A few miles southwest of Kankakee, I turn off the highway and drive down straight county roads bordered by cornfields that race by in a pale green blur. After a few minutes, I pull over and roll down my window, turn off the car. The engine ticks for a moment, then goes silent. A cloud of dust sweeps past and the air clears. I’m parked on a low rise that presides over impossibly straight and endless rows of corn. Anyone wanting to contemplate infinity need only stand at the edge of an Illinois cornfield.
As I open the car door urgent bells sound, reminding me, a car thief, that I have left the keys in the ignition. I walk for a few minutes, then kneel by the side of the road and watch the red sun hover over the fields. Red-winged blackbirds fly low to rattle the corn. Down the verdant slope, a tiny dog runs figure eights behind a white farm house, laundry waving in a gentle breeze as if the world is exhaling.
The ground next to me is pale red and dry. I take a packet of diamonds from my pocket and drop them on the dirt. I took them during night visits across the country. But they’re all less than a half-carat and flawed. They still glimmer beautifully in the late-afternoon sun, but they’re nearly as worthless as Ray’s black opals. I push them down into the ground, the day’s warmth enveloping my hands.
I’ve been burying these dinky orphan diamonds all over the country, after decades on fingers, around wrists or necks. It seems right to me. I’m putting evidence where no one will find it and repatriating them to the earth. But I can see how someone might find it strange. I would have a few years ago.
Hands in the earth, eyes on the sun’s slow descent, the beauty of the world lowers around me like a stage curtain of indigo and silver.
A bright light beams from behind me and boots scrape along the road. The day has faded and the dust around my hands is cold. I turn and squint into a blinding light. How long have I been lost here next to the fields?
“Please stand,” a voice calls. “Now.”
I pull my hands from the dust and rise slowly.
“Who are you?”
A beam of light moves from my eyes and across my dark pants, my shoes marked with dust, then trails along the ground between us. I can make out a dark figure, the glint of a silver belt buckle. In the distance, a low blue Illinois State Police sedan waits. So much for radiant moments.
“What are you doing here, Mr. Clifton?”
“I was driving from Chicago, stopped to rest for a few minutes.”
“You were sitting there for over an hour. Neighbors reported you, thought you might be having a heart attack or some kinda problem. Were you?”
“No, of course not.”
“Are you taking any medication, Mr. Clifton?”
I shake my head. “I haven’t taken anything for years.”
“Had anything to drink?”
“No.”
“Then do you mind telling me what exactly were you doing over there in the dirt?”
Reburying stolen diamonds might not be considered a good answer. “I play the piano,” I say. “I have a little arthritis in my hands. Sometimes keeping them in the dirt helps. It’s warm.”
“Am I supposed to believe that bullshit?” The policeman moves closer and I see he is young, a straight-backed black man with one hand holding his flashlight, the other on the handle of his service revolver. “I’m going to ask you to take out your wallet with one hand and toss it toward me.”
“I don’t carry a wallet.”
“Where’s your license?”
“In my jacket pocket.”
“Then hand it to me.”
I find my license and offer it politely. The patrolman shines his flashlight on it.
“New York. Long way from home, eh? And it says here your name’s Ross Wolfshead, not Clifton. What kinda messed-up name is that?”
“That’s my real name. It’s English, my father’s family name. Ross Clifton is my stage name.”
A pause, as the patrolman tries to put this whole tableau in context—a skinny white musician, squatting in the dirt near a cornfield, crazy apparently.
“What kind of music do you play?”
“Jazz. Just played a few nights at the Drake in Chicago. I’m playing St. Louis tomorrow night. Then Kansas City.”
“You get around then, do you?”
“I guess you could say that. I’m on the road a lot.” Sweat starts to trickle down my sides. I definitely don’t want the patrolman digging in the dirt or rummaging through my car.
Another pause. “Must be interesting.”
I shrug. “Probably not as interesting as being a state trooper.”
“Half the time I’m driving around, the other I’m doing paperwork.” A long pause. “Weekends though, I play bass in a little trio.”
“Electric or upright?”
“Electric.”
“What kind of music?”
“Fringe stuff.”
“Here in the heartland? Isn’t that illegal?”
The patrolman laughs, hands me back my license. With that lame line, I’m in.
“Not illegal, just not very popular,” he says. “You like Brother Jack McDuff?”
I smile at such an odd question asked in the twilight by a man with a gun. “Sure. I know a couple of his songs. Do It Now—that’s got a tricky little bass part.”
