5.
Evening Blues It really is a d.a.m.n shame to set yourself up for something when a little thought would have armed you against almost certain disappointment. It"s common as h.e.l.l, for instance, for a grown man to get the blues because "his team" has failed. I"m talking about professional sports. How is it, I ask myself from time to time, that a guy can invest so much emotionally in a group of hired men who purport to represent the community, although everyone knows they aren"t from Detroit? You would have to be more naive than any Detroit child to believe that the average professional player really cares about Detroit. The pro is from somewhere else, has no significant amount of his history invested in Detroit, and is probably hoping to get traded to New York or Los Angeles, where he can get the media attention he "deserves" and make some real money.
And yet, there are these ent.i.ties called the Detroit Tigers, Lions, Pistons, and Red Wings that readily earn the devotion of Detroiters (mostly boys and men) for their entire lives. Guys here still talk about Bobby Layne and Gordie Howe, although few are around who were adults when they saw them play. Even profound obscurities like Johnny Lipon and Eddie Brinkman are still mentioned daily. And when the Tigers are doing well, why, the whole city seems to perk up. But when they"re awful, as they often are, the city has got the blues.
Why is this? How can it be? Is it just that most of us have such an una.s.suageable hunger for community that even a squad of avowed mercenary athletes, all dressed up in the same costume and proclaiming that they are the Detroit team, suffices to bind us into a semblance of unity? Is it because we followed the fortunes of the team on radio and television and in the papers from our youth on, so that even when the names of the individual heroes change the corporate image remains and that image is cloaked in our childhood dreams and heartbreaks and longings, to the extent that at the age of forty, or fifty, or even ninety, we pick up a newspaper and automatically look to see how the Tigers, or the Red Wings, are doing?
How can this be? I don"t know. But every cop in Detroit knows that when one of the teams loses a game that they were expected to win, an "important" game-well, look out! More a.s.saults, more robberies, more everything.
The current wrench was the shocking turn in the fortunes of the Red Wings, the Detroit hockey club. Here was a club enjoying one of the greatest seasons in the history of professional ice hockey, yet they were losing the playoffs to a miserable overaged team, the Saint Louis Blues. I was surprised by how sick this made me. I was even having dreams about the Red Wings! And I knew that it wasn"t doing the spirit of Detroit in general any good.
You don"t have to live in Detroit, either, to feel this pain. You only have to have lived there as a child-or nearby, as I had, and again did, in Saint Clair Flats. It"s a rural place, still: the house is an old farmhouse and there"s a barn and a few other outbuildings, and the ten acres or so still border the Saint Clair River. I came across old Red Wings" memorabilia in the attic that night, while I was looking for Grootka"s stuff.
Ma had met Grootka once. She had invited him to dinner while talking to him on the phone; to my surprise, he"d accepted. I think she wanted to know who my friends were. The occasion was not particularly memorable, except that afterward my mother had observed that Grootka was "formidable." When I asked what she meant, she related an incident that had occurred as they were sitting in the backyard, sipping c.o.c.ktails, while I ran to the store for some herb or spice (probably a put-up job, now that I think of it: Ma probably wanted to grill Grootka about my love life). At one point, she said, a meadowlark had perched on a fencepost nearby and begun its vociferous song. Grootka swiveled his head and looked at the bird, which faltered in midphrase and fell silent.
"I don"t believe your friend is a bad man," Ma had said, "but he silenced a songbird with a glance!" Other than that, she"d gone on, "He seemed a perfect gentleman."
By the time I got home from Books"s the house was dark and Ma was gone again, and when I trekked up to the attic I couldn"t find Grootka"s stuff. There was quite a bit of old stuff up there, neatly stored and not too dusty. I had to wonder when Ma ever got a chance to dust. But there was no sign of the cardboard boxes in which I"d packed away Grootka"s notebooks and music.
I fell asleep listening to M"Zee Kinanda and, I must say, I was beginning to like it. In fact, I began to see what all the fuss was about. While I wasn"t looking, jazz had moved on. Oh, I don"t mean the hyped jazz, the youthful superstars that seem to pop up on television shows. But the music had changed. It had become more daring harmonically and rhythmically, and from what I could hear, the men and women who played it were tremendous technical players. This was nothing new, of course, but there was a suggestion of virtuosity, which made me a little uneasy. Virtuoso music is thrilling at times, as when an Art Tatum appears, although it has a tendency to become boring, too. The nice thing about this music is that an element of antic goofiness is present, as well. I"m thinking of the Sun Ra shtick: the man from the future, from Saturn, as he called himself-although it was pretty well known that he was originally Herman Sunny Blount from Birmingham, Alabama.
