Indeed, the neighborhood is already culturally bipolar. From Maxie’s box room’s narrow balcony are views across a new “zen garden”—hard landscaping, a single cherry tree, and litter that stays beyond the reach of winds or brooms—toward a complex of new galleries and jewelry stores. There is an expensive coffee shop, an arty bar called Scofflaws, another bar called the Four T’s. Yet twenty steps across the street are the unadorned front gates of a poultry supply depot that employs only Mexicans and that, once locked at night, becomes a crack corner. Just a half mile downtown, and downmarket too, is an art-free strip of single-story tinnies: the Roadrunner Cocktails Bar, the Big Shot Grocery, a couple of thrift stores, the Reno Hotel (“Rooms by the Hour”), and, painted black and yellow in tiger stripes, behind its daily pall of smoke, Gruber’s Old Time BBQ, with—for almost downtown Austin—its ironic promises “Hunters Are Welcome” and “Best Motorcycle Food.”
Leonard ventures to the store on his first evening in Texas, driven from the loft by Nadia and Maxie arguing and then not arguing. He has pretended to be watching CNN for almost an hour while his hosts whisper loudly at each other in their room. He hardly dares to overhear, as he fears they might be arguing about him, that he is less welcome in their home than they have pretended, even that Maxie has discerned Leonard’s amorous objectives. Finally he taps on their door—four beats to the bar—with his fingertips. “Off out,” he says, disturbing them as little as he can. When their door swings open in response, Maxie has her in his arms, laughing into her hair, as unrepentant as a boy. Her face is flushed and childlike. For the moment she is no longer mad at him, it seems, though clearly she’s been crying.
“I’ll take a stroll,” Leonard says. “Just checking out the neighborhood.”
“Get some juice,” she says.
Maxie comes with him into the hallway and downstairs as far as the street door. “She’s tense,” he explains. “It ain’t you.”
“You sure?”
“I’m sure because … Guess what? She’s gonna have a kid.”
“Nadia’s pregnant?”
“That’s the only way you get a kid in Texas.”
“Do I congratulate?”
“No, don’t say anythin’. Just get the juice. I’ll let you know what she decides when you get back.” Maxie reaches out and pulls at Leonard’s coat. “This is gonna be embarrassin’,” he says, pushing his fingers through his beard.
Leonard nods. He understands at once. “You’ll need the spare room now, I guess?”
“Whoa, take your time. That’s eight months down the road, if that’s a road she wants to take. You know? For me, I’m only sayin’ that the time’s not … at its very best. The kid’s no bigger than a cashew nut, she says. It’s no big deal. No”—he leans further in and whispers—“I’ll let you know if we … we’re gonna go ahead or if … well, if we’ll have to put a stop to it. Hey, man, what I have to say to you, now this is strictly private stuff—”
“I understand.” But Leonard still does not understand.
“I said you would. That’s what I said to her. Because what with your mother’s house an’ all and how the dollar is right now, not worth a bean, you’re better placed than us to be a little generous. I hate to even mention it, but if it comes to it, hard times and hard decisions, man, could you let me have a thousand dollars, say? Twelve hundred tops. Just to lend a hand. You know, like rent? Except not rent.”
“For an abortion?”
“Volume, Leon, please! She’s pregnant, dude. She isn’t deaf. Okay, get juice.”
Leonard’s indignation, and jet lag, send him two blocks down the street in the wrong direction, away from homes, away from the stores and traffic, into an industrial block of empty warehouses, abandoned tire-and-muffler-fitting stores, and railroad sidings with patches of sagebrush on their berms and—eerily—a pair of turkey vultures killing time on a power line. Ry Cooder country, he thinks, trying to recall the Paris, Texas sound track, which he has attempted to play once or twice. Despite the heavy, gluey air, he takes deep breaths. He balloons his diaphragm. He licks and purses his lips, practices his embouchures, blows vowels. All preparation for the saxophone—and his way of staying calm in any circumstances, even when, as now, his instruments are not at hand. A police car cruises by and turns, fixing Leonard in its headlights. It is only when the driver rolls down the window to stare at him and shake his head that Leonard stops miming notes, checks himself—and checks the neighborhood. It’s clear he’s lost, and vulnerable. He’s nervous, suddenly. This part of town is too shadowy and deserted for a newcomer—for this newcomer, at least.