“I can’t believe it. We just picked that one up.”
“Hard four bars at the end, aren’t there?”
“You’re good, man. What are you, some kind of jazz master?”
“Hardly.”
“We do Snap Back Jack too,” he says, excited now.
I nod. “If you like McDuff, you’d probably like Mulgrew Miller.” I actually don’t know much about either. Jazz is baseball for indoorsmen, the kind who still hang out in clubs, listen to expensive Japanese CDs of bootleg Bill Evans outtakes. You pick your team—stride, swing, bebop, hard bop, West Coast cool, Afro-Cuban, fusion, acid jazz—and stick with it.
“Don’t know that I’ve heard of him.”
“Check out Neither Here Nor There—a nice fast little number. Hand in Hand is good too. More of a Latin feel to it.”
We walk back toward our cars, glowing slightly in the last light.
“You play any Monk?”
“One of my favorites,” I say. “Definitely in the top four. Monk, Parker, Miles, Mose.” I don’t bother mentioning James P. Johnson—hardly anyone remembers him.
“Old school, eh?”
“You could say that.”
“Can’t get our piano player to do Monk except the easy ones.”
“Try Monk’s Mood for starters. Hold on, I’ve got it here somewhere.” We walk back to the car and I lean in to lift my fakebook from the seat. It falls open to the pouch of glimmering diamonds.
“You sure you don’t need them?” The cop is right next to me, shining his flashlight in. I flip to the front quickly, rip out the right charts, and hand them over. I shrug. “If I don’t know that song by now, I’m never going to learn it.”
“Thanks. You go knock ’em dead in St. Louis.”
“I will. I’ll do that.” I smile, then let it fade as I climb back into the rental car.
The patrolman waves. I wave back. Two musicians passing in the night.
Almost everyone is a musician. A hotel clerk who plays blues harmonica in the elevator shaft, a guitarist working at a coffee shop, a drummer lying on a Lower East Side corner selling records on a blanket. They’re all musicians, part of the universal union able to carry a tune, remember some lyrics, put the notes together into a melody, and get across with an audience.
Songs return us to where we heard them first. They connect us to the people who wrote them, who played them before us, listened to them. Some nights I look out into the audience and see dozens of people, eyes lost in the middle distance, traveling back down a path. I’m just lighting the way.
I took piano lessons from a psychotic German named Mrs. Bernecasstler, who drilled me so incessantly that my fingertips hurt and I wanted to quit. She kept a collection of miniature plastic busts of composers in a box next to her. When I played poorly, she would rummage for the right composer, then hold him up and scream, “Vhat are you trying to do to me!”
Then I discovered James P. Johnson.
When I was fourteen, Chief jumped to a new level of management at Moore’s and he enrolled us in the Kenilworth Hill School, where Ray and I wore white shirts, monogrammed blazers, rep ties slung around our necks—and became unlikely little dandies with plans for everybody.
Kenilworth had a fancy media center with low pods of cubicles equipped with turntables, tape decks, and enormous headphones. Ray found that if you pulled out the headphone jack and stuck in a steel Parker pen, you could deafen everyone in your pod. I found an enormous record library stocked with jazz albums—Sidney Bechet, Jimmie Lunceford, Jelly Roll Morton, Jack Teagarden, Glen Gray, Joe Venuti.
On the morning I discovered my true calling, I huddled in a cubicle that smelled of hot wiring, vinyl, and mildewed album covers. I put an early James P. Johnson side on the turntable, You’ve Got to be Modernistic. Even before the intro was over, every hair had stood up on the backs of my arms as if blown there by a gust of prairie wind. A latter-day Liszt, a Harlem savant who never got his due, Johnson played so well it seemed physically impossible—right hand like a sledge, left like a hummingbird.
As I pressed the headphones tightly over my ears, I heard something more than a transcendent stride tune, thousands of notes cascading down like water. I heard optimism, the promise that no matter how bad times were, there would always be escape in music, grace, and sheer audacity. I listened to James P. Johnson over and over until my ears turned hot beneath the headphones.
Chief was working hard for some vague payoff that would justify all the overtime, meetings, office politics, and seething dinners with Eileen. We would buy a boat and cruise around Lake Michigan, Chief at the helm. Our family would live in a big house in Lake Forest, go to fine restaurants, vacation in London to search out our Wolfshead relatives and impress them with our new American money.
I didn’t want any of it. All I wanted was to play piano like James P. Johnson. Nothing else mattered.
