A Little Night Music (3 page)

Jon glanced up, wished he could see it.

“Yeah, well, I haven’t felt anything, not for a while.”

“Aww, now. That’s a lie, Pretty Boy. That last solo last night? Um-um-um. A man don’t reach down to play like that unless it’s the fault of a woman.”

Jon remembered Elli’s welcoming hand, those blue-gray eyes, an intimate interpretation of a tune that never grew old. His heart slipped like a trombone slide. He dragged himself from the lusty precipice, his head clearly lost in unwelcome kite territory.

“Nah, man. No women. Too brutal.”

“Strange power, women,” mused Mongo.

Jon opened his trumpet case, attempting to pack away the subject of women, as if snapping the buckles on one would carry a case-closed finality to the other. The moment his thumb grazed the instrument’s lead pipe, a tingling jolt radiated up his arm. He released the cool brass. The sensation fizzled out. He touched the bell. Again, the strange undercurrent stirred beneath his skin. When he took the assembled instrument fully in-hand, the needling warmth was unlike anything he had ever felt.

Almost anything.

Those eyes, at the back of
The Lotus
, fixed on only him, charged from his short-term memory and branded the warmth as though the two had always and would forever be intertwined.

“Mongo?”

The pianist was stirring some drink on the rocks with his index finger, crowded with gold rings. “Hmm?”

“Do you believe an instrument can be…” Jon searched for a word that didn’t make him sound drunk or insane. Or both. “Can have baggage? Something attached to it?”

“Aww…now you’re talkin’ somethin’...”

“Crazy?”

“Real. Anything that touches the soul leaves a mark.”

“And if it gets in the way?”

“No sense fightin’ it. Couldn’t if you tried. Probably sent to help you find your way back.”

Jon wanted to ask
back to what—his sound? his life?
, but Mongo’s pupils swelled and his nostrils flared wide as if to take in some ominous wind of change. “If they come in darkness, you’d best be careful. They say voices from his tenor sax what caused Artie Page to jump off the High Rise.”

Jon hadn’t been in New Orleans long enough to say what the High Rise was, but it didn’t bode well for Artie. Or anyone who gave an instrument a power beyond sound. But wasn’t that the draw of this place? Magic that went beyond voodoo and spirit-talk. Magic that came as a gift from some musician whose soulful tunes and the life they captured could live on long after he was gone. Tunes to draw people together and remind them of the human condition—if only for one night. Or in Jon’s case, tunes to forget. Any instrument capable of that burden was worth its weight in brass and then some .

The two band mates warmed up without another word, their first sounds of the night burdened with talk of death—and worse—women.

When the second vision came, during his improvisational solo at the end of Count Basie’s
Shout and Feel It
, Jon took Mongo’s advice:
no sense fightin’ it, sent to help you find your way
. Jon remained sure-of-fingers, in the moment and ready for where it took him.

It was dusk. Yellow paper lanterns lit the sprawling live oaks like overgrown fireflies. Beneath the tree canopy, a jam session. This time, the musicians were older, the years evident in the folds and spots of their skin. The air was close, like an almost-kiss that never comes and leaves nothing but restlessness. Cool grass blades wiggled between Jon’s toes, though he knew he wasn’t there—he was in boots, in The Lotus. But, oh, the jubilation. In that alone—children laughing to insanity, the driving, unscripted high of the same but different tune, the sweat
of iced drinks and dancing lovers, the celebration of—
what?
he couldn’t quite say, and the voice of a small girl over the crowd as the song ended saying, “Play it, Sam!”—in that jubilation of family and friends, Jon was there.

And he nearly wept. For it turned him inside out as he played, exposed and vulnerable, but in the flash, joy was his for the taking. He siphoned every last drop into his hands and through his instrument because happiness was nothing if not a fleeting myth.

