The
Rise-Time
television show on the little kitchen screen has no new angle on the hostage house. The same reporter as last evening, this time wrapped in a green shawl, her hair tied back, says that she has nothing fresh to say. The night was quiet and uneventful. The police are happy to be patient. The hostages have been identified by relatives and neighbors: an unnamed family of five. Three generations, evidently. Leonard listens for their street vicinity and writes it down: Alderbeech. Two trees where probably no woods or orchards have survived. He knows at once what kind of upright suburb it will be. He can get there in an hour or so if he uses Routeway points and takes the motorway. Then what? He can’t be sure what he might do, or should. Being there, he thinks, will help him to decide.
Francine is not sleeping. Her reading light is on. Leonard hesitates outside, holding her tray unsteadily in his good hand. He can’t settle on what lie to tell. He’ll keep it simple, he decides: tell her that he’s going walking. She won’t be pleased to hear that. She’ll be working, after all, plagued by toddlers and curriculums, while she imagines he is having fun on what promises—incorrectly, as it turns out—to be a dry and pretty day. October at its best.
“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” she says, when finally he backs open the door and steps round the bed to place the breakfast tray across her lap.
“Do what?”
“Walk about with nothing on. Before breakfast.”
“You used to like it once. More than once, even.”
“Well, that was then.” She’s smiling, though.
“Curtains?”
“Please.”
He has his back to her as he pulls aside the heavy Spanish prints until the sunlight slants and corrugates across the bed. “I might go up into the forests today. See some trees. Some autumn color. I need the exercise. I’m getting portly.” He pinches the flesh at his waist and stretches it out a few centimeters. She cannot see his face, though he can see her in the window glass, sitting up in bed and staring squarely at the skelfwood cupboards opposite.
“Yes, go,” she says. “Enjoy yourself”—not meaning it but wanting to.
H
E DRIVES THE GIGMOBILE
, his aged liquid-fuel camper van, taking his time. He has all day. He is not even sure if he will complete the journey. He does not take the motorway after all. Making it circuitous and slow, on minor routes, not only saves him Routeway points but allows him greater opportunity to change his mind and flee back home. At first he does his best to concentrate on Maxie Lermon, listening to rolling news on the radio, playing out the conversation he might have with the police officers, and even rehearsing an interview on television with the woman in the shawl: “Yes, we were friends.” But Francine’s odd remark troubles him. “Well, that was then.” What does she mean by
then?
Before what? Before he became the tortoise with the paunch? He shakes his head. He’s worrying too much, as usual. But certainly he felt foolish and disappointed when she said, “Well, that was then.” He hoped to be attractive to her, naked, one-armed, with the tray. Once, many years ago, when they first met, she called him “Waiter” as he walked round the room with nothing on, and the breakfast he brought her went cold while they made love.
So music, then. To cheer himself, he will listen to himself. Most of his own recordings as well as cover versions of his compositions are stored on the van’s system. He does not like to play them at home. He is by nature both modest and secretive. But when he is alone and driving, who is there to care? He scrolls through the menu and selects
Live at the Factory
. This session, which was broadcast on the radio to hardly anyone as part of the “Approaching Midnight” series of new work, was judged too obdurate and odd at the time (a raging winter evening, almost ten years ago) to be issued by his recording company. This is Leonard’s own download. It is not perfect. But he is fond of it. He truly stretched himself that night—and was rewarded for the stretching in life-changing ways. “In an unexpected adjustment to this evening’s jazz recital,” the announcer explains, as the van heads south through suburbs and doughnut estates into the managed countryside and its network of preservation highways, “composer and saxophonist Lennie Less will play unaccompanied. Owing to the severe weather, his quartet has not been able to reach Brighton.” There is laughter and applause, and someone shouts out “Less is more,” as someone nearly always does when Leonard’s in the lineup. Then the concert host, reduced to cliché by the pressure of live radio and the panic of a green on-air light, overloads the microphone with “Ladies and gentlemen, let’s welcome to the Factory tonight … on tenor” and then steps a pace too far away, reproved by his own feedback, to offer, not audibly enough, “Mister. Lennie. Less.” (“It rhymes with penniless, as befits a jazzman,” his agent said when they agreed on this stage name instead of plain, unexciting Leonard Lessing.)