By the time Leonard has retraced his steps, gone beyond the lofts, and caught his breath, he is less incensed by Maxie’s casualness and his damned cheek for dunning money for a termination from a man he’s only met this afternoon, a stranger who has just arrived. He’ll not part with a dollar, though, he decides. Except for rent. He will pay rent. That’s not unreasonable. And he will contribute toward the groceries. But as for funding an abortion—not a cent, not a cent unless it’s Nadia who begs for it and possibly not even then. She needs to hear what might go wrong, long-term: his sister’s suicide, his broken mother’s subsequent deliberate decline and early death, at hardly fifty-eight years old, the nephew never born. “No, not a single cent,” he says out loud, but it is only to himself and to the sidewalk. He’s practicing. He’ll stand his ground. He lets himself imagine it, the line of reasoning: mother, sister, nephew, all of it. He rehearses each phrase, imagines Maxie storming off, imagines Nadia’s relief. Then he lets himself drift home to England, where Nadia is with him, rescued from the Lone Star State and in her final weeks, in great wide skirts. Her hands are resting on her unborn child. Whose child is it? His child—it’s simply done. He only has to say it to himself, envision it. Then Maxie never was. Dragged out of bed, kicked out of town. His building’s down. He’s murdered, possibly. And it is Leonard who will help her to take deep breaths and push. Meanwhile, he takes deep breaths of air himself and parps the saxophone again for her—a skipping variation, “Mack the Knife.” For half a minute he is admirable and brave, a husband and a father to be proud of, until he’s summoned back to Austin first by the wolf call of a train and then by vehicles and voices that to his tuned ear sound dangerous.
Leonard has never been at ease abroad. It always seems that anything he does outside of England is a sham, even in America, where at least the language is familiar, if not the same: Here I am, being local, is his running commentary. Here I am, blending in; here I am, not acting the outsider. But fooling nobody. He is still nervous too, despite the distance he has almost run from the warehouse block—nervous of the dark and light, nervous of the street but uneasy about leaving it and pushing open doors, even the partly open doors to the brightly lit Big Shot Grocery with its wall-mounted amplifiers blasting hip-hop at the sidewalk and its come-hither kitchen smells.
Leonard is not unduly paranoid. Strangers truly pick on him. He’s twice been beaten up in pub car parks, one a robbery (his instrument case, with his first beloved saxophone inside), the other without any cause or not any cause expressed except in punches. And he’s been threatened countless times by men (and women too) who haven’t liked his voice or his opinions or what they take to be his “attitude.” His attitude, he knows, might come across—because he’s tall and scholarly and has reed-player’s lips—as supercilious. He admits that he can also sound intemperate, extravagantly unbending in his politics, though he prefers to characterize, mythologize himself as a plain and simple man of solid principle. He’s even invented a working-class background, useful in both jazz and politics, as it validates his stridency. At antiwar and antiglobalization meetings, at the more sedate China Solidarity vigils and Carbon Conscience pickets, and on the Asylum Support and Open Borders committees (his current campaigns), Leonard is the one who does his best to strike the fiercest notes, who calls for action every time, as Mr. Perkiss would, who says they should not surrender an
inch to anyone but “be a limpet, cling to principle.” As far as possible, and certainly in his private life, such as it is, he matches what he says with what he does. No private health care for Leonard Lessing. He takes public transport when he can. What remains of his inheritance has been ethically invested. He carries an Amnesty credit card (“Buy One, Set One Free”). He plays for no fee at benefit concerts and charity gigs but does not accept corporate engagements. He has never crossed a picket line or stepped away from a trade boycott or defied an embargo. He does not patronize multinationals like Tesco, CaliCo, and Walmart. He will not wear clothes that have been sourced from sweatshops. He always checks the labels on his life.
