A Little Night Music (9 page)

The risk, it seemed, was greater than the bliss he had found with Elli.

He studied her face and gently brushed aside a lock of hair that had become trapped in her eyelashes in slumber. He wondered how his story would play out in the Leroux family archives—the one where a white guy from Chicago who could play Dixieland jazz like her father had given her everything inside, but it hadn’t been enough.

His stomach growled, threatened to wake her, so he crawled from bed, dressed and left a note on his pillow.
Gone to get beignets. You’re my finest song, J
. He slipped out onto the hot asphalt, the temperature hitting his face like a fry pan on high, eyes cinched against the brightness, and ran full-body into James.

“Is that any way to greet your partner?”

Jon stumbled backward. The incongruence of James being in New Orleans, of his old life colliding with the newness he had found here, took an extraordinary time to process.

James straightened his starched shirt, embroidered with a pricy logo. His gold framed Ray-bans and sparkling watch made him look like a Madison Avenue asshole.

Is that how I looked?

James removed his sunglasses and gave him the once over. “Let yourself go a little eh?”

Jon felt the breezy lead weight of his gaudy
Sacred Music Festival
shirt emblazoned with fifty colors. What once was a prize at last week’s Super Jam now seemed a liability in convincing James he hadn’t taken a mental tumble off the High Rise.

“How did you find me?” said Jon. The day’s heat burrowed deep against his patience.

“Landlord. Real gem. Told me to go fuck myself the last time I left you a message. I assume you never got it?”

Jon’s stomach growled again. He walked toward the Bon Moment Bakery, James trailing beside him. “I stopped reading them. Used them to get bird shit off the fire escape.”

“Jesus Jon. I knew it was bad. But this?”

Jon halted his breakneck pace. “This what? You’re telling me you can’t handle a corporation we started together for three goddamned weeks without me?”

“I’m telling you you’re out. As of tomorrow, nine am, if you don’t get your ass back in that boardroom and pretend you didn’t let some broad get in the way of the company.”

James put his sunglasses back on.  Jon’s wild hair and unshaven face in reflection, so unlike the man who deserved to step back into that boardroom as CEO, erased every protest his cerebellum had mounted in the city block their conversation carried them.

“Look, we get it, all right? It’s…unforgivable what Jessica put you through…” James’s tone eased from VP to the guy who had inked his name beside Jon’s in their first lease contract then went out for beers afterward to celebrate, as much as it could ease in the brisk pace he had resumed to keep up with Jon. “But all those people back at J.J. Birch who devoted their lives to
our
dream? They don’t deserve to be left out in the cold because of one selfish bitch. It’s time to return to the real world, man. Make this merger happen. Take care of those people who take care of us.”

Jon crawled back—if only for a moment—into the shell of the man who had boarded that plane in Chicago, knowing nothing of New Orleans or its intoxicating play on the heart. It felt familiar, comfortable—that man still inside him—the man he had become in the fourteen years since his father left. Was he willing to toss it all aside for three weeks? For a woman who could hurt him in the end?

“That’s not all,” James added. “A local journalist wants to interview you. Put a sympathetic spin on it. Thinks your story could get picked up by the national media. Could make J.J. Birch Financial a household name.”

Jon stopped again. “I’m not doing an interview.”

Immediately, Jon sensed James’s negotiation wheels spinning. “Sure, sure, no interview. But the company needs you. We’ve got seven thousand employees who need you. Promise me you’ll think about it.”

“Goodbye James.” Jon opened the bakery doors wide enough for only himself. He entered the sub arctic refrigeration of too much air conditioning as James’s final words fizzled away.

“I’m on the six-ten out this evening.”

Jon stood in line, freezing his nuts off in shorts and a paper-thin shirt even
he
had to admit was ugly. The piped in jazz music set off a spark of annoyance. Didn’t they play anything else down here? And when the perky register girl behind the counter asked, “What’ll it be?” Jon had no answers.

Beyond two beignets and coffee.

Elli slipped into one of Jon’s button-down shirts and crawled out onto the fire escape. Somehow she knew she would wake alone. She sensed it that morning after they made love, he had been the Jon of the night before—attentive, wholly present, joyful. She cursed the daylight as if it had been responsible for bringing back the guy who had stood on the Modesta Garden veranda and all but pushed her into the arms of a man he didn’t know. Problem solved. Prospectus closed.

She unfolded his note and read it three, four more times. A smile teased her lips but it took too many muscles, too much thought.

The apartment door clicked open. Jon entered with a crinkled white Bon Moment bag, a handful of paper napkins and two coffees. He moved around the apartment as if it wasn’t his, setting his keys down in one place before moving them to another. He took too many steps, too much time doing nothing. Elli wondered which Jon he was today.

When he didn’t join her, she slid back through the window. He sat on the corner of the bed, hands that had become hers now closed, food forgotten on the dresser.

A gallows door opened in Elli’s stomach.

“Jon?”

He glanced up as if he was surprised someone else occupied the room. His gaze returned from a thousand miles away to rest on his shirt draped on her body. He attempted a smile, but the drawn shadows around his eyes betrayed him.

“You look amazing,” he said. “
God
…”

She didn’t know what it was about that declaration—
God
—that added so much to so little. Perhaps she was seeking it out. Perhaps it was a disbelieving
Hallelujah
of good fortune. Perhaps it wasn’t at all what it sounded—a how am I going to do this bookmark that drove a wedge between her head and heart.

“What was it about me?” said Jon.

“I don’t understand.”

“Why did you sleep with me?” Jon stood and paced, scratching at his morning stubble with a wide hand across his chin. “After you called me a miserable human being and slapped me and vowed to get my instrument back. Why did you sleep with me?”

