The Song is You (2009) (35 page)

Dean Villerman’s piano that night in Chicago accompanied Julian’s mother padding from room to room in her stockings, and there was no way to tell if any one clinking glass belonged to his mother, a diner in the Skyline Lounge, or Lady Day herself. There was no way to tell whose drink it was on his iPod, nor on Julian’s living room speakers attached to his computer, whenever he clinked the ice into his own glass, under photos of his mother and father on the wall, and of Holiday, and the photo of an Irish girl going down into the subway with a man rising with mannequins and, tucked into the frame’s corner, the postcard of the old Parisian couple. But for all that, there was this piano miracle: that distant and incomparable piano work, decades old, sonically veiled and only sometimes clear, like a glimpse of unimaginable beauty across a four-lane highway at night.

And in 1988, less than a week after Julian moved to New York to take his first commercial job, by glittering coincidence (warm October day walking with Aidan through Central Park, jazz public radio rising from a spread blanket, calendar of events read in baritone monotone, “tonight at the Quaver,” name miswritten or misread as “Dan Villerman”), he learned of the pianist’s continued existence. Aidan declined without hesitation: “I have urgent personal business.” So Julian went alone.

The Quaver was a small club, soon to close its doors permanently in the latest resettling of jazz at the sandy bottom of the nightlife economy, and that night, when Julian arrived, the room was nearly empty. Villerman was already playing, though at first and fourth glance he could have been some dignified bum or migrant piano tuner. But the sound was unmistakable, that same magical transformation of the piano—in this case a battered old upright—into a whirling alchemist’s device of memory, lighting, even incense. Villerman played without looking up from the keyboard, without acknowledging the three tables at the front, which held real, listening fans. Boarding-school students? Long-memoried fanatics? Family?

Villerman played without stopping, strung song after song into garlands. Sometimes Julian had the impression he was just playing chords and scales, old exercises, but with such feeling that Julian hardly knew where to look or what to do with his hands, felt the waitress’s questions about drinks were heretically intrusive, disrespectful to a solar eclipse or a doomed tribe’s last and futile war council. Villerman was mythologically old—so old, small and slight—but with a distended belly straining the lower buttons of a plaid shirt. He curved forward, as if he were pulled over by his frayed black suspenders with silver clips attached to his woolly (and belted) trousers, or the weight of his old-man bifocals, thick in their old-man frames, refracting insanely anything Julian occasionally glimpsed through them when Villerman’s head came up and turned slightly to the left. It was a cold October night, and when the door opened, Julian heard, then felt the wind and smelled the dying season, but the old man didn’t react to the blasts of air or the pebbles-against-a-window applause, which soon stopped in relief at his obvious indifference. He only stopped playing—and only with his right hand—at just the right moments, executed as if they were composed and rehearsed far in advance, leaving dark chords or walking bass lines in command of the room while he drank, from the highball kept full at his side, clear liquid supplied by the sole waitress from a stained steel shaker, dented, with half the logo of an old gin, not made for decades.

Villerman was a particular species of steady-state drunk, well into the sixth full decade of his habit and manner. He had reduced himself to an equation: an intake of alcohol and an output of piano music. He was playing when Julian entered, and he was playing three hours later, when Julian was literally the only customer remaining in the room. He took no breaks, evoking the possibility of a jazz catheter or a perfect wasteless system.

The pianist, sideways to the room, seemed to withdraw from all directions, his eyes down, bending forward into the piano but also leaning away from the tables, drawing in his legs. The farther he buried himself in the piano, the sweeter the noise, as though he were slowly feeding himself to, and placating, a singing lion. He didn’t speak to the audience, or acknowledge those three tables emptying of his last earthly fans, nor did he look at anyone other than the waitress. “Thank you, dear,” he overenunciated each time she refilled his nearly empty glass, and another serenely lovely tune would flow from his hands and wrap itself around Julian in the shadows by the exposed brick wall under the cloudy mirror with the chipping golden logo for that same extinct gin, “Sorry, my heart” whispering its siren’s accompaniment to the perpetual river of music, as Villerman stayed drunk and Julian got drunk and the waitress—destined for a golden and symbolic anonymity and permanent youth in this story—accepted Julian’s invitation to sit down with him and get drunk, too, though she didn’t “really like jazzy stuff, to be honest, kind of prefer regular music.”

