Tiger Rag (7 page)

“What’s the topic?”

“POCD. Postoperative cognitive disorder. How anesthesia may cause memory loss. I believe it does, but many of my colleagues disagree. I’ll tell you all about it, if you’re interested.”

“Sure.”

“Will you come with me to New York? I’m going to drive. I haven’t made that drive in years. It will give me time to think.”

Devon felt queasy. “Can we discuss it in the morning?”

“It is morning.”

“I mean, like when the sun comes up.”

Ruby put down the pen and sipped champagne. “I know you have things to do, but it might be good for you to get away. It would mean a lot to me.”

“All right. But let’s talk it through in the morning.”

Devon returned to the living room sofa and immediately fell into a deep sleep.

The following day, it already seemed like old news that she was going to accompany Ruby to New York.

For the next few nights, before their trip, the two of them dined by candlelight at one end of the cherrywood table that seated twelve. The glass doors of the dining room opened onto the garden. Lush scents of jacaranda and frangipani wafted in. The stereo, with Ruby’s iPod in the dock, blared eclectic selections that amazed Devon: Jefferson Airplane, Blondie, Brazilian Forró, the Kinks, Senegalese drummers, and plenty of Joan Jett. No jazz, she thought ruefully. Ruby had recently hired a Vietnamese chef to prepare healthful organic meals, which she barely touched. Instead, she subsisted on midnight snacks at all hours—celery, onion dip, Spanish olives, Jell-O—washed down with tequila sours. At the dinner table she dawdled, applying fingernail polish, paying some bills and tearing up others, scribbling to-do lists (of things to avoid or buy, remember or forget), which devolved, or, from Ruby’s point of view, crystallized, into a list of her lists. Devon, meanwhile, began to enjoy the chef’s assortment of stir-fries, her vegetable spring rolls and garlic tempeh. Soon enough, Ruby would get restless, uncork a one-hundred-dollar Barolo, and begin pacing the Turkish carpet or wandering outside to clip calla lilies. Sometimes she remained on the lawn, tossing birdseed, long after the birds had retired. Or she disappeared into the small greenhouse at the edge of the property and tended to her herb garden. It had been built when Devon was a child and was off-limits to everyone, including the gardeners. Devon had only been allowed to enter with her mother. So of course when Ruby was out, Devon used
to take the key from her mother’s desk drawer and unlock the glass door. The interior had a spicy, earthen smell. There was a potting table, copper sink, humidifier, and dozens of herbs in clay flowerpots, carefully labeled. None of it seemed all that mysterious to Devon except the names of the herbs: bloodroot, balm of Gilead, boneset, coltsfoot, horsetail, calamus, and—Devon’s favorite—life everlasting. So far as Devon could tell, only a handful, like turmeric and fennel, ever found their way to the kitchen for cooking. Apparently Ruby grew the rest for her own pleasure. She said she found it relaxing. What had always been odd to Devon, even as a child, was that, aside from picking flowers, her mother rarely spent time gardening and left most landscaping decisions to the gardeners.

After dinner, Ruby invariably suggested a swim. They would change into their suits, but true to form, Ruby would lose interest even before they reached the pool. Wineglass in hand, she reclined on a chaise longue and watched Devon glide through the turquoise water. Ruby wouldn’t stir until Devon stopped swimming. Realizing this was one way to slow her mother down, with the added benefit of getting herself back in shape, Devon lapped the pool until her muscles ached.

Devon didn’t need to consult the DSM-IV in her mother’s study to figure out that Ruby was manic. Nearly every symptom listed in chapter 4 was applicable: grandiosity, lack of appetite, self-absorption, compulsiveness, indifference to danger. Devon realized that Ruby was running through the settlement money from her divorce at a frightening rate. Except that Ruby wasn’t frightened. Or was so deeply spooked by other matters that what happened to her money was the least of her fears. In her spending sprees she was acquiring bizarre objects: a gold-studded saddle from Argentina, though Ruby had no horse; a
deep-sea kayak, still under a tarp on the lawn; a Sung Dynasty credenza that remained boxed in the garage after express delivery from Macao. In recent days, she had moved on to seeking things that almost certainly didn’t, or couldn’t, exist: a red marble statuette of a five-footed fox and a silver barrel hooped in bronze and inscribed with the Sanskrit word for “secret,”
guhya
.

