A New Years Challenge [Archive] - Texas DownLow Forum

Alaska cat

01-01-2007, 03:51 AM

An example

(after two shots of Yeagermeister).

Both women at the table laughed. The bar was smoky, the jazz smokier, an atmospheric blend that was as intoxicating as the drinks in front of them. Several hours before, their waiter had set them down, nodding towards a man on the other side of the room.

"Compliments of the gentleman by the potted fern," he told them.

"What is it?" Jeanne asked, swirling the cloudy liquid, eyeing the
gradations from white to sliver.

"That's a Dust Bunny," he told her. "Coconut liqueur and vodka, with a
touch of vanilla schnapps." He learned closer, conspiratorially. "It'll
put you right on the floor-where the dust bunnies live."

"That would be under the bed, then," laughed Marianne, "instead of in it."

Marianne looked over at the man by the fern, who raised his glass. "Who is he?" she asked the waiter.

"Actually, he's your entertainment for the next set. Martin Nelson. Plays a mean saxophone."

Behind them, the snapping of fingers. Their waiter gave them a wink, and was gone. Jeanne gazed after him.

"Put your eyes back in your head, girl," Marianne laughed. "I saw him
kissing that porter-what's his name? Charles, that's right, the fellow
with the ears-behind a door to some broom closet or something. Kicked the door shut when they heard me coming."

"Damn," Jeanne shook her head. "What's a girl to do?"

The ocean liner on which they were traveling was fully decked out for New Year's Eve, with most of the guests in the upstairs ballroom. The bar was for the few for whom a dress-up affair was too cumbersome, or too snobby,or just too-ballroom. Jeanne and Marianne, old friends from U of T school days back in the 50s, figured this was a better way to ring in 1974, both of them with a divorce behind them, both hoping for something better than
a girl-gab 'til midnight followed by a drunken stumble down to a lonely
berth.

"Sax is good," offered Jeanne now, gazing towards the man by the fern. His face, under his fedora, was shadowed; she squinted to try to make out his features through the haze.

"Sex IS good," agreed Marianne.

They started laughing then, as they would sometimes do, snorfling into their hands until tears came to their eyes and they had to cross their legs to keep from peeing. Marianne, coming up for air, offered: "I always thought that if penises could talk, they'd speak sax." Which sent them, again, into gales of laughter.

"Did you really make that up?" Jeanne asked, when they'd finally settled into soft wheezing punctuated with giggles.

"Actually, I was in this pub. There was some kind of open mic thing, a bunch of writing students reading their work. It was something a woman read, Heather something. Fisher. Heather Fisher. I always thought it was perfect. I mean, saxophones are sexy. Smooth, right? But also."

They both looked at the man beside the fern with new interest.

***

Martin Nelson sits with a glass of Glenfiddich in front of him, a potted fern at his right ear, his beloved saxophone resting quietly in its case under the table. He doesn't know why he sent the Dust Bunnies to the women at the table by the kitchen. Sometimes these things come to him. It's like the muse, he thinks: sometimes, it's a tune that comes from somewhere off
above his right shoulder, whispers in his ear, and translates into the keys of the saxophone and into a riff of its own. Sometimes, it's a nudge that says: turn left at this corner, even though he's intended to turn right. It used to happen when he was a young man, desperate to get out of that godforsaken hole in northern Ontario and into a little bit of excitement. He's make that left turn, find himself on a back road, and there in the beam of headlights would be a bull moose with a full rack, standing there as a reminder that excitement was in the eye of the beholder.

A full rack, he thinks now, glancing sideways at the table by the kitchen and the full figure that is Marianne. He unwraps a Hershy bar-another vice, he has a few-and lets the chocolate melt with the Scotch in his mouth. It's heaven, he thinks. This is heaven.

Later, he looks at the woman at the table by the kitchen and ponders. It's all about the muse. You just never know where it's going to come from. Or what it means when it does.

***

Marianne and Jeanne took on the Dust Bunnies like they were in some sort of cleaning frenzy. "Man, these are good," Marianne kept saying.

"You're just trying to keep the waiter coming back," said Jeanne.
"Although he IS pretty cute."

"But gay."

"Oh, who the hell cares?"

"Well, he might."

Upstairs, they could hear the strains of music that suggested the ballroom dance had begun. Jeanne imagined women in full hoop skirts, men in-what did the men wear? "Codpieces," she said, then laughed, because she hadn't thoought about it much.

