End of the Jews (30 page)

Tristan reads it twice, then flicks his wrist and watches the card sail across the room and hit the wall. He should have known that Pendergast, the great friend of the Jews, was behind this Man of the Year business somehow. Good old Peter: too impressed with himself to stop and wonder whether a favor is worth doing, or to keep one a secret. God forbid Tristan should believe he's won on merit. Better that Pendergast, the Puritan Pilgrim, make clear to his former pupil and greatest discovery that life's prizes continue to rain down upon him only because Lady Pete is still fluttering around up there on winged golden sandals, seeding the clouds.

Tristan turns onto his side, stares at the drawn drapes, and wonders what he'll say to the smug phony. How ridiculous that Pendergast is even here, that he holds any sway at all with this organization. Who votes on next year's winner, the Daughters of the American Revolution? Tristan mashes his feet into his shoes. He's not going to get any rest until he's spoken to the man.

A
DO NOT Disturb
sign dangles from the doorknob of room 718, but Tristan knocks anyway, three short raps. The thought of breaking up Pendergast's nap is rather appealing, but Peter comes to the door clad in a white shirt and a Windsor tie, hair slicked back, healthy and tanned—tanned! It is December and Pendergast lives in goddamned Massachusetts.

“The Man of the Year!” he crows, clapping Tristan on the back. “Wonderful to see you, dear boy, wonderful to see you.” Tristan is ushered into a room identical to his, except that manuscript pages are strewn over the desk instead of California oranges, and two pressed suits and a garment bag hang in the open closet. By the time Tristan completes his survey of the premises, Peter is in the bathroom, running the water. He returns with a freshly rinsed glass in each hand.

“How about a drink? I've got a bottle here somewhere. So, does noon tomorrow work? It was the latest decent time they had.” The scotch is located. Peter sets the glasses on the desk and pours them three fingers apiece, hefts his drink to eye level and winks. “Always a bad idea to book an early golf game for a man who's being honored the night before.”

Tristan takes his glass from the table and holds it at his waist. “What did you do, Peter? Did you make them give me this award?”

Pendergast contorts his brow, laughs, takes a nip of scotch. He's nervous, and hiding it. Tristan takes a step forward. Peter won't register him coming closer, but it may increase his agitation. The professor has probably never been in a fight. A simple punch in the nose would catch him completely by surprise, lay him out flat, scare him half to death. Six feet of bloodied white Anglo-Saxon Protestant writhing on the hotel floor, wondering what the hell happened, and Tristan towering above, daring him to move a muscle.

“What do you mean, make them give you this award? Who do you think I am? I'm not even Jewish.”

No, Tristan thinks, and you never will be, no matter how many Heebs you manage to slip past the doors of your country club. Any more than you will ever know what it's like to be black, no matter how many angry black writers you broker book deals. You will only be the man holding open the door.

“But you did something,” Tristan says, low.

Peter is already comfortable again. “I guested on the JCA's board last year. They always ask one Gentile. It's an honor.” Pendergast leans against a bureau, crosses his ankles, and draws a semicircle in the air with his drink. “One meeting, a few months ago, they asked for nominations for Man of the Year.
Blockbusters
is a damn fine book, an important book, so I put your name down. Did I do something wrong?”

Tristan stares at him. Where to begin?

“Don't do me any more favors, Peter,” he rumbles, speaking into the glass as he lifts it to his mouth. The scotch is irritatingly excellent. Only Pendergast would order a fifteen-year-old bottle of Glenfiddich from room service.

Peter's drink arm dangles to his side. “What ever do you mean?”

“It's quite a game, isn't it? First, you convince the goys some lucky Jew is all right, and then—and this is really where I have to hand it to you, Peter—then you have the audacity to go back and convince the Jews. Well, thanks. That's what I'm supposed to say, isn't it? That I can't possibly thank you enough?”

