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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504009799 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | The Permanent Press |
| Publication date: | 05/12/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | NOOK Book |
| Pages: | 264 |
| File size: | 555 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Bloodlines
By Bruce Ducker
The Permanent Press
Copyright © 2000 Bruce DuckerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0979-9
CHAPTER 1
The pier swayed in the fetid and fixed water. Beyond it the land swayed in tandem, a gentle illusion. But not a bad one, Peter thought, hanging over the ship's rail. The world moves and I'm stable. Beats reality. With a gull's screek, a winch at midships hoisted a net full of luggage from the hold. The arm swung its load over the ship's side and lowered it to the pier. The net was floored by a wooden palette, and a dock worker caught a corner of the wood and slipped loops from the derrick's hook so that the net spilled its catch. A half-dozen hands arranged the suitcases, trunks, and satchels indifferently in rows. Amid the hundreds of pieces Peter spotted his own, a large duffel of brown canvas. Not a duplicate—he could tell, for an extra ten bucks the store had stenciled his name on its side.
That was odd. The musicians had been told to stay on board for the turn. Two days of refueling and loading at Le Havre, then the sail back to Hoboken.
Peter hurried to his cabin and passed the assistant steward coming out. The man smiled and uttered a cordial, unintelligible word in German. Even without the language Peter knew it was trouble.
Marcus Collopy sat on the lower bunk, examining the marble-sized joints of his fingers. He wheezed as if the sea air was hard to get down his throat.
"Marcus, the steward. You were supposed to be at his office at eight o'clock."
"Eight o'clock? Man, look at that light." Marcus stuck his nose towards the bare porthole.
"Eight in the morning," Peter said. He'd reminded Marcus as they closed the last set, before Marcus left to tour the ship's several bars.
Marcus looked up at him from under a heavy eyelid, a deflated balloon. "You mean there's another eight o'clock?"
The old man snuck up on awake, irritable and reluctant. Sat on the edge of his bunk in his underwear, a patient who had failed his medical check-up, and stretched his face into today. "No problem, kid. Turns out I didn't need to be there."
"That's a relief." Peter needed this gig. Good money, a chance to work with Marcus, but mostly good money. "No need," Peter said, looking for the story.
"Yeah, seeing as how we're through anyway. Easier to let him come to us." Marcus nibbled at a ring-finger callus.
"What do you mean, through?"
"Through, done, caput," Marcus said between his fingers.
"Fired?"
"You got it. They want a more danceable sound."
Peter had to smile. That, and maybe a leader who led the band. Not one who led the pack at the unbanked turn of the first class lounge, running up whiskey bills for adoring Americans while he improvised stories of Diz and Getz and Bird, some of them true. Not one whose amusement was squeezing the desiccated asses of the sixtyish and occasionally delighted women passengers. Marcus got away with a lot. Of their impromptu quintet he had the name, he was somebody who had played with somebody. If you were a fan you knew that name, you could find it listed on the rhythm credits in the dollar ninety-nine LP bins. A long time ago. Rivers of booze had tinned his eyes, flooded his face, silted a permanent rash where the capillaries were too tired to close. Marcus had gotten this job for them, and now he had lost it.
"Fired," Peter said back. He had never been in Europe before, let alone broke. What would it cost to leave? "We get paid?"
Marcus shot a pained look. He had two sins on his list, stupidity and slipping the beat.
"Kid," he said wearily, "don't be a doofus hipster. Of course we get paid. We played the gig, we get paid. We're on file with the local. What we don't get is a ride back. So we figure something out. We scuffle around and figure something out."
Marcus dressed and they went to the ballroom to retrieve his bass. Peter helped him zip it cautiously into its cover. It was an old Kaye, yellow plywood, no one could tell from the way Marcus coddled it or the tone he coaxed from it just how cheap it was.
The other musicians already had the news. They had cashed out at the purser's window and had split a cab into town.
