Night Soul and Other Stories (27 page)

One night it was late, father and son looking out into the street at the weather. Twelve years old, almost thirteen, the boy will sleep soundly but he has a theory or two of what is to be seen out their city window. “The rain has insomnia,” he said. The boy’s mother somewhere out there on her own knows not her limits, but father and son are finding theirs. Give her credit for work, thick skin, looks, getting out of the home and not coming back. There’s the door. The lock hasn’t been changed.

The man would hear the news from a distance, if it was news, like someone out on the landing, rain in the air, things going slow or is it fast?—music overheard. What the boy’s mother’s up to. A bird on the wing. Give her a hand, original-looking woman, pretty fair photographer, no telling how far she’ll go. The boy is beyond whose fault it is, isn’t he? He seems to know something. They named him Lang, and not such a long time ago.

What’s the worst thing that can happen? said an old acquaintance with a sense of humor, checking his watch at lunch one day. More power, dude, you got a day job to pay some bills, and as for her let’s say she’s a screaming success, which she probably isn’t, what’s the worst that can happen?

The man knew his limits and more than that, maybe didn’t. Hunched at the piano, on hold and counting, supper in the oven, on the burner, in the fridge, he wouldn’t bet against his gone wife. What about the kid he gets off to school in the morning who probably knew even these odds and did his own math?

The mother phoned after supper sometimes during homework. Lately something guessed-at from this end of phone calls which he believes she has conveyed but the boy doesn’t say—a new departure you have to feel and it’s not just work. Lang needs no help with homework but puts companionship to use. The living room table itself picks up the clamor of Lang’s mind. They think together, father and son, don’t they?

Jotted on blue graph paper the steps of a problem, a step skipped before you knew it.

“Wait a sec, she wants—”

“Dad—”

“—how you
did
it,” parent holds steady, who didn’t always get the advanced algebra himself, then did. Slowed down, Lang explained the new and improved denominator. Yet jumps into biology. (How does my child think?) Hydras with their tentacled mouths, cells so simple you could graft one hydra onto another—believe it. (Seems unfair to the hydras.)

The boy saw something in his father, he talked to him. Something’s happening in math. Physics sneaking in! (But
math
(?): in homework, the father cleaves to what has been asked.) Math is Mrs. Mukta (you can talk to her, smells good, her accent, her get-up, Indian, a transcendent lady, a star the father can tell, the kid’s doing her). Absent occasionally lately, something going on with Immigration, while in class the substitute’s sneaking some physics in. Mad smart, Dad, what T.P. knows. This substitute they know by his initials. Math’s not advanced enough for him, physics is cool, it’s, Sorry, can’t wait till eleventh grade—hey you all, it’s quantum time. The father gets it. Two different ways of same event happening simultaneously, everyone loved it. Can they be ready for it?

“Strin
g
theory (?),” the boy gives Dad the benefit of the doubt. (Well who didn’t know about string theory, the man thought, nodding, but who did? The very small, you understood; too small.) “My great-aunt Ruth tied a string around her finger so she’d remember.”

“What?”

“Everything.”

“He subbed in Global, too.”

“Will he be at Parent-Teacher?”

“Why would he be at Parent-Teacher?”

The man puts up his fists—the kid throws a punch, a feint. They spar, they mean to buy some gloves.

The man lands a left hand, open, the boy a wild flurry laughing. “Shadow-boxing,” the father teases. The boy fists his father’s arm to the bone, “Did you drop chili powder in the macaroni?”

“Does he teach you chem?”

“He’s amazing. He says to e-mail him.” “Do you?” “Puts his equations up there so fast it all fits.”

Homework lingers after Lang’s down. So much left to do of your own at ten o’clock of a school night. Time off to think.

It gets late and when you sit down at the piano it’s a soft touch on the rather stiff action not to trouble the neighbors. What cost of neighboring, what gauge of nearness? It’s through their cooking smells they think of you if at all (the thought comes at the piano). Piano at midnight along paths cut by the beat you track. Onto something, he should jot chords on a jittery sheet of music paper in front of him.

