Where The Seine Forgets

CHAPTER TWO:The Man Who Played Like Grief

Chapter Two — The Man Who Played Like Grief

James Ellington Cole had left New Orleans at twenty-one with thirty dollars, a trumpet, and a specific memory he was trying to outrun.

He was twenty-six now, and Paris had been good to him — better than he'd had any right to expect. He had a small room above a tabac on Rue des Abbesses, a regular gig at Le Chat Bleu, and the kind of freedom that a Black man from Louisiana could only find, it seemed, by crossing an ocean. In Paris, men like him were not curiosities or threats or property. They were musicians. Artists. Americans, which was itself a kind of exotic distinction that opened doors the color of his skin had always closed back home.

He didn't romanticize it. He'd talked enough to the older men, to Sidney Beaumont and Clarence Webb and Marcus Raines, who'd been here since the war, to know that Paris had its own architecture of exclusion. But it was different. The weight was different. And sometimes, standing on a stage with his trumpet and the lights low and the crowd leaning forward, he could almost forget the specific weight of being himself in a world that had very decided opinions about what that meant.

"You nervous?" asked his drummer, Lionel Duchamp.

They were in the back room of Le Chat Bleu, a narrow space with a cracked mirror and a shelf of abandoned sheet music that nobody had touched in years. Lionel was from Martinique, twenty-four years old, with hands that seemed too large for his body until you watched him play, and then they seemed exactly right. He was Jimmy's closest friend in Paris, which meant he was allowed to ask questions like that.

"No," Jimmy said.

"You always lie before a show."

"I always play better after." Jimmy raised the trumpet, ran a scale, lowered it. "Full house tonight?"

"Henri says yes." Henri Dumont was the club's owner, a stout man of fifty-eight who had run Le Chat Bleu since 1919 and had a gift for recognizing talent and an equal gift for underpaying it. "Some new crowd from the arrondissements. Rich kids wanting to feel dangerous."

Jimmy made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh. "Long as they listen."

The third member of their quartet appeared in the doorway: Gabriel Osei, the pianist, a Ghanaian-British man of thirty who had studied at the Royal Academy in London and played jazz with the focused intensity of someone solving a beautiful problem. Behind him came Rémi Lefebvre, the bassist, who was French, white, from Bordeaux, and who had a habit of arriving exactly one minute before a performance and never appearing nervous in his life.

"Henri wants us on in twenty," Gabriel said, in the clipped British accent that always made Lionel laugh.

"Henri always wants us on in twenty." Jimmy stood, straightened his jacket — black, worn at the elbows, perfect — and looked at himself in the cracked mirror. The man who looked back at him was composed. Controlled. That was the performance before the performance: becoming the version of himself that could walk onto a stage and make a room feel things they had no language for.

He thought, briefly, about New Orleans.

He put it away.

"Let's go," he said.

* * *

The room was full and warm and smelled of cigarettes, perfume, and the particular excitement of people who believed they were doing something slightly illicit.

Élise stood near the back, her coat still on, her heart in her throat. Théo Blanchard had found her at the door and steered her to a small table near the wall, whispering that she was lucky, that tonight was special, that Jimmy Cole was in one of his moods.

She had not known what that meant. She was beginning to understand.

The quartet took the stage to scattered applause that grew as the crowd recognized them — or recognized the possibility of them, the way a room recognizes lightning before it strikes. The drummer settled behind his kit. The pianist rolled a quiet chord. The bassist plucked a low note that Élise felt in her chest.

And then Jimmy Cole stepped to the microphone, raised his trumpet, and played the first note.

It was a single note. It hung in the air above the crowd like a question that had waited its whole life to be asked, and then it broke into something that Élise did not have a name for — a melody that was joyful and mournful at the same time, like watching something beautiful through glass you knew was about to shatter. She felt it physically, in her sternum, in the backs of her hands.

She sat down. She didn't remember deciding to sit.

Around her, the crowd leaned forward. A woman across the room closed her eyes. An older gentleman in the corner set down his cognac and did not pick it up again for twenty minutes. Élise gripped the edge of the table and stared at the man on the stage — lean, composed, utterly consumed — and thought: this is what my life has been missing. Not Armand Fontaine. Not the correct dress or the correct church or the correct silence. This.

She stayed for three hours.