L
EONARD STILL REMEMBERS
—and relives—the panic he felt that evening. His colleagues, turned back by blizzards, abandoned vehicles, and debris on the motorway just ten kilometers out of London, warn him only twenty minutes before the gig that he will be alone. All those fresh pieces they rehearsed and that are promised in the program will have to wait for the next night’s venue, Birmingham’s New Drum, weather permitting. The lead sheets and pages of chord patterns in his music case are useless now. Leonard will have no sidemen, then, to share the blame; no rhythm section to provide depth and camouflage, or any stout string bass to anchor the bottom line for him; no call and response from familiar colleagues, feeding him their hooks and cues; no points of rest; no nodding in another soloist at the end of a progression and stepping out, side-stage, to rest his mouth and hands for sixteen measures or so, or to empty his spit valve, adjust his reed, or sip a little water. Here he will be the solitary player, the nightlong soloist, the only face onstage. There can be no hiding place. What to play? When he first hears the news about the snowbound quartet, he thinks that unless someone at the Factory can magic up a
Real Book
full of comforting standards within the next few minutes, he has no choice but to offer a program of lollipops and show tunes—undemanding numbers he can reproduce entirely from memory.
But by the time the sound engineer appears at the door of the eerily empty green room to finger-five that the concert is about to start, Leonard has accepted the inevitable: for this radio concert he must not take the easy option. Everybody is expecting more. Lennie Less does not play show tunes or unembellished standards, no matter what. Lennie Less plays only taxing jazz. He’ll start cautiously, he decides finally, with his tenor version of a Coltrane classic solo, “My Favorite Things.” He’s played it, duplicated its patterns and glissandos, many times before—as an encore, something obvious that even the shallowest of aficionados can recognize. He knows it is a bit of a hot lick, begging for predictable but unwarranted applause—the enthusiasts will be clapping themselves, their own tuned ears—but applause is always a welcome boost at the start of any show. It is an agitating prospect, though, and frightening. Live audience, live radio, no band—and some evidence, from what he’s spotted through the stage curtains, that the concert hall is papered with free tickets. Every seat is taken, and that is suspicious for a contemporary music event. There are more frocks and ties than usual, and many more women. He’ll be playing not only for the usual pack of devotees, in other words, but for jazz virgins and jazz innocents as well. They could be restless, wary, bored, and certainly irritated. And the venue itself is off-putting: unraked plastic seating, poor sight lines, overhead industrial plumbing, and deadening acoustics—curtains, for heaven’s sake! The Factory is devoid of what jazzmen call
the climate
. Even now Leonard sweats at the memory: the trembling apprehension of that long wait before the Brighton broadcast begins, how shakily he adjusts his mouthpiece and the tuning slide, how he runs the keys and rods of his tenor so anxiously that his knuckles begin to clack, how he fusses over his jacket sleeves and his belt, unable to get comfortable or stay cool, how he practices his embouchure and lolly-sucks the reed until his lips are tense and dry.
But that applause, that darkened stage, the flustered concert host, the sense that at least some in that full, damp audience have battled through a storm to listen to his saxophone, the “live on radio,” make him feel—almost at the moment that his lips close on the reed, almost too late—too playful for Coltrane’s dark and modal meditation. But not too playful for some nursery rhymes. His entry still thrills him, the walk from backstage, playing, out of sight for the first few bars, a distant sobbing animal, the legato opening—the cheek of it—of “Three Blind Mice.” In the key of C. Four slow bars: three notes / three notes / four notes / four notes. Simplicity itself. See how they run. And then he finds the spotlight, his semicircle of sound boxes, microphones, and water bottles, his comfort zone where he can bend his knees, fold his shoulders, lean into the saxophone, and blow. See how they bleed, he says to Brighton with his horn on that appalling night of early snow and wind. Listen to the cutting of the carving knife.
