Chapter 25
In the midst of the insanity of the last week, Rai had looked forward to her date with Yazmín as a possible island of calm, but she still arrived late. By the time she ran into at the museum, sweat covered her body and Yazmín was pacing the lobby with a worried look. Rai called to her apologetically.
“You worry me, girl!” Yazmín exploded. “You don’t show up and I dunno what’s up with you. You coulda jumped off the fucking Brooklyn Bridge for all I know.”
Rai restrained the resentful bile that rose in her throat. “I’m sorry. I haven’t exactly been myself recently, y’know.”
“See? That’s why I worry. You sure you’s OK?”
“I’m fine.” Rai noted, condescendingly, that Yazmín’s grammar deteriorated with anger.
“Cool. Since you’s late, you can buy me a ticket. ‘S’only a nickel, so I know it’s not gonna break ya.”
Once Rai had checked her backpack and bought the tickets, Yazmín refused to allow her to go up the escalator, instead dragging her to the right, where they heard quiet jazz chords. “No, come on,” Rai protested. “My life’s tough enough without having to listen to this shit.”
“That’s the thing, ain’t it? It ain’t shit, and you’s gonna learn that right now. While I was waitin’ for you, I looked through all the stuff that’s goin’ on tonight, and this band looks way hot. Double Quartet: half typical jazz, then a string quartet with it. OK, maybe it’ll suck, but more likely you learn somethin’.” They stepped around the corner into the modernist café, jammed with almost two hundred people, most bobbing their heads to the syncopated music.
Yazmín pulled Rai toward the larger tables at the front, where she saw a couple of empty seats. Unexpectedly, no one looked at them as they pushed through the crowd; for the first time, Rai noticed that Yazmín suffered from none of her usual awkwardness or anxiety. The music and her desire to teach had given her a certain grace. She pulled out a stool from under the table and sat lightly on it; Rai tried to do the same, but the metal chair shrieked on the floor, and everyone, including the saxophonist, stared at her. She sat quickly to hide from the gazes.
Between her rush to get to the museum and Yazmín’s angry urgency, memories of the week had no space to intrude. Now, with time to think, she could not, because the music confused her too much. Certainly it had some of the rhythms she expected from jazz, and she heard certain themes return time and time again from different instruments. Yet when the first violinist stood and began to saw away at a melody the trumpeter had just started, Rai had almost no idea what she was hearing. Violins were not supposed to play jazz, and certainly not like this, with violent motions and long curly hair thrown wildly from side to side. The violinist seemed transported into another world, one that Itzak Perlman and Yasha Heifitz had never known. In middle school, Rai had taken a great liking to classical music, at first in order to show her cultural superiority to the denizens of Vanillaville, but later because she actually liked it, and now she wasn’t sure whether to be offended or overjoyed by this explosion of strings.
Finally, with a great burst of vibrato on the G string, the violinist sat down and the crowd applauded politely. Offended that white yuppies could muster no more enthusiasm for this extraordinary performer — though she still had no clue if it was good or not, Rai knew that it was extraordinary — Rai clapped as loudly as she could.
Yazmín looked over and smiled. “Told ya.”
“Amazing,” Rai said under her breath, increasingly convinced that she did, in fact, like the music. “Fucking amazing.”
Yazmín turned back to the musicians, not more that ten feet away from their table, and began to tap her thumb and foot in radically different rhythms. Rai felt her head moving unconsciously and knew that her body mimicked a beat she could never figure out with her brain. Finally, with a slow diminuendo, the band closed the piece.
“Told ya you’d like it.”
“I dunno. It’s fucking weird, but there’s something, y’know? That woman with the violin. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
An old woman sitting next to her turned and nodded at Rai. “I came tonight just to see her, and it is not even her band.” Her voice had an Upper West Side, Yiddish accent that almost creaked. “Not many Jews who can play like that anymore.” She smiled with the sort of nostalgia that Rai generally hated about old people, except that this time she didn’t even notice it.
“She’s Jewish? And she can play like that?”
“Probably from Israel, by her name.” The band had begun to strike up another tune, so the woman just pushed her program toward Rai, then began to move her hands in a complicated rhythm that no old woman should have been able to manage.
Rai picked up the mimeographed sheet. Then, loudly, “Holy shit.”
Yazmín turned to her with her finger to her lips. “Shhh.”
Rai pointed to program and whispered intently, “Yaz. She’s not just Jewish. Look at her last name!”
Yazmín, a bit resentful to have her attention distracted from the music, read the name. “Miri ben-Ari. So?”