While I was exploring the intricacies of Harlem stride, Ray invented the dickel, a dime and a nickel sanded down and soldered together down in Chief’s basement shop. Ray sold them to rich kids at school; they were all coin collectors. They knew that mint errors like this—freaks, they’re called—were valuable, certainly worth more than the five dollars Ray charged. By the time they figured out the scam, Ray had pocketed a couple hundred bucks and moved on to two-headed quarters, pennies etched with Lincoln smoking a fat joint.
Ray had found exactly what he was going to do with his life too.
The Westin lounge looks out upon the iconic Gateway Arch, which, like most celebrities, looks smaller in real life. I play my usual first set to a good, crowded room. A bald guy tips me a twenty and requests Our Love Is Here to Stay. Deep into the second set, I stray far outside the melody of East of the Sun and the hotel guests applaud when I bring it back into line after eight bars. Make it sound risky and they’ll cheer.
I play a set of moon songs—How High the Moon, then Old Devil Moon in the Mose Allison style. I skip Moondance—perhaps the most requested song in history—because it just isn’t jazz, it has the word fantabulous in the second line, and I worry that if I play it, my next number might be Bebop Kumbaya.
Between the second and third sets, a woman sitting alone at the front table watches me as if trying to memorize my every feature. She’s got short black hair cut in brutal bangs, her watery skin set off by a sparkling black dress.
Two hours later, the staring woman and I are horizontal in the Chairman’s Suite, an enormous room high up in the Westin, so big that it has an entire dining room and living room as well as the elegant bedroom where she kisses me hard. Carla tastes of minibar Scotch and cigarettes. In a dispassionate flurry, she gathers my rumpled suitcoat from the bed and opens the door to a massive armoire and hangs my jacket among a careful row of dark suits.
“Always travel with a dozen Armani suits?”
“Very funny,” Carla says. “They’re my stupid husband’s.” Women who find themselves alone with a traveling musician after midnight rarely have anything good to say about their husbands or boyfriends.
“Will he be coming back soon to put them on?”
“Don’t worry, he’s meeting me here tomorrow. Flying in from New York. And what do you care, piano man? You saw I was married the moment we met.” Carla sits back down on the bedspread and reaches out to touch my chest as she issues a liquor-fueled non sequitur. “You’re not very hairy at all.”
“No, I’m not,” I say. “And I didn’t know you were married.”
“Didn’t you see my wedding ring?”
I definitely notice rings. “You weren’t wearing one.”
“I guess I left it in the bathroom.” She shrugs. “The engagement ring’s a bit too much sometimes.”
I perk up at the news.
“We married a few years ago—a marriage of convenience. Ryan gets convenient use of my money. I get convenient use of his corporate jet.” She smiles at her own tired wit, cracks open another plastic nip of Scotch and offers it to me, then drinks it all herself.
If I ever needed proof that money doesn’t make people happy, it’s sprawled on the bedspread next to me.
“Are we going to do it?” Carla says. “Or did my husband’s nice suits scare you off?”
“I’m not scared,” I say. “But we’re not going to do it the way you’re used to.”
Her green eyes flare for a second. “Ohh . . . something special planned?” She pulls off her black silk pan ties and drops them on the floor, unsnaps her bra. Even in the dim light of the bedroom, I can see that Carla’s had some work done. She’s forty-five with the breasts of a cheerleader. Her eyes are too defined, hair too dark.
“Sit for a moment,” I say.
“Sit?” she says. “I don’t want to sit. If you can’t get it up, I have some Viagra. Do you need a Viagra, piano man?”
“No,” I say.
“I said I want to fuck, not sit,” she shouts.
“We can do both.” I climb off the bed and sit in a straight-backed chair, hotel-issue Baroque, carved with eagles with arrows in their beaks. I wave Carla over and she slides off the bed, walks with a slight sway across the carpet. Her pubic hair is trimmed into a porny vertical swath, like an exclamation without the point. She turns around and presents her surgically sculpted ass to me, lowers it slowly as if I’m a piece of furniture. To her, I might as well be.
I turn her around gently and sit her on my knees, her legs around mine, feet barely touching the floor. I start by looking into her eyes. I trace her eyebrows with my index fingers, pressing gently against the low rise where they have been so carefully painted and plucked.
“Jesus that feels good . . .”
“Try to be quiet,” I say, and go from eyebrow to cheekbone to earlobe, the innocent venues no one ever explores.
