Twenty-Three

Jack had been playing the saxophone on and off for a long time before he became aware of movement at the edge of the yard. Gavin was coming through the bushes at the side of the house.

   "Don't stop," Gavin said. So Jack continued, eased back into another long loop of melody. George Gershwin's "Summertime." Music for a place where it was almost always summer. He knew an arrangement that kept the song looping around and around and he improvised inside it, leaving the melody and wandering away and then coming back to the tune again, and the living is easy, long and slow and meandering, soft and low under the orange tree. Jack always imagined a singer's voice when he played this song, a woman soothing a child to sleep on a porch in the southern lands that lay north of Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, a summer afternoon with the air heavy around them, a breeze through tall grass. He stopped all at once because the daydream and backyard had converged and he was momentarily disoriented, caught between the two. There was a soft wind moving through the grass around him, and the lawn hadn't been mowed in so long that the grass rippled. Gavin was watching him with that look he always had since he'd come back from New York. Anxious, something desperate about the eyes.

   "That was beautiful," Gavin said.

   "Thanks." The instrument felt inert in Jack's hands now that the music had left it. He tried to lean the saxophone against his lawn chair but it toppled over and fell into the grass, an empty shell. He decided to leave it there for the moment. There was a high silent whine in his bloodstream, sweat on his forehead, he needed another pill. Gavin sank into the chair beside him and closed his eyes.

   "What happened to your arm?"

   "Bar fight," Gavin said. "You should see the other guy."

   It seemed to Jack that there'd been a time when Gavin would have just answered the question. "I miss everything sometimes," he said. He meant high school and the Lola Quartet, his life before South Carolina, but he realized as he spoke and as the flicker of confusion crossed Gavin's face that he didn't want to have to explain all this, so he spoke again quickly. "You like that song?"

   "I always liked that song," Gavin said. " There was a guy who'd play 'Summertime' on his saxophone on the street near Columbus Circle, Broadway and 61st, maybe 62nd Street. I used to stand there and listen to him sometimes on my way home from work."

   "I knew a girl who thought it was about death," Jack said.

   "Death? When I hear that song I always sort of picture a woman rocking a child to sleep. I always thought it was peaceful."

   "That bit in the middle," Jack said. "The lyric about rising up singing into the sky."

   "I thought that part was about leaving home."

   Jack reached into his pocket. The shivering in his blood was getting

worse. "This girl, Bernadette, she knew her stuff," he said. "She studied a lot." He swallowed a pill, quickly. He didn't think Gavin noticed. "She said that part was about dying."

   Gavin was silent, looking at nothing or maybe at his distant spired city where men played saxophones on Broadway.

   "You can hear it in some of the versions," Jack said. "Not all of them. You ever heard the Nina Simone cover?"

   "I'm not sure." Gavin sounded distracted.

   "Some versions are pretty bright and harmless, lots of brass. Ella Fitzgerald's recording was like that. But I hear Nina Simone's version and I think the girl was right. The drummer makes a sound like static and then the first note's a growl, the bass line's ominous and it kind of drags, and the melody's on piano but the piano's muted. It sounds fragile. You can hardly even hear the melody at the beginning. Half the song, it's just the piano drowning in the bass line, trying to break through. The singing doesn't start till halfway through, and then when it gets to that part about rising up singing, it's like—" Like a thunderstorm, like disintegration, like a soul rising up, but Jack felt stupid saying these things aloud. "I don't know, you can just hear it in that version."

   "Jack," Gavin said, "do you know what's happening tonight?"

   "I don't know." Jack wasn't sure what Gavin meant but earlier in the evening he'd been inside and he'd heard a car door slam. Through the living room window he'd watched Grace walk down the driveway to the waiting car. She'd been wearing a dress that reminded him of his little sister's china dolls, and this detail was so strange that he couldn't stop thinking about it, but stranger still was the identity of the driver waiting for her by the car. "What time is it?"

   "Two o'clock," Gavin said. " Maybe a little later. I keep thinking, if I'd just known, if I'd known she was pregnant. But then I think, maybe I did know, maybe I just didn't do anything about it . . ."

   Jack had taken a Vicodin but it wasn't enough, his skin was crawling, so he swallowed another. Why hadn't he called Gavin, all those years ago, when Anna arrived at Holloway College with a baby? He took another pill and sat still for a while before he spoke again, waiting for the substances in his bloodstream to light up. "I think she should have told you," he said. Gavin was looking at him now, a ghost in the dark. A light blinked on in the house and cast complicated blue-yellow shadows over the grass. "But you didn't hear that from me."

   "What happened to that girl who was staying here?"

   "Grace," Jack said. "I don't know what's happening to Grace. She left earlier in a funny dress." He remembered his saxophone and lifted it from the grass.

   "Who did she leave with?"

   "Anna," Jack said. "She left with Anna."

   "Do you know where Anna is?"

   "No."

   "I want to talk to her," Gavin said, but Jack thought he was talking mostly to himself.

   "Why would you want to talk to Anna? When has Anna ever done anything good?" Jack wasn't sure if he'd spoken aloud. He was floating. The saxophone was warm and clammy in his hands and it caught the light from the house, an ethereal shine down the curve of the bell. He liked looking at lights when he was in this state. All the edges were shimmering. "I'm going to play again," he said.

   "Wait," Gavin said.

   "What for?"

   "Jack, listen, it's none of my business, but it seems like maybe you're taking a lot of pills."

   "The thing with this arrangement of 'Summertime,' " Jack said, "is you can just keep it going. There's the first section that everyone knows, and then—"

   "What are you on, Jack? Is it Vicodin? Oxycontin?"

   "I'm going to play again," Jack said. Playing, he had realized, was something that would preclude talking. He wanted to fall back into music and rest for a while. He started playing "Summertime" at half-speed, almost a dirge, slow light all around him, and when he looked up some time later Gavin was gone. He drifted alone in his lawn chair on the grass.