CHAPTER FIVE

REVELATION?

Cajoling sleep, I lay back down and concentrated on lights from the street chasing each other across the ceiling. A radio played across the hall. Its dial was being spun, and the discordant sounds complemented the illuminations overhead. But then the roomer settled on a Billie Holiday recording of “Don’t Explain.”

I thought about Westley’s story of the father-son pilgrimage to Manhattan and the boy’s heralding “the most incredible music” emanating from a 52^nd Street jazz club called Birdland. I turned on the light and began rifling through the manuscripts on and about the bed. Somewhere in the pages, Westley, as an adult, had revisited that scene in some detail.

I located the passage in a lengthy work that I took to be an unfinished novel.

As if he’d lost his way.

By now, Lady Day was caroling “Willow Weep for Me.” The volume cranked up as if she stood outside my doorway.

NOVEL EXCERPT

At his urging we walked up to 52^nd Street, “The Street of Jazz,” and paid the cover to a downstairs club called Birdland.

“There’s Bird,” he whispered. Charlie Parker was the mythical jazzman he couldn’t quite believe ever existed anyplace except inside one’s head. Charles Mingus was on double bass, Bud Powell at the piano, and a young trumpet player, Miles Davis—all on the stand.

A dwarfish black man introduced the group. Bird, for some mysterious reason, grew belligerent and began harassing the announcer, tauntingly calling him “Shorty,” while the target of his mockery hollered from the back of the room for Bird to “get on with the damn set.” Whereupon the saxophonist seized the stand-alone microphone and pitched it out into the audience . . . before he began to blow.

We couldn’t take our eyes off Powell, who soloed with his eyes closed. The pianist struck a simple melody that, at first, repeated itself in single-voice hornlike lines mildly embroidered at different octaves. When he introduced a driving left-hand chord accompaniment, it seemed as if the Steinway grand would levitate. The tempo of the notes had ratcheted up, and the lines had become so extended and harmonically complex that the once simple refrain of “You Go to My Head” had been transformed into a raging dialogue only Bud Powell could “sing.”

Then the room fell nearly silent—no other sound whatsoever except the drone of the club’s air handler. The players, with their eyes shut and their heads resting on their chests, were concentrating on Powell cascading through the tune’s chord changes—but he wasn’t actually playing. He continued soloing, except he wasn’t. His fingers flew over the keyboard—but never lit on any of the ivories. The lines were all occurring inside his head, and he was “singing.” Straining, we could hear a high-pitched nasal drone. His fellow musicians periodically broke out in wide grins.

“Let’s check out Harlem,” Mr. Willard exclaimed as we exited Birdland. He flashed Billy a wide grin as if he knew what was on my friend’s mind.

We rode the A train to 125^th Street and found it as bustlingly alive as downtown Manhattan. Nearby, tucked inside a hotel, was an intimate jazz club called Minton’s Playhouse. On the bandstand, a musician wearing a beret, horn-rimmed glasses, and a goatee and holding a bent-bell trumpet intoned a scat phrase over and over.

“I can’t believe it,” Mr. Willard whispered, transfixed.

The place was packed with white and colored folks, and many of them accompanied the Diz under their breaths as he chanted his “Salt Peanuts” tune . . . and then, as he began blowing, they bobbed to the rapid beat of the radically different, undanceable “new jazz” whose melody became the stepping-off place for each musician’s improvised score . . .

Behind Gillespie and his quintet stood a giant mural of four jazzmen—guitarist, drummer, trumpeter, and clarinetist—alongside a woman in a red dress lying facedown on a bed. Our friend, whose mood quickly mellowed, had been eyeing it closely.

“Honor, that be Lady Day up there in that brass bed sleepin’ off a drunk. She break your heart so bad when she sings ‘Fine and Mellow,’ you understand why love is same as a faucet. You able to turn it off and on.”

Next day we took the subway to the south pier to catch a glimpse out in New York Harbor of Miss Liberty, looking resplendent in the morning sun.

“Jesus Christ, she’s green!” our friend crowed.

Yet when I read what immediately followed, everything else of his seemed to pale in comparison. Sleep would not come easily.

That very night after we turned in at a seedy hotel off the Bowery, I waited until Billy and Mr. Willard had settled in, then slipped out of the room and descended the three urine-scented flights to the dank lobby. When we’d entered earlier, I could see right off that some rooms weren’t used for sleeping. A sign at the check-in desk advertised ACCOMMODATIONS BY THE HOUR.

A willowy brunette, her magenta lipstick a dramatic foil to her milky cast, sat in a dark corner, impassively smoking a cigarillo; her legs were crossed, one of them counting out seconds.

I slid alongside her.

After taking a studied drag, she icily remarked, “I don’t do wemen, honey.”