Ten minutes later, Carla’s in a half-trance. I raise her up slightly by flexing my legs and pushing her up on my knees. She rises effortlessly, like the floating woman in a magic show. I lick the fingertips of my right hand and press them together in a narrow pyramid. I reach down and place this pyramid on the seat of the chair, then lower Carla down on it in increments so narrow that at first she doesn’t even feel my fingers inching inside her.
“Oh my God.” Her eyes pinch closed.
I turn my hand slowly clockwise, then back.
Carla reaches for the chair and tries to pull herself down but I push her back up with my legs, withholding any stolen increments. She has to wait, for once.
An hour later, I’m in the bathroom, flashlight clenched between my teeth, magnifier in my eye, looking at one of the largest diamonds I’ve ever seen. Carla was right. At almost four carats, the engagement ring really is embarrassing. I check the cut, find that it’s okay. Inside the crown there are dozens of inclusions, black bits of unprocessed carbon like tiny cancers. Carla’s diamond is impressive on the surface but shallow and flawed on closer inspection. Even so, it’s worth plenty. One of the many ironies of diamonds is that the large ones can bully through any number of flaws. Small diamonds have to be perfect.
A single pull of the calipers extracts the diamond from its gaudy, platinum setting. I look at my face for a moment in the mirror, the low light of the bathroom shadowing the hollows of my cheeks, my dark eyes. My face looks more honest the more I steal.
Feeling triumphant, I flip Carla’s diamond toward the ceiling with my thumb, open my mouth, and catch it like a grape. Except that it slips down my throat, and a grape doesn’t have sharp facets.
I gag, then grab both sides of the sink and make a desperate, feral choking sound. My face reddens and my hands are shaking on the sink as I retch again, raising nothing, lodging the diamond even further in its esophageal setting.
The bathroom door opens and Carla wanders in, sits on the toilet, and unleashes a torrent of piss. She squints up at me. “My God, what did you do to me? I can hardly walk,” she whispers.
I nod, try to pretend that I’m fine, then gag again, sending a recoil through my whole body.
“Feeling okay, piano man?”
I shake my head.
“Must be something you ate.” She stands and rubs my back gently.
My eyelids lower slightly and the room grows dark at the edges.
“Once I ate a bad scallop—are you allergic to scallops, maybe?—and I woke up in the ICU with a plastic tube down my throat.”
My whole body shakes, out of control.
Carla’s at the vanity mirror, rubbing some kind of cream under her eyes. “Maybe you’re allergic to nuts, everyone seems to be. Can you imagine that anything so innocent as a peanut could be . . .”
I press forward quickly to ram my stomach against the white corner of the sink. A hot gasp blows out of my mouth, and along with it, Carla’s diamond. It ricochets off the tiles with a tiny click.
“Better?”
I gasp, run the water, splash it on my face. “Yes, much better,” I say in a moment. “Choked on some water.”
Carla shakes her head. “Got to watch that stuff. I try to stick with Bordeaux or single malt.” She smiles and puts her arms around me, presses her cheek into my chest. “I feel so . . . incredible. I’ve never . . .”
I lay my fingers over her lips.
She nods. “I know, better not to talk about it. I won’t say another word.” She mimes locking her mouth and throwing away the little key. “Come back to bed. And bring those hands of yours.”
I nod.
Carla drifts back into the bedroom.
I close the door with a click and retrieve my flashlight from the top of the medicine cabinet. I get down on all fours and crawl through the bathroom like a pig looking for a four-carat truffle. Not in the corner, not in the bathtub. I crawl toward the sink and peer underneath. Nothing. I look over the rim of the toilet and spot a glimmer at the bottom of the bowl beneath Carla’s tea-colored pee and shrouds of toilet paper.
For someone who prides himself on being a complete professional, both onstage and during my nightwork, this particular evening is the equivalent of forgetting a song and hammering at the keyboard with lobster claws.
I swallow my pride, hoping it goes down a bit easier than Carla’s diamond, and remind myself that urine is pure, that yogis drink it. Then I plunge my hand down into the piss and catch the stone between my fingers, the last act in tonight’s performance finally over.
Like Carla, I used to have too much money, and it led me astray. It started with a simple desire—a better piano to replace my tinny upright. For years, I had dreamed of owning a grand piano. More specifically, I wanted, coveted even, a Bösendorfer, arguably the best piano in the world, and the most expensive. Alta, my girlfriend, encouraged me to buy myself one. I worked hard, I deserved the best, and anyway, it was a business expense.
