CHAPTER FOUR:Geography Of The Forbidden
1446 Words
PART TWO
The World Between Songs
Chapter Four — Geography of the Forbidden
They began meeting in the afternoons, which was easier than the nights and more dangerous in a different way.
The nights at Le Chat Bleu had a formality to them — the stage, the audience, the clear geometry of performer and witness. In the afternoons, walking along the Canal Saint-Martin or sitting in the back booth of a small café on Rue des Martyrs where nobody knew either of them, the geography was entirely different. There was no stage. There was only the two of them and the specific electricity of two people discovering that the other person is more interesting than expected.
He talked about New Orleans the way someone talks about a place that shaped them so fundamentally that it lives inside them as both home and wound. He talked about his mother, Celestine Cole, a schoolteacher who had made him practice scales until his lips ached and who had told him, when he was twelve, that the only thing no one could take from him was what lived inside his mind. He talked about the night in 1921 — he was eighteen — when three white men had shattered every window of the barbershop where his uncle worked, and how he had known, after that, that New Orleans would kill some essential part of him if he stayed.
"Paris saved you," Élise said.
"Paris gave me room," he corrected. "I saved myself."
She liked that distinction.
She talked about her family with the careful precision of someone defusing something. Her father, Bernard Moreau, was a man she respected and could not reach — a banker of the old school who moved through the world in a permanent mild disappointment that she had never managed to cure. Her mother's relentless campaign for a proper marriage. The engagement to Armand, which had been constructed around her rather than with her, the way one builds a beautiful room and then locks the door.
"And what do you want?" Jimmy asked.
Nobody had ever asked her that. She was twenty-three years old and nobody had ever asked her that.
"I don't know," she said honestly. "That's the terrifying part. I've spent so long wanting to want what they want that I can't hear my own — " She stopped. "When I hear you play, I hear something. I don't know what it is. But it's mine."
Jimmy was quiet for a while. Outside, the canal caught the afternoon light and turned it into pieces.
"Music is a way of saying what you can't say any other way," he said. "When I play something true, the audience feels it even if they can't name it. That feeling you have — that's you recognizing something true."
"About you?"
He looked at her. "About yourself."
* * *
Victoire found out in the third week, because Victoire had an instinct for secrets that bordered on supernatural.
She appeared at Élise's bedroom door one morning with a cup of coffee and the look of a woman who already knew the answer to the question she was about to ask.
"You've met someone."
Élise was at her vanity, very deliberately not reacting. "I don't know what you mean."
"You've stopped looking like a painting of a sad woman and started looking like an actual person." Victoire sat on the bed, tucking her feet beneath her. "Who is he?"
A long pause.
"His name is James Cole," Élise said finally. "He plays trumpet at Le Chat Bleu."
Victoire was quiet for precisely three seconds — which for Victoire was an eternity of restraint. "An American musician."
"Yes."
"In Montmartre."
"Yes."
"Élise." Victoire's voice held something she didn't often deploy: genuine worry. "Your mother would —"
"I know."
"And your father —"
"I know."
"And Armand —"
"I know, Victoire." She met her cousin's eyes in the mirror. "I know all of it. I just don't know how to unknow what I've found."
Victoire studied her for a long moment. Then she nodded, once, with the slow gravity of someone accepting a mission they know will be difficult.
"All right," she said. "I'll cover for you when I can. But Élise — be careful. Not just because of your family. Paris is kinder than New Orleans, but it is not kind."
Chapter Five — What Lionel Knew
Lionel Duchamp had opinions about James Cole falling for a French bourgeoise, and he shared them in the direct, affectionate manner of a man who had decided friendship required honesty.
"She's engaged," he said. They were in the practice room behind the stage, an hour before the Friday show. Lionel was loosening up on the snare, soft paradiddles, like a man punctuating his own sentences.
"I know," Jimmy said.
"Her family would not — " Lionel searched for the diplomatic word. "Appreciate."
"I know that too."
"And what happens in September?" Paradiddle. "When she marries the glove man?"
Jimmy ran a scale on the trumpet. Clean, controlled, going nowhere.
"I don't know," he said.
Lionel stopped playing. He looked at Jimmy the way he looked at a rhythm that wasn't landing right. "You never don't know things. That's how I know you're in trouble."
The door opened and Gabriel Osei entered, coat still on, carrying a newspaper. His expression — Gabriel almost never showed alarm — was doing something new.
"There's a piece in Le Figaro," he said, setting the paper on the shelf. "About les clubs américains in Montmartre. The Police Prefect is apparently concerned about the —" He paused, choosing the word with precision. "'Corrupting influence' on French society."
Jimmy and Lionel looked at each other.
"How serious?" Jimmy asked.
"Serious enough to print." Gabriel removed his coat. He had the stillness of a man who processed fear quietly and completely before letting it near his face. "There have been three clubs closed in the last month. Not Le Chat Bleu yet. But Henri is nervous."
Henri Dumont had been nervous all week, Jimmy realized. The way he hovered near the door between sets. The way he'd lowered the lights a fraction.
"We play," Jimmy said.
"Of course we play," Lionel said. "But maybe you think about what we're playing toward."
After they left, Rémi Lefebvre appeared from the corner where he'd been quietly tuning his bass through the entire conversation, with the supernatural inconspicuousness of a very tall man who had decided not to be noticed.
"For what it's worth," Rémi said, "she came to the show twelve times before you noticed her."
Jimmy looked at him.
"I notice everything," Rémi said, and plucked a single note that resonated a long time in the small room.
* * *
The thing no one had prepared Élise for was how different the world looked once you had a secret that was also, somehow, the most honest thing about you.
She moved through the days of her ordinary life — the fittings, the receptions, the Sunday lunches with her parents where her father discussed business and her mother discussed weddings and the conversation had a track it ran on so smooth that she sometimes felt she could get up and leave and nobody would notice for twenty minutes — and she felt, at the center of herself, this other thing. This person who sat in the back of a jazz club and felt the music like a second heartbeat.
Armand Fontaine visited on a Thursday. He was not unkind. She had thought about this carefully and arrived at this conclusion honestly: he was not unkind. He was simply a man who had decided what his life should contain and was assembling the pieces with methodical satisfaction. She was one of those pieces. He looked at her with a warm proprietorial approval that she suspected he also turned on his best gloves.
"You look well," he said.
"Thank you, Armand."
"Your mother tells me you've been going out more. Some concerts?"
A pause so small it was almost not a pause. "Classical concerts," she said. "I find them settling."
He nodded. Armand Fontaine thought music was settling. She had learned this about him. He did not understand that music could be the opposite of settling. That it could open something in you that then refused to close.
"After we're married," he said, "we'll have a piano in the drawing room. You can play in the evenings."
She smiled. It was one of her best smiles, the kind that reached her eyes because she had practiced it until it was automatic, and it gave nothing away.
"That sounds lovely," she said.
- Writer
