Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall (13 page)

We said our hellos, then for a time we just sat there side by side, not speaking. This didn’t seem so odd at first, partly because I was still getting my breath back, and partly because of the view. There was more haze and cloud than the previous day, but if you concentrated, you could still see beyond the Welsh borders to the Black Mountains. The breeze was quite strong, but not uncomfortable.

“So where’s Tilo?” I asked in the end.

“Tilo? Oh …” She put her hand up to shield her eyes. Then she pointed. “There. You see? Over there. That is Tilo.”

Some way in the distance, I could see a figure, in what might have been a green T-shirt and a white sun cap, moving along the rising path towards Worcestershire Beacon.

“Tilo wished to go for a walk,” she said.

“You didn’t want to go with him?”

“No. I decided to stay here.”

While she wasn’t by any means the irate customer from the cafe, neither was she quite the same person who’d been so warm and encouraging to me the day before. There was definitely something up, and I started preparing my defence about Hag Fraser’s.

“By the way,” I said, “I’ve been working a bit more on that song. You can hear it if you like.”

She gave this consideration, then said: “If you do not mind, perhaps not just at this minute. You see, Tilo and I have just had a talk. You might call it a disagreement.”

“Oh okay. Sorry to hear that.”

“And now he has gone off for his walk.”

Again, we sat there not talking. Then I sighed and said: “I think maybe this is all my fault.”

She turned to look at me. “Your fault? Why do you say that?”

“The reason you’ve quarrelled, the reason your holiday’s all messed up now. It’s my fault. It’s that hotel, isn’t it? It wasn’t very good, right?”

“The hotel?” She seemed puzzled. “That hotel. Well, it has some weak points. But it is a hotel, like many others.”

“But you noticed, right? You noticed all the weak points. You must have done.”

She seemed to think this over, then nodded. “It is true, I noticed the weak points. Tilo, however, did not. Tilo, of course, thought the hotel was splendid. We are so lucky, he kept saying. So lucky to find such a hotel. Then this morning we have our breakfast. For Tilo, this is a fine breakfast, the best breakfast ever. I say, Tilo, don’t be stupid. This is not a good breakfast. This is not a good hotel. He says, no, no, we are so very lucky. So I become angry. I tell the proprietress everything that is wrong. Tilo leads me away. Let’s go for a walk, he says. You will feel better then. So we come out here. And he says, Sonja, look at these hills, aren’t they so beautiful? Aren’t we fortunate to come to such a place as this for our vacation? These hills, he says, are even more wonderful than he imagined them when we listen to Elgar. He asks me, isn’t this so? Perhaps I become angry again. I tell him, these hills are not so wonderful. It is not how I imagine them when I hear Elgar’s music. Elgar’s hills are majestic and mysterious. Here, this is just like a park. This is what I say to him, and then it is his turn to be cross. He says in that case, he will walk by himself. He says we are finished, we never agree on anything now. Yes, he says, Sonja, you and me, we are finished. And off he goes! So there you are. That is why he is up there and I am down here.” She shielded her eyes again and watched Tilo’s progress.

“I’m really sorry,” I said. “If only I hadn’t sent you to that hotel in the first place …”

“Please. The hotel is not important.” She leaned forward to get a better view of Tilo. Then she turned to me and smiled, and I thought maybe there were little tears in her eyes. “Tell me,” she said. “Today, you mean to write more songs?”

“That’s the plan. Or at least, I want to finish the one I’ve been working on. The one you heard yesterday.”

“That was beautiful. And what will you do then, once you have finished writing your songs here? You have a plan?”

“I’ll go back to London and form a band. These songs need just the right band or they won’t work.”

“How exciting. I do wish you luck.”

After a moment, I said, quite quietly: “Then again, I may not bother. It’s not so easy, you know.”

She didn’t reply, and it occurred to me she hadn’t heard, because she’d turned away again, to look towards Tilo.

“You know,” she said eventually, “when I was younger, nothing could make me angry. But now I get angry at many things. I don’t know how I have become this way. It is not good. Well, I do not think Tilo is coming back here. I will return to the hotel and wait for him.” She got to her feet, her gaze still fixed on his distant figure.