"Maybe we'll find something," said Marcus. "Europe, man. They love modern jazz here. Diz was very big here, Bud Powell. Very hip country, Europe."
They thumped down the gangplank among the passengers. The embarkation hall was gloomy, filled with the chaos of foreign languages. Peter felt a shortening of breath, stumbling onto the wrong stage. Customs inspectors in muddy blue uniforms moved through the crowd, ignoring baggage and blowing into their fists to fight the cold. November's blade swung across the English Channel.
A young ship's officer pushed through the crowd. Over an arm he carried a plastic basket filled with the mail that had arrived during the week at the steamship company's dock. He called out Anglo names in a thick accent, and when he got to Peter's, pronounced it with a pleased recognition. They smiled at each other, he handed Peter an envelope. Robin's egg blue, inscribed in Matey's mannish hand.
Peter moved into the gullet of the hall, long and low-roofed, slatted walls painted a dull green. Travelers waiting for connections stretched out on benches. He was looking for a corner of his own when Marcus caught up to him.
"I told you."
"Told me what?"
"Told you this is a hip town. The drummer may have something for us in Zurich."
"Zurich? That's not here. That's some other city."
Marcus shrugged indifference. He wore a stained gabardine greatcoat, belted, floppy delta lapels of fake fur.
"Right. So you catch the subway. Drummer's gone ahead to sign it up. I've checked his kit and the bass. Meet me at the station tonight. Eight o'clock train."
"The eight train," Peter said.
"Fastest way to get to Harlem."
Marcus bumped his way through the mob. He moved heavily, no lighter on his feet for the absence of his instrument. The hall began to clear as passengers found taxis, tour leaders, their family to take them on. Peter claimed a bench at the far end of the building by a high window. He tucked his satchel and electric keyboard beneath his seat, took the envelope out of his pocket and thumbed open its flap. Inside was a single page. He examined it, looked dumbly at its blank back side. He had survived a shipwreck and now he was stripping the foil from a last bar of chocolate. Should he eat it in one sitting?
Peter dear Peter dear Peter
Where to start? In the middle, I suppose. I've moved in with Christopher. He is talking about marriage. I'm not ready for that, but I do think I should get on with my life and he seems to represent getting on. You and I keep blundering about, wander around, are we surveying a map of misunderstanding?
He is very sweet and represents owners of office buildings about their leases. I can hear you saying Is that anything for an adult to be doing, but you must understand, it is. I want to take life less seriously, to see through it so it doesn't hurt so much. With you it hurts. Really, without you, which is the more common state of being. Christopher doesn't exactly do that, take life less seriously, but he takes the wrong things seriously and that amounts to pretty much the same thing.
I don't know what else to say. Take care of yourself.
Paradoxically yours,
Matey
He was early to the railroad station. He ate a ham sandwich and a nut roll. He had read Matey's letter a dozen times. Looked under the stamp for a clue. He had a week's good wages and some extra the cruise line had to throw in under the contract to fire them. It might be ample, he couldn't tell.
Peter found a booth, read the instructions, placed a call. His French got him to Boston information. They had four listings for Christopher, residence, office phone, office fax, cell phone. Matey's jumped from an itinerant pianist who doesn't own a dish towel to a man with four lines in the directory. Hard to argue. He called the apartment.
In the long electronic rings, a beat so familiar, his pulse steps up. He sees the man dimly remembered from college days, wearing a purple soccer shirt that laces at the neck, white cotton shorts. Christopher is bouncing a ball from his forehead, ducking under it, controlling its symmetrical bounces. The thumping is a metronome.
"Is Matey there?"
"No, she's not."
Peter said his name. Twice. Said he was calling from France. "I'd like to speak to her."
"Well, she's gone out. It's just noon here. She had to run some errands."
Peter felt his voice slip into a conventional tone, a tone he had heard others use in movies.
