Jazz Moon (21 page)

More champagne. More inquiries about Harlem. More French words to store away. More food and laughter and cigarettes and celebration and crazy Denny clowning up the Charleston on the tabletop as Ben downed the last drop from his umpteenth glass of champagne, raised his hand to signal a waiter for more, and saw him: Clifford Treadwell. Near the entrance. He spotted Ben, nodded aloofly, and kept looking around until Baby Back marched up to him, hugged him like a buddy, and shepherded him over to LeRoi Jasper.

Ben had already drunk a bucket of champagne, but now he needed a real drink, not this fizzy stuff. He excused himself and went to the bar. He downed bourbon while watching the three confer like confidantes. They formed a triangle: Mr. Jasper at the apex, Baby Back and Clifford side by side, shoulders almost-touching, Clifford's eyes lodged on Ben's lover.

He knocked back a second bourbon. It slow-burned down his throat. He waited for Baby Back to wave him over and recruit him into the business being conducted. Clifford's shoulder still almost-touched Baby Back's. His eyes seemed addicted to him.

He was about to crash their triangle when someone next to him said, “Shit. You must really hate one them guys, sugar.”

Glo.

“Let me see if I can guess which one. Hmm. Can't be Mr. Jasper—you ain't known him long enough to hate him. Obviously ain't that fool Baby Back. And I don't care if he
did
bring this house down in that first set. He still a fool. And on top of that, he big-headed, arrogant, and too damn big for his britches. But where was I? Oh, yeah. That leaves that high-yellow gent standing next to him. Now, Benjy, tell Glo why you hate that poor little high-yellow man so much that you're throwing back straight bourbon like it's water even though I know you already been drinking champagne all night.”

He didn't know which was more shocking: that she was all up in his business after knowing him a day, or that she had called him
Benjy
. He stared at her, inarticulate, as she grinned that giant smile of hers. Close up, she was a little blinding in her gold getup.

“Never mind,” she said. “I
know
why you hate him. Mmm-hmm. See how he standing right next to Baby Back? Shoulder right up on him? Can't take his eyes off him? That's why you hate him. You think he after your man.”

She seemed content with her assessment, but Ben heard alarms go off.

“No, you got it all wrong, Glo. The high-yellow . . . uh . . . Clifford, that's our friend. We met him on the ship on the way over. Me and my cousin did, that is.”

“Lord have mercy. Benjy, if you and me gonna be friends, you gotta stop with this
cousin
shit.”

“We're gonna be friends?”

“We sure is. Starting tomorrow when you come to my house for coffee and tell Glo
all
about this high-yellow Clifford who you think wants to steal your boyfriend.”

T
he pastry was of deep-fried dough and jammed with a fruit filling. A “beignet,” the waiter had called it.
Another word to remember. Beignet
. It was probably delicious, but Ben couldn't be certain. Alcohol had soaked the taste out of his taste buds. Odors fumed from his mouth, a grotesque mix of champagne and bourbon.

“How's the head?” Baby Back asked, sipping coffee as they lounged at an outdoor café on the Place Pigalle. He sat back with his legs crossed at the ankles, grinning big as a floodlight, eyes sweeping from one end of the square to the other as if he had conquered Paris and now surveyed his new kingdom.

“
My
head just hurts,” Ben said. “Yours looks a little oversized.”

“Damn right. I tore up that club last night. Tore it
up!
”

“You and Glo.”

Baby Back groaned. “She did all right. For a girl singer.”

Ben bit into his beignet. Fruit filling oozed out. Baby Back, without so much as tilting his head away from the square, and with the floodlight still shining, said, “Saw you talking to her. Careful. Might not be a good idea. You know, consorting with the enemy.”

Ben returned fire. “I was surprised to see Clifford last night. Guess you two got pretty close on that ship. Ain't right, leaving me out when you was talking to him and Mr. Jasper.”

Baby Back's floodlight diminished like a scene from a movie: It faded rapidly, smoothly, to black. “I didn't want no mess. I may have fucked you yesterday, Mr. Poet, but that don't mean I trust you again.”

He had fired back with the cutthroat precision of a marksman. Ben took another bite of the beignet. The attack had jarred the sensation of taste back into his tongue and he discovered the filling was way too sweet. He sipped his coffee, cold now, through trembling lips.