Tristan cuts himself off as his voice begins to climb in pitch, volume. For a long moment, Pendergast is quiet. “Tristan, I…” he starts, then gives up with a sigh and a wave of his hand. The gesture is baffling. It could mean I'm sorry, there's nothing I can say. Or: This is too absurd to merit a response.

“You know how the Jewish press has gone after me, Peter. What do you think it's like to finally be offered an olive branch and then find out that it's not real, just my guardian angel meddling again?” He sips his drink. “I
knew
it was something like this.”

Pendergast stands straighter. “There were twelve of us who voted, Tristan. All I did was give your name.”

“The WASP seal of approval. Best endorsement you can get.”

“Ah. You're being ridiculous.”

“The hell I am. And as a matter of fact, Peter, I never asked for a guardian angel. Don't you think it's time you found a new way to feel good about yourself?”

Pendergast drops his head and gives a little snorting laugh. “You're unbelievable, you know that? You could just take the goddamn olive branch. But no, you'd rather find a reason not to. You'd rather attack me for trying to get you the kind of credit you bloody well deserve. I think you're scared, Brodsky. You know the minute you accept that olive branch you won't have the foggiest idea who the hell you are.”

“Spare me. All right? Just spare me. You can put us on the golf course, Peter. You can get us jobs. But don't you ever tell us who we are.”

“Oh, it's ‘us' now, is it? All of a sudden you speak for the Jews, Brodsky?”

Tristan throws back the rest of the scotch and sets the glass down. “Better me than you,” he says before he walks out of the room.

But by that evening, there is nothing Tristan wants to say. He calls off the performance, accepts the award wordlessly, and goes back to his room.

         

Sun pours through the windows, saturating everything. It's almost noon when she wakes up, barely having slept, her breasts pressed against Mari's back and her hand draped over Mari's thigh, and every emotion Amalia possesses sits so close to the surface that she scarcely trusts herself to move. The slightest sweetness, the lightest touch, might summon tears. And Mariko has seen her cry enough already.

As she lies breathing shallow, stroking Mari's hair, Amalia has the strange and horrible thought that perhaps she is too feminine even for a woman to love—too sensitive, too vulnerable. All night, she vacillated between intuition and experience, between making love the way she wanted to, the way that felt right, and letting doubts and errant fears corral her. If she can't be herself, then what in God's name is the point?

Mariko slips out from under her arm and disappears into the bathroom. Amalia opens her eyes in time to see Mari emerge, hair falling down over her tiny bee-sting breasts, a yellow sarong knotted around her waist. She heads straight for the French press.

Amalia props her head against a pillow. This cannot end now with a cup of coffee, or in an hour at some restaurant where they will masquerade as friends meeting for brunch.

“Mari,” she calls, “come home with me.” She yawns and stretches her arms over her head, then adds by way of enticement, “I'll make you dinner.”

Mari puts down her can of Folgers, picks her way across the clothing-littered floor, and sits down on the edge of the bed. She crosses her thighs, then reaches out and tucks a strand of hair behind Amalia's ear.

“If I come, Ama, I just have to leave again.”

“I know.” Amalia takes her hand. “But come.”

“You got daughter at home. You gotta make dinner for her.”

“I'll send her to a friend's,” Amalia says, knowing it's Sunday and no parent allows it.

“Ama, honey…” Mariko stands and looks down at her. “No. You know is a bad idea.”

“So when…” Amalia starts, but there's no point in asking. Mariko offers her a tissue from the nightstand and Amalia scowls, offended by the assumption that she will cry. But a moment later, it proves correct.

“Well then, I guess it's back to business.” She permits herself to blow her nose. Mariko hands over another few tissues, and Amalia takes them without looking up, smears them over her face, and lets her hand fall to her lap. “Back to your husband and back to mine.”

Mari moves to stroke her hair. Amalia flinches at the touch, then consents to it.

“What else, Ama?” Mari tilts her head, smiles. “Run away together?”