However, as Leonard remembers all too well when those first slow but risky bars fill up the van once more, there is no grand design as yet. There’s certainly no cunning. He is simply taking what he has and stretching it, making phrases from those few root notes, subdued at first, using vibrato sparingly and attacking most notes on pitch, like a beginner. He is not ready to decorate or bend them or embark on any doodling with fillers and motifs. He knows he needs to make it sparse and stable, until he’s settled in. He’s just pub crawling, heading for the next bar, not rushing the notes but waiting to catch them as they pass. Keep it tidy till the sixteenth. That’s the rule. But then, too soon, he makes his first mistake, and has to dare. It is a misjudged voicing that, even as he listens to it now, ten winters on, causes him to shake his head and suck his cheeks, as if to take the notes back from the air.
Yet this is where the concert finds itself. The best of jazz is provisional. It often emerges in panic from an error. He hears himself attempt to rescue the mistake by restating it until the error is validated by repetition and seems to be deliberate and purposeful. He listens to the audience, both the virgins and the devotees, applaud his juicing of the blunder. They’ve all been fooled. They think he has planned every note of it. Do they imagine that he planned the snow, that high gusts from his saxophone have blocked the motorways with trees?
Leonard’s band has not been fooled, of course. They are never far from his thoughts, even as he busks his way toward the final bars of this first tune, if tune it is, even as he syncopates the singing rhyme, cheekily matching every grace note with a note denied. He can sense them laughing as he plays. Trapped inside their car, hard up against their instrument cases and overnight bags, listening to him on the radio, they will not have mistaken his misjudged voicing as anything but wide of the mark, a blaring gaffe. And they will not have missed his nervousness and inhibition, the loss of pitch caused by a tight throat and tense mouth. He knows they will be chuckling as they hear him “digging his way out of jail,” as Bradley, the percussionist, calls it. So he plays for them as well, and even though they cannot comment on a single note, he hears their contributions in some auxiliary chamber of his ear. No improvising jazzman will deny that there is telepathy. Indeed, the group’s most recent release is titled
ESP
. So Leonard measures every note he plays against each chord—each sweetness or each dissidence—that they might have offered had they been onstage with him. He sends his absent rhythm section clues, invites them to add accents to his saxophone, to harmonize with him, to influence the color of his play. He imagines how a single furry and hypnotic note that he holds for the full length of a bar might be accessorized if there were comrades on the stage. Thus he perseveres, extravagantly, a soloist in imagined company, murmuring, then sharpening his edge, more shaman now than showman—until that eerie modest rodent tune, as familiar as heartbeats, becomes both pulsing anthem and lament.
L
EONARD LISTENS AND TAPS
his fingers on the steering wheel in half-time, happy with himself, happy now to have been so happy then. He sees Lennie Less—as Francine has so many times recounted seeing him that evening—from the third row of the gallery: the spotlight at the center of the stage, his casual and expensive suit, blue-black, the brass-gold glinting saxophone extemporizing its one-night-only bars.
“Did you ever see / Such a sight in your life / As three blind mice?”
The van replays it back to him through her.
Francine says she was attracted to him “not quite straightaway—but soon.” Disarmed by music she has not expected to enjoy—she’s come reluctantly, at the last moment, and only to oblige her sister, who’s been given several tickets—and by the flattering stage lights, which make Leonard seem complex and shadowy, she has begun to think of him, despite the grotesqueries of his bulging throat and cheeks, as someone she might like to kiss. And she’s had fun, she says. At times his playing has become knotty, shrill, and edgy, just as she’s feared. On occasions he is more blacksmith than tunesmith. It is witty, though. And it has helped, of course, that she has rushed a few drinks in the pub beforehand and that she, and every other virgin there, has quickly recognized the common language of each tune, the program of nursery rhymes that on an impulse he has decided to play once his “Three Blind Mice” has struck such chords. “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep” follows, to more laughter and applause—initially, at least. The less sophisticated and less sober concertgoers, Francine included, have actually sung along with “Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full,” until Leonard’s tenor deprives the singers of their tune and embarks on eight measures of bare but oddly poignant bleats, loosely pitched at first, then joyously unruly.