Tiger Rag (28 page)

Devon poured her a glass. “You want to talk about it?”

“Not now. Please.” She spotted Dr. Park’s card beside the lamp. “Karen?”

“She came by. You were lights-out so fast, I wanted her to check your blood pressure, your heart. I’m not a doctor.”

“Oh god.”

“It wasn’t cool.”

“I said I was sorry.” She sat up. “I’m fine now.”

“You’re not fine.”

“I am a doctor. You think I’m not aware of my condition?”

“What condition is that?”

“Please.”

“You can’t keep going like this.”

“Devon, come here.” Ruby embraced her. “Thank you for watching out for me. Why don’t you send for some food? A sandwich would be nice. And coffee.”

Ruby took a cold shower. Her head was aching. Her tongue felt numb. She had no idea how she had gotten a bruise on her hip the size of a plum. Accustomed to Florida humidity, her skin was dry from these overheated rooms. She rubbed cream onto her hands and face. She strained to focus her thoughts. Remembering her speech was like watching a film clip that
skipped frames, with no continuity and huge gaps. Under other circumstances, it might have been funny that she couldn’t remember what she had said about memory loss.

She put on a bathrobe and combed her hair. She didn’t want to look in the mirror. It wasn’t just that she appeared tired and ragged: there was a vacancy in her eyes that she couldn’t ignore so easily now.

Twenty years of professional integrity out the window in twenty minutes, she thought, burying her face in her hands. Who among her colleagues would hear her name now without mentally penciling
crazy
beside it? In Miami, when she had felt herself losing control, unable to steer a straight line, she tried to convince herself she was in fact adopting a more demanding sort of control that required you to negotiate zigzags, loop-the-loops, and curlicues previously unimaginable. A psychiatrist friend at a dinner party had once told her that some patients simultaneously attempt to conceal and announce the onset of madness—itself an act of madness. He had likened it to a construction crew’s unfurling one of those cosmetic trompe l’oeil banners down the side of a building: the pictorial representation made the building appear vividly intact even as it concealed demolitionists gutting the actual structure.

Devon ordered up a pot of coffee, three egg salad sandwiches, a plate of cookies, a glass of lemon juice, and some cayenne pepper, which she sprinkled into the juice.

When Ruby joined her on the sofa, Devon handed her the juice.

“What’s this?”

“Just drink it.”

“Whoa.”

“All of it.”

“Cayenne?”

“Uh-huh. I know something about hangovers.”

The pepper went down Ruby’s throat like fire. Then she surprised Devon, picking up a sandwich without a word and taking a healthy bite. When the sandwich was gone, she started in on another one.

“I was hungrier than I thought,” she said.

Devon started pouring her coffee, but Ruby stopped her. “I need more sleep. I’m already tired again.”

“Good.”

“You know,” Ruby said, “I always wanted to believe something my grandmother told me. She was a businesswoman, pragmatic, not formally educated, not given to big pronouncements. She waved a finger at me and said: ‘If your life is a story that begins when you’re born and ends when you die—and what else could it be?—you can write it yourself, or let other people write it. If you write it, you have to accept that sometimes something outside of you, that you can’t explain, will push the pen this way or that, and suddenly your story becomes someone else’s story—a person you love, or hate, or haven’t even met—and all you can hope is that eventually you take it back and get to finish it the way you like.’ ”

“Do you believe that?”

“I do now,” Ruby replied softly. “I just want it to be my story again. Not your father’s, not my father’s or mother’s, not anybody else’s.” She stood up and headed for her bedroom. “Please don’t wake me.”

It was 8:00
P.M
. on Thursday night. Ruby would sleep through to 1:00
P.M
. on Friday afternoon, seventeen hours straight, twenty-three hours out of twenty-four. Longer than she had slept during the two previous weeks combined.

Even so, Devon couldn’t let go of something Dr. Park had told her.

