Wading Home: A Novel of New Orleans (10 page)

“What gave you that idea?”

“The Bible. The Bible is missing from the house.”

Sylvia’s eyes clouded in skepticism, but she conceded, “It’s as good a place to look as any. When you going? In the morning?”

“As soon as I figure out how to get there.”

“You don’t know?”

He shrugged, embarrassed now. How many times had his father explained the route to Silver Creek while he, distracted, barely listened?

“Roads are kinda crazy down there, twisting and turning. When I get up, I’ll look it up on the motel computer, or call Triple A. I’ll call you as soon as I get there.”

He ran a hand along the back of his neck. “So anyway, what did you want to tell me?”

“Tell you?” Sylvia’s eyelids fluttered. “Oh, right. Just that someone you know, someone you used to know very well, might be stopping by, and I wanted to tell you in case you—”

The din of chatter rose in the living room; somebody everyone seemed to know had entered the house. The woman at the door greeted the friends gathered in the living room cordially, then walked straight back to the kitchen and stood in the doorway.

The last time he had seen her they had had a fight, a big one, and she had been walking away.

If she was as surprised to see him as he was to see her, she didn’t show it. She wore yellow. Her frizzy curl was longer, and she was still small, her compact, athletic body boasting hidden strength. Her eyes still glinted like those of a woman with a secret.

Velmyra Hartley reached a hand to her hair and twirled the ends of it in her fingers.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

An awkward silence passed between them.

Finally she said, “You know, I saw you on TV.”

O
n any other night, there’d have been lights on the river.

Any other night, at any other time, when the biggest storm of the century had not just swept through the town ravaging buildings and houses and parks and streets; any other time when the government levees had not failed and the flooding waters had not filled up the giant bowl of the sinking city and laid waste to thousands of acres and hundreds of lives; any other night when all that had not happened, there would have been lights on the river.

There would have been bridge girders strung with necklaces of white pearls, platinum jeweled steamboats and ruby-studded ferries and tugboats floating like giant party hats at sea. White gold beads of light from the Riverwalk shops and flickering bulbs from the houses of nearby Algiers. Carnival lights from the French Quarter bars and dives, the casino, the cafes, the taxis, and the red swirling lights of the police cars. And always, there would have been the rhinestone sparkle in the eyes of tourists, especially in the eyes of the children.

But tonight the only light on the river came from a pale, gibbous moon casting oyster-colored shimmers across the rippled surface of the water. Downriver, a lone barge floated without sound.

Julian sat in the unfamiliar dark on a bench near the water and put his trumpet case down near the leg of the bench. There was a small rock near his foot, so he picked it up and hurled it as far across the water as he could, and watched the small splash, the growing circles, the wider and wider spirals of concentric ripples spanning outward until they stilled, and the water near the splash finally restored itself to calm.

After he’d left Sylvia’s in a daze of humiliation, he’d driven to the French Quarter, parked the car illegally near the recently reopened Café Du Monde, grabbed his horn from the trunk, and headed over the levee down to the river. It was something he’d done as a boy; whenever he’d slipped into a deep funk—botched a solo in the marching band, or a girl he’d liked had shined him on—he found himself down near the water with his horn in his hands. The old heads, the musicians who’d been around forever, had told him how the hand-in-hand tourists went crazy for the romantic standards—“After You’ve Gone” or “Sleepytime Down South”—and between sips of chicory coffee and bites of beignets, would pay good tip money for a ballad or two. They were right. And if anything was bothering him, the feel of his trumpet, the flow of the music, and a pocket full of coin always made it go away.

No music-loving tourists tonight, and just as well. So he leaned forward, elbows on his knees and head between his hands, and tried to figure out what had just happened an hour ago.

Now, of course, he could think of a thousand ways it could have gone, a thousand things he should have said. Clever things, cavalier words to flaunt his impenetrable cool. But with everything else he’d been going through these last weeks, his emotions bound in a knot so tight he could not find one loose thread, he’d been blindsided. He hadn’t seen it coming, hadn’t known what seeing her again would do to his equilibrium, his balance. It was as if he’d been hit by a car all over again.

