Into The Night (8 page)

It's your song, Madeline told herself. You've got your whole life tied up in it and this woman just told you it's no good. This is your chance. If you can't win her with the song, win her with the way you feel about it.

She willed her face to sag in disappointment. "I'm very sorry," she said stiffly, reaching to gather the score sheets and take them from Adelaide. "I certainly had no intention of wasting your time."

She walked to the door, turned the knob, drew it open. She turned, looking on the verge of tears. "Thanks anyway," she managed, her voice breaking on the second word, and then she was through the door and drawing it shut behind her.

A moment or two passed. She heard the knob start to work around, as the door was about to open once more. She quickly planted her forearm against the wall and buried her face in it, in an attitude of crushed, heartbroken youthful despondency. She even made her shoulders quiver a little, as if with soundless sobs.

The door opened, and she knew Adelaide was standing watching her.

"Kid." Adelaide's husky voice softened a little. At least, insofar as it was capable of softening. "Sorry I was so rough on you, kid. Forget about it, and come on back in. I won't buy your songs, but I'll buy you a drink on the house. It's a lonely, dreary Tuesday afternoon."

Madeline slowly prepared to unearth her face and turn it, giving herself time to form a timid, tremulous smile on it. But underneath she was exultant. She was In.

Women can often form friendships with one another far more easily and far more quickly than men can. For one thing, their egos are less brittle, less ready to take offense and bridle at some misconstrued word or action. Once the pact is a fact, has been accepted, they are less inclined to stand on their dignity with one another, they show far less reserve toward one another. That is because a number of the precipitant factors producing this are lacking. They are seldom if ever financially jealous of one another per se, and by the same token are apt to be more trustworthy financially with regard to one another. The throat-cutting urge of business is lacking.

It was pity that opened Adelaide to the possibility of friendship with Madeline, pity combined with the guilt she felt over her outburst. But pity and guilt can only sustain a relationship for a certain amount of time before the object of pity becomes the object of resentment for having burdened the other party with an unpleasant emotion. In this case, the two women moved quickly past the stage of pity and guilt to the foundation of a deeper relationship.

Madeline realized, as she came to know Adelaide, that she filled a need the other woman had for a friend. She was someone to talk to, someone to confide in. At the same time, she was someone to lead and to instruct, someone to whom Adelaide could feel superior.

"Call me Dell," she told Madeline early on. "What's Adelaide, anyway? A city in Australia. I bet you've never been to Australia."

"You're right."

"Neither have I, but I've been enough places to know I don't have to go there. You know why? Because all places are the same. Or, even if they're different, I'm the same person wherever I go. And the life I'd find there would be the same life I fall into wherever I go. There'd be the same kind of men, even if they spoke with different accents. They'd want the same thing from a girl and offer the same thing in return as they do here. I'd be singing the same songs and hearing the same line of crap from everybody I met."

"You sound bitter," Madeline offered.

"Do I? That's good news. You're better off being bitter than sweet. If you're sweet, the world's full of people looking to eat you up. When you're bitter enough, they take one taste and walk away."

"And that's what you want?"

"That's how I stay alive," Dell said.

While friendship softened Dell's attitude toward Madeline, it didn't make her change her mind about the music Madeline had written. "These aren't songs," she said flatly. "From the looks of what you've done, you don't know anything about putting a melody line together, let alone figuring out the chords. If you had a great sense of melody, you could get somebody else to work out the chords and do up a lead sheet, but I don't see any of that here. Why are you so hipped on writing songs, anyway?"

"It just feels like something I have to do."

"Yeah," Dell said. "Well, I can understand what that feels like. Anything that gets in your blood that way, it's hard to find a way to say no to it. If you're lucky, the desire and the talent come in the same package. But some unlucky people get the one without the other. Of course, if you get the talent and not the desire, it's not necessarily the worst thing in the world. I knew a girl, I swear she had a voice like an angel. Unbelievable pipes. And notjust the raw material. Her phrasing, her timing, everything was right about her. Everything but one thing."