“Your mother ought to be put in the hospital, Devon.”

Devon was taken aback by her bluntness, but not by the suggestion itself. “That could really push her over the top.”

“She is over the top. This isn’t something you just sleep off. At least let me give you the name of a friend in Miami, a doctor your mother would trust. She’s going to need to see someone. If you want me to tell her this, I will.”

“No, you can give me the name.”

Devon didn’t mention any of this to Ruby. She thought that what had happened at the conference was the end of something, not the beginning. If that wasn’t the case, if Ruby doubled down on her denial and attempted to pick up where she’d left off, Devon would take Dr. Park’s advice.

Devon traveled up the West Side Highway in an overheated taxi. It was slow going. The snow had finally tapered off, but twenty-six inches had fallen on the city. Some drifts were ten feet high. The plows and salters were out in force now, but even the parkway, one rutted lane in either direction, was thick with ice. The road divider was buried. The exit ramp at Seventy-ninth Street was blocked by abandoned cars. The high-rise windows overlooking the Hudson were intensely bright, as if, through the frigid air, those thousands of rooms blazed with fire, not lamplight. The temperature had dropped to 10 degrees. Chunks of ice were sailing down the river. Some were large, like mini-icebergs, shot through with sapphire light. Devon wondered how long they would remain intact when they were swept out to sea.

The taxi pulled up before a tall, well-kept building by the park. The bare trees in front were festooned with Christmas
lights. The lobby was decorated with a fully trimmed evergreen, wreaths, and potted poinsettias. There was a basket of candy canes on the doorman’s desk. Devon stepped into the elevator and was whisked to the twelfth floor. A maid in a pale blue dress ushered her into a spacious apartment. The ceilings were high and the darkness deep down the two hallways off the foyer. The scent of incense wafted from a distant room. Devon was careful not to step on the nightingales in the mosaic tiles. The maid took her coat and led her into the living room. The lighting was dim, but the fireplace was alive with flames.

“Mrs. LeMond will be with you in a moment.”

Devon had been thinking so much about this apartment that she felt as if she had been there before. The oil portrait over the mantelpiece closely matched the image she had conjured of Sammy LeMond: a handsome man in a white suit, with a trumpet under his arm, a white carnation in his lapel, and a wry smile beneath a carefully trimmed mustache. Many of his possessions remained in place after all those years: the white grand piano, a set of tropical landscapes with flame trees and toucans, the African masks on the opposite wall that stared back at her.

Barely audible above the crackling logs, a woman said “Hello” from a doorway across the room. Tall and erect, she walked out of the shadows toward Devon with a silent tread, her green dress barely rustling. When she stepped fully into the light, what struck Devon was the unlined face and sharp eyes of a woman who, even with her long white hair, could be mistaken for fifty rather than seventy. More startling was how closely she resembled Adele, at Algiers, who could have been her daughter.

She extended her hand and looked Devon in the eye, not
unfriendly but wary. “Joan Neptune.” Nodding toward the sofa, she sat down across from it.

“Thank you for inviting me,” Devon said.

“May I offer you something?”

“No, thanks.” Devon couldn’t help staring at her eyes, a deep amber that caught flashes of orange from the fireplace.

“Then we’ll get right to it,” she said, crossing her legs, revealing a pair of gold slippers embroidered with stars. “You’ve been speaking with Emmett Browne.”

“How—”

“Please. You mentioned something to the manager of my club that only Browne could have told you, about a letter in which Leonard Bechet says he gave my husband an Edison cylinder.”

Devon panicked. “Is there no such letter?”

“There’s a letter, all right, but Emmett Browne, the man who purchased it, has never made it public. And this isn’t the first time he’s tried something underhanded.”

Devon knew she had to come clean. “Yes, he did tell me about it.”

“Do you work for him?”

“No.”

“Did he pay you?”

“No, it’s nothing like that.”

“What is it like, then? The truth, please.”