Alta’s work made her finely calibrated to appreciate timeless beauty and the objects that embodied it. She specialized in designing Eames-era interiors, which meant anything sleek, modern, and expensive, from what I could tell. Tall and serious, half-French, with long straight hair and unshakable poise, Alta made her clients feel okay about buying a German Expressionist print, a Mission desk, or beautiful knickknacks that cost five or six figures. That I loved her deeply made me ignore any worries I might have that I was straying disturbingly close to the ways of Chief, who believed that big-ticket purchases had medicinal properties.
I gathered up $75,000 in converted diamonds and BMWs, called headquarters in Vienna, and placed my order, sweat coursing down my sides. Instead of healed, I felt terrified.
Soon after, we realized that the living room of my apartment on University Place wouldn’t hold a ten-foot grand piano. Actually, it would hold the piano, but little else.
But Alta and I had spotted a loft for sale on Bond Street a few months ago. We’d find ourselves wandering past it after dinner, gazing up at its row of original windows, the intricate gray-flecked marble details. Bond Street—its very name promised to bring us together forever. Alta turned reverent when we talked about buying the loft during long walks, phone calls from the road, or afternoons in my cramped apartment, which seemed to shrink palpably.
Bond Street. I bought the loft and we moved in together—two decisions tied together with a bright green ribbon of money. Malcolm negotiated a deal with the own er, a once-plush financial services guy anxious to unload it. I made the down payment in cash.
At first, change, space, and more time together brought us happiness. When I think of those first few months together, a strong hand squeezes some unnamed and imaginary gland that secretes sadness—one found somewhere just below my heart.
Then Alta decided that she needed a cat to keep her company when I was on the road. We bought a kitten in Soho and named her Sake, Alta’s drink of choice. Sake was a Savannah, a rare, half-wild breed with short gray hair who stalked along the high-gloss floors like a pocket-sized panther. She cost $3,000 and some change.
Alta also thought our loft needed new furniture. Three months and $60,000 later, we had a set of original black leather Barcelona chairs, floor-to-ceiling custom bookshelves, a Ligne Roset bedroom set, and vintage Nichols rugs. Each purchase seemed to trigger late-night discussions of what to buy, where to find it, how it might fit with everything else. Alta carried a vague dissatisfaction with her, as if forever hunting for one last, perfect missing piece of our life.
The first sign of trouble came from Sake, who started to eat pencil erasers, rubber bands, food wrappers, and other colon-clogging plastic debris. One night, while Alta and I were out having dinner in Tribeca, Sake destroyed the Barcelona chairs, shredding the leather to get to some kind of midcentury adhesive that she craved like a kitty crackhead. When we came home, Alta crumpled to the floor and cried for hours in the fetal position.
Several thousand dollars in vets and feline psychiatrists later, Sake was diagnosed with feline pica, a nervous disorder that would require regular counseling and constant vigilance. We had to get rid of anything she could chew.
Then finally, the Bösendorfer arrived one June Saturday, hoisted in through the front windows of the loft. A crowd gathered to watch the enormous piano hovering like a black Austrian cloud over Bond Street. I directed it into the living room, placed it in the corner out of the sun. Sake used the opportunity to devour a Styrofoam coffee cup one of the piano movers left on the floor.
When the movers had finally left, I sat at the in finitely adjustable, ergodynamic bench ($2,500). I put my fingers on the keyboard and felt its cool elegance. It was Christmas in June. My payoff had come.
I played a James P. Johnson number first, Carolina Shout, then Monk’s Straight,No Chaser. The piano was responsive and fast. The whole room seemed to vibrate when I played most of All Blues, adding an extra sixteen-bar solo. Alta sat next to me on the bench, smiling, listening more intently than she ever had before.
Midway through Brilliant Corners, the phone rang. It was the woman who lived in the loft downstairs, May d’Assiandro. I had never met May, though I had heard she was an artist and that she had been in the Whitney Biennial a few years earlier. She specialized in gnawing plastic doll heads, something Sake would have been glad to help her with, I’m sure. From what Alta could decipher through the screaming and crying, May was hypersensitive to sound, particularly the sound of the piano, which reminded her of “something bad about to happen.” Alta said we’d keep it quiet and hung up.
Back at the Bösendorfer, I touched the keys as lightly as possible, playing an almost inaudible version of Almost Blue. The phone rang again immediately. Sake skidded into the living room and began to projectile-retch Styrofoam.
A few weeks later, we heard from May d’Assiandro’s lawyers; she was suing us for “sonic disturbances contributing to an inability to function as a working artist.” Then Sake ate the keys off the lower register of the Bösendorfer.