“It’s a shame,” I said, also getting up, “you having a row on your holiday. And yesterday, when I was playing to you, you seemed so happy together.”

“Yes, that was a good moment. Thank you for that.” Suddenly, she held out her hand to me, smiling warmly. “It has been so nice to meet you.”

We shook hands, in the slightly limp way you do with women. She started to walk away, then stopped and looked at me.

“If Tilo were here,” she said, “he would say to you, never be discouraged. He would say, of course, you must go to London and try and form your band. Of course you will be successful. That is what Tilo would say to you. Because that is his way.”

“And what would
you
say?”

“I would like to say the same. Because you are young and talented. But I am not so certain. As it is, life will bring enough disappointments. If on top, you have such dreams as this …” She smiled again and shrugged. “But I should not say these things. I am not a good example to you. Besides, I can see you are much more like Tilo. If disappointments do come, you will carry on still. You will say, just as he does, I am so lucky.” For a few seconds, she went on gazing at me, like she was memorising the way I looked. The breeze was blowing her hair about, making her seem older than she usually did. “I wish you much luck,” she said finally.

“Good luck yourself,” I said. “And I hope you two make it up okay.”

She waved a last time, then went off down the path out of my view.

I took the guitar from its case and sat back on the bench. I didn’t play anything for a while though, because I was looking into the distance, towards Worcestershire Beacon, and Tilo’s tiny figure up on the incline. Maybe it was to do with the way the sun was hitting that part of the hill, but I could see him much more clearly now than before, even though he’d got further away. He’d paused for a moment on the path, and seemed to be looking about him at the surrounding hills, almost like he was trying to reappraise them. Then his figure started to move again.

I worked on my song for a few minutes, but kept losing concentration, mainly because I was thinking about the way Hag Fraser’s face must have looked as Sonja laid into her that morning. Then I gazed at the clouds, and at the sweep of land below me, and I made myself think again about my song, and the bridge passage I still hadn’t got right.

U
NTIL TWO DAYS AGO
, Lindy Gardner was my next-door neighbour. Okay, you’re thinking, if Lindy Gardner was my neighbour, that probably means I live in Beverly Hills; a movie producer, maybe, or an actor or a musician. Well, I’m a musician all right. But though I’ve played behind one or two performers you’ll have heard of, I’m not what you’d call big-league. My manager, Bradley Stevenson, who in his way has been a good friend over the years, maintains I have it in me to be big-league. Not just big-league session player, but big-league headliner. It’s not true saxophonists don’t become headliners any more, he says, and repeats his list of names. Marcus Lightfoot. Silvio Tarrentini. They’re all jazz players, I point out. “What are you, if you’re not a jazz player?” he says. But only in my innermost dreams am I still a jazz player. In the real world—when I don’t have my face entirely wrapped in bandages the way I do now—I’m just a jobbing tenor man, in reasonable demand for studio work, or when a band’s lost their regular guy. If it’s pop they want, it’s pop I play. R&B? Fine. Car commercials, the walk-on theme for a talk show, I’ll do it. I’m a jazz player these days only when I’m inside my cubicle.

I’d prefer to play in my living room, but our apartment’s so cheaply made the neighbours would start complaining all the way down the hall. So what I’ve done is convert our smallest room into a rehearsal room. It’s no more than a closet really—you can get an office chair in there and that’s it—but I’ve sound-proofed it with foam and egg-trays and old padded envelopes my manager Bradley sent round from his office. Helen, my wife, when she used to live with me, she’d see me going in there with my sax and she’d laugh and say it was like I was going to the toilet, and sometimes that’s how it felt. That’s to say, it was like I was sitting in that dim, airless cubicle taking care of personal business no one else would ever care to come across.

You’ve guessed by now Lindy Gardner never lived next to this apartment I’m talking about. Neither was she one of the neighbors who banged the door whenever I played outside the cubicle. When I said she was my neighbour, I meant something else, and I’m going to explain this right now.