“I have been a jazz pianist and a music critic. I am going to write about Buddy Bolden. Browne had sent my grandmother a letter saying there was a matter he wanted to discuss. She died this month and they never spoke. But I met him yesterday and heard about the Bolden cylinder for the first time.”

“Why did he write to your grandmother?”

Devon hesitated. “I’m ashamed to tell you. My grandfather was Valentine Owen.”

Joan Neptune sat back slowly and looked hard at Devon. After what seemed like an eternity, she stood up and said, “Come with me.”

She led her, not to the front door, but farther into the recesses of the apartment, down a long hallway to a locked door. She opened a music box on a nearby shelf and took out a key. She unlocked the door and pushed it open. It was a double door, padded on the inside. The room within was pitch-dark and the air musty, as if it was rarely breathed. Joan Neptune threw a switch and three rows of track lights came on, blinding Devon before she realized she was standing in Sammy LeMond’s recording studio. Nothing had been changed since his death. The large room was a time capsule of 1970s technology: the recording console, synthesizers, wall speakers, hanging microphones, reel-to-reel tape recorders, and bulky amplifiers. Even the coffeemaker and refrigerator in the kitchenette. There was a Ludwig drum kit with yellowed skins and a Hammond organ beside an electric piano. Only the various brass instruments, a clarinet in an open case, and a standup bass were timeless. A plaid sport jacket was draped over a chair by the bass. A Stetson rested on the floor tom-tom. There was a pack of L&Ms on a music stand and a pair of black wraparounds on the console. At the center of the recording area, partitioned by corkboard panels, a trumpet sat on a stool atop a sheaf of sheet music. This had obviously been a place of high energy, of ferment. It saddened Devon, for just then the room could not have been more silent or still. The fact it was filled with objects, musical and personal, only made it feel that much emptier. When she looked at the instruments and half-closed her eyes,
she could imagine, could almost hear, the music they would have produced. But she also felt the bottomless silence of the decades in which the studio had lain dormant.

“I have something for you,” Joan Neptune said.

Devon was surprised. The cylinder? she thought.

“I’ve waited years to give it to the right person, never knowing if he or she would come along. But now you’re here.”

She went over to a chair against the wall, beneath which was another trumpet. A Selmer trumpet, Devon noted with horror, as Joan Neptune picked it up and handed it to her.

“Recognize it?” she said coldly. “That’s your grandfather’s. He left it here when he stole the cylinder from my husband. It’s yours now.”

Devon recoiled, shaking her head. “I don’t want it.”

“No?”

Devon’s anger was welling up in her. “My grandfather died before I was born. I’m ashamed of what he did. But I want no part of it. I made a mistake coming here.”

Joan Neptune studied her closely. “I’ll show you out.”

Devon felt sick to her stomach as they walked to the foyer. The maid had left her coat on a chair. Joan Neptune opened the door, then paused. Her voice remained calm. “On which side was Valentine Owen your grandfather?”

“My mother’s.”

“Her maiden name was Owen?”

“Cardillo. She didn’t want his name.”

“Cardillo. So that was your grandmother’s last name?”

“No, her last name was Broussard,” Devon replied, stepping outside. She couldn’t bear to be interrogated another moment. “I’m sorry for everything. I won’t bother you again.”

All the way down the corridor Devon felt Joan Neptune’s
eyes on her. Only when she reached the elevator did she hear the door to the apartment close.

Joan Neptune crossed her living room and looked out over the park. The clouds were low and flat, slate gray. The wind was so cold she could feel it through the double panes. She poured herself a white rum, neat, and sat down by the fire, beneath the portrait of her husband. As she’d grown older, she slept less—five hours at most, broken up. She knew that night she wouldn’t sleep at all. The maid asked if she needed anything else, then left. As soon as she heard the front door close, Joan Neptune set down her drink and cried, harder than she had in years, since she had stopped crying for Sammy.