American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [32]
Later, in the car, Joe said: I feel like with you I can do that, keep time. I feel like with you it is always now.
But you can’t keep time, Joe. Not really.
He turned the car quickly, hand over hand.
I guess that’s why I like swing.
But you’re not even a drummer, Joe. You play the saxophone.
I guess I’d always dreamt of being a drummer. But it doesn’t matter. It’s the music. The cymbals moving the music forward. I love that sound. You do too.
She was looking out the window. The rain had come back.
I’ll leave her, he said. I have to. We’ve tried to make each other happy but we don’t.
She turned back to look at him. I can’t promise I’ll make you happy either.
You already have, he said. That won’t change.
There you go again, she said, thinking that you can keep time.
They found a new way to keep time, he said. Let me try.
Honor wasn’t the kind to leave. She’d never left anyone, except Anna, and that was different because in her own way Anna had already left her many years before. But this was what she could not tell Milo, that people seemed to leave her, that one day there had been a phone call. They weren’t married or even engaged and so it wasn’t an official phone call. It was from his family, who’d found her number among his things. They’d met her twice. He was the one who had given her the book of Ralph Ellison essays. He was the one who had taught her about music. She had been walking down the street and it was the middle of the day and there was a howling all around her from traffic, trucks, the population steadily screaming through the city under siege as it was every day. The cell phone was pressed against her wet cheek and the cars screeched past and Honor was trying to wipe away tears with the back of her hand and a stranger caught her eye and looked at her with a momentary and truthful look of pity and compassion and she knew that everyone, everyone, everyone would always leave her.
CHAPTER NINE
1969
When she stood up to leave the restaurant the murals on the wall tilted and it looked like the Venetian gondolas were sailing straight to hell. The head curator held his liquor better and the benefactors seemed perfectly normal but the photographer rarely drank and so now she was wobbling and a centrifugal force spun around in her head. They walked her to the corner. The curator was saying something about the press for the show and doing interviews and had she been in Vogue before and she was trying to walk slowly but kept falling behind and she saw the very fashionable women in midtown wearing what would be the beginnings of the Seventies look, wide pants, wide collars, but for now most of the ladies were still demure as if the Sixties had not really happened here on Fifth Avenue. Even she, a painter, could have stepped more from the late Fifties with her pocketbook and headband but when she got home she would throw on her jeans. Oh to be home. To get away from the heavy leather menus and banquettes of midtown and back to her contemplative mess, her wavy glass windows, her cameras and slides. They didn’t wait long with her at the corner. The ladies sailed into cabs and the curator turned around and headed back to the museum. She was alone again and when the bus came she felt small and clear and free.
Walking up the stairs to her apartment she sensed the head-spinning return and wished she knew about those hangover remedies her alcoholic artist friends were always fixing for themselves on mornings