Until two days ago, Lindy was in the next room here at this swanky hotel, and like me, had her face encased in bandages. Lindy, of course, has a big comfortable house nearby, and hired help, so Dr. Boris let her go home. In fact, from a strictly medical viewpoint, she could probably have gone much sooner, but there were clearly other factors. For one, it wouldn’t be so easy for her to hide from cameras and gossip columnists back in her own house. What’s more, my hunch is Dr. Boris’s stellar reputation is based on procedures that aren’t one hundred per cent legal, and that’s why he hides his patients up here on this hush-hush floor of the hotel, cut off from all regular staff and guests, with instructions to leave our rooms only when absolutely necessary. If you could see past all the crêpe, you’d spot more stars up here in a week than in a month at the Chateau Marmont.

So how does someone like me get to be here among these stars and millionaires, having my face altered by the top man in town? I guess it started with my manager, Bradley, who isn’t so big-league himself, and doesn’t look any more like George Clooney than I do. He first mentioned it a few years ago, in a jokey sort of way, then seemed to get more serious each time he brought it up again. What he was saying, in a nutshell, was that I was ugly. And that this was what was keeping me from the big league.

“Look at Marcus Lightfoot,” he said. “Look at Kris Bugoski. Or Tarrentini. Do any of them have a signature sound the way you do? No. Do they have your tenderness? Your vision? Do they have even half your technique? No. But they look right, so doors keep opening for them.”

“What about Billy Fogel?” I said. “He’s ugly as hell and he’s doing fine.”

“Billy’s ugly all right. But he’s sexy, bad guy ugly. You, Steve, you’re … Well, you’re dull, loser ugly. The wrong kind of ugly. Listen, have you ever considered having a little work done? Of a surgical nature, I mean?”

I went home and repeated this all to Helen because I thought she’d find it as funny as I did. And at first, sure enough, we had a lot of laughs at Bradley’s expense. Then Helen came over, put her arms around me and told me that for her at least, I was the most handsome guy in the universe. Then she kind of took a step back and went quiet, and when I asked her what was wrong, she said nothing was wrong. Then she said that perhaps, just perhaps, Bradley had a point. Maybe I
should
consider having a little work done.

“No need to look at me like that!” she yelled back. “Everyone’s doing it. And you, you have a
professional
reason. Guy wants to be a fancy chauffeur, he goes and buys a fancy car. It’s no different with you!”

But at that stage I gave the idea no further thought, even if I was beginning to accept this notion that I was “loser ugly.” For one thing, I didn’t have the money. In fact, the very moment Helen was talking about fancy chauffeurs, we were nine and a half thousand dollars in debt. This was characteristic of Helen. A fine person in many ways, but this ability to forget completely the true state of our finances and start dreaming up major new spending opportunities, this was very Helen.

Money aside, I didn’t like the idea of someone cutting me up. I’m not so good with that kind of thing. One time, early in my relationship with Helen, she invited me to go running with her. It was a crisp winter’s morning, and I’ve never been much of a jogger, but I was taken by her and anxious to impress. So there we were running around the park, and I was doing fine keeping up with her, when suddenly my shoe hit something very hard jutting out of the ground. I could feel a pain in my foot, which wasn’t so bad, but when I took off my sneaker and sock, and saw the nail on my big toe rearing up from the flesh like it was doing a Hitler-style salute, I got nauseous and fainted. That’s the way I am. So you can see, I wasn’t wild about face surgery.

Then, naturally, there was the principle of the thing. Okay, I’ve told you before, I’m no stickler for artistic integrity. I play every kind of bubble-gum for the pay. But this proposition was of another order, and I did have some pride left. Bradley was right about one thing: I was twice as talented as most other people in this town. But it seemed that didn’t count for much these days. Because it has to do with image, marketability, being in magazines and on TV shows, about parties and who you ate lunch with. It all made me sick. I was a musician, why should I have to join in this game? Why couldn’t I just play my music the best way I knew, and keep getting better, if only in my cubicle, and maybe some day, just maybe, genuine music lovers would hear me and appreciate what I was doing. What did I want with a plastic surgeon?

At first Helen seemed to see it my way, and the topic didn’t come up again for some time. That is, not until she phoned from Seattle to say she was leaving me and moving in with Chris Prendergast, a guy she’d known since high school and who now owned a string of successful diners across Washington. I’d met this Prendergast a few times over the years—he’d even come to dinner once—but I’d never suspected a thing. “All that sound-proofing in that cupboard of yours,” Bradley said at the time. “It works both ways.” I suppose he had a point.