“Ben-Ari. That’s my name!”
“Rai: your name is Helen Miller, just in case you forgot.”
“No, my real name. From Algeria. It was Rachel ben-Ari.”
“Yeah, and there are lotsa people named Rodríguez, but do you see me having a fuckin’ orgasm in the middle of the room?” She turned her back to Rai to watch the musicians, and Rai followed her eyes toward the improvised stage. This piece sounded calmer, and it swung with a more constant beat. Rai almost thought she heard something of North Africa: though she could not have pointed to what it was, the music brought sand before her eyes, great dunes and long lines of Bedouin traders. Though she wanted to think they were memories from her own past, she knew she had stolen the images from National Geographic. Reverie had overcome her, and now the Berbers and the nomads carried saxophones and violins…
Yazmín shook her shoulder. “Whoa, chica. I wanted ya to like this stuff, but I didn’t mean–”
Rai opened her eyes. The music had stopped and the musicians had left the stage. The audience milled around the café, carrying coffee and wine back to their tables. “Was I asleep?”
“Sittin’ up straight as a dick in a porn flick, but I guess so,” Yazmín laughed. The old Jewish woman barked out something halfway between a laugh and a gasp, then turned to Yazmín, whose face instantly fell. “Sorry ma’am. Sometimes I forget where I am.”
The woman’s eyes twinkled. “We need more colorful language around this place. These concerts… Sometimes they make me feel old.” She gestured around the room, largely filled with people in their fifties and sixties. “It’s not like going to hear Coltrane in the Village back in the ‘50s.” Her face had taken on a nostalgic tint again. Rai began to fidget.
Yazmín, however, was not about to leave. “You saw John Coltrane? Live?” she gasped.
The old woman nodded. “Now that was a handsome man. I took the train all the way down from Washington Heights whenever he played at the Village Vanguard, even though my husband refused to go with me…” Rai stood up, squealing her seat once again, and excused herself to go to the bathroom. As she walked through the crowd, she heard the woman reminiscing about Dave Brubeck.
After she stood in line at the bathroom, Rai did not return to the café, but wandered out into the lobby. She noticed that the theater was showing Casablanca, and though she had never seen it, she knew that it took place in Morocco, and she felt like she needed more North Africa that night, so she asked for two free tickets. She hoped Yazmín would want to see the movie with her. Finally, she took the escalator up the stairs, walked quickly through the galleries, and sat down in front of her favorite Miró. She wondered why she had not noticed it before: the background was the same tint as the Sahara of her dreams.
By the time she finally made it back downstairs, the band had ended its thirty minute break and was preparing to play again. Rai pulled out the chair carefully, wanting to make sure it did not squeak.
“That was a serious pee.” Yazmín raised her eyebrows.
“I wanted to go see the Miró.”
“Cool. It was cool to get to talk with Essie, anyway. Did you know she saw Gilespie’s first…” Yazmín could tell instantly that Rai was not interested in this piece of information, so she turned back to her conversation with the old woman.
Rai could not take her eyes off the violinist. She watched the way she moved, the way she swished her hair, the laugh lines at the corners of her mouth. “So that’s what a real Sephardic woman looks like,” she thought to herself. “That’s how she walks, and how she cocks her head. God, I’m so far away from what I am. I don’t know anything about that; I’m just a little white girl in a body I don’t understand and that I don’t deserve…” The band began to play, interrupting Rai’s internal torment.
During the second set, Rai prohibited herself from falling into the reverie that had possessed her before. Instead, she watched the violinist, imitated her movements, felt her fingers on an imaginary wooden neck. She resolved to speak to her afterwards, to find out if her family had come from Algeria, from what part, why Jews would still have been there in 1982, whether there were other Ben-Aris in the world, whether they might like her.
At the end of the third piece, the band leader came to the front. “I hope you all don’t mind,” he began, confusing the audience. “But a friend of mine is here tonight, and I was hoping you’d let him join in.” Rai wasn’t sure what to make of this, but she took some consolation from the uncertain air in the café. The bandleader didn’t seem put off. “So, without further ado, Winton Marsalis.”
Yazmín fainted onto Rai. At first, Rai thought it was a joke, but then she felt her friend’s dead weight against her chest, so she slapped her face lightly. Yazmín opened her eyes sharply, then shook her head. “He didn’t say that.” Then, as she turned to look at Rai, a dashingly handsome black man with a round face and beautiful suit walked by, carrying a trumpet. “He did say that!” She leapt up and began to clap and scream at the top of her voice, which Rai would have found tremendously embarrassing except for the fact that even the old white people were doing the same thing. Finally, the black man and the bandleader calmed the crowd down and Yazmín sat again, excitement shining from her whole body.