Amalia bursts into fresh tears. “You're making
fun
of me.” With every sob, a bit more of her allure melts away forever, but the thought only makes her cry harder—and besides, she deserves to be disgraced. It's as though Mariko has been regressing her. Last night, Amalia was carefree and twenty; a few minutes ago, clumsy and fifteen. Now she is forlorn as only a five-year-old can be, in front of a woman who has no sympathy for children. Mariko—wife of a man she does not love, defender of a music she plays no part in creating—is a realist even in her passions. She offers nothing more than a few strokes of the hair as her lover goes to pieces on her bed. A bed that still smells like sex, like women, like things Amalia had never done before and doubts she will ever do again. The instant she is gone, the mattress will be stripped, the sheets washed. When Albert comes home, he will lie down on fresh linens.

“Ama.” Amalia lets go of the pillow she's been weeping into and looks up through wide red eyes. Mari stares at her a moment, then cups a hand to Amalia's cheek and wipes a tear away with her thumb. “Have some coffee.”

Amalia nods, lugs herself to the table, and sits down, still naked. Mariko rummages through a drawer, puts on a top, and joins her. The seats of the chairs are made of woven rope; the cords cut into Amalia's bare skin. They sit side by side and stare out at the street. Last night's snow didn't amount to much. Most of it melted when it hit the pavement, but there is still enough dusting cars and fire hydrants to bestow a little magic on the scene. Neither of them speaks. Eventually, Mariko gets up and begins washing last night's dishes. Amalia gathers her outfit together, glancing periodically into the kitchen. Soon she is almost dressed, and Mariko still has not bothered to steal a final glance at her body.

“You know, we still haven't danced,” Amalia says as she buttons her sweater, loud enough to be heard over the running tap water, not at all sure why she says it. Mari smiles without looking up. Amalia crouches to hunt for her stockings.

They kiss good-bye at the door: a real, long, tender kiss. Amalia feels the whole time as if it's out of consolation, but when it ends and they stand staring at each other, it is Mariko who pulls Amalia back into another, harder than the first, this one both wonderful and cruel, a kiss Amalia knows must last her a long time.

She reaches the street dizzy. Bright light and cold air shock her awake. Cafe Wha? is packed; a blond folksinger sits on a stool with his back to the entrance, strumming a guitar, and Amalia, caught up in trying to listen through the door, slips on the ice-slick pavement and has to windmill her arms to keep from falling on her ass. She recovers, stalks across the street to her car and finds it gone—towed off for being parked in front of what was, unbeknownst to her, a church. Too much to deal with right now, just too much. She hails a cab and takes it all the way home to Connecticut, a hundred-dollar ride. The cabbie comes inside and she gives him a drink of water and pays him by check. As soon as he leaves, Amalia goes to bed, pretends to have the flu, and sleeps for the better part of a week.

II

CHAPTER
NINE

“
I
must keep Albert's music alive,” Mariko told Tris, her mouth hard and her dark eyes flooded with sincerity. It was the first fall of the new millennium, and after a lifetime of willful invisibility—after forty-five years of shielding her husband from the appetites that had once threatened to destroy him, and that continued to, at least in her mind, until the day he died—Mari was about to take the stage herself.

And so after two years' vacation from the road, Tris was back in his dress shoes and musician's suit, ready to reprise his role as drum setter, wine fetcher, dressing room confidant. He looked Mari over now—the spindly hand clutching its customary cigarette, the drawn mouth overembellished with pink lipstick, the eyes perpetually narrowed, as if staring down a foe—and saw the cost of eternal vigilance, the toll of decades spent holding a fragile world together and a demon at bay.

Even during those moments of respite when she'd sat backstage bending his ear, Mariko had always been listening to Albert through the door. Anticipating, with every synapse, the nightmare moment when his saxophone would caterwaul and cut out and she would run onstage and find him slumped facedown, or shaking uncontrollably, with the other musicians staring slack-faced as musicians always did. And just like that, it would be 1959 again, and Mariko would sling his ashy elbow around her neck and drag him out of there, frame buckling beneath his sweaty weight, Albert's legs knocking together as he underwater-walked.

