.

We got into the Metropolitan Museum of Art before the crowds only just beginning to gather at the main entrance, and wandered through the galleries, which seemed larger and stranger than usual because, except for the guards, we were alone. I wanted to see the iris painting by Van Gogh—one of the two that he mentions in his letter to his brother, Theo, in May 1890.
At the moment the improvement is continuing, the whole horrible crisis has disappeared like a thunderstorm, and I’m working here with calm, unremitting ardour to give a last stroke of the brush. I’m working on a canvas of roses with a bright green background and two canvases of large bouquets of violet irises, one lot against a pink background in which the effect is harmonious and soft through the combination of greens, pinks, violets. On the contrary, the other violet bouquet (ranging up to pure carmine and Prussian blue) standing out against the striking lemon yellow background with other yellow tones in the vase and the base on which it rests is an effect of terribly disparate complementaries that reinforce each other by their opposition
.

I imagined that Van Gogh wasn’t sleeping much at the asylum in St. Remy in 1890. He would soon be dead. I stood in front of the irises and watched them as though waiting for a camouflaged bird to move and reveal itself. Of the two works mentioned in his letter, the one in the museum was the one with the pink background. Or rather, at one time it was pink, but was now just about completely white. So not-pink, in fact, that the viewer wouldn’t know simply by standing in front of it that the background used to be a different
colour, so nearly complete was the transformation. The explanation for such an absence, as written on the information card attached to the wall, was
owing to a fugitive red pigment
.

The words were almost as magnetic to me as the painting. A red in the act of fleeing. In the act of being unreliable, maybe hiding. There, and gone. Red, despite its volatility, despite being errata, and arousal, a pumping heart, was—in the painting anyway—retreating. Van Gogh had merged a dollop with obliterating white to create the pink he intended—pink, which is erasure and rapture. His gesture had been full of intention; he’d meant to enforce a kind of harmony. Was the change something he anticipated, as he was well versed in colours’ transposing nature? Maybe he understood well enough that the motion he extended into the painting would be instable, something living. The paint that was now white held a secret, one about mutability.

I could stand before the painting as the sleepless parent of a wordless child and make these sorts of connections, teasing out the weakest threads between seemingly isolated and irrelevant occurrences and tying them together until they meant something. I can’t say why I would do this, only that it occurs in the same way that weather happens or tides, though to make the connections, I suppose, is to bear witness, to become a conduit for a language without words. There is a supposition at work that meaning wants to be found. When I was standing in front of Van Gogh’s irises, just about eclipsing the entire show was the behaviour of red and something about the nebulous territories we believe to be ours. Something, too, about another force concentrating its will upon one. In the emptied background, then, a simple truth of our situation, that unreliability is an essential trait of what is living.

R and I, along with friends, take Gabriel to a different jazz club, this one in New London, Connecticut, about an hour from our house. We’ve been here a few times before. I walk Gabriel through the puzzle of bodies on the club’s upper level, which is a sports bar, to get downstairs to our table in the basement, where the floor is a grey mesh of footprints and every surface is sticky. Fries come in plastic baskets with wax paper liners, and the light fixtures don’t match. A brick wall on one side is topped by chain link and coloured lights and seems faintly like a psych ward at Christmas. The room, painted deep red, is long and narrow, and the band—sax, trumpet, drums, stand-up bass, and piano—fits on a small stage about six inches off the ground, and looks out to an audience that wakes around 10 p.m. The musicians wear jackets and ties and, in his other life, the guy leading them with his trumpet is an emergency room doctor. The sound for him must be full of subtlety or sirens.

They play “Sandu” by Clifford Brown, and the deeper they go, the more alleys appear. A passing train hoots its hollow blast into the club, and the sound links with the horns before fading. Baby Grand Davis pinches some dissonance from the piano with his right fingers, then does a melodic slide down the keys that moves him straight off his seat and almost onto the table of two women who are seated near the stage. He mugs at them, pulls himself back in, and the band is jumping. It’s like the stage is a griddle with water drops bouncing on it. Gabriel isn’t rocking and clapping as he usually is, he is utterly transfixed.