I was in hell, one of my own making, the worst kind. I had a piano I couldn’t play, a loft that served as a high-priced prison/ furniture showroom, and a cat that spewed plastic.
The disintegration of our loft paralleled our own. Like so many other fools in love, Alta and I had equated prime real estate with the promise of domestic happiness. I’ll skip the next few months of our dwindling love affair, rife with simmering regret, slammed doors, and arctic silences—a back avenue of love rarely explored in song, and for good reason. When Alta finally moved out and took a job in San Francisco, I was numb with sadness. Less so when Sake went to a feline rehabilitation clinic upstate.
When you’re in hell, there’s only one real road out—repentance. Mine was financial. I sold the loft at a loss to a younger financial services guy, who kept the Bösendorfer, for looks, as he put it so eloquently. I rented a room in an apartment building on Elizabeth Street, a kind of club house where Malcolm let his musicians stay for low rent.
I knew that no matter what I bought with my diamond and BMW money, it would be tainted. Some people give up drugs or drinking. I gave up money. I began my new life out on the road, stealing and giving away, staying in constant motion like a long run of sixteenth notes.
I would keep my damaged heart to myself and put my fast hands to good use.
I pay my twenty-dollar cover just like everyone else and take the table in the very back of the Infoscape Jazz Lounge at the Ambassador Hotel. Thanks to the club’s corporate sponsor, every table has free Wi-Fi, which keeps half of every couple pecking away on various handheld devices. Not exactly behavior that makes for friendliness, but that’s fine with me. I’m not here to talk to anyone.
Two glasses of warm red wine later, Marianne London takes the stage, nodding and smiling to the crowd, which applauds wildly. Her gentle reddish curls fall on her bare shoulders. Her carefully revealing black dress and her simple strand of three diamonds on a thin gold chain urge me to dismiss her as nightclub eye candy. But I’m impressed at how she’s won over the crowd before she even opens her mouth.
Then her pianist hits the bass intro to You Don’t Know What Love Is, a risky melancholy opener, and Marianne sings. Her voice is pure and strong but seductive, more Sarah Vaughn than Billie Holiday, more Kansas City than New York. She’s old school, not trying to sound like Diana Krall or her ilk, voices as silken and perfect as their hair. Summing up a voice is like describing a wine—much is lost in translation from experience to words. All I can say is that by the third verse, the one about not knowing how a lost heart feels, I’m completely hooked.
Marianne stalks the front of the stage during Taking a Chance on Love, using the long chorus to scan the audience and connect her gaze with dozens of men. I have to smile. It’s like watching my sultry twin in action. Except with one big difference. All I can do is send out looks from behind the keyboard. Untethered from the piano, she’s in close with the crowd, a beautiful wolverine among graying sheep.
During I Don’t Know Enough About You she takes it even further, walking between tables and laying her hand on the shoulders of dozens of men like a faith healer. Those sitting with their wives or girlfriends try to feign indifference. But their gleaming eyes give them away; they love being singled out.
Then suddenly, she’s coming toward me, singing the verse about knowing a little about biology, psychology, and geology. I have to laugh at that one—I know a thing or two about geology too, at least the gemstone part of it.
As she moves closer, the oxygen in the room seems to double and I think she’s singing just for me, even though of all people, I ought to be immune to any strain of musical seduction by now. But still, my heart is racing, even more when she pauses in front of me, puts her hands on my shoulders, and stares right in my eyes as she sings. The follow spot catches us as she’s finishing the chorus—But I don’t know enough about you. Then she winks at me, as if we’re both in on the game she’s playing, as if this line actually means something. Then she trails her fingers across my shoulders and moves through the crowd for the next verse. The spotlight trails her and abandons me to darkness.
All through the dim club, ardent fans are reinventing Marianne London. She’s a blank screen and they’re a hundred flickering projectors beaming conflicting story lines.
Marianne is mysterious. She’s blunt and direct.
Marianne’s an intellectual. She’s never read a book.
Marianne is easy to get along with. She’s a wildcat.
To me, Marianne is another long-suffering traveler trapped on Malcolm’s endless circuit. She’s looking for a way out, someone to steal her away from her admirers. She’s sick of singing alone and annoyed at her light-handed accompanist. Clearly she’s waiting for the right piano player to come along. Someone who understands, who listens. Someone a lot like me.
I leave the table and walk out of the club before she finishes the song, not wanting to share my version of Marianne with anyone. I can still hear her beautiful voice a block away.