Soul Siren (6 page)

“Oh, my God,” I whispered.

But she was doing the right thing for me. For all of high school kids’ urgent political liberalism, it’s still the most relentlessly conservative enclave on a social scale. I wouldn’t have dreamed of coming out in school and trying to be who I was. Everyone had heard about a white boy a year ahead of us who came out and said he was gay, and he was beaten to the point that when he could
walk on his leg again
he ran away from both school and home.

Karen did get up and place her call, pulling her bedroom door to as she spoke in a hushed voice to Isham. The next day Deborah avoided me as if I was one of the girl bullies, and it was only days after she stopped imitating Erica that she quit hanging out with both of us altogether. Erica, of course, had always felt a bit embarrassed by her hero worship. As far as she was concerned, Deborah wouldn’t be missed.

When Karen returned to the couch, standing for a moment over me, I reached out and stroked her bare leg exposed by the slit in the skirt. “You’re right about me…”

She stayed in place, enjoying my caress, and she said, “Sweetheart, it’s not too difficult to figure out.”

“So how am I supposed to get over this?” I pleaded. “Shit, why would you want me when you know how…?”

“I’m your teacher,” she said softly.

“What does that mean?” I demanded, getting irritable. “Haven’t you ever been in love? You said you were married and—”

“That was arranged. I was sixteen when I got married. He was okay for a while, but that wasn’t love. I thought I found love when I was a little older than you are now, with this girlfriend I had for a while, but…Michelle, it’s just too hard. To want someone so badly? Losing yourself and having to negotiate all the time to keep the other person happy? It’s just not for me.”

“God, you sound like Erica when you talk like that.”

“Erica’s a very shrewd young lady.”

“So if you think that way, what is this?” I asked.

She looked down at me and rested her hands on my shoulders. “This is solace. This is companionship and adoration. This is friendship. You’re a beautiful girl, Michelle. You’re smart, and you’re clever, and you have a good heart. I find you very attractive. Yes, I want you, and we’ll see what happens…That’s if you can accept what I offer. And believe me, it’s something a little more grown up than love.”

“What if I fall in love with you?” I asked.

She smiled. “Trust me, you won’t.”

I stroked her leg, parting the curtain of her skirt, and she looked at me with an amused curiosity. I pretended that I saw the lace panties for the very first time, and I moved from the couch to the rug, kneeling in front of her. I tugged the fabric away and admired her flesh. I breathed in the odour of her, so different from my own scent. When I made her come with the gentle flickering of my tongue, prompting her to joke I was a fast learner, she staggered forward a step, her knees buckling.

We moved into her bedroom, and she seemed even smaller to me now, as if I could gather her up completely in my arms. I needed to take her this time, running my fingers through her sheets of black hair as I nibbled her ear and felt her breasts. I needed my hand inside her so that I could put my face close to hers and examine her eyes shutting tight, her mouth opening and letting out a kittenish mewling. It was the first time I had made a woman come, seeing how the rapture expressed itself on my lover’s face after only feeling it for the first time myself earlier. Her black hair spilling onto my shoulder and arm, she held me tight as she fell asleep. I stayed awake and listened to her breathing and worried about school, worried about Deborah’s big mouth and Erica’s budding career, whether my best friend’s dreams would come true. I could never see into my own future, to imagine just what I would be doing with myself.

I became part of Karen’s carefully composed life. She had her books, her Indian friends and her non-Indian friends, her classes with us. She still went regularly, to my surprise, to the temple in Toronto, a brief walk from the Yorkville district, where the local ISSKON chapter held its services. What you and I know as Hare Krishnas but what is really not a cult, but a legitimate branch of the Hindu faith worshipped by thousands.

White people didn’t get second looks, but I got polite nods of astonishment the one time Karen brought me along, a young black chick here on a visit. “Hare, hare, hare, Krishna, Krishna…” And people danced, a line of Indian girls in saris as young as me bopping up and down in front of us as if they were at a techno-pop concert. A man came around with a kind of lamp, and Karen made waving motions of the heat to her face, leaving a donation of a couple of dollars.

“You all right?” Karen asked, enjoying my reactions to the vivid colours and the thick incense.

“Well, it’s not gospel wailing, but it’s fun,” I laughed.

“Worship should be joyful,” she commented. “Only white people make it into a tedious drag.”