“I thought maybe if I wanted these things enough,” Ruby explained, “I would find them.”

“You mean, you would wish them into existence?”

“Why not? How do we know that all things originate in the same way? If you project hard enough, maybe an object can move from the second dimension to the third. Or maybe the other way, from the fourth dimension to the third.” She sighed. “But it hasn’t happened. Doesn’t mean it can’t happen. But it hasn’t.”

Devon had hung out with plenty of strung-out people, but it was nothing compared to what she was experiencing with her mother. Ruby was doing the drinking, but Devon had the hangover. Ruby wasn’t sleeping, but Devon was exhausted.

Even in less turbulent times, it would have been strange for Devon to revisit that house and bunk down in her former bedroom: the dresser filled with old clothes, a poster of Duke Ellington in tails over the bed, the clarinet she played in the school band on a shelf. As a kid, she had taken lessons on the Steinway grand in the living room, which she hadn’t played in years. She moved out of the house at seventeen and rarely returned. She had taken her small collection of vintage instruments—two trumpets, a mandolin, a saxophone once played by Johnny Hodges, and the clarinet she sold—and two thousand CDs, nearly all jazz, that were stacked around her
tiny living room overlooking Corona Boulevard. As a kid, she was always plugged into a Walkman. She had a good ear. She augmented her lessons by playing along to Earl Hines and Horace Silver, to McCoy Tyner’s bop and Memphis Slim’s boogie, mimicking their licks as best she could. She became as much a student of jazz as a musician. Her tastes were broadly eclectic: she was equally attracted to James Johnson’s stride piano and Jason Moran’s historical fusion, which took a famous piece like Johnson’s “You’ve Got to Be Modernistic” and improvised a dozen sequences around the ragtime core. But she found her real model in Ahmad Jamal, the pianist she most admired. Classically trained, endlessly inventive, Jamal worked a broad canvas. He was ambitious, referring to his trio as an orchestra, exploring every jazz form that preceded him, and experimenting on the electric piano. His renditions of “Perfidia” and “But Not for Me” set the standard for Devon: the radical chord shifts, subtle colorations, and Afro-Cuban rhythms.

After dropping out of college for good, Devon had rented her apartment in Little Cuba. She liked it there, being an outsider. She played in a succession of jazz bands, appearing at second-tier clubs from Charleston to Key West. She never got the kind of break that would have landed her in New York or L.A. The demo she sent to various record labels barely elicited a response. She ended up working small clubs in Miami as part of a quintet. They made some good music, but their chemistry was terrible. They could never agree on their repertoire or their drummer (four in six months), haggled over money, and consumed vast amounts of booze and dope. After they broke up, Devon stopped playing. She was burned out. She tended bar in the same clubs where they had performed. And she started freelancing reviews for music magazines. A former classmate
hooked her up with solid contacts at
JazzTimes
and
Jazz Review
. She wrote about jazz and rock. She landed a few interviews with musicians performing in Miami. She was getting good at it, almost earning enough to give up bartending, when she—literally—blew a big interview for
DownBeat
with a famous sax player in from L.A., sharing lines of coke in his hotel suite and then scratching up his face when he came on to her and got rough, ripping her blouse, slapping her around. The hotel called the cops, and when her criminal record came up on the squad car LCD screen and the sax player laid everything on her, they let him go and hauled her in for possession. The magazine promptly fired her. She beat the coke rap, but a couple of months later was busted with the peyote, coming within a hair of going to the women’s prison outside Ocala.

And the fact is, she wasn’t lying to the judge at her trial: the peyote buttons really had been for her personal use. A tai chi instructor turned shaman who called himself Ciguri had turned her on to the drug in Key Largo. He claimed his mother was a member of the Tarahumara tribe in Mexico whose religion was built around the peyote cactus. The Tarahumara believed hallucinations induced by the drug were scenes from the future, and therefore sacred. They said their distant ancestors fell from the sky and roamed the earth. And that every man has a dormant Double who awakens at the instant of enlightenment and joins him in his life’s journey but will turn on him with a vengeance if he deviates from the true road.