“How did you know?” I asked, surprised by more than just her odd pronunciation.

“Men ogle you from where they squirrel their conscience. Where’s yours?”

I shrugged. “I guess in here,” I said, pointing to my heart. “Ain’t where a man packs his.”

As hard as I tried, I could never get Billy’s swagger down, even when I felt as hard as nails.

“What are you doing here?” she asked.

Before long, I was talking to her as if we’d met long ago in the notchery back on DeForest Road. She kept nodding as if nothing I said was the least unfamiliar.

“Well, I seen you eyeing me when you came in earlier. There must be something you want from me, honey . . . or you wouldn’t be sitting here.”

I told her.

Within moments she was up and alerting the man behind the cage. “Solly, if one of them comes in looking for me, tell ’em to wait right over there. I’ll only be a minute.”

Her room, at the end of the shadowy hall on the first floor, consisted of a narrow bed, a full-body mirror on wheels, and one rust-stained porcelain sink mounted on a wall. The window was covered with a poster of a nude Marilyn Monroe posing on red velvet.

Then her closet, half the size of the cell-like room.

What surprised me was how meticulously ordered it was. There were compartments for socks, scarves, blouses, sweaters, panties and bras. Dresses of all colors and fabrics were neatly hung with the hangers all hooking in one direction. There were hats, too, maybe a dozen stacked neatly on top of each other.

“It’s the costume shop. The naughty stuff’s in there.” A tall metal locker stood at one end.

“Don’t take too long, sweetheart. Say, what is your name?”

“Honor,” I said.

“Oh Jesus, honey, they’d pay you extra for that,” she sighed, closing the door behind her.

I knew exactly what to do. There was something very arousing about undressing before her mirror. Standing across from Marilyn staring at me . . . seeing what kind of wemen I was going to be. When I slipped on her panties, they had a fragrance of violet sachet about them . . . I immediately saw Alsada smiling at me from over by the door. Nodding, she was. Like Yes, do it, Honor. We all got to do it at some point. And don’t you feel wonderful? Don’t you feel like a woman? Ain’t it something, girl, to feel like a woman?

I slipped on the brassiere and again stood this way then that in front of the mirror. And placed my hands on my now-covered breasts and began sobbing as if someone had returned to me, as if these were hers and not Honor’s. The woman looked out of the mirror at me, extending her arms, and pulled me to her and kissed me softly.

Oh Christ, yes, I was holding myself and crying like a damn baby in Alsada’s arms, Miss Emma’s arms, and my absent mother’s arms—wherever she was—coming home to me; this woman, rising up inside me, and now I reached out and saw a black dress that somehow I felt I’d once worn. Don’t know where. But once a long time ago I’d had it on and a man came over to me, called me by my name, holding out his hand, and asked me to dance.

“You look so fine in that pretty little dress,” he said. “Why, it barely covers your dimpled knees.”

And I started laughing.

“Oh yes,” I said, and spun coquettishly around and said, “Will you zip up the back, sir?” Like he was actually there.

Then slipped back onto the bed and rolled her black hose up my white legs and prayed to God that those shoes with the rhinestone stars, the ones with the shiny black heels, would fit.

And yes, they did, a bit tight.

But that was no problem.

’Cause I no longer had to walk like a man.

Then I heard her softly knocking, whispering, “I’ll be needing the room in a minute or two, Honor. Hurry.”

“I’m ready,” I said.

I opened the door and my friend stood there, admiring me. “Praise Lazarus,” she sang. “If I wasn’t the kind of lady I am, I’d take you over any old damn man. What a stunner!”

She spun me about and zipped up the dress.

“Are my seams straight?” I asked.

On my initial reading I’d never given much thought to the narrator’s recounting outfitting herself in a scarlet woman’s garments. But that person was Westley. And it speaks of a yearning, the quality of which I couldn’t recall encountering in any of his stories.

Now it was past midnight and I was fully awake.

Was there a message about myself in these particular passages?

Was Westley revealing even a darker truth to me? I again began poring over my notes and the manuscripts. And then remembered . . .

I NEED A WOMAN

She hadn’t been gone but two days. One might have expected a whimper of grief, like “Christ, I miss her. What am I going to do alone?” I climbed out of bed and opened the door. He was standing naked in our hallway.

“Go back to bed.” I pulled the blind so the neighbors wouldn’t see.

“You don’t understand,” he cried. “Her dresses. Her shoes. The toiletries on the bureau. Her undergarments in our chiffonier.”

Now, at the fall interval of his life, his dam had ruptured—brought on by Mother’s death. Here’s my father unable to sleep because he’s blubbering, “I need a woman!” What the hell was I going to tell him?

“Do you understand what I’m talking about, son?”