"What was that?"

"She didn't have the desire. She didn't care about it. She could have been a headliner right off the bat, and she probably could have made it big. Records, television, maybe even the movies. She had that kind of talent. But without the drive she didn't put up with the crap that's a part of the business, and you know what happened to her?"

"What?"

"She met a real nice guy and married him, and the only singing she does now is to her husband and her kids, and she's living in a house in the suburbs and happy as a clam. Doesn't sound so bad, does it?"

"I guess not."

"That's what happens when you got the talent and not the drive. When it's the other way around, you got a lifetime of disappointment. Well, what the hell--that's what you get when you've got the drive and the talent, too, because this is a business where even the winners lose most of the time. But at least there are a few victories along the way, something to keep your hopes up."

"And I don't have any talent?"

"Not in the music department. But I'll tell you something, much as I hate to encourage you--"

"What?"

"Some of your lyrics aren't so bad. None of 'em really work, because a lyric can't exist in a vacuum. A lyric's not a poem, it's the verbal part of a song, and it has to be suited to a melody. A really good lyric, even when it's all by itself, has a melody locked up inside it waiting for a composer to find it and yank it out. You don't have lyrics in that sense, but you've got bits and pieces that show a certain flair."

"Like what?"

Dell thumbed through Madeline's papers. "Well, like this," she said. "You and I together all alone, in a little country of our own, where the population's only two.' That's just a fragment, but there's something about it I like. But that doesn't mean it's a lyric yet."

"Maybe I can work on it."

"Maybe you can, but I don't know why you'd want to bother. When you stop to think about it, all songs say the same thing. They all tell you love's wonderful, one way or another. Some say it hurts and some say it's a picnic, but they all think it's what makes the world go round. You think the world needs to hear that message again?"

It was funny, she thought, how quickly Dell sought to erase the sensitive side of herself. She couldn't say a nice word about a partial lyric without wiping it out with a bitter sarcastic comment in the next breath. What Madeline came to realize was that there were two Dells. The worldly cynical brassy Dell was onstage most of the time, but there was always the other Dell waiting in the wings.

The other Dell was quieter, less forceful. And this other Dell spoke so seldom, spoke so little, that you wanted to hear every word she said. She was dead, had been killed off, would never be alive, and you wanted to know as much about her as you could.

"There was Johnny Black. He wrote the biggest hit of its day, 'Dardanella.' They took it away from him. Or at least, moved in on it, cut in on it. To get it published, he had to let them tinker, rearrange a note or two. All to get their split. You know that long, mournful wail that starts up in the verse, and then dies down again? And then starts up, and then dies down again. Every time I hear it, I think it's Johnny Black, moaning in his grave because they cut his heart out.

"There was Byron Gay. He died dead broke. Twenty years after he was gone, somebody dug up one of his numbers. It was called 'Oh!'Just 'Oh!' Probably the shortest song title on record. It made twenty-five thousand dollars in one season. It couldn't have happened to a nicer corpse.

"It's a tough business. A bitch of a tough business. Don't let yourself be hooked into it. Marry, and have a school bus full of kids. You strike me as more that type."

And then at another time, in self-contradiction, she would say: "It has its moments of sudden inspiration, too, that make all the rest of it worthwhile, I guess.

"Like the struggling young songwriter who got caught in a rainstorm on the streets of New York one day. He ducked into the nearest hotel lobby to get in out of the wet, and while he was sitting there waiting it out, he overheard a wife say to her husband, 'Hasn't it let up? Can't we leave yet?' The husband turned around from the window he was looking out of and said, 'In just a few more minutes. Wait till the sun shines, Nellie.'

"Or the time Rodgers and Hart were in a near car collision in Paris, and one of the girls with them put her hand over her rib cage and gasped, 'My heart stood still!"

In all of us, Madeline thought broodingly, there are two. The one we might have been, the one we are.

There was a shrewd side to Dell, as there is to many women who appear at first sight to live by frivolity alone. It was more than just shrewdness, she had an excellent business head. Granting her original premise of getting something for nothing (and is that so foreign to business?), she took it the rest of the way from there with an acumen that would have met with the approval of any board of directors.

