* * *
Hayden came to the Nissen hut workshop and walked with me to the bad Greek restaurant. The weather was turning fast. When he saw the restaurant, he refused “to lunch” in a lichen-lined hole and took me in a taxi to an empty, expensive hotel restaurant near the Zoo. He said he didn’t know what to do. His soft, luxurious trench-coat collar was turned up spy-style. Cello had come back from her Swiss gold mine, but she was being coy about whether Hayden’s agent would see a contract and he needed to ask someone about an advance against his commission.
“Brancusi was a cross-dresser and a racist,” Hayden said over a shrimp cocktail that reminded me of the iceberg lettuce at Sunday lunches at O’Hare in my childhood.
The doctor would ask me what I was doing and I would be honest with him. I was practicing having cheekbones. The Almost Ran have round heads, never long ones. There are sometimes a lot of us in the choir.
Hayden was saying that he doubted whether Cello even told her money people about his piece, she was so intent on her libretto. She said she submitted the tape he’d made of a sketch, but he had no way of knowing what that meant.
“Plenty of women smart enough to be bitches make up their minds not to be.”
He exhaled. He put out the cigarette it was way too early for. He didn’t have to tell me that he didn’t believe in her opera, strapped as he was. But he wouldn’t let me be catty about the number of pianos Cello had, for all the good they did her. He said he was leaving to substitute for a friend at the last minute on a conductor’s job in Stuttgart. I picked up the check.
He said that I would learn that every artist in Berlin had a messed-up project, something life-defining on hold, something bringing him back, not letting him go.
In those days in West Berlin, restaurants and bars would phone to taxi ranks. You didn’t have to go to them. Not only that, the taxi driver would park and come inside and ask the maître d’ or the bartender for you by name.
Our tall driver that afternoon had a glossy black, curly beard and a thin hoop in his left earlobe. You knew his pubic hair looked exactly like his beard. He cool-jogged ahead to get the door for Hayden, the loose buckles on his thick-soled black boots tinkling. But Hayden walked by him, around to the passenger side up front, and came to rest.
I said I would walk. I said that where I was going was just around the corner, but nobody in Berlin was paying attention. I heard a door close, but I didn’t look back to see if the driver was running around to get the other door.
* * *
“You’re wise even when you’re flying a kite.” The things my dad said sounded like quotes or wise sayings. “These are pancake days.” But they weren’t, somehow. “You’re a pool of sanity in a sea of cologne. One doesn’t mind being either.” He was a black man who wore a bow tie and was never mistaken for a Black Muslim.
* * *
I was the most adroit negotiator since Lord Carrington had been in Zimbabwe. There was a chance Cello might introduce Hayden to her elderly Hungarian princess who had the Swiss-based foundation that helped American composers working in Europe.
“She’s so old she’s nostalgic for the Ottoman Empire,” Cello said in English.
“Miss Thing, you need to get out more.”
Cello despised camp. She was annoyed with me for taking her to meet with Hayden and when I first proposed that she discuss their problems with him when he got back to Berlin, the look on her face said that she would never forgive him for letting me in on her business.
“Stanley Dell tried to write a Jungian interpretation of Uncle Remus. I was thinking we could use that,” Hayden said.
I was impressed by Hayden. He wasn’t nervous, wasn’t in the least apologetic for who he was, was not cowed by her. She was wearing a couple of strong faces at that lunch. First, she looked down at him from a great height. Then she looked around at the Café Einstein, horrified, as though she’d been kidnapped and had only just regained consciousness and didn’t know entirely where she was. After a while, she’d go back to glaring at Hayden.
Hayden really tried to get on with her. “What you said after the reading meant a lot. And it helped.” They’d known each other for a while, I was thinking. “And it meant a lot that you even turned up.” He’d managed to organize on his own a read-through, with twelve singers, of some of his ambitious choral piece.
“When a man is desperate for a compliment, it is the same as shooting a horse,” Cello said in German and looked up at the wall, as if noticing something really interesting about the play of light on it that we just wouldn’t get so why point it out to us.
“I know we said we’d work on the opera,” Hayden continued in real person’s English.
“Your music sounded different, perhaps because a musician could learn it,” Cello persisted, auf Deutsch. She held her green tea with both hands and lifted the warm cup to her forehead.
“An idea has to speak to me. I have to hear something.”
“Ever been fucked by a bottom?” Her English came out angry. She brought the cup down. “A guy trying to prove he’s straight? It’s no fun.”
Hayden waved goodbye to Cello’s unforgettable hood of beautiful hair. Across Berlin, old videos and new songs were continuing in the usual venues. I thought his piece was wonderful. I was impressed with myself for being on his side and thrilled that Cello was not.
“Thank God the spirit of Chinese capitalism makes them willing to serve another drunken customer,” Hayden was saying some hours later. He said he was glad I didn’t mind that he was drinking for me as well.
I thought that, finally, I was going to hit the town with Hayden Birge. But at some surprising point he hugged me and walked away. In honor of his hurt, and my having been almost Grade A, I did not double back to the ChiChi.
I spent the weekend hanging out with Manfred and a braless blonde oncologist originally from Leipzig. She kept him on the move — three museum exhibitions, two movies — and cooked every meal. I understood her German. He’d come get me at her insistence. Manfred was the white boy I wanted to bring home to my black parents. Dram didn’t mind his calls and Manfred returned me well before curfew. He wasn’t drinking, at least not in front of me. I didn’t say anything to him about it. I didn’t have any coffee for two days. As a result, I slept twelve hours after I left him. When I woke, the sheets were soaked with the sweat of withdrawal.
I ran into Hayden in the large newsstand across from Zoo Station. He was subletting his place and taking a contract conducting in Wales for a while, just until he could get his shit back together. There was always one day in Berlin when darkness came faster than you were ready for it to. Rainy, icy winter had jumped down on you, throwing its low clouds across the bottom of the world.
* * *
“We don’t have a drummer here tonight, but we do have a hit list,” Cello’s father said to The Price Is Right on television.
* * *
Cello did not flee from me, but she had little to say to me or to anyone else when I was around. One of the reasons I liked Dram was that he maintained a sense of proportion about everything. He’d studied to be a scholar of music and had given it up to take his place in business. He did not confuse the two. Because he’d studied creativity, he did not consider businessmen as creative as artists.
His part was to be the bass line, the steady support that could be counted on without question. The flights were for Cello to make. She was his wild, unpredictable music. So, too, her kooky friends and relations. But only up to a point. He did not play when it came to his family. Therefore he had to speak to me immediately when their Soviet-certified doctor cleaning lady turned over to him the little fold-up of cocaine she found on the floor behind my toilet. He for one did not want to see a repeat of what had happened to me four years before. He didn’t want Cello to have to live through the fear again.