The first time she ate peyote, Devon dreamed of a mountain range where rocks danced, plants spoke, and the terrain was a desert by day and a lake at night.

Ciguri nodded, smiling, when she told him. “You just visited the Sierra Tarahumara, home of the tribe. In order to integrate
your warring selves and become an initiate, you ought to eat twenty-eight buttons in as many days. That is the next step toward enlightenment.” He paused. “Which nevertheless you may not achieve.”

It became a moot point when, arrested, convicted, and put on probation, Devon knew she’d have to find a different route to enlightenment—like sobriety.

Devon had found an unlikely reason of her own for going to New York. It began the day before Camille Broussard’s funeral, when Ruby told her about her last conversation with her mother. Camille Broussard had only been living in Miami for seven months when her health began to fail in late November. Ruby had checked her in to the Saint Francis of Assisi Hospice, a Catholic facility run by nuns, with a first-rate medical unit. Her mother shared a room with two other women, who played gin rummy incessantly at a Formica table. Ruby visited every few days. She would wheel her mother to the lounge. They didn’t talk much. Her mother had no energy. Usually she dozed off after five minutes, at which point Ruby would get on her cellphone to her lawyer, who was overseeing the implementation of her divorce agreement—transfer of assets and deeds and so on. On that last visit, her mother had been too weak to get out of bed. She had just returned from the medical ward after suffering an angina attack. The doctors said she was stable, but Ruby thought otherwise the moment she saw her. Her blood pressure was high, her pulse irregular. Her surgeon wanted to install a pacemaker. He had telephoned Ruby that morning for her okay, and the operation was scheduled for the following week.

Propped up in her wheelchair, her mother interrupted Ruby’s description of the procedure. “Let them do whatever they want, honey,” she said in her Louisiana drawl. “No matter what, it’s in the Lord’s hands.”

Ruby winced, as she always did when her mother waxed pious. “Sometimes he needs help,” she said, trying to keep the contempt out of her voice.

“Never.”

Sitting on a plastic chair beside the bed, Ruby hadn’t taken off her raincoat.

“Don’t go yet,” her mother said.

“I wasn’t leaving.”

“You were.” She started coughing. “I need to tell you something.”

“That’s a nasty cough.”

“Listen to me. When you close up my apartment, Ruby, there’s some effects I want you to have. You can throw away everything else. It’s mostly junk, and seeing as you’re rich, you wouldn’t want any of it. But there’s a cabinet in the living room that’s got my keepsakes, including everything I ever had of your father’s.”

Ruby hadn’t been expecting this. “What kind of things?”

“Have a look.” She started coughing again, and this time she didn’t stop. Ruby called for one of the nuns, who administered a sedative.

Camille Broussard suffered a stroke the next day, so those were her last words to Ruby:
Have a look
.

Ruby had taken Devon to her mother’s apartment on Mosby Avenue to get a dress for the mortician. Devon was shocked by the shabbiness of the place: the chipped appliances, frayed carpets, cracks like spreading veins in the ceiling plaster.

“Feels like home,” Ruby said, shaking her head. “Like every other place she ever lived in.”

When Ruby opened the cabinet in the living room, she was greeted by a pocket of stale air. The dusty shelves were lined with odds and ends: empty perfume bottles, hotel ashtrays, AA pamphlets, yellowing road maps. There was an Annie Oakley doll. A replica of a steamboat named the
Camille
. A New Year’s party hat emblazoned
1956
.

At the base of the cabinet, behind shoes and hatboxes, they found a battered leather suitcase labeled
VAL
in Magic Marker. It was also affixed with faded travel stickers,
ROME
(back-dropped by the Colosseum),
PARIS
(the Eiffel Tower),
LONDON
(Big Ben), and
KANSAS CITY
(a steer). Ruby pulled the suitcase out and snapped it open. She and Devon found an assortment of Valentine Owen’s possessions, including a trumpet embouchure, a pair of pearl cuff links, and a coaster from the Oasis Lounge in New Orleans.