She’d started to make conversation, something about seeing him on TV. He’d said nothing, just kept looking at her like an idiot. She’d asked him something else, and he couldn’t hear it because his face was too hot, and the bile in his stomach was rising too fast. So what had he done? “Excuse me,” he’d said. And disappeared inside the bathroom off the kitchen.

Inside he’d tried to gather himself.
This is old business,
he thought, shocked at his reaction. He looked in the mirror and saw a man trapped in trouble and pain. “Nice going, genius,” he said to the sad figure looking back at him. His eyes sagging, his face shiny and chin covered in stubble, his hair too long and untrimmed, his T-shirt sticking to his chest. He’d always been a fairly good looking man, or so he’d been told—he enjoyed reasonable height, a trim and fit body from his daily standing date at the Gold’s Gym two blocks from where he lived, the blessing of his father’s luminous eyes, thick hair and long lashes. But that was not the man he saw. The man he saw looked like hell.

She, on the other hand, looked exactly the way he remembered, they way she had entered his dreams for the first eight months after their breakup.

She looked, well, perfect.

He’d washed his face with liquid hand soap and cold water. When he finally left the bathroom, she had moved to the other room. And he’d left through Sylvia’s back door, got into his car, and headed for the river.

It made sense that Sylvia would invite her. After all, she and Sylvia were tight; in fact, it was Sylvia who had introduced them all those years ago. “There’s a young teacher I work with,” she’d said, sidling up to him one Sunday afternoon after one of Simon’s elaborate Creole meals. “I want you two to meet.”

Julian had been interested. He’d split with the accountant/yoga instructor he’d met at the gym and was looking to meet somebody new. He’d been doing little more than teach a couple of classes and a few private students at Tulane, play a gig or two on the weekends, then go home to an empty place. Why not?

The restaurant on Tchoupitoulas Street where he’d taken her had been lit with geranium-scented candles that turned the ends of her hair to deep red. The suspended stereo speakers above their heads dispensed a dreamy, big band version of “Moonglow,” and they had talked until the waiter had asked them for the third time, with practiced subtlety, if they “needed anything else?” And then until the chairs were flipped onto the tabletops.

He’d taken her home, where they’d talked outdoors in front of her apartment for another two hours. She spoke thoughtfully, her timbre low and eyes flashing, her hands in constant motion. She was an artist, a painter: mostly figurative stuff, occasional abstracts, some collage. She liked the play of bold colors in neo-Afrocentric themes, and managed to sell at least two paintings a year, each bringing in enough for about two months’ rent.

She liked jazz, she told him, the older stuff mostly, Peterson on piano, early Miles. For a living, she taught art to thirteen-year-olds in the school district—her real passion. Teaching delighted her—the silly jokes, the sharp, curious challenges of her smartest kids—and he loved that she loved it. When she talked about them, the air around her seemed to amplify, charged with light. Her brown eyes warmed to amber, and her smile nearly took his breath away.

He’d started to leave sooner, but wanted to memorize her face, trace her profile in his mind so he could call it up that night while he slept—the loose, raw beauty, the strong features gently framed in red oak skin.

Within weeks, they were a thing. They spent long hours talking on the phone, then met for even longer dinners at Dooky Chase’s or Parmenter’s, where his father sent special hors d’oeuvres from the kitchen, or floated winks and smiles between the stage and the back table while he played the late set at Snug Harbor. They rode their bikes through Audubon Park and jogged along the levee by the river. He washed her car on Saturday afternoons, and she picked up his shirts when he was running late. She fixed him cinnamon coffee while he practiced arpeggios in her studio, and he baked his special lasagna while she painted, her stereo rolling out vintage Miles.

Their engagement ended abruptly. To this day, he couldn’t remember what happened between them at the end, just the muddy weight of his heart after it was over. He was in New York when he heard the news of her marriage, a few months later, to a man he thought she barely knew. That sent him reeling. And a year later, news of her divorce left him just as dazed.

One good thing had come out of it all. From her, he learned to play the blues—the deep-down, been-there blues. After their breakup, everything in his playing shifted; he dared to reach deeper inside, walk the tender landscape she had bruised, and turn the journey into liquid sound. Minor thirds, salted with tears, spilled from his downtilted bell, and soulful riffs of heartbreak became his signature. When he arrived in New York, heart scarred and mind numbed, music flooded from his horn, from him, unstoppable.

