LOOKING FOR JASON CONTINUED to be a dead end, and after hanging around the rock clubs for a while, I began to think about playing my sax again. I had hardly touched it lately and I didn’t even listen to my tapes much anymore. I wasn’t exactly inspired by the music Jason’s friends played, but you could hear the strains of jazz history in it, if you listened hard enough, and I realized how much I missed my own music.
A few weeks after Gil died, one of the men in his group, the bass-playing dentist, called a couple of times to ask if I wanted to sit in with him and the pianist. I always had some excuse handy—I was busy, tired, under the weather—and I promised to get back to him, but I never did. Not playing was a kind of mourning, I suppose, for Gil, for my marriage, for Jason. I thought of how Orthodox Jews are forbidden to listen to music, go to the movies, or watch television for at least a month after a death in the family. Some even hold out for a whole year. I think the idea is not to interrupt the grieving with entertainment, because it only prolongs the agony. Sooner or later you have to serve the whole sentence. After Paulie’s father died, her mother stopped watching her favorite soaps for such a long time she lost track of the characters. Later, she was surprised to find out that some of them had died, too, knocked off by the networks during her period of mourning. And yet, as she would be the first to say, life goes on—and now music invaded my head, pushing out some of those troubling thoughts. As I drove to work, I found myself tapping out a lively tempo on the steering wheel and singing little riffs under my breath. Finally, I called Irv Jacoby, the dentist, and asked if he and his pianist wanted to get together at my place that Friday night. Gil must have told him about Paulie and me because he said, with obvious discomfort, that Fridays were kind of a family night for him, and would Wednesday be okay instead? The sad truth was that I was free almost any night, and I said sure, that was fine with me.
I left the studio early on Wednesday afternoon and went to the liquor store and the supermarket. When I got home, I looked around the house, the way you do when visitors are coming, to see if it’s presentable. I examined the spot that was wearing down on the left sofa arm, and ran my fingers up a fine jagged crack in the wall that came from the house settling. Paulie had been after me to sell the house, so we’d have the money to provide a home for Sara and the baby. I’d told her to look for a rental for them, and that I’d pay most of the rent. She and Sara found something only a few days later. It was a small one-bedroom, with a convertible dining area, in a new building near Union Square. Now they were busy fixing it up and sending me the bills. It was going to cost an arm and a leg, but I’d manage it, even if I had to take out a second mortgage on this place.
Paulie could also have the lion’s share of our savings in the divorce settlement, to make up for her share of the house. And I’d will the whole thing to her, anyway, no matter what happened between us. It wasn’t that I was so sentimental about it. I was used to living there, though, and I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, with the light coming in through the windows at a different angle. And during the night, I could find my way to the bathroom and back to bed without ever opening my eyes. I sat on the sofa, my elbow covering the worn spot, and wondered, as I often did, what Paulie was doing at that moment. I had never seen her apartment and didn’t really want to, didn’t want to set the images I had of her and her lover in an actual, known place.
I got up and plumped the pillows, wiped some dust from the coffee table with my handkerchief. Shadow sensed that we were having company, and he perked up as I puttered around, sniffing at the dish of peanuts I set out, following me from room to room. But when I took my sax out and began to blow, about a half hour before the other men were expected, he gave me a mournful look and padded back to the kitchen. The sound always hurt his sensitive ears, and this time it hurt mine, also. In a matter of weeks, I seemed to have lost most of the polish and confidence I’d gained with all that recent practice.
Irv and the pianist, Marco, arrived together in Irv’s station wagon. I hadn’t seen either of them since Gil’s funeral, when we’d stood around, empty-handed and solemn in our dark suits. Now, like me, they were dressed casually and eager to get started. We set up in the den, and in a few minutes we were jamming again. Nobody had said anything about Gil—what was there to say? Instead, we’d made small talk about the weather, music, the latest White House mess. I’d apologized in advance for being rusty, and they were both quick to assure me they sounded rotten themselves. They didn’t, though, and to my surprise, neither did I, once we really got going. “Hey, not bad, kids,” Irv said, modestly, when we took our first break.
I brought out the Scotch and ice and passed the peanuts and some cheese around. Still, none of us mentioned Gil. I’d been having a lot of dental work lately, and I asked Irv if he could recommend a good root-canal specialist who wasn’t a highway robber. He insisted on pulling me over to the desk lamp to take a look at my mouth before he wrote down a couple of names for me.
Marco was a younger guy who had recently married and moved from Queens to Northport. He kept grilling me about Port Washington, asking how high the taxes were, if the schools were any good, and if the sewers were in yet and paid for. He wanted to know if my basement was as damp as his, and we all tramped downstairs so I could show him the dehumidifier. I explained how it worked and that the humidistat was its essential feature. Once we were down there, Marco looked over the furnace, and the water heater, too, as if he were a plumber and this was a service call. Irv stood under one of the tiny, darkened windows with his hands in his pockets and remarked, almost to himself, that he needed a new set of plastic well covers at his place. The basement had never seemed so eerie before, like a cave in which our separate voices echoed and dwindled. In the dim corners I saw the shapes and shadows of things we stored there during the winter: the barbecue, the lawn chairs, the carton with the string of Japanese lanterns we’d always used for outdoor parties. “Well, let’s get back to work,” I said. Marco lingered briefly at the water heater before he followed Irv and me upstairs to the den.
We did a whole set of Mingus next, including “Celia” and “Diane”—Marco’s wife’s name was Diane. And then we went right into “Sentimental You,” in which I took the long, melodic solo with just the right blend of cool and schmaltz. We got high on how good we sounded, and we began making plans to meet again, to meet regularly at someone’s house at least twice a month. In the middle of that happy rush, I could practically hear Paulie saying “Is this how you’re looking for Jason?” just as I used to fix on dying right after making love, and it brought me down in the same fast, heart-stopping way. But I had to live, didn’t I?
After that, we noodled around for a while, playing a few bars of this and that, and then we broke into some slow but joyful Dixieland. We ended with an aching version of “Jazz Me Blues,” a number the marching bands in New Orleans play in funeral processions. When we finished, Irv mopped the sweat and the tears from his broad, reddened face. “Well, that’s it for me, fellas,” he said, drooping forward with his arms around his bass.
“Yeah, me too,” Marco agreed, and he went into the bedroom to call his wife.
I wanted to say something to Irv about Gil, to formalize what wound up being a kind of musical service for him, but I didn’t, and by the time Marco came back the mood was gone, the thing was over.