The worst that can happen. It hits home where new work travels under his fingers at white keys his wife once tried Windex on. Your hands so close they’re exchanging fingers, tipping chords together for small changes an out-of-work jazz player will try, voicing what he sees he was getting at. Even yesterday can change. Who in this household calls this stuff daydreams now?

Yet on a Sunday, food on the table, a good half of who-knows-what is bringing up this boy who knows his dad has a job but is an unemployed musician who works at it every day—as an evening meal menus his son’s likes within a short-order range of ravs, chicken, green beans, the bud-like head of the Brussels sprout and beets in curious fact, the yam—in their colors, covert seasonings for the man, the music he and Lang listen to at the table.

A message discovered on his cell (
Hey Vic, you still there?
…) calls up in the very months and months since he’d heard from any club or tried Lou’s Corner. A business message the boy would know to be huge watching his dad try three times while they’re eating to get back to them out of politeness. Matte-black-painted sheetrock walls, three-foot-high painted photos of musicians. “How come they called
you
?” “What do you mean how come they called me?” But he would like to know himself almost. He hears scattered applause for a solo.

It’s the next night. He’s heard Lang’s Spanish. They’re on the bed sort of acknowledging the ceiling where a luminous galaxy might never be peeled off, long superseded by comix stored under the pillow. Lang down under the covers. “It’s all math, the planets,” the man said. His own tenth-grade math teacher, you know, went way back to
music.
Two strings, equal tension different lengths, but for the two notes to be in harmony—something (?). A question not nailed, more in it than the man knows. A thinking sound from the boy: “Mmm…ehh…” almost thirteen.

“What was that?” the father remembers these very sounds, and the lanky boy can feel his father’s amusement, his memory.

“If the lengths are pro
por
tional,” Lang stresses, his power beyond mere memory.

“Science.”

Eyes shut, what sees the boy? “You’re music, I’m science, Mom’s Mom, but Mom…” “Hey, Lang, the club date’s on.”

“Hey.” The news settles. “That’s great.” “Guess I got friends in—” “You do?” “—low places.” “Who?” “I didn’t ask.” “You sure you didn’t?”

What’s going to happen Wednesday? Right away they’re arguing a school night and the boy vetoes a baby sitter, and that’s good night. The man will leave him dinner.

Right over the keyboard, wrists low, hands where they belong cup the notes. Let them argue. After the long day at the day job branching and hopeless but not as jazz is.

The man had played for his wife, and could still. It’s
her
loss to have run out of time with him, a jump of memory answering answer, fighting it out, beyond fatherdom and standard love, the beat is all, left hand, right hand working our way along the edge. The keyboard could go its own way. Finding in the dozen bars to come waiting already with you the surprise (
her
loss) climbing down through doubt and a flat-seven ninth to turn upon a jabbed two-finger second that would sound like a mistake in someone else’s playing, to a major seventh in a cousin key somewhere still a standard spinning daydreams to tell a story if it could, escaping to one single coastline longer, more indented, longer still.

Redoing the tune in the backwards forwards truck or just incomprehensible or tune-dumb someone had said—furious you could call it, finicky, to crowd the keys to stumble on, the song somewhere surging above the rocky bite and interruption, give of sand, swirl of wind, rush of wave, of which, in spite of what his son asleep (he hopes) tells him, comes to not just equal and opposite reaction to these life forces so fine and off the map, though left by a woman one hundred ninety-nine days ago to lift your shoulders like a shrug. Walking on fingertips with soft claws—and watched, he would think—only to then lean back, wrists high and classical, never mind from time to time three felt hammers it will cost a hundred-and-fifty-dollar tuner to unstick. (“What did I say? Your work’s on hold but you’ll get back to it, was I right or what?” his lunchtime friend had said.)

With your hands you would hit out, hearing someone—at the door—over
head
—no, it’s bare feet paused at the hall threshold awake, and Vic doesn’t miss a beat eye to eye with his son across the room never thinking
You should be asleep
—not looking at the keys. How he got the club call, who it was remembered him. That’s not it, but that he got the call at all. The boy’s listening in his pajamas, to a sudden untypical run of octaves up and down. “They’re doing themselves a favor,” he tells the boy, who doesn’t move, but will go back to bed.