I returned the favour by taking her to a service of the Second Toronto Baptist Church on College Avenue, which I think must have been an equally surreal experience for her. Karen taught me about literature. She took me to French and Italian movies at the repertory cinema in the Annex district. She opened my mind to all kinds of intellectual stimulation. And on weekends, I rang the bell to the house and once I was quickly inside her short foyer, we kissed like lovers reunited after I’d been gone on a trip.

I celebrated graduating high school with dinner out with my parents and brother, and I celebrated again that weekend with Karen when she took me away to a bed and breakfast in the Ottawa Valley. I told my folks I had won an essay contest to visit the Canadian Parliament under teacher supervision—you don’t have to guess who my chaperone was. Looking out the window at the rolling hills of the valley and feeling the silkiness of Karen’s golden skin, I knew I had proved her wrong. I was in love with her. And we had cleared the hurdle. I was a graduate, our relationship no longer a risk for her professional career. But I had also been accepted at Yale (Fisk as well, but I wasn’t crazy about college in Nashville). My parents were adamant that I should go to a prestigious American university and not settle for Queens or Carleton, or God help me, the University of Toronto, none of which could open as many career doors for me.

“Go learn something,” Karen told me at the airport, smiling bravely.

“I’ll email you plenty,” I promised, hugging her close.

“Look, you have to do this, it’s all right,” she said, using these words instead of
I knew I would have to give you up one day.

When they called my flight, I said softly close to her ear, “I love you, Kamala.”

Her eyes were moist with tears, and she couldn’t speak, her pose of detachment reduced to an emotional fiction. If she hadn’t broken in that moment, I do think I would have moved on. Not that I didn’t take other lovers, but I always came back to Karen when I visited home, staying at her place, in her arms, briefly picking up where we left off and then parting again. It’s why it was so much harder for us later.

Mentor

I
n the month
that I flew out to Connecticut and accepted my room at the dorm in New Haven, Erica boarded a Greyhound bus and rode for about twelve hours on a bumpy seat with shedding upholstery to the Big Apple. The bus wheels turning as she softly sang along with Bob Marley through her earphones:
Open your eyes and look within. Are you sat-is-fiiied—with the life you’re living? Uh!

She stepped into New York at Grand Central Station with her demo tapes and a grocery list of maybe five contacts in the city and no booked hotel room for the night. She says she walked for hours with her pack slung over her shoulder, amazed at how compact Manhattan was. From American television beamed across the border into Canada, you never got the impression that the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building were so close together, the extent that those lions of the public library commanded a great swath of Fifth Avenue, or how you could look down from the low hill of Madison somewhere between Midtown and the upper sides and see the Twin Towers, because they were still standing back then. Erica Jones was here, but she hadn’t yet arrived.

I’ve always had trouble trying to convey to Americans what it’s like to be a black person growing up in Canada, what an interesting milestone it was in Erica’s life to come to New York—or in mine. Hell, it’s hard enough trying to convey what it’s like to come from Canada. There’s an old joke that a Canadian will pick up his Coke from a vending machine and say, “Thank you.” They think of themselves as middle-class, polite, moderate people. For a long time, my Dad tells me, the most right-wing Canadian politician was still left of any American Democrat. After all, we’ve got a national health care scheme borrowed from the British. The founders were British and French who never really got along, and the music…The music is so painfully
white
.

Bryan Adams and Shania Twain, the Crash Test Dummies and Rush, Céline Dion and Avril Lavigne and Nelly Furtado and Nickelback and the patron saint of Celtic introspective bleating, Sarah McLachlan. The radio by law has to play a substantial portion of Canadian music in a desperate attempt to keep the national culture from going flatline, and to be fair the music industry itself was strong and thriving. But Erica and the rest of my friends hardly ever listened to the radio, because you were either hearing American pop tunes or the tongue-in-cheek Barenaked Ladies or folkie angst. Erica and I spent our weekends hunting for clubs that would play stuff for
us
. They were small scenes that we did our best to support even when they were clearly derivative and amateurish, just to have
something
. You never got a vibe that someone would break out and hit it big. So you couldn’t pretend to be cool in recognising them first and having them to yourselves.

