As she strode toward Columbus and St. Augustine Middle School, a gentle wind detached some of the blossoms from the tree and they pursued her, floated about her like a scene from Madame Butterfly. She caught one in her hand and ran it along her lips, her cheek; it felt like her own soft skin.
Joggers loped past her and kids strolled bantering in easy, laughing conversation. The Girl knew by now not to try to speak to them. People looked real, too, but they wouldn’t engage her in conversation; they were like extras in a movie.
Every now and then, though, someone would talk to her, and then she knew they were really real, or at least connected to someone who was.
The Girl slowed as she came to Mr. Lungo’s home. It was the familiar curlicued Victorian wedding cake of a house she remembered. But really, with its warped and weathered shingles, its peeling paint, listing fenceposts and wild devil grass, it was more like Miss Havisham’s ruin of a cake in Great Expectations, the symbol of abandonment, and broken promises, and time stood still. Even when she was little it had disquieted her, seemed an anomaly brutishly inserted onto this ordered street of brownstones with their weathered stoops and muted foliage.
It wasn’t like this every day. Sometimes the lot showed nothing more than blackened timbers and twisted wreckage, smoke curling up and choking the air, the way the house had been after disaster had befallen it on that riotous, murdering night.
Other times it wasn’t there at all-just the houses adjoining on either side, butted up against one another.
Lungo himself never made an appearance. But occasionally, his front-porch glider would rock with the slightest motion from the wind, in the shade of his scraggly jacaranda, and his twisted walking stick, like an arthritic, broken finger, would be resting against the rail.
The realest people here are the ghosts, the Girl thought, and turned onto Columbus.
She caught the sweet liquid sound from far off, way around the corner, like the smell of menthol, and honey on your tongue, and the azure sky at sunset when the stars were just peering through.
Then the husky, lulling murmur of the saxophone paused in mid-phrase.
“Well, if it ain’t Anna Pavlova….”
The blind black man turned his milk-sheened, useless eyes toward her and smiled with that smile that was like sinking into a warm bath. How he could know she was there before she spoke was always a mystery to her, and it felt right.
He was not young like the third blind man in her dream, nor pale like the other, malign one. His skin was a deep burnished brown, like old, oiled furniture, and when the light hit it just so, it showed a subtlety of gray, like a fine coating of ash.
“How they treatin’ you today, sweet girl?” Papa Sky asked.
“Okay,” she replied, and both the question and the answer soothed her, although she couldn’t have said who she thought “they” were.
“Well, you just hang in there. You got friends in high places. What you wanna hear today?”
She shrugged, which was a request in itself. Dealer’s choice…and when the dealer was this good, it was all flow.
Papa Sky put the shaved Leblanc reed of the 1922 Selmer alto sax (this instrument that was almost, but not quite, as old as he was) to his wetted lips, and it was an incantation and supplication in one.
The glorious sounds poured out, smooth perfection, throaty and soaring and exultant.
The Girl recognized the tune. The last time he’d played it, the old blind black man (the half cubano as he called himself) had told her it was called “Night and Day.”
She closed her eyes and let the melody fill her, began to move to it. And this was no longer just going through the motions, nor feigning interest in the arabesque and pas de deux that had once been her universe.
Night and day, you are the one….
She gave herself over to the river of harmony, let its cool voice fill every pore, engulf eye socket and fingertip, ankle and neck, liberated into expression and movement.
The way it had been before, when Luz Herrera had taken the photo (so exactly like the one atop her night table now) of her as Giselle at the March recital in mid-jete, enraptured, effortless.
Freed from the pull of earth, and its cares.
Weightless.
Before weightlessness had become a curse and a shaming, and a constant source of danger…
But that pang of memory was not for now; if that waking-dream existence lingered in her it was pushed far down and away, like a sliver imbedded and grown over with flesh, like venom lurking in a vein.
Let it go….
There was only this moment, this gift, here and real and fine if she just held on to it….
As she twirled and swayed, inseparable from the tumble of exquisite notes one on another, the image came to her of Nijinsky as the Faun and the Rose, posed with that excruciating, incredible mix of delicacy and power that only he could attain, so expressive and perfect that these weren’t still images to her-she saw him in the glory and magnificence of motion.
The clear, undeniable message, the siren song that had drawn her so long and with such constancy…You are your real self when you are removed from self, when you give yourself over to what the cosmos calls you to be, and that thing might be called Destiny. Or simply Truth.
To see that truth, to not be blind to it…
And yet Nijinsky thought he saw it, heard what he took to be its call. He followed it, and that false god led him to his destruction.
She knew that god, too, now, had been snared by it.
But not in this moment, this sanctuary, blessed and released…
The song ended, the notes held, then drifting away, to unknown, unreachable places.
The Girl settled to stillness, exhaled a slow breath. She opened her eyes.
Inigo was there, watching her. As she knew he’d be.
Hanging back in the shadows against the cold stone wall of an office building, gazing at her through Gargoyle sunglasses. Though she could not see his eyes behind them, she knew from past encounters that they were white as pearl, with only the faintest vertical slash of gray for the pupil.
White like the old jazzman’s eyes, like Papa Sky’s. But not blind; Inigo could see as well as she could; better, particularly at night.
He was her age, but shorter-smart like her, though-bundled up not against the cold, because there was no cold, but against the light. The dark navy hood was pulled low over his broad forehead, the sides of it drawn tight against his bony face, that pale skin that was blue-gray and spoke of sickness but also, paradoxically, of strength.
The Girl couldn’t say why he looked this way. But then, she couldn’t say why she looked the way she did, wasn’t sure she wanted to know, to hear the insistent thrumming deep in her bones. It was quiet now. Sometimes it seemed aching to scream.
Is it real or Memorex?
Let it go….
“Hey,” Inigo said to her.
“Hey yourself.”
Papa Sky smiled his smoky smile. “Now we got enough to really make an audience.”
“Nearly didn’t get through,” Inigo said. “The Bridge-”
He stopped himself, shot a worried glance at Papa Sky, whose face had darkened, a silent caution.
The Girl knew he hadn’t meant the Brooklyn or Verrazano Narrows or any of the others familiar to her and to Manhattan. There were things that could be said here and things that couldn’t, and the rules were always unspoken.
She remembered her friend Margie Daws once confiding about her own family, as the two of them had loitered after phys ed beside the volleyball net at St. Augustine’s, “The best stories are the ones we never talk about.” (And she wondered just now how she could so clearly recall Margie Daws, but not the owner of that other room in her apartment-the one who slept in that perpetually rumpled bed.)