“Jon, where is this coming from?”

“I need an answer.”

He had already gone. He was here, pacing a floor on Royal Street in New Orleans, fighting the inevitable, but Elli knew he had already gone. Her face grew hot despite the plunging chill in the room.

“Of course you do. The CEO of a Wall Street company orders answers, he gets answers. Tell me Jon, is that who I slept with last night? Because I lost track three personalities ago.”

“Truth is, I could have been anyone—hell, I could have been the guy I just passed with a tin cup and two teeth—as long as I played
that
instrument.” He pointed at the trumpet case with a stab of contempt.

His words were a broken bow scraped across her chest, leaving her incapable of finding a sound with which to defend herself.

She shook her head.
No-no-no.

But he refused to back down. He ground out his solo until the wound grew deeper with each pass. “I can’t begin to explain the trumpet—why it gives me things I never asked for, but it’s a way back to your past you can never bring yourself to leave. It’s too bad you never learned to play. You wouldn’t need to use someone to get to your father.”

Elli’s blood rolled to full boil. She grabbed the beignet sack and hummed it at Jon’s head.

The bag crumpled against the door beyond him.  A powdered-sugar bomb exploded out the open end and snowed to his feet.

They both stared at the deep-fried carnage. Neither of them moved nor breathed nor did anything to indicate the path from here. Curtains at the window lifted on a breeze. A horn honked three stories below. Somewhere, new love blossomed like Elli’s favorite white moonflowers in her mother’s garden. But not here, not this time.

Elli dressed. Jon packed his suitcase. Silence prevailed but for a few heel clicks, a few closing zippers. Elli lowered herself to the bed when there was no longer an excuse to stay.

“I slept with you because I thought you deserved to be happy.”

Her voice was a quiet spark to the charged air—all that was needed to ignite the departure of a man suspended in the static between two lives.

“I guess I was wrong.”

“Someday I’ll be one of your stories. Make sure the ending is clear. Elli Leroux deserved someone whole. Someone who knew who he was, like your father. Someone who believed in comets and risked everything for love. I’m not him. I never will be.”

Had her skin not held her together, Elli would have been a puddle on the floor, stomped on by the leaving, by the mention of her father and her unquenchable grief, by the aloneness that would settle her bones, by the anger she couldn’t give words to because she had known. She had known he would return to his other life, yet she gave him her heart. No guarantees—wasn’t that what he said?

At the door, Jon paused, suitcase in hand. He tried to say something, but the words stalled somewhere inside.

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

Elli’s voice was not her own. It was cold, distant.

Between them lay the trumpet in its case.

“Keep it. It’s what you wanted.”

Jon left, his polished shoes clipping away, away, away, down the hall. She heard the pause, the hesitation at the top of the stairs before the cacophony of footfalls retreated to a door far below.

Elli crawled to the trumpet, her mother’s words as fresh as the day she uttered them—
Never again child. No one plays it. Ever.
Elli’s wails were not her mother’s—the kind that rattled shutters and carved out the heart of anyone who heard its strain. Elli’s tears came without sound, silence, the cruelest song of all.

Seven

Elli stood near Jackson Square, trumpet case in hand. A jet-lagged fog hovered between her ears, but this couldn’t wait.

She had to know.

The idea came to her one afternoon, sometime between overseeing the contractor in Honduras nail shingles to the roof and a little boy asking her to play one of the donated instruments. She explained through her Spanish interpreter that she had been content to listen to her father play—that he was a great man, a great musician who taught many people. The boy simply said, “He still teach, just not here.”

It had been a month since Jon left to reclaim his
other
life. She saw a piece about him on a layover in the Houston airport—an interview with a national news station. The volume had been down so she hadn’t heard what he said. It didn’t matter. He had found his way back. To himself, to the life a woman had taken from him. Wasn’t that what he wanted?

Her grip on the case’s handle shifted. If she closed her eyes and allowed her mind to drift she could almost feel Jon’s hand in hers. She wondered if it was a little of Issa’s magic at work.

“Ellington?”

Elli turned to see Cedric walking toward her. The air was cooler now. He wore a suit. Fresh from the law firm, impeccably dressed, nothing like the boy her father made her swear she would never marry. “That boy ain’t your comet,” he would say.

“Cedric,” Elli greeted him with a warm kiss to both cheeks. “Thanks for coming. How are you?”

“Not as good as you I hear. Rumor has it the school is open for business.”

“That it is.” The sense of accomplishment that had filled the emptiness after Jon left buoyed to the surface. Her only regret was that its prime contributor was unable to see the joy on the faces of the village children who held instruments for the first time and made their first awful, beautiful notes. Happiness may not be a guarantee, but it was a sweet sweet fruit when picked ripe.

“Let’s have that lunch you promised me for coming to your fundraising rescue.”

“First, I need a favor.” Elli motioned him toward an empty bench. At Cedric’s questioning gaze, she sat and opened the case.

“I need you to play this.”

“What?” Cedric sat beside her and pursed his lips together as if he had bitten into a raw crawfish. His nose crinkled in defiance. “You know I stopped playing after two lessons with your father.”

“Just a few notes.” She assembled the instrument as she had seen her father and Jon do a thousand times and nudged it into Cedric’s hand. “For me.”

“Elli, I—”

“Please?”

Cedric wrenched a reluctant gaze from hers and glanced around. Passersby went about their day, oblivious to a test that had the potential of a high magnitude earthquake on Elli’s soul. He licked his lips, gave the mouthpiece several offerings of proper embouchure, none of them the proper positioning Elli knew to be right, but she didn’t care. What came from the bell end was what mattered.