One of the things I especially liked about the music was that, while unabashedly modern, advanced if you will, it didn"t turn its back on earlier jazz. It clearly was based on an admiration for what had gone before, in a way that bop hadn"t seemed to manage. That is, the boppers seemed contemptuous of their predecessors, although as Books had suggested, perhaps that was more hype than reality. Anyway, this music did not make me feel that I didn"t want to listen to Ellington anymore; indeed, its echoes of Parker and Monk and Powell, as well as Ellington and Basie, made me want to get out some of my old records.
But what endeared the music to me was its ingenuousness. It didn"t try to be liked. And it didn"t take itself too seriously. It was full of self-referential humor, I felt. From childhood I had been very wary of my own tendency to play to others" liking for me. It was not an attractive trait. I had to learn, in a way, not to be loved-no easy task when you"re the only child of overaged parents. This music was intelligent and splendidly performed, but it got that way without trying to be loved, which is my point.
My first thought in the morning was: Where can I buy more of M"Zee? I thought of a jazz shop on Mack. I thought of this while I wondered what had happened to Grootka"s notebooks. My mother, as I now realized (this was thought number four, while drinking the last of the microwaved coffee) was in Siberia. Yes, actually in Siberia, in cruel April, to observe the arrival of some rare cranes to the great marshes. I hoped she had remembered her boots; no doubt she had. She wouldn"t be back for at least a week, perhaps longer.
Siberia, of course, was the birthplace of one of the Red Wings" new stars, Vladimir Konstantinov, alias "the Gladiator." I"d dreamed about him last night, along with the rest of the Russian Line, skating furiously through a kind of Sun Ra Ice Show Extravaganza.
All of these things were swirling in my mind when I saw in the Metro Times (the Free Press and the News were on strike, still) that M"Zee Kinanda was performing in concert tonight, at the Detroit Inst.i.tute of Arts. Ordinarily, this would simply be viewed as a serendipitous occasion: an opportunity to go see the man himself and hear his interesting music up close. But I also had tickets to the seventh game of the Red Wings-Blues playoff, at the Joe Louis Arena. Even for a cop, these tickets were hard to come by.
The million-dollar question: Since the Wings were in some kind of weird spiral of self-destruction (probably a consequence of relying so heavily on a brilliant front line of ex-Soviet stars-Fedorov, Konstantinov, Fetisov, Larionov, and Kozlov [talk about alien mercenaries!], who were subject to spasms of Slav fatalism, apparently), ought a fan to desert them in this perilous hour and go to the M"Zee Kinanda concert? Or was it not true that since one"s presence at the other games had not helped, that one"s absence at this game might be a decisive factor that would make victory possible?
I decided to abandon my Red Wings tickets. It was a bold move, one that only a true fan could understand and appreciate. I invited Agge Allyson to accompany me to the M"Zee Kinanda concert and she accepted. This made the sacrifice of the Red Wings tickets easier to bear, as did the eager purchase of the tickets by Maki, for little more than I"d paid for them.
But I emphasize that this was no minor gesture. Much against my will I had found this team occupying my thoughts. Particularly the Russian Line. I had a notion that the Line was const.i.tuted of at least two distinct and well-known Russian types: the aristocratic, intellectual, poetic, or even mystical type, as exemplified by the brilliant and dashing Sergei Federov, Slava Kozlov, and Igor Larionov, and the pragmatic, indomitable, tough, salt-of-the-earth-peasant, tank-commander types embodied in Konstantinov and, especially, the thuggish-looking Vyacheslav Fetisov.
Of course, I hasten to say, these are mere simplifications: I"m sure none of these men were in fact mere exemplars of such a reductive dichotomy. That is, in real life they are certainly more complex, complete personalities. But these categories are sometimes useful. There was something dreamy and creative, romantic even, about Fedorov: he fairly swooped about the ice, creating plays, flashing brilliantly across the blue line in his scarlet road jersey like a cardinal (Cardinalis cardinalis, according to my mother), a regular Ariel on skates. But then, at times, he would go into eclipse and seemingly brood, despairing, paralyzed, as if in molt.
