Page 73 of Shadow Ticket
“You’re not what you seem.”
“Maybe it’s you makin me look good.”
“Ever dance professionally?”
“Back in Chicago, ballroom act, didn’t work out.”
“Personal issues, artistic differences?”
“Gang war.”
“That thing where it looked like you were walking forward but you’re really sort of gliding backwards?”
“Yeah, Cab Calloway showed me the basics one night at a joint up on Walnut Street. Calls it The Buzz.”
After thinking a while, “See,” she lets him know, “there’s the other fella.”
“Hop Wingdale.”
“The only one for me, case you’re wondering.”
“Hmm, and would that ol’ Hop happen to be around tonight, it’d sure be nice to meet him sometime—”
“Hoping for a twofer, were you. Sorry, flatfoot, I don’t know where he is, and frankly it’s beginning to worry me.”
A familiar mental prowl car now begins to drive back and forth across Hicks’s brain, gonging high-low-high-low, signaling trouble for somebody, which Hicks would prefer to be anybody but him.
“Don’t know what they told you about me and Hop except these days it’s not running off with, but more like running after. Since the morning I woke up to find the Klezmopolitans dissolved into solo acts and once again life’s vaudeville hook emerging from the wings and latching around Hop’s neck, and off he goes staggering to boos and whistles, wondering what he did wrong this time…”
No, not exactly the way it happened. Or not without what she should have recognized as the tip-off one early evening at the Hotel Grand Pignouf in Paris, where all up and down the corridors transoms are open, a dozen invisible plumes from illicit cigarettes, out-of-town cooking, perfume being overapplied as if in romantic spasms, each a different nasal melodrama.
The Klezmopolitans, reformatted by electric xylorimba virtuoso Curly Capstock from his original Back Alley Rhythm Cats into a progressive swingband, continually bringing in chords glamorized with up-to-date accidentals, lines with chromatic licks, Latin percussion, a less inhibited or as some might put it screamingly insane brass section where the Harmon mute despite being the hep dance-band introduction of the moment goes generally underemployed, an openness to non-Western scales especially in the solos of reedmen, each as crazy as any trumpet player in the band, since Curly only hires crazy to begin with…
“They wantfreilach, that’s what we give ’em. They want hot Latin rumbas, that’s what they’ll get. The customers can have whatever they want. Any comments?”
“Do we have to smile, like in the movies?”
“Depends. Sometimes you’ll want to go more for that earnest hardworking style, which you’ll have to tell me what it looks like, I don’t see much of it around here.”
The last thing resembling a pep talk till the dismal day Curly announces, “Could still be some loose change to be made here and there, though we’d be running it close. If we liquidate now, money’s there in the bank in Zurich, but don’t wait too long, ’cause it won’t be there forever and neither will you.”
Meanwhile as the prospects for anything like reliable work go fading, “I’ve been trying to keep my nerve,” Daphne admits, “but it’s too dangerous over here anymore, I know that going back to the U.S.A. will only be buying time, that sooner or later no place will be safe. We need to relocate before it’s all Storm Trooper chorales and three-note harmony. You’re thinking about it, so am I. When can we leave?”
“Of course there’s still work,” Hop a little grumpy, “house orchestras at some of the hotels, bands pretending to be Lud Gluskin on tour, but if you want, sure we can make our way to Zurich, cash in my shares if they’re still there…”
“Cheap talk, Hop, and it won’t fix anything about you and me—you’d rather keep playing till the sun comes up, alone with your clarinet, unless it’s some little Swing Fräulein, which I could understand, maybe even pick up a few fashion tips in the course of, but not this, this is a magic act, you’redisappearing from me, into all the trick lighting, and the big band glare and shine. ‘One of these days’ might’ve already come and gone, for all I know, you might be gone anyway.”
“Nothing you can’t get used to, is it.”
“Ah, there it is once again, like a monster in the Tunnel of Love—Bruno, evil Bruno, family crimes, bad blood, never good enough for the biblical prophet here.”
“Who can assure you that the ways of God are not for us to even puzzle over. Bruno in your life is a mixed blessing which is only likely to get more so.”
“You keep saying. But then remember, he isn’t in my life, hasn’t been for a good while.”
“Sit back and let me bring you the evening news. Awkwardly enough, it turns out more of your life than you think is being run on the Q.T. by none other. Look at the things that don’t keep happening—Bruno doesn’t make any surprise visits, doesn’t die or go bankrupt, you watch the market reports for signs of cheese being hoarded, sold off, yes, and not only the Board of Trade and other cheese trading floors but also grazing conditions in pasturelands so far away the cows go oom for all we know, the movements of refrigerated trains and fleets, dairy operations local to nationwide, herd dynamics, any quivering li’l deviation from normal that could turn out to be Bruno’s invisible hand…”
And so they have hurtled on into that warm patch somewhere between heartburn and mittelschmerz at the immensity of everything they don’t want to happen to them, together or separate. She wants to dissolve into some “Oh, please, Hop…” but instead out comes, “I could always get it changed into small bills and rent an airplane and just fly around pretending I’m the weather, dumping it on people, till I get my net worth down to a number you’re comfortable with, how’d that be?”
