“Baby. ”
“I’m all right,” he says.
“You gave me such a scare.”
“They say I need to take it easy for a while. No more touring. No more playing or recording for a while. Get some rest.”
“Well, you better do what the doctor says.”
“Yeah, I suppose I’d better. They say I might not be able to play like I used to.” He sighs and then looks down at his hands, which are lying on top of the sheet as though they don’t belong to him, as though they are something someone else left behind when they came to visit. In his face she sees, more clearly than she has in all their years of being married, a deep seam of sadness that stretches down, down, out of sight. And she knows it goes all the way through him, back to New Orleans, to Storyville, to when he was a child, to the sound of women laughing from upstairs rooms with locked doors, the sound of women crying for their lovers who’ve left, the smell of men getting drunk in the afternoon. She remembers those things, too, from another city but the same. Suddenly, he looks up at her, looks into her face. His eyes are wide and serious.
“I’ve got to show you something,” he says.
“What?”
“I can’t tell you. I’ve got to show you. You ready?”
“Yes,” she says, straightening her posture. “I’m ready.”
He reaches down beside the bed. There is a loud mechanical buzzing sound, and she realizes that he is slowly tilting away from her, the top half of his body moving steadily downward until, with a click and more buzzing, it begins to move back up.
“Check out this bed!” he says. “The bottom part moves, too, you know, the legs. Look.” He presses a different switch and his legs begin to elevate slowly until they are nearly level with his chin. “Is that great or what? Come on. You can have a go, too.” He lifts up one side of the covers and pats the mattress. She hesitates, then slips off her shoes and climbs into bed beside him, laughing while he moves the levers so the bed rises and falls beneath them.
After a while he can’t manage the stairs, and she has an electric chairlift put in so he can get up to the second floor.
“Better than that bed,” he says. He rides up and down in it for fun. He is restless, wanting to do more than he can handle. He records the conversations of people who visit them, the sounds of their street, sometimes. He sits in the garden when the weather is nice.
She makes food for them and they eat supper out on the patio. He is on a new diet.
“I can eat fish and rice and salad,” he tells their guests. “Or I have the choice of rice and salad and fish. Or sometimes on special occasions, salad and fish and rice. But no liquor. Isn’t that a terrible injustice?”
One evening, she finds him standing out on the balcony of his study upstairs. The day has been especially golden and now the light is slanting among the low buildings as the sun makes its way from the sky. He has his trumpet out of its case for the first time in some weeks. He puts it to his lips when he sees her and plays, something slow and sweet that she doesn’t recognize. It must be new. She sits down at his desk and listens to him.
“I think I’m ready to get back to work,” he says. “I feel good. I’m going to call up the band tomorrow.” He inhales deeply, holding onto the railings and looking out at the street where they have lived for thirty years.
That night Lucille wakes up suddenly and opens her eyes in the darkness. When she listens, she cannot hear him breathing anymore.
She knows it is not a healthy impulse making her insist that the closet needs to be wallpapered all over again. She understands perfectly well that it is neither necessary nor appropriate for her to demand that the flowers match up. But she doesn’t care. She is angry, she realizes after the designer leaves, politely promising that the men will come to strip and repaper the walls before the end of the week. She is angry because here she is in this house and all she has left is money. It is not that she objects to money as such. She is not sorry to have it. But by itself, it is something of a disappointment.
She papers the interior of the bureau herself, pasting and smoothing the foil into place in each of the twelve drawers, top, bottom and sides. Sometimes when she is working, she forgets that this is anything more than another temporary absence. It is not that she thinks it: once she begins thinking the game is up. But she feels, fleetingly, that he will call, from Cairo or Los Angeles or Hamburg. That he will be on his way home any day. She is going to finish fixing up the house just as though he was still there to come back to it.
But at a certain point there is nothing left to do. She walks from end to end of the place, and every inch of it is just as she envisioned. She sits down on the couch that faces the bay window in the living room and watches the street shift quietly in its bed. Sometime later, it might be hours, or months, or even years, she isn’t sure, there is a ring on the doorbell. When she opens it, a young man is standing there. He asks if he can come in.
He says:
“I used to come here to watch movies sometimes. My family lived on this street but they moved away. The Harrises, Sharon and Roy. I’m sure you don’t remember. ”
But she does. “Terrence, right?” she asks.
“No,” he says, “Terry is my older brother — lives in Chicago now. I’m Jake.”
“That’s right,” she says. “You wanted to play baseball when you grew up.” Terrence and Jacob. They were as alike as twins but cast from different-sized molds, she recalls, though both had these astonishing legs that stretched practically to their chins. Terrence was the noisy one, the natural performer. Jake was the reader.
“Do you ever have movies here now?” he asks, a little later, over a glass of tea. “For the kids that are around here these days?”
“I haven’t done that since Mr. Armstrong got sick,” she says. It hadn’t occurred to her to do it without him. She can’t really even imagine a room full of children without him in the middle of it.
“Well, that’s too bad. Those are some of my best memories, sitting on the floor downstairs here, watching cartoons, getting my fingers all covered in butter and salt. You should think about starting that up again.”
When he goes away she forgets about what he has said for a while and then, one day, it is there in her head, this idea, as though it has simply been waiting for the rainy fall weather to come back. She thinks, today is the day for a film. But she realizes that without Louis she doesn’t know how to tell people what is going on. For a while she is stuck and then she has an idea.
One by one, she takes the speakers down from where they sit on the shelves of his study. Each one is encased in a solid wooden frame and they are heavy to lift. Where they have been standing on the shelf, there is an outline marked in dust, and she tuts to herself; she thought she’d kept the place neater than that. She opens the French doors and carries them carefully out onto the balcony so that they are pointing into the street. Then she goes to the cupboard where he kept all of his recordings. She realizes to her profound surprise that she has not listened to any of them since he died.
She thumbs along the spines of the eight tracks and chooses one. Something from one of the sessions he did with Ellington, she isn’t sure exactly what is on there, but she has a feeling about this one. She slides it into the machine and presses “play” and listens. It is beautiful and sad, the music like a whirlpool, and within it the sound of his trumpet is a smooth, strong fish with shimmering scales along its length. It pulls her down into the depths of the song. And at the bottom of all that glorious sound, there he is. He has been here all along; when she thought she was all alone, in fact he was only waiting here for her to find him. You didn’t know? the trumpet is saying to her now. This song is for you. And so is the next one. And the one after that one, too.