Across the dim room, the full figure of Wilson himself ate up my playing. His smile lost its sadness. His great arms clasped his table, and for a moment I thought he was going to lift it up in the air and twirl it in tempo. He recognized every message I threaded into the mix. I brought the thing into a hilarious homestretch, ending with a fat plagal cadence, a big old amen that left my old friend shaking his head in pleasure. In the Glimmer Room’s darkness, his eyes asked, Now how’d you learn to play like that?
I bounded up from the bench and made for him. It wasn’t time for my break, but Mr. Silber was free to replace me with the mod-chart crawler of his choice. Wilson’s head shake swelled as I came near, and as I closed the distance, I felt how much I’d missed his deep charity toward the species — the only man I’d ever felt completely comfortable with. He smiled in more quizzical surprise as I approached, a smile that only broke when he saw mine crack and fall. In the light of his table’s candle, Wilson Hart vanished and became someone from Lahore or Bombay — some land I’d never laid eyes on. I stopped ten feet from him, my past broken in front of me. “I–I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”
“But I am someone else,” the fellow protested with a bewildered, unplaceable accent. “And you play like no one else!”
“Forgive me.” I retreated to the safety of my piano. Of course it wasn’t Wilson Hart. Wilson Hart would never have entered a club like this, even by accident. He’d have been stopped before reaching the door. I fell back on the bench and launched into a brutal, humiliated “Something.” When I dared to look up again at song’s end, the stranger was gone.
Maybe because they’d never heard any quotations quite as crazed, or maybe under the mistaken impression that I was inventing something, a small circle of patrons actually started to listen. They’d sit at tables close to the piano and lean forward when I played. I thought at first that there was something wrong. I’d gotten used to sending my phrases off into the farthest reaches of space. Now, somehow, word had gone out. I wasn’t sure I liked having an audience. All this avid listening reminded me too much of the world I’d come from. It disconcerted me.
Mr. Silber took me aside before I went on one night, toward the end of the summer. The season was ending, and I’d done nothing to prepare for winter. I felt incapable of moving out of Atlantic City. I was unable even to think of looking for work again. Returning to the music I’d betrayed was impossible. I suffered from a massive fatigue, many times bigger than my body. For the first time since birth, it felt simpler not to be alive at all. Mr. Silber held me by one shoulder and examined me. “Boy,” he said, or maybe “My boy.” He used them both. “You’ve got something.” He tried for some tone of approval that wouldn’t tip his hand. “I know we only contracted for the high season, but if you’re not going anywhere, we could probably keep using you.”
I wasn’t going anywhere. This year or ever. All I wanted was to be used.
“With your playing, we can bring in listeners year-round.”
“I’m running out of ideas,” I warned him. “I’m out of touch.”
“You know that stuff you’ve been playing? The crazy stuff? Your music? Just keep letting it flow. Wherever the spirit moves you! Make it up as you go along; then don’t change a single note. Now, I’ll have to cut you to one hundred, during the off-peak season, of course.” But in a preemptive move, lest I head down the road to play at the Shimmer Room, he promised that the ginger ale would, forever onward, be complimentary.
The summer ended and the tourists disappeared. The town turned harder, inward. But Mr. Silber had guessed right: Enough people kept coming to the Glimmer Room to subsidize live music. I placed the faces of repeat offenders. Atlantic City residents: The concept seemed too sad to consider, though I now was one myself. Sometimes the regulars approached me during breaks. They’d speak in short, stressed words as if I couldn’t quite follow their tongue. As if I were in and out of heroin-recovery programs. I’d do my best to accommodate, keeping my voice low and my answers peppered with mangled Brooklyn street slang. Mumbling always works wonders — an authenticity all its own.
One woman started showing up every weekend night. I noticed her the first time she came in, on the arm of a mallet-headed man four inches shorter than she was. I’d stopped noticing the striking women after a few months, but this one got me. She had that bruised hothouse flower look that always caught Jonah’s eye. I wanted to run and find him, lure him back to America with a full report of this chess-piece creature. Her face was small and flawless, the color of spun sugar, trimmed by high cheeks and a magazine nose, with unnervingly straight glossy black hair that fell in a pert Prince Valiant helmet. She dressed against the times, in dated colors, with a taste for white blouses and hunter green skirts above dark stockings and granny boots.
She looked out of herself, as through a picture frame. Maybe she’d come to Atlantic City to take part in one of the beauty pageants and just stayed on. Maybe she was some third-generation clammer’s daughter, or the scion of a ruined gambling family. I guessed something different every night. I felt myself grow happy when she walked in. Nothing more. Just a good warm sense of playing the way I liked to, as if the best set of the night could now begin. I was happy, too, when the mallet-headed man stopped showing. I didn’t like how he steered her, using the small of her back as the wheel. Call it racism, but I didn’t like someone who looked like him liking my music.
She’d sit at a tiny two-person table almost in the crook of the piano. The hostesses saved it for her. She’d sit and nurse an amaretto stone sour for hours. Men came by and mashed on her, sitting across the little table, their backs to me. But she always got them to leave within fifteen minutes. She wanted to sit by herself. Not alone, but with the tunes. I’d noticed it for weeks. Even when she stared into space, her straight black hair blocking her profile, I could still see it. She sang along. On almost every song I played, no matter how deep I buried the melody, she found and unearthed it. She even knew the second verses.
I tested her, taking her out for spins without her ever knowing. Her repertoire was huge, bigger than mine. I was learning the tunes, often as late as the afternoon I came in to work. This velvet-haired woman knew them all already. When I slipped in a jazzed-up, transmogrified Schubert or Schumann — imposters passing, for an evening, in that smoke-filled room — she’d sit and listen, cocking her head, puzzled that there could be a pretty tune she’d never heard. I studied her for the covers she liked, the ones that made that linen-colored face go Christmas. She whispered almost gravely to “Incense and Peppermints.” But to “The Shoop Shoop Song,” she positively squirmed in place. “Monday, Monday” left her subdued, while “Another Saturday Night” got her hopping. It took me a while to figure out the key. But once I did, the pattern rarely failed. Her musical passion obeyed the simplest rule in the world: She wanted to shim-sham-shimmy with the black and tan.
Once I figured out her songs of choice, I favored her with them. Without our exchanging a glance — for she had a heart-stopping ability always to be staring at some distant place whenever I looked up — I made her know I was playing for her. I ran whole musical commentaries to her evening, playing “Respect” when guys tried to pick her up, “Shop Around” when I caught her checking out the men, “I Second That Emotion,” early in the morning as she stifled a yawn. She loved when I dipped back into the thirties and forties — Horne, Holiday, all the contraband material Mr. Silber put on the forbidden list. She sat icy and statuesque, mouthing tunes from the year I was born. She herself couldn’t have dated to a minute before the stroke of 1950. But the further back in time I reached, the more she delighted in the journey.