 

A monumental building hunkered on the crest of a hill immediately north of the Place Pigalle. Three domes sat atop it like crowns—one giant dome in the center, two smaller ones on either side that seemed to play attendant to the dominant one. The building was white and looming as an iceberg. It looked like a palace or a mausoleum or a fortress. He'd never seen anything so large. It sat on that hill like it ruled it; as if it had been there always and had condescended to let Montmartre spring up around it. Ben stared up at it, stupefied, while Baby Back shifted his weight from one leg to the other and continually checked his watch. Two sets of stairs crawled up either side of the grassy hill to the palace-mausoleum-fortress. The climb looked daunting.

“Let's go up,” Ben said.

“I ain't climbing all the way up there. Gotta save my breath for my horn. You go on.”

“I want us to do this together.”

“I want to rehearse.”

As Ben climbed, bells rang out, reverberating in a majestic clang. Others climbed the steps as well. Some were well-dressed tourists who had underestimated the stamina required for this quaint adventure; others drably clothed Montmartre residents who had long ago learned to pace themselves for the trek. The bells continued to clang.

“
Excusez-moi, monsieur,
” Ben asked a fellow climber. “
Qu'est-ce que c'est?
”

“
La Basilique du Sacré-Cœur
.”

It took several patient repetitions on the man's part and a mad flipping of pages through Ben's dictionary to determine that the edifice was The Basilica of the Sacred Heart. A church.

“
La Basilique du Sacré-Cœur. La Basilique du Sacré-Cœur.
” Ben repeated it until he could reproduce it with only a fraction of stuttering.

“
Mon ami,
” the man said, “we call it
Sacré-Cœur
for short.”

It turned out to be the highest point in Paris.

Ben reached the summit, then proceeded up to the basilica's portico. From behind the heavy wood doors came the surge of an organ and an exhilaration of voices in song. Ben looked out beyond the crest of the hill. The rest of Paris lapped below like an electric tapestry, sewn with a surfeit of colors and textures, some creamy, some jagged; all distant and shadowy, yet touchable. The city rippled out, far, vast, grazing the world's corners.

 

The apartment was in rue Blanche, not far from Chez LeRoi. The girliest thing he'd ever seen. A tyranny of lace. And ruffles. And pink.
Everything
was pink—the drapes, the tablecloths, the wallpaper, and beyond.

“What you think of the place?” Glo asked. She set two pink mugs on the coffee table, filled them with coffee from a pink urn, and spiked them with gin.

“You have . . . you possess . . . a certain . . . flair,” Ben said.

What she possessed was a skyscraping self-regard. Pictures of her inundated the smallish apartment: a gigantic portrait in a gilded frame above the sofa, several smaller photos parked on accent tables and shelves, a showstopper of a painting in the entryway. Smaller than the monster above the sofa, it illustrated Glo in the midst of a dance step with bold hues that vaulted across the canvas. The artist had ditched realism—Glo was just some drawn lines and flourishes of color—and instead endeavored to capture her sass.

“I know that painting is as irresistible as I am,” she said, “but I want to talk. Sit down, drink your coffee, and tell Glo why you think this Clifford's trying to steal Baby Back from you.”

Ben laughed, confounded and weirdly charmed by this woman's presumption. “How about this: You tell me a little something about
you
first.”

She sighed. “All right, Benjy, if that's the way you want to do this. Lord, Lord. Where to start? Well . . .”

She was born in Cleo, Mississippi. At sixteen, she married a banjo player.

“Floyd Fairchild. The homeliest man you
ever
did see. Plain as a mule and about as smart. But a kind man. A good man. I loved him. And he had a way with his . . . instrument.” She winked.

The couple moved to New Orleans when they heard its music scene paid. With his banjo-playing and her voice, they worked right away—in dive bars and brothels in downtown Storyville.

“Joints so low-down, you had to dig your way in with a shovel. Whores and thieves and killers. And then the rough folks showed up.”

After New Orleans they toured the colored vaudeville circuit. Tent shows in the summer. Tiny, rickety theaters in the winter months. Riding Jim Crow smokers and bunking at colored-run boardinghouses.

“We did all right. Made a name for ourselves. Cut a few records. Made a little money.”

Then Floyd enlisted and came to France to fight in the Great War.

“Got his brains blowed out. Ha. Never had much anyway. They buried him here. I came over to lay flowers on his grave, pay my respects.”

And she stayed.

“Sugar, this town went jazz-crazy after the war. I had it made. I ain't never once thought about going back to the States. Never once.” She refilled their coffee and added another generous draught of gin to both cups. “That's my life story, Benjy. Your turn.”