Jon coasted the remainder of the song, giving the clarinetist the melodic support to have his way with the song’s end. His muscles, drained from the after burn of something so powerful, so surreal, barely supported his bones, and he leaned against the piano for support. He grieved for the fantasy place in the trees, wanting to exist there indefinitely, where family and support and the warmth of others trumped all.

The song ended abruptly, almost too abruptly, Jon skidded the tune to an unceremonious ending with a playfully slurred note that made the house erupt in laughter. And the darkness that had settled in his chest subsided as The Lotus patrons gave the
Seems Like Old Times
band a standing ovation.

Sweat drizzled past his eyelids. He blinked it all away, the glare from the stage lights, the glimpse of Gabe behind the bar, hand to his lips in a shrieking whistle, Dezi’s slow, reluctant clap and appraisal of a room on a tide of grins that could only translate to cash. Mongo, standing with great effort, his hand extended as if to say
him, all him.
Jon blinked all of it away but the one thing he had waited three nights to see again. Near a neon saxophone sign at the back, a familiar face.

Elli.

She wore a mint-colored shorts-suit that hugged every curve of her slight frame. Were he able to follow it past the eclipsing crowd to her calves—probably to heels that brought forever to mind—he was certain he would lose the strength in his knees to stand. Her arms were crossed, her generous lips straight and unemotional. She was the only one in the room not applauding.

Jon stood, nodding toward the most vocal of the audience then placed his free hand over his heart and bowed to his band to say
you, all you
. He turned back toward the neon saxophone.

Elli was gone.

He shouldn’t care. She was after all a woman. Capable of floating a man’s dreams face-down in Lake Michigan, and she was after all the person who thought him most undeserving of her father’s instrument. Fire spread along his veins at the thought that he shouldn’t care what she thought, but
damn it all
, he did care.

Jon assisted a plump singer with pipes that harkened back to Ella Fitzgerald and legs that moved like tree trunks —Darla something— onto the stage for a subdued, intimate number with Mongo and the string bassist. Jon worried that in the time he had taken to secure his trumpet, set up the singers mic and meander through a crowd of congratulatory handshakes and the occasional clap on the back Eli could have made it halfway to Baton Rouge.

He charged out the door, around the club’s sidewalk tables and over the fancy iron barrier to Dauphine Street. The street afforded little relief from the crowd. Jon wiped his thin, cotton sleeve across his face and scaled the base of a fancy torch lamp to afford him a better view. He zeroed in on hip-hugging mint shorts, heels and a walk bold enough to secure the crown of Miss Pissed-Off Pageant.

Jon bolted through drunk tourists with blinding camera flashes, a few panhandlers trying to make a quick buck off sympathetic deep pockets and crippling Saturday night traffic until he caught up to her enough to call out.

“Elli!”

She hesitated then turned, at eye contact she resumed her frenzied pace.

“We had a magical night together Elli.” Jon amped up the volume so every pedestrian within a two-block radius heard the commotion. “You can’t pretend you don’t know me.”

Elli stopped short. She glanced sheepishly around at the crowd, who seemed to have come down on the forever kind of commitment side. The hand she had casually hooked onto her purse strap dropped to an exasperated
what?
stance.

“Subtle,” she clipped.

An unforgiving passer-by nudged her. Elli stumbled.

Jon extended a hand to steady her. The touch was a pure and unhinged charge to his libido. Her soft, cool to the night air skin reminded him of the first few touches to his trumpet’s valves—a coming home. He recoiled his hand.

“It
was
magical, was it not?”

“The part where you were an arrogant ass? Positively enchanting.”

Her eyes burned under arched brows, her long hair as straight and silky-brown as a musical staff.

“Why did you come?” charged Jon.

“I like jazz.”

“A hundred clubs down here have jazz. Try again.”

“You have my father’s instrument. I want it back.”

She was neither pointed nor forceful with the demand, as if she didn’t really believe it herself. The crowd poured around them, squeezing them closer. Blood pulsed against his eardrums—from the noise, from a heart that sprinted now in far more dangerous directions.