Hunched, contorted, retreating within ever-reducing limitations, the old man played until four in the morning. He only stopped then because the barman called a halt. Two or three people had come and gone between one and four, but at four, only Julian and the staff remained. “That’s it, baby,” the bartender called to the stage, and at once, in the middle of a measure, Dean’s hands fell from the piano and burrowed under his thighs. He sat, nodding at the keyboard, as if agreeing with it. “Real nice playing,” said the barman. Villerman stood and, not surprisingly, wavered a little; he’d been sitting on a wooden bench getting drunk for seven hours. Instinctively, trained by a childhood with a tippy man, Julian stepped forward and caught the pianist as he tumbled over. “Ah, yes, thank you,” he murmured politely, still not looking up, as Julian propped him in a seat by the door. “Very kind of you. Fall sometimes.”

Villerman’s pay for the gig—minus his drinks at the performer’s discount—left him with a tab of twenty-seven dollars. He reached for his wallet, attached to him by a thin chain. Julian stopped him and reached for his own money, flush after his first job and desperate to repay the man for his service to his family. “Oh, this is too depressing,” grunted the bartender with his ponytail and croquet-wicket mustache. “I’ll cover it. Please, just—good night, bye-bye.”

Villerman was somehow smaller when standing than when seated.

“Thank you, thank you, very kind of you,” he said with the extreme politeness of certain drunks as Julian and his waitress accompanied him outside, not having discussed it but with everything clear.

When Julian’s father was diagnosed with the cancer that would kill him with vulgar haste, Aidan responded with a flood of his own symptoms, some convincing enough that he found himself slid into MRI coffins and orbited by CT donuts. He had running sores that didn’t respond to treatments and a shortness of temper that didn’t respond to criticism. His trials ended suddenly, before their father’s death, in the MRI tube as the machine’s banging magnets cried out their mother’s name, and Aidan wept at the mystical epiphany of it, in the tight white enclosure,
as pam
was shouted at him, and sobs shook him from the inside while a disembodied Russian voice kept repeating, “You must remain still, sir. You must remain still, sir, or your results will be tainted.” After this, Aidan was cured of his ailments by a self-described “ambulance-chasing psychologist” who left his card with ERs and internists, even waited outside doctors’ offices looking for a particular sort of disappointed expression on the faces of departing patients.

Julian, by contrast, though much closer to their father, had been relatively unaffected by the news of his illness. He just kept telling himself it was all part of life, part and parcel of his own emigration to New York (which he had made with his father’s valedictory reminder that “we enter this world alone, screaming, and we exit alone”). Sad, yes, obviously very sad, he loved his father, but as Aidan was traveling through the terminal stages of his disorder, and their father was entering his own terminal stages, Julian, four in the morning, five hours before he was meant to fly to Ohio to visit him, was walking down lower Broadway with a waitress-treat, each of them supporting one arm of a shuffling, elderly jazz musician, childlike in Julian’s black peacoat, as Villerman claimed to have forgotten his own coat in New Hampshire. The pianist also shyly admitted that he had nowhere to stay before his 11
A.M
. train back north to school. He had played so ceaselessly, in part, to fill up the time until the train, figuring that if he didn’t stop playing, they wouldn’t kick him out. With the little man swallowed by the outsize coat, killing time before going back “to school,” one arm in Julian’s and one in the waitress’s, they made a distorted picture of a young family, even more so when they all ended up at the waitress’s studio apartment watching the pianist fight off sleep, sitting up on her sofa bed as the day arrived, not with the sun rising but as a change in the color of the shadows cast on the brick wall a few feet in front of her only window.

Villerman didn’t recall any radio gig with Billie Holiday. He laughed at the idea that he had ever achieved such heights. “I’m more of an amateur, Henry,” he told Julian after he woke up, his eyes still tipsily cheerful through the soundproof panes of his glasses. Julian smiled fondly at the jokey modesty and asked if he’d played often with Holiday. Villerman blinked, though the top lids (above the bifocal bifurcation) and the bottom lids (below it) had to cover vast, magnified distances to meet. “I’m telling you, kid, I never played with Billie Holiday. I never played with any big stars like that.”