Hoagy Carmichael talked about a night in 1923, at a black-and-tan joint, listening to and then joining in on piano with cornetist Bix
Beiderbecke.
He showed me that jazz could be musical and beautiful as well as hot. He showed me that tempo doesn’t mean fast. His music affected me in a different way. Can’t tell you how—

like licorice, you have to eat some
.

A radio announcer called Monk’s music extraordinary, in spite of him
playing the wrong notes on the piano
. Monk dropped notes from his chords like he was shucking peas, and within the newly created space the remaining notes joined edgily to create his signature sound. There was this and his silences, hesitations like colours. Monk called the station switchboard:
 … the piano
, he said,
ain’t got no wrong notes
.

Hoagy Carmichael:
It was the music. The music took me and had me and it made me right
.

S’s friend A is over at the house. A is the kind of kid who’s going to educate him on a few things, throw light into some dark corners. The first time A’s mother dropped him off, she was heading back down the walkway when she turned and said,
Oh … Don’t let him near any matches
. For Hallowe’en, before she’d put a stop to the idea, he wanted to be a pimp. When I took them out to lunch one day, he perused the cocktail menu while laughing heartily.

S and A are playing upstairs while I’m in the kitchen, moving between occupying Gabriel and chopping vegetables. I hear S run down the stairs, a pause and a rustle close by me, then the
thup-thup-thup
as he runs back up. A few feet away from me, just around the corner, a crackling sound materialises, the intimations of distance and far-off places. I find the walkie-talkie he’s put on the floor and pick it up. His
transmission then:
We’re thirsty
.
I think of Byrd, and also Monk, his incident in the Delaware Hotel with the water and the silence.

He’d stopped at the hotel and walked into the lobby because he wanted a drink of water. According to the hotel owners, who called the police, he just stood there, saying nothing. There was silence as heavy as armour and the owners delivering their rage to the black man in need of something. 1958. You have to admit, silence shakes things up.

Only months before, Monk had played Carnegie Hall with Dizzy Gillespie, Billie Holiday, Ray Charles, and Sonny Rollins, among others; he’d played the Newport Jazz Festival, been photographed by
Esquire
and the subject of a profile in
Downbeat
magazine after winning the critics’ poll. Then there he was, thirsty and saying nothing.

His friend Nica—Pannonica, the baroness who’d been driving him to Baltimore in her Bentley—told the police officers that he was ill. (In another six months, he would come late to a gig, sleepless and wild with pacing, would play and pace, then sit at the piano without moving until all of his musicians, Rouse and Jones and Taylor, had gotten off the stage and left. It was possible for him to sit and cause an unfolding all around him.)

She told them he was ill, and the police officers replied that they should leave, but then they followed the Bentley along the highway and pulled them over. Monk tucked into his silence as he held the car door and one of the cops started beating him, beating his hands. A drumming of hands and sticks, and a gap in the night.

There is another story, too, of Manhattan covered in snow and Monk sliding his Buick into the back of another car. He slid into the car, and then his silence, which provoked the other driver. Snow,
and silence. The police came to get him and took him to a hospital. On his car, his beloved Buick Special, they left a piece of paper:

Psycho taken to Bellevue
.

At the market where I shop, there’s a woman, J, with a vague disability who bags the groceries. She’s probably forty-five or fifty years old and, in the current parlance, she is high functioning. She smiles enormously when she recognises her customers, then looks through her thick glasses as if down a well and begins slowly to bag the items. On a recent day, the clerk who was operating the cash register and who was apparently annoyed, snapped to J that there were already cloth bags in front of her, she didn’t need to use the plastic. J drew out a slow smile and said amiably,
Oh … okay
, and gingerly opened a cloth bag. The clerked hissed and jerked a box of pasta across the scanner. I watched how J, unruffled, continued her careful process, placing a few items in the cloth bags before returning to the plastic ones. I saw something I recognised, the retreat with the hint of defiance, a wall around her. The back-and-forth between the clerk and J unfolded as if pasta and apple juice were symbols of will and acquiescence. J finished filling the bags, lifted them into the shopping cart. I saw a flicker of humour, and we grinned at each other.