He could even say it was Velmyra who’d made him famous. It had taken him a while to put the whole business behind him; but when the heat of his hurt had cooled and he could walk upright again, the memory of her, which had been dense and imposing, thinned to vapor. The stamp she’d made on his music, though, was still there. The pain let him tap into something real, something everybody knew, and it had taken his playing from good to great. From that point on, his life hummed. Things came easily, quickly, perfectly. A recording deal with a major label. A great deal on the best apartment on a gentrified street in Brooklyn Heights. Dates at the best clubs in town—the Village Vanguard, The Blue Note, Birdland—and a major network TV appearance that fell into his lap.

He fashioned an image that was cool, clean, and marked by a sartorial elegance he associated with success. Tassled loafers handcrafted in Italy. Hand tailored shirts from London, and gig suits designed by Hugo Boss. His people marketed him a “young lion of jazz”—accessible, with a nouveau-bop edge that straddled a graceful line between the mercurial tastes of the young and the older jazz purists. He made more money than he had time to spend, and women clung to him like lint to coarse black wool. Once he became well known in top music circles—when the word went out that another new hotshot was up from New Orleans—he was the curiosity everyone wanted to hear.

His life was exactly the way he wanted it to be—every day, another dream.

Until the accident.

He stood up from the bench. He could have sworn he heard a sound—like a ship’s foghorn—coming from the river. But maybe not, maybe it was just in his head. Whatever, the music of the sound—a low, husky B-flat—was enough to make him unpack his horn.

The metal mouthpiece was a cold shock to his lips, as always when he hadn’t played for a while. The valves were stiff; he drummed his fingers, miming a quick scale. His lips and fingertips had grown tender and uncallused since the surgery. He started blowing a flood of hot air through the horn.

A small sharp burn swelled in his jaw, then went away. He touched his hand to the spot and held it there. He waited, then tried again.

A scale stumbled out—his tone cracking horribly, notes splitting like dry wood. But in a moment, through a dull film of pain, clean notes streamed into the thick night air.

The doctor said the soreness would go away and the nerve endings would take a while to heal. Didn’t make sense to press his luck. But after a minute, he put the horn back up to his lips and played again.

The moon, arced higher now, its silver reflection casting longer tendrils of light on the surface of the river, bathed everything in deep purple and strands of muted light. A tune surfaced from somewhere beneath his jumble of thoughts, low and lazy like a whisper of sea-fog, a blues drenched in flood water and rising like mist from a childhood summer night. He felt lightheaded. He was a little kid again, playing street tag, double-dog-dare, stickball. And like most of the kids he knew, he felt safe, like nothing bad would ever happen in his life.

No thoughts of his city sinking in on itself, or simply washing away.

Standing by the river in the dark, he realized he’d thought little about the city itself, about what all this meant. This was his
home,
the place where he’d been born and grew up, where his roots stretched so deep into the sandy soil that their beginnings seemed to have no end. Now, it was unfit for human life. He closed his eyes and his tears burned and in the shadow of the song a rhythm section grooved in the breezeless night—wire brushes soup-stirring watercolor patches of blue—while the sodden soil of home grew soft beneath his feet.

Tomorrow he would go to Silver Creek to find his father and bring him…home, whatever that meant now. If he was there.

If he was there.

As he lifted the horn high and played out over the big, silent river, he wondered if anybody out there in the endless dark was listening, if maybe he could play so loud that Simon, wherever he was, could hear him. From nowhere, the legendary musician Buddy Bolden sprang to mind, the golden brass god blowing the city’s first song, a sound so big it soared across time to split the air where he stood now.

When he was small and his friends’ fathers spooked them with stories of ghosts and dragons, Simon had made up tales to get Julian to practice. He told stories about the mythic cornet player who blew way back when the city was young, when jazz crawled up from cradle-high to paddle upriver to the world.
He was a genius, the best anybody ever heard. A horn player who blew so loud that clouds trembled and birds’ wings stuttered in flight. Handsome, too—a ladies’ man. Or so the story goes.
In Simon’s stories, Buddy Bolden’s power was mighty, fierce, and the sound of his horn could level mountains and raise the dead. Julian’s young eyes lit up, his mind filled to overflowing, and he could not wait to play.