Free The Wonders of the Invisible World by David Gates Page B

bunch of bleating, supposedly denoting passion and pathos.
    We use the piano player’s loft on Grand Street. He has a Steinway grand there, and his neighbors bang only if we go past eleven. He’s a piece of work, this Mark. A partner at some law firm, not anybody I’d be likely to know if not for the music. Andy either, as far as that goes. To be an assistant dean isn’t scruffy, exactly, but at my age it’s getting there. A late bloomer, you could call me, if I were blooming. I’ve been trying to get through one more winter with this coat by walking around with my hands in my pockets, thereby keeping the fraying cuffs tucked out of sight, except the edges of the pockets are fraying, too. When Mark first told me his address, I said, “Ah, where the neon madmen climb,” and he obviously thought I was a babbling burnout. He’s got a sleek, dark-haired wife and a pretty little blond daughter named Margit. Second wife, first child: you know the deal. Margit is four (Carrie’s now eight), and at bedtime she’ll pad in barefoot in her nightie and listen for a minute, eyes only for Daddy. And he’ll be sitting there at his Steinway in his pink oxford shirt, playing this Jimmy Yancey shit he’s learned note for note.
    We’re still looking for drums—hard to find anyhow, but especially for this music—and string bass. We’d prefer not to go the tuba route. Bass sax might give things an interesting feel, though more New York 1924 than I personally care for. If we had drums and bass, Mark wouldn’t have to be holding everything together on piano. But the Hot Five got along fine without drums and bass—though they did have banjo, not to mention Louis Armstrong instead of Andy Kroll—so I suppose it’s not crucial.
    Not crucial. Jesus,
I’
ll say.
    •   •   •
    Last Thursday I left Mark’s a few minutes after eleven and took the E train uptown to meet Jane. (You must have seen this coming, you ladies especially. Yes, even in his desolation—O lost daughter! O new-mown lawn!—he’s managed to get himself a new one. So now you know her name.) Jane had called me at work that afternoon: could I see her, that night, didn’t matter how late, kind of important. After a couple hours at Mark’s the subway makes you feel poor and put-upon. Across from me sat an old woman, dozing, her possessions tied with yellow nylon rope to a two-wheeled cart. White-crusted sores that looked like salt deposits on her swollen shins. I caught myself regarding her only as another disagreeable feature of the mise-en-scène and not as a fellow traveler to the grave. One more way you know you’ve been in New York too long. Or maybe just at Mark’s too long. Stop after stop, the doors opened and made the phoebe sound, and each time I clutched my clarinet case reflexively, though no one got on. While we were packing up, James had slipped me a sinisterly slender joint—“For you and your lady sometime”—and I was spooked about having it hidden in the case; it had been years since I’d carried anything around. Probably I should’ve been touched by James’s friendly overture rather than creeped out by his inserting himself into my sexual life. Years ago, Laura and I had tried to make love stoned, and I couldn’t control my mind. This was the time my brother and his grad-student cutie visited us at the farm. The two of them on the futon in the spare room. Jesus, the amount of stuff we owned back then. The lawn mower, the hibachi, the croquet set, the outdoor furniture, the
indoor
furniture. Most of it ended up going to a Scranton auctioneer who wore a cowboy hat and talked in a Bronx-like honk. I’ll think of his name in a second. It occurred to me, sitting there in the subway car, that most of these things, still solid and serviceable, mustpersist somewhere in the world. In displaced self-pity, I reached across and stuck a five-dollar bill under the yellow nylon cord on the woman’s cart. Which made me feel no better.