“Mind if I join you for a few minutes, Hazel Jones?”
He could see that she was flattered he’d approached her. Other patrons had been waiting to speak with the pianist but he’d brushed past them heedless. Yet Gallagher would recall afterward to his chagrin that Hazel Jones had hesitated, staring at him. Smiling, but her eyes had gone slightly flat. Maybe she was alarmed by him, looming over her so suddenly. He was six foot three, whippet-lean and loose-jointed and his high balding dome of a head glowed warm with the effort of his stint at the piano; his eyes were shadowy, kindly but intense. Hazel Jones had no choice but to move her chair to make room for him. The zinc-topped table was small, their knees bumped beneath.
Close up, Gallagher saw that the young woman’s face was carefully made up, her mouth very red. Hers was a poster-face at the Bay Palace. And she was wearing the cocktail dress made of some dark red glittery fabric that fitted her breasts and shoulders tightly. The upper sleeves were puffed, the wrists tight. In the smoky twilight of the cocktail lounge she exuded an air both sexual and apprehensive. Politely she declined Gallagher’s offer to buy her something stronger than Coke: “Thank you, Mr. Gallagher. But I have to leave soon.”
He laughed, hurt. Protested, “Please call me Chet, Hazel. ”Mr. Gallagher‘ is my sixty-seven-year-old father way off in Albany.“
Their conversation was wayward, clumsy. Like climbing into a canoe with a stranger, and no oars. Exhilarating and also treacherous. Yet Gallagher heard himself laughing. And Hazel Jones laughed, so he must have been amusing.
How flattered a man is, that a woman should laugh at his jokes!
How childlike in his soul, wishing to trust a woman. Because she is attractive, and young. Because she is alone.
Gallagher had to concede, he was excited by Hazel Jones. In the Bay Palace in her ridiculous uniform, now in the Piano Bar in her glittery-red cocktail dress. Her eyebrows were less heavy than he recalled, she must have plucked and shaped them. Her hair was cut in feathery, floating layers, like a loose cap on her head. Brunette, streaked with russet-red highlights. And her skin very pale. It was like leaning toward an open flame, leaning toward Hazel Jones. The sensation Gallagher felt was tinged with dread for he was not a young man, hadn’t been a young man for a long time, and these feelings were those he’d had as a young man and they were associated with hurt, disappointment.
Yet, here was Hazel Jones smiling at him. She, too, was edgy, nervous. Unlike other women of Gallagher’s wide acquaintance, Hazel seemed to speak without subterfuge. There was something missing in her, Gallagher decided: the mask-like veneer, the scrim of will that came between him and so many women, his former wife, certain of his lovers, his sisters from whom he was estranged. With girlish aplomb Hazel was telling him that she admired his “piano playing”-though jazz was “hard to follow, to see where it’s going.” Surprising him by saying that she’d used to listen to jazz music on a late-night program on a Buffalo radio station, years ago.
Immediately Gallagher identified the program: “Zack Zacharias” on WBEN.
Hazel seemed surprised, Gallagher knew the program. Gallagher had to resist telling her that late-night jazz programming on a number of stations through the state was his, Chet Gallagher’s idea. WBEN was an affiliate of Gallagher Media, one of the stronger urban stations.
“Do you know him? ”Zack Zacharias‘? I always wondered if he was-you know, Negro.“
Delicately Hazel enunciated the word: Ne-gro. As if to be Ne-gro was a kind of invalidism.
Gallagher laughed. “His name isn’t ”Zack Zacharias’ and he’s no more Negro than I am. But he knows good jazz, the program is in its ninth year.“
Hazel smiled, as if confused. He didn’t want to seem to be laughing at her.
“You’re from Buffalo, are you?”
“No.”
“But western New York, right? I can hear the accent.”
Hazel smiled again, uncertainly. Accent? She had never heard the flat nasal vowels, herself.
Gallagher didn’t want to make her self-conscious. She was so vulnerable, trusting.