Was it the high from the gin, or was she growing on him? Ben took a gulp of coffee and gave her the rundown. Dogwood. Angeline. Harlem.
This thing
. Baby Back. Even Willful, tactfully skirting the more raw details.

“
This thing?
That what you called it?” Glo said. “Sugar, you should have been in New Orleans. There was sissy-men running around all over the damn place. Nobody cared. Least not in Storyville or the Quarter. Now tell Glo all about this Clifford!” She was almost salivating.

“Why you so anxious to get up in my business?” Ben asked.

She batted her eyes like a coquette. “Because that's what friends do, Benjy.”

Yes, she was growing on him. He had said her decorating had flair. That seemed true of her, as well. Lighthearted devilment tiptoed behind the sass. Irreverence was her calling card. She was presumptuous and nosy, and even that charmed him. He had known lots of nosy women, but had never found one endearing. Perhaps Glo could chaperone him through this strange world he'd sailed into or counsel him across the capricious terrain of this new distance with Baby Back. Hadn't she bested the trumpeter, even as she clicked down those spiral stairs? Called out his inflating ego and won?

Ben drank some more gin-laden coffee and told his new friend all about Clifford. All about the distance.

“You ain't got a thing to worry about,” Glo declared, a judge who had heard the evidence and now presented her ruling. “Baby Back done come all the way to Paris with
you,
right? Distance, hell. He ain't gonna toss you aside that easy. But I don't know what you see in him. He arrogant as all shit.”

A woman with a home chock-f of pictures of herself complaining of someone else's arrogance? It made Ben snicker.

Ben sat on the steps of Sacré-Cœur, writing. He looked up from his tablet and out over the panoramic view, in love with it. The August air was summery, but a bit cool, the sky clear except for the factory haze. Buildings clustered together along the streets that threaded the city. The Eiffel Tower ascended above all, puncturing the sky like a needle. Two months in Paris and this spot on the steps of this church surpassed all others. It was his favorite.

He checked the time. He had a few hours before he had to be at work. Work: as in waiting tables—at Chez LeRoi. It happened because of Clifford Treadwell.

Since his arrival, Ben had spent his days exploring Paris and his nights wading through the tumult of the Place Pigalle to get to Chez LeRoi where he hobnobbed with Denny's set. When that crowd was absent, LeRoi Jasper trotted him over to other groups to exhibit him like a prize horse.

“
Mes amis, je vous présente
Ben Charles,” he'd crow. “He's from HARLEM!”

Chairs would scuffle against the parquet floor as the people scooted aside, frantic to make space for an authentic Harlemite.

“You've all heard of wild, jungle nights in Harlem, yes?” Jasper would say. “Well, this young man was downright
savage!
”

Champagne would be ordered and the now-familiar questioning would ensue:

“Do you know Josephine Baker?”

“Did she always dance in a belt of bananas?”

“
Le jazz-hot
was born in Harlem,
n'est pas?
”

“Why are Negroes more sensual than Europeans?”

“Do you dream of Africa?”

This querying about Harlem in particular and Negro life in general made Ben think he'd been appointed the official representative of both.

Clifford came to Chez LeRoi frequently, usually with his oft-mentioned connections. Between sets, Clifford and Baby Back and the connections would huddle like conspirators. They never included Ben. If Clifford came alone, he assessed the scene from the doorway before deigning to make his entrance. Whether commandeering a table or parked at the bar, he always kept in his sights that big, bad wolf of a trumpeter spewing jazz dynamite from the stage.

“I gotta be there every damn night,” Ben told Glo one day. “Because
he's
there every damn night. I gotta keep an eye on him.”

She poured him coffee from the pink urn. “Sugar, just work there. It kills two birds with one stone: You can keep an eye on Cliffy and get paid for it, too. And Melvin just quit, so this is your lucky day.”

Baroness Deneuve—Denny—once his patroness, became his customer. It didn't take long to get the gossip from his new coworkers.

“Baroness” may have been her title, but controversy percolated over its validity. In what had become a catty guessing game in the
haute
parlors of the rich Parisian set, some debated whether she had inherited the title from family or acquired it by marriage. Others sniped that she had invented it: a ruse for accelerating up the ladder of Paris society. But with her chauffeur-driven, snakeskin-upholstered Renault town car and couture from Jeanne Lanvin and Coco Chanel, faux title or not, no one could deny that Denny possessed egregious wealth. She was in her mid forties; her male escorts (she cavorted with a different one almost every night) were half that and always the most stellar men in the room.