I don’t know how to convey what it was like. We came from the second-largest country in the world, but the population is only about 35 million. Toronto is one of the most multicultural cities you can go to—Chinese, Hungarian, Somali, Argentine, Iraqi, Polish, Jamaican, you name it, it’s got it. And it’s actually the seventh most expensive city in the world to live in, and yet…There was no homegrown black music that could rise to the top and stay on the pop mainstream. If it was black and really popular, it came from Down There. Nothing talked about where we were, what our lives were like at home, it was all Compton ’hood glory or Destiny’s Child wannabes.

Around High Park, just off the Polish neighbourhood of Roncesvalles Avenue, Erica and I had both gone to a high school that was predominantly white. So we laughed at the white kids who got their gangsta patter from Eminem and American crime shows, sneering in disgust at them and saying, “Do you honestly believe anybody talks like that? And talks like that around
here
?”

It wasn’t so much the incidents of bigotry I recall back home, not that they didn’t happen. My father worked as a construction carpenter, and he didn’t suffer too often from racism at work or over his hiring—he was just too good at his job. And Erica’s father, being a dentist, said if someone had a problem with his black hands going into their mouth, fine, let the bastard’s teeth rot. No, what springs to mind is how badly Erica was needed because our kind back then—as far as the popular cultural mainstream mattered—were, for the most part, simply not
there
.

Yes, there’s a music network that has patterned itself on MTV and has played some progressive black music, but its producers are a cliquey bunch, and if they don’t like you, you never make rotation. Yes, there’s the Caribana parade in Toronto with its waves of tourists from all over, but it’s a once-a-year gig. I am talking about our own artists getting on CBC shows, getting radio airplay, selling out the SkyDome.

A year after she hit it big, they promptly awarded Erica a Juno, the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy with nowhere near the prestige. The Junos were publicly ignored long before that time when the Brit Awards became a joke over in the UK. But the media tried to appear miffed that Erica didn’t bother to fly home to accept hers. In fact, she showed no interest in even having it sent along to her. I have the clip of her interview where our national television network, the CBC, caught up to her at a concert in Boston, the clip that was shown and quoted all over the place.

“Don’t give me that (bleep) that I’m dissing my fans—I’m dissing
you
. I’m dissing a music industry that wants reflected glory off things
I
did that they had no part of.” She laughed in contempt and added, “You want me to show up and smile for your ceremony? Then you forget that fool hood ornament you give out and pass on some actual
money
to No Big Thang and Jamie Cross and Chantal Fox and play them on CFNY in Toronto.
Then
we’ll talk.”

You could almost hear the scramble of music journalists as they hunted on Google and Lexis to find out who these artists were that she was referring to. She boosted careers overnight with her diatribe. Because she knew herself what they were going through. She had sent her demo tapes in, she had applied for a Factor grant—that great government financial angel of struggling Canadian musicians—and she had gone to sit-down “chats” with the label executives. She wasn’t what they had heard before, and they were not going to take a chance.

So she came to New York because it was New York. And because she couldn’t do what she wanted so badly to do in Toronto. “Oh, Michelle, this is not where the music starts,” she said as we made our goodbyes outside Union Station, “this is where the music ends up getting heard.”

I
already told you how she met Easy. Her short apprenticeship as backup singer, jingle vocalist, waitress in a Third Avenue diner has all been well documented. What the books and
Rolling Stone
never got right, never heard of at all, was how Erica met Morgan and how he became an influence in her career.

Morgan. His voice always sounding like a bass drum dropped at the bottom of a well. His one nervous habit was to tug on the salt-and-pepper curls of his modest beard as he sat on his piano bench, and he would look at the keys as if he had been waiting to recite a great truth for a long time. Morgan never told me how old he was exactly, but he always looked middle-aged and yet ageless. His freckled caramel skin was etched with character lines, and you knew that wasn’t just a name for them with Morgan, that they really were folds and crevices of his maturing character. He didn’t have a potbelly or that hard look older men get. In fact, his body seemed to be always straining the cloth of his shirts, and I kidded him once or twice about it to learn if he worked out. This, too, he never told me.

