CHAPTER 17

Parting Is Not Good-bye

I wrote a note, too. On the back of the one he’d left for me. But in the end I didn’t leave it.

I had it in my purse.

What am I doing here?

I belonged with Andre, didn’t I? He was the one who was so caught up with “belonging” to a place. Not me, not anymore. I was beginning to accept that I’d always be a little bit on the periphery. Fuck the place—it was Andre I belonged with, no? So what was I doing up above the world, heading back to America? Alone.

You’re taking Vivian’s body home. That’s what you’re doing. Her brother is going to bury her, and maybe you along with her.

To repeat, I belonged with Andre, didn’t I? Here was a man who had not only pledged the rest of his life to me. Not only could play “Billie’s Bounce” on the violin. Not only showed a willingness to face down my shitty karma. He loved me enough to take a bullet that by all rights should have been mine.

“Madame?” I heard a soft voice say.

The flight was only half full. The attendant with the chignon wouldn’t leave me alone. I had already declined the game hen dinner, smoked salmon, honey peanuts, champagne, the current issue of Paris Vogue, and the in-flight Julia Roberts movie. With each offer I turned my puffy, ugly old face to her and tried to answer in the fewest polite French words possible.

I had downed an ocean of black coffee since boarding the plane.

The poison gas began to rise again in my stomach as I had another flashback of Vivian lying in that alley with the back of her head blown off.

I turned on the overhead light to help chase the image away.

I lived too much in the past. That was my trouble. That’s what the music was about, when you really got down to it. It wasn’t just what I did for a half-assed living, what I respected and loved. It was my escape from the world as presently constituted.

Worse, it wasn’t even my past. All my life it seems I’ve been caught up with the people, the music, and the feel of life at another time, a time at least three generations removed from my own. Here you are, little Nanette, it’s 1969 and here’s the gift of life. Welcome to the world, dear. What are you going to be, a postal worker, a bank manager—you know, they let us do that kind of thing now—or a computer whiz? Me? Thanks, but no thanks. I’d rather be Mary Lou Williams. Ivy Anderson? Or, yeah, how about Sonny Rollins? I could never get with the music I was supposed to like. Nor the kind of man I was supposed to like. Nor the kind of ambitions that were supposed to drive me forward. I don’t give a damn about the things that excite or tie up the folks drinking shooters on the Upper West Side or hanging with Spike in Fort Greene.

Yes, through the music of the past I had, like Andre, found a way to honor my forefathers. But I knew there was something terribly dishonest about the way I lived. It wasn’t just living in a fantasy world, it wasn’t just being phony—it was wrong. It’s wrong not to live in the here and now. It’s cowardly and pious and arrogant and wrong.

And the other kids just don’t like me.

If I played my cards right I could spend the whole flight beating up on myself. I think it must have been Ernestine, that voice in my ear, that was telling me: If you feel this awful, you must deserve it.

Pictures of Andre were now interspersed with the memories of Vivian. Those big feet of his, and the way he moved, and that hollow place in his lower back. The day he took me on that breathless guided tour, the same day we first went to Bricktop’s. Teasing him then, I said he was crazy—that his devotion to the past had crazed him. Well, maybe that was no joke; maybe he was crazy, crazy for real. And, finally, those cold blue killer-for-hire shades that had obscured his eyes, hidden him, taken him from me during the last days we had together.

Belong with him? said Ernestine scornfully. You’ll never see him again.

It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair.

I dug a few paper napkins out of the seat-back pocket and dabbed at my eyes.

Would Andre continue to live and work in Paris, stay on in France forever? He sure had the talent and the determination. I had no doubt he would do our forebears proud, the obscure ones along with the famous. All those black people with a hyperdeveloped sense of the romantic which takes them to faraway places, out of the here and now they were born to endure in America. Maybe someday, as maturity softened his contempt, he’d be able to view Little Rube Haskins in a more sympathetic light. And Morris Melon. And me. All us permanent strangers.

Sure, Andre would distinguish himself in print or as a venerable lecturer or an acclaimed performer. He’d get—I made myself say it—get married, become a French citizen, like he wanted, and grow into his Inspector Simard role. A stone cottage in the provinces, two dogs—the whole bit. Un homme français.

The aircraft shimmied a little and then the pilot’s reassuring baritone issued from the loudspeaker. In a nutshell: Go back to sleep, it’s going to be okay.

Would I ever see Paris again? Probably. It was unbearable to think of dying without seeing those lights once more. Would I ever cry again as I drove past the Arc de Triomphe or walked in the Bois du Boulogne? Maybe. Would I ever again feel that the city belonged to me, and I to it? Like I wasn’t just another savvy tourist, or even a starry-eyed expatriate, but the genuine article—une femme française.

No.