Long, long afterwards, long beyond that moment I held at my belly my old trumpet tasting of wet zinc, long after the woman seated almost clothed there through the bare notch of the early March limbs, past the years I drank enough to talk, then got gnawed by every wrong kind of woman there was, gnawed and thrashed by their awful stories (because I made them tell all to learn what being rightly human was about, even the woman who kept marrying others while we were courting I made tell everything before she got off her bicycle); on past this I only half realized what I had seen. Can’t I be pardoned, because what ecstasy holds a candle to the sudden intelligence one is granted years, whole cycles of war and famine, after viewing a rare event in ignorance? The collision of mind and flesh, all your veins pumped with light. Your own sweet innocence brings tears to your eyes, which see again revised, nostalgia on you like a barrel of walnuts. Time has been a kind uncle saving your inheritance until the moment was right. He has been patient, his hands out to you over the years. The woman’s husband was a rented soul too, in our neighborhood of pale clerks in their red brick dormings. He too was dull. He came to this town where nobody would ever ask him, How could you deserve this wife of yours? Drudge as you are, teacher of religious education, you must have rich hidden gifts, eh? This town with a surplus of flanking churches where the unctuous and the grim were sanctified. No ruffians took him off to the alley and told him, Your face is getting on our nerves, see, gray fool. While I played my trumpet at all their studied venerable blank heads, unable to speak.
After that afternoon their marriage somehow ground to a halt, a halt of a halting anyway, and a muted scandal hung around them when he went away. I would have known everything, had I known. She was Mediterranean, a little anyway, although her voice was the same as everyone’s. Some Sicilian, maybe, frowning out of her. Or she could be a tropical Jewess. I thought I had driven them apart with my trumpet and was vain. In three separate sleeps I dreamed of her and I was ruined for the regular girls. I couldn’t speak to them anyway. At every pass I was vanquished except in a state contest where they gave me a yellow ribbon for superior.
Then I went to the nationals where I was attacked by a Latvian judge and driven into the familiar dark again, where a bum with perfect pitch heard me and mugged me of my instrument. But I lingered there in New York and drank out the tanks of this my first metropolis. I felt I was on the last planet of man, where the dregs of all stories were, and I became for years a mere roving hole of audiation, a great ear in my courtly brogans rubbed off to the white underneath.
When I finally got my story out, the woman and the loaf, it had a terrible design to it, and the terrible part confused others. What terrible, how terrible, why terrible? Or was my story really kind, perhaps tragic too, the loaf floating out of her curtain, the man’s head in the curtain, he wore the curtain, wasn’t I remembering that finally? This was my first anecdote but I couldn’t blurt it out correctly. I didn’t have the light yet. The conjunction was not quite made, I had not driven the thing home. I was a sorry sight to my ruined acquaintances, shouting in my liquor, Show it, prove it, let’s have it out in the open! Drinking my cheap scotch, shouldering through mongrel New York. Or worse, meeting my own kind. It’s a hideous affront to see your own kind on the walks there. You want to run into them, through them, blaming them for the needless duplication. There they are with their own loyal monkeys around them, redundantios.
Nevertheless I went on searching for my trumpet. I had met the man who stole it many, many times, but he never recognized me. He wore a hat like my father’s except much taller in the crown, perhaps ten inches of hat there giving him away and the further clue that he had never moved from the spot where first he fell on me, but without the trumpet in his hands now. My trumpet old and zinc flavored but mine and a partner to my vision through the naked tree. But this man begged so violently I couldn’t just stand there accusing him with my new New York voice. No, he would get the jump on you begging so you felt he’d tear your limbs and clothes off for a dime, and he saw no redundancy in people, he was such a consumer, so needy. He begged the same man as yesterday, who always gave something to him. He would beg the same man over and over, each day freshly minted, unbeggared. People gave him buttons, Tums, lint, keys, all over again. During his racket I was trying to get a word in but at not too close range. He had sucked in my horn and I felt did not remember this. Besides, he was pure. I mean he barely acknowledged the turds and string thrown at him. It was begging itself, the clean form, he aspired to. I tell you there was not the least suggestion he was mad. You saw a great patient sanity in his eyes under the hat, a sort of rage. Now and again he broke into song, always sweetly pitched, almost angelic like a castrato. I believe the whole street thought him superior, I’d swear it. They feared him when the cold days began and he became even louder, fearless, their obliviousness sorely tested. With more cold he loomed more awful, a fiend let down off a bronze horse rampant with pigeons and green mange. He kept up in his thin, not too nasty, clothes, a suit with vest over a tuna gym shirt. On his cheeks were handsome small tracks of acne. This touched me, his old teen-agehood shared with mine. With his persistence in the thin clothes under the tall optimistic hat as the chill of the mongrel city went inward to your marrow, then grew like a vine around your feet. I began to love the man.
It started in pity as I saw him huddle, then hunker, some special wind from Maine smashing his pride. But he ascended to a racket of beseeching every now and then. Hardly anybody knew me, but I knew him. All the iron in me fled as love took over. Love is a buttered clarinet, that’s what it is. You’ve barely touched the instrument but begin your wretched toots on the alien thing.
Sir, I said, Sir, don’t you have my horn? If so, just keep it, don’t think a thing about it. Or you could give it back. Either way your heart desires. I spoke aloud.
The cold in him gave me my brief opportunity. He was not quick enough to drown me out begging. Holy God, the man collapsed when he heard me. On the spot he fell inwards. You saw what a delicate thing his need was. Reversed, begged at, he suffered spasms of revolution. Under the ambitious hat you saw the woe of an artist gripped in bankruptcy.
The horn, devoured so long ago, the idea of the horn pitched him into such a rage about every delinquency of the planet he could not finish yelling them out. He could not possibly announce all that was owed him. He broke down in a sickness of decomposition. I was a heinous agent from the Outer and his beany eyes magnified me. He shrank in his thin suit. He was a dog rolled over in awe, spreading his legs to explain his inconsequence. His protests died choking.
Say, there’s not that much to it, man. We could let it go. It’s just I’ve waited so long, the months of growing this beard on my face, I said.
He jumped towards me and put his hands around my throat. But then he shrank back in his suit odor. The odor was not that bad, either that or I had become married to it in my long wait for the horn.
The philosopher had it right, the monkey scratches its fleas with the key that opens its cage. I was liberated to speak by the whiskey but more by the bum, while he dove back in his cage at the horror of being asked for anything back. The whirlpool of need stopped cold by a simple request.
He ran off somewhere and then was here again. I had the old horn back in my hands, just a shade greener with corrosion, and I was free to see my youth again. From then on he would hardly look at me until one day he and the hat were immobilized by sleet. I think he was dead or very ill, squatted there in a stare. Maybe he was me in my old age. I didn’t want to age anymore up north. I took a bus driven nearly walking speed back to my own rented lands.