Rules of Civility - Amor Towles [118]
Later, as we were leaving, the big Negro who had played the saxophone in the ensemble intercepted me at the door. I did my best to hide my surprise.
—Hey, he said in a monastic octave.
But as soon as I heard his voice, I knew who he was. He was the saxophonist we’d seen play at The Hotspot on New Year’s Eve.
—You’re Evelyn’s pal, he said.
—That’s right. Katey.
—We haven’t seen her round in awhile.
—She moved to L.A.
He nodded his head in heavy understanding, as if by moving out to Los Angeles Eve was somehow ahead of her time. And maybe she was.
—That girl’s got an ear.
He said this with the appreciation of the too oft misunderstood.
—If you see her, tell her we miss her.
Then he retreated back to the bar.
It made me laugh and laugh.
For on all those nights in 1937 when we had frequented jazz clubs at Eve’s insistence, and she had cornered the musicians to bum cigarettes, I had attributed it to her shallower impulses—her desire to shed her midwestern sensibility and mingle in the Negro’s milieu. While all that time, Evelyn Ross was a jazz lover of enough subtlety that the musicians missed her when she was out of town?
I caught up with the others outside, giving a little prayer of thanks to no one in particular. Because when some incident sheds a favorable light on an old and absent friend, that’s about as good a gift as chance intends to offer.
Dicky wasn’t kidding about the paper airplanes.
Having been out late at The Lean-To, the next night we indulged in that sweetest of New York luxuries: a Sunday night at home with nothing to do. Dicky called down to the kitchen for a plate of tea sandwiches. Instead of gin, he opened a bottle of self-pacing white wine. And as the night was unseasonably warm, we took our little picnic onto his fifty-square-foot terrace overlooking Eighty-third Street and entertained ourselves with a pair of binoculars.
Directly across the street on the twentieth floor of No. 42 East Eighty-third was a stifling dinner party at which know-it-alls in smoking jackets were taking turns making ponderous toasts. Meanwhile, on the eighteenth floor of No. 44, three children, having been put to bed, had quietly turned on their light, built barricades with their mattresses, seized their pillows, and commenced a reenactment of the street fighting in Les Misérables. But straight across from us, in the penthouse of No. 46, an obese man in the robe of a geisha was playing a Steinway in a state of rapture. The doors to his terrace were open, and drifting over the faint sounds of Sunday night traffic we could hear the strains of his sentimental melodies: “Blue Moon,” “Pennies from Heaven,” “Falling in Love with Love.” He played with his eyes closed and swayed back and forth, passing his meaty hands one over the other in an elegant progression of octaves and emotions. It was hypnotizing.
I wish he’d play “It’s De-Lovely,” Dicky said wistfully.
—Why don’t you ring his doorman, I suggested, and have him send up a request?
Dicky put a finger in the air indicating a better idea.
He went inside and came out a moment later with a box of fine paper, pens, paper clips, tape, a ruler, and a compass—dumping it on the table with an expression of unusual intent.
I picked up the compass.
—You’re kidding, right?
He plucked the compass back from me with a bit of a huff.
—Not in the least.
He sat down and organized his tools in a row like the scalpels on a surgeon’s tray.
—Here, he said, giving me a stack of paper.
He bit the eraser of his pencil for a moment and then began to write:
Dear Sir,
If you would be so kind, please play us your interpretation of “It’s De-Lovely.” For is it not de-lightful to-nightful?
Your Moonstruck Neighbors
In rapid fire we prepared twenty requests. “Just One of Those Things,” “The Lady Is a Tramp.” And then, starting