Showing off a solitaire one day, breathing on it lovingly, then frictioning it against her sleeve to polish it, she remarked idly, "This has about two weeks to go."

"What d'you mean? You give them back?" Madeline asked in Surprise.

Dell arched her eyebrows in rebuke. "Be sensible," she admonished her. "Only the weak in the head do that."

"That old song Carol Channing used to sing," she went on. "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend,' that's the bunk. Not so. You can hoard them for twenty years, and what have you got? Still diamonds. They're beautiful, but they don't work for you. And anything that doesn't work for you isn't really beautiful at all, is it? Put it this way: AT&T pays three point six a year. Diamonds pay exactly oh point oh a year. Diamonds don't feed the kitty.

"So here's what I do. I have a sort of special personal friend--" She interrupted herself to laugh at herself. "Well, he'd have to be a special personal friend, wouldn't he?--who comes up with a piece of this stuff every now and then. On special occasions. Like Christmas, like a birthday. I give it a run of about two months, and then when he's good and used to seeing it on me and doesn't pay any more attention to it, I take it off display. I take it down to a diamond broker I know, he puts it up for sale, takes his commission, and I collect the balance. I take a beating every time, but I don't mind that. For instance, a piece worth two thousand, I'm glad to take twelve hundred for. You never can get back the full price. Then I take my twelve hundred, which is now all clear, to another special friend I have, this one's an investment broker, and he buys me a hunk of U.S. Steel or General Motors or some other blue chip with it. I put it away and forget about it, and it starts working for me from then on. So when I wind up someday with too much rust in my pipes to go on singing, and when the men don't turn up anymore with the diamonds, I'll have enough money coming in to keep body and soul together."

"You've got it figured out," Madeline said admiringly.

"You've got to, the way life is. You know that song Billie Holiday sang? 'God Bless the Child Who's Got His Own.' God, it tears me up, the way she sang that song. She didn't just sing it, you know. She wrote it. She wasn't a songwriter, nobody who sings like that should have to do anything but sing, but she wrote that song. And before she wrote it, she did something else."

"What?"

"She lived it. 'God bless the child who's got his own.' You can't wait for other people to give it to you, you can't live on crusts of bread from other people's sandwiches. 'God bless the child who's got his own.' If you don't take care of yourself, you're always going to be the kid outside the candy store, nose against the glass, looking in, wondering why everybody else has got the candy and all you've got is a cold nose and an appetite."

Later, she asked Dell how her gentleman friend would feel if he knew she sold his gifts.

"Take it from me," Dell said, "he doesn't want to know. Because if he knew, he'd think he had to be upset about it, but why should he? He gives me diamonds because he can't give me money because that would give our relationship a name neither of us wants it to have. But what's a diamond beside money disguised as beauty? He could give me fake jewelry and it would look the same when I wore it. Diamonds are an acceptable way for him to give me money, and if I invest that money instead of wearing it, all I'm being is smart. But he wouldn't like it if he knew, because it would mean looking at something he doesn't want to see."

"And God bless the child," Madeline said.

"Amen to that. You know how to write a song? Start off with a feeling--your own feeling, not one you got secondhand from a song. Something you feel as deeply as Lady Day felt that song. Then write a lyric that's so good it's got the melody curled right up inside it."

"I'd have a better chance," Madeline said, "if I had a piano. That's why my melodies are so bad. I'm trying to hear the notes in my head. If I had a piano, I could sound them out, write down the melodies that I hear instead of guessing at them."

"So save your pennies and buy yourself a piano."

"I haven't got enough pennies. And even if I did, I don't have room for a piano. I was thinking--"

"Oh?"

"There's plenty of time when you're not here," she said. "If I could come here when you're out, not all the time but whenever I've got something I want to work out on the piano all by myself. If I did that, I think I could come up with some lead sheets that wouldn't look like the Morse code in Slovakian."