"Listen, Christopher. I would really like to speak to her. There's no place she can call me back."
"Damn it, Steinmuller. I'm not a barbarian. If she were here I'd put her on."
Peter left no message. He sat unhappily imagining the report of his call. Christopher's lawyerly account, accurate and neutral, the soccer ball in perfect rhythm. How he had stammered. Christopher's command, equanimity even, Matey's face strong as a bolt. Why do I think of her mostly to miss her?
Marcus supervised the porter's loading of the drum kit. Everything was stored in hard cases, it would be safe in baggage. High hat, tom-tom, snare, kicking bass. Six or seven pieces. But the yellow Kaye he wouldn't let go. He carried it with him in second class propped against the opposite seat. Peter stowed keyboard and duffel in the rack overhead and sat by the window. The train pulled out ugging like a sound-effects tape.
"This'll do fine," Marcus said, settling his hat over his eyes. It was Russian-style, fur earflaps that tied on top in a bow. At the far end of the car a young couple was spreading cheese and sausage on a sheet of newspaper for their supper. A thick, greasy smell reached Peter and he could hear the purring sound of their intimacy but not what they were saying.
There was nothing to be seen through the black windows. Occasionally a platform, a stop, a few travelers moving on or off. Marcus looked up a first time.
"Zurich," he said. "That's Germany?"
"Switzerland."
"And we're coming from?"
"France. Le Havre is France."
He settled down again.
"My father came from Switzerland," Peter said quickly.
"That right?" Marcus asked from under his hat. "So you got people there we could stay with?"
"No. He came to the States as a little boy and he's long dead. My grandfather died in Switzerland after the war. There's no one left."
"Well," Marcus said, uninterested. "We all go."
"That's a comfort." Marcus scrunched down again and in minutes was asleep.
At the funeral for his father Peter sat dry-eyed and diffident while the doctor talked about an early call. As if they hadn't reckoned the difference in time zones. Death had come fast the man said, a massive coronary. Peter saw a jagged steel construct, a locomotive with a gauge too wide for the tunnels of flesh. Strokes are more fatal in one's early years, the man said, we don't know why.
A young age, hardly a full life. But Peter didn't think his father had been shortchanged. The man was always packed, ready to go. Nothing to leave behind. Peter was the same, except for his music. And music was simple, no motives or hopes. Or people, except for sidemen. The beat, the chords, the tune. Still, days on the road passed slowly.
He woke Marcus for the changes, once in Paris and again in Nancy. In the men's room while they waited for a train, Peter told him of his letter from Matey.
"We're all an indigo hue," Marcus said. It was a line from a song.
"'It's a Blue World.'"
"You got it, kid," Marcus said. They moved out to the main salon and found benches to lie on. Marcus hummed eight bars, something else. Closed his eyes, put his hat down over his brow.
Peter let the motion of the train take him home. Life without Matey, better or worse? He would miss being in love. A tune where notes are missing. The bridge, eight bars in the middle—the release, musicians called it—the bridge has washed out. But she was always at him. Why didn't he feel this or that, what did he feel? Just because I can't name it, it still may exist. Not what I mean, she would say. You can't name it because you're afraid of it. Find out what you feel, she'd say. Get in the car and take it for a drive. Her eyebrows would tilt inward, showing earnest.
"The heart as stone in the poetry of Peter Kurz Steinmuller," she announced. They were walking somewhere marshy. Water had seeped through his shoes and his feet were cold. Red-winged blackbirds scolded them from dry stalks. "It's a recurring theme, like a leitmotif. I'm considering it for my senior thesis."
"I don't write poetry," he said.
She looked at him aslant, shot him Bacall, up and sideways at the camera through wisps of hair.
"Perhaps. I figured that would be your defense."
