“What are you saying?” Tom asked. “White people shouldn’t make music?”
Eyes focused on him. Soderman ventured, “The repairman speaks!”
Millstein was full of beery scorn. “What the fuck do you know about the Negro experience?”
“Not a damn thing,” Tom said amiably. “Hell, Larry, I’m as white as you are.”
Lawrence Millstein opened his mouth, then closed it. A moment of silence … then the table erupted in laughter. Millstein managed to say something—it might have been fuck you—but it was lost in the roar and Tom was able to ignore him.
Joyce laughed, too, then steered the conversation down a less volatile alleyway: she’d had a letter from somebody named Susan who was doing political organization in rural Georgia. Apparently Susan, a Vassar graduate, had been pretty wild during her Village days. Everybody trotted out Susan stories. Joyce relaxed.
She leaned over and whispered in Tom’s ear, “Try not to make him mad!”
He whispered back, “I think it’s too late,” and ordered another beer.
He had reached that subtle turning point at which he was not quite drunk but definitely a little past sober. He decided these were good people. He liked them. When they left Stanley’s, he followed them. Joyce took his hand.
The night air was warm and stagnant. They moved past tenement stoops full of people, bleak streetlights, noise, a barber shop reeking of Barbasol, to an old building and inside and up to a long room cluttered with bookshelves and bad, amateurish paintings. “Lawrence’s apartment,” Joyce confided. He asked, “Should I be here?” and she said, “It’s a party!”
The books were poetry, Evergreen Review, contemporary novels. The record collection was large and impressive— there were Bix Beiderbecke 78s in among the LPs—and the hi-fi looked expensive: a Rek-O-Kut turntable, an amplifier bristling with tubes. “Music!” somebody shouted, and Tom stood aside while Millstein eased a John Coltrane record out of its sleeve and placed it on the turntable—the gesture was faintly religious. Suddenly the room was full of wild melody.
Tom watched Soderman pull down the blinds, cutting off a view of the Con Ed stacks on Fourteenth Street, while someone else produced a wooden box containing a quarter ounce of seeded brown marijuana and a package of Zig-Zag rolling papers. Tom was amused by the solemnity of this ritual, including a few doubtful glances in his direction—was this new guy trustworthy? He bustled over and said, “Let me roll it.”
Smiles. Joyce asked, “Do you know how?”
He pasted together two papers to make a double-wide. His technique was rusty—it had been a long time—but he produced a creditable joint. Soderman nodded his approval. “Where did you learn that?”
He answered absently, “In college.”
“So where’d you go to college?”
“In the agricultural heartland of the Pacific Northwest.” He smiled. “A match?”
He meant only to establish his camaraderie, but the dope went instantly to his head. Coltrane’s sax, radiating from a single speaker, became a great golden bell-like instrument. He decided he liked Lawrence Millstein for liking this music, then remembered the diatribe in the bar and Joyce’s warning —Don’t make him mad—implying something about his temper and what she might have seen of it. He looked at Joyce where she stood silhouetted in the door to Lawrence’s ugly kitchen. He recalled the half promise she had made him and thought about the possibility of holding her in his arms, of taking her to bed. She was very young and not as sophisticated as she liked to believe. She deserved better than Lawrence Millstein.
The Coltrane ended. Millstein put on something Tom didn’t recognize, fierce bop, an angry music recorded with the microphone too close to the trumpet—it sounded like a piano at war with a giant wasp. The party was getting noisier. Disoriented, he moved to a vacant chair in one corner of the room and let the sound wash over him. There was a knock at the door; the dope was carefully hidden; the door eased open —it was some friend of Soderman’s, a woman in a black turtleneck carrying a guitar case. Shouts of welcome. Joyce went to the turntable and lifted the tonearm. Millstein shouted, “Careful with that!” from the opposite end of the room.
Joyce borrowed the guitar, tuned it, and began picking out chords and bass runs. Pretty soon there were five or six people gathered around her. She was flushed—from the drinking or the dope or the attention—and her eyes were a little glassy. But when she sang, she sang wonderfully. She sang traditional folk ballads, “Fannerio,”
“Lonesome Traveler.” When she spoke she was tentative, or shy, or sardonic, but the voice that issued out of her now was utterly different, a voice that made Tom sit up and stare. He had liked her without guessing she had this voice bottled up inside. The look on his face must have been comical; she smiled at him. “Come play!” she said.
He was startled. “Christ, no.”
“I heard you diddling that guitar you carried into town. You’re not too bad.”
Soderman said, “The repairman plays guitar?”
If he’d been a little more sober he would never have accepted. But what the hell—if he was lousy it would only make Joyce look good. Making Joyce look good seemed like a fairly noble ambition.
For years he’d taken his guitar out of its box maybe once a month, so he wouldn’t lose what little skill he had. He’d been serious about it in college—serious enough to take lessons with a semialcoholic free-lance teacher named Pegler, who claimed to have led a folk-rock outfit in the Haight in 1965. (Pegler, where are you now?) He took the guitar from Joyce and wondered what he could possibly play. “Guantanamera”? Some old Weavers ballad? But he recalled a song he’d taught himself, years ago, from an old Fred Neil album—counted on inspiration and luck to bring back the chord changes.
His singing voice was basically charmless and the dope had roughened it, but he managed the lyrics without groping. He looked up from his fingering halfway through the song and realized Joyce was beaming her approval. Which made him fumble over a chord change. But he picked it up and finished without too much embarrassment. Joyce applauded happily. Soderman said, “Impressive!”
Lawrence Millstein had drifted over from a dark corner of the room. He offered, “Not bad for amateur night.”
“Thank you,” Tom said warily.
“Sentimental shit, of course.”
Joyce was more rankled by the remark than Tom was. “Must be a full moon,” she said. “Lawrence is turning into an asshole.”
“Reckless,” Soderman observed quietly. Tom sat up.
“No, that’s all right,” Millstein said. He made an expansive gesture and spilled a little Jack Daniel’s from the glass in his hand. “I don’t want to interrupt your lovefest.”
Tom handed away the guitar. It was dawning on him that he was in the presence of an angry drunk.
Don’t make him mad. But Joyce seemed to have forgotten her own advice. “Don’t do this,” she said. “We don’t need this shit.”
“We don’t need it? Who—you and Tom here? Joyce and the repairman?”
Soderman said, “You spilled your drink, Lawrence. Let’s get another one. You and me.”
Millstein ignored him. He turned to Tom. “You like her? Are you fond of Joyce?”
“Yes, Larry,” he said. “I like Joyce a lot.”
“Don’t you fucking call me Larry!”
Instantly, the party was quiet. Millstein picked up the attention focused on him; he forced a smile. “You know what she is, of course,” he went on. “But you must know. It’s an old story. They come in from Bryn Mawr wearing these ridiculous clothes—ballet flats and toreador pants. They have bohemian inclinations but they all shop at Bonwit Teller. They come here for intellectual inspiration. They’ll tell you that. Of course, they really come to get laid. Isn’t that right, Joyce? They see themselves in the arms of some nineteen-year-old Negro musician. You can get laid in Westchester just as easily, of course, but not by anyone nearly as interesting.” He peered at Tom with a fixed, counterfeit smile. “So just how interesting are you?”