American Music - Jane Mendelsohn [4]
Then he realized that she barely knew Pearl. Pearl had grown up on the West Coast and had never been east until she’d met and married Joe. Vivian must have been encouraged by her parents to call Pearl. He had a vague memory of his wife mentioning family in Brooklyn, maybe they’d even visited once.
So you’re the East Coast branch of Pearl’s family, he said. The intellectuals.
And you’re the musician.
The law student. He looked at Pearl.
Yes, Pearl told me, she said. It’s nice that your music can pay for school. How often do you do that, play on ships?
A few times a year. I know a band or two that will take me when they go overseas. The money is good. But I get homesick. He reached over and took Pearl’s hand.
Of course, Vivian said.
They were driving up Central Park West now, along the park. The trees swayed and rustled like enormous skirts.
Vivian dances, Pearl said.
Not really, Vivian said. Not anymore.
Well you used to. Your mother told me that you were a wonderful dancer. She said you went to all kinds of places, jazz places, way uptown, the Savoy.
Really? Joe said.
I like that kind of music, she said quietly, still looking out the window.
So does Joe, Pearl said. He plays it beautifully.
Does he, Vivian said.
In the rearview mirror he could see the park receding, the green light of the trees, their colors, pulling away.
We should all go hear some music together, he said. Hear some music and dance.
Milo
He sat in his wheelchair in his room staring out the window. He always did that after she left. His thoughts spun around in his head, images that she had unleashed just by touching him, a string of memories, some of which were his own but most of which were not, could not be, from his life. He thought he was finally going crazy. He was surprised it had taken this long. He watched visions stream past like the radically changing scenery out the window of a swift train. He saw the green trees pulling away from him in the mirror of an old car and a profile cut like a cameo. A voice asked him when he had started to play music and he could not remember that he had ever picked up an instrument. Maybe in elementary school he had been taught the recorder, or in high school plucked a guitar for a few months. He could see that ahead of him a streetlight was changing from red to green and the sun was slicing between the buildings on his left side, where there appeared to be a river, just out of sight. He was heading up a wide street and saw the store signs jauntily bouncing past, vendors on the sidewalks, rounded cars like giant toys rolling beside him and parked at the curb but he could not remember having driven in such a city and all the places he had driven were now jumbled together in a crazy highway of his past. The street he’d grown up on, leafy and almost always empty, turned into the rolling road to Blue Hill where he’d gone to high school which became a cobbled street in Germany which merged into the dusty desert under the convoy, his mother driving him home …
Everything flew by, a freeway of memories that were his but then as quickly as they ribboned past they would change into places such as this broad city street of another era and he was saying, as clearly as he had ever said anything, that he had first picked up a trumpet when he was five. He had done no such thing. But