And no one could deny that the brutal faces and the hard, mean body-checking style of Konstantinov and Fetisov had something of the earthy peasant about it. Chekhov and Tolstoy would have recognized it, I"m sure; and especially would have Gogol. They were hard men, actually former officers of the Red Army, strong workers, untiring, the kind of men who led tank regiments into Krakow. And naturally afflicted with a semimystical fatalism. This seemed to be the current problem. It was as if an overwhelmingly superior Red Army had stalled in the suburbs of Berlin because they knew, deep down, that they were inferior. (Just for a day, of course: the following day they awake with a familiar hangover and without hesitation roll on, crushing all opposition.) I had dreamed that their brilliant, interweaving ice dance was suddenly thrown into chaotic confusion, not unlike the music of M"Zee Kinanda, which was playing furiously. I feared that they had fallen pray to a despairing belief that they could not win, and so the beloved Red Wings were doomed. I knew this was bulls.h.i.t, but in my "Russian mood" I couldn"t shake it. As rational a person as I like to think I am, I fell back on the petty magic of seemingly ignoring them-in the hope that they would then prosper.
It was all nonsense, to be sure, but I think it"s fairly common nonsense among American men, perhaps among Western men generally. (I"m thinking of what I"ve heard about European soccer fans here.) I took the precaution of programming the VCR to tape the game, just in case.
In the afternoon Agge Allyson and I had gone to the warehouse on At.w.a.ter (an apt name) and been confronted with the boxed files. With the help of an amiable clerk we were dismayed to learn that the files were organized on a principle of case histories, which meant that you had to start with a file name and number and then begin to ransack the boxes. It was no use asking, "Where are the Grootka files?" It didn"t work that way. It was dusty and dirty and daunting.
Nor was there, for instance, a master file ent.i.tled "Riot-1967." You had to know what you were looking for before you could look. I had some experience with this, of course, but without the a.s.sistance of the clerks at Records, it"s the old haystack again. Agge took a few notes, but after only an hour or so of cursory poking about, she declared that she needed to rethink her approach. She fell eagerly on my suggestion that we"d better get out of there if we were going to go home, shower, dress, and so on, before the M"Zee Kinanda concert.
The M"Zee Kinanda performance, as often happens, was nothing like I had expected. I suppose I was influenced by the Sun Ra image, although the only comparison was in the music rather than the appearance. Kinanda and his musicians did not wear ludicrous costumes, robes and bizarre headresses from the B-movie s.p.a.ce-opera property room, as I"d seen in photos of Sun Ra. (Some of those getups were wildly wacky, suggesting that his mom had whipped them up out of towels and sheets; the headgear often had a suspiciously ex-pantry aspect: you wouldn"t have been shocked to detect a handle obscured by the glued-on antennas.) It was this theatrical tawdriness arid spoofery that had hampered serious appreciation of Sun Ra"s music, in fact, and I"ll be d.a.m.ned if it wasn"t hard to shake.
M"Zee Kinanda and his ensemble were only vaguely suggestive of Africana. There were some stylized masks and fancy drums on the stage, as decorative props, but the players were dressed in a variety of more or less ordinary casual clothing-jeans and sweaters, a tweed jacket, a kind of Nehru jacket, running shoes, for heaven"s sake. The woman who played the synthesizer wore something that might be construed as a dashiki, though most would just call it a colorful dress. And most of the men wore a hat or cap of some kind, usually a round one with colorful patterns or brocade, rather like a yarmulke, although the French horn and tuba player wore a Detroit Tigers baseball cap.
All the musicians were evidently African-Americans, to use the currently favored term. The t.i.tles of the musical pieces were ostensibly African in origin, though even that wasn"t clear. I wasn"t sure what to think when Kinanda, in his rich, attractive voice, said, "And now we"d like to perform a piece that I wrote a few years ago, ent.i.tled "Kilwa Kisiwani." It"s in three parts, reflecting the Indian, Bantu, and Portuguese influence on this medieval trading center of East Africa. The first part opens with a soprano sax interlude, followed by May anna"s solo on the Yamaha DX-7 . . ."
I don"t know . . . it didn"t sound particularly African to me. It sounded like wild and beautiful Free Jazz. The percussion was terrific, but it was mainly a bop drum kit, as far as I could tell, and the drummer sounded a lot like Roy Brooks, an old Detroit player and drum teacher, who was pretty familiar to me. It wasn"t Roy, it was a younger man, but it sounded like him.
