On that thought, I stood up and walked past the bandstand and opened the door—if I was wasting my time, it didn’t matter what I did.
He was leaning against a brick wall about ten feet up the alleyway from the club’s back door. The door clicked shut behind me, but Hat did not open his eyes. His face tilted up, and a sweetness that might have been sleep lay over his features. He looked exhausted and insubstantial, too frail to move. I would have gone back inside the club if he had not produced a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket, lit it with a match, and then flicked the match away, all without opening his eyes. At least he was awake. I stepped toward him, and his eyes opened. He glanced at me and blew out white smoke. “Taste?” he said.
I had no idea what he meant. “Can I talk to you for a minute, sir?” I asked.
He put his hand into one of his jacket pockets and pulled out a half-pint bottle. “Have a taste.” Hat broke the seal on the cap, tilted it into his mouth, and drank. Then he held the bottle out toward me.
I took it. “I’ve been coming here as often as I can.”
“Me, too,” he said. “Go on, do it.”
I took a sip from the bottle—gin. “I’m sorry about your son.”
“Son?” He looked upward, as if trying to work out my meaning. “I got a son—out on Long Island. With his momma.” He drank again and checked the level of the bottle.
“He’s not dead, then.”
He spoke the next words slowly, almost wonderingly. “Nobody-told-me-if-he-is.” He shook his head and drank another mouthful of gin. “Damn. Wouldn’t that be something, boy dies and nobody tells me? I’d have to think about that, you know, have to really think about that one.”
“I’m just talking about what you said on stage.”
He cocked his head and seemed to examine an empty place in the dark air about three feet from his face. “Uh huh. That’s right. I did say that. Son of mine passed.”
It was like dealing with a sphinx. All I could do was plunge in. “Well, sir, actually there’s a reason I came out here,” I said. “I’d like to interview you. Do you think that might be possible? You’re a great artist, and there’s very little about you in print. Do you think we could set up a time when I could talk to you?”
He looked at me with his bleary, colorless eyes, and I wondered if he could see me at all. And then I felt that, despite his drunkenness, he saw everything—that he saw things about me that I couldn’t see.
“You a jazz writer?” he asked.
“No, I’m a graduate student. I’d just like to do it. I think it would be important.”
“Important.” He took another swallow from the half pint and slid the bottle back into his pocket. “Be nice, doing an important interview.”
He stood leaning against the wall, moving further into outer space with every word. Only because I had started, I pressed on: I was already losing faith in this project. The reason Hat had never been interviewed was that ordinary American English was a foreign language to him. “Could we do the interview after you finish up at this club? I could meet you anywhere you like.” Even as I said these words, I despaired. Hat was in no shape to know what he had to do after this engagement finished. I was surprised he could make it back to Long Island every night.
Hat rubbed his face, sighed, and restored my faith in him. “It’ll have to wait a little while. Night after I finish here, I go to Toronto for two nights. Then I got something in Hartford on the thirtieth. You come see me after that.”
“On the thirty-first?” I asked.
“Around nine, ten, something like that. Be nice if you brought some refreshments.”
“Fine, great,” I said, wondering if I would be able to take a late train back from wherever he lived. “But where on Long Island should I go?”
His eyes widened in mock-horror. “Don’t go nowhere on Long Island. You come see me. In the Albert Hotel, Forty-Ninth and Eighth. Room 821.”
I smiled at him—I had guessed right about one thing, anyhow.
Hat did not live in the Village, but he did live in a Manhattan hotel. I asked him for his phone number, and wrote it down, along with the other information, on a napkin from the club. After I folded the napkin into my jacket pocket, I thanked him and turned toward the door.
“Important as a motherfucker,” he said in his high, soft, slurry voice.
I turned around in alarm, but he had tilted his head toward the sky again, and his eyes were closed.
“Indiana,” he said. His voice made the word seem sung. “Moonlight in Vermont. I Thought About You. Flamingo.”
He was deciding what to play during his next set. I went back inside, where twenty or thirty new arrivals, more people than I had ever seen in the club, waited for the music to start. Hat soon reappeared through the door, the other musicians left the bar, and the third set began. Hat played all four of the songs he had named, interspersing them through his standard repertoire during the course of an unusually long set. He was playing as well as I’d ever heard him, maybe better than I’d heard on all the other nights I had come to the club. The Saturday night crowd applauded explosively after every solo. I didn’t know if what I was seeing was genius or desperation.
An obituary in the Sunday New York Times, which I read over breakfast the next morning in the John Jay cafeteria, explained some of what had happened. Early Saturday morning, a thirty-eight year old tenor saxophone player named Grant Kilbert had been killed in an automobile accident. One of the most successful jazz musicians in the world, one of the few jazz musicians, known outside of the immediate circle of fans, Kilbert had probably been Hat’s most prominent disciple. He had certainly been one of my favorite musicians. More importantly, from his first record, Cool Breeze, Kilbert had excited respect and admiration. I looked at the photograph of the handsome young man beaming out over the neck of his saxophone and realized that the first four songs on Cool Breeze were “Indiana,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” “I Thought About You,” and “Flamingo.” Sometime late Saturday afternoon, someone had called up Hat to tell him about Kilbert. What I had seen had not merely been alcoholic eccentricity, it had been grief for a lost son. And when I thought about it, I was sure that the lost son, not himself, had been the important motherfucker he’d apothesized. What I had taken for spaciness and disconnection had all along been irony.
PART TWO
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