Night Work Read Online Free PDF Page A

about the plates being hot, and left.
    “Joe,” Marlene finally said. “Let’s just relax and eat dinner, okay? You don’t have to apologize for anything.”
    “Okay.”
    “We can talk about something else, right?”
    “Yes,” I said. “That sounds like a good idea.” If quite impossible.
    She smiled again. Every time she did that, somehow it seemed to make me feel a little better.
    We ate our dinners. We didn’t say much, but the silence wasn’t unbearable. After a while, she looked up and said, “That’s nice.”
    “What is?”
    “The music.”
    I hadn’t even noticed it, which just showed me how tightly wound I had been. Or maybe just because it was so familiar to me—it was the kind of music I had running in the background, and through my head, all the time.
    “This is a great album,” I said.
“Alone in San Francisco.”
    “It’s Monk, right?”
    “Yes. Jacques has good taste, I’ll say that much. Of course, the French, you know … They love this stuff.”
    “So you’re a boxer and you’re into jazz.”
    “I’m not half as cool as that makes me sound,” I said. “Believe me.”
    She laughed at that. I sat back and watched her listen to the music. Her hands started moving like she was following along on an invisible piano. “I can’t even imagine playing like that.”
    “Don’t tell me you play piano.”
    “Mostly classical,” she said. “I’m not that good.”
    “I bet you’re being modest now.”
    “Really, it’s just something to keep me occupied. Like you and your boxing.”
    “I would trade it for being able to make music, believe me.”
    “Maybe you can tell me,” she said. “I was looking at that little club down on the corner. What’s it called?”
    “The Uptown.”
    “It looks like a nice little place. They ever have anybody good there?”
    “Sometimes.”
    “Really? All the way up here? In Kingston?”
    “Miraculous, isn’t it?”
    “Anybody playing there tonight?”
    With that she saved the whole goddamned evening.
    T he trio was good. They played it pretty safe, mostly the standards. Things picked up when an unannounced saxophone player joined in. He played the alto, and I swear to God, when they played a stripped-down version of “Mood Indigo” he sounded just like Johnny Hodges, with that perfect smooth tone like the sound of your lover’s voice. It was impossible for someone to play that well, absolutely impossible, but that’s the thing about live jazz. When it comes together it sounds better than you ever could have expected. As good as anything you’ve ever heard.
    We talked a lot about music. I ran down my whole list of favorites for her. Miles Davis, especially his second quintet—Shorter, Hancock, Carter, the young Tony Williams on drums. Coltrane, of course. Cecil Taylor. And Albert Ayler. I was hoping I had finally found someone else who had even
heard
of Ayler, let alone someone who could appreciate his music, but his was the only name on my list that Marlene didn’t recognize.
    I told her that gave me a new mission in life. I’d burn her a sample CD and deliver it personally.
    “I’d like that,” she said. She looked like she meant it.
    When the music was done, we walked around uptown for a while. She’d only been in town for a month, so it was all new to her. We walked around the Old Dutch Church with all the gravestones in the courtyard, some of them over 350 years old. I told her about the ghost in the clock tower and the twelve on the west-side clock that had somehow turned into a thirteen.
    “Where?” she said. “Show me.”
    We stood close together as I pointed it out. I could smell her perfume, an exotic scent that Laurel never would have worn, not in a hundred years. Marlene was so completely different, this stranger with brown eyes and hair as black as the night sky. A streetlamp was shining behind her. It was a dark and disorienting night, and this was the last thing I would have expected, to be standing here under