His elegant fingers were to the keyboard, and I was singing the opening bars, the famous preamble, in which only the dead stay home, while people like Mama, oh, they’re different, they won’t just sit and take it, they’ve got the dreams and the guts, they won’t stay and rot, they’ll always fight to get up—and out!
I rested a hand on the piano, turned in toward it, closed my eyes, and I can remember thinking I was starting small, at least, that’s what I consciously intended to do—to start small and keep it small—singing under the notes so as not to be noticed, or not noticed too much, out of the old shyness. But also out of deference to Aimee, who was not a natural singer, even if this fact was unspeakable between us. Who was in fact no more a natural singer than the bachelorettes sitting in front of me sucking down mai tais on their bar stools. But I was a natural, wasn’t I? Surely I was, despite everything? And now I found I couldn’t stay small, my eyes stayed closed but my voice lifted, and kept lifting, I got louder and louder, I did not feel I had control of it, exactly, it was something I’d released that now rose up and away and escaped my reach. My hands were in the air, I was stamping my heels into the floor. I felt I had everyone in the room. I even had a sentimental vision of myself as one in a long line of gutsy brothers and sisters, music-makers, singers, musicians, dancers, for didn’t I, too, have the gift so often ascribed to my people? I could turn time into musical phrases, into beats and notes, slowing it down and speeding it up, controlling the time of my life, finally, at last, here on a stage, if nowhere else. I thought of Nina Simone dividing each note from the next, so viciously, with such precision, as Bach, her hero, had taught her to do, and I thought of her name for it—“Black Classical Music”—she hated the word jazz, considering it a white word for black people, she rejected it totally—and I thought of her voice, the way she could extend a note beyond the point of tolerability and force her audience to concede to it, to her timescale, to her vision of the song, how she was completely without pity for her audience, and so relentless in pursuit of her freedom! But too involved in these thoughts of Nina I didn’t see the end coming, I thought I had another verse, I sang over the concluding chord, when it came, and continued some way ahead before I realized, oh, yes, yes, stop now, it’s over. If there had been riotous clapping I couldn’t hear it any longer, it seemed to have stopped. I only felt the piano player patting me, two quick pats, on my back, which was sticky and cold with the dried sweat of the previous club. I opened my eyes. Yes, the uproar in the bar was over, or maybe it had never been, everything looked as it had before, the piano player was already talking to the next performer, the bachelorettes were happily drinking and talking as if nothing had happened at all. It was two thirty in the morning. Aimee was not in her seat. She was not in the bar. I stumbled around that cramped and crowded space twice, kicked open each stall in the awful toilets, my phone at my ear, ringing and ringing and getting her answerphone. I struggled back through the bar and up the stairs to the street. I was making yelping noises of panic. It was raining, and my hair which had been blow-dried straight now began to curl back up, with terrific speed, every raindrop that hit me spurred a curl, and I reached into it and felt lamb’s wool, the damp spring of it, thick and alive. A car horn went. I looked up and saw Errol parked where we had left him. The back window went down and Aimee leaned out of it, slow-clapping.
“Oh, bravo.”
I hurried to her, apologizing. She opened the door: “Just get in.”
I sat next to her, still apologizing. She shifted forward to speak to Errol.
“Drive to midtown and back.”
Errol took off his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.
“It’s almost three,” I said, but the partition went up and off we went. For ten blocks or so Aimee said nothing at all and neither did I. As we passed through Union Square she turned to me: “Are you happy?”
“What?”
“Answer the question.”
“I don’t understand why I’m being asked the question.”
She licked her thumb and wiped some mascara I had not realized was running down my face.
“We’ve been together, what? Five years?”
“Almost seven.”
“OK. So you should know by now that I don’t want the people who work for me,” she explained slowly, as if talking to an idiot, “to be unhappy working for me. I don’t see the point in that.”
“But I’m not unhappy!”
“Then what are you?”
“Happy!”
She took the cap off her head and pulled it over mine.
“In this life,” she said, falling back against the leather, “you’ve got to know what you want. You have to visualize it, and then you have to pull it down. But we’ve talked about this many times. Many times.”
I nodded and smiled, too drunk to manage much more. I had my face wedged between the walnut and the window and from here I had a fresh view of the city, from the top down. I’d see the roof garden of a penthouse before I saw the few, stray people still out at this hour, splashing through puddled sidewalks, and I kept finding in this perspective uncanny, paranoid alignments. An old Chinese lady, a can collector, in an old-fashioned conical hat, pulling her load—hundreds, perhaps thousands, of cans gathered together in a huge plastic sheet—under the windows of a building I knew to contain a Chinese billionaire, a friend of Aimee’s, with whom she had once discussed opening a chain of hotels.
“And in this city you really need to know what it is you want,” Aimee was saying, “but I don’t think you do know, yet. OK, so you’re smart, we get that. You think what I’m saying doesn’t apply to you, but it does. The brain is connected to the heart and the eye—it’s all visualization, all of it. Want it, see it, take it. No apologies. I don’t apologize ever for what I want! But I see you—and I see that you spend your life apologizing! It’s like you’ve got survivor’s guilt or something! But we’re not in Bendigo any more! You’ve left Bendigo—right? Like Baldwin left Harlem. Like Dylan left . . . wherever the fuck it was he was from. Sometimes you gotta get out—get the fuck out of Bendigo! Thanks be to Christ we both have. Long ago. Bendigo’s behind us. You get what I’m saying, right?”
I nodded many times over, though I had no idea what she was saying, really, apart from the strong sense I usually had with Aimee that she found her own story universally applicable, and never more so than when drunk, that in these moments we all of us came from Bendigo, and we all of us had fathers who had died when we were young, and we had all visualized our good fortune and pulled it down toward us. The border between Aimee and everybody else became obscure, hard to make out exactly.
I felt sick. I hung my head like a dog into the New York night.
“Look, you’re not going to be doing this for ever,” I heard her say, a little later, as we entered Times Square, driving beneath an eighty-foot Somali model with a two-foot Afro dancing for joy on the side of a building in her perfectly ordinary Gap khakis. “That’s just fucking obvious. So the question becomes: what are you going to do, after this? What are you going to do with your life?”
I knew the right answer to this was meant to be “run my own” this or that, or something amorphously creative like “write a book” or “open a yoga retreat,” for Aimee thought that in order to do these sorts of things a person only had to walk into, say, a publisher’s office and announce their intent. This had been her own experience. What could she know about the waves of time that simply come at a person, one after the other? What could she know about life as the temporary, always partial, survival of that process? I fixed my eyes on the dancing Somali model.
“I’m fine! I’m happy!”