They had met in college. He had noticed her from the start, a face serene in the midst of New England intensity, eyebrows inked across that face, the dashes of an editor's felt pen. The name, Mathilde, had been Matey forever. Her face was strong, igneous. Thick hair, brown with reddish tints in the sun, and eyebrows that were darker, and bushy like a man's. Her ancestry, she told him, was mongrel French, and her father was a doctor somewhere in the Los Angeles basin. The expression on her face was determined even when she was confused. She had a chin like a fist.
"Not bad, Steinmuller," she said. "You're getting the hang of this language business, English as a second tongue. Next week's lesson, I like you Matey. Simple declarative sentence with an appositive."
They first made love in the fall. His roommates were gone for Thanksgiving holiday. Too far to fly back to California for the weekend, she had stayed on campus and he stayed too. They lay in front of a fire on a black bear rug in a far dormitory corner. Afterwards they lingered, fingertips over each other's faces. The soft bristles of a Japanese paintbrush. It was the lingering Peter best recalled, wordless and inches apart, Ella singing Body and Soul over the speakers the way she sings, each note hit smack in its stomach.
"You got to give me the setting is romantic," he said at last. "The first snow of the season, a hearth, the pine logs. Maybe you'd prefer Rachmaninoff."
"Should I?" she said wide-eyed. "You think he does this better?"
That was the Matey he used to find sleep as his train bumped across France up tempo, the tough and soft and funny one.
He quit school midway in his second year. Developed a few tics. He would idly put his fingers to his face, touch the lower lip on its red plum. He rocked when he listened, slowly, a dance tempo. He grew the spare beard that he still wore, a scruff cover that didn't quite take, but he kept it. It made his appearance taller, thinner, ill at ease.
Dropping out of school was a manumission. He was freed. He had regularly earned pocket money playing occasionals, and now he took on established club dates. Backed on two CD's, got several solos. Downbeat reviewed one of the recordings and called him a young lion of the piano. But he moved away from that path, stuck to obscure bars. Recording jobs meant pursuit, you had to interview, rehearse, a lot of hassle. This way, no hanging around. The influence of events over his will comforted him. Winds were acting upon him, he needn't choose, he let himself be blown along.
Matey graduated from their college and moved to Boston to begin a career in advertising. He got a job playing keyboard for a rock group, wrote several tunes for their first CD and earned enough to last six months. He moved to Los Angeles, but a second record deal fell through. The Coast was a surplus of talent, stacked like cordwood, waiting to be selected. Pianists who cut him up and down, modulating everything through twelve keys. A guitarist he knew in Kansas City thought there might be something there.
Kansas City worked out. It was a singles disco, a DJ faked a black accent and played records when the band was off. Suits hustling secretaries, serious boozers. He found a rooming house by a park. There were rowboats on the lake. He took long walks in the afternoon and had an affair with a woman who played passable trombone.
Until her death Peter mailed his mother extra money. Not from charity, but to repay college expenses squandered on him. The money he sent made him feel better. Distant. He had in mind to set himself so free he could float.
There had been talk of money in the family, his Swiss grandfather. But the war changed everything, and his grandmother had arrived in the U.S., he knew, toting a baby and very little else. If there had once been wealth, only his grandmother would have the story, and she was long past recollecting and talking about it.
Between gigs he found his way to Boston for a joy fix. The first few times Matey took him in without dues. After Kansas City and the trombone, though, she was on him.
"You think this is some emotional flop house, Peter, you're wrong. You want to stay, I'm glad to have you. You want to sit and contemplate the predicament of man at the crossroads, no reliable information to help him along his existential way, include me out. I'm not at home for that."
He thought if he could stay near Matey he'd learn her passion. A summer theater on the Cape hired him, he and a drummer were the pit. Dark Monday and Tuesday. He bought a wheezing BMW motorbike the scrap side of antique. After Sunday night curtain, he snaked his bike through lines of returning beach traffic.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bloodlines by Bruce Ducker. Copyright © 2000 Bruce Ducker. Excerpted by permission of The Permanent Press.
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