That scene had never played and now it never would, but it was still as real as yesterday to her, much realer than tomorrow. She tapped her Dunhill against the glass ashtray and Tris thought, You don't have to do this, Mariko. You can go home and find yourself some peace.

But this dressing room in Amsterdam was home, as much so as a hotel in Nice or a nightclub in London or a restaurant in Chicago, and maybe more so than the mildewing loft on Third and MacDougal, where Albert and Mariko had never spent longer than six months at a stretch. All Mariko's domestic skills were geared toward travel; she kept an impeccable house in sixty cities around the globe, remembered what to order from room service at the Madrid Hilton and what not to at the chain's New Orleans branch. She could tell you how to pack for a fifteen-day, six-city swing versus a two-week string of one-nighters, where the best music shop in each city was located in case Albert needed reeds or Murray busted a drum head, how to fly with an upright bass in a hard case and a seven-piece trap set and never pay the airlines' extra-baggage fees.

“You know what Albert tell me one time?” she asked, smiling. Tris raised his eyebrows. “He say, ‘Don't worry, baby. If you die before me, I'm gonna kill myself.'”

“Mmm.” Tris said it with conviction, made the syllable an amen. This was a rare story, not in regular rotation. He believed it had happened—even Mariko wouldn't invent something like that—but Tris had never been convinced the saxophonist had meant what he'd said.

“I was so shocked, Tris! I never dared to bring it up again.”

The irony was that it had been Mariko who'd ended up the subject of a suicide watch last month, when Albert passed away. Her stated purpose in life was to give the world the gift of Albert's music by keeping him alive and drug-free, taking care of anything that might distract him from his calling. Nobody had ever thought about what Mariko would do if Albert died, and so they assumed the worst.

But when he did, her instincts told her: Play. The watch disbanded within hours.

Mariko reached into her patent-leather purse and extracted another cigarette. The gig was scheduled to begin in ten minutes. In Albert's band, the guys would have been massing in the hallway to trade wisecracks, repeat the set list to each other, resolve minor song-structure confusions. Tris opened the door and peered out, but the untested young men who comprised the other two-thirds of the Mariko Van Horn Trio were nowhere to be seen.

“No one know Albert's music like me,” Mariko said to herself, giving the vanity mirror a hennish nod. Tris didn't argue, though he could think of many who might. All the musicians who had played it with Albert over the years while Mariko sat in the wings muttering encouragement, for starters. Murray Higgins was off performing Van Horn's music right now, with an all-star lineup of their former bandmates, in a group dedicated to Albert. He'd invited Mariko to manage the tour, but she'd declined:
I tell him I not manager for hire. I only manage my husband
.

In Tris's time as a roadie—ten or fifteen short tours between '97 and '98, whenever the Van Horns were playing someplace too cool to pass up or he felt a hotel room might be a more conducive place to write than his and Nina's clutter-filled apartment—Mariko had never so much as fingered a piano. Sometimes she sang along, under her breath, to a Japanese folk song she'd arranged for the band; that was the closest to performing Tris had ever seen her come. How she'd even booked this handful of European gigs was a mystery. On the strength of her last name and her history with the club owners, presumably. Quite a chance they were taking. And on a woman whose unparalleled ball busting they'd spent the last forty years sniping over, at that.

“Are you nervous?” Tris asked, and instantly regretted it.

Mariko scowled, waving away the question the same way she did her own smoke.

“How your grandfather? I not seen since Albert's funeral.”

“He's okay, I guess. Still working on his new book.”

“Of course. Gotta keep working. What about you? When your book come out?”

“Four months.”

“Fantastic. Your grandfather read yet?”

Tris felt his stomach pitch, and shook his head. “I've been too scared to give it to him.”

