American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [18]
CHAPTER FIVE
Summer came. She had first encountered Milo in late winter and now it was summer. In the stifling heat the city seemed to empty out and become desolate, then explode from the stagnating hotness and open itself up like some vulgar dying flower. On the sidewalks, garbage cooked in the cans and in the gutters. Fat water bugs cruised the pavement with abandon. People wore very few clothes. Honor opened the windows of her tiny walk-up apartment and brought out fans. The edges of the large piece of fabric thrown over the sofa rippled in the warm breeze. The Rolling Stones played in her kitchen, as they had played in her mother’s kitchen and possibly, if perhaps only by accident, in her grandmother’s. The music, overloaded with memories and associations and familiar melodies, sounded cheerfully timeless and not the least bit irreverent. The band played valiantly through the heat. It went banging on like some workhorse Dixieland band at a Fourth of July gathering on a town green.
It was, in fact, the Fourth of July. Honor whistled along to the tunes and felt oddly patriotic, as if these songs were her own private national anthem. When that was over she put on some Billie Holiday and felt more deeply connected to her country, and this time she didn’t whistle along because she didn’t want to miss hearing the words. For dinner she had prepared a traditional barbecue of wheat-free pasta and seaweed salad with a little bit of this morning’s leftover French toast for dessert. She was not really hungry. Her mother’s birthday had been July Fourth and she remembered year after year of celebratory cakes. Now she was not in touch with Anna, and so the day had a painful undercurrent of independence. But she would go up onto her roof later to watch the fireworks. They were the only part of the holiday that really interested her. She especially liked small-town fireworks, the kind that shot up only a little ways and gently drooped when they fell like handkerchiefs thrown in surrender. Big-city fireworks were staggering and awesome, but terrifying in their resemblance to real bombs bursting in air. The wheels of whirling fire setting the skyline aflame. Great explosions of unnatural red thunder. A simple constellation of white stars expanding into gigantic webbed galaxies of light.
The night air was still sweaty when she emerged from the building staircase onto the black roof. A few people were milling around, waiting for the festivities to begin, holding cups and beer bottles. She said hello but hung off to the side. She did not really know her neighbors. Then the sky lit up and the world appeared to be taking a picture of itself. There was a lengthy flash as if from an old-fashioned camera and the population stood frozen in the moment, holding their smiles, waiting for their transformation. When it was all over there was that minute of uncertainty about whether or not it was really all over and then a general agreement as to the appropriate timing and amount of applause. The night was still hot. Nothing had changed. As people filed back down the staircase Honor walked to the edge of the roof and lifted her face to the breeze. At the edge of the roof she had a quick memory of someone sitting on the edge of a roof, and then it passed. She turned her intense gaze on the dark cityscape and thought about her soldier.
Her soldier: that was how she thought about him now. Her soldier who had begun to tell her his secrets. He spoke to her through his body and she felt as though if she could piece together his stories, she could piece together the person. The person: Milo Hatch, formerly of Penobscot, Maine. Milo Hatch, who had suffered a spinal cord injury in the desert and that was all he would say about it. Milo Hatch, a handsome young man, only in this story, the story that she was receiving from him, he was not a twenty-four-year-old war veteran struggling for his sanity in the first decade of a new century, he was a young jazz musician in New York in the 1930’s who was falling in and