“Who’s Winton Marsalis?”
“Only the best trumpeter ever in the history of the world,” Yazmín sighed.
“Don’t forget Miles…” Essie began, but the band had begun to play, so she fell silent.
Rai thought the new trumpeter was fine, but he stood directly between her and the violinist, so she fidgeted from one side to the other, trying to glimpse her new heroine again. Finally, Yazmín reached back and forced Rai to sit still.
At the end of more two pieces, the audience exploded in a way that white people should not, in Rai’s imagination of the world. Half of them rushed the stage, and through they were only trying to say a word to the trumpeter, they got in the way of Rai’s attempt to find Miri ben-Ari. By the time that she had pushed her way to the front, only the handsome black man stood there; the rest of the band was gone.
Crestfallen, Rai snaked through the thinning crowd to find Yazmín. She and the old woman traded amazed comments, repeating the same, “I don’t believe it!” over and over again, then humming a bit of a melody the trumpeter had played.
At a brief pause, Rai broke in. “I got tickets for the movie at eight,” she told Yazmín.
“Eight? Shit. I got curfew at nine. I’m sorry.” The curfew confused Essie, so Yazmín had to explain about Covenant House and what it was like to be homeless and how she got interested in jazz even though she was living on the street. Rai was equally surprised. When had Yazmín checked herself into Covenant House? And why? Unexpectedly, she fet terrible not to know this detail, betrayed even, so Rai got up, told Yazmín to find her in the Matisse room, and sulked off.
Once again, she felt lonely, even in the bright lights and brilliant colors of post-impressionist France. Her bitterness with Yazmín slowly calmed as she reminded herself that Yazmín had no responsibility to entertain her at every moment. She accused herself of being pathetic, of needing constant, unmerited attention. “You just have to grow up, Helen,” she lectured herself.
Finally, Yazmín arrived and sat down on the floor next to her. She noticed Rai’s slumped shoulders. “God, I didn’t even notice you was so bummed. I’m sorry.”
“No biggie. I’m just a loser for needing people around all the time.”
“Fuck that. We all need people. Especially when life sucks.”
“I shouldn’t. I gotta be stronger than that.”
“It don’t work that way.” Yazmín looked up at the huge canvas of white dancers on a blue background. “Look. At least I can keep ya comp’ny for a while more. Let’s go to that movie. What’s showin’?”
“Casablanca. But you got curfew.” She failed to keep the disdain from her voice. “The Cov? What the fuck you doing in Covenant House?”
“Got tired of turning tricks, y’know? Thought I’d see if there were some other options. But it’s no biggie. I got a plan.” She stood up and dragged Rai to a phone by the bathrooms. “Yo. You can talk all yuppie. Just tell ‘em you’s my boss and that I gotta work till eleven. We’re set.”
“Yuppie? What? I thought your bos would be a…” She let her voice trail off to avoid the word “pimp.”
“Yeah, I was gonna save this for a surprise, but fuck that, huh? I got a real job. Figured I’d sucked enough cock for one life.”
“So checked into the Cov?”
“It sucks, but maybe I can save some money, huh? I was thinking maybe we could even get an apartment together or something…”
Rai missed the last phrase. “So whaddaya do? What do I tell the fucking fascists when I call them?”
“I clean apartments. ‘Maid Right.’ Just say your name is Justine LeMalle.” She picked up the phone, put in a quarter, dialed a number, and put the phone to Rai’s ear.
“Covenant House.”
“Yes, hello.” Rai made her voice as professional and deep as possible. “My name is Justine LeMalle of Maid Right, and I am the employer of Yazmín Rodríguez. Unfortunately, we have a serious backlog of apartments to clean on Park Avenue, and I have had to ask Miss Rodríguez to work late. I hope you will extend her curfew.”
After the staff member took down the right information, Rai hung up. “Easy as shit. Why don’t you do that every night?”
“Ya can only get away with it once in a while, or they start checkin’ up. C’mon. Let’s see the flick.”
Though the movie, with its melancholy humor and dark aesthetic, did little to improve Rai’s mood, Yazmín’s presence did, so by the time they had agreed to meet next day at the Place, Rai felt as good as she had all day. They had not talked of Z, of meaning, or of the cops, and she had felt deeply relieved at the chance to forget, if just for a moment. Deep in the Ramble, as she wrapped herself in the tarp and looked up at dim stars, she wondered how much brighter they shone over Algeria.