Mariko clicked her tongue. “Nonsense. He gonna love. I can't wait read myself.”

“You'll get the first one.” At the reception after the funeral, he'd found
Contents Under Pressure
sitting atop the same pile of CDs on which she'd placed it four years earlier, when he'd presented them with a signed copy. It was for the best. The Van Horns had no respect for hip-hop, didn't consider it music, resented it for pushing jazz further toward the margins of financial viability. Tris had always been careful, in their presence, to disassociate himself from it.
A young painter,
he remembered telling Albert when the horn player asked what his book was about, declining to mention that the painter's canvases were New York City's slumbering subway trains, his medium shoplifted spray cans.

Mariko wagged her forearm, and the silver flecks in her slate-colored dress shimmered. “No, no. I buy. Never give nothing away, young man. Friends gotta support the artist. Not easy to make a living.” She squeezed her eyes shut and shook her head once, and just like that, Mariko was speaking in reverie, in reruns. “I feel so bad for black musician. To be black man in America so hard! But Albert got his freedom! He overcome! Albert the last of the Mohicans.” She shooed Tris without looking at him. “Tell band two minutes for me, please.”

“Yes, ma'am.” He crossed the hall, rapped at the door of the other dressing room. “Ready when you are, gentlemen.”

Tris hustled down the stairs and took up position by the sound booth in the farthest corner of the club. The room was crowded, the vibe of the audience unlike any Tris had ever felt. They did not move with the ease of sophisticates out for a night on the town, and an expensive one, but with the formal gravity of funeral attendants filing into church pews. Tris saw his own doubts reflected in the jitteriness of their movements: the way they tapped their feet, glanced compulsively over their shoulders, worried their napkins, made geometric figures of the hard plastic stirrers garnishing their drinks. They didn't know whether to trust her, either.

“Ladies and gentlemen, please join us in welcoming the Mariko Van Horn Trio!” She marched to the piano on the left side of the stage, arms rigid at her sides. She sat down, twisted at the waist to bow to the audience, then dropped her head and stared at the keys, hands folded in her lap.

The noise faded, until only small rumblings persisted—the recrossing of women's nyloned legs, the clearing of male throats, the deliberate rise and fall of drink glasses. Even those died away, and there was true silence, odd forward-creeping silence that promised to deflate at any moment, punctured by delicate piano tinklings or authoritative drum strokes. The drummer and the bassist hunched over their instruments, faking cool reflection but really glancing over at Mariko in search of a cue. The pianist's hands stayed in her lap, and the room waited. A second round of rumblings erupted. Men scratched their temples, women leaned slightly toward them or away. More sips were taken, more glasses replaced.

Then a small noise from the piano bench perked up their ears and froze the crowd. Mariko was sobbing. Her back was turned, but the shaking of her thin torso was unmistakable. She sat and cried, growing no louder and no softer, and the club and the musicians and the soundman and the roadie watched, paralyzed. Tris caught a refracted fragment of her face in one of the decorative slivers of mirror hanging behind the bandstand. Makeup ran in streams down her cheeks. He found himself walking toward her.

Tris reached the stage and stood below it. He brought his hand up, almost placed it on Mariko's back, then changed his mind, recalled it to his side. Her sobs were like her singing voice, as clear and delicate as soap bubbles. Tris reached for her again, and this time laid his hand against the crushed velvet covering her spine.

Mariko jumped, and so did the room. Without turning toward him, she reached behind her and grabbed Tris by the wrist so hard he felt his pulse throbbing beneath her thumb. Mariko was strong enough to swing drum cases off an airport baggage belt herself if nobody else was paying attention.

He winced and leaned forward on tiptoe to whisper in her ear, trying to exercise what discretion he could. “Do you want me to take you upstairs, Mariko?”

Mariko shook her head, releasing his hand and turning far enough toward Tris for him to see the tears had stopped. “No. Thank you, Tris. You good friend.” She sighed through her nose and gave him a weak smile. “I cry for Albert plenty when he alive, but hardly at all since he gone.”