Leonard cannot fool himself, however, with low-cost gestures such as these. He knows full well that he is at heart too civil and reasonable and too readily embarrassed to be truly militant on the street, no matter that the noises he makes indoors declare otherwise. He recognizes the flattening truth about himself: that he is a man of extreme principles, hesitantly held. So many activists of his acquaintance, the ones he envies, are the opposite, he thinks—comrades who seem to have weak principles but are still quick to shout and punch for them in public until they get their way or break a bone or two. Leonard might equal them in shouting, but he’s never been the sort to punch. Never will be, probably. Perhaps that’s why he makes a noise. Perhaps that’s why he’s ended up in jazz instead of in some more polite and rational form of music. Yes, the dynamo at meetings, like the all-styles hero on the saxophone, is tame and timid when there are risks and ferocious when it’s safe. That’s dispiriting.
So here is Leonard, shopping done, jealous, anxious, and annoyed, walking as invisibly as possible along the sidewalks of a Texan town, hurrying out of this run-down neon neighborhood where everything he notices augments his nervousness: the black men who call out to him from the poultry depot gates, the bony girls smoking cigarettes outside the bar, the two Mexicans idling, elbow to elbow, in their cars and talking unconcernedly while traffic waits in the street, the smell of chicken carcasses. He has expected to feel displaced and self-conscious for a while, the first few days. It’s Texas, after all. He has not expected, though, to be assailed by such discordance, so many disconcerting odors, sights, and noises. Nothing is familiar or comforting. Here the thud-slap of someone running at his back, a siren from an ambulance, a loudmouthed television set, the clanging of a shade-trees mechanic, even the sudden starter motor of a Frito-Lay truck are played in different keys from what he’s used to. They set his teeth on edge. They strike, then leave him jittery. He is convinced—how can he doubt it now?—that this journey to Austin will prove to be a costly blunder. He’s traveled—what, five thousand miles?—to pursue his love, if truth be told, for Nadia. Instead, he is her English gooseberry, and the unwelcome occupant of the box room and the single bed in a town with which he feels incompatible. Nadia is tearful at the window now, he thinks. Maxie’s at the street door waiting for the rent. There’s bound to be an argument, a scene. “Not a single cent,” he says again, but this time he has doubts.
By the time Leonard gets back to the loft, carrying a Big Shot paper bag with orange juice and some other groceries, he is feeling much less ruffled. He has decided what to do. Cut and run. It’s his highway code: be cautious and be sensible, obey the danger signs. He can easily promise to lend them money but do nothing. He can say that it will take up to a week to clear the British bank. That way he’ll neither have to be part of their plans nor be forced to sound a judgmental, moral note about abortion or his sister’s suicide. After all, it’s Nadia’s right to choose, not his. He shouldn’t bully her. No, he’ll avoid that argument, fly east to New York, spend time there—see MoMA and the Met, visit the Hall of Jazz Greats in Harlem Plaza, sit in on a few gigs, improvise a holiday—and then go home, to the country where he best fits in.
The mood in the loft has transformed during Leonard’s short excursion. Maxie is not waiting in the street. The scrounging abortionist is no longer even in evidence. He has washed and is drying three glasses, not for orange juice but for wine. There’s music on the CD player, something French cum African with banks of percussion and exuberant horns. Their little table has been dressed for a meal: three sets of silverware, unmatching plates, and saucer flames. The microwave is humming brightly, and rattling. Nadia has changed into a loose white top that makes her face seem pinker and healthier than before. Aren’t her breasts already plumper than they were in England, where she was overzealously flat-chested?
“I think I’d better move on somewhere else quite soon,” Leonard says, standing at the window, his face hidden, almost tearful. Nadia’s skin is blooming, especially in the fluctuating mix of arctic/tropic microwave and candle lights. “Tomorrow, possibly. I know I’m in the way.”
But “Absolutely not!” “No way!” Nadia and Maxie will not hear of it. They both come up and put their arms round him. He has to stay, at least until the “showdown” in the coming week. “Boy, don’t miss that. We need your manpower. We’re gonna shake this city up a bit. Smile for the cameras.” Leonard offers them his plucky smile.