The tunes, or whatever you call these musical pieces, were wonderful. They weren"t tunes, in the sense of "My Funny Valentine," but they weren"t ragas or fugues or concertos, either. They were fairly brief, somewhat evocative tone pieces, or mood pieces, with definite melodies, some of them even a little bluesy. There seemed to be a basic simple structure, a theme or a melodic phrase, and a general but fluctuating rhythm, with a lot of improvisation. But I think I"d have to listen to a lot more of it before I"d like to describe it further. And I plan to hear a lot more of it.
The audience definitely loved it. The audience seemed more familiar with the music than I was, certainly. It was a mostly African-American audience, young but not very, and evidently a bit upscale, judging from the dress and the cars in the Art Inst.i.tute parking lot. There seemed to be at least a minority academic element in the audience: beards and conservative suits, horn-rimmed gla.s.ses.
I was happy to take up Agge"s suggestion that we go to the reception after the concert. It seems that she knew one of the musicians, or a friend of one of the musicians, and she thought we could at least meet Kinanda and shake his hand. I was all for it, although these scenes often seem a bit uncomfortable or awkward to me-but then I"m not averse to social awkwardness: you can often learn something from such situations. It isn"t always clear just what is supposed to be happening. Are the musicians really interested in talking to their fans and admirers? Or is it an obligatory thing? Or maybe they"re just happily greeting their old pals and other musicians who have come to pay a little compliment, a courtesy. Anyway, as a cop, I"m naturally curious, not to say nosy. I want to know what"s going on, what different kinds of people are like. I don"t mind seeming awkward.
Kinanda was a pleasant man about my own age, tall and good-looking, with a graying beard that made him look distinguished, an effect aided by horn-rimmed gla.s.ses that he hadn"t worn onstage. He had, as I mentioned, an especially fine voice. Agge"s friend introduced us.
"So glad you could come," Kinanda said. "Did you enjoy the program?" He seemed genuinely interested in our reaction. "You"re familiar with the music?"
"I"m just getting into it," I told him. "A friend introduced me to it and I like it. I like it a lot." I started to say that my listening background was in hard bop, but he interrupted, asking the name of my Virgil-that was his phrase. I started to say "Books Meldrim," but that didn"t seem quite appropriate, and for the life of me I couldn"t remember Books"s real name. I ended up stammering out, "Buh-, uh, a guy named Meldrim."
Kinanda frowned. "Is he a musician?"
"Sort of semiprofessional," I said. "He plays a little jazz piano . . . Teddy Wilson style, maybe a little "Fatha" Hines."
"Books Meldrim? Why, I know Books. Is he still . . . around?" This last was phrased as one might say "still alive."
"Sure. I don"t know if he plays in public anymore, but he"s still kicking, still in good health. I saw him last night, as a matter of fact."
Kinanda seemed interested. A young woman came into the room, a gallery of the Art Inst.i.tute actually, a kind of reception area. They were serving wine. The young woman wrapped herself around Kinanda, perhaps seeking warmth, as she was inadequately attired (if you take clothing as essentially a form of shelter, rather than decoration; she certainly didn"t need clothing for decoration). "Baby, you were bewitching," she declared. It seemed an appropriate appreciation. The music had been bewitching. Kinanda tolerated the frankly erotic embrace with a graceful reluctance. Not obviously insane, he didn"t, apparently, want to cool the young lady"s ardor or affection, but he was also not comfortable with her demonstrativeness. He may have been conscious of Agge"s sniff of disapproval.
I should say something here about Agge. She was looking rather stunning herself. I never knew you could wear a T-shirt with an evening gown. She certainly perked up when Kinanda managed to fend off his sultry a.s.sailant long enough to ask, "Is Books still hanging out with Grootka?" I know it caught my attention.
"You knew Grootka?" I asked.
"Knew?" Kinanda said. "Do I detect a past tense? Yes? I"m sorry to hear it."
"It"s been a while," I said. "Four years, anyway."
Kinanda pursed his lips. "Line of duty, I suppose?"
"Well, yes," I said. "Although he was supposed to be retired."
"Hard to imagine Grootka retired." But he didn"t ask for details and I didn"t volunteer them. "You are a policeman too, I suppose." I admitted I was. "Mulheisen," he voiced my name, almost to himself, as if committing the name to memory.
"How do you know Books and Grootka?" I asked. But Kinanda had turned away, happy to talk to the young woman and several other people who were eagerly demonstrating to one another how familiar, even intimate, they were with the celebrity of the moment. "My man!" they exclaimed and, "Brother!"
My old friend Jimmy Singleton suddenly materialized. Jimmy will occasionally run a blind pig, for a few weeks at a time, until its natural half-life expires. "Mul, what you doin" here? You dig this s.h.i.t? I didn"t know. It"s cool, eh?"
