“It’s him we’re aimin’ at, you kiddin’ me? I said up front, he’s comin’ into town. The man himself. How do we know? We know ’cos George Senior has tickets. He says he and Barbara will be hoppin’ across from Houston to listen to the speech, and little George is bound to wanna see his mom and pa for the day. George’ll show, I’m sure of it—”
“You’re using Christian names yourself,” Leonard says, emboldened by his single glass of wine. He only means to defend Nadia.
“I’m usin’ ’em without respect, and that’s the difference. I’m usin’ ’em to differentiate. We’re talkin’ ’bout four Bushes here. You hearin’ me?”
“How could I not?” Leonard can’t decide whether he is exhilarated or annoyed by Maxie’s unembarrassed stridency or simply doesn’t trust it, the mix of street talk, Texas drawl and twang, and campus condescension.
How Nadia’s been taken in by such a showman is an irritation and a mystery.
“So don’t get the British smarties, Leon, por fayvore. Either you are with us or you ain’t.”
“With you where?”
“Not in the silent fuckin’ vigil on the Capitol lawns that those blowhards of the American Civil Liberties Union and Mrs. Pussyfoot of the Texas antiwar coalition have organized. No way. No, sir. We’re gonna take our shit into the House chamber and we are gonna dump it in his lap. AmBush, we’re callin’ it.”
“Sounds good.”
“Too right, it does sound good. And it is gonna be a breeze, my man, ’cos we mean it and we’ve got it organized. Tell him, Nadia. Tell our comrade what we’ve gotten ourselves.”
“Well, number one, Maxie knows a schoolteacher, and number two, she’s been invited to”—she hesitates—“the Bush wife’s speech, and number three, she’s handed us her tickets!”
“Three tickets, Leon. One, two, three.”
10
LEONARD STAYS ANOTHER WEEK, and is relieved to do so. He is not well enough for travel yet. What at first he has presumed to be jet lag and then mistaken as a cold has left him coughing, sneezing, and itching. His eyes are red and weepy. His lips are dry and sore. The lotion Nadia offers him gives no relief. “Welcome to Austin, the City of Sniffs and Tears,” Maxie says, by way of explanation. “What you have gotten is either the last of this summer’s dander fever or the first of this winter’s cedar fever. Allergy planet. We live with it.” Don’t make a fuss, in other words.
Maxim and Leon, or Comrades Gorky and Trotsky, as Nadia refers to them, spend their days — while she is at the college teaching class — training for AmBush, largely at Leonard’s expense, in the Four T’s. As its name implies (Newsweek has judged that Austin ticks all the T’s for “a creative city”—tolerance, technology, talent, taste), it is a bar intended and designed as a watering hole for the neighborhood’s new yuppies, the aspirant professionals, the opinionators and tenure slaves who, since the advance guard of students, gays, and artists softened up and bleached that quarter of the neighborhood, have already started moving in their businesses, their offices, their yard art, and their families. It is here, on the afternoon of his fourth day in Austin, that Leonard unpacks his saxophone. The first time in America.
It’s always a comfort to lift his instrument free from its nesting case, to check and finger its glinting, complex engineering, the key stacks mounted on their axle rods, the pillars, needle springs, hinges, and leverages, the tooling and the soldering, which against all seeming logic unite and conspire to make this “singing tube” the most harmonic of the reeds, and the one most like a human voice, capable of everything from murmuring to oratory. As a child with a “good ear,” Leonard was captivated by the saxophone rather than his parents’ preferred clarinet or oboe, not despite but because of its fussy, varicose technology, the way its fittings and its moving parts dripped and melted from the tube like hardened candle wax. “It’s easy, man, it’s like puffing a cigar. You breathe through it, not into it. Just don’t put the wrong end in your mouth,” he was told when, as a teenager and on an impulse, he bought his first cheap saxophone, the only affordable left-hander in the shop. The salesman was not being entirely frank about how easy playing it would be, but there was some truth in what he said. Despite its size and visual complexity, Leonard found his instrument less complicated to cope with than he feared. As a single-note instrument, its fingering system was relatively simple, and its generous bore and extended octave range flattered even the beginner. Leonard took to it speedily, keen to prove his parents wrong — the clarinet and oboe seemed docile by comparison — but not so keen to let them know how effortless and satisfying his progress was, or how music felt as personal and clandestine as sex. When they were out, he practiced in front of the long mirror in their bedroom, sometimes naked even, serenading his own reflection and never quite forgetting that salesman’s sensuous advice that he should play it like a cigar: the long dense tube that’s held between the fingers, fits between the lips, and puffs out melodies as pungent and weightless as smoke.
Leonard’s current Capitaine — acquired only weeks ago, with money from his inheritance — is a much grander instrument than that first workhorse. He calls it Mr. Sinister, his southpaw friend. It’s customized: everything from the hand engravings on the cone to the details of the mouthpiece at the business end was designed especially for him by a Belgian atelier. Even his reeds have been modified: they’re longer than the usual heartwoods, favoring clarity and nuance over the brittle brightness of that first cheap instrument — and of too much postwar jazz, in Leonard’s view. Just holding it is comforting. Today he’s keen to show it off.
“I’m all set to puff on my cigar,” he says to Maxie, though Maxie seems determined not to pay him any heed, even as his English houseguest clips Mr. Sinister to his neck strap and blows almost inaudibly across the mouthpiece to excite the air column for the first time in America. Maxie’s jealous, Leonard thinks, wishes he could be this cool. He’ll wish it even more when I start playing.
It has been exhausting, living Maxie’s lazy, energetic life — the late mornings and late nights, the noise, the tricky, ranting, high-revved conversations and the intimidating charm that leave Leonard shaken and unnerved, the couple’s almost unrestricted lovemaking, their arguments, the day-for-night in low-lit bars. Leonard is not bored exactly. In fact, he’s more flattered than perturbed to be paraded in the neighborhood and introduced as Maxie’s British friend, for Maxie is to all appearances a local celebrity, a man that everyone — the Mexican construction workers, the prostitutes, the users and suppliers, the painters and jewelers, the storekeepers, the surviving black families — knows by name and seems to like. To be perceived as Maxie’s friend is “the key to the city,” Nadia has said, quick to exaggerate on her lover’s behalf while her lover sits listening, interrupting only to correct and embellish the details. The sight of him and his great stack of hair seems enough to make even the meanest-looking passersby smile, or wave, or stop to talk. He has the happy knack of flattering the listener while referring mostly to himself, and somehow even when he isn’t talking still remaining the focus of attention.
“Maxie’s everybody’s Everyman. The original twenty-four-carat, emblematic, whacked-out, freethinking American.” (Nadia again, quoting herself.) “He’s been to college and dropped out. He’s been in prison—”
“Yeah, way more than once. Property is theft. Violence is the poor man’s repartee and stuff. Carnage, mayhem, mutiny. I like to shake it up a bit, is all. Tumultuous! I do my thing and then I do my time.”
“And now he’s going straight—”