"What?" said Marianne, and they were laughing again, the Dust Bunnies having fully infiltrated the brains of the two women, as Dust Bunnies will do. Most people in the know understand the nefarious nature of the Dust Bunny.

And then it everything changed.

Both women fell silent as they watched the man, previously of the Potted Fern, take the stage. The jacket was off, revealing a white shirt rolled at the cuffs, first button undone. A pair of dress pants. The fedora, still shading his face, his eyes, even under the lights directed at the small stage. He was wrapped in smoke. His saxophone gleamed. In the pause that preceded the first note, neither breathed.

***

Martin tries to see past the lights, but it is as if there is nobody in
the audience. He's alone on the stage. Against the blank that often accompanies him in these moments, his playlist is scotch taped to the stage. But, as always, the muse comes to him, through his fingers, through his mouth as his tongue touches the mouthpiece, the taste of the reed, the cool of the metal, all of it an extension of each limb, each organ, and at the rot of it, the pulse of his heart. He blows, and the sound wraps
around him, curling, then, like a snake, curling out into the audience in reptilian seduction.

***

Marianne hears the sound, and the hilarity of the evening dissipates, becomes something else altogether.

"Marianne?" Jeanne snaps her fingers in her friend's face. "Oh, damn. Here we go."

***

His eyes are closed, it's just him and the sax, now. It's an oddly sexual experience, in a purely musical form. He wonders at the strange connection between the sexual, the musical, the rapturous, almost religiousexperience, thinks that perhaps it's about bein g in the moment, purely there, not thinking about tomorrow's shopping, or the collection agency, or whether or not he remembered to let the dog out. There is nothing but
the moment, like those Zen Bhuddists are always striving for, The Now.

And in the middle of that moment, in the Now of the Sex of Sax, of the Radiant Rapture and the notes that curl, snakelike around him, serpent in the Garden of Eden, she comes to him, Eve-like, and he opens his eyes and sees her in stereoscopic vision, as clear, and three-dimensional and yet strangely ethereal, walking toward the stage from the darkness of the Shadow of Death, and.

***

"Oh, man." Jeanne waved at the waiter, who sauntered over, all tight jeans and dimples.

"Can you believe this?" She asked him. She gestured to Marianne, who now stood at the edge of the stage, eyes fixed on the shadow beneath the fedora, seeing something, Jeanne thought, that perhaps no-one else could see.

The waiter, apparently, saw nothing. "Did you want another drink?" he asked her.

Jeanne looked at him. Saw, in that moment, another moment much later, after the bar had closed, the dark embrace in staff quarters after the passengers had seen the new year in, the last reveler safely back in dreamy berthland. She envied the waiter that intimate moment.

"Don't you see them?" she asked him.

Jeanne looked, then, saw her friend step onto the stage, and looked back to see if the waiter was seeing what she, herself saw, a tunnel of light between two disparate people on a New Year's eve on an ocean liner miles from any port of call.

He looked at her squarely. "I don't see anything," he said.

Jeanne looked back. The stage was empty.

***

At the stroke of midnight, Martin and Marianne have ceased to be. They are not Martin, not Marianne. They are two stars spinning in a universe between one year, and the next. Far below them, a party launches into cheers, midnight achieved, as if by some miracle, as if it wouldn't have been realized anyway by the mere ticking of the clock. If they took the time to notice they would see the warm, boozy embraces of the passengers
on an ocean liner who, before today, knew nothing of one another, stars spinning in their own closed galaxies. But for a moment, there is the unity of shared time, and in itself, it is perfect. But there is no galaxy but their own.

***

"Don't you see it?" Asks Jeanne again. She is looking at him, watching the subtle shift in facial expression. His eyes remind her of a Michaelangelo painting. A cherub, gazing skyward. How odd, to find so much rapture. She finds herself looking up, as if that is where, surely, they must both have gone.

"Lucky," he says, and in that word Jeanne can hear a symphony of unrequited love. Elusive, she thinks. Like enlightenment. Or, she thinks more practically, like the likelihood of another drink anytime soon. The waiter is gazing at the stage, and the sparkly place where, in another time, a musician might be blowing cool notes on an alto sax as smooth as.

"Lucky" he repeats, and keeps looking straight up.