Like everything else, there is Erica’s version of their first meeting and Morgan’s that you can check from old magazines or articles posted on the Internet. Whoever you believe, the locale and minor details don’t change. He lived on the whole top floor of a block above 125th near Fifth Avenue zoned as “artist space” but what really meant cheap apartments with stand-up showers and communal toilets down the hallway. I think Morgan was probably the only tenant who had his own washroom, though he said he took the place because it had a freight elevator that could take his upright piano. On the wall was “A Chart of Basic Jazz Scales,” which had columns and rows with headings like C, Db, D, Eb, F, Gb, G matched with “Enigmatic, Chromatic, Augmented, Whole Tone” and so on. Since I’ve practically forgotten all of my music theory from high school, it looked to me like a musician’s Periodic Table. He says the chart was a gift. Morgan would say that many of his possessions were gifts from friends, like the framed poster for the movie
Paris Blues,
the one where you’re supposed to believe Paul Newman could ever jam on a horn with Louis Armstrong, and of all things, the black lacquer bust of Beethoven on its kitschy pillar next to the Sears couch and coffee table.

The freight lift was also the way you got into Morgan’s place, and one day, Erica lifted the wooden slats of the guard door and stepped into his living room.

“She walks into my place like she’s coming in to buy a paper or something, as if I expect her,” Morgan told me, “and she sits down at my piano and says, ‘I’m Duane Jones’s kid, so that’s how I found you, but it’s not why you should let me stay.’ And she rips into ‘A Train’ and plays the improvisation off a Stan Getz album I
know
Duane must have. And for three quarters of an hour, she’s showing off. The only guy I know who can mimic other pianists that well is Oscar Peterson, who I used to work with. I mean, she did Ahmad Jamal, and if you listen to him, he’s all about space between the notes. She did that tinkling Basie, she did Ellington. She cracked me up because she did Erroll Garner, complete with his stride playing and groaning. It was a hell of a performance.”

Erica remembers it differently. She claims she never burst in on Morgan and “took over” his piano, but she does admit he’s quoted her accurately. And she did play for him.

When she was done strutting her stuff, Morgan took a long pull of his cigarette and said, “Okay, I believe you.”

“Believe what?” she asked.

“I believe you’re Duane Jones’s kid,” said Morgan.

Erica’s father and Morgan had played together when they were young. They were bandmates and used to collaborate on song efforts. Morgan would expect his old friend’s little girl to grow up hearing jazz legends, and in one line, he let her know that playing them back note for note didn’t impress him.

“So what did you come to me for?” he asked, still slumped on the couch with his abandoned book on, of all things, Australia. Morgan had eclectic tastes. His bookshelf had a lot of history, but you could find him reading Agatha Christie novels, a book on the behaviour of bees, a history of the Napoleonic wars.

“My Dad told me I should come to you.”

“That’s not an answer,” replied Morgan. “That’s a course of action. I asked about the motive.”

“I want to record,” said Erica, feeling embarrassed because a big dream like this always sounds ridiculous when you have to blurt it out. “I write songs, but I think I can write them better.”

“
Ohhhhhh,
you want to be a star!” said Morgan. “Duane lives in Toronto, right? That’s where you’re from? Canada? Go home to Toronto, Anna—”

“Erica.”

“Gimme a break, kid. I haven’t had so much as a postcard from your Dad in five years. Fuck me if I have to remember the name of his kids. I am
not
in the lottery business. I do session recordings. I play with small combos for shit on Wednesdays. I do arrangements. Now and again—very, very rarely—I get asked to compose a little instrumental background music for TV shows filmed here. That’s like your wannabe novelist buying his groceries by writing greeting cards. ’Kay?”

Erica didn’t move.

Morgan grew irritable. “
What
do you think I can teach you? I do jazz. Jazz is precise. Jazz is
clean
. You can be sloppy all you want with pop music, A-B rhymes, three goddamn chords if you want, and we won’t get into the bullshit of rapping—”

“You do music,” Erica cut in. “I hear it in my head, new things, scraps of melodies, and I need to tap into it better, use it better.”

Morgan nodded with a sigh and told her, “You know, I think it was Elton John or somebody who said he tripped on the formula for making popular songs by using the structure of a hymn. So there you are. All the Zen I can give you. Bye now.”

“How about this,” said Erica. “You’re the only person I know in New York.”

“Starbucks. Sixth Avenue, Midtown. Guys will want to pick you up in no time.”

She was getting nowhere. So she turned on her heel and stomped back into the freight elevator.

I’ve heard there is an old Japanese tradition with teaching, and since Morgan read so much, maybe he happened upon it and decided to adopt it. Or maybe in truth, he couldn’t be bothered with her that day. The tradition is that the master always says no the first time, the second time, the third, until the student makes such a pest of himself or hangs around so pitifully for so long that the master sees that the student is actually sincere.