The Snare

13. AND MUSIC AGAIN

13. AND MUSIC AGAIN Jake had come down from Baton Rouge with his car full of instruments: guitar, banjo, steel guitar, and zimbalon. Up in Baton Rouge, he played evenings from time to time in some of the lounges, imitation New Orleans places. It was how he'd got away from his wife so easily to come back to Julia and her city: the fact that he'd brought the instruments along. He said he'd had an offer to play. But a little something more was in it and this little something made Julia proud of the place she called home. A Negro group had sought him out: they wanted him to play with their band, first for a night in Preservation Hall, then for a week in Dixieland. There was glory in this, Julia thought: something genuine. They were telling him, by asking him to play with them in those places, which were showcases in New Orleans for one of the things the city did best, that understanding was not withheld from him just because he might have burglarized a little, or got tangled up in some kind of weird-smelling murder case. He had come there wanting what mattered, their kind of music, and they were saying that his good intention had not gone unnoticed in the world they liked. It made a kind of blessing, and a forgiveness. When the musicians actually started appearing (and Jake for a while had seen none of them, had only received a note of invitation from the band, which had been mailed to him in jail), Julia felt that they bore out what she had thought in advance about them. 298 Elizabeth Spencer 299 Her flesh satisfied, set as deeply in place in her own life choice as a garnet in a gold ring, she lay in long afternoon silence on the green and gold bed, musing about this new turn of things, about how the city had come through. She dwelt on the instruments of music, each fitting into velvet compartments made to receive them, brown, white, and rose-coloretf within their scuflFed black cases. For a while, back wheiti she first knew him, Jake had tried to teach her to play. She would hold, cradle, examine the guitars, tilt up into its correct slant and position the bass which he rented for a time to fill in with a group who needed it; sometimes She would pluck the strings, hearing the vibrations as much through her fingertips as in her ears, and the thrill in it was part of what she thought of him. So too she used to hear his heart in his rib-cage, or his voice speaking beneath her hand, down in the length of his chest. "I bet you got them first through Sears, Roebuck," she would say. "How'd you know? Of course I did." "I can see you, a little tow-headed boy, bending over the catalogue." "Way up there, where you've never been." "Oh, probably it's just like anywhere else," she would answer. "I guess," he would absently agree. Once in the years Jake was absent she had heard someone say at a party, "Nobody can love a guitar player . . . they're all stamped out like figures on a tin. It's a modern symbol . . . no individuality." She was shaken just to hear the mention of loving one. Jake laughed about it himself: "I wanted to do something original, I took up with a guitar." They went out together to meet the Negro man, a clarinetist, who would wait for them up on Rampart, in the lobby of a cheap hotel that catered to Negro meetings and banquets. He was there, tiny, shriveled up, wearing a carefully brushed black suit like a preacher, and, also like a preacher, apparently not thinking about such earthly things as heat. He was a lot like an old cat. He had a retracted, shrunken-back look, not so much 3 0 O T H E S N A R E from physical age as expressive of an attitude toward life; and a mottled eye-surface, dark gray, dark brown and black, opaque of feeling. One thought of the narrow little hands with long fingers and yellow nails moving sure, strong, and tremulous up and down his clarinet. Julia, retired behind her dark glasses, saying nothing, was entranced. She caught everything about...