Nocturnes_ Five Stories of Music and Nightfall - Kazuo Ishiguro [49]
In answer to her question, I told her the toughest part for me was not being able to play my sax.
“But you can see why Boris won’t let you,” she said. “Just imagine. You blow on that horn a day before you’re ready, pieces of your face will fly out all over the room!”
She seemed to find this pretty funny, waving her hand at me, as though it was me that had made the wisecrack and she was saying: “Stop it, you’re too much!” I laughed with her, and sipped some coffee through the straw. Then she began talking about various friends who’d recently gone through cosmetic surgery, what they’d reported, funny things that had happened to them. Every person she mentioned was a celebrity or else married to one.
“So you’re a sax player,” she said, suddenly changing the subject. “You made a good choice. It’s a wonderful instrument. You know what I say to all young saxophone players? I tell them to listen to the old pros. I knew this sax player, up-and-coming like you, only ever listened to these far-out guys. Wayne Shorter and people like that. I said to him, you’ll learn more from the old pros. Might not have been so ground-breaking, I said to him, but those old pros knew how to do it. Steve, do you mind if I play you something? To show you exactly what I’m talking about?”
“No, I don’t mind. But Mrs. Gardner …”
“Please. Call me Lindy. We’re equals here.”
“Okay. Lindy. I just wanted to say, I’m not so young. In fact, I’ll be thirty-nine next birthday.”
“Oh really? Well, that’s still young. But you’re right, I thought you were much younger. With these exclusive masks Boris has given us, it’s hard to tell, right? From what Gracie said, I thought you were this up-and-coming kid, and maybe your parents had paid for this surgery to get you off to a flying start. Sorry, my mistake.”
“Gracie said I was ‘up-and-coming’?”
“Don’t be hard on her. She said you were a musician so I asked her your name. And when I said I wasn’t familiar with it, she said, ‘That’s because he’s up-and-coming.’ That’s all it was. Hey, but listen, what does it matter how old you are? You can always learn from the old pros. I want you to listen to this. I think you’ll find it interesting.”
She went over to a cabinet and a moment later held up a CD. “You’ll appreciate this. The sax on this is so perfect.”
Her room had a Bang & Olufsen system just like mine, and soon the place filled with lush strings. A few measures in, a sleepy, Ben Webster–ish tenor broke through and proceeded to lead the orchestra. If you didn’t know too much about these things, you could even have mistaken it for one of those Nelson Riddle intros for Sinatra. But the voice that eventually came on belonged to Tony Gardner. The song—I just about remembered it—was something called “Back at Culver City,” a ballad that never quite made it and which no one plays much any more. All the time Tony Gardner sang, the sax kept up with him, replying to him line by line. The whole thing was utterly predictable, and way too sugary.
After a while, though, I’d stopped paying much attention to the music because there was Lindy in front of me, gone into a kind of dream, dancing slowly to the song. Her movements were easy and graceful—clearly the surgery hadn’t extended to her body—and she had a shapely, slim figure. She was wearing something that was part night-gown, part cocktail dress; that’s to say, it was at the same time vaguely medical yet glamorous. Also, I was trying to work something out. I’d had the distinct impression Lindy had recently divorced Tony Gardner, but given I’m the nation’s worst when it comes to showbiz gossip, I began to think maybe I’d got it wrong. Otherwise why was she dancing this way, lost in the music, evidently enjoying herself?
Tony Gardner stopped singing a moment, the strings swelled into the bridge, and the piano player started a solo. At this point, Lindy seemed to come back to the planet. She stopped swaying around, turned the music off with the remote, then came and sat