Question what’s the worst was no question but shakes him in the morning, his son just out the door, leaving then himself, bumping into bearded super in elevator who grins knowingly, like there’s something to know; Vic simply falling away from the apartment into the train, the creeping noise of fact another slant on the question postponing itself which is asking itself in the supermarket that afternoon or finding the tubes at a place he knows, screws at the hardware, thinking to fix his Vector Research tuner-amp himself, and home again waiting for the elevator as cell goes and it’s Lou’s Corner—Hey you got a bass backup maybe, maybe not, said the woman’s voice in that asking tone as if it was up to him; drums, we hope. While the super opening his cell asks at Vic’s floor, “Workin’?”—Vic answering, “You?”

Anger even at the boy of the father trying to keep up, isn’t real but just giving the finger to the absent mother who’ll phone Lang apparently before the man got home, hear about the gig, but as if Lang, home from school, and with the phone in the bathroom because he didn’t like the toilets at school, half preoccupied with his things to do, half thinking basically that his father’s kind of
always
here, is half talking with her as Vic lets the front door fall shut behind him,—the kid correcting himself, “He just came in.”

At dinner, “What did you research today?” the kid makes conversation. Thinking about tomorrow, the answer.

Three sets was one too many on a Wednesday school night, he would be late. Though a sitter vetoed by the boy, about to be thirteen.
You don’t get it, Dad
. And he phoned home at nine-thirty, the place of homework, Lang busy; the woman now in front of him, happy, a kind of manager who’d introduced Vic, taking the phone back, surprised he didn’t know Bill Flyte, who had told them about him, Vic still wondering how he’d left his cell home.

The second set let him think what he was doing. A room longer than he recalled, stool-sitters at the bar, some standees, and a familiar face from Boston, Columbus, Philly, and in a white shirt and tie a great little timekeeper you used to see all business with his sticks. Photos of Herbie, his glasses mirroring his hands, and Chick (think of it) and Buddy Holly for some reason, Monk holding forth with a trumpeter, Bud Powell, who you’re pretty sure never played here, the wart on his forehead or whatever that was, and a woman behind him at a table; and Errol Garner seeming tall all by himself at the keyboard. A fugitive Cecil Taylor snapshot taken by a customer blown up.

“Vic.” Two women he didn’t know in skirts stood over him, and named some names and he nodded while he had a bite, lifted his face to the dark one with her hand on his shoulder for some reason who told how it was like a duet of the two hands and asked had he been out of New York for a while? “Always getting the hang of it,” he said. “With everything in between,” said the other, who was cooler, not so nice maybe, “but no
tonal
center (?),” she said, which was correct and he looked at her, her blue eyes still discernible in the light, and when she offered to buy him a drink and said she hadn’t heard the last number before, and received a call on her cell, “New work,” he said.

“Does it have a name?” said the first woman, who was a little wild, personal, but a man in a bow tie, gruff and grizzled, stopped by to say thanks for “Got the World on a String,” he could hardly make out the tune, he introduced himself, he had heard of Vic, and, asking if Vic could play “Dancing on the Ceiling,” seemed in his ironic enunciation to be testing you as if it was a business proposition. The second woman, closing her cell, who was not turned on to whatever, knew Annabella as it happened and this “thing” she was finishing (?), this book (?) (as he lifted his glass to drink his club soda). And something else the woman was saying he didn’t listen to at all, as the first one said, “I’ll give it a name.” “It’s not about anything,” Vic said, “it’s about time.” The first woman laughed and it touched him.

“We heard you were…”—the second woman shrugged—“but you don’t seem that way at all,” she finished.

Two or three men at the bar he knew but didn’t visit, though this was a mistake. All the instruments still packed under the hood of the best instrument of all, laughter behind him leaving well after midnight. A hand of applause.

Two blocks from home and no umbrella, there is their lighted window on the third floor. The worst thing that could happen was so small the rain gave crystalline distance-vision. The worst that could happen absolutely vibrated, yet for it to be so far off and at the same time in you you had to be vast.