"What happened at the Joe?" I asked, referring to the Joe Louis Arena, the home of the Red Wings.
"Blew "em out," Jimmy said. "Six-two. Yzerman scored two goals, the Russians got all the others."
Blessed relief. My sacrifice had paid off. I was shocked at how good it felt.
"Do you know these guys?" I asked, meaning Kinanda.
"Known "em for years," Jimmy said.
"Kinanda says he knew Grootka."
Singleton nodded. "Yeah, he would."
"Well, Grootka knew everybody," I said. "But is Kinanda, or was he, a local guy?" I was puzzled: Grootka"s unusually wide acquaintance could hardly extend to, say, New York, or Chicago, which is where I presumed Kinanda was based.
"He used to play around here, in a previous life," Jimmy joked, "but he made his name in L. A. He usually has a couple of the home cats in his band."
"Ah, that explains it. I guess he likes the Detroit sound." Although, I thought, what is the Detroit sound?
"You mean that hard edge?" Singleton said.
"Yeah." I thought I knew what he meant. It was a legacy, I thought, of a couple generations of Detroit players, dating back to the twenties with the McKinney"s Cotton Pickers, through boppers like Wardell Gray, and up to and including Roland Hanna, the Jones boys, Barry Harris, Paul Chambers, Ron Carter, Kenny Burrell, Louis Hayes, Pepper Adams, Donald Byrd, Marcus Belgrave, and Geri Allen. It was a straightforward, technically brilliant style that was devoid of sentimentality, but not unemotional.
Reflecting on the music I had just heard, I found a definite affinity. This music was not mainstream, certainly not bop, but there was that same wry, unsentimental edge that said "Detroit" to me. The only thing I missed was a lack of a strong tenor or baritone sax presence. The only sax in the lineup tonight had been a soprano, played virtuosically by a young black woman named Karen Tate. She was a terrific player who doubled on clarinet and ba.s.s clarinet, but she didn"t blow with that characteristic Detroit edge. I mentioned it to Singleton.
"The man didn"t blow," he pointed out.
"You mean Kinanda? I thought he was a piano player." The tape Books had given me had listed Kinanda as a keyboard player and composer, but there had been some mention of "saxes." I"d heard some powerful saxes on it, but I"d gotten the impression, as I had tonight, that Kinanda was a pianist.
"He also plays sax," Singleton said. "d.a.m.n good, too. Tenor and bari. I guess the music didn"t call for a big horn."
The featured composition had, in fact, been an extended series of reflections on a theme, presumably about African life, except that the composer didn"t bother to tell us anything about the theme, just the somewhat evocative t.i.tles of the relatively short pieces that made up the suite: "Kilwa Kisiwani," "Victoria Nyanza," and so on. It wasn"t unusual: music lovers are used to t.i.tles that are vaguely evocative without being very descriptive of the music itself, as in Schubert"s "Trout" quintet.
When I saw an opportunity I approached Kinanda again and asked him straight out what the composition was all about.
"It"s about jazz," he said, promptly. "Music and instruments. Keyboards, drums. Music is always about that. But we give it other names sometimes, maybe because we think it should be about something . . . something out there." He waved his hand vaguely in the direction of the city. "Tchaikovsky got together an orchestra and wrote a piece about Napoleon and the invasion of Moscow, but it"s really just orchestral music, no matter how many cannons are fired."
"But what do names like "Kilwa Kisiwani" and "Victoria Whatever-it-was" mean, then?" I persisted.
"Oh, yes." Kinanda looked thoughtful. He didn"t seem in the least put out by my impertinence. "You know what? I think at the time I had some idea . . . maybe some memory or image of visiting Tanzania. I had been there on a State Department-sponsored trip a few months before. So I had that thought. But"-he shrugged, as if in apology-"I can"t say that the pieces, despite their names, are about Tanzania. I was taken to see Lake Victoria, so I remembered the African name, which is really a holdover from colonialism-Victoria Nyanza/Lake Victoria."
"So you"re saying," I pushed on, "that music can never be about something other than itself?"
"Well, it"s just music, you see. It"s purely abstract. Of course, once you add words . . . a song can be about something other than itself, than music. A hymn, for instance, is about G.o.d. And Bach"s Ma.s.s in B Minor is about G.o.d, or about religion, at least. But I don"t think that a Bach fugue is about G.o.d, although I guess some would say that G.o.d is in the details. But for me, it"s about something else-rhythm, harmony, tonality. I have written music that was about places and people, events. But "Kilwa Kisiwani" probably evokes an ancient African capital only for me."