Snipers Without Bullets, it transpires over dinner from two packets and a can—bean and tuna bake, a local pecan pie—has a membership of two. A third voice (Leon’s) would be welcome. “Essential. Crucial. Indispensable,” Maxie adds, bringing more wine to the table but topping up only his own tall glass. It’s Maxie’s “private enterprise,” Nadia explains, “his plague on all their houses. You know, not just the fat cats, the military and the Republicans, but Democrats as well …”
“And fuckin’ liberals.” Maxie is becoming more sweeping and profane by the glass, more twangingly and less persuasively American. The alcohol—or something else, done out of sight—has made him noisy, volatile, and jittery. Nadia, though, is calm and quiet and prettier by the sip.
“We want to make a difference—and Maxie thinks that liberals will never make a difference,” she says. “Voting isn’t enough. Having an opinion isn’t enough. Caring isn’t enough.” Repeating what Maxie thinks is clearly all that counts.
“Fuck them. Liberals are the front-row enemy. Prime target. Wipe ’em out. They’ve got this city by the balls. Do you hear what I’m sayin’, man?” Leonard both nods and shakes his head. Maxie is only striking attitudes, though he’s striking them a bit too tritely for Leonard’s tastes. It’s harmless boozy talk, he supposes, amusing more than bullying. “Hear this, then, heh? We’re pretty certain Bush is comin’ into town … yessir—”
“Next Saturday, to be exact,” interjects Nadia, being his dutiful British secretary.
“We know he’ll spend the weekend at his snake pit in Crawford bein’ Audie Murphy.”
“What’s that?”
“That’s wearing jeans, basically,” says Nadia.
“It’s wearin’ jeans and pullin’ wire …” Maxie’s beard is truly bristling.
“The Bushes have their place out there.” The secretary again. “Prairie Chapel Ranch. It’s White House West—”
“It’s Funk Hole Number One, is what it is. Where he goes hidin’ from the people. Buried hisself out there five whole weeks, that man, when Iraq was, you know, gettin’ difficult. Folks are layin’ dead. And he’s out on the ranch, fixin’ gates and clearin’ mesquite and bustin’ broncs and muckin’ stalls and being everythin’ ’cept the fuckbrain president. Cowboy George sure does love to dirty up when it gets tough.” Maxie is performing only for Leonard now, facing him excitedly across the table, talking fast and showing off. “How do we know what he’s gonna do next weekend? We know it ’cos we have a comrade workin’ there. The sister says they’ve set aside a patch of brush and cocklebur for the president to clear and there’s been Secret Service personnel crawlin’ all over it in case somebody’s left a thorn out there and he could scratch his thumb. We know it ’cos a comrade workin’ in the canteen at Fort Hood army base has seen the signs. Air Force One is scheduled for a drop, and there’s a chopper on standby all wee
k. You gettin’ me, Leon?”
“I’m getting you.”
“There’s more. We know that the Bush bitch is coming down from Crawford into Austin on Saturday. That ain’t no secret, point of fact. It’s there in black-and-white, on the first page of the program for the Texas Book Festival. She’s come to patronize y’all. She’s gonna give a little talk, no shit … except it’s all bullshit … in the Texas State Capitol. She’s gonna give a little talk on ‘Libraries and Children’s Literature’ because, guess what? She used to be a little girl herself.”
“And she was trained as a librarian,” adds Nadia. “Books for kids.”
“Except Iraqi kids, natchoo.”
“You know, the Reading First initiative. The No Child Left Behind bullshit. It’s Laura’s special thing.”
“Don’t call her by her fuckin’ name. Jeez, Nadia. You countin’ her among your friends? That’s what the problem is, right there. Too much respect.”
“Maxie’s got no time for her,” says Nadia, rubbing Maxie’s arm by way of recompense for her slip of the tongue.
“Too right, I don’t. She deserves what’s comin’ at her Saturday.” Both Snipers Without Bullets look at Leonard, inviting questions. He doesn’t ask, “What’s coming at her Saturday?” as they expect. He wants to ask, “You’ll keep the baby, then?” He says, “You ought to pick on Bush, not her. The president.”
“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—”