“You don't have to play, Mariko. Everyone will understand.”

“Bullshit. I gonna play Albert's music so fucking loud, he gonna hear me. Tell soundman to turn down monitors.”

She turned back to the piano and held her left hand aloft, then brought her right up from her lap to meet it and dropped them both onto the keyboard, and a chord rang out and jolted the drummer's left foot back to life. His hi-hat pumped once, the first beat of a resuscitated heart. Tris stepped back, and Mariko brought her hands down again.
Doon,
another chord, and now the bass player was standing straight as a sunflower, his hands performing shiatsu on the big old double fiddle and his mouth moving along with his fingers, echoing each note he played in a soft, breathy baritone.

Mariko ratcheted her body up and down on the cushioned bench, long black hair already coming loose from its bun, frizzing into a mane, and a swell of sound rose up around her. Tris dropped into an empty stage-side seat, jutted his head and knit his brow and grimaced happily. That was what you did when somebody was swinging like a motherfucker.

A minute later, it hit him. Mariko was trying to play Albert's solo, the one on the record, and she was getting most of it, too. Every now and then she'd fork off, like a river diverging into a pair of streams, and play something of her own devising. The music would rush slower, shallower, and then when the time was right, she'd reconnect with Albert's notes and seize on their momentum and surge forward for a while more. How many of his solos had she committed to memory? Probably all of them, Tris decided. Probably every note he'd ever played. But how—when—had she learned to pound the keys like that?

An hour later, Mariko sat alone with a Campari and soda, and Tris stood outside the closed door of the dressing room, explaining to an anxious line of friends and well-wishers that Mariko was resting for a few minutes, would receive them shortly. The club's owner fronted the delegation, his face shiny with perspiration and his fist choking the equally sweaty neck of a champagne bottle. Just as Tris was tiring of the bouncer role, Mariko summoned him inside.

She had rebunned her hair and reapplied her makeup. Smoke willowed from a cigarette lying in the ashtray, and Mariko sat rifling through her purse.

“Tris, I don't wanna see nobody for 'nother ten minutes. Tell Rolf come back later. I gotta talk to friends first. I don't wanna insult! Some of these people I known thirty years!”

Rolf must have been the owner. Tris had shaken his hand earlier but hadn't bothered to register a name. “No problem, Mariko. You want me to let them in one at a time?”

“No, no, I can do. You gotta go on errand.” Her hand emerged, and Mariko extended a Dutch bill. “Down the street, they got a place called Talking Blues.” She bent toward the mirror and corrected her lipstick with a curled pinkle. “I need you pick up some hashish.”

Tris stared at her in disbelief, then grinned. Mariko ignored him, occupied herself in rummaging.

“Any particular kind?”

“I have no idea. I never smoke in twenty years. Whatever you think.”

Tris gangled down the stairs, laughing, and hit the street. Inside the club, it was easy to forget what country he was in, but now Tris stood in the middle of an iridescent midnight thoroughfare pungent with great rich clouds of herb smoke, thick with bicyclists, and multinational with barhoppers.

Not even Pleasure Central, though—with its rows of mood-lit hash bars and its twenty-four-hour money-changing stands, its pink-piped sex-shop windows and, most garish of all, its two-story McDonald's—could match the impact of listening to Mariko pull so much sound from that piano. Even the knowledge that around any corner might be a fully bonded and licensed whorehouse, with a near-naked woman standing behind the glass of each full-length window, flirting in mime language, was less discombobulating than the fact that Mariko was planning to sit in her dressing room and suck down a joint Tris would no doubt have to roll for her. Mariko—who fired cats for showing up fifteen minutes late to a sound check, who looked askance if Albert ordered anything stronger than wine, who'd taken young musicians publicly to task for sloppy table manners and muttered loud aspersions about their lack of home training. It was a brand-new day.