Agge had listened to this with great interest. "What did you write about people?" she asked. "An opera?"
Kinanda screwed up his handsome face. "No, not really. It used some lyrics, some narrative . . . it"s never been recorded, or even performed. It was an early work. But"-he brightened-"you know, I may do something with it yet."
"Does it have a name?" Agge said.
"Well . . . ah, I think I"ll have to rename it-if I rewrite it." He turned to me. "Are you a player"
"A jazz player?" I shook my head. No one had ever asked me such a thing. "No, of course not."
"Of course not? Does that mean you don"t play at all?"
"Well, I took piano lessons, as a boy. But no, I never thought of myself as a player." Now that I thought of it, I wondered why I had never attempted to play anything other than my lessons. Why not a jazz tune? "I don"t know why I never tried it," I said. "It never occurred to me."
"There are two kinds of people," Kinanda said, his voice taking on a certain pontificatory inflation, "players and auditors."
"I would be an auditor," I affirmed. "I love music. But there are people, you know, who don"t seem in the least interested in music. A third type. I wonder what they would be called."
"Idiots," Kinanda said, decisively.
"What was Grootka?" Agge said.
As one, Kinanda and I said, "Player."
I think at the moment I was taking Kinanda"s dichotomy to be one of those great generalities that people often invoke, and that what he meant by player was an activist, a doer, as opposed to someone like myself, who was more an observer. Although I hasten to say that I don"t subscribe to these gross dichotomies: I"ve never been content, for instance, to merely observe; and there is no doubt that Grootka was a crocodile of a watcher.
"There are certain kinds of players, however," Kinanda said, "who probably should have stayed auditors."
6.
Fine and Dandy "I believe that Lao-tse says somewhere that you should govern an empire as you would cook a little fish," said Books Meldrim. He was cooking a little fish. Several of them, in fact. Bluegills. We were on the deck of his house on the Lake Erie sh.o.r.e. I nodded and smiled and sipped some more of the excellent champagne he had provided, a Mot & Chandon, not too brut.
"I"m not familiar with Lao-tse," I said. "He was a Chinese philosopher, I guess, but what period"
"You heard of Lao-tse! Very early, pre-Christian. He wrote the Tao-te ching. Lately, folks call him Lao-tzu."
"Oh, that Lao-tse." I was embarra.s.sed.
"He may be just a myth," Books said, as if to comfort me, "though usually there"s something to a myth. Anyway, the Tao certainly exists. It"s a basic text, good for rummaging through. And I have to admit"-he smiled as he turned the fish on the portable grill-"that"s what I do, rummage. I never really studied it. I get these pithy quotes that sound like good rules for living. Nothing wrong with that, of course. Even Charlie Parker quoted from Ellington. It"s knowing that it"s a quote, not something you invented your own self, that"s important. A feller gets to believing what he stole is what he made is when he gets into trouble."
I felt like saying "Amen," but thought that might sound phony. I contented myself with my cigar and watched the sun continue to fall into the great lake of the Eries, scene of fierce battles among the Hurons and Chippewas, the Potawatomis and the English, and the Americans and the Canadians. It looked peaceful enough now, with a scattering of clouds to the west, black and blue and red and gold. A few large seagoing ships were barely moving out there. Gulls were stroking their steadfast way home. It was pleasant, indeed, and the fish were as well governed as an empire, according to Books: "Not overdone."
I had come down at Books"s invitation. He"d said he wanted to show me something and he also wanted my reaction to the M"zee Kinanda concert. I was happy to comply, especially if it meant a fish feast on the deck. And especially since Books condescended to play the piano. His house was small, but very cunningly and beautifully designed and accomplished. It featured, for instance, heavy gla.s.s doors that essentially opened the living room onto the deck, which in turn gave onto the jetty itself. On a warm night like this, with little breeze, a pianist could comfortably sit in the living room, as on a stage, and perform to a gathering of dozens, sitting on the deck chairs or the seats built into the railings-it made the lake itself an extension of the house. But I was the only fortunate auditor this evening.
"When I had this house built I was a little worried about these windows," Books confessed, talking while he rummaged through sheets of music, in the manner of all musicians." "Cause I know how the wind can howl off that lake in the winter and I didn"t want my piano ruined. But the carpenter got these good insulated doors and he put them in so they seal tight."