Julian had the newly transferred CD and his day-old portable CD player with him, and he plugged the furry, floppy G clefs of Villerman’s ears. Villerman instantly became just a disoriented old drunk baffled by space-age technology, but eventually he listened, semi-awake, to the piano playing that Julian’s father (and Julian) held in esteem above all other jazz piano playing in history, above Peterson or Tatum or Monk or Hancock or Frishberg or Strazzeri. “Who’s on piano?” Villerman asked, pulling the cords out of his head after a minute or two. “Do you have any coffee, dear? Or gin?” he asked the waitress.

“It’s you,” Julian insisted.

“No, I couldn’t ever play like that. That’s Jimmy Rowles.”

Julian put the disc on the last track and, almost pushing the old man back on the couch, gently batting away his resisting hands, he shoved the earphones back in place. “Just listen.” And Julian watched the old face as, he knew, the man heard Billie Holiday introduce the band, concluding with, “And our friend, Mr. Dean Viller—
ahem—
on the piano.” She didn’t say his name quite right back in ‘59; he had probably been a last-minute sub she’d had no choice but to accept because Mal Waldron or Hank Jones or, yes, Jimmy Rowles was sick, but the sound of her flubbing his name, in 1988, sufficed to jar something loose from the mucky banks of Villerman’s silted memory. His mouth opened, and he looked up, slumped on the couch, and his face contorted, the muscles of his lower lip fighting each other. “She,” he said. “Is this a record?” he shouted, adjusting his volume for the music only he could hear. Julian removed the headphones and asked, “Were you living in Chicago in 1959?”

“I suppose I must have been,” he replied. “May I listen to the whole thing again?” With his eyes closed, but awake (he’d occasionally yell something), Dean Villerman listened to an entirely forgotten hour of his life from thirty years before. Julian’s sexual exploit for the morning was postponed indefinitely, as the waitress fell asleep at the far end of the couch from her elderly guest, and Julian sat on the only chair—stolen from the Quaver but camouflaged with a leopard-skin cushion—watching Dean’s face react to the music. “Who said, ‘Sorry, my heart’?” he inevitably shouted, “Or did I just dream that?”

Later that same day, the waitress’s sleepy, amused kiss at her door still a palpable, edible memory, Julian recounted his adventure that morning, walking the great pianist himself to his train before taking a taxi to La Guardia and the flight to his father’s hospital bed. He tucked the same headphones into his father’s ears, attached to a head that was rapidly losing its shape.

His father—reduced, reducing—took out one plug, achieving a skeletal Secret Service effect. “That was just yesterday.” He smiled, then turned away and vomited violently. “Sorry.”

“That’s all right. You can keep the headphones.”

“I won’t need them where I’m going. I have it on good advice the sound system is exquisite. Tell me about Dean. Can you tell by looking at him? Does he seem like the guy who played like that?”

“Not even to himself,” Julian said. “There wasn’t much left of him.”

“I know the feeling.”

“You used to say Dean was playing like he was giving Billie his blessing, saying it was going to be okay.”

“Yeah.” His father closed his eyes and listened, might have been asleep until he asked, “Can you believe your mother? She just stomped around the house for half the broadcast.”

“It will be, you know, Dad,” Julian said, choking a little. “Okay, I mean.”

“I know. You, too. Things are mostly okay, most of the time.”

His father was consuming a death squad of painkillers with ferocious reputations, but he dismissed them as “ambitious but ineffective.” They did, however, succeed in shutting down his digestion, except, after several days of concrete inaction, a sound-and-smell show that entertained him and defied anyone present not to comment. “Impossible noises for a human,” he boasted, and Julian heard enough in the last week of his father’s life to agree: jet engines, a sobbing child’s repetitive stuttering cry, a distant trill of machine-gun fire several towns away, the wheeze of a dying bird. “I’m turning into a faulty inflatable,” his father said. “And one of those Japanese sleepers. You remember them?” By then his voice was scarcely audible, far less than his other noises, and he was falling asleep often, and for longer, less troubled naps.

The smells he produced were equally improbable and even funnier to him as he tried to find just the right names to make his crying son laugh: burnt scrambled eggs, fermented vanilla extract, cordite, hay-fever tears. “Do you smell this?” he asked. “Can you smell this? Am I insane or is that…”