“Well . . .” I said.

“You just don’t get it. Come here.” We stood outside their bedroom. “Go in there and pull open the top drawer of the chiffonier.”

The room was dark save for the streetlight laying an amber puddle across the bed—one side slept-in.

“Go on, open it.”

Inside, neatly piled, were panties, camisoles and slips, and—bunched in one corner—a cluster of brassieres. The drawer let loose a breath of sachet.

“That’s what I’m talking about,” he said. “Now, open the closet door. Go on, do it, James.”

Plaid knife-pleated skirts, georgette shifts, crêpe de chine empire dresses, blazers, all draped on wire hangers; mules, espadrilles, and spaghetti-strap heels assembled underneath. On the upper shelf—black pillbox hats whose veils she’d let fall at weddings or funerals. On his side, prosaic two-piece suits in summer and winter blends. The closet was redolent of gardenia.

“Do you get it yet, boy?”

He ambled down the stairs.

“No damn way are we ever going to get rid of her presence. You can throw all that shit outside, clean every nook and cranny of her belongings, toss out the creams and face lotions, the prescription bottles, her Bible, her photograph, you name it. Scour her out of every board and plaster in this house, and she still won’t leave.”

I poured us coffee.

“I need a woman,” he whispered, his face a hairbreadth from mine.

“I don’t get it, Pap. What are you telling me?”

“You really want to know?”

“This isn’t like you.”

“Do you grasp why she wore those things up there? That smoky sundress with jasmine flowers, for instance? She’d stand there admiring herself in the mirror, watching me button it up her backside. Those peekaboo nets she’d drop over her china-blue eyes? Undergarments the shade of her blush?”

“Why?”

“So I wouldn’t have to wear them”

“Yeah, I get it,” I said. The damn whiskey was blubbering.

“Listen to what I’m telling you. It’s your mother’s stain . . .”

“Finish your coffee so we can go back to bed.”

“No. You don’t get it!” he bellowed, bounding out of his chair. A gingham napkin from the buffet drawer was tied under his chin—a babushka. Like she might have done, he pressed his face on mine, and, sotto voce, mewled again, “I need a woman.”

I followed him up the stairs.

We entered the darkened room, and in a fury Father snatched her garments out of the closet, the chiffonier, the bureau drawer—heaping everything onto the bed they had shared for decades. With each item, his frenzy accelerated. The last garment on the clothes pole, a navy-blue button-down-the-front frock with a stiff sailor’s collar, he held up to his torso. “How about this, Junior, with my patent leather please-fuck-me shoes? Are my seams straight?” He turned as I’d witnessed her do many times, bending a calf up toward his derriere while staring over a bare shoulder.

The streetlight’s corrugated shade serrated the room’s shadows. With one swipe he pitched the bureau’s opaque perfume bottles and pearly emollient jars across the floor and under the bed, a chromium lipstick tube the lone survivor. He opened it and studied himself in the mirror, my face his double.

Was he going to paint both our lips?

“Pap, please, stop this absurdity.”

“I’ve no bosom!” he cried. “My chest is a goddamned void. Look at me!” A salmon brassiere dangled from his neck. The circle he’d drawn around his mouth exaggerated our pathos.

“What’s left for me, James? Will she ever come home?”

Father lay down upon her wrappings, burying himself.

Grief.

Causes people to do the strangest things. His was implacable. I still had him. Her departure hurt, but I could abide it. Yet a piece of him was half gone. It was as if the heart was now eating itself in some kind of bizarre, comical remorse.

I slept downstairs that evening.

At first light, I softly opened his door. Their room had been restored. He was sound asleep. His frozen magenta “O” faintly smudged.

“So I wouldn’t have to wear them.”

Westley’s narratives actually spoke to his yearning for a single identity and had no more to do with finding that place in a woman’s body or her clothes than in the various male characters in which the narrator found life. The father in “I Need a Woman” aches for that which has been taken from him—his opposite, the woman who each day confirmed his identity as a male. Now, only her garments testify to that and are powerless to alleviate his loss; and so, as if to bury himself, he puts them on.

Once again it harked back to “Going Dark.”

This was my eureka moment.

Quiet out in the hallway now. Even the lights from the street had muted on my ceiling, their movement lethargic now, not erratic.

I gathered the manuscripts, placing them at the foot of my bed.

In a strange way, it felt as if at least the penumbra of my brother had joined me in the room, for earlier, I’d truly had no notion of who he was.

Now, I’d begun to comprehend that he hadn’t either.

I, too, had been somebody once. I thought about the tale of a man too cowardly to kill himself, so he believed he was dead.

Was that what Westley was up to?

Fading off to sleep, I even speculated he’d become Proteus-like out of necessity, as no single persona is adequate for any one of us.