“Better,” said Jon, taking another step toward her, “but it won’t happen.”

Elli backed up toward the white-washed brick front of a coffee shop. Her chest rose and fell with labored breath, but her eyelids were relaxed. No fear.

“You’re a miserable human being, you know that?”

Jon followed, step for step, until she had nowhere to go. He washed in her assessment, tried it on like a new suit. It fit, as surely as any persona he had sampled since he checked out of his life. Her truth ruled him, made him want to own it, wear it proudly. Heat raced to his core, his arousal so immediate, so intense it fueled him past a thin thread of warning in his brain. If she was going to accuse him of being miserable, he would become it.

She licked her bottom lip, as if she too knew the next beat. Her mouth glistened baby pink in the neon glow and everything fell into place, the wetness, the standing in a dark street...

Jon kissed her. Hard.

The scorching eagerness in her exhale was undeniable. She might have slipped away beneath the hand he had used to stabilize his crumbling balance against the brick. She might have bit his lip or kneed his testicles to his skull, but she didn’t. In the span of time it took his synapses to jump from kiss to wrinkled sheets and moans, she was there, a jumble of answering passion,  parted lips and roaming fingertips.

No longer enough, his tongue sampled the sweetness beyond her lipstick. But what was his surest bliss in this godforsaken swamp was her epiphany. She broke the kiss and smacked him across the cheek.

The sting, made all the more pleasant by another, harder smack to the same spot, rendered them both mute until a drunk woman with a red plastic cup bumped Jon from behind. Warm beer soaked his sleeve. He nodded off the sloppy apology, incensed more that the distraction gave Elli a chance to slip free than from the beer shower.

“That man on stage—that man you are when you make that instrument cry?
That’s
the man I want to kiss. This guy?” Her gaze slipped low, her pitch lower. “This guy is pathetic.”

Ellington Leroux smoothed her beautiful hair from where it had snagged the brick and wiped a delicate fingertip along her lip to remove all evidence of his kiss as she might have a pesky beignet crumble. Her cayenne stare charred his ego. She entered the moving throng of jazz fanatics and disappeared.

Jon should have known. Pageant girls don’t go down dark alleys with men who have only to prove women are a brutal distraction. That surest bliss had just become his most passionate vow.

Never again would he allow the strange power of a woman—especially
that
woman—to penetrate his carefully-constructed nest of self-preservation.

                                                                    ****

Upper Bourbon Street, New Orleans is nothing if not bat-shit juju, as Gabe put it. Every shop window displayed something more shocking than the last, crude dolls crucified with stick pins, Ouija boards, Tarot cards, symbolic jewelry promising every possible method to circumvent the natural laws of life and skulls of every species under the sun . Incense cloyed the tightly-clustered fortune houses, trapped by balconies with dream catchers and women with angry stares and angrier dresses hanging off them.

Jon tightened his grip on his trumpet case and entered Madame Troussaint’s All-Seeing Lounge. Enormous crystals lined the entrance like a path in some dysfunctional Grimm’s fairy tale. Hanging beads smacked him in the face along with the muted stench of patchouli and incense, and something else, boiled sausage.. or the flesh of a gullible Yankee? A display of shrunken heads in the corner did nothing to ease the grievance of his stomach.

“Help you?” came a throaty, kick-your-spiritual-ass kind of female voice behind him.

The case handle slipped against Jon’s sweaty palm. He saddled it against his thigh to keep it from tumbling down and joining the crystals.

Before him stood a...well -  something-gendered version of what would pass for a reveler in Rio. Jon would have bet his nicely-padded 401K that this Madame was a guy, but the last place he wanted his gaze to venture was the surest spot to confirm or deny the fact. Jon hesitated, unable to figure out a way to explain his appearance at the Lounge and considered for a moment using the restroom as an excuse. He swallowed the paltry amount of saliva that remained on his tongue and said, “I’m looking for someone who can hold my instrument.”