“Why’ve you come so far north? Malin Head Bay? Must’ve come here in the summer, yes?”
“Yes.”
“D’you know people here? Relatives?”
This blunt question Hazel seemed not to hear. Surprising Gallagher with a remark he’d have had to take as flirtatious, from another woman: “You haven’t been back to the movies for a long time, Mr. Gallagher. At least, I haven’t seen you.”
Gallagher was flattered, Hazel remembered him. And was willing to allow him to know that she remembered him.
Telling her again, poking at her arm, please call him Chet.
Now Gallagher leaned over Hazel feeling the blood course warm and exhilarated in his veins. How pretty she was! How desperately grateful he was, she’d come back! A man plays jazz piano hoping to attract a woman like this one. Telling her that really he didn’t like movies, much. He wasn’t very American, very normal in that regard. His family background was “media”-not films, but newspapers, radio, TV. Trading in images, dreams. Always the film industry had been primed to sell tickets, that was its aim. If you knew this, you were not so likely to be seduced. What Gallagher most disliked about Hollywood films was the music. The “score.” Usually it grated against his nerves. The sentimental employment of music to evoke emotions, to “set scenes” offended him. A holdover from silent films when an organist played in each theater. All was exaggerated, perverse. Sometimes he shut his ears against the music. Sometimes he shut his eyes against the images.
Hazel laughed. Gallagher was himself exaggerating, to be amusing. He loved seeing her laugh. He guessed that, in other circumstances, Hazel didn’t laugh much. A warm flush rose into her face. One of her mannerisms was to brush unconsciously at her hair, lifting and letting fall the neatly scissor-cut bangs that lay across her forehead. It was a childlike gesture that called attention to her serene face, her shining hair, ringless fingers and red-painted nails. Also, she shifted her shoulders in the tight dress, leaning forward, and back. Her body seemed awkward to her, as if she’d grown up too soon. The red-glittery dress was a costume like the usherette’s costume; Gallagher knew without needing to check that Hazel would be wearing very high-heeled shoes.
Gallagher wanted to protect this young woman from the hurt that such naiveté would surely bring her. He wanted to make her trust him. He wanted to make her adore him. Wanted to caress her cheek, her slender throat. That squirmy, partly bared shoulder. Wanting to cup her breast in his hand. He felt a swoon of desire, imagining Hazel naked inside her clothes. The shock of it, seeing a woman naked for the first time, such trust.
Gallagher was talking rapidly. This was all coming fast, careening at him. And he hadn’t had anything stronger than beer all evening. Just he was a little drunk with Hazel Jones.
That old familiar shiver of dread. Yet a perverse comfort in it. Never had Gallagher made love to a woman without that anticipatory sensation of dread. Except in his marriage, he’d become numbed to extremes of emotion. As soon as sex becomes companionable, habitual, it ceases to be sex and becomes something else.
This one, you won’t marry.
Wishing to comfort himself.
Gallagher heard himself ask Hazel how she liked movies?-having to see them continuously as she did.
He cared nothing for her reply. Her voice engaged him, not her words. Yet she surprised him, saying she saw only fragments of movies at the Bay Palace, never anything whole. And before working as an usherette she had not seen many movies-“My parents didn’t approve of movies.” So now she saw just broken parts of movies and these many times repeated. She saw the ends of scenes hours before she saw the beginnings. She saw the beginnings of movies soon after having seen their dramatic endings. Stories looped back upon themselves. No one got anywhere. She knew beforehand what actors would say, even as the camera opened upon a “new” scene. She knew when an audience would laugh, though each audience was new and their laughter was spontaneous. She knew what music cues signaled even when she wasn’t watching the screen. It gave you a confused sense of what to expect in life. For in life there is no music, you have no cues. Most things happen in silence. You live your life forward and remember only backward. Nothing is relived, only just remembered and that incompletely. And life isn’t simple like a movie story, there is too much to remember.