And Ben got the low-down on LeRoi Jasper from Norman, the bartender, when they passed a cigarette back and forth before work one evening.

“I knew him when he was
Leroy
Jasper. We was in the 369th Infantry Regiment during the Great War. All through training, Leroy was timid and quiet. Awful nervous, too. Whenever somebody made fun of him or played a joke on him—which was all the time—I swear he'd look like he was 'bout to break down crying. I felt bad for him. I thought,
Might as well send the telegram notifying his next of kin 'cause ain't no way this boy's gonna make it through no war
. When we got over here, a French soldier told him
Leroy
was a corruption of
le roi,
which is French for
the king
. It went to his head and stayed there. He made everybody call him
LeRoi
. And no more Mr. Scaredy Cat. No, sir. He turned out to be the most vicious fighter out of all of us. Them krauts ain't stand a chance against him. When the war ended, he scraped the money together and opened this place.”

Baby Back was displeased at not being consulted about Ben's hiring.

“Just keep a low profile when Clifford comes in with people, hear me? Clifford says his contacts might not, you know, understand about you and me.”

“Baby, you're the one that's been keeping a low profile.”

They worked in the same place, lived in the same room, but rarely saw each other on account of Baby Back's constant meetings with record people or impresarios or club owners or Ben didn't know who. Or he spent his days at the club obsessively practicing his trumpet and rehearsing the musicians, driving them—and himself—like a plantation overseer.

“Clifford says I gotta be ready. Never know when one of his contacts might make an offer.”

It was afternoon. They were in their room in the boardinghouse in rue Constance.

“Here we go again,” Ben said. “
Clifford says
.
Clifford says
. If Clifford said you should jump in the Seine, would you?”

“If it would help my career: hell yeah.”

He sat on the bed, buffing his horn with a soft cloth. Ben took the horn, laid it aside, sat on Baby Back's lap, and kissed him.

Ben became aroused. Baby Back didn't.

“Get up,” he said, patting Ben's thigh, then nudging him away. “I gotta go practice.”

Ben watched him retrieve the shining horn and place it in its case. It occurred to him that Baby Back spent more time with his trumpet than he did with him. Was more intimate with it, too. For exactly one split second, Ben hated that trumpet.

“Hey. Would you jump in the Seine to help
us?
”

Baby Back opened his mouth, but didn't answer. A minute later he was out the door.

 

Paris. Full. Filling. Rational. Daft. It could be conservative as a mortician's suit and then you'd round a corner and it was a brazen flapper. It could be itinerant or intransigent; tamely feral or wildly civilized. Paris was vast, eternal, but also small and annoyingly provincial. It soared multifaceted and diverse and eclectic, and it was homogenous as hell. Ben discovered all of this once he broke out of the fishbowl of Montmartre and dove into the rest of the city—a painter's palette streaked with colors: brilliant, moody, audacious, tantalizing, inviting, alienating. Reds and blacks and pinks and that milky gray that belonged both to the cloudy Paris sky and the pearls entwining a rich socialite's neck.

But he felt rather than saw its colors.

He felt pastels—peach, pink, diaphanous yellows—when he traipsed up the Champs Élysées with its fashionable shops full of wealthy customers radiating easy grandeur. Something light and airy hummed about the Champs Élysées, dancing up and down the street and in and out of every expensively appointed shop window. Older conservative women climbed out of limousines in long skirts whose hems skimmed the pavement. Young women stormed the boulevard in boxy hats and dresses that stopped just above their knees. But it was the men at whom Ben marveled. Slim young men, slicked hair glistening and distinctly parted, wearing the new jazz suits—pants hemmed high and cuffed at the ankle, jacket waists pinched tight to flaunt their slender contours. Ben refrained from staring until he didn't.

Then there was the black of Notre Dame. Its gothic weight oppressed and fascinated him as he perused altars and artwork hand-crafted with such intimate specificity that even the details had details. The cathedral was somber. Its dim light spoke elusiveness and distance. You had to strive toward the light, aspire to it. He sat in a pew, decimated by the dark beauty, and thought of the distance with Baby Back. It was a tunnel, the poet at one end, the trumpeter at the other, and in between lay an unnavigable expanse of dense black. They couldn't see through it to get back to each other. They didn't talk anymore. They didn't fuck anymore. The only time Baby Back seemed alive was when he was performing or scheming to advance his career. Or when Clifford Treadwell came around.

