Allow the foliage below an easy embrace. You mop your forehead free of the film of sweat the August heat has pasted there, wipe the dew from your chest’s silver curls, crumpling the napkin beside the untouched knife and fork. Somehow the heat down in Mississippi, Georgia, Florida, like this interior clamor, has followed you north, everyone around you is fanning themselves, reclining on benches or couches, already displaying like the underarms of your violet linen suit the dark, wet badges of the season’s relentlessness. Your mother, no stranger to heatwaves, has taken to afternoon naps in the still silent dark. Bad as it is up here, though, it’s worse, you know, far worse down in Manhattan. You gulp down a glass of water warmer than the soup, polish off a second soon as it’s poured. Sometimes the songs make you so dizzy you forget where you are, you’ve tried every manner of patent medicine, the one that tastes like licorice and the one that tastes like silver, the one that’s made from coal ash and the one that’s made from pine resin, neither whiskey nor gin nor cocaine nor hemp nor hashish does the trick, you can’t easily get your hands on opium — only sleep, morphine and the unknown dulling potion the orderlies provide temporarily blot it out. Then soon as you stir you’re back at this internal concert, on stage again inside your head as Willy Wayside, performing with Billy at the Standard in Kansas City, twirling that mahogany cane and jigging at the Pekin and Savoy in Chicago, only without the corked mask and zinced lips and red wig and patchwork coats and satin lapels and tails and popped top hat and tap shoes polished to the consistency of glass and the orchestra, without the after-parties and champagne breakfasts, without the evening ending and you being able to sleep a whole night through, without these notes pealing into bedlam nobody knows, why did you ever write them, who did you write them for, yourself and them, more them than you you did not want to, do now dare to admit, these songs still reeling and unreeling, unreal, daily, hourly, by the minute, in you, your head, and you can’t, simply cannot, can no longer bear it.
Open your mouth as if you intend to swallow. You set the glass down and head for the door. “Excuse me, Sir, but you finished?” the young man, so light only his features, hair texture reveal his story, murmurs politely, “Can I get you anything else, Sir, send something up to your room?” You pause, look him over, see the eyes catching yours, another time, you think, shake him off, force a half-smile when you catch his flash of recognition, or perhaps it’s just that broader sense of a link mixed with abstract solidarity, so common wherever you see each other, our people, even if no one else fully sees you, until the stain of disdain seeps in, perhaps the young man stood at the doorway as you regaled everyone last night with a few of the songs your fingers played from memory since your mind would not cooperate, you could see your mother beaming from her seat as you completed “Under the Bamboo Tree,” nodding, clapping, her eyes telling you that everything was all right although it wasn’t, it isn’t, perhaps years before he saw you staring back from a handbill, contentedly, unlike now, and he too secretly blames you, they all do, for how you all are viewed? You pass into the alcove, past the check-in desk. The doorman, dark as a pneumatic tire, in elaborate livery despite the heat, swings the door open. You flinch, seeing your own face staring back, your mug never so cool or placid anymore except in photographs, engravings, the same wide forehead, broad slender lips, lantern eyes bearing something outward while beaming back in, making you glad no mirror’s nearby, that you never saw yourself on stage, made up and masked, always masked, that awful jamble thankfully never captured for the Nickelodeon or a gramophone, you recover and extract the sole bill—$10—you have and some coins from amid the goldweight and the paperweight you stuffed this morning in each of your trouser pockets and place the money in that other palm, sheathed in white cotton beneath which you know lies a square of pink ridged with brown like your own, as your grip tenses, relaxes. The hurdy gurdy in your head churns on. “Thank you so much, Sir. Shall I call you a driver, Sir?” the doorman asks, assuming correctly that you will not want to walk in this heat through the streets toward downtown, or perhaps you might be heading to Athens or across the river to Hudson. No thank you, you mean to say, if you there, staves and quarter notes stalling your tongue, spilling out, you think you assure the doorman you’re fine with a wave and head in the opposite direction, away from the town and river, northwest instead, over the meadow toward Main.
The first response is to struggle but you should stifle it. On the lawn as you pass a seated trio is laughing. Beneath them spreads a lake of gingham. You know the couple, initially because of your stays here, later after time spent with them in the City and at their home, Luther and Anna, they travel down from Buffalo where he has a general practice and also runs the local colored paper and she teaches school. You chatted with them briefly yesterday when you got in. The other woman, pretty enough to be a movie star if colored women starred in movies, looks familiar but you cannot place her. Gwendolyn, they introduce her, from Boston, she was here last year with her parents, the father a bishop of some sort, now you remember, I’ll bet six bits she was one of Anna’s former students you’d said to yourself before you met her then, they are trying to make that kind of introduction again, she straightens the ribbons in her loose black locks before you take her hand and drop it. She is saying something to you about your songs, your shows as you think you hear Luther ask, Why don’t you join us, Bob? he and Anna nodding, she adds, We’d like that, we haven’t hardly seen you since you arrived. You cannot hear what Gwendolyn is saying, it’s as if someone has a trombone against your lobes, playing an ostinato, the same long, low phrase, then the original song comes back and you feel light, almost giddy, whisper you are going to walk over to the creek, if you see yourself going along so, Luther looks at Anna, they lift themselves up to join you. You touch your hairline where the music threatens to erupt, as they gather up the knives and forks, the bread and honey, the corked bottle of lemonade, place it in the basket, fold up the cloth, Luther’s and Anna’s manners each as precise as they always have been, as anyone would expect of folks of their station. Gwendolyn hangs back, fanning herself, her eyes trained on you. You mean to say something about the weather, but no words emerge, nothing about the food, the staff, your mother, Luther’s suit, Anna’s dress the shade of crème anglaise, Boston, Harlem, Rosamond or Jimmy, the Sambo Girls Company or your other efforts, touring, business in general, Gwendolyn in whom you’d never be interested, your other friends in New York you would never discuss let alone hint at, the train ride up, the last few months, years, the long winters of blue periods that have plagued you even before the music could not be turned off. Only a sound that sounds like the inside of a sound, a not-whistle, a not-warble, not-words, a code, a cloud of could and cannot, and Luther laces his arm in yours, Anna close by on his other side, the basket on her free arm, Gwendolyn somewhere behind them, humming, why is she humming? two live as one, she’s humming one of your tunes, or is that you and the sound is escaping you, as it sometimes does, if you like a me and I like a you, as you proceed across the grass to the road.