One evening, Ben complained to Glo. He was lolling on the chaise longue in her dressing room while she made up her face and took swigs of gin from a silver flask. She stopped in the middle of applying rouge.

“Benjy. Oh, sugar.” She said the three words like she pitied him.

“That bigheaded fool gonna keep on hurting you. He ain't no good for you. And be honest with yourself:
You
ain't no good for
him
. Baby Back Johnston needs somebody as ambitious and bloodthirsty as he is. I know that ain't what you want to hear, but Glo gotta call it like she sees it.”

“I love him.”

She shook her head like he was the most tragic thing she'd ever seen. “I know. Poor child. All the worse for you.”

Ben rose. “You have a good night.”

He walked out and down the spiral staircase as she called after him.

“Yeah, that's right. Just walk on out when you don't like what ol' Glo has to say! Mmm-hmm. Even when you know she's right! Just walk your little skinny ass on out, like that's gonna change anything!”

 

Pastels again when he discovered Le Jardin des Tuilleries. People strolled the garden's grounds amid sculptures and fountains, or busied themselves with the food and entertainments: puppet shows, acrobats, lemonade stalls. Ben walked to the edge of the garden, looked west, and saw the Champs Élysées clogged with automobiles streaming toward the Arc de Triomphe. The bottom of the Eiffel Tower was visible, but a light-blue mist obscured its top.

It started raining. He sought shelter in an orchard of trees. The leafy boughs shielded him. A few feet away, a man also sought protection under a tree. He extended one hand against the trunk, the other on the half-moon of his hip, which jutted out as if waiting for someone to claim it. His body was slim and lithe and pliable, his hair a light brown. He was close enough that Ben could stare into his light green eyes. Close enough for the man to return the favor with a gaze, steely and carnal, as rain began to invade the sanctity of the protective trees.

Ben thought how easy it would be to do something with and to this man. Nobody had to know. Baby Back didn't want him these days, hadn't touched him in weeks.

And Ben craved to be touched.

He broke the impasse, offered the man a nod. The man puckered his pink lips, smooched a kiss, then walked off into the rain. He turned and teased Ben a look, then continued on until he was swallowed by distance and the pallid white wall of rain.

 

Everything in the Latin Quarter shone gold. The fiery haggling in the marketplace and the exchange of coins, one tawny hand to another; the gilded intellects of artists and students and aesthetes blazing glitter against the backdrop of the dark, twisting, medieval streets. Ben ate in the Latin Quarter's literary cafés to eavesdrop on the intellectuals, though he cared nothing about their philosophies, their theories, their socialistic complaining.

He listened in order to master French.

Not the spiritlessness of tourist French, nor the workaday French gleaned from grammar books. Ben aspired to its tricky nuances, its artful cadences, so he could one day skate the slopes of its slippery idiosyncrasies. He listened and uncovered new words and imitated the accent and practiced the inflections until he sensed new muscle forming on his soft palette and at the back of his throat. He wanted to flex the part of his brain that stored English and make room for French. He'd know that he'd mastered it when he could skate the slopes in his head, when he dreamed in it.

And if he dreamed in it, couldn't he write poetry in it, too? Recently, he'd been startled to find he couldn't even write in his own language. Long accustomed to poems sailing off his fingertips and onto the page, lately he'd sit at his typewriter or with his notepad, waiting for a wind to charm his sails. Sometimes it came as a languid breeze, sometimes not at all, leaving his paper either flecked with listless verses or blank. He wasn't sure which was worse, or what to do. Baby Back never suffered any loss of artistry. Why had
he?

He went to a café in the Latin Quarter one afternoon, a cramped room with rough wood floors and the odor of coffee in every corner. He chose a table near the entrance. In the middle of the dining area were tables with benches on either side like picnic tables. One hosted a group of male students from the Sorbonne. Clean-cut boys with clear white skin and rosy, dimpled cheeks. Clichés, but lovely nonetheless.

A literary debate ensnared the table: one side advocated romanticism, the other defended modernism.

“Chateaubriand, Hugo, and Dumas,
père
.
They
are the masters,
mes amis
.”

“The
old
masters. Their words, their styles are gray-haired and decrepit! Give me Breton and Cocteau. Give me Apollinaire. Hell, give me Fitzgerald.”

“Fitzgerald? Bah! Ninety years from now, no one will remember him or care. American writers: bah!”